The Detective and Mr. Dickens (21 page)

Inspector Field was not often wrong in his analytic perceptions, but in this case he was in error. There
was
someone in that bedchamber. Upon closer inspection, there was someone, but it was someone who was only formerly someone. Field’s igniting of the oil lamp on the dry sink set the chamber ablaze with light, and revealed the body of Paroissien face downward on the floor with arms outspread, his ankles pointing through the doorway to the kitchen, his open vacant eyes staring into the dust beneath the tousled bed. In the middle of the white shirt, which covered his back and which was soaked brown in blood, were six jagged stab wounds. The blood-soaked shirt was the only clothing that Paroissien wore. His corpse was naked from the waist down, the deep brownish-red pool spreading in a dark halo beneath him.

I looked away from that terrible sight, but I could not escape it. The pier glass impassively reflected the bloody corpse. Rogers and Field also stared down in shock. Mister Paroissien, the guilty murderer of Solicitor Partlow, was, without question, himself murdered, and murdered very thoroughly.

“Good God!” It was Dickens’s voice.

“Stay clear. Don’t touch anythin’ yet,” Field ordered.

Dickens and I stepped back into the doorway from the front chamber. Field dispatched Rogers to call reinforcements to the scene for the purpose of securing the building from the intrusions of sensation-mongers. Then, standing next to the corpse at the foot of the bed, Field slowly turned in a complete circle, his deep-set black eyes burning into every corner of the room.

When he finally stirred, he startled us. With a quick decisiveness he moved closer to the bed, bent to examine the rumpled blood-stained sheet.

What does he see that interests him
? I thought.
What is he looking for? What has he found?

From the bed, Field moved quickly to the dry sink. One drawer of the two in the face of the wooden stand was pulled open. The drawer contained household necessities. Field left it as it was, and I stole a look into it moments later. It was filled with the necessaries for boot polishing and sewing, and the small tools for such common household affairs as picture-hanging and fabric cleaning. Field seemed quite interested in this drawer, but when I looked into it, I saw nothing threatening or out of the ordinary.

Next Field moved to the doorway of the adjoining chamber (which, upon later inspection, proved to be the entrance to a small kitchen and water closet, which held a large chamber-pot), and stood facing in toward the bed almost treading on the stiffening feet of the corpse. He was leaning so precariously forward, that I thought that he was going to lose his balance, and pitch headlong down on top of the bloody body. Instead, he bent down, and examined the soles of the late Paroissien’s bare feet. Then, he was up and moving along the wall to a position approximately half the distance between the dry sink with its open drawer and the doorway through which Paroissien had entered, prior to receiving his first stab wound in the back.

On the move again, he stepped to the chairs against the wall near where we stood. With one professional hand, he inventoried the clothes—one pair white cotton under-breeches, one pair tweed trousers, one tweed jacket, one pair grey gloves, one pair black stockings with garters, one pair leather pumps. We later found a greatcoat and hat, on a chair near the door in the front parlor. One other wooden straight-backed chair was pulled up to the side of the bed, but it held no clothes nor anything else, just stood there empty, seemingly out of place. Nevertheless, Inspector Field bent to study this chair, reached down, and removed some small tatter of something from the wood of the chair’s seat. He placed whatever this clue was in one of his many inside pockets before I could distinguish its color or texture or meaning.

For more long minutes, Field prowled that room. He bent this and poked at that, his crook’d forefinger scratching lightly at the side of his eye. “He was re-creating the scene,” Dickens speculated later, “writing it exactly as a novelist would.”

The last thing Field bent to examine was the corpse itself. I glanced at Dickens but, to my surprise, Dickens was not looking at Inspector Field. Dickens was watching the scene unfold in the large mirror. The pier glass over the dry sink reproduced every move of Inspector Field’s detective investigation: his precise measurement, with a small ruler extracted from one of his many inner pockets, of the length and width of each stab wound, and the recording of those measurements in his small notebook; his sketching of a diagram of the configuration of the stab wounds, and his placing the numbers one through six next to each wound in that configuration; his insertion of his formidable forefinger into each wound testing no doubt for its depth; his frozen pondering over the body as he rested on one knee beside it. I must admit that I too became fascinated by this angle of view which Dickens had chosen. Watching it all take place in the mirror somehow made it seem not so real or terrible or brutal.

Later, when we were alone, I asked Dickens why he had been watching so intently in the mirror rather than looking directly upon Field. “Mirroring life, that is what I do,” Dickens answered almost wistfully. “Perhaps I didn’t want to look too closely because I was afraid I would see too much. Perhaps I am like the famous inhabitants of Plato’s cave, content to watch the mere shadows of reality.”

I watched through Dickens’s mirror for a brief time but when Inspector Field rose from his contemplation of the stab wounds in the corpse’s back, he regained my full and direct attention. He shot a quick glance at Dickens and myself, and he too caught Dickens looking in the mirror, because he then glanced quickly into the glass startling Dickens.

Gingerly, with his right foot, Inspector Field rolled the corpse over onto its back. My mind immediately recalled the dead eyes of Solicitor Partlow, staring up into the Thames night. Paroissien’s mouth was twisted into a silent gasp of surprise, as if he had made a sudden drawing in of breath to cry out or curse, but then froze in the midst of that aborted act.

After a momentary hesitation, Field once again stooped to inspect the corpse. First he examined closely the face, neck and hands. Next, however, Field did one of the most distasteful things I have ever seen a gentleman do. He took the dead man’s sexual appendage in his hand and squeezed it twice with an upward movement toward the head, with the intent, I presume, to force any liquid which might have pooled within to flow out. Whether or not he was successful neither Dickens nor I could see. Then, carefully, he stretched and examined the skin of the member, concerning which he made a number of notes in his small black book. The indecorousness of this episode brought to Dickens’s countenance a look of chagrin so severe that it verged upon pain. I found it a bizarre and mildly revolting procedure, but I was not nearly so strongly affected. When Field finished, he rubbed his hand twice on his trouser leg and rose to his feet. With one quick step he moved to the foot of the bed. For a long moment he stared down at the wrinkled and blood-stained sheets, then a quick glance down at the dead body, then a glance to the doorway from the kitchen, then a glance into the pier glass, then another glance into the kitchen’s doorway, then another glance to the corpse, then his eyes returned to contemplation of the tousled bed.

“That is all there is to be done ’ere, gentlemen,” he announced, startling both Dickens and myself when he broke the silence which had reigned over the chamber. “Let us return to Bow Street. My constables will clean up ’ere.”

I was ready to leave. I actually took an immediate step backward to the door. Dickens, however, did exactly the opposite. He stepped into the room, moved directly to the corpse. Field did not object. Dickens bent to the dead body and, with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, closed the man’s vacant staring eyes. With that, Dickens turned and led us from that chamber.

“What did you learn in there?” Dickens timidly inquired in the coach.

Inspector Field deflated the entire evening with the grim resignation of his profound verdict: “The young woman killed ’im, I’m afraid.”

Dickens slumped back against the cushions as if he had received a sharp blow to the chest.

Reading the Book of the Dead, or, “Out, Out Damned Spot”

May 8, 1851—almost midnight

Novel writing, this compulsive attempt to mirror reality, is much like detectiving, yet different. In writing a novel, the author must construct a credible plot, even if, in reality, the events upon which that plot is modeled take irrational turns. What the detective undertakes is precisely the opposite. The detective looks at the events and furnishings of the world, studies them, and constructs the plot of his story. A novelist is, from the onset, lord of the whole, and his talent for words and structures serves as a valet to the parts. A detective begins as valet to the parts, but by his ingenuity and hard work rises to become lord of the whole. There lies the difference between art and reality.

Though this is but a secret journal, it nonetheless poses all of the novelist’s problems. I am a novelist, yet this is not a novel. I am forced to play the role of the greenest of apprentice detectives. I cannot see where this tale is going. Perhaps Dickens could see further. Yet, that cold night at Bow Street Station, newly returned from that grisly scene in the murderer’s lodgings, I felt that Dickens was as far adrift as was I.

Dickens once said, on one of our night walks, “We should be able to read the world as we would read a book.” Should not I, then, have been able to read this vision of the world, which had been thrust upon us that night? The scene of that grisly crime was a text, a veritable three-decker, yet I was fully incapable of reading past page one. Thank the Lord that Inspector Field was an expert at reading the book of the dead.

“What makes you believe that Miss Ternan killed the stage manager?” Dickens was already arguing in the young woman’s defense. “I saw no evidences…”

‘‘I cannot yet prove it,” Field answered, trying to hide his surprise at the emotional strain detectable in Dickens’s manner. “Yet, in my own mind, she is the one. All the signs were there, in the room, all pointin’ to ’er.”

“What signs?” It was my voice, the faithful bulldog.

Field smiled benignly, giving two nervous little scratches to the side of his eye with his crook’d forefinger. “The signs were there, posted all about that room. You gentlemen just did not know ’ow to read ’em.”

Both Dickens and I waited for him to explain.

“Tho’ it’s neither ’ere nor there until we catch up with the principals in our little drama, this is what I am certain ’appened. We all know that Paroissien killed Solicitor Partlow over the girl. That night Partlow ‘ad struck a bargain with the girl’s mother for the sale for sexual purposes of ’er
virgin
daughter.” For some unexplained reason he gave particular emphasis to that word “virgin” by a quick tap on the wooden arm of his chair with his formidable forefinger.

How could he know she was a virgin
? The thought darted through my consciousness no sooner than Inspector Field enunciated it.

As if reading my mind, Field continued with his narrative.

“Rakes of wealth and power, of the order of Lawyer Partlow and Lord Ashbee, take great satisfaction in the deflowerin’ of such an innocent. They coveted ’er because she was young and beautiful, but especially unspoiled.”

“They?” my voice challenged him again.

“No. Partlow is the only one of whom I can be certain. I simply suspect that Ashbee is of that type. No…I meant Partlow.”

Dickens sat like a stone idol.

“The night of the first murder, Partlow, in ’is cups and feelin’ secure in the company of other rakes and drunkards, boasted of ’is purchase of the girl’s virtue, perhaps even went so far as to describe when and where ’ee planned to force ’imself upon ’er. That night, as ’is tongue ran loose, Partlow either did not suspect, or was too drunk to care, that Paroissien also coveted the young woman, and could not stand to ’ear another man boastin’ of the ownership of that which ’ee so passionately longed to possess. In an uncontrolled passion of lust and ’ate, Paroissien killed Partlow, and, with the ’elp of the others, threw his mortal remains into the Thames.”

He paused and glanced in Dickens’s direction, as if to check a barometer.
Steady there
, his eyes seemed to say.

“You both know the details of our investigation. Paroissien ’angs back until ’ee feels ’ee ’as put the bloodhounds off the scent. ’Ee feels ’ee ’as gotten away with it, and, in ’is false security, allows ’is lust for the Ternan girl to rise up out of its dormant state. Rememberin’ Partlow’s boasts, ’ee is convinced that ’ee can buy the girl. ’Ee approaches the maternal bawd. The deal is struck. Paroissien’s dinner this evenin’ with the mother and the girl was the scene of the final transaction. Paroissien, by payin’ money or by offerin’ the promise of favor, possessed himself of the prize he had so long lusted after and even killed to possess. Since the girl herself would probably be innocent to all that was afoot, the scenario most likely followed the conventional rake’s progress. Paroissien pays the Ternan woman, mother lures daughter to Paroissien’s lodgin’s, then abandons ’er. Perhaps they drug ’er. Thus, the scene is set. Yet, when the script is played out, the result is murder.”

“But all of this is sheer speculation,” Dickens sputtered.