I confess here, Dear Reader, that my heart began to pound wildly and I felt an urgent liquidity in the region of my bowels. I do not like to think of myself as a coward—what man does? — but I am a small man, and a peaceful one, and though I might write fiction from time to time about violence, fisticuffs, mayhem, and murder, these are not things that I had then personally experienced, nor wanted to.

At that moment I wanted to run. I had the absurd but real compulsion to call out for my mother, although Harriet was hundreds of miles away.

Even though none of the three men said a word, I reached into my jacket and removed my long wallet. Many of my friends and acquain-tances—certainly Dickens—thought me a shade too reluctant to part with money. Actually, Dickens and his friends, all having been gifted with money for many years, ignored my need for pecuniary discipline and thought me cheap, a penny-pinching miser in the mode of pre-revelation Ebenezer Scrooge.

But at that moment I would have given up every pound and shilling I had on me—and even my not-gold but quite serviceable watch—if these ruffians would only let me pass.

As I said, they did not demand money. Perhaps that is what frightened me most. Or perhaps it was the terribly serious and inhuman looks on their bewhiskered faces—especially the alert deadness combined with something like anticipatory joy in the grey eyes of the largest man, who approached me now with knife raised.

“Wait!” I said weakly. And again, “Wait… wait…”

The big man in the shabby clothes raised the knife until it was almost touching my chest and neck.

“Wait!” shouted a much louder and much more commanding voice from behind the four of us, towards the thoroughfare, where there was still light and hope.

My assailants and I all turned to look.

A small man in a brown suit was standing there. Despite the commanding voice, the figure was no taller than I. He was hatless, and I could see short, curly grey hair plastered to his head by the light rain that was falling.

“Go away, friend,” growled the man holding the knife to my throat. “You don’t want no part of this.”

“Oh, but I do,” said the short man and ran towards us.

All three of my assailants turned in his direction, but my legs felt too unsteady to allow me to bolt. I was sure that within seconds both I and my would-be rescuer would be lying dead on the filthy paving stones in that unnamed, lightless lane.

The brown-suited man, whom I had first thought to be as portly as I but who I now saw to be compact but as muscled as a diminutive acrobat, reached into his tweedy suit jacket and quickly brought out a short, obviously weighted piece of wood that looked like a cross between a sailor’s marlin spike and a policeman’s club. This club had a dull, heavy head and appeared to be cored with lead or something as heavy.

Two of my assailants leaped at him. The brown-suited stranger broke the wrist and ribs of the first thug with two quick swings and then cracked the second one over the head with a sound such as I had never heard before. The burliest of my attackers—the whiskered and deadly-eyed man who had, only a second before, been holding the knife to my throat—extended the blade with his thumb atop it and feinted and whirled and lunged and swung at my rescuer from a poised, catlike crouch, all dance-like motions which, I am sure, had been honed in a thousand back-alley knife fights.

The brown-suited man jumped back as his attacker’s blade swung first right and then back left in vicious arcs that would have disemboweled him if not for his agility. Then—much more quickly than one could ever imagine judging from his stolid appearance—my saviour leaped in, broke our mutual assailant’s right forearm with a downward swing of his small cudgel, broke the thug’s jaw with the backhand return of the same swing, and—as the big man fell—struck him a third time in the groin with such violence that I winced and cried out myself, and then hit him a final time in the back of the head as the thug went first to his knees and then to his face in the mud.

Only the first assailant, the one with the broken ribs and wrist, remained conscious. He was staggering towards the darkness deeper in the alley.

The brown-suited man ran him down, spun him, struck him twice in the face with the short but deadly weapon, kicked his legs out from under him, and then struck him a final savage blow to the head as he lay there moaning. Then there were no more moans.

The compact man in brown turned towards me.

I admit that I backed away with my hands up, palms open imploringly towards the short, deadly figure that approached. I had come very, very close to soiling my linen. Only the incredible—I would say impossible—speed of the violence I had just witnessed had prevented my full and total reaction of fear.

I had written about violent altercations many times, but the physical events were all recorded as if choreographed and carried out in slow, deliberate motions. All of the real violence I had just witnessed—certainly the worst I had ever witnessed, and the most savage—had happened in seven or eight seconds. There was, I realised, a very real chance that I might vomit if the brown-suited terror did not kill me first. I held my hands up and tried to speak.

“It’s all right, Mr Collins,” said the man, tucking his cudgel into his jacket pocket and firmly taking me by the arm and leading me back the way I had come, out into the thoroughfare light. Broughams and cabs passed as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.

“Who… who… are you?” I managed. His grip was as relentless as one imagines a smithy vice’s steel grip might be.

“Mr Barris, sir. At your service. We need to get you back to the hotel, sir.”

“Barris?” I was ashamed to hear the quaver and stammer in my voice. I have always prided myself on being cool in difficult situations, at sea or on the land (although in recent months and years, I admit, that equanimity had been in small part due to the laudanum).

“Yes, sir. Reginald Barris. Detective Reginald Barris. Reggie to my friends, Mr Collins.”

“You’re Birmingham police?” I said as we turned east and began walking quickly, his hand still on my arm.

Barris laughed. “Oh, no, sir. I work for Inspector Field. Came up from London by way of Bristol, just as you did, sir.”

One uses the word “wobbly” in relation to “legs” often enough in fiction; it is a cliché. To actually feel legs so unsteady and wobbly that it is difficult to walk is an absurd situation, especially to someone like me, who loves to sail and who has not the slightest problem peramubulating on a pitching deck in the high seas of the Channel.

I managed to say, “Should we not go back? Those three men might be injured.”

Barris, if that was his true name, chuckled. “Oh, I guarantee that they are injured, Mr Collins. One is dead, I believe. But we are not going back. Leave them lie.”

“Dead?” I repeated stupidly. I could not believe that. I would not believe that. “We must inform the police.”

“The police?” said Barris. “Oh, no, sir. I think not. Inspector Field would sack me if I got my name and our Private Enquiries firm’s name in the Birmingham and London papers. And you might be delayed here for days, Mr Collins. And called back to testify in an endless series of inquests and hearings. And all for three street thugs who were ready to cut your throat to steal your purse? Please, sir, put such thoughts out of your mind.”

“I don’t understand,” I said as we turned east on an even wider street. I recognised the way back to the hotel now. The lamps were being lit all along this busy boulevard. “Did Field send you to… watch over me? Protect me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Barris, releasing my arm at last. I could feel the blood rush in where he had cut off circulation. “That is, sir, there are two of us… ah… accompanying you and Mr Dickens on this tour. In case Mr Drood should make an appearance, sir. Or his agents.”