Riot Most Uncouth

by Daniel Friedman

  Using the point of his umbrella, Knifing pushed Tower forward, so the corpse slumped onto the table. The back of the skull was a tangled mess of hair and bone and flesh and brains.

  “A pistol shot, at close range,” he said.

  “He was shot in the back of the head?” I asked.

  “Don’t be preposterous,” Knifing said with a dry chuckle.

  He lifted Tower’s mangled head up by the ears and tilted it backward. Stinking red-and-gray pulp poured out of the gunshot wound, but Knifing paid no attention to it, except to make sure none got on his boots.

  He pointed to a round, red wound beneath the jaw. “The bullet went in here, and out the back,” he said. “Entrance wounds are typically smaller than exits. You’ll find a pistol load embedded in the wall of the bedroom.”

  He went back into the bedroom and knelt down, grunting softly as he bent his aged knees. He found a tear in the rug and rubbed it with his fingers.

  “With more luck, these poor people might have survived, and solved our mystery for us,” he said. “Professor Tower struggled with the intruder, and had the better of him, for a while.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “The same way the Comanche can read the trail to learn where the buffalo herd he’s been tracking was attacked by wolves,” Knifing said. “The brains on the wall are at a level with a man’s chest, so Tower must not have been standing when he was shot. The track of the bullet is angled upward, and the entrance wound is beneath the chin. The killer must have fired the lethal shot while lying on his back, with Tower kneeling over him. The killer entered the bedchamber from the dining room with a knife or a dagger, and attempted to attack the victims. The husband resisted, and stripped away the weapon.” He toed the rip in the carpeting with his boot, and I realized the blade must have fallen there. Knifing continued: “Tower wrestled the attacker to the floor, but the killer got a hand free, and drew a gun.” He shook his head sadly at how close Tower had come to eluding his grisly fate.

  Angus approached the wall and stuck his finger in the bullet hole to verify that it was, indeed, angled upward. “That all makes sense,” he said. “And the evidence corroborates each supposition. It’s really quite amazing, Mr. Knifing.”

  “I know I am,” Knifing said, “but I wonder how the assailant gained access to the residence in the first place.” He retraced his steps out of the bedroom, past Professor Tower’s body in the dining room, and back to the front entryway. He scratched the loose, wrinkled flesh that connected his chin to his neck as he examined the bolt on the door, which looked ordinary. Then he opened an adjacent coat-closet, and the limp body of the Towers’ domestic maid fell into his arms. Knifing examined her and showed us the dark purple bruises around her throat.

  “He strangled her,” Knifing said. “I doubt she even had a chance to scream.”

  “We don’t have much violence here in Cambridge,” Angus said. “The students and Fellows are from the better classes, and most of the townsfolk have been here for generations. We all know each other. But maybe people here trust too easy. Likely as not, the killer simply knocked on the door, and this poor girl opened it for him.”

  Knifing gently laid the body on the floor, and we went back to the bedroom to examine Violet’s corpse.

  “How did he hang her up like that?” Angus asked. “Did she not resist?”

  “She was already dead,” Knifing said.

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Imagine a wineskin filled with fluid, and suppose someone punctured it. The contents would drip or flow out, depending on the size of the hole, and if you held that pierced bag over a bucket, you could catch the fluid as it drained. But suppose you squeezed the wineskin.”

  “The fluid would spray out of the hole instead of flowing into the bucket,” Angus said.

  “Exactly. The beating of the human heart applies a force upon the veins and arteries not unlike that which you would apply upon the wineskin by squeezing the bag. For the killer to drain her into his pot or bucket, her heart must not have been beating when he cut her neck. If it had been, the mess would be evident.”

  Knifing grabbed Violet’s head and peered into her glassy eyes.

  “Cause of death is most likely asphyxia,” he said, and having verified that fact, he seemed to lose interest in her. He wandered around the room twice, and then opened the door to the adjoining bedroom, where the Towers’ children slept.

  The older girl was also killed by smothering, Knifing told us. She was left in her bed, and looked as though she might only be asleep. I commented to this effect, and Knifing shrugged.

  “Putrefaction will be quite noticeable in a matter of hours, if the body is left at room temperature,” he said. If he felt any twinge of emotion at the child’s death, his face did not betray it. I tried to mimic his stoicism. Angus didn’t. He sniffled loudly and wiped his eyes. Then he began to turn very red, and he left the room.

  The Towers’ young son, only an infant in his crib, had been dashed to death against one of the walls. The baby had dark curls; hair like mine. I had inquired about this similarity, and Violet laughed at me. She had told me her father and two of her brothers had dark hair, as did her husband’s aunt. She told me that she had foolproof methods to prevent conception during our illicit exchanges. And she told me that the timing of our affair made it impossible for me to have fathered the child. I believed her, because believing her was so much easier than considering the alternative. But the timing didn’t seem impossible to me. As I looked at the tiny corpse, I tried not to think about this.

  Knifing looked at me with a kindness that had not characterized our interactions up to this point. “There’s no weakness in reacting to the sight of a thing like this,” he said. “It’s an instinctive response, and a sensible one. I’ve grown used to such things. But sometimes I wish I had not.”

  I set my jaw and gripped the railing of the baby’s crib with some measure of determination. “I can handle myself,” I said.

  “Normally, I’d call a situation like this a murder-suicide, and lay the blame upon the father. He seems unlikely to attempt to refute my findings.”

  Tower had been a decent gentleman, and I had humiliated him. If I had to be honest, I’d admit that the mangled corpse at the dinner table had been an enthusiastic and compassionate teacher, and one I might have become quite friendly with, if I were predisposed to taking instruction. “You don’t plan to besmirch poor Professor Tower’s name, I hope.”

  “Unfortunately, I think I cannot,” Knifing said. “I doubt I can credibly posit that he peeled his own face off. It’s a pity he wasn’t only shot. I could have pinned Felicity Whippleby to him, and been in London for supper.”

  I wondered if Knifing’s constant boasts about his own disreputability and the moral bankruptcy of his profession were a kind of amusement for him. A man in his line of work might develop a black sense of humor.

  “As it stands, I am hunting a maniac, which is a shame, because hunting maniacs requires a lot of work,” Knifing said. He glanced toward the door through which Angus had fled. “These Indian techniques are just parlor tricks. The mechanical details of what happened here are of little value to our investigation. Their primary application is theatrical; when I testify at trial, the details of the victims’ deaths may cause an emotional reaction among the jurors. But nothing I’ve discerned here brings us closer to discovering the killer’s identity. Most killers are motivated by cognizable desire; the desire for love or the desire for money. A typical murder investigation has a structure, like one of your poems.” Here he paused, and chuckled a little to himself. “Pardon me. Your poems are scattershot and amateurish, and so, of course, that metaphor will not hold up. A typical murder investigation has a structure, like a good poem. I can work backward, in such cases, through the victim’s associates to find someone with a motive and an opportunity. But I expect such exercises will prove futile here.”

  I thought of Mad Jack’s stor
ies, and I thought of the image in my ancient book; a lithograph of a vampire tearing at a woman’s throat.

  Knifing continued: “The constable seems to be a good man, though not an especially capable one. He reacts as good men do when they witness evil. He reacts with incomprehension. You’re not a good man, Lord Byron. I think you like the idea of being good, so long as goodness comes easily. But decency is unnatural for you, at least when it requires sacrifice or self-restraint. You are callow and selfish.”

  Perhaps he was right. I had cuckolded the man who sat faceless and rotting at the dinner table in the next room. I’d loved the woman hanging from the bedpost, but I’d done nothing to keep her safe. There was a chance—I persuaded myself again that it was only a remote one—I may have fathered the dark-haired child, and I had not been around to protect it when a monster came into its nursery.

  “Do you know why someone would do a thing like this to these people?” Knifing asked. “Comprehending such a man’s motivation is quite beyond the abilities of our friend, the constable. But I think you might grasp the nuance.”

  I did understand. The killer did the things he did for the same reasons I did the things I did. “He did it because he wanted to,” I said.

  He nodded at me. “That’s the whole of it. The act of killing rather than the identity of the victims carries significance. I will canvass the local innkeepers and see if any of them happened to see one of his guests hauling around buckets of blood, and I will send Angus to check the woods and fields around town for vagrant campsites. But I am pessimistic. Unless this killer pins some unmistakable proof of his identity to a murdered corpse, I feel that he may escape me. And if you’re still underfoot when my talents are exhausted, I will arrest you. I am not returning to London empty-handed. You should leave Cambridge. Go spend some time at Newstead, while I hunt this monster. When he kills again, you ought to have an unimpeachable alibi.”

  I wondered how much he knew about me and Violet, but I didn’t dare ask. “If I go, whom will you arrest?”

  Knifing made a gesture with his hands that simulated the act of plucking an apple from a tree. “It doesn’t matter. Sedgewyck, probably. Or maybe I’ll arrest Angus. I find his earnestness annoying.”

  With that, Knifing walked out of the room and left me alone with the cold, still children. He had brought me to these crime scenes because he thought he could frighten me off. I thought it strange that he was so keen to be rid of me, especially since he seemed to think my arrest would make his work so much easier.

  After a minute, I followed the sound of Angus’s sobs back to the dining room, and found Knifing consoling the constable with soothing words that I would have thought were entirely uncharacteristic of the man. He had figured me out entirely, but I really didn’t know him at all.

  Fielding Dingle showed up to investigate the scene just as we were preparing to leave. “It’s a great honor to meet you, sir,” he said to Knifing. “I’ve heard grand tales of your exploits and adventures.”

  “I’ve heard little enough about you, but more than I’d like,” Knifing replied.

  Dingle did not appear to comprehend the insult. “Perhaps you would like to confer with me on the evidence, as I reconstruct the events which transpired here?”

  Knifing shook his head. “Our employer in London must have hired two of us for a reason,” he said. “It’s best we work independently. That way, when we reach the same conclusion, our testimony will be more persuasive at trial.”

  “Oh, quite right. Quite right, of course,” Dingle stammered. Knifing turned on his heel and walked out the front door without paying any further attention to his colleague.

  “Did he tell you if he knows who did it yet?” Dingle asked Angus.

  “I asked him, and he said he didn’t want to spoil the ending,” Angus said.

  “What do you think happened here?” I asked Dingle.

  His small, beady eyes narrowed as he regarded me with undisguised suspicion. His fleshy mouth wriggled with distaste. He would never have brought me here or granted me entrance to this murder scene, I realized, and his mind must have been struggling to figure out what Knifing was doing with me.

  His face slackened, and then he showed me a tight, cold smile. Since Knifing had decided to treat me politely, Dingle seemed to have concluded that he must as well. He scratched his chin and carefully inspected the corpse of Professor Tower, touching the wounds and examining the dead man’s hair and fingers. “It appears that this gentleman was murdered in his seat as he awaited his supper,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “It’s really quite elementary,” Dingle said. He stuck a finger in his shirt collar, which was too small for his thick neck, and stained the fabric with a bit of Tower’s congealed blood. “He remains where he fell, and his dishes are prepared for the service of the evening meal. You can see that the flatware is untouched. Thus, it is clear that he was caught unawares by his killer, and received violence where he expected sustenance.”

  Angus started to correct him, but I jabbed the constable with my elbow to shut him up. “It’s really shocking when one realizes what sort of man one is dealing with,” I said.

  “Mortifying,” Dingle agreed.

  Chapter 22

  Here’s a sigh to those who love me,

  And a smile to those who hate;

  And, whatever sky’s above me,

  Here’s a heart for every fate.

  —Lord Byron, “To Thomas Moore”

  Angus and I left Dingle to his explorations, and followed Knifing out onto the street, where I found the man hunter conversing with Frederick Burke, the lawyer from the Banque Crédit Française.

  “Hello, Lord Byron,” said Burke. “Joe Murray told me I might find you here.”

  I resolved to instruct Murray to stop informing people of my whereabouts. I was beginning to understand that I did not want to be found by the sort of people who might come looking for me.

  “Mr. Burke has rooms next to mine at the inn by the College,” said Archibald Knifing. “How is it that you two gentlemen are acquainted?” His expression was hard to read, but he had already demonstrated remarkably intuitive capacities, and I had no doubt that he perceived my discomfort with the situation.

  “This gentleman is a representative from a bank I’ve had some dealings with,” I said.

  “Oh,” Knifing said. “How very interesting.” There was, of course, no reason he should be interested in this at all, except that he enjoyed seeing me humiliated.

  “There has been a bit of confusion about some paperwork,” I said. “Mr. Burke has come from London to assist me in correcting it.”

  “It seems Lord Byron may have committed a major criminal fraud against my client and has, thus far, frustrated my attempts to seek remediation,” Burke said with a sweet smile. Evidently, he had taken my threats against him the previous day with some measure of personal umbrage.

  “Mr. Burke has sought me out to trouble me over an internal clerical error committed by a drunken bank clerk,” I countered. I was fully frothed and hungry for vengeance after seeing what the killer had done to Violet. I understood why Burke might be vexed, but I didn’t care, and was fully prepared to engage him physically if he pushed me too far.

  “So you’re a solicitor?” Knifing asked Burke.

  “I am,” Burke said.

  “And you work for a bank?” Knifing asked.

  “A bank is my client,” said Burke.

  “A French bank,” I added.

  “Well, like I said, that is just terribly interesting,” said Knifing. One of his arched eyebrows seemed to arch slightly higher. “I shall leave the two of you to your terribly interesting business.”

  “I believe I’ll join you,” said Angus.

  “I’m sure I’ll enjoy the company,” Knifing growled. It was clear from his tone that he did not enjoy Angus’s company much at all. Knifing walked down the street, taking long, deliberate strides; a proud old warhorse
grown patchy and lean with age, his supple, London-cobbled hooves clopping with each step upon the paving stones. Angus bounded after him like a preposterously rotund puppy.

  In a less harrowing situation, I’d have found this pairing quite amusing, and retrospectively, I cannot help but wonder what their conversation might have been like when they were alone together, without me around to bounce insults off of. At that moment, though, I was awash with emotions and unable to see any humor in the situation.

  “Do you intend to threaten me again, here upon the public street?” Burke asked. “I see you are without your bear today.”

  He thought, perhaps, it was safer to confront me in the street than it had been in my residence, but Burke didn’t know that, while my protestations of grief over Felicity Whippleby’s death had been a convenient excuse to avoid dealing with him, I was truly anguished about the loss of Violet Tower. Burke didn’t know that the bear was tame, whereas I was the danger.

  “Why are you still in Cambridge?” I asked him, squeezing my right fist until the knuckles turned white, while adjusting my gun-belt with my left hand. “I told you that Mr. Hanson, in London, is the gentleman you need to speak to regarding any legal matters.”

  His Adam’s apple seemed to recede slightly into his neck as his jaw clenched. “If I was satisfied to get run around by your lawyer, I would never have made the trip. In any case, you made the deal with Lafitte without consulting counsel, so I don’t see why you need a lawyer to correct these defects.”

  “Well, first of all, I ought not concede that there are any defects in the agreement until my counsel has reviewed your allegations. And, second, if there are any defects, they are only innocent mistakes, consequences of M. Lafitte’s incompetence as a banker, and perhaps attributable, in some small measure, to my own youthful inexperience in the norms of business.”