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 e
mbarked 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was May and we were in Dickens’s alpine chalet. It was a pleasant place to be.
After a wet, cold, slow-to-waken spring, late May had suddenly erupted in sunlight, flowers, blossoms, green lawns, warm days, long evenings, soft scents, and gentle nights perfect for sleeping. My rheumatical gout had improved to the point that I was using the least laudanum in two years. I had even considered discontinuing my Thursday-night trips into King Lazaree’s world.
It was a beautiful day and I was on the upper level of the chalet enjoying the breeze through open windows and telling the partial story of my book to Charles Dickens.
I wrote “telling” advisedly because although I had forty pages of my written outline and synopsis on my lap, Dickens could not read my handwriting. That has always been a problem with my manuscripts. I have been told that printers scream aloud and threaten to resign when confronted with the manuscripts of my novels—especially the first half of the book, where I admit that I have a tendency to rush, to scratch out, to write in all available margins and open spaces, and to substitute until the cramped words and letters become a blur of ink and a riot of lines, arrows, indicating marks, and violent scratches. The laudanum, I admit, does not increase the legibility.