“Even famous knaves are discreet about some things,” I said, though I supposed I was done with discretion. “The deepest wounds are the ones we conceal.”
“We are both preoccupied, then. We both grieve,” he said. “A son grieves for a father, and a father grieves for a daughter. But my daughter and your father have nothing to do with one another.”
“There are things I know and there are things I believe,” I said. “Some of the things I know are things I cannot let myself believe, and some of the things I believe are difficult to reconcile with facts. This, I think, is a common human conundrum.”
“You speak of God.”
“No, I’m talking about Mad Jack. And about vampires.”
“John Byron Gordon is dead.”
“I know that,” I said, “but I don’t believe it. He cannot be dead. I’m not finished with him yet.” Death was only for the poor and the foolish, Mad Jack said. And Mad Jack was no fool.
Whippleby licked his fingertip and contemplatively stroked it across his mustache. “They say both of us are insane, and perhaps they’re right.”
“A woman I once loved will proclaim to all who will listen that I am mad and bad and dangerous to know. I’ve also heard that I am a drunk and an addict and a sexual deviant. But madness and drunkenness seem to me the only reasonable responses to the desperate reality of the human condition. How else can one dull the pain of past sorrows and quiet the howling inevitability of future grief?”
When Whippleby spoke again, his voice was softer and gentler. His hands unclenched a little. After so many years of hatred, this man would never forgive me, but perhaps we had found a common cause. “If you truly mean to write a full account of the Cambridge murders, you must find out who hired the second private constable. This question has become, for me, an obsession. Both Fielding Dingle and Archibald Knifing claimed to have come to Cambridge on my behalf to catch my daughter’s killer. But I swear on Felicity’s grave that I hired only one man.”
He waited for me to speak. When I did not, he resumed.
“People have, in the past, suggested that I gave duplicate instructions to two servants, and thus, through my agents, I hired both men inadvertently. For a time, I believed this myself. I was near delirious with grief in the hours and days after I learned of my daughter’s death. But I could account for only one servant who had been dispatched on such a task. I consulted my bankers, and only one disbursement was made to compensate an investigator. One of those two men went to Cambridge at my behest. The second went there under false pretenses. The trouble is that I do not know which man I hired.”
“Why don’t you simply ask your servant whom he retained?” I said.
“He was killed only a few days after Felicity died, before I learned that a second investigator had gone to Cambridge, masquerading as my agent,” Whippleby said. “My man was knocked down in the street by a speeding stagecoach. The driver was never identified, and I have come to believe my servant’s death was not an accident.”
“Does your bank not keep records?” I asked. “Can they not tell you who drew funds on your note?”
He shook his head, and a visible cloud of dust shook loose from his hair and danced in the dim sunlight streaming through his dirty window. The old man’s skin was pale as milk, and blue veins rolled beneath the translucent surfaces of his neck as he spoke. Whippleby probably had not been outside in months. “My servant paid cash, so the bank could offer no assistance. I made inquiries into the backgrounds of both thief-catchers. Fielding Dingle was, at least, legitimate, known among the fraternity of professional investigators and respected for his doggedness, if not for his intellect. Knifing, of course, was among the profession’s greatest lights. He was a war hero and a personal friend of the King. His reputation was said to be unimpeachable, though I’d call that an overstatement.”
Whippleby paused to pour himself a glass of warm, cloudy gin from a bottle with a crystal stopper. He didn’t offer me any, but I took no offense. His stuff smelled like pine sap, and I had a flask of a finer spirit in my waistcoat pocket. I unscrewed the cap and indulged. It seemed rude to let Whippleby drink alone.
“Deceit and disreputability are the thieftaker’s apprenticeship. These men are former spies and criminals, ostensibly reformed, but turned to a task only marginally more respectable. I told my man to find me the best one I could afford. I’d think, with my resources, I could have hired a better man than Dingle, but I doubt my coin was sufficient to employ someone of Knifing’s eminence, unless he agreed to lower his rate for some reason. In any case, only one of the two went to Cambridge at my urging. The second was acting on behalf of other interests. Of this, I am certain, and for this reason, I have never been able to accept the claim that the killer was some deranged peasant of no particular consequence. Someone must have hired the second man. Something has been covered up, and if you mean to lay down a true account of these events, you must unravel that mystery. I’ve failed in all my attempts, but perhaps you will succeed where I could not.”
I locked my gaze with Whippleby’s; stared into the deep hollows around his eyes and at the pinched, mealy-white flesh of his face. This man was wrecked, and I was partly responsible. I’d told a lie I believed was insignificant; Felicity Whippleby and the other Cambridge victims had gotten a sort of justice. There seemed to be little harm in manipulating a few of the facts.
But this old man perceived the falsehood, and the lie had devoured him. He needed to know what had happened to his daughter, just as I needed to know what had happened to my father. And so, he’d ruined his mind and wasted his vitality trying to unravel a conspiracy I’d been a part of. We had offered the perception of justice, of certainty. And, as Knifing might have predicted, the others bereaved by the Cambridge murders had accepted it and found it comforting. But Knifing had been wrong about Whippleby. What the dead girl’s father needed was the truth.
On one level, I had visited Whippleby to find an emotional center for my narrative of the murders. I didn’t really know Felicity, and she was already dead when I entered the story. Thus, she was an abstraction within the narrative. The murders and the process of their resolution, to the reader, seemed to merely be sort of a puzzle, and this made everything that happened afterward seem unimportant. I’d gazed upon the corpses with my own eyes and I’d filled my nostrils with the stink of their decay, so the pursuit of justice, as I experienced it, had had an urgency that I failed to convey upon the page.
More than once, in the course of writing my polemic, I’d wished I’d spoken with Felicity’s mourners in the days after she was killed instead of running around uselessly in a drunken frenzy. Archibald Knifing, with the assistance of Angus the volunteer constable, interviewed Felicity’s close friends and her neighbors in the rooming house to try to reconstruct the events of her final hours. I will admit that it never occurred to me to do so. Just as, only a few years after the installation of gaslights, one can no longer imagine the streets of London dark and empty at night, it seems strange to recall that protocols of criminal detection have been only recently established, and to the extent they existed in 1807, they were certainly unfamiliar to those outside the fraternity of investigators. So, while readers of the mystery stories that now proliferate in the popular press may think it elementary to interview a victim’s associates as a first step in investigating a murder, it was by no means the obvious course of action for me in Cambridge.
But there’s no point in defending myself. Because of my investigative omission, I knew very little of Felicity Whippleby, and I needed more information to write about the events surrounding her death. I’d hoped the girl’s father might provide me with some anecdote; some story about a sweet or precocious child that would become maudlin when placed opposite a depiction of the horrific details of her demise. If I could not fully convey my own visceral alarm on the page, perhaps I could instill in the reader some of Lord Whippleby’s gnawing sense of loss.