Chapter 27 #2
Lady Jersey's eyes had narrowed, just slightly, at the word "detective," and the narrowing had communicated to me, with the precision of a telegraph, that she had registered the remark, filed it away, and would, in due course, mention it to her husband, who would mention it to his colleagues on the Commission, who would mention it to their contacts at the Yard, and the mention would travel, through these intermediary channels, to the ears of Superintendent Graves, who was already predisposed to view Sebastian's conduct with disfavour and who would, upon hearing the remark, find his existing concerns confirmed by the independent testimony of a source whose respectability was beyond question.
I made four more calls that afternoon, each to a woman of influence, each following the same pattern: the social call, the pleasant conversation, the casual remark about the detective, and the immediate transition to a subject of no consequence.
The women I chose were selected for their positions within the social network, for their known tendency to share information, and for their connection, however indirect, to the institutional structures that governed Sebastian's professional life.
Lady Pemberton, whose brother was a magistrate.
Mrs. Fanshawe, whose husband's banking connections extended to the Home Office.
The Marchioness of Tavistock, whose influence, though informal, was exceeded only by her capacity for devastating understatement.
And the Duchess of Halford, who needed no connection to any institution because her word was, in certain circles, the institution itself.
The duchess was the most important of the four, and I reserved her for last. She received me in her morning room, a small, elegant space overlooking the garden, where the light fell through lace curtains and created patterns on the carpet that shifted with the movement of the breeze outside.
She was drinking tea, which she offered me, and which I accepted, because refusing the duchess's tea was not a thing that was done, and because the ritual of tea provided a framework within which the conversation could develop naturally, without the artificiality of a summons or the formality of a business meeting.
We spoke of the weather, which was execrable.
We spoke of the opera, which had been mediocre.
We spoke of the latest scandal in the diplomatic corps, which was amusing but not, the duchess assured me with a knowing smile, suitable for repetition.
And then, as the tea cooled and the conversation entered that phase of comfortable intimacy that precedes departure, I allowed the remark to surface.
"I suppose you have heard," I said, with the air of a woman who is reluctant to discuss something she finds distasteful but who feels, out of loyalty to her acquaintance, that she must, "that the detective from Scotland Yard has been making rather a nuisance of himself.
Not to me, personally. I have nothing but sympathy for a man doing his duty.
But I am told that his behaviour has been, shall we say, excessive.
He has been seen at my residence at hours that are not consistent with official business.
He has pursued me at social functions with a persistence that my friends find troubling.
And I understand that his colleagues at the Yard are becoming concerned about his state of mind. "
The duchess set down her teacup. The click of porcelain against saucer was very small and very precise, and in the silence that followed, it was the loudest sound in the room.
"My dear," she said, and her voice was the voice of a woman who has spent fifty years navigating the treacherous waters of London society and who has, in that time, developed an instinct for the manoeuvrings of others that borders on the supernatural.
"This is most distressing. You must feel quite besieged. "
"I am managing," I said, and I allowed a note of weariness to enter my voice, the weariness of a woman who has endured much and who is too proud to complain but not too proud to allow her friends to perceive, through the cracks in her composure, the extent of her burden.
"But I confess that the situation has become uncomfortable.
I have no wish to cause trouble for the Inspector.
I understand that he is, by all accounts, a competent man.
But competence, when directed improperly, can become something rather more dangerous. "
The duchess inclined her head. The inclination was slight, barely perceptible, but it communicated a depth of understanding that a paragraph of explicit statement could not have achieved.
She knew what I was telling her. She knew what I was asking.
And she knew, with the certainty of a woman who had performed this calculation a thousand times, that the information I had provided would be deployed, not immediately and not publicly, but through the quiet channels that she controlled with the same effortless authority with which she controlled everything else in her sphere.
"Leave it with me," she said.
I thanked her. I rose. I took my leave. And as the footman showed me to the door, I felt, with the particular satisfaction that accompanied the successful execution of a complex manoeuvre, the operation settling into its final configuration.
The letters would reach Scotland Yard and plant doubt in the institutional mind.
The gossip would reach the ears of those who influenced the institution from without.
And the two pressures, institutional and social, would converge upon Sebastian like the jaws of a vice, squeezing his professional position from both sides until the space in which he could operate shrank to nothing.
I returned to Blackwood House in a carriage that moved through the afternoon streets with the unhurried progress of a woman who has accomplished what she set out to accomplish and who can therefore afford to be generous with her time.
The light was better now, the pale sunshine having given way to something warmer, and the trees in the square were beginning to show the first tentative green of spring, a colour so faint it was almost imaginary, the ghost of a green that would, in a month's time, become a canopy of shade.
I thought about Sebastian as the carriage moved.
This was, I acknowledged, an inefficiency, a lapse in the rigorous compartmentalisation that I maintained between my strategic calculations and my private reflections.
Sebastian belonged in the strategic compartment.
He was a variable, a risk, a problem to be managed.
The fact that I thought about him at times when I was not actively managing him was, by my own standards, a weakness, and weaknesses, as Vivienne had taught me, were to be identified, catalogued, and, where possible, eliminated.
But I could not eliminate this one. I had tried.
In the months since the funeral, since the first interview, since the night in the drawing room, I had attempted, with the systematic thoroughness I brought to all my operations, to categorise Sebastian Aldric and to file him in the appropriate mental drawer, the drawer marked "Threats: Active" or the drawer marked "Threats: Neutralised" or, failing either of those, the drawer marked "Variables: Unresolved.
" But he would not stay in any of the drawers.
He kept sliding out, drifting across the boundaries I had established, appearing in contexts where he did not belong, and the appearance was always accompanied by the same sensation, a faint but persistent tremor in the machinery of my calculations, the tremor of something that did not fit the mechanism and that the mechanism could not, despite its precision, accommodate.
I did not dwell on the sensation. Dwell was the wrong word.
I observed it, the way I observed all phenomena that fell outside my understanding, with the detached attention of a naturalist cataloguing a new species: interesting, potentially significant, but not yet sufficiently understood to be incorporated into the system.
The system was my primary concern. The system was the machinery of my survival, the network of performances, calculations, and manoeuvres that kept me alive and free and in possession of everything I had built, and the system could not accommodate a sensation it could not explain.
So I observed the sensation, noted its existence, and returned my attention to the operation at hand.
The operation was progressing according to plan.
Hartwell was dead and could speak no more.
The documents he had provided to Sebastian were copies, and the originals were now in my possession, retrieved from Hartwell's offices by an intermediary who had posed as a representative of Hartwell's estate and who had been given access to the files by the senior clerk, a man named Pritchard who was loyal to the firm rather than to the dead solicitor's conscience.
Dr. Hale was being managed. The witnesses Sebastian had interviewed were being neutralised, one by one, through the various instruments of social pressure, financial incentive, and, in the case of Crutchley, the crude but effective threat of exposure.
And Sebastian himself was being dismantled, not through frontal assault but through the patient, systematic erosion of everything that sustained him: his credibility, his institutional support, his professional reputation, and, ultimately, his capacity to pursue an investigation that no one in authority would any longer tolerate.