Chapter 25 #3
I found nothing. The copies of the documents Hartwell had given me were not in the files.
The correspondence with Dr. Hale was missing.
The physician's letters, which should have been in a folder marked "Ashworth, R.
- Medical," were not there. The folder existed, but it was empty, and the emptiness was the emptiness of a space that had recently been occupied, the faint outlines of removed papers still visible on the surrounding folders where they had pressed their shapes into the cardboard.
Someone had cleaned the files. Someone had removed every document that connected Hartwell to the investigation, and the someone was either Hartwell himself, in a final act of self-protection, or someone else, someone who had access to Hartwell's offices and the knowledge of what to remove and the opportunity to remove it without being detected.
Cecilia. The name was a presence in my mind, constant and unbidden, and it had been there for four months, and it would be there, I suspected, for the rest of my life, because she had become part of the architecture of my thinking, a fixed point around which all other thoughts revolved, and what revolved around her was not admiration and not hatred and not love, though it contained elements of all three, but something more complex and more total than any of those words could capture.
She was in the files. She was in the missing documents.
She was in the empty brandy glass and the wiped laudanum bottle and the suicide note that was too perfectly consistent with its author's character.
She was everywhere I looked, and everywhere I looked, I saw the evidence of her work, and the seeing was both agony and intoxication, because the work was terrible and the work was beautiful, and I could no longer separate the two.
I returned to my rooms that evening with the file under my arm and nothing else.
The case was not closed. I would not allow it to be closed.
But the case was wounded, perhaps mortally, and the wound had been inflicted not by incompetence or bad luck or the indifference of the system, but by the deliberate, calculated action of the woman I was investigating, and the deliberateness of the action was the most terrifying thing about it, because it meant that Cecilia was not merely defending herself but was actively eliminating threats, and the elimination of threats was not the behaviour of a frightened woman but of a predator, a predator who had identified me as a threat and who had already begun the work of neutralising me, not through violence, at least not yet, but through the systematic dismantling of the evidentiary foundation on which my case was built.
I sat at my desk and opened the file and read the documents one more time, and the words were the same and the meaning was the same and the meaning was not enough, and I understood, with the clarity of exhaustion, that I was now operating outside the boundaries of official sanction, without the support of my superiors, without the cooperation of witnesses, and without the documentary evidence that Hartwell's death had rendered unreliable.
I had my certainty, which was not evidence.
I had my suspicion, which was not proof.
I had my obsession, which was not a case.
And I had the knowledge, the terrible, irreducible knowledge, that Cecilia Blackwood was a murderer, that she had killed four times, possibly five if Hartwell was counted, and that she would kill again if the killing served her purposes, and that nothing I had done in four months of investigation had made the slightest difference to her freedom or her safety or her capacity for destruction.
I put the documents away. I turned off the gas lamp.
I sat in the dark, as I had sat so many nights before, and I listened to the sounds of London and I thought about Cecilia, and about the look she had given me at the Radnors' ball, the look that was not triumph and not satisfaction but something closer to a question, and I thought about the question, and about the fact that I could not answer it, and about the possibility that the question itself was the answer, and that the answer was that she saw me, truly saw me, in a way that no one else ever had, and that the seeing was the bond between us, stronger than evidence, stronger than law, stronger than the three dead men whose ghosts I carried with me like stones in my pockets, and the bond was the thing that would destroy me, because it was the thing I could not break, and the thing I could not break was the thing that held me in place while she dismantled everything around me, piece by piece, document by document, witness by witness, until there was nothing left but the two of us, and the space between us, and the question that neither of us could answer.
I did not sleep. I would not sleep for many nights.
But I did not abandon the case, because abandoning the case would mean abandoning the three dead men and the one dead solicitor and the principle of justice that I had spent my entire professional life serving, and I could not abandon those things, even though continuing meant fighting without weapons against an enemy who had an arsenal that I could not match and could not penetrate and could not even identify, because the arsenal was not made of documents or testimony or legal instruments but of the things that Cecilia was: her intelligence, her beauty, her precision, her absolute, terrifying control of every variable in her environment, including me.
The war had begun. I did not start it. I did not want it.
But it had begun, and I was in it, and the only way out was through, and through was a direction that I could not see and could not navigate and could not trust, because the territory through which I would have to move was Cecilia's territory, her world, her society, her domain, and in her domain, she was invincible.
I was not. And that was the thought that kept me awake, and that would keep me awake for many nights to come, and that would, in the end, prove to be the most accurate assessment of the situation that I had yet made: I was not invincible, and she was, and the asymmetry between us was not merely strategic but existential, and no amount of evidence or certainty or professional determination could change the fact that I was a man, and she was a force, and forces, unlike men, cannot be defeated, only endured.