Dan Simmons - Drood

“Have you ever seen him, Inspector?” I said. “Drood, I mean.”

“Seen him?” repeated the older man. “Why no, sir. I believe I’ve told you that I have never personally laid eyes on the murderer. But I have apprehended some of his agents and I have certainly seen the results of his work. More than three hundred murders in those twenty years, not the least terrible of which was the grisly death of Lord Lucan in 1846. You yourself told me the story that Dickens reported Drood telling him —and the identity of Lord Lucan, who was long rumoured to have had a son in Egypt, fits perfectly.”

“Too perfectly,” I said smugly.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“You may be a detective, Inspector Field,” I said, “but you have never plotted and written a story with detective work in it. I have.”

Inspector Field continued striding and tapping, but he looked my way and listened.

“Certainly there has been a legend of a murderous Egyptian named Drood for these two decades or so,” I explained. “The shadowy dockside murderer. The phantom Oriental mesmeriser, sending his agents out to rob and kill. The unreal occupant of the very real Undertown. But he is only a legend, with no more real history to him than there is actual physicality. Charles Dickens has walked these riverside and dockside slums for years and years. He certainly has heard of this Drood—perhaps before you did twenty years ago, Inspector—and for his own purposes, he has incorporated actual events such as the murder of Lord Lucan (with its delicious element of the man’s heart being ripped from his chest) into his biography of the unreal personage.”

“What would those purposes be, Mr Collins?” asked Inspector Field. We had just passed Somerset House. Once a royal residence, the newer structure had housed government offices for the past thirty years. I knew that Dickens’s father and uncle had been employed there.

We crossed the Strand and took a narrow lane as a shortcut in the direction of Drury Lane, where the fictional David Copperfield had ordered beef in a restaurant and where a very real Wilkie Collins hoped to have a successful staging of Armadale before too much more time passed.

“To what purpose, sir?” repeated the inspector when we were alone in the lane. “To what purpose would Mr Dickens lie to you about the existence of Drood?”

I smiled and swung my own walking stick. “Let me tell you a little story from Dickens’s reading tour, Inspector. I heard it last week from George Dolby.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“The travel part of the tour ended in Portsmouth at the end of May,” I said. “Dickens had a little time that was his own so he led Wills and Dolby on one of his walking expeditions and they found themselves in Landport Terrace. ‘By Jove!’ exclaimed Dickens. ‘Here is the place where I was born! One of these houses must be the one.’ And so he led Wills and Dolby from house to house, explaining that one must be it because it ‘looked so like my father.’ Then, no, another must be the correct one ‘because it looked like the birthplace of a man who had deserted it.’ But no again, a third must be it because it was ‘most definitely like the cradle of a puny, weak youngster…’ and so on through the row of homes.

“Then, Inspector, in an open square in the town, all lined with redbrick houses dotted by white window frames, Dickens decided to imitate the clowning of Grimaldi.”

“Grimaldi?” said Inspector Field.

“A pantomimist whom Dickens adored,” I said. “So, with Wills and Dolby watching, the famous writer Charles Dickens mounted the steps to one of these houses, gave three raps to the brass-plated green door, and lay down on the top step. A moment later when a stout woman opened the door, Dickens leapt up and took off running, with Dolby and Wills beating a hasty retreat behind him. Dickens would point behind them at an imaginary policeman pursuing and all three distinguished gentlemen would pick up their pace. When the wind blew off Dickens’s hat and scuttled it ahead of them, the pursuit became real enough as all three chased the hat in comic pantomime.”

Inspector Field stoppped. I stopped. After a moment, he said, “Your point, Mr Collins?”

“My point, Inspector, is that Charles Dickens, although chronologically fifty-four years of age, is a child. A mischievous child. He manufactures and plays the games he enjoys and—through his fame and force of personality—bullies those around him to play the game as well. We are now involved, you and I, in Charles Dickens’s Game of Drood.”

Field stood there, scratching the side of his nose while seemingly lost in thought. He suddenly looked very old to me. And not at all well. Finally he said, “Where were you on nine June, Mr Collins?”

I blinked at this. Then I smiled and said, “Didn’t your agents inform you, Inspector?”

“Yes, sir. In truth, they did. You went to your publisher’s offices in the late morning. Your new book was released that day. Then you went to several bookshops from Pall Mall along the Strand to Fleet Street, where you signed several copies of the volumes for certain friends and admirers. That evening you dined… there …”

Field was pointing his cane at the Albion, opposite Drury Lane Theatre.

“… with several artists, including one older gentleman who was a friend of your father’s,” continued the inspector. “You returned home a little after midnight.”

He had managed to wipe the smile off my face and it irked me that he had. “The point of this intrusive and unwarranted recitation, Inspector?” I asked coldly.

“The point is that both you and I know where you were on the ninth of June, Mr Collins. But neither of us knows where Mr Dickens was on that important anniversary.”

“Important anniversary?” I said and then remembered. It was the first anniversary of Dickens’s near thing in the railway accident at Staplehurst. How could I have forgotten?

“Mr Dickens was at Gad’s Hill Place that day,” said Inspector Field without looking at any notes, “but took the four thirty-six PM express to London. Once here he began one of his long walks, this one in the general vicinity of Bluegate Fields.”

“Opium Sal’s,” I ventured. “The entrance to Undertown through the crypt in the cemetery he called Saint Ghastly Grim’s.”

“Not this time, sir,” said Inspector Field. “I had seven of my best agents following Mr Dickens. We felt that the odds were great that the author would contact Drood on this first anniversary of their meeting. But your friend gave my men and myself—I was involved in the tailing that night—quite a merry chase. Just when we were sure that Dickens had gone to ground, he would pop out of some ruin or slum, hail a cab, and be off. Eventually he left Bluegate Fields and the dock areas there and came quite close to where we stand at this moment.… To Saint Enon Chapel north of the Strand near the eastern entrance to Clement’s Inn, to be precise.”

“Saint Enon Chapel,” I repeated. The name rang a faint bell. Then I remembered. “The Modern Golgotha!”

“Exactly, sir. A charnel house. The vaults under Saint Enon had so filled with unclaimed corpses that in 1844, after I had begun work in the Police Bureau but before I became Chief of Detectives, the commissioner of sewers sealed it off while creating a drainage tunnel beneath the building. Still the bodies festered there for years, until the premises were purchased by a surgeon in 1847 with the purpose of removing the remains to—I believe he called it—‘a more appropriate place.’ The exhumation continued there for almost a year, Mr Collins, with two giant heaps accumulating in the alleys above those vaults—one heap a pile of human bones, the other a mountain of decaying coffin wood.”