Chapter 37 #2
I thought about the evening. The dinner table, the silver, the candles, the flowers.
Cecilia presiding over the meal with the serene authority of a woman who owned every room she entered.
The consommé, the sole, the lamb, the syllabub, each course a small masterpiece of culinary precision.
The conversation, the laughter, the comfortable noise of people who believed they were at a dinner party and not at a battlefield.
The moment when Sir Geoffrey had asked for a private word, and the quality of silence that had followed the request, a silence that was not the absence of sound but the presence of dread.
The closed door. The twenty minutes of waiting.
And then the door had opened, and Cecilia had walked back into the dining room, and on her face, for a quarter of a second, I had seen the expression that I could not unsee, the expression of a mind that was calculating, coldly and rapidly and without the interference of anything that might be called conscience, and the expression had told me more about what she was than every piece of evidence in my files combined.
She had been calculating how to survive.
And the options she had been weighing, I knew, with a certainty that was intuitive rather than rational, included options that no civilised person would consider, options that involved the elimination of the threat by the most direct and permanent means available.
She had been sitting in that study, looking at Sir Geoffrey's evidence, and she had been calculating, in real time, how to kill him.
And possibly how to kill me. And possibly how to kill everyone in the house, if that was what the calculation required.
This was what she was. This was what I had known, on some level, since the beginning of the investigation, since the moment I had first looked at the pattern of three deaths and one widow and felt the cold thrill of recognition that comes when a detective sees a pattern that no one else has seen.
She was not merely a murderer. She was a murderer of extraordinary capability, a woman who had turned killing into a craft, who approached each death as a technical problem to be solved, and who solved the problems with a meticulousness that was, in its own appalling way, admirable.
And I loved her. Or I desired her. Or I was fascinated by her.
Or I was destroyed by her. The words were insufficient, all of them, because the thing I felt was not love and not desire and not fascination and not destruction but something that contained elements of all four and was larger than any of them, a thing that had no name in any language I knew and that defied every category of human experience I had ever encountered.
I had spent six months inside the orbit of this woman, and the orbit had changed me, altered the fundamental architecture of my moral universe in ways that I was only now, sitting on a cold bench in Green Park at midnight, beginning to understand.
I thought about Edmund. The boy was recovering from his injuries, the broken leg mending, the contusions fading, the concussion subsiding into the dim, unreliable memory of a frightening experience.
He was, by all accounts, in good spirits, entertained by Dorothea and visited by the tutor and watched over by the sister who protected him with a ferocity that was, in its own way, as terrifying as her capacity for killing.
I had been there, at the moment of his injury, and I had held his hand while he cried for his sister, and I had felt, at that moment, a tenderness for the boy that was genuine and uncomplicated and which had nothing to do with Cecilia and everything to do with the simple, fundamental human response to the suffering of an innocent creature.
Edmund was the one person in Cecilia's world who was truly innocent, truly good, truly untouched by the darkness that surrounded him, and his survival mattered, not because of what he represented in the larger scheme of the case but because he was a person, a real person with a real mind and a real capacity for joy and trust and the simple, unguarded affection that made him, in the context of this story, the only character who was not performing.
If Cecilia were caught, if she were arrested and tried and convicted and imprisoned or executed, what would happen to Edmund?
He would be placed in an institution, almost certainly, because there was no one else to care for him, no family member who had the resources or the willingness or the understanding to manage a young man who required the kind of constant, attentive care that Cecilia and Dorothea provided.
The institutions for people like Edmund were, I knew from professional experience, places of neglect and cruelty and despair, warehouses where the unwanted were deposited and forgotten, and the thought of Edmund in such a place was a thought I could not bear.
This was not, I recognised with a clarity that was almost painful, an altruistic thought.
This was a rationalisation, a way of justifying the thing I already wanted to do by cloaking it in the language of concern for another person.
But the rationalisation, however self-serving, was not entirely without merit, because Edmund's welfare was genuinely at risk, and the risk was genuine, and the consequences of Cecilia's exposure would fall, disproportionately and unjustly, on the one person in her world who was truly innocent.
But this was not why I did not want her to be caught.
I knew that, even as I thought it, even as the rationalisation formed itself in my mind with the neat, convenient logic of a man who is trying to find a reason for a decision that has already been made by forces that have nothing to do with reason.
The reason I did not want her to be caught was not Edmund and not justice and not the rule of law and not any of the abstract principles that I had spent my career defending.
The reason was simpler and more terrible than any of those things, and the reason was this: I did not want to live in a world without Cecilia Blackwood in it.
This was the admission that broke me. Not the knowledge of her crimes, not the evidence in my files, not the expression I had seen on her face in the dining room, but this, the quiet, devastating acknowledgment that my desire for her had exceeded my commitment to justice, and that the excess was not marginal but total, a complete and irrevocable surrender of the principles that had defined my professional life and, to a significant degree, my personal identity.
I was a detective inspector. I had spent eleven years building a career on the foundation of a single conviction: that the truth, once known, must be acted upon, regardless of the personal cost. And now, sitting on a bench in Green Park at midnight, I was confronting the fact that the cost, in this case, was one I was not willing to pay, because paying it would mean losing her, and losing her was the one outcome that my mind, for all its analytical capacity and all its moral rigour, could not accommodate.
The lake was still. The moonlight lay on its surface like a sheet of silver, and the reflection of the trees was broken and distorted by the slight movement of the water, and the effect was beautiful in a way that was almost painful, because beauty, at this particular moment, was a reminder of everything I was about to lose: not Cecilia herself, because she was not yet lost and might not be lost, but the version of myself that believed in beauty as something separate from the darkness that produced it, the version of myself that could look at a beautiful thing and not see, behind it, the machinery of calculation and control that had made it possible.
Cecilia was beautiful. That was not in question.
Her beauty was the first thing I had noticed about her, at the funeral, standing at the graveside in her black crêpe veil, and it had been the last thing I had noticed about her tonight, as she walked back into the dining room with her mask in place and her composure intact, and it was the thing that threaded through every interaction we had ever had, a constant, inescapable presence that shaped my response to her in ways I could not control and did not fully understand.
But the beauty was not separate from the darkness.
The beauty was the darkness, or rather, the beauty was the expression of the darkness, the form that the darkness took when it was rendered in flesh and gesture and the precise, calculated movement of a woman who had made physical grace into a strategic asset.
And my attraction to that beauty was not, as I had once believed, an attraction to something pure and good that existed in opposition to the crimes I suspected her of.
It was an attraction to the whole of her, the beauty and the darkness together, the mask and the calculation and the cold, brilliant mind that lay behind both, and the attraction was, I understood now, not a weakness to be overcome but a fact to be accepted, a fact about myself that was as immutable as the colour of my eyes or the rhythm of my heartbeat.