Drood

CHAPTER TWENTY

Iwent to stay at my mother’s home near Tunbridge Wells for most of December of 1866. I decided to remain there with her until I celebrated my forty-third birthday on 8 January. It is fine to spend time with one’s mistresses, but—please trust me on this fact, since almost all men feel this way but few are courageous or honest enough to admit it—at very difficult times or on one’s birthday, there is no place more welcome and comforting than at one’s mother’s side.

I recognise that I have said little to you about my mother in this document, Dear Reader, and I must confess to you that this was a deliberate omission. In this winter of 1866–67 and through most of the coming year, my beloved mother was quite well—indeed, most of her contemporaries and most of mine found her more active, energetic, and engaged with the world than many women of half her age—but as my story must soon relate, her health was to deteriorate quickly before the end of 1867, and she would greet the end in March of 1868, my own annus horribilus. It is still difficult for me to think about that time, much less write about it. The death of one’s mother must be the single most terrible day in the life of any man.

But, as I mentioned, her health was still good this winter of 1866–67, so I can write about this period with something less than full pain.

As I have also previously mentioned, my mother’s Christian name was Harriet and she had long been a favourite among my father’s circles of famous painters, poets, and up-and-coming artists. After my father’s death in February of 1847, my mother had truly come into her own as one of the preeminent hostesses among the higher circles of artistic and poetic society in London. Indeed, our home at Hanover Terrace (looking out at Regents Park) during the years my mother was hostess there is acknowledged as one of the centres of what some are now calling the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

At the time of my extended visit with her beginning in December of 1866, Mother had realised her long ambition of moving to the countryside and was dividing her time among various cottages she leased in Kent: her Bentham Hill Cottage near Tunbridge Wells, Elm Lodge in the town itself, and her most recent cottage at Prospect Hill, Southborough. I went down to Tunbridge Wells to spend some weeks with her, returning to London each Thursday in order to keep my late-night appointment with King Lazaree and my pipe. Then I would take the train back to Tunbridge Wells on Friday evening, in time to play a game of cribbage with Mother and her friends.

Caroline was not happy with my decision to be gone during all of what some were now calling “the holiday season,” but I reminded her that we never celebrated Christmas to any extent anyway—a man and his mistress obviously were not invited to his married male friends’ homes at any time of the year, but at Christmas-time these male friends accepted even fewer invitations to our home, so it was always the social low-point of our year—but, showing a woman’s resistance to simple reason, Caroline remained vexed that I would be gone all during December and into January. Martha R—, on the other hand, accepting with perfectly good grace my explanation that I wished to get away from London to spend a month and more with my mother, temporarily gave up the room rented to “Mrs Dawson” and returned to Yarmouth and Winterton and her own family.

More and more, I was finding life with Caroline G— tiresome and complicated and my time with Martha R— simple and satisfying.

But my time with Mother that Christmas was the most satisfying of all.

Mother’s cook, who travelled with her everywhere, knew all of my favourite foods from childhood, and often Mother would come into my room in the morning or evening when the tray was delivered and I would enjoy my repast in bed while we carried on our conversations.

When I had fled London I was filled with a terrible sense of guilt and foreboding concerning the presumed death of the boy named Gooseberry, but after a few days at Mother’s cottage, that dark cloud had moved away. What had the child’s unusual real name been? Guy Septimus Cecil. Well, what nonsense to think that young Guy Septimus Cecil had actually been murdered by the dark forces of Undertown as represented by the foreign sorcerer Drood!

This was an elaborate game, I reminded myself, with Charles Dickens playing one game on his side, the elderly Inspector Field playing his corresponding but not identical game on the other side, and poor William Wilkie Collins caught in the middle.

Gooseberry murdered, indeed! The Inspector shows me a few tattered cloths sprinkled with dried blood—dog’s blood for all I knew, or the vital fluid from one of the thousands of feral cats that roamed the slums from whence Gooseberry sprang—and now I was expected to fly all to pieces and to do Inspector Field’s bidding even more assiduously than I had to date.

Drood had moved beyond being a phantasm and had become more of a shuttlecock in this insane game of badminton between a disturbed author with an obsession for play-acting and an evil old gnome of an ex-policeman with too many secret motives to count.

Well, let them play their game without me for a while. The hospitality of Tunbridge Wells and my mother’s cottage served me well for December and early January. Along with recovering some of my health—my rheumatical gout was strangely better there in Kent, although I continued administering doses of the laudanum, albeit in lower quantities—my sleep came easier, my dreams grew less clouded, and I began to think more earnestly about the elegant plot and fascinating characters of The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent). Although the serious research would have to wait until I returned full-time to London and the library at my club, I could—and did—jot down preliminary notes and a rough outline, often writing from my bed.

Occasionally I thought of my duties as detective in discerning whether young Edmond Dickenson had been murdered by Charles Dickens, but my interview with Dickenson’s solicitor had been singularly unenlightening—except for the shock of learning that Charles Dickens himself had been appointed the youth’s guardian-executor in the last months of the young man’s need for such care—and even my keen novelist’s mind could find no next step to take in the investigation. I decided that when I returned to London life, I should discreetly ask around my club if anyone had heard of the comings and goings of a certain squire named Dickenson, but other than that, I could see no obvious direction to take in the investigation.

By the second week of December, the only thing that was disturbing my peace of mind was the lack of an invitation to Gad’s Hill Place for Christmas.

I was not sure that I would have accepted the invitation that year (there had been subtle but obvious tensions between the Inimitable and myself in the preceding months, my suspicion of the author’s being a murderer among them), but I certainly expected to be invited. After all, Dickens had more or less said the last time I saw him that I would be receiving the usual invitation to be a houseguest.

But no invitation arrived at my mother’s cottage. Each Thursday afternoon or Friday mid-day, before or after my visit to King Lazaree’s den, I would drop in on Caroline to pick up my mail and to make sure that she and Carrie had enough money to meet all accounts, but still there arrived no invitation from Dickens. Then, on the sixteenth of December, my younger brother, Charles, came down to Southborough to spend the day and brought with him an envelope addressed to me in Georgina’s distinctive hand.

“Has Dickens said anything to you about Christmas?” I asked my brother as I searched for my knife to open the invitation.

“He has said nothing to me,” Charley said sourly. I could tell that his ulcers—or what I then thought were his ulcers—were hurting him. My talented brother was listless and downcast. “Dickens told Katey that there would be the usual houseful of guests.… I know the Chappells are coming down to Gad’s Hill for a few days, and Percy Fitzgerald for the New Year.”

“Hmm, the Chappells,” I said while unfolding the letter. These were Dickens’s new business partners in the reading tours and, I thought, interminable boors. I decided that I would definitely not stay at Gad’s Hill for the full week that I usually tarried if the Chappells were going to be there for any extended length of time.

Imagine my surprise when I read the letter, which I reproduce here in its entirety—

My Dear Wilkie—

This is a pretty state of things! — That I should be in Christmas Labour while you are cruising about the world, a compound of Hayward and Captain Cook! But I am so undoubtedly one of the sons of Toil—and fathers of children—that I expect to be presently presented with a smock frock, a pair of leather breeches, and a pewter watch, for having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves.

But as some of us must labour while others adventure onward and outward, we still extend to you the heartiest of Christmas greetings—should these greetings catch up to you during your farflung peregrinations—and wish you the most prosperous of new years.

Yr. Most Obedient Servant and Former Fellow Traveller,

Chls. Dickens

I fairly dropped the letter in my amazement. Thrusting it at Charley, who read it with a quick glance, I spluttered, “What does this mean? Does Dickens somehow believe I have gone sailing somewhere?”

“You were in Rome in the autumn,” said my brother. “Perhaps Dickens believes you are still there.”

“I returned quickly to try to save the doomed production of The Frozen Deep at the Olympic Theatre,” I said with some asperity. “I saw Dickens after I got back. There is no possibility that he does not know I am in England.”

“He may believe you returned to Rome or Paris,” said Charley. “For there was some speculation about that in the clubs, after you had told acquaintances that you had some business to settle in Paris. Or perhaps Dickens is preoccupied, thinking mostly of his children. Katey, as you know, is despondent much of the time. Mamie has fallen out of favour in London society. And his youngest son has been a great disappointment. Dickens recently told Katey that he had decided that Plorn should be sent to Australia to become a farmer.”

“What the deuce does that have to do with my invitation to Christmas?” I cried.

Charley only shook his head. It was obvious that I had deliberately been left off Dickens’s Christmas guest-list this year.

“Wait here,” I said to my brother, who needed to catch the early train back to London. I went into Mother’s sewing room, found her stationery with the address of the Tunbridge Wells cottage on it, and began a quick missive—

My Dear Charles:

I am neither touring the world like Captain Cook nor visiting Rome or Paris. As you must already know, I am visiting my mother near Tunbridge Wells and I would be available for…

I stopped, crumpled the sheet, threw it in the fire, and found a blank sheet of stationery in my mother’s secretary.

My Dear Dickens,

I return your Christmas greetings—in my absence this Holiday, please give the ladies a bow from me, and the children sweets in my name—and regret that I shall not be able to see you until sometime in the New Year. Rather than cruising the world like Captain Cook or touring Scotland and Ireland like an itinerant juggler, I am—as you may know—deeply involved in an investigation into a Missing Person or Persons that may have the most profound consequences. I look forward to surprising you with the imminent results of this investigation.

All of my love and Christmas cheer to Georgina, Mamie, Katey, Plorn, the Family, and your Christmas guests.

Yr. Most Obedient Detective,

Wm. Wilkie Collins

I sealed and addressed the note and—when giving it to Charley, who was pulling on his travelling cloak—said with the utmost seriousness, “This must be delivered into Charles Dickens’s hands and his alone.”

CHRISTMAS AND MY BIRTHDAY were most happy occasions for me in Mother’s presence—and in the snug warmth of the Tunbridge Wells cottage, with its constant cooking smells and undemanding female company—but because both of those holidays fell on a Tuesday, I did not see Caroline until the Thursday of each of those weeks. (It was on Thursday the tenth of January that I returned to London with all of my luggage, work, and research materials, but since that was my night for King Lazaree and my pipe, I did not actually move back to the house on Dorset Square until the afternoon of Friday, 11 January.)

Caroline was not pleased with me and found innumerable small ways to show me her displeasure, but in my time away at Tunbridge Wells I had learned how to place less stock in Mrs G—’s pleasure or displeasure.

During the weeks that followed in early 1867, I spent more and more of my time at my club, using the Athenaeum’s wonderful library as my primary research centre, taking my meals there, frequently sleeping there, and generally spending less and less time at my Melcombe Place address, where Caroline and Carrie still resided full-time. (Martha R— remained in Yarmouth during this period.)

Since my business often brought me to the offices of All the Year Round (where, indeed, I still had an office of my own, albeit shared with other staff members and regular contributors from time to time), I heard much from Wills and others about Dickens’s new tour. Thick envelopes of galley proofs and other magazine materials were constantly being mailed out, chasing Dickens from Leicester to Manchester to Glasgow to Leeds to Dublin to Preston. Amazingly, Dickens managed to get back to London at least once a week to give a reading at St James’s Hall in Piccadilly and to come to the offices to deliver his own manuscripts, to check up on the books, and to work at editing the writing of others. He rarely got back to Gad’s Hill on these flying visits but would sleep in his rooms above the office here or, frequently, at his private address in Slough (near Ellen Ternan).

I did not happen to cross paths with Dickens during this time.

Various stories of woe, hardship, and Dickens’s amazing courage (or good luck) filtered back to the office and were repeated to me by Wills or Percy Fitzgerald or others.

It seemed that Dickens was still recovering from the discovery— this had been in the autumn, while I was briefly in Rome—that his personal servant and valet of the past twenty-four years, a dour and dyspeptic (I thought) but discreet shade of a man named John Thompson, had been regularly stealing from his master. Eight sovereigns had disappeared from these very offices at Wellington Street North, and when the theft was discovered, the sovereigns had quickly reappeared. But too late for Thompson, whose years of petty thefts from his employer had now come to light. Dickens sacked the man, of course, but could not bear to give the thief a “bad recommendation.” He sent Thompson off to future employment with a vague but not clearly negative letter. According to Percy Fitzgerald, Dickens had been almost distraught at this betrayal, although all the Inimitable had said to Percy about his emotions was “I have had to walk more than usual before I could walk myself into composure again.”

That composure seemed more and more rare if recent reports from Dolby to Wills were to be believed. Dickens was suffering more than ever from “nervous exhaustion,” brought on, no doubt, by the rail travel—his reaction to the Staplehurst accident seemed to grow more, rather than less, pronounced as the months went by—and early in the tour, on only his second night in Liverpool, Dickens became so faint by the end of the first part of his performance that he had to be physically helped to a sofa backstage, where he lay prostrate until it was time for him to put on a fresh boutonnière and go out for the final part of the strenuous reading.

During his reading in Wolverhampton (the first reports had this incident occurring in Birmingham proper rather than its smaller neighbour, so I had first pictured the old theatre there as I had seen it the night the illusion of Drood had threatened me), a wire holding one of the reflectors above Dickens’s head began to burn red-hot. The heavy bulb of this reflector projected out over the stalls and was suspended by a single, strong copper wire, but a new gas man only recently having joined the tour had mistakenly placed an open gas-jet beneath this supporting wire.

Dolby had seen the wire turning first red and then white and, shifting from foot to foot in his anxiety, had stage-whispered out to the reading Dickens, “How long shall you be?” while gesturing wildly at the heated wire. Dickens must have appreciated the danger: when the wire burned through, the heavy reflector would come crashing down to the stage, but not before careering through the maroon-cloth stalls and screens erected around the Inimitable. The result would be instant conflagration. The flammable screens themselves ran almost to the ancient cloth curtains above. Once the overheated wire parted, there was little doubt that the stage—and almost certainly the theatre—would go up in flames within minutes, if not seconds.

Dickens, still reading without missing a word or gesture, calmly showed Dolby two fingers behind his back.

The distraught stage manager did not know what this meant. Was the Chief telling him that he would be finished in two minutes or that the wire would be parting in two seconds? Dolby and Barton, the gas man, could do nothing but shuttle back and forth offstage, bringing sand and buckets of water and preparing for the worst.

Dickens, it turned out, had seen the wire heating in the middle of his reading and had coolly calculated how long it would take for the copper to burn through. Working from those quick mental calculations, the Inimitable had improvised instant alterations to the rest of his reading—editing and conflating as he went—and reached the end only seconds before the wire would have melted and parted. (Dickens had figured when Dolby signalled him that he had two minutes left before the reflector would have come crashing down.) The curtain closed, Barton ran out and turned off the misplaced flame, and Dolby—according to his later testimony to Wills—came close to fainting as Dickens patted him on his wide back, whispered, “There was never any real danger,” and calmly went out to take his curtain call.

All these breathless reports from Dickens’s tour were of little interest to me. None mentioned Drood, and I had my own literary work to do (more important, in my humble opinion, than reading one’s old work to audiences of bumpkins in the provinces).

As I’ve mentioned, I settled into doing my preliminary reading and researching at my club, the Athenaeum. The club was most helpful—moving my favourite wing chair to a place by the window where the weak winter and spring light would be at its best, providing a small table for my materials, and appointing several of the servants to seek out the volumes I needed from the club’s expansive libraries. I also appropriated Athenaeum stationery for my notes and kept these in a series of large white letter envelopes.

My first job was to gather information, and here my years as a journalist served me well (even as that profession had equally served Dickens, although I might remind you, Dear Reader, that I had been a true journalist and Dickens had written primarily as a mere court reporter).

For weeks I copied out pertinent entries on India, on various Hindoo cults, and on gems from Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eighth edition, copyright 1855. I also found a new book by a certain C. W. King, The Natural History of Gems, published in 1865, very helpful. For my specific India backgrounds that I thought might open The Serpent’s Eye (or possibly The Eye of the Serpent), I consulted J. Talboys Wheeler’s newly published The History of India from the Earliest Ages and both 1832 volumes of Theodore Hook’s The Life of General Sir David Baird. The diligent servants at the club also sought out and provided relevant articles in recent issues of Notes and Queries.

And thus the early outlines of my magnum opus began to take shape.

I had known for some time that the plot would revolve around the mysterious disappearance, in England, of a beautiful but cursed diamond brought from India—a diamond sacred to some Hindoo thuggee sort of cult—and that the mystery would unfold in a series of accounts from various viewpoints (rather as Dickens had done in Bleak House, but, more pertinently, as I had done to better effect in The Woman in White). Because of my preoccupation—“distraction” might be the better word—with the whole Drood issue at this time, the story would hinge upon such themes as Eastern mysticism, mesmerism, the power of mesmeric suggestion, and opium addiction. The solution to the theft (as I knew from an early point in my envisioning of the tale) would be so shocking, so unexpected, so clever, and so unprecedented in the nascent field of detection fiction that it would astonish all English and American readers, including such supposed practitioners of such sensationalist serial authorship as Charles Dickens himself.

As is true of all writers of Dickens’s and my level of accomplishment, I was never free to pursue just one writing project. (Dickens, while he prepared for and then travelled on tour, had written his usual Christmas novella, was editing All the Year Round, was completing elaborate forewords for the special edition of his works, and was generating ideas for novels even while writing actual stories such as his strange “George Silverman’s Explanations,” kindled, he told me later, by Dolby’s and his coming across the ruins of Hoghton Towers between Preston and Blackburn. That ruined old manse happened to crystallise all the disparate, floating fragments of ideas Dickens had been playing with for some time, but rather than support a novel—which he needed in order to offer something for serialisation in All the Year Round—it provoked this strange story of a neglected childhood so very similar to Dickens’s own. [Or at least to what he thought of as his childhood of neglect and want.]

So it was with my own multiple and often overlapping literary and dramatic efforts that spring of 1867. My rewritten The Frozen Deep had failed the previous autumn at the Olympic Theatre, this despite the fact that my revised version was, I believe, much improved, after I had rewritten the character and passions of Richard Wardour, the character Dickens had—I was about to write “played” but “occupied” might be a more precise word—making the man both more adult and believable, freeing the character from Dickens’s pathos and overly sentimental gestures.) But my hopes for a theatrical breakthrough remained high, and that spring—when my health and research commitments allowed—I travelled back and forth to Paris to consult with François-Joseph Régnier (whom I’d met through Dickens more than a decade earlier) of the Comédie-Française, who was eager to adapt The Woman in White to the stage there. (It was already the rage in Berlin.)

My own goal was to sell Régnier and the French theatre-goers (and thence English theatre-goers) on an adaptation of Armadale, which I was certain would be warmly and enthusiastically received, despite what Dickens had considered its controversial aspects.

Caroline, who loved Paris beyond her limited means of expressing such emotion, all but begged to go with me, but I was firm: it was a business trip and there would be no time for shopping, explorations, or any social engagements outside the strict regimen of theatre business.

That month I wrote to Mother from my hotel in Paris—“I have breakfasted this morning on eggs and black butter, and pig’s feet à la Sainte Mènéhould! Digestion perfect. St Mènéhould lived to extreme old age on nothing but pig’s trotters.”

Régnier and I attended a new opera at which the theatre was packed, the intensity was astounding, and the experience was electrifying. Also electrifying were those “very special little periwinkles”—as Dickens and I used to call the attractive young actresses and demimondaines so available in a culture where the night life was as rich and varied as the food—and with a bit of guidance from Régnier and his friends, I blush to say that I did not have to spend an evening or night alone (or even with the same periwinkle) the whole time I was in Paris. Before returning to London I remembered to pick up a handpainted card of the city for Martha—she loved such trifles—and a lovely chiffon robe for Carrie. I also purchased some spices and sauces for Caroline’s kitchen.

My second night back at Melcombe Place after my return from Paris, I may have taken too much (or too little) laudanum, for I found it difficult to sleep. I was tempted to go to my study to work, but the inevitable confrontation with the Other Wilkie (even though he had shown no recent signs of violence in his attempts to seize my papers or pens) dissuaded me. Instead, I was standing at the window of my bedroom (Caroline had found reasons to sleep in her own room) when I saw a familiar shadow near the lamp post at the end of the street near the square.

I immediately pulled on a long wool coat over my dressing gown—it was a bitter night—and hurried to the corner.

The boy extracted himself from the shadows and came towards me in the dark without so much as a summoning gesture on my part.

“Gooseberry?” I said. It pleased me that my speculations on Inspector Field’s contrivances had proved correct.

“No, sir,” said the boy.

As he came into the light, I saw my error. This lad was shorter, younger, a bit less ragged, and his eyes—although too small and too close together in his narrow face for good looks, even for someone poor—were not the bulging, wandering, nickname-earning disasters that Gooseberry’s had been.

“You’re from the Inspector?” I said gruffly.

“Yes, sir.”

I sighed and rubbed my cheeks above my beard. “Can you remember a message well enough to deliver it verbally, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Tell the Inspector that Mr Collins wishes to meet him tomorrow at noon—no, make that two PM—at Waterloo Bridge. Can you remember that? Two PM, Waterloo Bridge.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Deliver the message tonight. Off with you, then.”

As the boy ran away, the loose sole of one ill-fitting boot slapping against the cobblestones, I realised that I had not thought to—had not wished to—ask his name.

THE INSPECTOR WALKED briskly to the middle of Waterloo Bridge at precisely two in the afternoon. It was a raw, cold, windy day and neither one of us wanted to conduct the conversation out in the elements.

“I’ve not had time for my luncheon,” rasped Inspector Field. “I know an inn nearby with excellent roast beef served all through the afternoon. Will you join me, Mr Collins?”

“An excellent idea, Inspector,” I said. I had partaken of brunch at my club two hours earlier, but I was still quite hungry.

Sitting across the table from the inspector in our booth, staring at him in the wan light as he sipped eagerly from his first mug of ale, I found him looking older and rougher than I remembered from our last visit. His eyes seemed weary. His dress was a trifle in disarray. His cheeks showed more tiny rosettes of burst veins, and there was a line of grey stubble along the wild profusion of his whiskers that suggested a man of lesser circumstances or less prominence than a former Chief of the Scotland Yard Bureau of Detectives.

“Is there any news?” I asked when our food had come and after an interval of intense attention to our beef and gravy and vegetables.

“News?” said the inspector, taking a bite from his bread and a sip from the wine we had ordered to follow the ale. “What news do you await, Mr Collins?”

“Why, of the boy called Gooseberry, of course. Has he got back in touch with you?”

Inspector Field only stared at me, and his grey eyes were cold within their nest of wrinkles. Finally he said softly, “We shall not hear again from or of our young friend Gooseberry. His flayed body is in the Thames or… worse.”

I paused in my dining. “You seem very sure of this, Inspector.”

“I am, Mr Collins.”

I sighed—not believing for a second this fantasy of young Master Guy Septimus Cecil being murdered—and applied myself to the roast beef and vegetables.

Inspector Field seemed to sense my silent disbelief. Setting down his fork and still sipping his wine, he said in a hoarse whisper, “Mr Collins, you remember the connection I told you about concerning the relationship between our subterranean Egyptian friend Drood and the late Lord Lucan?”

“Of course, Inspector. You said that Lord Lucan was the absentee English father of the Mohammadan boy who later became our Drood.”

Inspector Field held one fat finger up to his lips. “Not quite so loud, Mr Collins. Our ‘subterranean friend,’ as I so affectionately call him, has ears everywhere. Do you recall the manner of Forsyte’s—that is, Lord Lucan’s—murder?”

I admit that I shuddered. “How could I forget? Chest torn open. Heart missing…”

The inspector nodded, motioning me to quiet again. “In those days, Mr Collins—1846—even the new Chief of Detectives could, and regularly did, accept positions as ‘confidential agent’ for people of importance. Such was my situation late in 1845 and throughout much of 1846. I spent much time at Lord Lucan’s Wiseton estate in Hertfordshire.”

I struggled to understand. “You were called in by Lord Lucan’s family to solve the murder. But you were already attending to the case in your role as Chief of…”

Inspector Field had been watching my face and nodded. “I see that you now understand the chronology, Mr Collins. Lord Lucan—John Frederick Forsyte, father of the bastard who became the occultic shaman Drood—had hired me nine months before his murder. His need was security. Using private agents of my hire at the time, I attempted to provide it. Since the Wiseton estate already had adequate walls, fences, dogs, doors, latches, servants, and experienced gamekeepers wise to the ways of poachers and would-be trespassers, I thought the security was adequate.”

“But it was not,” I said.

“Obviously,” grunted Inspector Field. “Three of my best men were in Wiseton Hall at the time of the… atrocity. I had been there myself until nine o’clock that night, at which time my duties brought me back to London.”

“Incredible,” I said. I had no idea what point the old inspector was attempting to make.

“I did not advertise the fact that I had been working in a private, confidential capacity for Lord Lucan at the time of his murder,” whispered Inspector Field, “but detection is a small professional field, and word leaked back to both my superiors and the detectives who served under me on the Force. It was an unpleasant period for me… at a time that should have been the apex of my professional career.”

“I see,” I said, although in truth I saw nothing but a man admitting to his own incompetence.

“Not quite,” whispered the Inspector. “It was a full month after the murder of Lord Lucan, the official investigation still under way, of course—Her Majesty herself had expressed interest in the outcome—when I received a small package at my office in the Metropolitan Police Detective Bureau at Scotland Yard.”

I nodded and sliced off a large shred of beef. It was a bit chewy, but otherwise quite good.

“In the package was Lord Lucan’s heart,” rasped Inspector Field. “Treated somehow—by some lost Egyptian art—so as not to decay, but most assuredly a human heart and, according to several forensic physicians with whom I consulted, most assuredly that of John Frederick Forsyte, Lord Lucan.”

I set my knife and fork down and stared. Eventually I managed to swallow the suddenly tasteless wad of beef.

The old inspector leaned closer across the table. His breath was strong with ale and beef. “I did not tell you, Mr Collins, what arrived with Gooseberry’s bloody shirt and the note from Drood. I sought to spare your sensibilities.”

“His… eyes?” I whispered.

Inspector Field nodded and sat back in the booth.

THIS EXCHANGE KILLED both appetite and conversation, at least for me. Inspector Field lingered for coffee and dessert. I drank the last of my wine and waited, lost in my thoughts.

It was a relief when we stepped outside into the cold wind. I welcomed the fresh air. I was not certain that I had believed Inspector Field’s horror story about either Lord Lucan’s wandering heart or Gooseberry’s packaged eyes—a writer of sensationalist fiction knows another possible piece of sensationalist fiction when he hears it—but the topic had upset me and brought on a rheumatical gout headache behind my eyes.

We did not part immediately upon leaving the inn but walked back towards Waterloo Bridge together.

“Mr Collins,” said the inspector after honking into a handkerchief, “my guess is that you wanted to meet with me for some reason other than to enquire into the fate of my unlucky young associate. What is it, sir?”

I cleared my throat. “Inspector, you know that I am embarked upon a new novel that requires research of the most unusual kind.…”

“Of course,” interrupted the private policeman. “That is why I pay one of my most useful operatives—the esteemed Detective Hatchery—to spend every Thursday night in a crypt awaiting your return sometime the next morning. You assured me that your trips to King Lazaree’s opium den were for relief from pain, not research. And I must say, Mr Collins, that my paying Detective Hatchery’s hourly wage for that service, not to mention his unavailability for a full night and day in terms of my own service (for even detectives have to sleep, sir), has not been… balanced, shall we say… in terms of your promise to report on the whereabouts and activities of Mr Charles Dickens.”

I stopped and clutched my stick with both hands. “Inspector Field, you certainly cannot be suggesting that it is my fault that Dickens is on yet another reading tour in the provinces and thus is out of my effective radius of investigation!”

“I suggest nothing,” said the inspector. “But the truth of the matter is that the esteemed author returns to London for at least one day and night a week.”

“To read at Saint James’s Hall!” I said in some heat. “And occasionally to do some work at his office at Wellington Street North!”

“And to visit his mistress in Slough,” Inspector Field said drily, “although my operatives tell me that he is now looking for another house for Miss Ternan—and possibly her mother—in the suburb of Peckham.”

“This has nothing to do with me,” I said coldly. “I am neither a gossip nor keeper of my fellow gentleman’s affairs.” I regretted that last choice of word as soon as it was out of my mouth. Pedestrians were beginning to stare at us as they passed, so I began walking again and Inspector Field briskly joined me.

“Our arrangement was for you to see Dickens as frequently as possible, Mr Collins, and thus to accumulate—and to convey to us—any and all information you received on the murderer who calls himself Drood.”

“And so I have done, Inspector.”

“And so you have done, Mr Collins… to a very meagre degree. You did not even spend Christmas with Mr Dickens, although he was at home in Gad’s Hill for the better part of two weeks and came into the city repeatedly.”

“I was not invited,” I said. I meant my tone to be chilly, but it emerged as almost plaintive.

“Which you cannot help,” said Inspector Field in a tone of sympathy that made me want to break my cane over the crown of his balding old head. “But you also have not availed yourself of obvious opportunities to join Mr Dickens either on his tour or during his London sojourns. It may interest you to know, sir, that Dickens continues to elude my operatives at least once every two weeks and disappear into slum basements and old church crypts, not to reappear until he takes the train to Gad’s Hill the next day.”

“You need better operatives, Inspector,” I said.

The old man chuckled at this and blew his prodigious nose again. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps. But in the meantime, I wish not to chastise you, Mr Collins, nor to complain of an… imbalance… in the performance of our contractual agreements, but merely to remind you that our common interests lie in running this monster Drood to ground—or to above ground—before more innocents have to die by the creature’s hand.”

We had reached the bridge. I stopped at the railing and looked at the line of wharves, hovels, derricks, and low-masted rivercraft running in both directions. Rain squalls whipped the surface of the Thames to rows of white crowns.

The inspector pulled the plush collar of his out-of-date jacket up over the back of his neck. “Now please tell me the reason for this meeting, Mr Collins, and I will do my utmost to accede to your requests for further… ah… research assistance.”

“I admit that my purpose was not merely to pursue research,” I said, “but to offer you a suggestion that may be of inestimable assistance in your efforts to find this Drood.”

“Really?” said Inspector Field, the bushy eyebrows rising under the brim of his top hat. “Please go on, Mr Collins.”

“In the novel I have almost finished outlining,” I said, “there is a section that shall require a detective—one of great intelligence and experience, I might add—who knows all the techniques employed to track down a missing person.”

“Yes? These are common procedures in both my former and current aspects of police work, Mr Collins, and I will be pleased to offer professional insights.”

“But I did not wish this assistance to benefit me alone,” I said, looking at the grey waves rather than at the grey inspector. “It occurred to me that a London man who has gone missing might be your missing link in tracing the chain of contacts and circumstances back to Dickens and Drood’s contacts since the Staplehurst accident… if such contact actually exists.”

“Really? Who might this missing man be, Mr Collins?”

“Edmond Dickenson.”

The old man scratched his cheeks, tugged at his side-whiskers, and, inevitably, set that plump forefinger alongside his ear as if awaiting further information from it. Finally he said, “That would be the young gentleman whom Mr Dickens helped save at Staplehurst. And the same young man whom you reported as having sleepwalked at Gad’s Hill Place a year ago this past Christmas.”

“Exactly the same man,” I said.

“How has he disappeared?”

“That is precisely what I would like to know,” I said. “And it might be precisely what you need to know in order to close the connection to Drood.” I handed him a folder of notes I had taken on my conversation with the solicitor Mr Matthew B. Roffe of Gray’s Inn Square, the address of Dickenson’s last known London dwelling place, and the approximate date when the young man had ordered Mr Roffe to transfer the duties of guardian-executor, for the last few months such a role was required, to none other than Charles Dickens.

“Fascinating,” Inspector Field said at last. “May I keep these, sir?”

“You may. They are copies.”

“This may indeed be of some service to our common cause, Mr Collins, and I thank you for bringing this man—missing or not—to my attention. But why do you think that Mr Dickenson might be important in this investigation?”

I opened my gloved hands above the railing. “Is it not obvious, even to a non-detective such as myself? Young Dickenson was perhaps the only other living person who we know—through Dickens’s own testimony—was in the immediate area with Drood at the Staplehurst site. Indeed, it was Drood, according to Dickens, who led my friend to the young man, who was trapped in the wreckage and who would have died had it not been for Dickens’s—and Drood’s! — intervention. There is also, I would suggest, the inexplicable interest that Dickens took in the orphan in the months after the accident.”

Inspector Field rubbed his cheeks again. “Mr Dickens is widely known to be a public altruist.”

I smiled at this. “Of course. But his interest in young Dickenson bordered on the… shall I say… obsessive?”

“Or self-interested?” asked Field. The wind had arrived from the west, and we were both now holding our hats with our free hands.

“How do you mean, sir?”

“How much money,” asked the old man, “was under trust to whomever the guardian of Edmond Dickenson was until the young man reached his majority last year? Did your investigations, Mr Collins, happen to extend to visiting young Dickenson’s bank and having a chat with the manager?”

“Of course not!” I said, voice cold again. Such an idea was totally outside the scope of a gentleman’s behaviour. One might as well open another gentleman’s mail.

“Well, that will be easy enough to find out,” muttered Inspector Field as he tucked my papers away into his jacket. “What did you wish in return for this possible help in our search for Drood, Mr Collins?”

“Nothing in exchange,” I said. “I am neither a tradesman nor peddler. After you look into the disappearance of this man who, despite his claims to the contrary, actually may have seen Drood at Staplehurst—indeed, his having seen Drood may be the reason for his disappearance, who knows? — all I wish to hear are the details of your investigation… so as to add verisimilitude to my own writings about the investigation into a missing person, you understand.”

“I understand perfectly.” The old inspector stepped back and extended his hand. “I am delighted that we are working on the same side again, Mr Collins.”

I looked at the extended hand for several long seconds before finally shaking it. It made a difference that we were both wearing gloves.