Drood

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Charles Dickens is going to murder Edmond Dickenson.”

It was the second time in eighteen months that I had sat straight up in bed out of a deep laudanum sleep and shouted those words.

“No,” I said into the dark, still half-claimed by dream but also imbued with the complete deductive certainty of my yet-to-be created Detective Sergeant Cuff, “Charles Dickens has already murdered Edmond Dickenson.”

“Wilkie, darling,” said Caroline, sitting up next to me and seizing my arm, “what are you going on about? You’ve been talking in your sleep, my dearest.”

“Leave me alone,” I said groggily, shaking off her hand. I rose, pulled on my dressing gown, and went to the window.

“Wilkie, my dear…”

“Silence!” My heart was pounding. I was trying not to lose the clarity of my dream-revelation.

I found my watch on the bureau and looked at it. It was a little before three in the morning. Outside, the paving stones were slick with a light sleet falling. I looked at the streetlamp and then searched the small porch on the abandoned house on the corner opposite that lamp until I saw the shadow huddled there. Inspector Field’s messenger—a boy with strange eyes whom the inspector called Gooseberry—was still there, more than a year after I had first spied him waiting.

I left the bedroom and started for my study but paused on the landing. It was night. The Other Wilkie would be in there, waiting, most probably sitting at my desk and watching the door with unblinking eyes. I went downstairs instead to the small secretary in the parlour, where Caroline and Carrie kept their writing materials. Setting my glasses firmly in place, I wrote—

Inspector Field:

I have good reason to believe that Charles Dickens has murdered a young man who survived the Staplehurst train wreck, a Mr Edmond Dickenson. Please meet me at ten AM at Waterloo Bridge so that we can discuss the evidence and prepare a way of trapping Dickens into admitting to the murder of young Dickenson.

Yr. Obedient Servant,

William Wilkie Collins

I looked at the missive for a long moment, nodded, folded it, set it in a thick envelope, used my father’s stamp to seal it, and placed it in an inner pocket of my dressing gown. Then I took some coins from my purse, found my overcoat in the hall closet, pulled on rubbers over my slippers, and went out into the night.

I had just reached the streetlamp on my side of the street when a shadow on the porch opposite separated itself from the deeper shadow of the porch overhang. In an instant the boy had crossed the street to meet me. He had no coat on and was shivering violently in the rain and cold.

“You are Gooseberry?” I asked.

“Yessir.”

I put my hand on the letter but for some reason did not draw it out. “Is Gooseberry your last name?” I asked.

“No, sir. Inspector Field calls me that, sir. Because of my eyes, you see.”

I did see. The boy’s eyes were distinguished not only by their absurd prominence but by the fact that they rolled to and fro like two bullets in an egg cup. My fingers tightened on the letter to his master, but still I hesitated.

“You’re a crossing sweeper, Gooseberry?”

“I was a crossing sweeper, sir. No longer.”

“What are you now, lad?”

“I’m in training with the great Inspector Field to be a detective, is what,” said Gooseberry with pride, but with no hint of boasting. Between shivers he coughed. It was a deep cough—the kind that had given my mother the horrors whenever any similar sound emerged from Charles or me when we were young—but the urchin had the manners to cover his mouth when he coughed.

“What is your real name, boy?” I asked.

“Guy Septimus Cecil,” said the boy through slightly chattering teeth.

I let go of the letter and brought five shillings out, dropping them into Guy Septimus Cecil’s hurriedly raised palm. I am not sure that I have ever seen another person quite so surprised, with the probable exception of the thugs Mr Reginald Barris had clubbed down in the alley in Birmingham.

“There’ll be no message from me to your master tonight or for the next three days and nights, Master Guy Septimus Cecil,” I said softly. “Go get a hot breakfast. Rent a room—a heated room. And with whatever you have left over, buy a coat… something made of good English wool to go over those rags. You’ll be no good to either Inspector Field or to me if you catch your death of cold out here.”

The boy’s gooseberry eyes wandered, although they never seemed to fix on me.

“Go on, now!” I said sternly. “Don’t let me see you back here until Tuesday next!”

“Yessir,” Gooseberry said dubiously. But he turned and trotted back across the street, hesitated by the porch, and ran on down the street towards the promise of warmth and food.

HAVING DECIDED TO DO the hard detective work related to the murder of Edmond Dickenson myself, I set about it with a will the next morning. Fortifying myself with two-and-a-half cups of laudanum (about two hundred minims, if one were applying the medicine drop-by-drop), I took the mid-day train to Chatham and hired a cart to whisk me—although “plod me” would be a better choice of verb given the age and indifference of both the horse and cart-driver—to Gad’s Hill Place.

As I approached the important interview with Dickens, I began to see more clearly the to-this-point-amorphous idea of my fictional detective in The Eye of the Serpent (or perhaps The Serpent’s Eye), Sergeant Cuff. Rather than the brusque, stolid, and gruff Inspector Bucket of Dickens’s Bleak House—an unimaginative character in the most literal sense, I thought, since he was based so clearly on the younger version of the actual Inspector Field—my Sergeant Cuff would be tall, thin, older, ascetic, and rational. More than anything else, rational, as if addicted to ratiocination. I also imagined my ascetic, grey-haired, hatchet-faced, ratiocinated, pale-eyed and clear-eyed Sergeant Cuff as nearing retirement. He would be looking forward, I realised, to devoting his post-detective life to beekeeping. No, not beekeeping—too odd, too eccentric, and too difficult for me to research. Perhaps— growing roses. That was the ticket… roses. I knew something about roses and their care and breeding. Sergeant Cuff would know… everything about roses.

Most detectives begin with the murder and spend ages following roundabout clues to the murderer, but Sergeant Cuff and I would invert the process by starting with the murderer and then seeking out the corpse.

“My dear Wilkie, what a pleasant surprise! The pleasure of your company two days in a row!” cried Dickens as I approached the house and he came out, tugging on a wool cape-coat against the chill wind. “You’re staying for the rest of the weekend, I trust.”

“No, just stopping by for a quick word with you, Charles,” I said. His welcoming smile was so obviously sincere in his childlike way—a little boy whose playmate has shown up unexpectedly—that I had to return the smile, even though inside I was holding fast to the cool, neutral expression of Sergeant Cuff.

“Wonderful! I’ve just finished my morning’s work on the last of the introductions and my Christmas story and was about to set out on my walk. Join me, dear friend!”

The thought of a twelve- or twenty-mile hike at Charles Dickens’s pace on this windy, snow-threatening November day caused a headache to start its throbbing behind my right eye. “I wish I could, my dear Dickens. But as you mentioned Christmas… well, that was one of the things that I wished to talk to you about.”

“Really?” He paused. “You—the original ‘Bah! Humbug!’ Wilkie Collins—interested in Christmas?” he said and threw back his head for a true Dickens laugh. “Well, now I can say that I have lived long enough to see all improbabilities come to pass.”

I forced another smile. “I was just wondering if you were having one of your usual galas this year. The day is not too far distant, you know.”

“No, no, no, it isn’t,” said Dickens. Suddenly he was calmly and coolly appraising me. “And no, no gala this year, I fear. The new round of readings begins in early December, you may recall.”

“Ah, yes.”

“I shall be home for a day or two for Christmas itself,” said Dickens, “and of course you shall be invited. But it shall be a modest affair this year, I’m sorry to tell you, my dear Wilkie.”

“No worry, no worry,” I said hurriedly, improvising my little scene in a way that I felt would do justice to the yet-to-be-created Sergeant Cuff. “I was just curious… will you be inviting Macready this year?”

“Macready? No, I think not. I believe his wife is indisposed this season anyway. And Macready travels less and less these days, you remember, Wilkie.”

“Of course. And Dickenson?”

“Who?”

Aha! I thought. Charles Dickens, the Inimitable, the novelist, the man with the iron memory, would not, could not, ever forget the name of the young man whom he’d saved at Staplehurst. This was a murderer’s—or soon-to-be-murderer’s—dissembling!

“Dickenson,” I said. “Edmond. Surely you remember last Christmas, Charles! The somnambulist!”

“Oh, of course, of course,” said Dickens even while he waved away the name and the memory. “No. We shan’t be inviting young Edmond this Christmas. Just family this year. And the closest friends.”

“Really?” I feigned surprise. “I thought that you and young Dickenson were rather close.”

“Not at all,” said Dickens while he pulled on his expensive and far-too-thin-for-such-a-day kid gloves. “I merely looked in on the young man from time to time during his first months of recovery. He was, you remember, Wilkie, an orphan.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, as if I could have forgotten this essential clue as to why Dickens had chosen him as his murder victim. “Actually, I had rather looked forward to chatting with young Dickenson on a couple of topics we were discussing last Christmas. Do you remember his address by any chance, Charles?”

Now he was looking at me most queerly. “You wish to pick up a conversation you were having with Edmond Dickenson almost a year ago?”

“Yes,” I said in what I hoped was my most authoritative Sergeant Cuff manner.

Dickens shrugged. “I’m quite sure I don’t remember his address, if I ever knew it. Actually, I believe he moved around quite a bit… restless young bachelor, always changing quarters and so forth.”

“Hmmm,” I said. I was squinting against the cold wind out of the north that was rustling Dickens’s winter-pruned hedges and driving the last of the sere leaves from the trees in his front yard, but I might as well have been squinting through the suspicion I felt.

“In fact,” Dickens said brightly, “I believe I remember young Dickenson left England last summer or autumn. To go make his fortune in southern France. Or South Africa. Or Australia. Some promising place like that.”

He’s playing with me, I thought with an electric surge of Sergeant Cuff—ish certainty. But he does not know that I am playing with him.

“Too bad,” I said. “I would have enjoyed seeing young Edmond again. But there’s nothing for it.”

“There isn’t,” agreed Dickens, his voice muffled by the thick red scarf he’d pulled up over his lower face. “Are you sure you won’t join me for the walk? It’s a perfect day for it.”

“Another day,” I said and shook his hand. “My cart and driver are waiting.”

But I waited until the writer was out of sight and the tap of his stick out of earshot and then I rapped at the door, handed my hat and scarf to the servant who answered, and went quickly to the kitchen, where Georgina Hogarth was seated at the servants’ table going over menus.

“Mr Wilkie, what a pleasant surprise!”

“Halloo, Georgina, halloo,” I said affably. I wondered if I should have wore a disguise. Detectives often wore disguises. I’m sure that Sergeant Cuff did upon occasion, despite his uniquely tall and ascetic appearance. Sergeant Cuff was almost certainly a master of disguises. But then, that ageing Scotland Yard detective did not suffer the handicaps of my disguise-proof shortness, full beard, receding hairline, weak eyes that demanded spectacles, and oversized, bulbous forehead.

“Georgina,” I said easily, “I just ran into Charles on his way off to his walk and popped in because my friends and I are planning a small dinner party—a few artists and literary people—and I thought that young Dickenson might enjoy such an evening. But we don’t have his address.”

“Young Dickenson?” Her expression was blank. Was she an accomplice? “Oh,” she said, “you mean that boring young gentleman who sleepwalked here Christmas Day night last.”

“Precisely.”

“Oh, he was terribly boring,” said Georgina. “Hardly worth inviting to your wonderful party.”

“Possibly not,” I agreed, “but we thought he might enjoy it.”

“Well, I do remember sending out the Christmas invitations last year, so please follow me into the drawing room to the secretary where I keep my files.…”

Ahah! cried the successful ghost of the unborn Sergeant Cuff.

GEORGINA HOGARTH’S FEW NOTES from Dickens to Edmond Dickenson had all been mailed to (and presumably then fowarded by) a barrister by the name of Matthew B. Roffe of Gray’s Inn Square. I knew this area well, of course, since I had also studied for the law—indeed, I once described myself as “a barrister of some fifteen years’ standing, without ever having had a brief, or ever having even so much as donned a wig and gown.” My own studies had taken place at the nearby Lincoln’s Inn, although I confess that my “study” there consisted much more of attending to meals provided than to studying, although I do remember reading seriously for the Bar for six weeks or so. After that, my interest in law books waned even as my interest in the meals persisted. At that time, my friends were mostly painters and my own efforts mostly literary. But the Bar was more generous to gentlemen with vague legal aspirations then, and somehow, despite my lack of attendant effort, I became licensed as a barrister in 1851.

I had never heard of Mr Matthew B. Roffe and—based upon the dinginess of his small, cluttered, dusty, and remote third-storey office near Gray’s Inn—neither had any clients. There was no clerk present in the low-ceilinged little closet of an outer office and no bell to announce me. I could see an old man wearing clothing twenty years out of date, eating a chop at his desk piled high with folders, testaments, volumes, and bric-a-brac, and I cleared my throat loudly to gain his attention.

He pressed a pair of pince-nez into place on his hook of a nose and stared out of that papered cavern with much blinking of his small and watery eyes. “Eh? What’s that? Who’s there? Enter, sir! Advance and be recognised!”

I advanced, but when I was not recognised, I gave my name. Mr Roffe had been smiling through the encounter so far, but his expression showed no further recognition upon hearing my name.

“I received your name and business address through my friend Charles Dickens,” I said softly. It was not the full truth, but it certainly was not an outright lie. “Charles Dickens the novelist,” I added.

The wizened marionette of a man was galvanised into a response consisting mostly of twitches and jerks. “Oh, my, good heavens, oh, yes, I mean… how wonderful, yes, of course… The Charles Dickens gave me your, I mean, gave you my name.… Oh, where are my manners?… Do sit down, please, be seated please, Mr… ah?”

“Collins,” I said. The chair he had waved me towards probably had not been unburdened of its stack of opened volumes and scrolled documents in years, if not decades. I leaned back against a high stool instead. “This is quite comfortable,” I said, and, in a flourish perhaps not unworthy of Sergeant Cuff, added, “and better for my back.”

“Oh, yes… well, yes… Would you like some tea, Mr… ah… Mr… oh, dear.”

“Collins. And yes, I would love some tea.”

“Smalley!” cried Mr Roffe towards the empty outer office. “Smalley, I say!”

“I believe your clerk is absent, Mr Roffe.”

“Oh, yes… no, I mean…” The old man fumbled at his waistcoat, removed a watch, frowned at it, shook it next to his ear, and said, “Mr Collins, I trust it is not a little after nine in the morning or evening?”

“Indeed not,” I said, referring to my own watch. “It is a bit after four in the afternoon, Mr Roffe.”

“Ah, that explains Smalley’s absence!” cried the old man as if we had solved a great mystery. “He always goes home for his tea at around three, not returning until after five.”

“Your profession demands long hours of you,” I said drily. I would have liked to have had that promised tea.

“Oh, yes, yes… to serve the law is more like a… like a… well, perhaps ‘marriage’ is the term I am looking for. Are you married, Mr Collins?”

“No, sir. That happy domestic state has eluded me, Mr Roffe.”

“Myself as well, Mr Collins!” cried the old man, slapping the leather binding of a volume on his desk. “Myself as well. We are two fugitives from bliss, you and I, Mr Collins. But the law keeps me here from before the lamps are lighted in the morning—although, of course, that is Smalley’s job, the lighting of the lamps—until they are extinguished late in the night.”

I slowly withdrew from my jacket pocket a new leatherbound notebook which I had purchased precisely for this purpose—detective work. I then drew out a sharpened pencil and opened my notebook to the first blank page.

As if a gavel had been pounded, Mr Roffe sat more upright, clasped his hands together in front of him—thus quieting his long, twitching fingers for the first time—and generally looked as attentive as a man of his advanced years and character and obvious failing senses could look under the circumstances. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Now to our business, Mr Collins. What is our business, Mr Collins?”

“Master Edmond Dickenson,” I said firmly, hearing the flinty yet sensitive Cuff overtones in the syllables as I spoke. I knew precisely how my creation would carry out such an interview.

“Ah, yes, of course… Do you bring word from Master Edmond, Mr Collins?”

“No, Mr Roffe, although I am acquainted with the young gentleman. I came to ask you about him, sir.”

“Me? Well… yes, of course… delighted to be of help, Mr Collins, and, through you, of course, of help to Mr Dickens, if Mr Dickens is desirous of my help.”

“I am sure he would be, Mr Roffe, but it is I who am interested in the present whereabouts of Mr Dickenson. Could you give me his address, sir?”

The old man’s face fell. “Alas, I cannot, Mr Collins.”

“It is confidential?”

“No, no, nothing of the sort. Young Master Edmond has always been as open and transparent as a… a… well, a summer shower, sir, if you do not mind me trespassing in Mr Dickens’s literary realm with the simile. Master Edmond would not mind my passing on to you his current address.”

I licked the carefully sharpened tip of the pencil and waited.

“But, alas,” said old Mr Roffe, “I cannot. I do not know where Master Edmond is living at present. He used to keep a suite of rooms here in London—a short walk only from Gray’s Inn Square here, to be precise—but I know he gave those up during the past year. I have no idea where Master Edmond resides now.”

“With his guardian, perhaps?” I prompted. Sergeant Cuff would never be stopped by an old man’s faulty memory.

“His guardian?” repeated Roffe. The old gentleman seemed slightly startled. “Well, that is… could be, I mean… might be… a possibility.”

I had searched my own memory and notes of my discussion with young Dickenson eighteen months earlier in his sick-room at the Charing Cross Hotel before beginning this investigation. “That would be a Mr Watson in Northamptonshire, Mr Roffe? A onetime liberal M.P., I believe?”

“Well, yes,” said Roffe, obviously impressed with my knowledge. “But, alas, no! Dear Mr Roland Everett Watson passed away some fourteen years ago. Young Master Edmond moved from place to place after that at the whim of the Court’s appointments of guardianship… you understand… an aunt in Kent, a travelling uncle with a town home in London—Mr Spicehead was in India most of the time Master Edmond was in his titular care… his grandmother’s failing cousin for a year or so after that. Edmond was raised mostly by servants, you understand.”

I waited as patiently as I could given the painfully impatient promptings of my rheumatical gout.

“And then, when Master Edmond turned eighteen years of age,” continued old Roffe, “I was appointed his guardian, although of course it was a purely financial formality. Master Edmond had long since taken rooms in the City by then and because the stipulations of the will were very generous and elastic, Master Edmond, from a very young age, could… and did… gain access to his funds almost without adult supervision.… But since I had administered those funds for the years before that… I handled the legal work of Master Edmond’s grandfather, long ago, you see, and his late parents’ will stipulated that I should keep the books for the inheritance and…”

“How did Mr Dickenson’s parents die?” I asked. It was not so much of an interruption as it appears here on the page, since Mr Roffe had paused to wheeze for breath.

“Die? Why, in a railway accident, of course!” he said when he could.

Ahah! I heard Sergeant Cuff cry in my ear. Dickenson comes to Charles Dickens’s attention in a serious railway accident, and the boy’s own parents died in a similar circumstance. Surely the odds of such a coincidence must have been remote. But what did it mean?

“Where was that accident?” I asked, making careful notes in my little book. “Not at Staplehurst, I trust?”

“Staplehurst! Good heavens, no! That was where young Master Edmond himself sustained injuries and was saved by your very own employer, Mr Charles Dickens!”

“Charles Dickens is not my…” I began but stopped. It did not matter if this old fool laboured under the delusion that I worked for Dickens. It might even loosen his tongue, although that tongue certainly seemed loose enough as it was.

“Back to the issue of guardianship,” I said, lifting my little notebook. “You are Edmond Dickenson’s current guardian and financial advisor?”

“Oh, my, no,” said Roffe. “Besides the fact that the role of guardian passed from me almost a year ago to another more suited to the task, Master Dickenson came into his majority this very year. His twenty-first birthday came on September the fourteenth. I had Smalley send him our cordial congratulations every year. Every year but this one.”

“And why no note this year, Mr Roffe?”

“Neither Smalley nor I had any idea where to contact him, Mr Collins.” The old man looked woeful at this last revelation. I realised with a strangely sad certainty that young Dickenson was almost certainly this old man’s only client—the only client of this dedicated husband to the law who worked in this tiny room from the time the lamps were lit before sunrise until long after that unseen sun had set.

“Could you tell me who Mr Dickenson’s final guardian was… until he came of age two months ago?” I asked.

Mr Roffe actually laughed. “You’re jesting with me, Mr Collins.”

I gave him Sergeant Cuff’s flintiest stare. “I assure you that I am not, Mr Roffe.”

Confusion passed across the old man’s features like cloud shadows across an eroded field in winter. “But surely you must be, Mr Collins. If you come on the behalf of Mr Charles Dickens, as you say you do, then you surely must know that—upon the request of Master Edmond himself—legal guardianship and all control of Master Edmond’s financial affairs passed from me to Mr Charles Dickens in early January of the present year. It is, I assumed, why you are here and why I could speak so freely of a former client’s… Mr Collins, why are you here?”

I HARDLY NOTICED the traffic or streets I was passing as I walked towards Dorset Square and home. Nor did I notice the squat, stolid presence that had fallen into step alongside me until he spoke. “Just what exactly do you think you are doing, Mr Collins?”

It was Field, of course—the accursed inspector! — with his face looking redder than ever, whether from the cold wind or from advancing age and drink, I neither knew nor cared. He had a small bundle tucked under his left arm, but because of the wind, his left hand still had a firm grip on the brim of his silk top hat.

I stopped amidst the flow of other men holding fixedly to their hats, but Inspector Field released his hat brim and gripped my arm to move me along as if I were one of the countless tramps he’d found on his night-watch.

“What business is it of yours?” I demanded. My mind was still spinning from the revelation in the old barrister’s office.

“Drood is my business,” growled the inspector. “And he should be yours. What is the import of your seeing Dickens two days in a row and then running back to London to speak to an octogenarian lawyer?”

I wanted to blurt it all out—Charles Dickens insinuated himself into the position of becoming Edmond Dickenson’s legal guardian before he murdered the boy! He had to murder him before September because… — but managed to remain silent and glowering at this real detective. Both of us had death-grips on our hats as the winter wind howled up the Thames at us.

None of this made real sense to me. My certainty—whether from laudanum or not—had been that Dickens had murdered young Dickenson for the sheer sake of the experience of murder, not for any pecuniary motive. Had Dickens been hurting for funds? He had earned almost five thousand pounds during his spring reading tour and certainly had received a healthy advance against sales for the special Charles Dickens Edition for which he was currently finishing his forewords.

But if he had not murdered young Dickenson for money, why become the boy’s guardian and draw suspicion to himself? It went against Dickens’s own lecture in the graveyard at Rochester Cathedral, which I now understood to have been a form of bragging after the fact, a lecture about murdering almost at random, of one’s never falling under suspicion because one would have had no motive.

“Well?” demanded Inspector Field.

“Well what, Inspector?” I snapped back. The beneficial effects of the morning’s laudanum had long since worn off, and the rheumatical gout was hurting my every joint and sinew. My eyes were watering from both the rising pain and rising cold wind. I was in no mood for criticism, but most especially not from some mere… retired policeman.

“What are you playing at, Mr Collins? Why did you send my boy off to a warm bed and overpriced breakfast this morning in the wee hours? What were you and Dickens and the man named Dradles doing in the crypts at Rochester Cathedral yesterday?”

I decided to let Sergeant Cuff answer. One old detective refusing another. “We all have our little secrets, Inspector. Even those of us under twenty-four-hour watch.”

Field’s already reddened face grew even more crimson, turning into an ancient vellum map of tiny burst veins. “Bugger your ‘little secrets,’ Mr Collins. There’s no d— ned time for them!”

I stopped in the middle of the pavement. I would not, under any circumstances, allow myself to be spoken to this way. Our working relationship was at an end. I clenched my hand on my stick to allay its shaking and had opened my mouth to say this, when suddenly the inspector thrust an unsealed envelope at me. “Read it,” he said gruffly.

“I don’t care to…” I began.

“Read it, Mr Collins.” It was more growled command than gentleman’s request. It left absolutely no room for debate.

I removed the single sheet of thick paper from the envelope. The handwriting was bold, almost as if it had been produced with a brush rather than a pen, and the letters were more printed than written. It read, in its entirety—

MY DEAR INSPECTOR—

TO THIS POINT, WE HAVE GAINED AND SACRIFICED ONLY PAWNS IN OUR ENJOYABLE LONG GAME. NOW BEGINS THE END GAME. PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THE IMMINENT LOSS OF MUCH MORE IMPORTANT AND PRECIOUS PIECES.

YOUR FAITHFUL OPPONENT, D

“What on earth can it mean?” I asked.

“It means precisely what it says,” Inspector Field said through gritted teeth.

“And you interpret the signature ‘D’ as ‘Drood’?” I said.

“It can be no one else,” hissed the inspector.

“It could stand for ‘Dickens,’ ” I said lightly, even as I thought, Or for “Dickenson” or “Dradles.”

“It stands for Drood,” the older man said.

“How can one be sure? Has the phantom ever written you a direct note in this fashion?”

“Never,” said Inspector Field.

“Then it could be from anyone or…”

The inspector had been carrying a rolled-up canvas-and-leather bundle, rather like a countryman’s portmanteau, under his left arm, and now he unrolled it and removed what looked to be a torn and befouled dark cloth. He handed the cloth to me as he said, “The note came wrapped in this.”

Holding the strips of cloth gingerly—the rags were not only begrimed, I realised, but absolutely soaked through with what appeared to be newly dried blood, and the already ragged material had been serrated into strips as with a razor—I began to ask him what the importance of a few foul rags might be, but stopped myself.

I suddenly recognised the bloody cloth.

The last time I had seen these rags, more than twelve hours earlier, they had been on the back of the boy named Gooseberry.