Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

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 stories, 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.”