Dan Simmons - Drood

“How would I get word to him?” I asked.

“The boy is still waiting on your street, Mr Collins. Send word through my Gooseberry, and Detective Hatchery will be there within the hour to escort you through the dangerous neighbourhoods, open the way to the staircase for you, and wait upon your return.” The infernal inspector smiled. “He will even loan you his revolver again, Mr Collins. But you should have nothing to fear from King Lazaree and his patrons. Unlike Opium Sal’s shifty clientele, Lazaree and his living mummies down there know that they are allowed to exist only upon my sufferance.”

I hesitated.

“Is there something else we can help you with in exchange for your help in finding Drood through your Mr Dickens?” asked Field. “Some problem at home, perhaps?”

I glanced askance at the old man. What would he know of my problems at home? How could he know that my daily and nightly fights with Caroline had sent me to Sal’s as surely as my need to lessen the pain from my gout?

“I’ve been married for more than thirty years, Mr Collins,” he said softly, as if having read my mind. “My speculation is that your lady is, even after all this time, demanding marriage… even as your other lady in Yarmouth is demanding to return to London to be near you.”

“D— n you, Field,” I cried, banging my fist down on the heavy, worn planks of the table. “None of this is any of your business.”

“Of course not, sir. Of course not,” said the inspector in his oiliest voice. “But such problems can be a distraction to your work as well as to our common goals. I am trying to see how I could be of help… as a friend would.”

“There’s no help for this,” I growled. “And you are no friend.”

Inspector Field nodded his understanding. “Still, sir, if you don’t mind advice from an old married man, sometimes a change of place buys a period of peace and quiet in such domestic disagreements.”

“Move, you mean? We’ve talked about it, Caroline and I.”

“I believe, Mr Collins, that you and the lady have several times walked to look at a fine home on Gloucester Place.”

I was no longer surprised or shocked to hear that Field’s men had followed us. I would not be surprised to learn that he had secreted a dwarf into the walls of our home on Melcombe Place in order to take notes on our quarrels.

“It is a fine home,” I said. “But the current resident, a Mrs Shernwold, does not wish to sell. And I’d be strapped to find the funds for it at this time anyway.”

“Both of these impediments could be eliminated, Mr Collins,” purred Inspector Field. “If we were working together again, I could all but guarantee that you and your lady and her daughter could be moved into that fine residence on Gloucester Place within a year or two, even while your Miss R— could be reinstated on Bolsover Street, if you wish, with our help in meeting her travel and other immediate expenses.”

I squinted at the old man. My head hurt. I wanted to go home to breakfast and then bed. I wanted to pull the bedcovers over my head and to sleep for a week. We had moved from blackmailing to bribery. On the whole, I believe I had been more comfortable with the blackmail.

“What do I have to do, Inspector?”

“Nothing more than we have already discussed, Mr Collins. Use your good offices with Charles Dickens to find out where Drood is and what he is up to.”

I shook my head. “Dickens is completely absorbed in his preparations for his imminent reading tour. I am sure he’s had no contact with Drood since Christmas. Besides being frightened by what he thought he saw outside his window that night, Dickens is buried now in details. You have no idea the amount of preparation such a tour involves.”

“I am sure I do not, Mr Collins,” said Inspector Field. “But I do know that your friend will begin his tour with an opening night reading in a week, on the twenty-third of March, at the Assembly Rooms in Cheltenham. Then, on the tenth of April, he will appear at St James’s Hall here in London, followed immediately by readings in Liverpool, then Manchester, then Glasgow, then Edinburgh.…”

“Do you have the entire itinerary?” I interrupted.

“Of course.”

“Then you would know how impossible it would be for me to get Charles Dickens’s attention during the tour. All authors’ public readings are exhausting for the author. A Dickens reading is exhausting for the author and for everyone around him. There is simply nothing in the world like a Charles Dickens reading, and he promises this tour to be even more intense.”

“So I have heard,” Inspector Field said softly. “Somehow, Drood is involved in this reading tour of your friend’s.”

I laughed. “How could he be? How could a man of such appearance travel with Dickens or be seen at his readings without comment?”

“Drood is a man of infinite guises,” Field said. His voice was hushed, as if Hatchery or Miss Darby or the boy Billy could be the Egyptian criminal in disguise. “I guarantee that your friend Dickens is—consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or as an instrument of Drood—carrying out that Devil’s purposes on this tour.”

“How could he…” I began and stopped, remembering Dickens’s odd insistence that he would be magnetising the entire audience during each reading. Mesmerising them. But to what dark purpose?

This was all absurd.

“Still,” I said wearily, “you know Dickens’s schedule. And you know he has only a small entourage travelling with him.”

“Mr Dolby,” said Inspector Field. “His agent Mr Wills.” Field went on to name the gas man and lighting expert and even those agents sent in advance to inspect the theatres and arrange for ticketing prices, advertising, and such. “But surely, Mr Collins, Dickens would enjoy seeing his dear friend during such an exhausting tour. I know that he plans to see Macready at the Cheltenham opening. Could you not arrange to spend a few days of travel with your famous friend, attend one or two of his readings?”

“That’s all you want of me?”

“Your help in these small things—a simple matter of observing and chatting and reporting—could be invaluable,” purred Inspector Field.

“How on earth do you plan to make ninety Gloucester Place available to us, even by next year, if Mrs Shernwold is reserving it for her missionary son and absolutely refuses to sell?” I asked.

The inspector smiled. I half-expected to see canary feathers protruding from between those liver-coloured lips. “That will be my problem, sir, although I expect no problems at all. It is a privilege to help someone aiding us in the public service of ridding London of its least notorious but most successful serial murderer.”

I sighed and nodded. If Inspector Field had extended his hand then to seal our dark deal, I’m not sure if I could have touched him. Perhaps he sensed as much, for he merely nodded—the deal was set—and looked around.

“Would you like Miss Darby and the boy to burn us some more sherry, sir? It’s a wonderful preparation for sleep.”

“No,” I said, trying to get to my feet and suddenly feeling Hatchery’s huge hand on my arm, effortlessly lifting me out of the booth. “I want to go home.”

Ichose to join Dickens for a few days well into his tour.

Inspector Field had been correct in saying that Dickens would welcome the idea of my joining him for a bit of time on the road. I sent a note to Wills, who—exhausted as he must have been from travelling every day with the Inimitable—flitted back to London every few days from the tour to carry on his own and Dickens’s business affairs at the magazine with Forster (who disapproved of the entire idea of the reading tour), and within a day I received back that rarest of things for me—a telegram—which read,