Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

The Professor grunted assent; Angus was right.

“A bit of brandy serves as a fine lubricant for the creative processes,” I said.

“Well, being so well lubricated, why don’t you go ahead and slide off down the street.” His lower lip twitched as he spoke, and I could tell that one had taken some effort for him to think up.

“Will you deny me entry to this alley?” I asked him.

“I’ll warn you away, because I think you should leave,” he said. “But if you persist, I’ll let you pass, as was Sir Archibald’s instruction.”

It was my turn to fall silent as I digested this new bit of information and tried not to take offense at Angus’s unconcealed amusement at my speechlessness. “He told you I would be coming?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and then he lowered his voice so Knifing, who was behind the building, could not hear. “And that’s as good a reason as any to flee. The gentleman is not somebody you ought to trifle with. I doubt you committed these crimes, but you’re getting yourself into trouble here, nonetheless. I’ve encountered a lot of the fellows and a fair few of the old dons in my rounds here in Cambridge, and none of them ever seemed so quick as Mr. Knifing. I know you take a measure of pride in your own cleverness, Lord Byron, but you can’t think your way around a man like this. I don’t know what he can see, with that white eye he’s got.”

Angus had a point. Knifing had anticipated my arrival at this murder scene, even as he’d warned me to stay away from the investigation. We might both be playing the same game, but I had to concede that he was several moves ahead of me, and I could not figure out what sort of strategy he was unfolding.

How had he known I would come here? Perhaps he’d sensed the curiosity or morbid fascination that had drawn me to Felicity Whippleby and guessed that it had not been fully satisfied. I had no problems with being morbid or curious; these were traits I’d come to embrace. But I didn’t like being predictable, and I didn’t like being manipulated.

“Let me pass,” I told Angus. “I will see Mr. Knifing.”

“I can’t see how this turns out well for you,” he replied as he shifted his bulk away from the gate. “Consider yourself warned.”

I left the bear with the constable, who took the chain leash without hesitation and rubbed the animal behind its ears. The Professor settled upon his haunches and yawned, contented. It was unusual to see him warm so quickly to a stranger, and my estimation of Angus improved somewhat. Bears are excellent judges of character.

The iron gate groaned in protest as it closed behind me, and I followed the alleyway around the side of the building, stepping carefully on the uneven stones for fear of turning my weak foot. Behind the tavern, Knifing paced in tight circles around the corpse of Professor Fat Cheeks, which was flayed open and spread across the alley like jam on a slice of bread. The killer had not, this time, collected much of his victim’s blood, for the body was surrounded by a huge, gummy pool of the stuff, with more splattered on the back wall of the building.

The investigator touched the wide brim of his black rabbit-felt hat with two fingers as a manner of greeting me. When I had seen the hat gripped in his gnarled fingers the previous day, I had assumed it was the sort of austere headwear commonly favored by ministers, but now that it was on his head, I saw it was a queer thing, a sort of slouch hat or bush hat, like one might expect to see on the head of an ex-soldier turned sheep rancher in some far-flung, hot-weather colony. Regardless of its style, it would have been appropriate for him to uncover his head in my presence, as I was his social better, but Knifing seemed to be unabashedly indifferent to protocol. I found this disrespectful but decided not to make an issue of his boorishness.

“I had not known one man could contain so much gore,” I said.

“Yes,” Knifing agreed. “But as containers go, he was a rather large one.”

I suspected that was some sort of joke, but Knifing wasn’t smiling, so I kept my face blank. “Angus the Constable said you had expected me.”

He glanced up from a coil of purple viscera he’d been poking at with the tip of his black umbrella. “Like the common maggot, you can be found wherever there is putrefying flesh.”

Perhaps this was what passed for wit in the world of Archibald Knifing, but it was sour stuff. “What has your investigation uncovered?” I asked.

He opened his arms as if to draw my attention to our grisly surroundings. “It appears that there is a dead man here.”

Evidently, Knifing was auditioning to be the jester in the royal court of Hades. “And will you use the science of detection to render his killer unto justice?” I asked.

Knifing sighed and drew himself to full height. He seemed to become even thinner and more wraithlike, which I would have thought was impossible. Whatever flicker of mirth had animated his features vanished, and he seemed to grow colder and grayer. “I don’t enjoy being here or doing this, you know,” he said. “It’s a dirty business, mucking about with corpses. And far beneath my station; I did not distinguish myself in four wars on three continents so I could get a job as an undertaker in Cambridge. I’d be quite pleased to see an end to the science of detection, and return to an era when justice was served by inquisitors and confessors who extracted God’s truth from the guilty before rendering them unto the gallows.”

“Such methods have fallen into disfavor among England’s educated classes,” I said.

“Not with me.” Knifing noticed a spot of Pendleton’s blood on the toe of his calfskin boot. He rubbed it on an unsullied cobblestone. “That was clean justice. That was certain justice. A confession certified by a clergyman and swiftly followed by a public execution. The matter was resolved without doubt or ambiguity, and everyone could go home satisfied that right had been vindicated.”

I sensed he was trying to lead me into some sort of rhetorical trap. “Confessions extracted through torturous interrogation cannot be relied upon.”

“How could a sworn confession be unreliable? How could injustice be perpetrated in the name of the Lord? He would not allow such a thing. God is justice, and there is no justice but God’s.”

“A man in torment will say whatever is necessary to be granted respite, even the respite of death.”

Knifing tapped his soiled boot against the wall of the alleyway, trying to shake the blood off it. “Your supposition is that a man exposed to the mild discomfort associated with traditional inquisitive methods is likely to admit to a crime of which he is innocent, with full knowledge that such an admission will result in his own execution?”

Traditional inquisitive methods included sleep deprivation, beatings, flaying and scourging of the skin, and chaining accused individuals in painful positions for hours, or even for days. “I’d take issue with your assumption that the discomfort caused by torture is mild,” I said.

Knifing spat upon the ground, and his thick, yellow-gray wad of phlegm landed with a little splash in the wide, deep pool of blood surrounding Pendleton’s corpse. “It is the amount of discomfort that learned and moral members of the clergy believed was appropriate to apply in pursuit of the truth,” he said. “By suggesting differently, you are putting your assessment of their methods ahead of their own, though you are a child and know nothing of God or of justice or of morality.”

I started to say something, but he wasn’t really looking for a conversation, and he raised his voice and talked over me.

“We’ve replaced sanctified truth with the justice of man, and look at where it has gotten us. We stand in a dirty alley, speculating upon events that may have occurred, using methods adapted from the hunting tactics of savage American Indians and the heathen tribesmen of Africa. Do you think we can fashion from these crude materials a better truth than God’s? Why disdain a clergymen’s words while credulously accepting extrapolations drawn by a secular shaman about the direction of a spray of blood or the size and depth of a footprint? Why distrust a confession yet uncritically accept an ex-thief’s divinations about a bit of discarded pipe-ash?”