I cast my eyes downward and noticed what looked like part of a sticky boot-print at the edge of the pool of blood.
“Well, here is a clue you missed, perhaps due to the disadvantage of having half as many eyes as me. Unlike your fake scuff mark, this may lead us to the killer.”
“No,” said Knifing. “The foot to match that print belongs to Fielding Dingle.”
I shuddered as if I’d been struck; Knifing had disarmed me of the last advantage I held over him. “Oh, so you know already, of Mr. Dingle’s arrival?”
“Yes. And let me revise my earlier statement. Now that he’s in Cambridge, you are only the second-worst investigator in town.”
Grasping for any form of solace, I decided this was a backhanded compliment. “Why is he here, anyway, if you’re investigating the murders?” I asked.
Knifing shrugged. “The man who hired me mentioned no one else. I suppose he sent Dingle down so we could collaborate, or so we could each confirm the other’s findings. Whatever the reason, it makes no difference. Dingle will second my conclusion. He has neither the professional credibility nor the intellectual capacity necessary to persuasively disagree with me.”
“Even if you are wrong?”
Knifing laughed his wicked laugh again. “Especially if I’m wrong. When I am wrong, I am at my most compelling. You should keep that in mind, in the event I decide to accuse you of the murders.”
As I tried to formulate a retort, Angus came charging down the alley with the Professor in tow. Both of them were panting loudly and clearly excited.
“Get that creature out of my crime scene!” Knifing shouted.
“There’s been another one,” Angus said.
“Another bear?” I asked.
“Another murder,” Knifing said.
“More than a murder,” Angus said, gulping mouthfuls of air, like a hairy grouper flopping upon the deck of a fishing boat. “There’s been a massacre.”
Chapter 20
Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of Life is but intoxication:
Glory, the Grape, Love, Gold, in these are sunk
The hopes of all men, and of every nation;
Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk
Of Life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion!
It was only when I began preparing this account of the Cambridge murders, nearly a decade after the relevant events occurred, that I finally arranged to meet with Lord Whippleby, the father of the first victim. His fortunes were in decline even before his daughter’s death, which was why he had been trying to marry her to Leif Sedgewyck. After the murder, his finances had unraveled entirely; he’d become too despondent to tend to his affairs. I found him residing in cramped London apartments, having leased his lands and his ancestral manse to better-situated tenants.
“So,” he said as I entered his parlor. “The poet has come, at last, to pay me a visit.” His voice was like a sheet of sandpaper being drawn across a velvet curtain.
“I’m really surprised we haven’t encountered one another before, at some function or other,” I said.
His laugh was angry and hollow. “I don’t attend many social events anymore, Lord Byron. People find my company unpleasant. They believe I am quite mad.”
Whippleby’s flesh sagged from his face in loose folds, and his rheumy eyes were set deep in dark-purple sockets. He scratched at the white rats’ nest of hair upon his scalp with thin, spidery fingers. Everything about him seemed dried out, as if he’d wept away all his body’s vital fluids.
“People believe you’re mad as well, of course,” he said. “But your kind of lunacy is so very entertaining, and mine is merely the madness of an old man racked by grief and loneliness.”
“I am writing a book about the Cambridge murders, and I have come to ask if you have any thoughts to contribute.”
“My daughter’s death was a kind of entertainment to you, and now you’ve come to document my suffering so that you can share your depraved amusement with an adoring audience.”
I didn’t say anything. He smacked his lips a couple of times to work up enough saliva to spit at me. He failed to do so, and cursed with frustration. “I spent years and no small amount of money trying to establish your guilt or complicity in those crimes,” he said.
“We captured your daughter’s killer,” I said. “His punishment was death.” This was not a lie, exactly, but the statement contained a significant omission.
And Whippleby knew there was something wrong with the story; he always had. “I’ve never been satisfied with your explanation of the events in Cambridge, nor am I satisfied with the man you delivered up as the murderer,” he said. “Even though I’ve been unable to prove you’re a liar, you are a detestable man and I would like to see you dancing upon the air with a rope around your neck.”
I let the insults pass without comment; I knew what had happened to my reputation. My fortunes were in such disarray that I had been forced to sell Newstead to stave off my creditors. The acrimonious dissolution of my brief marriage had left my reputation a shambles. People of all social classes gossiped openly about my affairs with chorus girls and spread the slanderous rumor that I had committed incest with my half sister, Augusta Leigh. This pained me greatly, for Augusta was my only living connection to my father.
“Your own hired man told you the same story,” I said.
“The supposed perpetrator that you and that investigator accused was utterly ordinary; of so little consequence that his death brought me no catharsis or satisfaction. And yet, for years, you’ve been speaking in public of goblins and ghouls, and the involvement of mystical and supernatural elements in the Cambridge murders. How can you claim that mundane and fantastic explanations for my daughter’s murder are simultaneously true? At least one of your stories must be a lie, and if one of them is, then the other might be as well.”
My natural instinct was to be evasive about this subject, yet it seemed atrocious to lie to this bereaved old man. And why was I writing about the Cambridge murders, if not to finally tell the truth about them? I had no interest in continuing to preserve secrets that belonged to the dead.
In light of my own financial ruin and public shame, I was preparing to flee permanently to the Continent, to Switzerland, perhaps, and then to Italy or Greece. Or perhaps I’d go to the East; to Greece, to Turkey, to Rumania, to Transylvania. I was not ashamed; I have never been ashamed. But I was leaving. I had no desire to live anymore among people with the audacity to question my moral character.
With no esteem or fortune left to risk, I was free to leave behind an unvarnished account of the truth about the Cambridge murders, a final volley of ordnance to blast the legs off my enemies and assure that, in my absence, England would not forget me. I had nothing to gain by lying anymore, and nothing to lose by telling the truth.
“During the brief period of my childhood in which I knew my father, he spoke often of the vampires he’d encountered in the East,” I said. “I first involved myself with the murders in Cambridge because the killer’s method of draining blood from his victims reminded me of those stories.”
Whippleby’s expression softened. “Yes, your father abandoned you when you were a small boy and died soon after, in France.”
“It seems you know a lot about me, Lord Whippleby.”
“You are inextricable from the events in Cambridge, which have, for years, preoccupied me. Yes. I know much about you. I have followed your antics; your rise to fame and your inevitable public shaming. I have studied your poetry. But I have never heard or read anything to suggest that your father was an important piece of the Cambridge puzzle. He left England years prior, did he not?”