Chapter 33 #2
The law existed for a reason. I had said this to her, months ago, in the drawing room, and she had smiled at me with the particular smile of a person who understands the law better than the person who is quoting it.
The law existed to restrain appetite, to channel the destructive impulses of human nature into structures that prevented chaos, to provide a framework within which justice could be administered and order maintained.
I believed in the law. I had built my career on the foundation of that belief.
And the law said that a person who commits murder should be arrested, tried, convicted, and punished, regardless of their social position, their wealth, their title, or the neurological condition that made them what they were.
The law did not make exceptions for those afflicted with moral insanity.
The law did not recognise the distinction between a person who kills for profit and a person who kills because they are incapable of understanding why killing is wrong.
The law said that murder was murder, and that was the end of it.
But the law also required evidence, and the evidence I had was not sufficient, and the pursuit of insufficient evidence against a person of Cecilia's standing would not result in justice but in my own destruction, and the destruction of my career and my reputation would not bring back the three dead men or prevent the next woman like Cecilia from following the same pattern, and the futility of the exercise was so total, so comprehensive, that it amounted to a different kind of crime, the crime of pursuing a course of action that would accomplish nothing and destroy everything.
I was sitting at my desk, turning these thoughts over in my mind, when the letter arrived.
It came by messenger, a young man in the uniform of the General Post Office, who delivered it to the front desk with the particular gravity of someone who is aware that the item they are carrying is of more than ordinary importance.
The envelope was thick, cream-coloured, and sealed with red wax impressed with a crest that I did not immediately recognise.
My name was written on the front in a hand that was precise and authoritative, the hand of a person accustomed to being read and obeyed.
I opened the envelope and extracted the letter, which was written on heavy paper, the paper of a government department, the paper of institutional power.
The letter was brief. It bore the letterhead of the Home Office and was signed by a man whose name I knew by reputation: Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce, Under-Secretary for Special Affairs, a position that I had heard described as the most powerful job in Whitehall that no one outside Whitehall had ever heard of.
The letter informed me, in language that was polite but unmistakable in its implications, that Sir Geoffrey was aware of my investigation into the affairs of the Countess Dowager of Ashworth, that he had been monitoring the matter through informal channels for several months, and that he wished to meet with me at his earliest convenience to discuss "certain developments that may bear upon the case.
" The letter was dated the seventh of May, the day before Edmund's accident, which meant that it had been written before the accident and that the developments it referenced were not related to what had happened on Davies Street but to something else, something that had been in motion before Edmund was hurt and that was, presumably, still in motion.
I read the letter three times. The first reading was for comprehension.
The second was for implication. The third was for the thing that lies beneath implication, the unstated message that a letter from a government official always contains, which is the message that the writer is powerful, that the writer is watching, and that the writer's interest in the matter has not yet been defined and could, depending on the recipient's response, become either an asset or a liability.
I put the letter in my pocket and continued with my work.
The routine paperwork absorbed the next three hours, and during those three hours, I did not think about the letter, because thinking about the letter would have required me to think about what it represented, and what it represented was a shift in the balance of the investigation that I had not anticipated and that I was not sure I welcomed.
The investigation had been, from the beginning, a solitary exercise.
I had pursued it alone, without the support of my superiors, without the cooperation of witnesses who had been intimidated into silence, without the resources of the institution that employed me.
The solitude was not comfortable, but it was familiar, and familiarity had become, over five months, the only thing I could rely on.
The letter from Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce introduced a new element into the equation: institutional authority.
The Home Office, unlike Scotland Yard, possessed the power to override the social and legal protections that Cecilia's position afforded her.
A Home Office inquiry, backed by political authority and access to resources that I could not dream of commanding, could accomplish what I could not: compel testimony, obtain foreign evidence, request exhumation, and pursue a prosecution that would otherwise be impossible.
But institutional authority was not the same as institutional justice.
I had been a police officer long enough to understand that the machinery of government operated according to its own logic, a logic that was related to justice in the way that a clock is related to time: it measured the same phenomenon, but its mechanisms were driven by forces — political, bureaucratic, personal — that had nothing to do with the thing they were nominally designed to produce.
A Home Office investigation into the Countess Dowager of Ashworth could result in justice.
It could also result in a cover-up, a quiet arrangement, a deal that traded exposure for stability, a sacrifice of truth on the altar of institutional convenience.
I did not know which outcome Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce intended, and the not-knowing was itself a form of vulnerability, because it required me to place my trust in a person I had never met and an institution whose interests were not necessarily aligned with mine.
I left Scotland Yard at six o'clock and walked home through the evening streets, and the walk was longer than usual, because I was not walking toward a destination but away from a decision, and the away-ness of the walk was its defining quality, the sense of a person moving not toward something but from something, postponing the moment when the decision would have to be made.
The letter was in my pocket, and the paper was heavy against my thigh, and with each step I felt the weight of it, the physical weight of the paper and the metaphysical weight of what it represented: the possibility of a conclusion to the investigation, and the equally real possibility of a conclusion that would satisfy the institutions while betraying the truth.
I reached my rooms and lit the lamp and sat in my chair and took the letter from my pocket and read it a fourth time.
The words had not changed. The implications had not changed.
But something had changed, in the interval between the third reading and the fourth, and the thing that had changed was me.
I had seen Cecilia on her knees. I had heard her say the words.
I had witnessed the thing she felt for Edmund, and the witnessing had altered my understanding of her in a way that the evidence, voluminous and damning as it was, had not.
She was guilty. Of this I had no doubt. But she was also a person — a person of a particular kind, a person whose emotional architecture was fundamentally different from the architecture that the law was designed to regulate — and the recognition of her personhood, even the diminished, distorted personhood of a constitutionally disordered mind, had introduced a complication into the case that the law was not equipped to resolve.
I composed a reply to Sir Geoffrey. The reply was brief and formal, acknowledging receipt of his letter and proposing a meeting at his convenience.
I did not mention Edmund's accident. I did not mention the scene on Davies Street.
I did not mention the words Cecilia had spoken in the drawing room.
These were my observations, my experiences, my understanding, and they were not, yet, the property of the Home Office or anyone else.
I would meet Sir Geoffrey, and I would listen to what he had to say, and I would decide, on the basis of what I heard, whether the institutional path he represented was a path I wished to follow.
I posted the reply the following morning and returned to Scotland Yard and resumed the routine that the routine of police work demanded.
The hours passed. The paperwork accumulated.
The city of London went about its business, and the business of London was, as always, the business of indifference, the ceaseless, efficient indifference of a metropolis that had seen a thousand scandals and survived them all and that would, I was quite certain, survive this one too, regardless of whether the scandal was exposed or concealed, prosecuted or bargained away.