For my ride out to Peckham and my wait of unknown length, I packed in my old leather portmanteau—which I carried with a shoulder strap—the proofs of my last number of The Moonstone; a portable pen-and-ink writing set; a copy of Thackeray’s most recent novel (should I finish reading my own work); a light lunch and a late-afternoon snack consisting of cheese, biscuits, a few slices of meat, and a hard-boiled egg; a flask of water; another flask of my laudanum; and the deceased Detective Hatchery’s pistol.

I had succeeded in checking the revolving cylinder. At first I was surprised to see all the cartridges in place, their round brass circles remaining in their cubicles, and wondered if I had only dreamt firing the weapon in the servants’ stairwell. But then I realised that the bases of the brass cartridges remained in this sort of pistol after their lead bullets had been fired.

Five of the nine cartridges had been fired. Four remained.

I pondered whether to remove the spent cartridges or to leave them in place—I simply did not know the proper protocol—but in the end I chose to take the empty cartridges out of the weapon (disposing of them secretly) and remembered only later that I should make sure that the remaining cartridges be in place to fire when I next pulled the trigger. This was achieved simply by rotating the cylinder back to the position it had been in before I removed the empty cartridges.

I wondered if four workable bullets would be enough for my purposes that night. But the point tended to be academic, since I had no clue as to where I might find new bullets to purchase for this odd pistol.

So four would have to be enough. At least three for Drood. I remembered Detective Hatchery once telling me, after our Thursday-night visit to a public house and while on our way to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery, that even for such a large-calibre pistol as the one he had given me (and I had no idea what “calibre” indicated), those very few detectives who carried pistols were taught to aim and fire at least two shots at the centre torso of their human target. Hatchery had added in a whisper, “And we boys on the street add one for the ’ead.”

The words had made me shiver in revulsion on the night I heard them. Now I took them as advice from the grave.

At least three for Drood. Two for centre torso and one for that odd, balding, pale, repulsive, and reptilian head.

The fourth and final bullet…

I would decide later that night.

The early parts of my plan worked perfectly.

I spent my afternoon and early evening sitting in ever-more-slanting sunlight in the small park between Peckham Station and the rural thoroughfare. Carriages and pedestrians came and went. A single glance through the hedge from where I sat usually told me all I needed to know to certify the arrivals were not my quarry. The only sidewalk from the station driveway to the station platform ran directly past the trellised entrance to my little park, not thirty steps from my bench, and I found that I could keep pace along my side of the hedge and clearly hear the conversation between any pedestrians approaching the station along that walkway.

As I had hoped and planned, this hedge offered me both concealment and the ability to observe through thin gaps that were rather like vertical gun slits. In the parlance of our day, borrowed from English hunters of good Scottish goose on the wing or Bengal tiger in the jungle, Dear Reader, I was in a blind.

The pleasant afternoon passed into pleasant evening. I finished my lunch and my snack and two-thirds of the laudanum in my flask. I had also finished the proofing of the last instalment of The Moonstone and set the long galleys away in my valise with my apple core, cake crumbs, eggshell shards, and pistol. I should have been racked with anxiety as the hours slipped away, torn by the certainty that Dickens had used the New Cross Station or was not going to London at all that day.

But the longer I waited, the more calm I became. Not even the painful shifting of the scarab, which seemed to have burrowed down close to the base of my spine that day, disrupted the rising certainty that calmed my nerves more surely than any opiate. I had never been so sure of anything in my life than that Dickens would come this way this evening. Again, I thought of the experienced hunter of tigers on his raised and camouflaged shooting platform somewhere in India, his oiled, deadly weapon nested secure in the crook of his steady arm. He knew when his dangerous prey was approaching, even though he could not have told the non-white hunter how he knew.

And then, about eight PM, when the June evening shade was turning into cool twilight, I set down the Thackeray that was not holding my interest, peeked out through the hedge, and there he was.

SURPRISINGLY, DICKENS WAS not alone. He and Ellen Ternan were walking slowly on the park side of the dusty thoroughfare. She was dressed as if for an afternoon outing and, despite the fact that the lane was in full shadow from trees and homes on the west side, carried a parasol. Behind the two of them and on the opposite side of the street, a carriage was creeping along—now stopping, now moving forward slowly—and I realised that it must be one that Dickens had hired to carry Ellen back to Linden Grove from the station. The lovebirds had decided to walk to the station together so that she could see Dickens off.

But there was something wrong. I could sense it in the halting, almost pained way that Dickens was walking and by the strained distance between the two of them. I could tell it by the way that Ellen Ternan would now lower the useless parasol, close it, grip it tightly with both hands, and then open it again. These were not two lovebirds. They were two injured birds.

The carriage stopped a final time and waited along the opposite kerb thirty yards from the entrance drive to the railway station.

As Dickens and Ellen came alongside the high hedge, I was suddenly frightened into immobility. The dying evening light and hedge-shadow should have worked in my favour, making the sometimes sparse hedge seem solid and dark to anyone walking beyond it, but for an instant I was certain that I was clearly visible to the two. In a few seconds Dickens and his mistress would see a familiar small man with a high forehead, tiny glasses, and a voluminous beard huddled on a bench less than two feet from the walkway they would be passing. My heart pounded so wildly that I was sure that they would be able to hear it. My hands were half-raised towards my face—as if I had been about to try to hide behind them—and set into the position in which they had frozen. I would appear to Dickens like a soft, pale, wide-eyed, and bearded rabbit caught in the beam of a hunter’s lantern.

They did not look in my direction as they passed the hedge. Their voices were low, but I could hear them easily enough. The train had not arrived, the suburban thoroughfare was empty of traffic save for the parked carriage, and the only other sound was the soft coo of doves under the station’s eaves.

“… we can put our sad history behind us,” Dickens was saying.

The italics were obvious from his tone. So was an undertone of pleading that I had never… never… heard from Charles Dickens.

“Our sad history is buried in France, Charles,” Ellen said very softly. Her broad sleeves brushed the hedge as they moved past me. “But it shall never be behind us.”

Dickens sighed. It came out almost as a moan. The two stopped ten paces before the sidewalk reached the turn towards the station. They were not six paces past my blind. I did not stir.

“What is to be done, then?” he said. The words were so loaded with misery that they might have been extracted from a man being tortured.