Daniel Friedman - Riot Most Uncouth

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.

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 Credit Francaise.

“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.”