Free The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

café, he knocked into the table where the man with the blond beard had been sitting. A glass tipped and spilled water on the papers stacked beside the typewriter. The man with the blond beard dropped the receiver and came running over, cursing under his breath.
    Unwin took the napkin out of his hat; something was written on it in blue ink. He uncrumpled the paper and read the hastily scrawled message. Not safe here. Follow while he’s distracted. He stuffed the napkin into his pocket, gathered up his things, and left. The man with the blond beard was too busy shaking wet pages to notice him go.
     
     
    THE MUSEUM ATTENDANT GRABBED Unwin by the arm and directed him north into the first of the museum galleries. The name on his pin was Edwin Moore. He leaned close and spoke into Unwin’s ear. “We must choose our words carefully. You especially. Everything you say to me I must spend precious minutes unremembering before I sleep. I apologize for waiting as long as I did to intercede. Until I heard you speak, I thought you were one of them.”
    “One of whom?”
    Moore breathed worry through his whiskers. “I cannot say. Either I never knew or I have purposefully forgotten.”
    Their route took them through the halls of warfare, where empty suits of mail straddled horse’s armor empty of horses. Gold and silver weapons gleamed in their cases, and Unwin knew them each, knew the slim-bladed misericord, the graceful rapier, the double-barreled wheel lock pistol. They were all in the Agency’s index of weapons, though the pages dedicated to such antiquated devices were less useful than those covering the more popular implements of the day: the pistol, the garrote, the cast-iron skillet.
    Moore looked in Unwin’s direction as he spoke but would not meet his eyes. “I have been an employee of the Municipal Museum for thirteen years, eleven months, and some-odd days,” he said. “I always follow the same path through these corridors, altering my course only when necessary, as when a lost child begs my assistance. I like to keep moving. Not to see the paintings, of course. After all this time, I no longer see the paintings. They may as well be blank canvases or windows onto white sky.”
    A dull but potentially dangerous personality, the man with the blond beard had typed, empty or clouded over. Was it Moore he had been describing? What sort of man worked to forget everything he knew? Doubtless he was a little mad. Unwin, mindful of the commandment to choose his words carefully, chose none for now.
    Soon they came to a broad, circular chamber. Unwin knew the place. Light entered through a small window at the top of the domed ceiling, entombing in gray light the coffin of glass on a pedestal below. The Oldest Murdered Man was surrounded by schoolchildren, out on a field trip. The more brave and curious among them stood close, and some even pressed their faces to the glass. Unwin and Moore waited until their chaperone, a stooped young man in a tweed coat, counted the children and shepherded them away. Once the patter of their feet had receded, the only sound was that of the rain on the window high above.
    They went closer, the squeaking of Unwin’s shoes echoing in the vast room. A plaque set in the floor at the base of the pedestal declared, TO DETECTIVE TRAVIS T. SIVART, WHO RETURNED THIS TREASURE TO ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE OF REST, THE TRUSTEES OF THE MUNICIPAL MUSEUM EXPRESS THEIR UNDYING GRATITUDE.
    The Oldest Murdered Man lay curled on his side, his arms folded over his chest. His flesh was yellow and sunken but intact, preserved by the bog into which he had been thrown, all those thousands of years ago. Had he been a hunter, a farmer, a warrior, a chieftain? His eyes were not quite closed, his black lips drawn back over his teeth in an expression that suggested merriment rather than terror. The hempen cord with which he had been strangled was still twisted around his neck.
    “I always found the name imprecise,” Unwin said.