Chapter 39 #3
I opened the door and stepped into the corridor and pulled the door shut behind me, and the click of the door was the sound of a closure that was not a resolution, because resolutions require the delivery of justice, and justice had not been delivered, and the absence of delivery was the thing that I would carry, the stone in my chest, the weight on my conscience, the permanent, irrevocable knowledge that I had been right and that being right had not been enough.
The corridor was the same corridor I had walked down a thousand times, lined with the same doors and the same sounds and the same smell of institutional anxiety, and the sameness was oppressive, because the sameness communicated that the world had not changed, that the system continued to function as it always had, that the men behind the doors were still doing the work of detection, still assembling the evidence, still pursuing the truth, and the pursuing was, in light of what had just happened in Graves's office, an act of faith that the system did not deserve, because the system had demonstrated, with a thoroughness that was almost impressive, that the truth, once known, could be buried if the burial served the interests of the powerful.
I walked out of the Yard and into the street, and the street was bright with June sunlight and crowded with the ordinary business of the city, and the ordinary business was, for the first time in my professional life, an affront, because the ordinary business of the city proceeded as though nothing had happened, as though three men had not been murdered and their killer had not been allowed to walk free, and the proceeding was the privilege of a world that did not know and would never know and that was, in its ignorance, both blessed and complicit, because the ignorance was the product of a system that concealed its failures with the same efficiency that it concealed its successes, and the concealment was the point, the purpose, the reason for the system's existence.
I walked. I did not know where I was going, and the not-knowing was, for a man whose profession was the pursuit of direction, a source of considerable disorientation, because I had spent six months moving toward a destination — the arrest and prosecution of Cecilia Blackwood — and the destination had been removed, and the removal had left me standing in the middle of a map with no routes and no landmarks and no indication of where to go next.
I thought about what I knew. I knew that Cecilia had killed Arthur Pendleton with cardiac stimulants dissolved in his nightly cordial.
I knew that she had arranged the death of Henry Ravenscroft through a wire strung across a bridle path.
I knew that she had poisoned Richard Ashworth with arsenic in his brandy over a period of eighteen months.
I knew that she had murdered Sir William Hartwell and staged it as a suicide.
I knew these things with the same certainty that I knew my own name, and the certainty was useless, because the knowing was mine and mine alone, a private burden that no court would hear and no jury would weigh and no judge would acknowledge, and the privacy of the burden was the system's final cruelty, because it ensured that the truth would die with me, or at least would survive only in the small, diminished space of my own conscience, where it would fester and rankle and provide, for the rest of my life, a source of bitterness and regret that no amount of professional achievement would ever fully assuage.
I found myself in Green Park, at the same bench where I had sat after the dinner party, and the coincidence was not coincidental, because my feet had carried me here without my direction, and the direction of feet is, in moments of distress, more reliable than the direction of minds, and the bench was the same bench and the lake was the same lake and the willow tree that overhung the water was the same willow tree, and the sameness was both a comfort and an accusation, because the sameness communicated that the world continued while I had been stopped, and the stopping was the thing I could not accept and could not escape.
What would I do now? The question was unanswerable, because the question presupposed a future that I could not imagine, a future in which the case was closed and Cecilia was gone and the system had demonstrated, with finality and without apology, that the pursuit of truth was a pursuit that the system tolerated only when the truth was convenient, and that when the truth became inconvenient, the system's capacity for self-protection was absolute and remorseless and entirely without reference to the principles of justice that it claimed to embody.
I sat on the bench and watched the lake and thought about Cecilia, and the thinking was not the analytical, professional thinking of an investigator assessing a suspect but the thinking of a man who has lost something and who is trying, with the inadequate tools of human cognition, to understand the nature of the loss.
I had lost the case. I had lost my professional credibility.
I had lost the belief that the system I served was capable of delivering justice.
I had lost the woman I loved, or the woman I was fascinated by, or the woman I could not stop thinking about, and the loss was total and permanent and irrecoverable, and the irrecoverability of it was the thing that sat in my chest like a stone, and the stone was heavy, and I could not put it down.
And Cecilia would go to France, or to Italy, or to wherever the system had decided to send her, and she would live in comfort, in a villa with a garden and a view of the sea, and she would read books and walk in the sunshine and drink coffee at a café on the promenade, and she would do all of this with the same composure and precision and controlled beauty that she had brought to everything in her life, because Cecilia was, by her own nature and her own training, incapable of being anything other than what she was, which was perfect, and controlled, and entirely without remorse.
And I would stay in London. I would return to my desk at Scotland Yard and I would take up the next case and the next and the next, and each case would be a small, inadequate substitute for the case that had been taken from me, and the substitution would be, I knew, the shape of the rest of my professional life, a long, slow diminuendo of purpose and conviction that would end, eventually, in retirement and obscurity and the quiet, private knowledge that I had once been right about something that mattered and that the rightness had not been enough.
The lake was very still. The June sunlight lay on its surface like a sheet of hammered gold.
And somewhere in London, in a house on Grosvenor Square that she would soon be forced to leave, Cecilia Blackwood was packing her belongings and saying goodbye to her brother and preparing for a departure that would take her away from everything she had built and deposit her in a world where no one would know her name or her history or the things she had done, and the departure was a punishment, of a sort, though not the punishment she deserved, and the punishment she deserved was a punishment that the system was not prepared to deliver, because the delivery would have cost the system more than it was willing to pay.
I sat on the bench and felt the weight of what I knew, and the weight was the weight of a truth that would never be spoken, and the silence of the truth was the silence of a system that had chosen, once again, to protect itself rather than to protect the people it was designed to serve, and the choosing was the choosing of power, and power, in the end, was the only thing that mattered, and the mattering of power was the thing that Cecilia had always understood and that I, in my foolish, idealistic, professional sincerity, had never fully grasped until it was too late.