Civil War
One of the Bow Street Runners, being more intrepid and enjoying the fortune of having taking up residence near the disturbance a month before, found a complete series of letters in the house, the perfect order of which which was almost completely derailed from the donnybrook a mere half hour earlier. The letters, held in two separate plain pine boxes and faintly reeking of some kind of combustible residue, were found undisturbed right near the fire-place and were unusual in that it held correspondence from either post-end.
The conversation’s beginning was written by a young spinster schoolteacher somewhere in Hertfordshire, to her father in London. Both were diligent grammarians and experts in the realm of linguistics, though the inspector had strong presuppositions that the father held a slight advantage as a prestigious university-level department head and held various scholarly titles of the highest-sounding order.
The letters were filled with questions and conversations on comma usage, dangling participles, the correct deployment of the pluperfect tense in Victorian fiction, the authenticity of loan words, and predicate logic. The correspondence on both sides got progressively more contested and personal, as evidenced by the harsher glyphs, hasty ink blots, and meticulously crafted curses and insults. The inspector, with the trained scales of his internal and informal jury, blamed such hotheadedness on the daughter’s uprbringing by her father’s spoiling hand, which instilled an excess of presupposed and deposed royalty (the family’s pedigree was assuredly not royal, much less overthrown).
Wishing to reconcile their professional differences, the pair decided to reunite in person at the father’s estate — the scene of the crime — and to symbolize the amicable reconnection they planned to surrender the evidence of their lengthy correspondence to the flames of the father’s fireplace.
But academic passions prevailed once again, it was concluded, and made the injudicious and injurious leap into the physical realm right there in the father’s study, where we now found our hero. Much afterwards, the case, was settled with nary a barrister’s inclusion (or intrusion, if the reader prefers) and the perpetrators went back to their own professions and lives as it was before the start of the entire protracted disputation, but it took the inspector an entire month to shake the fright and mental agony of ever scratching out a simple sentence.