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?”
“If you’ve such contempt for your employment, why do you continue in it?”
“I serve at His Majesty’s direction. England has spent years at war, and London is rife with lawlessness. The populace demands safety, and perhaps His Majesty hopes a few high-profile investigators employing fashionable methods can forestall the need for the Crown to make a more comprehensive investment in stopping crime. If His Majesty says there must be scientific inquiry into a few murders, then so there will be. Indeed, because it is my duty to serve the King, I have become the foremost practitioner of this so-called science. I can read a murder scene as well as any Comanche can read a buffalo trail. But the alleged quality of my application of these methods is aided in no small amount by my lack of reverence toward them. I’m not here engaged in a search for anything like the truth. I’m performing a ritual; I’m here as a priest of man’s godless justice, though I fear this ridiculous blasphemy might be the seed of England’s downfall.”
“I hardly see the nation’s ruin in the science of detection,” I said. “I am, indeed, baffled at how the two things could be related.”
His brows pulled together and his face became a collection of shadowy triangles. “I suspect you spend a lot of time being baffled, Lord Byron. You certainly seem to spend a lot of time drunk.”
I couldn’t help noticing that he parried my rhetorical jabs with the same sort of bored insouciance that I’d employed in insulting Fielding Dingle. Everything about Archibald Knifing was scary, but the scariest thing about him was how brilliant he was. I suspected, for the first time, that my assumption that I was the world’s greatest criminal investigator might have been mistaken. I wondered if Knifing had ever written verse, and I rather hoped he had not. He’d probably have been spectacular at it.
I replied: “I am a poet, and I am thusly endowed, at least, with a finely honed sense of truth.”
“A finely honed sense of the truth?” His clenched features lifted and spread apart, and his lips peeled off his teeth. I was terrified that I was about to find out what it sounded like when he laughed, but he restrained himself.
“It is not a thing for your mockery, Sir Archie. It’s the most sacred and exquisite tool in an artist’s repertoire.”
He tucked his hands into his waistcoat pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels, stretching his legs as he did so. Finally, he spoke: “I just want to make sure I understand this,” he said. “Your finely honed sense of the truth is an exquisite tool?”
“I do not appreciate your tone,” I said.
He relinquished his self-control and cackled. The evil sound reverberated off the blood-spattered stone walls. “I must say, I am thoroughly enjoying your ridiculous presence. You add no small amount of levity to these grim and routine proceedings.”