Chapter 26 #2
The management of the club acquaintances required a different approach than the management of Dr. Hale.
These were not professional men with reputations to protect but social men with positions to maintain, and the currency of their world was not professional credibility but social standing, and social standing could be affected by money.
I identified the three men Sebastian had interviewed most extensively: Lord Marchmain, a genial peer with expensive tastes and a modest income; Mr. Beecham, a stockbroker with a weakness for cards; and Colonel Fanshawe, a retired military man whose gambling losses were a matter of quiet but widespread knowledge.
Each of these men was, in his own way, vulnerable.
Lord Marchmain needed money. Mr. Beecham needed discretion.
Colonel Fanshawe needed the social position that his military service had earned him and that his gambling habit threatened to undermine.
I arranged, through intermediaries whose identities I will not record here, for each man to receive a discreet communication.
Lord Marchmain was offered a favourable position in an investment that I controlled, a position that would yield a return of several hundred pounds per annum, on the condition that his memories of the Viscount's final years remained general and imprecise.
Mr. Beecham was reminded, through the medium of an anonymous letter that referenced certain embarrassing details of his card-playing activities, that discretion was a virtue that worked in both directions.
Colonel Fanshawe was approached directly, by a mutual acquaintance at his club, and was told, in the course of a conversation about the Ashworth estate, that certain persons had been making inquiries about the Viscount's death, and that these inquiries were, in the Colonel's words, "most unfortunate for all concerned, and best not encouraged. "
Each communication was calibrated to the specific vulnerability of its recipient.
Each was deniable, in the sense that none could be traced back to me through any documentary or testimonial chain.
And each was, I was confident, sufficient to achieve its objective, which was the elimination of a potential witness through the mechanisms of self-interest rather than the crude instruments of threat or intimidation.
Fourth: Crutchley. Henry Ravenscroft's former business associate was the most difficult target on my list, because Crutchley was not a gentleman and was not susceptible to the social and financial pressures that governed the behaviour of gentlemen.
He was a rough, unpleasant man, a Manchester industrialist of the old school, whose manners were coarse and whose morals were flexible and whose loyalty to anyone, including himself, was negotiable for the right price.
Sebastian had interviewed him during the investigation of the Ravenscroft estate, and Crutchley had provided information about Ravenscroft's business enemies, information that was vague and self-serving but that, in the context of Sebastian's broader investigation, could be reinterpreted to suggest that Ravenscroft's death was not accidental.
Crutchley could not be bribed, because his price was unpredictable and his discretion was nonexistent.
He could not be threatened with social consequences, because he operated outside the social world in which those consequences had meaning.
He could, however, be threatened with legal consequences, because Crutchley had secrets, and the secrets were the kind that, if revealed, would result in his prosecution and imprisonment.
I had known about these secrets for some time, having learned of them during my marriage to Ravenscroft, when Crutchley had been a frequent guest at the Cheshire estate and had, on several occasions, made remarks in my hearing that revealed the extent of his involvement in practices that ranged from the merely unethical to the outright criminal.
I had filed these remarks in my memory at the time, not because I anticipated needing them but because I filed everything, because everything is potentially useful, and because the accumulation of information about the people in one's orbit is the most reliable form of self-defence.
I composed a letter to Crutchley. Unlike the letter to Dr. Hale, this letter was not warm or sympathetic or indirect.
It was cold, precise, and specific. It referenced, by date and circumstance, three incidents that Crutchley would recognise as descriptions of his own criminal conduct.
It noted that the information regarding these incidents was in the possession of a third party who had an interest in Crutchley's continued cooperation with certain expectations regarding his testimony in a pending matter.
It did not specify what the expectations were.
It did not need to. Crutchley was not a sophisticated man, but he was a cunning one, and cunning men understand implication without requiring explicit statement.
I sealed the letter and sent it by private courier to Crutchley's offices in Manchester, and I was confident that it would achieve its objective, because Crutchley's cunning was, at bottom, a form of cowardice, and cowardice, when confronted with specific and detailed knowledge of one's criminal conduct, invariably produces the desired result.
Fifth: Sebastian himself. He was the most dangerous element in the equation, and he was also the most difficult to manage, because he could not be bought, threatened, or persuaded, and because my hold over him, which was the hold of desire and entanglement, was the one hold I was reluctant to use.
I could destroy him. I could send anonymous letters to Scotland Yard alleging that he had been seen entering and leaving my residence at unusual hours.
I could ensure that the society gossip about his "obsession" with the widowed countess reached the ears of his superiors.
I could, in short, deploy the same weapons I had used against Penelope, the weapons of information and insinuation and social pressure, and the deployment would be effective, because Sebastian was a professional man whose career depended on his reputation, and a reputation damaged by allegations of impropriety with a suspect was a reputation that could not be repaired.
I did none of these things. Not because I was incapable of them, and not because I was restrained by conscience, because conscience, in my lexicon, was merely another word for weakness, and I was not weak.
I did not deploy these weapons because Sebastian was the one variable in my calculations that I could not resolve, the one element that defied categorisation and control, and destroying him would eliminate not merely a threat but something that I could not name, and the inability to name it was itself a form of evidence that the thing existed and that its existence mattered.
This was irrational. I knew it was irrational.
I have never pretended to be other than what I am, and what I am is a woman who thinks in terms of strategy and consequence, not sentiment and attachment.
But Sebastian had, from the first moment I saw him at the funeral, occupied a position in my calculations that was not strategic, and the occupation was persistent and resistant to every attempt I had made to dislodge it.
He saw me. Not the performance, not the mask, not the carefully constructed persona of the grieving widow, but me, the thing behind the mask, the mechanism beneath the performance, and his seeing was a kind of recognition that I had never experienced before and that I did not know how to manage.
I could manage everything else: the witnesses, the documents, the social dynamics, the legal constraints, the institutional inertia that protected people like me from people like him.
But I could not manage the fact that he saw me, and the seeing was, in some fundamental way, the point of everything, the reason the game continued long after it should have been concluded, and the reason I could not bring myself to end it, even though ending it was the rational, strategic, and necessary thing to do.
I put the thought aside. It was not productive.
It was not even coherent. It was a sensation, and sensations, in my experience, were noise in the system, distractions from the operational imperative, and I had trained myself, from childhood, to filter noise from signal and to attend only to the signal.
The signal, at present, was this: the case against me had been reduced to a set of documents in Sebastian's possession, a set of witness testimonies that were being systematically neutralised, and the determination of a single detective who was operating without institutional support, without evidentiary foundation, and without the cooperation of a single witness who could corroborate his suspicions.
The situation was, by any rational assessment, under control.
The threats had been identified, prioritised, and addressed.
The countermeasures were in motion, and their motion was, by design, invisible, operating through the channels of social influence and personal self-interest that were the true mechanisms of power in Victorian England, and that were, by their nature, immune to the kind of scrutiny that the law applies to more overt forms of interference.