Chapter 340: Enmity and Revenge?

Chapter 337: Avenging a Favor?

Bang Bang Bang.

The smoke of black powder was accompanied by several consecutive gunshots.

The early morning of Liverpool’s old docks was already crowded with many dockers who came to try their luck. At first, the noisy human voices soon covered up the gunshots.

However, when Dumas and Louis started to draw their guns and return fire, the pedestrians on the road finally realized that something was wrong.

Soon, panic spread through the crowd, and the scene quickly became a mess as people ran in all directions.

Arthur and his party stuck close to the carriage as cover, their revolvers spitting fire.

Arthur looked at the chaotic crowd looked around half a day and could not find where the enemy, he hastened to ask: “Do you see clearly who fired?”

Dumas gritted his teeth and poked out half a head: “There was a guy wearing a coffee-colored brimmed hat, a red jacket, and straight pants. There were a couple other guys standing next to him, clutching guns in both hands!”

Arthur looked in the direction Dumas had identified, and soon spotted several of the perpetrators hiding in the fleeing crowd.

Arthur mentally counted the number of shots they fired and suddenly yelled, “Six shots! They should have run out of bullets, charge up and finish them off!”

The crowd heard this and got up ready to swarm to subdue the gang of outlaws, however, as soon as Louis ventured out, a bullet shot his high bowler hat through and through.

The close contact with the bullet startled His Majesty the Emperor out of a cold sweat, he shouted, “Damn! They’re holding revolvers too, with more than one bullet!”

Just as Louis was fuming, Dumas saw the moment when the crowd was evacuating, and a single bullet took down the assailant who stood in the forefront.

And those sent by the Liverpool departments to follow Arthur rushed forward with pistols drawn to support them.

As they fired, they shouted out a question, “Mr. Hastings, are you all right?”

Beep beep beep!
In the midst of the chaotic environment of shouting, the sound of a police whistle also sounded, followed by a tumultuous sound of horses’ hooves.

The local sheriff of Liverpool had apparently noticed the unusual conditions occurring in the dock area and was on his way with a mounted police team under his command.

The attackers had thought that they would only have to deal with Arthur and his nearby entourage, but what they hadn’t expected was that the Liverpool authorities would be so attentive to Commissioner Hastings that they would even go so far as to place a large number of ‘plainclothes’ near the hotel in order to protect him.

Seeing that the assassination operation was about to fail, Arthur and the others were gradually approaching them, the leader of the attackers simply gritted his teeth and took out matches from his pocket and threw them towards the horse’s trough next to him.

“Hastings! You bastard who works for the government, go to hell!”

Only a loud boom could be heard, and the flames of the explosion instantly rose.

The food trough made of wood was blown to pieces, and the projectiles hidden in the trough splashed around, instantly piercing through the walls and window panes of the nearby inn.

A few pedestrians who were unable to avoid the explosion were also affected by the explosion, and they fell to the ground wailing with their bullet-riddled parts of their bodies, and even the attacker himself fell to the ground like a broken kite after shivering for a couple of moments with his eyes wide open.

Although Arthur and the others were standing far away, a few stray bullets still scattered to this side.

Several holes were opened in the carriage’s door, Dumas was overturned by the shockwave generated by the explosion, and although Louis and Heine were less affected, they were still smeared with mud.

Arthur is considered to be the most unlucky one, although the bullet did not hit him, but the explosion lifted a small stone in the corner of his eye opened a wound, seeping blood outward only to make him feel a burst of fiery pain.

Still, Arthur was more concerned about Washington Irving, the secretary of the American Embassy beside him, than the corner of his own eye. If he was injured as well, then the characterization of the attack would not just be a domestic issue, but a diplomatic incident.

Having to maneuver between the Chancellery, the Customs Service, the Central Board of Health, and the Liverpool authorities was problematic enough, he didn’t want to bring the Foreign Office into the mix.

Especially if the Foreign Secretary was Viscount Palmerston, a dandy of the Irish aristocracy who was not so easy to deal with.

“Mr. Owen, you’re not hurt, are you?”

“What a shock!” Owen looked at the injured and corpses in the pool of blood in front of him, and returned with round eyes, “Mr. Hastings, compared to worrying about me, you should care more about yourself! How are your injuries?”

Arthur acted calmly about the injury because he had long been mentally prepared for this situation, but what he didn’t expect was that the attackers actually launched a surprise attack so blatantly in the street.

He took out a handkerchief to cover the side of his face, and even had the mood to make a few jokes: “This small injury is nothing, just a little skin. Although the attacker’s formation looks quite scary, the actual effect is not as good as the London groundlings. At the very least, when I first joined Scotland Yard, the East End hooligans did indeed keep me in bed for a few days.”

Owen’s hanging heart dropped at the sight of Arthur, who looked so calm that he even had the leisure to pull out a cigarette, “Still, I’m not surprised that Arthur Sigma is Hastings. Who else but you could have written The Hastings Mysteries?”

Agareth took Arthur’s shoulder and lifted his finger to dab the blood on his handkerchief as the Red Devil skimmed and shook his head, “I told you so, Arthur, you just don’t remember. It didn’t have to be your life, but even if it did send you on your way, the gang didn’t particularly mind.”

“Mr. Hastings!”

As soon as the Red Devil’s words were out of his mouth, the staff of the various departments of Liverpool, who had seen that the miscreant was dead, hastened to gather round him.

But just as they approached, they noticed the bloodstains on the side of Arthur’s face. For a moment, no one dared to take the lead in the conversation, for fear that the blame would be placed on them.

While the scene was silent, Liverpool’s security team finally arrived.

The sheriff rolled over and dismounted and hurriedly probed, “Mr. Hastings, you ……”

Without waiting for him to finish his sentence, Dumas spoke out sarcastically, “Sir, as you can see, the assassination is over, and rather than hush up the scene, you and your vigilantes would do better to wash this blood-stained street as soon as possible.” Owen, who had already recovered from the assassination, also expressed his dissatisfaction with this, “I now finally understand how Spencer Percival was assassinated and killed in the halls of the Palace of Westminster back then. That’s what happened to the Prime Minister, not to mention the Special Anti-Smuggling Ombudsman in Liverpool.”

The magistrate blushed at the dislike between the two of them and held his tongue for half a day without knowing how to reply.

Seeing this, Arthur just let out a soft laugh and spoke out to comfort him, “It’s actually not that bad, I’m in a better situation than the Prime Minister. At least from today’s scene, the guys who assassinated me didn’t have much of a brain. They shot at me from thirty yards away, and if they could have been a bit smarter, like what John Bellingham did back then, until they got close enough to me to shoot me in the chest again, then I should be able to go back to London in bed this afternoon.”

The sheriff was sweating at that, “Mr. Hastings, it was a mistake on our part. But as you know, we only have so many men on our policing team, and Liverpool is so big that negligence is always inevitable.”

Arthur nodded, “That’s right, and that’s why Sir Robert Peel pushed for the establishment of Scotland Yard in the first place. He was the one who thought at the time that it was too heavy to place the full responsibility for policing London on the shoulders of the magistrates and the Bow Street Mounted Police. I take note of your comments, and out of gratitude, I will be sure to report truthfully on what happens here.”

With that said, Arthur turned his attention back to the silent group of trackers, “Gentlemen, what are you all standing around for? Go back and report to the people who sent you here, I’m a bit unwell today, so I won’t be going to their place, as for whether they come to me or not, it depends on their mood.”

……

On the second floor of the Golden Lion Inn, in Arthur’s room.

Arthur looked at the six pistols laid out on the table, four flintlock pistols and two revolvers.

The flintlock pistols were professionally identified by firearms expert Alexandre Dumas, a double-barreled Howdah flintlock pistol produced by the Bureau of Ordnance of the British East India Company, a spiral-barreled flintlock pistol produced by the Pietro Beretta Company, a veteran Venetian medieval arms dealer, and two remelting-type percussion pistols suspected of coming from some unknown gunsmithing workshop.

As for the remaining two revolvers, Arthur didn’t know firearms as well as Dumas, but that didn’t stop him from recognizing that they must be from Samuel Colt.

As a kind of contraption that appeared in the 16th century, although the revolver can’t be considered a new contraption, but once upon a time the revolver was either a flintlock or a flintlock.

And equipped with a primer-impact action and a spiral-bore barrel, and also using conical-tipped shells, in addition to the Colt revolver, the world for the time being can not really find the second one.

Dumas sat at the corner of the table and casually copied a revolver and played with it: “Heh! This job is really quite rough, even if it is assassination, but also use the revolver to assassinate. Is he afraid that we won’t know where he bought the gun from? The production line for Colt’s revolvers hadn’t been established yet, so now almost every revolver was almost always handcrafted by Mr. Colt with a few craftsmen. Just have someone check who has placed an order recently, and won’t the identity of the assassin be clear?”

Heine chimed in, “Yeah! I originally thought that assassination was a high-end business, where one must devise a tight and detailed plan, match it with an assassin with excellent marksmanship, and bury an ulterior and mysterious purpose, and only then would one be able to accomplish an assassination that can be called an art. Yet what I saw today was that so many shots were fired, yet not one of them landed on the ground, and the only thing that really killed Arthur was his unlucky luck. God knows how he got hit by a stone?”

A few people were talking when Louis pushed his way in and said, “Arthur, according to Sheriff Field’s confirmation, two of the three assailants are dead and one is wounded, but the wounded one isn’t doing too well, he was shot through the right side of his chest by Alexander, and although he won’t die for a while, he should be close.”

Arthur covered the side of his face with a handkerchief and asked, “Is he willing to confess?”

Louis shook his head, “The employer should have paid them a lot of money or given them some kind of promise that they can’t refuse, so he’s not willing to say anything. But that doesn’t affect us to continue our investigation, we have recovered some interesting things from his body. Take a look at this.”

With that, Louis threw a pocket watch at Arthur.

Arthur’s fingertips must have picked open the cover of the watch, and a soft blonde female portrait instantly appeared in front of his eyes, while her name, Agnieszka, was also outlined in timelessly beautiful words at the bottom of the portrait.

“Well …… that’s not a name you see very often in England.” Arthur read, “Agnieszka, is that how it should be pronounced?”

“That’s right.” Louis nodded slightly, “A very common Polish name, and all three of those killers were quite Eastern European looking.”

“Polish?” Dumas exclaimed, “Are you saying that the ones who assassinated Arthur were a group of Poles? What reason would the Poles have to cross him? I’d find it more believable if you even said it was done by the French.”

Louis was helpless at this, “If you mean Poland, a country that no longer exists now, then I really don’t think they had much need to do this. And more than having no need to assassinate Arthur, they should be grateful to him. After all, Arthur had just saved Poland’s national pianist, Frederic Chopin, for them not too long ago. But we’re not talking about Poland, we’re talking about Polish assassins. Killers, they work when they’re paid, and with so many Polish refugees in Britain right now, it’s not a big surprise that there are a few who want to get rich off the street.”

Heine asked: “But those killers clearly did not want to go back alive, a word on the side of the detonation of explosives, where there is this kind of money?”

Louis nodded, “Maybe they are not making money for themselves? Maybe they still have family in Britain? Using a life to exchange for a good life for their family, there are plenty of people who do this kind of business.”

“Ah ……” Dumas heard here suddenly seemed to think of something: “So …… no wonder they made the assassination so amateurish. The Poles really do not have much hatred for Arthur, but took the order and had to do it. So, they have made such a two-way street?”

Heine questioned, “But without killing Arthur, can the employer willingly pay the money?”

Dumas shook his finger, “You can’t say that, they dare to take this kind of order, no matter if the assassination is successful or not, there is no way they will return alive. So they will definitely ask for enough money before they do it, otherwise after they die, are they going to let the orphans and widows at home ask their employer for the money?”

Heine hummed, “If you put it that way, the employer who hired them to kill is also brainless. What is it when the money is given and the job isn’t done?”

While the group argued over the puzzling unsolved case, the victim, Arthur, never said a word.

He wasn’t as concerned about the killer’s mental activities as Dumas and the others were; he was more concerned about who actually did the deed than that.

On the bright side, there was absolutely no need for the old guys in Liverpool to do something so brainless when there was a chance that they could chop up two hundred thousand dollars in municipal construction projects.

Moreover, Arthur remembered that Agares had warned him before that someone in London seemed to want him dead.

He didn’t have many enemies in London but he didn’t have few either, but there were only 2 that he knew of that could pay for an assassin.

One was Mr. Bernie Harrison, a former MP, and the other was Judge George Norton.

But although Mr. Harrison is no longer qualified to be a member of parliament, but the company is open well, Arthur follow-up also did not show the intention to pursue him, in this case, he has to jump over the wall?

As for Judge Norton, he is recently fighting with Viscount Melbourne over an extramarital affair lawsuit, does he still have the time to hire three assassins to come to Liverpool to give him trouble? If his CPU is really so good at multi-threaded operations, he shouldn’t have been in the job for so many years and eventually had to rely on his wife to get a magistrate’s seat!

(End of chapter)