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.”
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.”