“Well, I am sure the honourific is well deserved and should be and will be maintained by all who know you,” I said, not bothering to point out that the “Inspector” title was plainly there on his card.
“Thank you, Mr Collins,” said the florid detective, exhaling a great cloud of smoke. With the doors to my study closed and the window open only a small bit, as was my habit due to the noise from the streets outside, the little room was quickly filling up with blue smoke.
“Tell me, Inspector,” I said, “how can I be of assistance today? Are you writing your memoirs? Is there some small gap in your otherwise voluminous and incredible memory which I could help fill in some way?”
“Memoirs?” chuckled Inspector Field. “Now that is an idea… but bless you, no, sir. Others, such as your friend Mr Dickens, have written about my… well, exploits would not be too bold a word for them, would it, sir?… about my exploits before, and I suspect that more will write about them in the future, but no memoirs on my docket for now, sir.”
“How can I help you, then, Inspector?”
Cigar firmly clamped between his teeth, Field leaned forward, planted his elbows on my desk, and freed his corpulent forefinger to point first up, then down, then to prod the desk, and finally to point it at me. “It came to my attention, Mr Collins—came to my attention too late, I regret—that you and Mr Dickens were in Tiger Bay and the Undertown searching for a certain personage named Drood.”
“Who told you that, Inspector?” My voice was cool. This former Scotland Yard detective had already exhibited too much curiosity and intrusion to suit me.
“Oh, Hib Hatchery, of course. He works for me. Hatchery is an operative of my Private Enquiry Bureau. Did not Mr Dickens tell you that?”
I remembered Dickens saying something about Inspector Field having moved on from police work and not being available for our outing, and of Field having recommended Hatchery, but I had not paid much attention to the comment.
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe he did.”
Field nodded and his finger seemed to move of its own volition to a place alongside his beak of a nose even as his other hand removed the cigar from his mouth. “He is, sir. Hatchery is a good man. Not imaginative, perhaps, as the great inspectors and detectives must be, but a good man. A dependable man. But when Dickens contacted me about finding someone to escort him into the… ah… difficult parts of the city again, I assumed that it was another little slum-jaunt of his, of the sort I escorted him and you on and him and the American visitors on, sir. I was out of London for a while, on Private Enquiry Bureau business, and did not hear until I returned recently that Drood was the object of Mr Dickens’s pursuit.”
“I would hardly call it pursuit,” I said.
“Search, then,” said Inspector Field, breathing blue smoke out. “Enquiry. Investigation.”
“Is there something about Charles Dickens’s interests that concerns you?” I asked. My tone was not sharp, but it was meant to put a former policeman in his place when it came to the interests and actions of gentlemen.
“Oh, yes, sir. Yes, Mr Collins. Indeed there is,” said the inspector, sitting back in the chair until it creaked. He was inspecting his still-burning cigar and frowning slightly. “Everything about this Drood person concerns and interests me, Mr Collins. Everything.”
“Why is that, Inspector?”
He leaned forward. “Drood—or the monster that calls itself Drood—appeared and began its depradations upon my watch, Mr Collins. Quite literally upon my watch. I had just become Chief of the Detective Branch of Scotland Yard, taking over from Inspector Shackell… it was 1846, sir… when Drood’s reign of terror began.”
“Reign of terror?” I repeated. “I do not remember reading in the newspapers about any such reign of terror.”
“Oh, there’s lots of horrors that happen in those dark parts of town you and Mr Dickens went voyaging into in July that don’t end up in the newspapers, Mr Collins. You can be assured of that.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Inspector,” I said softly. The cigars were close to being smoked in their entirety. When they were, I would claim the press of creative business and show the retired old policeman to the door.
He leaned forward again and this time his active finger was pointed at me. “I need to know what you and Mr Dickens discovered about Drood that night, Mr Collins. I need to know everything.”
“I do not see how that is your concern, Inspector.”
Field smiled then and it was a broad enough smile to rearrange his ageing face into an entire new complexity of wrinkles, folds, and planes. It was not a warm smile. “It is my concern, Mr Collins, in ways that you cannot and could not ever comprehend. And I will have this information in all its details.”
I sat straight in my chair, feeling the pain from my rheumatical gout fuel my displeasure and impatience. “That sounds like a threat, Inspector.”
The smile grew wider. “Inspector Charles Frederick Field, either of the police Detective Bureau or of his own Private Enquiry Bureau, does not make threats, Mr Collins. But he will have the information he requires to carry on his battle with an old and implacable foe.”
“If this… Drood… has been your foe, as you put it, for almost two decades, Inspector, you hardly need our help. You must know much more about… your foe… than Dickens or I ever will.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” agreed Field. “I do. I would blush to say that I know more about the creature you call Drood than does any man now living. But Hatchery informs me that Mr Dickens has had recent contact with the entity. And out of Undertown. At the Staplehurst accident, to be precise. I need more information about that and about what the two of you saw in Undertown in July.”
“I thought the arrangement, or at least Detective Hatchery explained it as such, was for you police and private detectives to leave the denizens of Undertown alone as long as they continue to leave us surface dwellers to our own devices,” I said drily.
Field shook his head. “Drood don’t leave us alone,” he said softly. “I know for a fact that the creature has been responsible for more than three hundred murders in London alone since I first crossed his trail twenty years ago.”
“Good God,” I said. The shock was real. I felt it coursing through me like a full glass of laudanum.
The inspector nodded. “I need to have the information from your amateur search, Mr Collins.”
“You will have to ask Mr Dickens for any information,” I said stiffly. “It was his outing. Drood was of his interest. I assumed from the beginning that our ‘outing’— as you put it—with Detective Hatchery was part of some research that Dickens is doing for a future novel or story. I still assume that to be the case. But you will have to speak to him, Inspector.”
“I went to speak to him as soon as I returned to London after my long absence and heard from Hatchery the reason for Dickens having hired him,” said Field. He rose and began pacing, walking back and forth in front of my desk. His corpulent finger was first at his mouth, then to his ear, then alongside his nose, then touching the stone egg on my desk or the ivory tusk on my bookshelf or the Persian dagger on the mantel. “Mr Dickens was in France and unavailable. He has just returned and I interviewed him yesterday. He gave me no information of any use.”
“Well, Inspector…” I said, opening my hands. I set my cigar on the edge of the brass tray on my desk and rose. “You see then that there could be nothing I could add to help you. It was Mr Dickens’s research. It is Mr Dickens’s…”