I shook my head. “Why would he choose to travel by… my God… by coffin? It would cost more than a first-class ticket.”

“A little less, sir, a little less,” interposed Hatchery. “I checked into that. Cargo rates for transporting the deceased is a little less than first class, sir. Not much, but a few shillings lighter.”

I still could make no sense of it. “But certainly, Charles,” I said softly, “you’re not suggesting that your bizarre-looking Mr Drood was a… what? A ghost? A ghoul of some sort? The walking dead?”

Dickens laughed again, even more boyishly this time. “My dear Wilkie. Really. If you were a criminal, Wilkie—known to the port police as well as to London police—what would be the easiest and most effective way that you could get from France back to London?”

It was my turn to laugh, but not with any delight, I can assure you. “Not by coffin,” I said. “All the way from France? It’s… unthinkable.”

“Hardly, my dear boy,” said Dickens. “Merely a few hours of discomfort. Hardly more uncomfortable than normal ferry and rail travel today, if one must be perfectly candid. And who bothers to inspect a coffin with a week-old corpse rotting in it?”

“Was his corpse a week old?” I asked.

Dickens only flicked the white fingers of his glove at me, as if I had made a jest.

“So why are we going towards the docks tonight?” I asked. “Does Detective Hatchery have some information on where Mr Drood’s coffin has floated?”

“Actually, sir,” said Hatchery, “my enquiries in this part of town has led us to some folks who say they know Drood. Or knew him. Or have done business with ’im, as it were. That’s where we’re ’eaded now.”

“Then let’s press on,” said Dickens.

Hatchery held up a huge hand as if he were stopping carriage traffic on the Strand. “I feel it my duty to point out, gentlemen, that we are now entering Bluegate Fields proper, although there is precious little proper about it. It ain’t even on most city maps, officially speaking, nor New Court, where we’re ’eaded, neither. It’s a dangerous place for gentlemen, gentlemen. There’s men where we’re going as will kill you in a minute.”

Dickens laughed. “As would those ruffians we encountered a while ago, I presume,” he said. “What is the difference with Bluegate Fields, my dear Hatchery?”

“The difference is, gov’ner, that them what we met a while ago, they’d take you for your purse and leave you beat senseless by the road, p’hraps even to the point of death, aye. But them what’s up ahead… they’ll slit your throat, sir, just to see if their blade still ’as an edge.”

I looked at Dickens.

“Lascars and Hindoos and Bengalees particular and Chinamen by the gross,” continued Hatchery. “Also Irishmen and Germans and other such flotsam, not to mention the scum o’ the earth sailors ashore a’hunting for women and opium, but it’s the Englishmen ’ere in Bluegate Fields you have to fear most, gentlemen. The Chinee and other foreigners, they don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t talk mostly, just live for their opium… but the Englishmen ’ereabouts, they are an uncommonly rough crew, Mr Dickens. Uncommonly rough.”

Dickens laughed again. He sounded as if he had been drinking heavily, but I know he only had some wine and port with dinner. It was more the carefree laugh of a child. “Then we will just have to entrust our safety to you once again, Inspector Hatchery.”

I’d noticed that Dickens had just given the private detective a promotion in rank, and from the way the huge man shuffled modestly from foot to foot, it appeared that Hatchery had interpreted it that way as well.

“Aye, sir,” said the detective. “With your pardon, I’ll take the lead now, sir. And it might be’oove you gentlemen to stay close for a while now.”

MOST OF THE STREETS we had already passed through were not marked and the maze of Bluegate Fields was even less delineated, but Hatchery seemed to know exactly where he was going. Even Dickens, striding next to the huge detective, seemed to have a sense of his destination, but the detective answered my whispered question by listing, in his normal tone of voice, some of the places we had been or were soon to see: the church of St Georges-in-the-east (I had no memory of passing it), George Street, Rosemary Lane, Cable Street, Knock Fergus. Black Lane, New Road, and Royal Mint Street. I had noticed none of these names posted on signs.

At New Court, we left the stinking street, passed into a dark courtyard—Hatchery’s bullseye lantern was our only illumination— and proceeded on through a gap that was more hole in the wall than formal gateway into a series of other dark courtyards. The buildings seemed abandoned, but my guess was that the windows were merely heavily shuttered. When we stepped off pavement, the ooze of the river or seeping sewage squelched underfoot.

Dickens paused by what had once been a broad window but which now, with all the glass gone, was merely a ledge and black hole in the blinded side of a black building.

“Hatchery,” he cried, “your lamp.”

The cone of light from the bullseye lantern illuminated three pale, whitish, indistinct lumps on the broken stone sill. For a moment I was sure that three skinned rabbits had been left there. I stepped closer and then stepped quickly back, raising my handkerchief to my nose and mouth.

“Newborns,” said Hatchery. “The one in the middle was stillborn, is my guess. The two others died shortly after birth. Not triplets. Born and died different times from the look of the maggots and rat nibblings and other signs.”

“Dear God,” I said through my handkerchief. Bile rose high in my throat. “But why… leave them here?”

“’Ere’s as good a place as any,” said the detective. “Some of the mothers try to bury ’em. Dress ’em up in what rags they may have. Put little caps on ’em before dropping the wee things into the Thames or burying ’em in the courtyards ’ere. Most don’t bother. They ’ave to get back to work.”

Dickens turned towards me. “Still tempted by the wench who wanted to take you inside for ‘bacca,’ Wilkie?”

I did not answer. I took another step back and concentrated on not vomiting.

“I’ve seen this before, Hatchery,” said Dickens, his voice strangely flat, calm, and conversational. “Not just here in the Great Oven during my walks, but as a young child.”

“Have you indeed, sir?” said the detective.

“Yes, many times. When I was very young, before we moved from Rochester to London, we had a servant girl named Mary Weller who would take me with her, my tiny hand trembling in her large calloused one, to countless lyings-in. So many that I have often wondered if my true profession should not have been that of midwife. More often than not, the babies died, Hatchery. I remember one terrible multiple birth—the mother did not survive either—where there were five dead infants—I believe it was five, as astounding as that sounds, although I was very young, it might have been four—all laid out side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of drawers. You know what I thought of at my tender age of four or five, Hatchery?”

“What, sir?”

“I thought of pigs’ feet the way they are usually displayed at a neat tripe-shop,” said Charles Dickens. “It’s hard not to think of Thyestes’ feast when encountering such an image.”

“Indeed, sir,” agreed Hatchery. I was sure the detective had no idea of the classical reference to which Dickens was referring. But I did. Again the bile and vomit rose in my throat and threatened to explode.

“Wilkie,” Dickens said sharply. “Your handkerchief, if you please.”

After a pause, I handed it over.

Taking out his own larger, more expensive silk handkerchief, Dickens carefully laid both cloths over the three rotting and partially eaten infant bodies, weighting down the ends with loose bricks from the broken sill.