Free The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry Page A

“He may be the first victim of murder we’ve discovered, but surely he wasn’t the first man to be killed by another. He may even have been a murderer himself. Still, he is our oldest mystery, and an unsolved one at that. We have the weapon, but not the motive.”
    Edwin Moore was not listening. He looked at the ceiling while Unwin spoke. “I hope there is enough light,” Moore said.
    “For what?”
    The sun, though partly obscured by clouds, crested the window at the top of the dome, and the room suddenly brightened.
    “There we are,” Moore said. “Did I tell you that I always keep to the same route when making my rounds? That is why I reach this room at the same time every afternoon. There was a woman, I think. She wanted to draw my attention to something, to this. Who was she? Did I only dream of her? I try not to notice things, Detective. I know a story or two. I know the days of the week. That is enough to help eclipse the rest. But look, look there. Can you fault me for noticing that?”
    Moore pointed at the glass coffin, at the dead man’s parted lips. Unwin saw nothing at first, just the grim visage that Sivart had described, in his reports, as a sad sorry face, laughing because it has to—a face you’d like to buy a drink. Then he noticed a glinting at the back of the man’s mouth, like that of the gold lettering on The Manual of Detection. He knelt, using his umbrella for balance, and drew as close to the corpse as he could bear. He and the mummy peered at one another through the glass. Then the light shifted, and the dead man gave up his secret.
    In one of his teeth, a gold filling.
    Unwin dropped his umbrella and jerked upright, tripping over his own feet as he backed away from the mummy. He had the odd impression that his breath had escaped with his umbrella and gone skittering over the floor with it, out of reach. He needed them both, but he could not go and fetch them. He was still standing only because Edwin Moore was propping him up.
    Let sleeping corpses lie, the note in the dumbwaiter had read. The gold filling twinkled in the mouth of the Oldest Murdered Man, and to Unwin it was as though the corpse were silently laughing at him. The implications extended deep into the Agency archives, all the way down to Unwin’s own files. He said it aloud as he realized it: “The Oldest Murdered Man is a fake.”
    “No,” Moore said. “The Oldest Murdered Man is real. But he is not in this museum.”
    Footsteps at the edge of the room caused Unwin and Moore to turn. The man with the blond beard stood in the doorway, his portable typewriter in his hand.
    “We must continue,” Moore whispered. “I’ve never seen that man before, but I don’t like the looks of him.”
    Unwin was standing on his own now. “He was in the café not ten minutes ago,” he said.
    “No time to argue,” said Moore. He picked up Unwin’s umbrella and pressed it into his hands. They left the way the schoolchildren had gone, through an arched doorway and into a dim hall between galleries.
    “Please understand,” Moore said. “I tried hard to forget the whole thing. Succeeded, perhaps, many times. But every day there is the tooth again, the filling. And that woman, who keeps insisting that I see it. It itches at my brain. The filling may as well be set in my own head. I need to forget about it. Knowing much of anything is a danger to me. I need you to fix your mistake.”
    “My mistake?”
    “Yes. I did not want to be the one to break it to you, Detective Sivart. But the corpse you retrieved from The Wonderly the night you first confronted Enoch Hoffmann—it was the wrong corpse. A decoy.” Moore looked sad as he spoke, his breath whistling through bunched whiskers. “He tricked you, Detective. He tricked you into helping him hide a dead body in plain sight.”
    “Whose dead body?”
    “Either I never knew—”
    “Or you’ve purposefully forgotten,” Unwin said.
    Moore seemed surprised to have his sentence