Chapter 28
The Last Witness
T he letter from Dr. Hale arrived on the twentieth of April, delivered by the morning post in a cream-coloured envelope that bore the physician's address in Harley Street and his name in the precise, rather small handwriting that I had learned to associate with a man of careful habits and moderate ambitions.
Dorothea brought it to me on the silver tray, together with the other items of correspondence that had accumulated overnight, and I took it from the tray and held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it in my hand, the slight thickness of the paper, the crispness of the fold, and I understood, before I opened it, that it represented the final victory in a campaign that had been conducted with the patience and precision of a siege.
I opened the letter and read it.
"Dear Lady Ashworth,
I write to inform you that, after careful consideration, I have decided that I am unable to provide the testimony that Inspector Aldric has requested of me regarding the late Earl's medical history.
I realise that I previously indicated a willingness to cooperate with his inquiry, and I regret any confusion or inconvenience that my change of position may cause.
Upon reflection, I have concluded that my professional obligations to patient confidentiality, and my duty to the reputation of the medical profession, must take precedence over the demands of a police investigation that, in my judgment, has been conducted with insufficient regard for the sensitivities involved.
The Earl was a private man, and his medical history is a private matter, and I am not comfortable discussing it in a context that may lead to public speculation or, worse, unfounded accusation.
I trust you will understand my position. Please convey my regards to Mr. Edmund, whose company I much enjoyed when I had the privilege of attending the Earl.
I remain, your obliged servant,
Dr. Philip Hale"
I read the letter twice. The first reading was for content; the second was for texture.
The content was unremarkable, a standard refusal composed in the measured, slightly stilted language of a man who was acutely aware that his words might one day be examined by persons other than their intended recipient.
The texture was more revealing. The letter was too careful, too qualified, too anxious to demonstrate that the change of position was the result of principled reflection rather than external pressure.
A man who genuinely changes his mind through reflection does not feel the need to justify the change with such elaborate precision.
A man who changes his mind because he has been pressured to do so writes exactly this kind of letter, the letter of a man who is trying to convince himself, as much as his correspondent, that the decision was his own.
The pressure had been applied through two channels, operating simultaneously.
The first was social and professional. Through an intermediary, a Dr. Aldous Vernet who sat on the council of the Royal College of Physicians and who owed me a favour of some magnitude, a favour originating in a matter involving his eldest son and a gambling debt that no one wished to see publicised, I had arranged for a veiled communication to reach Dr. Hale suggesting that his cooperation with Sebastian's investigation might have consequences for his professional standing.
The communication had not been a threat, not in any explicit sense.
It had been, rather, an observation, the kind of observation that a senior physician might make to a junior colleague in the course of a conversation about the challenges of medical practice in London: how difficult it was, these days, to maintain a practice when one's patients were drawn from the upper classes, how sensitive those patients were to any suggestion that their physicians were involved in matters of scandal or controversy, how easily a reputation built over decades could be destroyed by a single association with an investigation that, however well-intentioned, might lead to outcomes that no one desired.
Dr. Hale, who had been building his Harley Street practice for twelve years and who had invested every penny of his savings in its establishment, would have understood the observation perfectly.
He would have understood that it was not, technically, a warning. But he would have heard it as one.
The second channel was financial. Through another intermediary, this one a woman named Mrs. Pendleton who operated a small but lucrative employment agency for medical professionals, I had arranged for a position to become available at a practice on Wimpole Street, a position that paid substantially more than Hale's current situation and that offered the kind of clientele that a Harley Street physician spent his entire career trying to attract.
The position was real, in the sense that it existed and that the senior partner of the practice was genuinely looking for an associate.
The funding that made the position possible was mine, channelled through two layers of financial intermediaries that rendered the source of the money invisible.
The condition attached to the position, conveyed to Hale through Mrs. Pendleton with the subtle discretion of a woman who had been arranging such transactions for twenty years, was that the position would remain available only as long as Dr. Hale's name was not associated with any investigation that might prove embarrassing to persons of standing.
The condition was not, technically, a bribe.
It was, rather, a statement of the senior partner's preferences, and the preferences were reasonable, and the position was desirable, and the choice, as Dr. Hale understood it, was his.
He had chosen. The letter in my hand was the evidence of his choice, and the choice was, in every meaningful sense, the end of Sebastian's case.
I set the letter down on the desk and considered the position.
Sebastian's evidentiary base was now reduced to the following: the copies of documents that Hartwell had provided, which were damning in their implications but which, without Hartwell's testimony to authenticate them, were merely pieces of paper with no provenance and no legal weight; his own observations and deductions, which were, by any standard, insufficient to support a criminal charge against a countess; and the testimony of Dorothea Crewe, who had provided information about the locked cabinet in the stillroom but whose testimony was, in the eyes of the law, the testimony of a servant, which meant that it carried approximately the weight of a gust of wind against the hull of a ship.
No witnesses. No authenticated documents.
No institutional support. No professional credibility.
Sebastian Aldric was now in possession of nothing but his own certainty, and certainty, however sincere, was not evidence, and evidence, however compelling, was not a case, and a case, however strong, was not a conviction, and a conviction, however just, was impossible without the cooperation of the institutions that administered justice, and the institutions, I had ensured, would not cooperate.
I felt a sensation that I recognised from previous operations, the sensation of completion, the clean, precise satisfaction of a mechanism that has performed exactly as designed and that has, in performing, achieved its intended result without deviation, without waste, and without the messiness that characterises the work of amateurs.
The sensation was pleasant. It was not, however, as pleasant as I had expected it to be, and the absence of full pleasure was itself notable, a data point that I filed away for future examination.
I stood and went to the window. The morning was grey, a low ceiling of cloud pressing down upon the rooftops of Mayfair, and the air had that particular quality of April in London, the dampness that penetrates clothing and settles into the bones and that makes every outdoor excursion feel like a small act of endurance.
The square was quiet. A nursemaid pushed a perambulator along the pavement.
A delivery cart clattered past. A man in a dark coat stood near the railings, his back to the house, apparently studying the trees.
I recognised him, of course. I had been aware of his presence for the past three days, a figure who appeared at irregular intervals in the vicinity of Blackwood House, always at a distance, always with his face averted, always with the slightly too-casual posture of a man who is trying very hard not to look like he is watching something.
He was not one of mine. He was not, I was fairly certain, connected to any of the institutions I had been cultivating.
He was, I suspected, one of Sebastian's, a junior officer assigned to maintain a discreet observation of the house, perhaps in the hope that something useful might present itself.
The observation was futile, and the futility of it was, in its own small way, an indicator of the desperation that was now driving Sebastian's operation, the desperation of a man who has run out of leads and who has resorted to the investigatory equivalent of standing outside a door and hoping it will open.