Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

“Can I feel it?” Angus asked.

“Feel what?” said Knifing.

“The groove in your face.”

It was interesting to see Knifing’s features register surprise. His dead eye seemed to bulge a little, and his mouth sort of dropped open, as if he intended to speak but had forgotten how to form words. Knifing’s entire persona seemed to be structured around anticipating everything in advance, and he clearly hadn’t expected Angus to want to palpate his face. Of course, whoever gave him the scar and took his eye probably also surprised him a little bit. “Is there something permissive about my manner or demeanor that might possibly make you think that’s an appropriate thing to ask?”

“I don’t know,” said Angus. “I thought, perhaps, we were becoming friends.”

“If I’ve said or done anything to cause you to believe that, you have my sincerest apologies,” Knifing said.

The killer had not been very interested in the blood of Professor Tower, apparently; as most of it was smeared on the walls and emptied onto the floor around the body, which had been positioned at the head of the table in the dining room with a white cloth napkin folded in its lap.

“He was seated here at the table when he died?” Angus asked.

“I think not. Note the cuts and gashes across the left forearm and the knuckles of the right hand,” Knifing said.

“He’s ripped up so badly, I didn’t think those were special,” Angus said.

“Those happened when he tried to defend his vitals from a knife-wielding attacker,” I said. “During the years before I inherited Newstead, my mother and I lived in Aberdeen, a city rife with drunks and brawlers. Knife fights are not uncommon when Scotsmen get to drinking, and I’ve seen such wounds before.”

“Very good, Lord Byron,” Knifing said. He bent forward, leaning on his umbrella, and squinted at a mashed-down bit of blood-soaked carpet next to the body. “The body was dragged in here, and posed in this seat.”

“To what purpose?” Angus asked.

Knifing waved his hand; the kind of elegant gesture certain people can make to demonstrate that they don’t know something, but don’t really care. “Perhaps it’s some private ritual of the killer’s, or perhaps it’s merely some sort of theatrical flourish, for the benefit of anyone who discovers these bodies,” he said. “Or maybe it’s some specific sort of message to me or to Dingle. Or even to Lord Byron.”

“Why would it be a message to me?” I asked.

“Fielding Dingle can be relied upon to be the last person to learn of anything, so if he is aware that you have entangled yourself in this unpleasantness, you can be certain the killer knows, as well.”

I stepped back and took a careful look at my surroundings. I had walked through this room a number of times during my secret trysts with Violet, but I had never noticed that this dining table was virtually identical to the one in my residence. It seemed a shocking coincidence, until I remembered that I’d purchased my furniture locally. In a town as small as Cambridge, it was not unlikely that both Tower and I would patronize the same carpenter.

However, if Knifing was correct, and this scene was a message to me, then the killer must have been inside my home to have seen my furniture and learned of the coincidence. Leif Sedgewyck had seen my table, but how could he have connected me to the Towers? Another theory was gnawing at the back of my mind; the theory that had attracted me to the scene of Felicity Whippleby’s murder in the first place: blood-draining was the mark of the vampire. And the suspect likeliest to have left me a message was Mad Jack.

My unease must have been plain upon my face, because Knifing said: “You’re getting exactly what you wanted right now. You decided to involve yourself and I can see that you’re only just realizing what it is in which you’ve become involved. I hope you’re enjoying the experience.”

He followed the trail of blood to the heavy door of the bedroom. He found it unlocked, and pushed it open.

“Oh dear,” said Angus as we entered.

My sweet Violet had been killed and drained in the same manner as Felicity Whippleby. We found her naked body in the bedroom, hung by the feet from a knotted linen sheet, which was affixed to one of the four high posts of the canopy bed. I tried not to think about how I had cavorted there with her the previous afternoon, and instead concentrated on keeping my expression blank to prevent my face from betraying our affair to Knifing. I wanted to take her down, to cover her, to offer her whatever protection I still could. But the revelation of our indiscretions together would only taint her memory, and it certainly wouldn’t be the best thing in the world for me and my standing in the community. I did nothing.

But my heart pounded in my chest, and my pulse fluttered in my throat. Feverish sweat began to pour from my forehead and my armpits, though the room was quite cool. I mopped my brow with my shirtsleeve and hoped my reaction to the sight of the corpse had escaped Knifing’s notice.

The idea that Violet could be ripped out of the world seemed a direct rebuttal to the sentiment I had shared with her the previous day. How could life be imbued with purpose if someone like Violet could be unceremoniously and arbitrarily unmade? My guts twisted within me, and I nearly swooned. This, I realized, was the intrusion of disorder Knifing had told me his clients hired him to rectify. He was right; looking at that still, dangling form, I wanted order and I wanted certainty and I wanted vengeance.

Knifing’s stony expression didn’t change when he saw the dead woman, and he did not seem to acknowledge her at all. He seemed more interested in a splatter of blood and bits of bone on the wall, near the doorway. He spotted a small hole bored into the plaster, and then, without commenting about Violet, returned to the dining room to look at her husband’s corpse again.

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.