“Detective Hatchery,” he said, already turning away, his walking cane clicking on stone, “you shall see to the disposition?”

“Before daybreak, sir. You may count on it.”

“I am sure we can,” said Dickens, lowering his head and holding his top hat as we stepped through another aperture into yet an even darker, smaller, more pestilential courtyard. “Come, come, Wilkie. Keep up to the light.”

The open doorway, when we finally reached it, was no more distinguished than the last three dozen shadowy doorways we had passed. Just inside, shielded from view from without, set into its own deep niche, was a small blue lantern. Detective Hatchery grunted and led the way up the narrow black stairs.

The first-storey landing was dark. The next flight of stairs was narrower than the first, though not quite as dark, since there was the dim glow of a single fluttering candle above us on the next landing. The air was so thick here, the heat so intense, and the stench so overpowering that I wondered how the candle managed to continue burning.

Hatchery opened a door without knocking and we all filed in.

We were in the first and largest of several rooms, all visible through open doorways. In this room two Lascars and an old woman sprawled over a sprung bed that seemed heaped with discoloured rags. Some of the rags stirred and I realised that there were more people on the bed. The whole scene was lit by a few burned-down candles and one red-glassed lantern that cast a bloody hue over everything. Eyes peeped furtively at us from beneath rags in the adjoining rooms even as I realised that there were more bodies—Chinese, Occidental, Lascar—sprawled on the floors and in corners. Some tried to crawl away like roaches exposed to a sudden light. The ancient crone on the bed immediately before us, its four posts carved with years of idle knives, its draperies hanging down like rotted funeral cloths, was blowing at a kind of pipe made of an old penny ink-bottle. The thickness of smoke and harsh, aromatic stink in the room, blended with the sewer-Thames stench wafting in through the close-slatted blinds, caused my gout-hounded stomach to lurch again. I wished then that I had imbibed a second glass of my medicinal laudanum before joining Dickens this evening.

Hatchery prodded the old woman with a wooden police club he had smoothly retrieved from his belt. “’Ere, ’ere, old Sal,” he said harshly. “Wake up and talk to us. These gentlemen have questions for you, and by my oath, you’re going to answer them to my satisfaction.”

“Sal” was a wrinkled ancient, missing teeth, lacking colour in her cheeks and lips, and showing no light of character other than the debauchery visible in her weak, watery eyes. She squinted at Hatchery and then at us. “’Ib,” she said, recognising the giant through her daze, “are you back on the force? Do I need to pay thee?”

“I’m here to ’ave some answers,” said Hatchery, prodding her again on the rags above her sunken chest. “And we’ll ’ave them before we leave.”

“Ask away,” said the woman. “But give me leave first to refill old Yahee’s pipe, that’s a good copper.”

For the first time I noticed what appeared to be an ancient mummy reclining on pillows in the corner of the room behind the large bed.

Old Sal reached to a tumbler in the centre of the room, on a japan tray, that appeared to be half-filled with something like treacle. Lifting some of the thick treacle with a pin, she carried it to the mummy in the corner. As he turned towards the light, I saw that old Yahee was attached to an opium pipe and had been since we had entered. Without fully opening his eyes, he took the bit of treacle in his yellowed, long-nailed fingers, rolled it and rolled it until it was a little ball hardly larger than a pea, and then set it into the bowl of his already smoking pipe. The old mummy’s eyes closed and he turned away from the light, his bare feet tucked under him.

“There’s four pennies more to my own modest coffers,” said Sal as she returned to our small circle of red light near the lantern. “Yahee, you should well know, ’Ib, is more nor eighty years old and been a’smoking the opium through sixty nor more of those years. It’s true ’e don’t sleep, but ’e’s wonderfully ’ealthy and clean. In the morning, after a night o’ smoking, ’e buys his own rice and fish and vegetables, but only after a’scrubbin’ and a’cleanin’ ’is house out and own person off. Sixty years o’ opium, and never a sick day. Ol’ Yahee ’as smoked his way ’ealthy through the last four London Fevers while those arounst ’im were fallin’ like flies, and…”

“Enough,” commanded Hatchery, silencing the crone. “The gentleman’s going to ask you a few questions now, Sal… and if you value this rat hole you call a ’ome and business and don’t want to see it shut down around your poxy ears, then by God you had better answer quick and honest.”

She squinted at us.

“Madam,” said Dickens, his tone as easy and cordial as if he were addressing a lady visitor to his parlour, “we are seeking out an individual named Drood. We know that he used to patronise your… ah… establishment. Could you tell us, please, where we might find him now?”

I saw the shock and sobriety hit the opiated woman as surely as if Dickens had thrown a bucket of freezing water on her. Her eyes widened for a few seconds, then closed in an even more narrow and suspicious squint. “Drood? I don’t know no Drood.…”

Hatchery smiled and prodded her harder with his stick. “That won’t wash, Sal. We know he was a customer ’ere.”

“Who says?” hissed the crone. A dying candle on the floor extended her hiss.

Hatchery smiled again but also prodded her again. The club pressed against her skeletal arm, harder this time.

“Mother Abdallah and Booboo both told me that they’ve seen someone you called Drood ’ere in years past… a white man, missing fingers, strange accent. Said he used to be a regular of yours. He smells of rotting meat, Mother Abdallah told me,” said the detective.

Sal attempted a laugh but it came out only as a wheezing rattle. “Mother Abdallah’s a crazy bitch. Booboo’s a lying Chinaman.”

“It may be.” Hatchery smiled. “But no more crazy nor lyin’ than you, my Puffer Princess. Somebody named Drood has been ’ere and you know it and you’ll tell us.” Still smiling, he brought the end of the weighted baton down on her long but arthritis-gnarled fingers.

Sal howled. Two heaps of rags in a corner began dragging themselves and their opium pipes into another room where the noise, should someone be murdered, would not disturb their dreams.

Dickens removed several shillings from his purse and jingled them in his palm. “Telling us everything you know about Mr Drood shall be to your advantage, madam.”

“And you’ll spend a few nights—maybe weeks—not just in my station cell but in the dankest pit in Newgate if you don’t tell us,” added Hatchery.

The impact of that struck me on a level that could not affect Dickens. I tried to imagine a few nights, much less weeks, without my laudanum. This woman obviously ingested much more of the pure opium than I ever had. My own bones ached at the mere idea of being deprived of my medicine.

There were real tears in the Puffer Princess’s watery eyes now. “All right, all right, leave off wi’ the bludgeonings and threatenings, ’Ib. I’ve always done right by you, ain’t I? I’ve always paid up when pay-up was due, ain’t I? ’Aven’t I always…”

“Tell the gentlemen about this Drood and shut your gob about anything else,” Hatchery said in his most quiet and threatening voice. He laid the length of his club along her quivering forearm.

“When did you know this Drood?” asked Dickens.

“Up to about a year ago,” breathed the Puffer Princess. “’E don’t come around no more.”

“Where does he live, madam?”

“I don’t knows. I swears I don’t knows. Chow Chee John Potter brought this Drood bird in for the first time about eight… maybe nine years ago. They smoked prodigious amounts of the product, they did. Drood always paid in gold sovereigns, so ’is credit was pure gold and all paid up for the sweet future, as it were. He never sung or shouted like the others… there, you ’ear one now in t’other room… ’e just smoked and sat there and looked at me. And looked at the others. Sometimes ’e’d leave first, long before t’others, sometimes ’e’d be the last t’leave.”