After dinner we took a cab to a police station house in Leman Street.

“Do you remember Police Inspector Charles Frederick Field?” Dickens asked as our cab rumbled towards the police station.

“Of course,” I said. “Field was in the Detective Department at Scotland Yard. You spent time with him when you were obtaining background material for Household Words years ago, and he escorted us that time we toured the… ah… less appealing areas of Whitechapel.” I did not mention that I’d always felt sure that Dickens had used Inspector Field as his template for “Inspector Bucket” in Bleak House. The overly assured voice, the sense of easy dominance over obvious criminals and brigands and women of the street who had crossed our path that long night in Whitechapel, not to mention the big man’s ability to take one’s elbow in an iron grip one could not escape and which would then move one in directions one had not planned on going… all of Inspector Bucket’s rough skills had described the real Inspector Field to a “T,” as they say.

I said, “Inspector Field was our protective angel during our descent into Hades.”

“Precisely, my dear Wilkie,” said Dickens as we exited the cab in front of the Leman Street police station. “And while Inspector Field has gone on to retirement and new endeavours, it is my sincerest pleasure to introduce you to our new protective angel.”

The man waiting for us there under the gas lamp outside the police station seemed more wall than man. Despite the heat, he wore a full coat—rather like the loose, long sort that Australian or American cowboys are so often shown wearing in illustrations for penny-dreadful novels—and his massive head was topped with a bowler hat set firmly on a mop of tight, curly hair. The man’s body was absurdly wide and stolidly square—a sort of granite pedestal to the square block of stone that was his head and face. His eyes were small, his nose a blunt rectangle seemingly carved out of the same stone as his face, and his mouth appeared to be little more than a thin sculpted line. His neck was as wide as the brim of his bowler. His hands were at least thrice the size of mine.

Charles Dickens stood five foot nine inches tall. I was several inches shorter than Dickens. This square hulk of a man in the grey cowboy duster looked to be at least eight inches taller than Dickens.

“Wilkie, please meet former sergeant Hibbert Aloysius Hatchery,” said Dickens, grinning through his beard. “Detective Hatchery, I am pleased to introduce my most valued associate and talented fellow writer and fellow seeker of Mr Drood this night, Mr Wilkie Collins, Esquire.”

“Pleasure, sir, indeed,” said the wall looming above us. “You may call me Hib if it pleases you, Mr Collins.”

“Hib,” I repeated stupidly. Luckily, the giant had merely tipped his bowler hat in greeting. The thought of that huge hand enveloping my own and crushing all the bones of my hand made me feel weak about the knees.

“My father, a wise man but not a learned one, if you follow my meaning, sir,” said Detective Hatchery, “was sure that the name Hibbert was in the Bible. But, alas, it weren’t. Not even as a resting place for the Hebrews in the wilderness.”

“Detective Hatchery was a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Force for several years but is currently on… ah… leave and is privately employed as an investigative detective,” said Dickens. “He may decide to rejoin Scotland Yard’s Detective Bureau in a year or so, but it appears that being privately employed pays more.”

“A privately employed detective,” I muttered. The idea had wonderful possibilities. I filed it away at that moment and the result—as perhaps you know, Dear Reader from my future, if I might be so immodest—would later become my novel The Moonstone. I said, “Are you on holiday, Detective Hatchery? Some form of police sabbatical?”

“In a way as you might say, sir,” rumbled the giant. “I was asked to take a year off because of irregularities in my treatment of a blackguard felonious sort in the pursuance of my duties, sir. The press made a row. My captain thought it might be better for the Bureau and myself if I went into private practice, a leave of absence as you might say, for a few months.”

“Irregularities,” I said.

Dickens patted me on the back. “Detective Hatchery, in arresting the aforementioned blackguard—a presumptuous daytime burglar who specialised in preying upon elderly ladies right here in Whitechapel— accidentally snapped the worthless thief’s neck. Strangely, the thief lived, but now has to be carried around in a basket by his family. No loss to the community and all a proper part of the job, as Inspector Field and others in the profession have assured me, but some of the oversensitive Punch group, not to mention the lesser newspapers, decided to make a fuss. So it is our great fortune that Detective Hatchery is free to escort us into the Great Oven tonight!”

Hatchery removed a bullseye lantern from beneath his coat. The lantern seemed like a pocket watch in his huge hand. “I shall follow you, gentlemen, but will endeavour to remain silent and invisible unless called upon or needed.”

IT HAD RAINED while Dickens and I were dining, but it only served to make the hot night air around us thicker. The Inimitable led the way, setting his usual absurd walking pace—never less than four miles per hour, which he could maintain hour after hour, I knew from painful experience—and once again I struggled to keep up. Detective Hatchery flowed along ten paces behind us like a silent wall of solidified fog.

We left the wider highways and streets, and with Dickens leading, we entered into a maze of increasingly dark and narrow byways and alleyways. Charles Dickens never hesitated; he knew these terrible streets by heart from his many midnight rambles. I knew only that we were somewhere east of Falcon Square. I retained vague memories of this area from my previous expeditions into the underbelly of London with Dickens—Whitechapel, Shadwell, Wapping, all parts of the city a gentleman would avoid unless looking for the lowest sort of woman—and we seemed to be headed towards the docks. The stench of the Thames grew worse for every gloomy, narrow block we advanced into this rats’ maze. The buildings here looked as if they went back to the medieval period, when London lay fat and dark and diseased within its high walls, and, indeed, the ancient structures on either side of the sidewalk-free streets here overhung us so as almost to shut out the night sky.

“Do we have a destination?” I whispered to Dickens. This particular street was empty of people, but I could feel the eyes watching us from the shuttered windows and filthy alleys on either side. I did not want to be overheard, although I knew that even my whisper would carry like a shout through this thick, silent air.

“Bluegate Fields,” said Dickens. The brass-shod tip of his heavy walking cane—one he carried only on such nocturnal descents into his Babylon, I had noticed—clacked on the broken pavement stones at every third step of his.

“We sometimes calls it Tiger Bay, sir,” came a voice from the darkness behind us.

I admit that I was startled. I had all but forgotten that Detective Hatchery was with us.

We crossed a wider thoroughfare—Brunswick Street, I believe—but it was no cleaner or more illuminated than the rotting slums on either side. Then we were back in the narrow, overhanging labyrinth again. The tenements here crowded high and close except for the few that were total ruins, merely collapsed heaps of masonry and wood. Even there, in those tumbled or charred absences, I could sense dark shadows moving and stirring and watching us. Dickens led us over a narrow, rotted footbridge that crossed a reeking tributary to the Thames. (This was the year, I should point out to you, Dear Reader, that the Prince of Wales officially turned the wheel that opened the Main Drainage Works at Crossness, the first great step in chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s attempt to bring a modern sewage system to London. The cream of England’s nobility and high clergy attended that ceremony. But, setting all delicacy aside, I should also remind you that the Main Drainage Works—and all future sewer systems as well as the myriad of old tributaries and ancient sewers—still drained unfiltered shit into the Thames.)