The Detective and Mr. Dickens (6 page)

Field’s handling of this whole indelicate situation bespoke his mastery over this fallen world. He was rough with her because he understood her motives, but he never lost control of his temper, never tried to hurt her. It was as if he could identify with her hopeless plight. We learned later that Field was a bachelor who lived alone in Great Russell Street near the British Museum. Another time, he actually said in reference to a criminal bearing the odd name of John Butt: “’Ee’s not so different from me, I from ’im. I found ’im because I know ’ow ’ee thinks.” Having obtained what information he needed, Field and his prisoner emerged from the darkness. He dismissed her under our streetlamp, and the London night swallowed her up in an instant.

With Rogers and his bull’s-eye once again in the lead, we retraced our steps to the Bow Street station house. The fog had not relinquished its grip on the city. Beneath another lone streetlamp, Field paused to light a cigar. Quietly he apologized for the woman’s shocking behavior. He stated that he had obtained and would obtain more information from the woman, which would guarantee that Tally Ho Thompson would be run to ground. And then, he said a rather strange thing.

“The women of these rookeries are the ’ardest to deal with,” Field said, “the ’ardest by a stretch. There’s much more to them than the men. The men are often slow an’ ’ard an’ don’t ’ave no ’ooman feelin’s, live like animals. But the women still seem to believe in love, ’old on to that chance. Too bad. They learn ta lie, steal, do anythin’ for love. ’Ats ’ow the men turn ’em into ’ores.”

We bid Inspector Field “goodnight” at the station house door. He protested that Rogers should light us back to our lodgings, but Dickens steadfastly refused that courtesy. “These are my streets. I walk them every night,” Dickens insisted. Field only chuckled at that bit of braggadocio as if thinking,
They are my streets, an ’ I could teach you much about ’em
. Dickens extracted a promise that, when on some future evening some particularly interesting case or bit of detective work arose, Field would summon him to another evening of observation.

We Are Off!

April 12, 1851

One week later to the day, I was working late with Dickens in the Wellington Street offices, when a sharp knocking at the street door interrupted us. The knock was quite insistent and authoritative. It was well after dark.

“Ah, the knocking at the gate,” Dickens joked. “MacCready would make much of this. He is doing
Macbeth
this very night.”

I peeked out through the small porthole window in the door and was blinded as if by the headlight of a train bearing down upon me in a tunnel.

“Bright light…” I stammered as Dickens boldly peered out.

“It’s Constable Rogers and his bull’s-eye,” Dickens announced as he hastened to unbolt the door.

“There’s been a report of a murder. Before dawn this morning. Near Blackfriars Bridge.” Rogers spoke in haste.

“A murder!” Curiosity and excitement vibrated in Dickens’s voice.

“Aye, murder allright. Thought to be a gentlemen, stabbed and ’elped into the Thames. Whether dead or alive, we don’t know, but our nets are out.”

“Dead or alive! Heigh-ho Wilkie, did you hear that?”

How could I not have heard it.

“Inspector Field sent me to fetch ye, as promised.” Rogers could barely mask his enmity toward us as the cause of his being sent on this menial errand, and thus exiled from the eye of a murder investigation. “Please gentlemen, we must ’urry to get back before they leave for the river.”

Dickens and I dashed back up the stairs to extinguish the gaslights and pull on our greatcoats while Rogers champed in the lower hallway.

“Wilkie, this takes me back fifteen years to when I was a young reporter on the
Mirror of Parliament
and the
True Sun
. This is truly something to get the blood up.”

On foot, Rogers led us at a stiff gallop through the dark maze of West London’s streets. We passed through Covent Garden just at the moment when the crowd was the thickest, choking the narrow street as they waited for the doors to open at that famous theatre, but Rogers paid the crowd no attention. There was bigger game abroad this night. Breathless, we arrived at the detectives’ door of the Bow Street Station.

Inside the bullpen, Field rose from his pillowed rocker and shook our hands heartily. “So glad you could make it, gentlemen,” he said (quite comically, I thought—as if he had invited us for tea and crumpets, rather than crime and murder). I noticed a woman in a deep maroon dress warming herself by the fire. I’m sure that Dickens noticed her as well. He missed nothing. In the blaze of the fire, her appearance—the low cut of the top of her gown, the chaos of her hair—revealed why the niceties of social etiquette did not immediately apply. Yet, it was impossible to keep one’s eyes from her as she sat, unintroduced, like a threat, across the room.

“We’re waitin’ for word from the river. A body, rumored a gentleman’s, went in off the steps above Blackfriars Bridge when the tide was goin’ up.”

“Extraordinary,” Dickens exclaimed. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you summoned us.”

“The body will come down on the tide tonight, unless its gotten ’ung up on something. But they’re pretty good about that. They normally stick to the middle of the river where the current runs fastest.”

“What are we waiting upon?” I inquired politely. “Constable Rogers implied great urgency.” Had Rogers not left the bullpen, I probably wouldn’t have posed the question.

Field, scratching the side of his eye with that crook’d forefinger, said in a lowered voice: “Rogers ’as a tendency to exaggerate when ’ee gets a bit excited, you know—the subordinate’s eagerness not to miss out. ’Ee probably gave you a devil of a run to get back ’ere,” Field chuckled.

I wasn’t nearly as amused by Rogers’s officiousness.

Continuing, Field leaned conspiratorially into us. “It’s a little game we play with the watermen. The body should come down on the tide if our informant ’as got the times right,” he said, and glanced eloquently to the woman by the fire. “A waterside prostitute. Says she saw it all. Says body went in off the stairs above Blackfriars. We figure the Thames river rats will save us the price of a dredger. One in particular we keep in our pay. We’re waitin’ for word of ’im.”

“How did it go in?” Dickens asked eagerly. No detail could be too insignificant for his novelist’s curiosity.

For my part, I was captured by the woman. Her neck was white and her full breasts almost completely exposed by the low-cut, loosely laced bosom of her dark, blood-coloured dress. She stared fixedly at the flames as if contemplating throwing herself into them. The shimmering blaze sent flickering shadows across her face which softened her mien, and ripples of orange light sparked in her thick mob of ungoverned curls.

From across the room, she seemed beautiful to me. Dickens has frequently cautioned me about my tendency to idealize.
*

“She saw it all,” Field answered Dickens’s question.

He led us across the bullpen to hold audience with the fire-woman.

“This is Meggy Sheehey, also known as Irish Meg,” Field introduced the woman, who raised her eyes from the fire with disdain. “This is Mister Dickens and Mister Collins.”

“Aye…Mister Dickens, eh? Oy’ve ’eard o’ you, all right, oy ’ave.”

“We’re lucky to ’ave Meg this time.” Field played to his audience. “We’ve got ourselves a reg’lar eyewitness come for’ard voluntarily.”

“The bloody bastards did’na pay me. That’s the only reason I follered ’em. To make ’em pay. Fieldsy knows that. All’s for a price, Fieldsy. For a price. Don’t forgit.”

Field frowned at her familiarity. “We’re not so sure Meg didn’t ’ave something to do with this man’s goin’ in, are we Meg? That scene’s still possible. You’re goin’ to watch your langwidge, ain’t you Meg?”

Her lips clamped tight, and she slumped back in the chair, subdued.

“Now,” Field ordered, bending down and crooking his forefinger lightly under her defiant chin, “tell your story from start to the throwin’ in.”

“Oy wos workin’ the street outsoyd the door o’
The Snug Harbor
verry late las’ night. On a suddin, five swells, all drunk, climb out o’ a ’ansom cab. They muss’a bin piled atop each other. Wos a strange sight. Five swells in that place near the river at that time o’ night.
The Snug
, she’s a sailors’ pub, she is. But there wos five fine ’uns, standin’ there in the street big as life. Wos a strange sight, allright.”

As if the strangeness of it all had suddenly parched her whole being, the fire-woman reached for her glass, which was sitting on the small deal table at her right hand. Field caught her meaning immediately, and produced a half-full bottle of gin out of a cabinet. Her glass filled, Irish Meg returned to her tale.

“The five swells didna go inta
The Snug
. Smart o’ ’em. Instead they spotted me. I gave ’em me terms. They walked me to a bench near the river. Two o’ ’em used me. The other three jus’ watched. Two o’ ’em used me but only one paid proper. The others, the one wi’ the fat, curlin’ nosebrush, laughed and spit on me as I knelt there. They were an ugly crew, all drunk, and at each other the ’ole time. They staggered away along the river. I follered ’em, keepin’ my distance.”

At this point in her narrative, Rogers stuck his head in and called Inspector Field from the room to consult. The woman seized the occasion to take a long pull from her gin glass. Satisfied, she grinned slyly up at us and dropped all pretension. “Wot are you gents?” she asked boldly. “Swells come to sniff about in London’s dustbin? Swells brought round to watch the animals perform? You know, gents, for a price you can perform with the animals.” With a wink, she brazenly threw back her shoulders to display the full white expanse of her breasts and with both hands she formed the most indecent of gestures. With the thumb and forefinger of her left she formed a circle through which she drove her straightened right forefinger with a pumping motion. She was the second prostitute to whom Field had introduced us, yet she was utterly different from Scarlet Bess. This one seemed to have an ironic sense of humor, seemed to enjoy taunting these two voyeurist swells, whose witness to her degradation she obviously resented. When Field came back into the room, Irish Meg gave a short laugh at our discomfiture, and dove back into her story.

“I follered all the way to Blackfriars Bridge. They moved slow—a couple stopped to piss in the shadows. Then they started yellin’ at each other. ’Bout some girl. The little man yappin’ her name. Helen, I think it was, or somethin’ like. Right before Blackfriars Bridge a fight broke out between the big man with the whiskers and the little man. Two others grabbed the big man, but the little man had a big knife. ’Ee stabbed the big man in the belly while t’others ’eld ’im. T’other man just watched, then sicked-up all over the ground.”

“You say you can identify the men,” Field pressed.

“Oh, I knows ’em allright. I sees the whole thing. ’Ow the big man falls on the ground and don’ move. ’Ow the rest on ’em gather roun’ him pokin’ and rollin’ ’im over. ’Ow they whisper together. ’Ow they pick ’im up, carry ’im to the steps and push ’im in. Oh, I sees it all, allright.”

“And you’re sure you can recognize all of their faces?”

To my great surprise it was Dickens’s voice which had taken up the interrogation. In the excitement of her story, his curiosity had made him blurt out the question without thinking.

“Theer faces ain’t all I’d rekernize o’ ’em,” Irish Meg laughed at her vulgar joke. Dickens couldn’t suppress his own grin. Field laughed out loud.

“Remarkable,” Dickens exclaimed.

“With gin and a promise of good pay, Meg can, at times, be remarkable indeed,” Field flattered her.

“Oh, oy’m a pricey ’ore, oy am,” Irish Meg saluted us.

At that very moment Rogers poked his head back in, and announced that the signal had arrived from the river.

Dickens’s eyes flashed with anticipation.

“Now Dickens, Mister Collins, Meggy girl,” Field jabbed his forefinger at each of us in turn, “we are off!”

*
Years later, in a cautionary letter, when Collins was caught in the throes of his obsession with the real “Woman In White,” Dickens would remind his friend of his tendency “to be carried away like a paper boat on the tide.”

Under Blackfriars Bridge

April 12, 1851

We marched in Rogers’s tow through the dark labyrinth of streets, until the sour smell of the Thames and the dark shapes of warehouses, skeletal docks, and the naked masts of ships signaled our arrival in the shadowy waterside neighborhood.

Out of one of those shadows suddenly stepped an apparition. Inspector Field confronted it. “Good evenin’ to you, Mister Marcus,” he said. “Ben keepin’ the watch as directed?”

“Lor’, if it ain’t Insperrer Field hirrselferrer.” This Marcus seemed overwhelmed either by the great honor of being greeted by that personage or by the heavy cargo of gin he had already taken on that evening.

Rogers immediately thrust forward his flaming eye and illuminated this spectral figure. His clothes were all rags and he shook uncontrollably from the cut of the sharp river wind or, perhaps, from the effects of the gin. His head was wrapped in a sailor’s knit cap which, pulled down tight around his face, caused him to resemble a grinning skull. “Yee’re quite the loose rogue tonight, ain’t ye, Mister Marcus?” Rogers threatened.