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He was buried beside his father, under his own name. It was a condition of his plea. This is what she heard from Gregson, anyways, when it occurred to her to ask what became of him. He was hanged hadn’t felt like a sufficient answer. Nor did high treason, soliciting to murder, manslaughter. Nothing Gregson could tell her could have been sufficient. She hadn’t realized it until she tried to ask, but what she’d really wanted to know was how he’d felt on the gallows.
To be sure that she understood him, or to prove that she didn’t.
She understands now that she’ll have no way of knowing. Were she younger, she might have put it out of her mind. She’d put a lot of things out of her mind then, things that she didn’t have the power to change. Things that weren’t worth worrying about. But perhaps it’s her police training that’s given her a sensitivity to mysteries, or perhaps it’s having been caught up in a couple. It’s been proven to her now that even the most knotted-up mystery can be unraveled. Even if she knows that this one is impossible…she can’t help trying to solve it.
He thinks she’s being ridiculous. Or she thinks he thinks she is, which is ridiculous. She knew the man for a few days, most of them spent in a prison cell. What makes her think she can speak for him? She doesn’t know anything about him. Not really.
“But,” he says to her, “don’t you?”
I don’t, she says. Or she thinks, echoing around her skull like his voice does. She thinks it firmly, as much to herself as to him. To remind him that he is herself. Nothing more than a lingering insecurity, self-doubt given voice.
There’s no more effective voice she could have given it. She can still hear him, that smooth, oily tone. She can still see him looking down his nose at her.
“That courtroom turned you inside out,” he says. “Showed everyone who you really are. Don’t you think that’s what it did to me?”
She clenches her jaw.
It’s a Wednesday, a fine one at the end of summer. She’s been a free woman for one week and five days. His voice has been quieter, now that she’s busier, but dwelling on him makes her hear it again. He’s not sure why she thinks coming to see him will undo it. He’s eyeing her, brows raised, and she wishes he were still above ground so she could spit in his arrogant face.
She knows nothing else to try.
The cemetery he’s in isn’t much nicer than Lowgate. Barely worth bargaining for. But all the dead that she’d ever known had never even touched cemetery soil. She’s been to graveyards, but she’s never had any grave to visit before. Visit. For lack of a better term.
She’d nosed about in the case files to memorize the letters of his name. She’d copied them down into her detective's notebook. It takes her nearly an hour to comb the gravestones, checking against her notes. It goes faster once she realizes she’s looking for a new stone. (She thinks Gregson would be proud of her logic, if she ever planned to tell him she were here.)
He's on the far edge, nearest the street. The grass is still patchy on the earth over him.
ASHLEY BENEDICT GRAYDON
MARCH 11, 1873 – MAY 29, 1900
Poor old Thrice-Fired Mason in the spot next to him, she figures, though she can’t read his name. She’d intended to look it up too. But when she’d opened his case file the photograph had nearly made her sick. Dizzied, she’d slammed it shut.
There’s no photograph here, so she sits on the ground before his headstone and copies down his name. Not for any real purpose. Just because she feels she ought to know it. He’s the one she really ought to be visiting, isn’t he? The man she owes something to? The man she’d actually helped to deny justice, rather than the one who’d have denied her the same? But the way that he haunts her is different. She can feel his blood on her hands, but she can’t hear his voice in her mind. Mason Milverton lives in her heart, but not her head.
His son is more troublesome.
“You look well,” he says. “Not my taste, but at least you’ve washed.”
There’s a bathtub in the Gregson house. There are proper mirrors. She thinks about his posh, shiny getup every time she looks in one and sees her new self.
Fuck off.
“Would that I could.”
She stares at his headstone. You can. If she stares hard enough it will be true. You can if you want to.
“Perhaps if you want me to.”
He’d pinned a man’s death on her. He’d make her own suffering her fault as well? The rage nearly overwhelms her before she remembers that he isn’t real. And, therefore—that he’s right.
She stuffs her notebook back in her pocket and finds her badge, gripping it, her fingers tightening between the points of the star.
“Inspector Lestrade.” He chuckles. He always does, whenever she says it, but he’s louder today now that she’s let him be. “Someone’s got a high opinion of herself.”
The badge digs into her palm. You’re one to talk.
“I’m one to know.” His lips twist into a bitter smirk. “Dress yourself up all you like. You’re gutter filth, and you’ll be no more than that until you’re dead.”
Like you?
“Precisely.”
She grits her teeth.
“Do you dream about it?” he asks. “Do you wake up and think you’re still hungry? That you’re still penniless and half-dead?”
Fuck off.
“You must. I was free of it far longer than you, and I did.”
Fuck off.
“I studied to escape it. I worked, and I earned a living, and none of it did a damn thing. You’re arrogant enough to think that you can change, when you’re handed a life on a silver platter?”
Fuck off.
“You earned nothing but a detective's pity.”
Fuck you.
“But even if you study, even if you work, none of it will do a damn thing.” She can see his pale eyes, gazing down at her under low, judgmental lids. “That’s what scares you, isn’t it?”
I ain’t scared.
“You wouldn’t be talking to me if you weren’t.” His voice is firm, hard-edged, no longer smooth and smug but no less condescending. "You’re scared that you’ll always be a desperate street rat underneath it all. That it lives in your bones, like it did mine.”
She draws her knees to her chest, fighting the voice in her head and the acid in her stomach.
“You can decide to become anything you want to, Inspector, but that doesn’t mean that you can.”
At her trial, she hadn’t been in a place to understand what he’d meant. She’d never tried to cover up the street rat—she’d taken pride in it. She’d taken pride in everything anyone had ever tried to hold against her. It had been easier than changing.
She hadn’t understood the nerve it took to try. She’d seen him as a traitor then—as the community she’s left must see her now. It doesn’t matter one bit whether she can or can’t turn over a new leaf, because she will not be welcome back if she doesn’t. Her future depends upon it.
As his had.
Maybe I’m cleverer than you, she thinks.
He laughs.
Maybe I’m stronger.
"That’s easy to say now, isn’t it?” He snorts softly. “We’ll see how strong you are when you need to be.”
Strong enough not to kill anybody.
“Are you?”
I am.
He replies calmly, clearly, cleanly, in the Queen’s painstaking English. “You held a man at gunpoint over a stack of papers, you miserable wretch.”
It was more than that.
"It wasn't."
She screws her eyes shut, sickened with herself. He’s right. She’s enraged that he’s right. If only she’d thought of a better way—if only she’d never gone there at all—if only, if only—
“And now you’ll be given your own gun, on police issue? Do you really think that’s wise?”
I never killed nobody, she insists, because she has to. I’ll never kill nobody.
“Do you think I thought that I would?”
She curls over her folded knees, pressing her face into the hollow between them. She wants to look away, she wants to run—but she can’t run from him. She can’t even look away. He still gazes down at her, serene in his nonexistence.
“What made you apply to Scotland Yard?”
It’s a question she doesn’t need to think about. She answers instinctively—she's spent a great deal of time repeating it. I want to help someday. People like me. People who need it, who need a copper on their side.
“Is that what you’ve been telling yourself?”
‘Course it is. It’s true.
“I’m not sure it is.” She can see his mouth twitch, the barest, faintest flicker of a smirk. “I think you want the power that’s been held over you your entire life.”
...What?
“You’ve been running from the police since you could run. You’ve always hated them. But underneath it you’ve always envied them, haven’t you?”
You don’t know anything about it.
“Don’t I? You’re tired of being at the mercy of the law. Why shouldn’t you be the law?”
YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT.
“There’s nothing unnatural about wanting what’s always been denied you. Becoming what’s always hurt you. You’re not the first to leap at the opportunity.”
I don’t WANT any of that.
“It’s what I wanted.”
I’m not you.
“But I’m you.”
This is the most infuriating thing he can say. He can insult her all he likes, spin conspiracies and spit cruelty, but knowing that it all comes from the inside is what makes it truly sting. How could she let someone else’s failure haunt her so profoundly it’s convinced her that her own is inevitable? Someone like him? It’s humiliating—and it hurts.
“Perhaps I’m not all of you,” he says. “Or even most of you. But I am part of you. The clever part.” He stares at her, in her. “The one that knows what becomes of fools like you and me.”
Shut up.
Perhaps defeatism is justified from a dead man, but he’s not a dead man. He’s a miserable little corner of a living girl’s brain that latched onto someone else’s misery. She’s sick of hearing it.
Shut up about how it never leaves us. Shut up about how we can’t change. It’s pathetic.
“It’s the truth,” he says. “You’ve seen it.”
I’ve seen one single knobhead fuck it all up, she replies. I’m not him.
His laughter rings in her skull.
“Good Lord,” he drawls. “You foolish child. You really do think you can pull it off, do you?”
She snorts. I liked you better when you thought you could too.
“…Hm.”
He’s still grinning, but his eyes are solemn now. She lifts her head.
“You're welcome to imagine me that way," he says. "I’m sure it would be more inspiring.”
I don’t want to imagine you at all.
He looks away to inspect the head of his cane, rubs the thumb of his glove along the gilding. “Even so, I think you’re lucky that you have. A cautionary tale is more than I had.”
You wouldn’t have listened either.
He laughs again, this time more softly.
“Perhaps I wouldn’t have.”
She listens, but he doesn’t speak again. She doesn’t think he’s gone—simply chastened, for the moment. She knows how to chasten him now.
She thinks succeeding where he’d failed may shut him up for good.
She gets to her feet. She stands there staring at his gravestone, and she gathers her spit on her tongue for a minute.
She swallows it.
She walks away.