Chapter Eleven
Counsel for the Prosecution
Eleanor Ashford had been a solicitor for thirty-one years. She had made senior partner at forty-two, which was six years earlier than anyone else had done it at her firm, and she had maintained that position by being methodical, unsentimental, and almost never wrong.
She was also, Nora now understood, the kind of person who made decisions in the same way she constructed legal arguments: from the outcome backward. What result do I need? What does achieving that result require? Do the things required. This was a useful framework for prosecuting crimes. It was also, taken to an extreme, a useful framework for committing them.
Nora did not go to arrest Ashford immediately. She had one more conversation first.
She went back to Cecily Whitmore.
"I need to ask you something," Nora said. "And I need you to think carefully before you answer, because we are at a point in this investigation where what you say next is going to matter significantly."
Cecily was still in the small sitting room. She looked as though she had not slept, which was likely true, and as though the process of not sleeping had produced a kind of brutal clarity, which was visible in her face.
"Eleanor Ashford," Nora said.
Cecily was absolutely still for three seconds. Then she said: "She called me."
"At eleven forty-three."
"Yes." Her voice was very controlled. "She told me Marcus had changed his mind. That she had spoken to him during dinner and he was going to deliver the correct verdict. She said there was a problem."
"And what was your role in this?" Nora asked.
The pause was long enough that Nora counted it.
"The forty thousand," Cecily said. "I received it. I was — a mechanism. A conduit. I knew the outline of what was happening. I didn't know the extent. I knew someone was going to pressure Marcus. I thought it would stay at pressure." She looked up. "I didn't know about Eleanor."
"She was Aldgate's insurance policy," Nora said.
"I didn't know that," Cecily said. "I knew she had connections to his people — it was Eleanor who approached me, in the first place, three months ago. She said it was a business arrangement and that Marcus wouldn't be harmed. Just persuaded." She pressed her hands flat against her knees. "I believed that because I wanted to believe it. Because I wanted the money and because—" She stopped.
"Because you wanted him to be vulnerable," Nora said. "Not dead. But diminished. Compromised. Less powerful."
Cecily was quiet for a very long time.
"There are things about this marriage," she said, "that I am not going to tell you unless I have to. But yes. There were reasons I was not entirely opposed to Marcus being put in a position of weakness."
"And when Ashford called and said there was a problem—"
"She said she was going to handle it," Cecily said. "She said to stay in the drawing room and keep the others talking and not worry about anything. She said she needed fifteen minutes."
"And then she went upstairs."
"I assumed." Her voice broke, finally. "I assumed she was going to threaten him. Confront him. Not—" She pressed her hand over her mouth for a moment. "She called me at eleven forty-three. I started talking to Hennick. I kept Foy engaged. I made sure nobody went upstairs for fifteen minutes."
"You provided the alibi window," Nora said.
"Yes." Barely audible.
"And when she came back down?"
"She poured herself a drink," Cecily said. "She sat down. She looked—" A pause. "She looked exactly the same as she had before."
Chapter Twelve
The Arrest
They arrested Eleanor Ashford at her office the following afternoon.
Nora did it herself. She had pulled Farrow into the arrest team, and two uniformed officers, and she went through the proper steps with the particular care of someone who knew that any deviation would be exploited later by exactly the kind of lawyers Eleanor Ashford could afford.
Ashford received the arrest with the composure of someone who had been expecting it — not complacently, but with the preparation of a person who had thought through multiple outcomes and had a plan for each of them. She said nothing beyond confirming her name and stating that she would be represented. She put on the coat that her assistant held for her. She walked out of her office past two dozen colleagues who were watching from behind glass partitions and she did not look at any of them.
In the car, Nora sat beside her and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say before the caution and the formal interview, and she had learned that silence was sometimes a more accurate kind of pressure than words.
At the station, in the interview room, with the recorder running and Ashford's solicitor present — not from her own firm; someone from outside, which was itself a careful choice — Nora laid out what she had.
She laid out the GSR on the door handle, and the position of it, and what it told her about the height of the person who had made it. She laid out the second key, and the partially engaged lock, and what the locksmith had said. She laid out the phone call at eleven forty-three, and Cecily's account of the conversation, which was a risk — Cecily had not yet been formally interviewed under caution — but a calculated one. She laid out Eleanor Ashford's connection to Aldgate's companies, and the defense challenge that had been mysteriously withdrawn, and what that suggested about the length of time she had been compromised.
And then she laid out the thing she hadn't told anyone yet.
"Your shoes," she said.
Ashford's expression did not change.
"The shoes you were wearing at dinner — Italian leather, two-inch heel. We have them from the clothing examination this morning." Nora folded her hands on the table. "The heel on the left shoe has gunshot residue in the join between the heel cap and the sole. That's a transfer pattern. The kind of pattern you get when you step on a hard surface where a gun has recently been discharged."
A long silence.
"The carpet in the study," Ashford's solicitor said. "She was in that room along with everyone else during the initial discovery—"
"The initial discovery was at twelve thirty-five," Nora said. "The carpet tests we ran this morning show GSR concentration highest at the area directly in front of the desk, which is consistent with the shot being fired from that position. The pattern on Ms. Ashford's heel is consistent with that area specifically." She looked at Ashford. "The responding officers documented everyone's position during the initial entry. You were at the doorway. You didn't step past the threshold until the room was confirmed clear. The recording confirms this."
She let that sit.
"I think," Nora said, "that you went upstairs at approximately eleven forty-five. You used the gun that Aldgate's network had obtained and passed through Foy. You shot Judge Whitmore while he was seated at his desk. You placed the gun on the floor to suggest he had dropped it. You took his right hand and introduced GSR to it from the barrel — the angle of the residue on his hand is smear-pattern, not blowback, which the forensic report will confirm. You placed the key in the inside of the lock, partially turned. You left, and you pulled the door closed, locking it with the second key that Cecily Whitmore — knowingly or unknowingly — had provided you access to. And then you went downstairs and poured yourself a drink."
Silence.
Eleanor Ashford looked at the table for a long time. Then she looked at her solicitor. Something passed between them that Nora could not read.
Then Ashford looked at Nora.
"You're almost right," she said.
Chapter Thirteen
What Eleanor Ashford Said
She spoke for four hours.
The solicitor attempted to stop her twice. She waved him quiet both times. She was, Nora recognized, doing what people who have carried something too long eventually do: she was setting it down.
The part where Nora had been almost right: the second key had not come through Cecily. Cecily had thought she was the only one Ashford had approached, but she wasn't. Ashford had made a copy of the study key eighteen months earlier, during a dinner at which she had been shown the study and had, while Whitmore was attending to another guest, palmed the key from the desk drawer and returned it within twenty minutes. She had had a copy made the following morning. She had kept it for eighteen months.
"You planned this for eighteen months," Nora said.
"I planned for the possibility," Ashford said. "There's a difference. I always thought it might not be necessary."
"What changed?"
"The defense challenge," Ashford said. "The conflict-of-interest filing they brought against me. Aldgate's people thought I could be pressured into withdrawing from the prosecution if they threatened to expose certain things about my financial history. They were right that I had things to hide. They were wrong that I would respond to blackmail by standing down."
"Instead you responded to blackmail by joining them."
"I responded to blackmail by taking control of the situation," Ashford said. "I went to them. I said: withdraw the challenge, and I will ensure the verdict is managed. They withdrew it. I stayed on the prosecution, as the prosecution."
Nora stared at her. "You prosecuted the case you were simultaneously ensuring would fail."
"I prosecuted it competently," Ashford said. "The case was solid. Whitmore was supposed to deliver the verdict as instructed. He chose not to."
"And when he chose not to—"
"The contingency became necessary." She said it without inflection. "I had not wanted it to be. A dead judge is a much larger problem than a corrupt one. But the alternative — Whitmore confessing, the investigation that would follow, where it would lead — I had more to lose than he did."
"And Foy? Hennick?"
"Foy is Aldgate's man, not mine. Hennick is useful to Aldgate and knows enough to be frightened. Neither of them knew what I was going to do that night." She paused. "Foy called Cecily. He thought Cecily would call someone — Aldgate's people, perhaps, who would send someone. He didn't know I was already there."
"You were always going to be there," Nora said.
"I was going to be there," Ashford agreed. "Because I couldn't trust anyone else to do it correctly. And because if it were ever traced — if it were ever traced to anyone in the room that night — I needed it to look as though any of them could have done it." She looked at Nora with something that might, in a different person, have been admiration. "The locked room was supposed to be the problem that couldn't be solved. It nearly was."
"The key in the lock," Nora said. "You were careful. Almost."
"The photograph," Ashford said. "I didn't account for the photograph at that angle."
"No," Nora said. "Most people don't."