The Detective and Mr. Dickens (7 page)

Field, impatient, moved between Rogers and this riverside skull. “Loose rogue perhaps, but on the watch, right Mister Marcus?”

“Yetherrer. Onna watcherrer all night. Irs arful colderrer, Mirrer Insperrer. Need my money, shurr. Need to girr waarrrmmerrer.”

At the mention of money, Field’s forefinger became unfriendly and began tapping the sepulchral Marcus on the chest. “You’ve been skulkin’ ’ere all evenin’, Marcus. What ’ave you done ta earn your gin?”

“I dorm spend ir on gin,” the skull, abashed, protested.

“It’s all you spend it on, wretch,” Rogers spat.

“Give us your report,” Field ordered.

I watched Dickens as he hung on every word and I could tell that he was recording it down to the very sound and inflection of the drunken informant’s slurred speech. I could see Dickens sitting at his desk later, and opening a lock in his mind, and all of it flowing out to become characters and scenes in one or another of his novels. As for me, I watched it all from the background in the company of Irish Meg.

“’Orrible ain’t ’ee,” she moved closer and whispered to me. When I looked at her in the dim backlight of Rogers’s bull’s-eye, her eyes were sad, as if she were seeing something in a mirror that frightened her. She was no longer taunting me with obscene gestures; rather, she seemed to want someone to talk with, and for some reason she had chosen me. I didn’t answer her overture.

“’Ee’s bin out morrer ’an an arrerrer,” Marcus slobbered. “’Ee’s orrerdrue, orrerdrue. I’rr take yerrer ter wherrer he’rr purt in.”

We followed our guide’s unsteady lead down through the darkness to the river. A sliver of moon cast dim shadows across its surface. Its current crept, deathly black, between its low jagged shores. To me it seemed a river of death, full of pathetic suicides and drowned bodies, a graveyard for the city’s lost.

Marcus led us to a jumble of small boats pulled up in the mud within view of the towering iron scaffold of Blackfriars Bridge. “’Ee’ll purr in ’ere, ’Umphry wirrll,” he assured us.

Field grabbed a handful of Marcus and escorted him away out of our hearing. In a minute or two Field returned alone and Marcus, that grinning skull, had returned to his gravehole in the city.

We all moved into the lee of an overturned boat to escape the wind. Dickens and Field conversed in low tones. Rogers stood lookout. Irish Meg moved so close to me that I could smell the gin on her breath, feel the voluptuous rise and fall of her breathing beneath her slight wrap. I removed my long woolen scarf which had been wrapped across my chest beneath my greatcoat and placed it around Irish Meg’s neck. The shivering woman accepted it without protest, but in doing so fixed me with the strangest of looks, eyes startled. She said not a word as she wrapped the scarf around her white neck, but her eyes forced mine to retreat back to the silent, black expanse of that infernal river.

We waited twenty minutes beneath that overturned boat. Rogers’s bull’s-eye paced back and forth along the river’s edge like the eye of some huge prowling hound. Twice he returned to report the obvious to Inspector Field: “No sign o’ ’im ’ere yet sir.”

“’Ee knows the body’s out there. ’Ee should’ve snagged it by now,” Field spat the words toward the river.

“’Ee’s a sure waterman,” Rogers consoled his governor, “and you know ’ee’s too afeerd to ever cross us.”

“Aye, but we can’t wait ’ere all night,” Field said, glancing at Dickens and myself. “Let’s give these fine gentlemen a real adventure, Rogers.” He grinned at us in the light of the bull’s-eye. “Give the signal with your light, and fetch our man of the Thames Police.”

Rogers marched off to the dark river bank, and swung his bull’s-eye over his head three times. Within moments his signal was answered by the sound of oars slapping the thick water. After another moment or two, a low dark shape slid into shore.

We heard voices. Gruff greetings were exchanged as Field joined Rogers at the river’s edge. Dickens, the woman and myself quickly left our temporary shelter and followed. Without hesitation, at Field’s brusque “Go on, get in,” we climbed into the launch and found ourselves propelled out into the grasp of that black current. The oarsmen leaned to their work. We moved steadily upstream against the tide toward the towering iron hulk that is Blackfriars Bridge. Dickens and Field conversed. I could only catch snatches of their conversation.

“We’ll find ’im. ’Ee’ll not get by us in the dark of midriver now.”

Dickens nodded vigorously and said something which I could not overhear. Irish Meg Sheehey huddled at my side. “This is passin’ stoopid, this is,” she muttered as the boat rocked against the current and we were swallowed into the dark maw of shadow that is the underbridge.

That is how Dickens and I found ourselves in a four-oared Thames Police Galley lying in the deep shadow of Blackfriars Bridge. The massive iron skeleton quartered the lowering sky above us, and, below us, its hulking black shadow seemed to penetrate all the way to the bottom of the stream.

“We’re lookin’ for a small boat with one man at the sculls. If ’ee’s got wot we want ’ee’ll be low in the water or else ’ee’ll ’ave our goods in tow,” Field instructed us. We floated on the flood. The Thames policeman in the bow held fast to one of the bridge pilings. The river rushed swiftly by.

We didn’t have to wait long. Field, of course, saw it first, no more than a small moving shadow on the water, but enough for Field’s forefinger to point and Field’s brusque voice to order: “There. There’s our man. Bend to ’em, lads.”

We shot out of the deep shadow of the underbridge and caught the current, which sent us swiftly toward our target. The man, bent to the oars of the small boat for the purpose of steering, not rowing (for the rushing tide carried the boat firmly in its grasp), did not seem to notice us as we bore down upon him. To the rear of his mongrel boat, something split the water in tow. With one last strong pull, our oarsmen shipped their sculls and we intercepted him.

It looked like a boat which had barely survived a shipwreck. It was patched and braced with bits of the rejected garbage of the Thames, the most slapped together of boats, a boat of many colors, a patchwork boat with more crazy boards and dashes of pitch than could be found on a countrywoman’s quilt.

At the boat’s sculls sat a block of a man. His hulking shoulders conjured the African gorillas I had so recently seen with Dickens in the Zoological Gardens in Hyde Park. We floated alongside and Constable Rogers clamped onto the waterman’s ragged gunwale. A mean-looking hooked and pointed boatman’s gaff rested in the bottom of this waterman’s boat. However, when he spoke, his voice was amiable enough.

“’Iss un’s a reel swell, ’spector,” the waterman nodded to the cargo in tow behind his makeshift boat. “More lace an’ muttonchops than yer damn Prince Regent.”

For a long moment, Field stared at him without saying a word, but I noticed that intimidating forefinger make a contemplative scratch at the corner of his eyebrow. Meanwhile, the waterman’s dark cargo floated and bounced merrily on the flood, arms and legs rolling crazily like some comic marionette at each tug of its rope.

“Where ’ave you been ’idin’ all evenin’?” Field demanded. “We’ve been waitin’ almost an ’our for you to deliver our package, and it’s no night for waitin’ under bridges.”

“Yer mustachioed friend,” the waterman said, jerking a thumb toward his cargo, “got detained ’mongst the keels an’ anchor ropes of the hupstream shippin’. Found hisself in an orful tangle, ’ee did. I hackchoohally ’ad to tie hup an go ho-ver the side jus’ to cut ’im loose. Sorry, guv’ner, but theese blokes don’t always jus’ swim up an’ hook themselves to yer line like yer reg’lar little fishes do.”

“Did you search the body? Was there identification on it?” Field’s voice sounded as if he wasn’t really interested in his own question, as if he already knew its answer, as if this were a familiar game.

“Pleese guv’nor,” the man’s voice evidenced great dismay. “I nivver teched nothink. I knows the rules. The searchin’ is the job o’ the dirtective. All I did wos wot you said,” he protested. “Find the body. ’At’s all. ’At’s all.”

Seemingly satisfied with the man’s protestations, Field, with a jerk of his forefinger, ordered the man to follow the police galley to shore.

“’Ee was out so long because ’ee searched the body, stripped it of its valuables and ’id them somewhere upstream,” Field explained. “It will take us days, maybe weeks, to identify the body. That corpse won’t ’ave a shillin’ or a scrap of identification. It’ll be lucky if it’s got the gold in its teeth!”

Within minutes, the waterman beached his mongrel boat in the mud next to ours. We watched with morbid curiosity, as, pulling hand over hand, he dragged his grisly cargo ashore. The rope was noosed beneath the dead man’s armpits. The body was coatless and bootless. A huge dark stain covered the whole back of what, by the hint of its muddy sleeves, must have been a white evening shirt. The corpse came to rest face down at our feet.

I watched Dickens as the waterman pulled his grisly piece of salvage to us. He stared hard at the hole ripped in the center of that dark stain.

“My God, how could this happen?” he said in a low voice.

“’Appens once, sometimes twice each week,” Rogers replied, brusque and unfeeling. “Man’s been stabbed,” he diagnosed the body’s ailment.

“Stabbed indeed,” Field said, taking up the diagnosis as impersonally as if describing a large river trout recently fileted for his supper, “and, from the looks of that wound, by a large, flat, quite pointed blade. Not your usual waterside robber’s blade, eh Rogers?”

“No sir. Not at all, sir.”

“Who are these fine gennulmen?” the waterman demanded of Field.

Field introduced us. “This is the famous Mister Charles Dickens,” he said, grinning as if enjoying some private joke, “and Mister Wilkie Collins.”

“Famous fer wot?”

“For books.”

“Don’t know nothink ’bout books.”

The man faced Dickens and me down, and, congenially enough in his rough way, introduced himself: “I be ’Umphry ’Owse. If I worked on land they’d call me a resurrection man, but since I works the river they calls me a fisher o’ men.” He howled at his own joke.

Rogers quickly stooped to the corpse, showing no squeamishness as he rifled its pockets. “Nothin’,” he informed Field.

“You’ve done your usual thorough job,” Field muttered.

Humphrey House, the waterman, flinched perceptibly and shrank backwards.

At that moment, Rogers rolled the body over to continue his search. The corpse’s gaunt dead eyes stared up at us. Drops of moisture and smears of mud distorted that sightless face.

Dickens started back, his face twisting in shock and recognition.

“What is it?” Inspector Field, who missed nothing, and certainly not such a dramatic change of expression, asked immediately.

I had never seen “the Inimitable” so discomposed. No one, not even Macready, could have imitated that startled look.

“I…I know that face,” Dickens stammered.

The Body Will Tell Us!

April 13, 1851

It was midnight by the bells atop Saint Paul’s, but not for the spirit which once inhabited that sodden corpse staring up from its bed in the mud of the Victoria embankment.

“I know that face,” Dickens repeated, his voice shaking.

“Well, who is it?” Rogers’s impatience showed.

“What ho, identified on the spot,” Field took a lighter tack.

“Yes…Yes…I know the man,” Dickens uttered the words slowly as if in a daze.

Inspector Field became positively festive.

The corpse lay silent like some shipwrecked seaman washed ashore on an alien beach.

“It is Lawyer Partlow of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He is an acquaintance of Forster’s. In fact, one of Forster’s close neighbours.” Dickens’s voice gained strength with each word. “Forster lives at fifty-eight Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Partlow at sixty-two. We shared a hansom back from the theatre one evening. Their addresses were a subject of the conversation.”

Both Field and Rogers were impressed by Dickens’s novelist’s memory.

“You ’ave no idea ’ow much better than a ‘FOUND DEAD’ notice posted on boards across the city your identification is,” Field gushed.

“We wouldn’t ’ave identified this bloke for days,” Rogers nodded.

“Partlow is well known among the players at Covent Garden Theatre. He is one of the most visible patrons and the theatre’s solicitor, said to be an expert in angel contracts and private fund raising. He has even taken his turn in the crowd scenes of some of the more populous productions.” Dickens’s voice had gradually become clinical and detached. “Macready dislikes him, but then Macready dislikes everyone,” Dickens finished with a quip, the procession of facts from his capacious memory having dispelled his initial shock at being acquainted with such a brutally murdered corpse.

“Excellent work, Mister Dickens,” Inspector Field complimented him. “You ’ave saved me days of work with your identification.”

Dickens bowed and smiled.

A lorry clattered up on the street; the horse stood snorting in the cold wind. Two Bow Street constables placed the body in a winding sheet, the sheet in the lorry and drove off. Field directed us to wait, which occasioned Dickens and me to retreat once again into the shelter of the same overturned boat we had employed earlier. From that protected vantage we watched as Inspector Field tied up the loose ends of the evening.