I must have drifted to sleep on the grass, for when Knifing’s singsong greeting roused me, the stars had changed.
“My congratulations, Lord Byron!” the investigator shouted at me across the heath as he approached.
I lifted myself into a sitting position, which caused me no small amount of pain. “For what?”
“For your deliverance,” he said. “For your vindication. For your exoneration.”
I squinted to see the thin, dark form approaching from the highway, some two hundred yards distant. Knifing had come in a black carriage pulled by black horses, and driven by a rather severe-looking gentleman clad, predictably, in black. I thought this was a fitting conveyance for the wraithlike investigator, because it looked like a hearse. Then I realized it actually was a hearse; Knifing had come out with the undertaker to collect the remains of Fielding Dingle and his driver. I was unhappy about having to ride back to town in the same vehicle as those ripening corpses, but it was better than riding in the prison-carriage, so I decided not to complain.
Instead, I asked: “Am I no longer suspected of murder?”
Knifing jauntily adjusted his bush hat. “My God, no. That preposterous proposition perished with its ponderous proponent.”
I was nursing a rattled skull and a belly full of rotgut whisky, so it took some calculation on my part to figure out that he was talking about Dingle. Knifing seemed bizarrely chipper for a man who had been summoned from bed in the dark hours of the morning to examine the corpse of a colleague who’d been shot in the face and crushed beneath a stagecoach.
“You said you’d march me to the gallows, regardless of my guilt or innocence, to assuage your clients’ uncertainty.”
The investigator let out a peal of his singular, unpleasant laughter, and I realized why the carriage-horse’s death-wail had sounded so familiar. “That’s certainly something I’d say, but it’s not something I’d do. I’ve got standards, you see, and you’ve got lawyers. Such threats were only a ploy; a stratagem designed to intimidate you into disclosing facts, and to scare you away from my crime scenes. Arresting you is something only Dingle would be fool enough to do, and in fact, it’s something Dingle did, before Dingle died.” The alliteration set him off into his disconcerting giggles again.
Though it caused some pain in my sore neck, I turned my head to see how Angus was reacting to his hero’s strange behavior. The constable’s eyes were bulging and his mouth hung slightly open. I wouldn’t describe his expression as one of astonishment, however; Angus just always looked like that. “Are you drunk, Mr. Knifing?” I asked.
“That’s quite a thing for you to ask me,” Knifing said, and then he made his horse-scream noise, because he was so amused with himself.
“Have you seen the corpses, sir?” Angus asked.
“What was left of them,” said Knifing, who had closed the distance between the road and the wreck of the prison-coach, and was looming unpleasantly over me as I lay sprawled in the dirt. “Quite a mess it was. I was greatly entertained to watch Bartholomew scraping Mr. Dingle off the road.” He pointed with his thumb back at the hunched figure on top of the corpse-wagon.
“That’s a queer thing to derive pleasure from,” I said.
“I’ll defer on that question to your experience, Lord Byron. You’re our reigning authority on the subject of queer pleasures.” He poked me in my bruised ribs with the end of his umbrella. “I will say that I like to see a bad man get what he deserves. That’s part of why I do this job.”
Angus scratched his jowls. “If you think Dingle’s death establishes Byron’s innocence, does that mean that you believe the Cambridge killer shot Dingle?”
“It’s not likely that there are two killers about, is it?” Knifing asked.
“I don’t suppose I know whether that’s likely or not,” Angus said. “Why would the killer rescue Byron from Dingle?”
“I don’t think he meant for me to be rescued,” I said. “How was he able to shoot them both? I’ve never met a man who could hit a fast-moving target at any great range with a musket.”
“He didn’t use a musket,” Knifing said. “He used a rifle.”
“I’ve heard of those,” Angus said with a touch of awe. “Never seen one.”
“They’re supposed to be hard to load,” I said.
I must confess I’d been as confused by the killer’s uncanny marksmanship as Angus was, but I probably should not have been. Forgetting that the alley gate at the Modest Proposal was open at night was an egregious observational failure, but my inability to recognize a rifle shot was nearly as embarrassing.
I was quite familiar with the Baker infantry rifle because I’d tried on several occasions to purchase one. In every case, the seller had either refused to part with his weapon or had demanded an exorbitant price. It was a remarkable toy and a difficult one to obtain, and so I lusted after it with a fervor that was, in other circumstances, reserved exclusively for beautiful women.
Unlike the wide, smooth barrel of a musket, a rifle’s was narrow and grooved inside; when the gun fired, the grooved track caused the bullet to come out spinning, which allowed it to maintain a straight trajectory over a great distance. Because the rifle bullet fit so tightly into this special barrel, it took more than twice as long to load as a standard-issue Brown Bess musket.
Muskets were an excellent weapon for infantry who marched in formations, since, though the accuracy of any single shot was poor, a volley from an infantry line could cut through an opposing force. But even a skilled soldier armed with a musket would miss a target at fifty paces twice as often as he’d hit it. A good rifleman could put a chunk of lead through a man’s eyeball at two hundred yards.
Since the Baker took so long to reload, it was an unsuitable weapon for infantry; a slower-firing weapon couldn’t lay down the devastating hailstorm of bullets that was the specialization of the British Army. So, riflemen fought as skirmishers, either running out ahead of the advancing line to pick off targets before the main forces engaged each other or taking positions near the battlefield to shoot officers from the side or the rear.
Two years after the events in Cambridge, the Baker rifle would become famous when a sharpshooter named Thomas Plunket used one to kill a French general from a distance of six hundred yards. Then he reloaded and killed a second officer at the same range, just to prove he could do it twice. The killing of Fielding Dingle never garnered the same level of publicity, but it required similar prowess; though the range was likely closer, the targets were moving.
Knifing and Angus had both been soldiers, so either of them could conceivably have the expertise to make such a shot, but it was unlikely that either of them did. Angus’s service predated the use of rifles by British forces by a number of years, so it seemed unlikely he’d been trained to use one. Also, he’d needed two tries to kill a fallen horse at point-blank range with his musket.
Knifing probably could have obtained a rifle without much difficulty, but his infantry days were long past and he had no professional reason to have made the effort required to become a master marksman with a new kind of weapon. And he only had one eye. Even with a tool as precise as the Baker rifle, it’s difficult to shoot with accuracy from great range when one lacks the ability to perceive depth. It seemed a folly, however, to underestimate Archibald Knifing. He was diligent and blessed with a monstrous intellect. Perhaps with skill and practice, even a one-eyed man could calculate distance and hit his target. And if there was a potential hobby he might take up that would make him one of the deadliest men in the world, it seemed like the sort of project Knifing might find appealing.
“There cannot be more than a few men in Cambridge with access to a Baker rifle and the skill to shoot two men off a moving carriage from great range,” I said. “The killer has finally made a fatal error. We need only identify those men who are likely to possess the rifles, and we can begin to interrogate them.”