Riot Most Uncouth

by Daniel Friedman

  “I hardly see the nation’s ruin in the science of detection,” I said. “I am, indeed, baffled at how the two things could be related.”

  His brows pulled together and his face became a collection of shadowy triangles. “I suspect you spend a lot of time being baffled, Lord Byron. You certainly seem to spend a lot of time drunk.”

  I couldn’t help noticing that he parried my rhetorical jabs with the same sort of bored insouciance that I’d employed in insulting Fielding Dingle. Everything about Archibald Knifing was scary, but the scariest thing about him was how brilliant he was. I suspected, for the first time, that my assumption that I was the world’s greatest criminal investigator might have been mistaken. I wondered if Knifing had ever written verse, and I rather hoped he had not. He’d probably have been spectacular at it.

  I replied: “I am a poet, and I am thusly endowed, at least, with a finely honed sense of truth.”

  “A finely honed sense of the truth?” His clenched features lifted and spread apart, and his lips peeled off his teeth. I was terrified that I was about to find out what it sounded like when he laughed, but he restrained himself.

  “It is not a thing for your mockery, Sir Archie. It’s the most sacred and exquisite tool in an artist’s repertoire.”

  He tucked his hands into his waistcoat pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels, stretching his legs as he did so. Finally, he spoke: “I just want to make sure I understand this,” he said. “Your finely honed sense of the truth is an exquisite tool?”

  “I do not appreciate your tone,” I said.

  He relinquished his self-control and cackled. The evil sound reverberated off the blood-spattered stone walls. “I must say, I am thoroughly enjoying your ridiculous presence. You add no small amount of levity to these grim and routine proceedings.”

  “I spread joy wherever I go,” I said. Contrary to rumor, I am capable of embarrassment, and I was, then, embarrassed.

  “Do you use the whole repertoire to spread the joy, or do you merely require the exquisite tool?”

  “You’re very funny yourself.”

  “Perhaps, my dear Poet, you’d like to engage your tool upon the matter at hand. Do your finely honed senses lend you any insight into what has befallen our poor Professor Pendleton?”

  He was baiting me, but I wanted very badly to humiliate him by demonstrating that my talents eclipsed his own, even in the narrow field of his supposed expertise. I scratched my chin and wobbled a little bit on my feet. “Well,” I said. “Professor Fat—er, Pendleton wouldn’t have climbed over the gate. He probably couldn’t have, for he was quite heavy. I’d assume the killer either possessed a key to the padlock, or he was strong and agile enough to carry his victim over seven feet of wrought iron.”

  “My God, I must retract and apologize for all my previous mockery; your reasoning is wondrous to behold,” said Knifing. “We elderly fellows often forget that we have much to gain by availing ourselves of the cleverness of youths. Were it not for you, I might have overlooked the significance of the gate.”

  I should have perceived his sarcasm; which would have been obvious to even the least savvy of observers. But I did not. It is possible, I will admit, that my perception was impeded by drink, for I was already about six fingers deep into a bottle. I was also considering whether Fielding Dingle could have heaved Pendleton over the gate. It seemed unlikely; Dingle didn’t seem much of an athlete. Knifing couldn’t have done it either, for the victim matched his weight, plus half of it again.

  Sedgewyck, perhaps, could have managed it; the Dutchman was large, and such a feat was, perhaps, within his abilities. But the timing was also difficult to work out; he’d been at my party, and then he’d walked Olivia home. So when could he have committed this murder? And how could any of them have known Fat Cheeks? There was only one suspect in these killings who had feuded with the dead man: me.

  What I said to Knifing was: “It’s wise of you to acknowledge your deficiency.”

  Knifing glanced downward, ashamed, and seemed to notice something on the ground.

  “Have a look at this,” he said, pointing to one of the cobblestones. “See, there, how it’s scuffed in the middle, how its coloration is dull, while the others around it are damp and shiny? Suppose I said that I could deduce from my scientific methods that this scuff mark was made by the boot of the perpetrator of this crime, and suppose I could tell you that based on the angle of the marking and my scientific knowledge of the force necessary to scuff such a stone, that the killer had a foot-length of roughly ten and one-half inches, a weight of at least two hundred and ten pounds, and was likely taller than six feet, but no taller than six feet and three inches.”

  “Why, that’s remarkable,” I said, mentally calculating Sedgewyck’s height and weight. “I believe you’ve nearly solved the thing, for there could only be a handful of men in Cambridge matching that description.”

  “Perhaps I could determine the guilty party by deduction and intuition,” Knifing agreed. “I could round those men up, interview them, and see who has reasons to want this man dead. I could examine their boots to see whose match the cobblestone. Indeed, that would be convenient, except that everything I just told you is utter fabrication.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Fabrication. Horseshit. I made it up.”

  “You made it up?”

  “Entirely.”

  “But there really is a scuff.”

  His good eye gave me a blank stare. His bad eye always looked blank. “So?”

  “So what, then, does that scuff mean?”

  He laughed again. “It means nothing at all. It was probably like that before the murder. And yet, you were ready to believe me, and ready to place criminal suspicion on a small group of men based upon that assessment. How is the employment of such easily manipulated scientific methods more reliable than a sworn confession by the accused? How can judges and jurors assess the veracity of statements by professed experts regarding these obscure forms of evidence?”

  “Perhaps such observations are reliable if they are the legitimate deductions of qualified men acting in good faith,” I retorted.

  “The legitimate deductions of good faith experts such as yourself?” Knifing asked.

  “Precisely,” I said.

  He smiled his thin gravedigger’s smile. “Well, let’s explore, then, your little theory about the gate, shall we?

  “I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts.”

  He seemed delighted as well. “Tell me what you smell in this alley.”

  The air was heavy and stank of copper. “Blood,” I said. “And also, shit.”

  “Yes, that happens when murderers kill by disemboweling. He must have slashed open the lower intestine whilst digging with his knife in Professor Pendleton’s guts.”

  I shuddered. “That is a fact I could have lived without knowing.”

  Knifing puffed up his narrow chest and pointed an emphatic finger at me. “You came here of your own volition, without any prompting or invitation. You appeared unbidden as well at the scene of Felicity Whippleby’s murder. If, as you contend, you have no connection to these killings, then you have no reason for involving yourself with me or my investigation. Your presence here is an unseemly expression of your curiosity, so if you cannot endure the unpleasantness, you are welcome to leave me alone.”

  “I just don’t see how the stink of Pendleton’s blood and shit are at all relevant.”

  “Blood and shit are not relevant,” Knifing said, making a steeple of his fingers and assuming a lector’s pose. “The important fact here is that this alleyway smells like piss.”

  “You mock me,” I said.

  “Even a man of my assiduous discipline and impeccable manners could scarce resist such a ripe and easy target for ridicule, but on this matter I am utterly without pretense. The smell of urine, pungent though it may be, would not ordinarily be discernible over the stink of this corpse, or of all this blood, unless said urine was prese
nt in large quantities. Observe, also, the water stains upon the walls around this alley, suggesting that the buildings here are regularly leaked upon from waist-high spigots.”

  “I still fail to see the importance of this.”

  “Despite the benefit of your finely honed poet’s sense, and despite the advantage of having twice as many eyes as I’ve got, your observational failure comes as no surprise to me. I have already learned that, though this establishment serves as many as twenty concurrent patrons on a busy night, it is equipped with only a single outhouse. It’s evidently the custom among the bar’s regulars to relieve themselves in this alleyway. That gate was not locked last night, nor was Pendleton carried over it. He most likely stepped out here, of his own volition, to see to his functions. The killer took that opportunity to empty out all the stuffing in the unfortunate gentleman’s torso.”

  I thought about that. Knifing continued:

  “Now, there are only a few taverns in Cambridge, and you’ve been a local resident and a drunkard for quite some time; certainly for long enough to become familiar with this place and its accommodations. Therefore, you should have known, and probably did know, that this alley is left open as a public urinal.”

  He was right. Only a few evenings earlier, my weak foot had rolled sidewise on one of the wet, slippery cobblestones in this very alley as I’d leaned against the wall. Staggering, I’d pissed all over the front of my trousers. How could I have believed the gate was locked? My mouth felt very dry, and I fumbled in my waistcoat for my flask. “I was not trying to mislead you,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you were. I simply think your faculties as an observer are substandard, your deductive capabilities are undeveloped, and your alleged gifts as a poet are of limited applicability to the task of hunting killers. Among criminal investigators, Lord Byron, you’re the worst I’ve ever seen.”

  I cast my eyes downward and noticed what looked like part of a sticky boot-print at the edge of the pool of blood.

  “Well, here is a clue you missed, perhaps due to the disadvantage of having half as many eyes as me. Unlike your fake scuff mark, this may lead us to the killer.”

  “No,” said Knifing. “The foot to match that print belongs to Fielding Dingle.”

  I shuddered as if I’d been struck; Knifing had disarmed me of the last advantage I held over him. “Oh, so you know already, of Mr. Dingle’s arrival?”

  “Yes. And let me revise my earlier statement. Now that he’s in Cambridge, you are only the second-worst investigator in town.”

  Grasping for any form of solace, I decided this was a backhanded compliment. “Why is he here, anyway, if you’re investigating the murders?” I asked.

  Knifing shrugged. “The man who hired me mentioned no one else. I suppose he sent Dingle down so we could collaborate, or so we could each confirm the other’s findings. Whatever the reason, it makes no difference. Dingle will second my conclusion. He has neither the professional credibility nor the intellectual capacity necessary to persuasively disagree with me.”

  “Even if you are wrong?”

  Knifing laughed his wicked laugh again. “Especially if I’m wrong. When I am wrong, I am at my most compelling. You should keep that in mind, in the event I decide to accuse you of the murders.”

  As I tried to formulate a retort, Angus came charging down the alley with the Professor in tow. Both of them were panting loudly and clearly excited.

  “Get that creature out of my crime scene!” Knifing shouted.

  “There’s been another one,” Angus said.

  “Another bear?” I asked.

  “Another murder,” Knifing said.

  “More than a murder,” Angus said, gulping mouthfuls of air, like a hairy grouper flopping upon the deck of a fishing boat. “There’s been a massacre.”

  Chapter 20

  Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

  The best of Life is but intoxication:

  Glory, the Grape, Love, Gold, in these are sunk

  The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

  Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

  Of Life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion!

  —Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto 2

  It was only when I began preparing this account of the Cambridge murders, nearly a decade after the relevant events occurred, that I finally arranged to meet with Lord Whippleby, the father of the first victim. His fortunes were in decline even before his daughter’s death, which was why he had been trying to marry her to Leif Sedgewyck. After the murder, his finances had unraveled entirely; he’d become too despondent to tend to his affairs. I found him residing in cramped London apartments, having leased his lands and his ancestral manse to better-situated tenants.

  “So,” he said as I entered his parlor. “The poet has come, at last, to pay me a visit.” His voice was like a sheet of sandpaper being drawn across a velvet curtain.

  “I’m really surprised we haven’t encountered one another before, at some function or other,” I said.

  His laugh was angry and hollow. “I don’t attend many social events anymore, Lord Byron. People find my company unpleasant. They believe I am quite mad.”

  Whippleby’s flesh sagged from his face in loose folds, and his rheumy eyes were set deep in dark-purple sockets. He scratched at the white rats’ nest of hair upon his scalp with thin, spidery fingers. Everything about him seemed dried out, as if he’d wept away all his body’s vital fluids.

  “People believe you’re mad as well, of course,” he said. “But your kind of lunacy is so very entertaining, and mine is merely the madness of an old man racked by grief and loneliness.”

  “I am writing a book about the Cambridge murders, and I have come to ask if you have any thoughts to contribute.”

  “My daughter’s death was a kind of entertainment to you, and now you’ve come to document my suffering so that you can share your depraved amusement with an adoring audience.”

  I didn’t say anything. He smacked his lips a couple of times to work up enough saliva to spit at me. He failed to do so, and cursed with frustration. “I spent years and no small amount of money trying to establish your guilt or complicity in those crimes,” he said.

  “We captured your daughter’s killer,” I said. “His punishment was death.” This was not a lie, exactly, but the statement contained a significant omission.

  And Whippleby knew there was something wrong with the story; he always had. “I’ve never been satisfied with your explanation of the events in Cambridge, nor am I satisfied with the man you delivered up as the murderer,” he said. “Even though I’ve been unable to prove you’re a liar, you are a detestable man and I would like to see you dancing upon the air with a rope around your neck.”

  I let the insults pass without comment; I knew what had happened to my reputation. My fortunes were in such disarray that I had been forced to sell Newstead to stave off my creditors. The acrimonious dissolution of my brief marriage had left my reputation a shambles. People of all social classes gossiped openly about my affairs with chorus girls and spread the slanderous rumor that I had committed incest with my half sister, Augusta Leigh. This pained me greatly, for Augusta was my only living connection to my father.

  “Your own hired man told you the same story,” I said.

  “The supposed perpetrator that you and that investigator accused was utterly ordinary; of so little consequence that his death brought me no catharsis or satisfaction. And yet, for years, you’ve been speaking in public of goblins and ghouls, and the involvement of mystical and supernatural elements in the Cambridge murders. How can you claim that mundane and fantastic explanations for my daughter’s murder are simultaneously true? At least one of your stories must be a lie, and if one of them is, then the other might be as well.”

  My natural instinct was to be evasive about this subject, yet it seemed atrocious to lie to this bereaved old man. And why was I writing about the Cambridge murders, if not to finally tel
l the truth about them? I had no interest in continuing to preserve secrets that belonged to the dead.

  In light of my own financial ruin and public shame, I was preparing to flee permanently to the Continent, to Switzerland, perhaps, and then to Italy or Greece. Or perhaps I’d go to the East; to Greece, to Turkey, to Rumania, to Transylvania. I was not ashamed; I have never been ashamed. But I was leaving. I had no desire to live anymore among people with the audacity to question my moral character.

  With no esteem or fortune left to risk, I was free to leave behind an unvarnished account of the truth about the Cambridge murders, a final volley of ordnance to blast the legs off my enemies and assure that, in my absence, England would not forget me. I had nothing to gain by lying anymore, and nothing to lose by telling the truth.

  “During the brief period of my childhood in which I knew my father, he spoke often of the vampires he’d encountered in the East,” I said. “I first involved myself with the murders in Cambridge because the killer’s method of draining blood from his victims reminded me of those stories.”

  Whippleby’s expression softened. “Yes, your father abandoned you when you were a small boy and died soon after, in France.”

  “It seems you know a lot about me, Lord Whippleby.”

  “You are inextricable from the events in Cambridge, which have, for years, preoccupied me. Yes. I know much about you. I have followed your antics; your rise to fame and your inevitable public shaming. I have studied your poetry. But I have never heard or read anything to suggest that your father was an important piece of the Cambridge puzzle. He left England years prior, did he not?”

  “Even famous knaves are discreet about some things,” I said, though I supposed I was done with discretion. “The deepest wounds are the ones we conceal.”

  “We are both preoccupied, then. We both grieve,” he said. “A son grieves for a father, and a father grieves for a daughter. But my daughter and your father have nothing to do with one another.”

  “There are things I know and there are things I believe,” I said. “Some of the things I know are things I cannot let myself believe, and some of the things I believe are difficult to reconcile with facts. This, I think, is a common human conundrum.”