“Thirteen,” I said.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Thirteen years ago,” I said. “Dickens published ‘Down with the Tide’ in Household Words in February of 1853. I edited it.”

“Ah, of course,” said Inspector Field. He brushed his chin with his thumb. “Is there a reason you suggested we meet, Mr Collins? News of any kind?”

“Rather an absence of news,” I said. “You never responded to my written report or query.”

“I apologise,” said the inspector, but there was no real tone of apology in his husky voice. “It has been very busy, Mr Collins. Very busy indeed. I very much appreciated your report on Mr Dickens’s reading in Birmingham, even though our friend Drood did not appear. Was there a specific query I could answer?”

“You could tell me if any of those three men died,” I said.

“Three men?” The inspector’s flushed, chapped, and heavily veined visage was the picture of innocent ignorance.

“The three men in the alley, Inspector. The three men who assaulted me and whom your Detective Reginald Call-Me-Reggie Barris clubbed down. Barris said that one or more of them might be dead from the blow. I went back to that alley the next morning before leaving Birmingham, but there was no sign of them.”

Inspector Field was smiling and nodding now, his forefinger along the side of his nose. “Yes, yes, of course. Barris did report to me about the incident in the alley. I’m sure that all of those ruffians suffered no more than a headache and an insult to their thieves’ pride, Mr Collins. You have to forgive Barris. He has a penchant for melodrama. Sometimes I believe he would have preferred a career on the stage to the life of private investigative enquiries.”

“Why did you have him follow me, Inspector? I thought that the idea was to observe Charles Dickens in the hope that Drood might contact him… not follow me around.”

Field’s bushy eyebrows lifted towards what remained of his hairline. “Surely Detective Barris must have explained that to you, sir. We have concerns that this Drood might make an attempt on your life.”

“Barris said that the three men in the alley were most likely simple thieves,” I said.

“Aye,” agreed Inspector Field, nodding again. “Them being white men and all, that is almost certainly the case. But you must admit that it was fortuitous that Barris was there. You might have been severely injured, Mr Collins, and you certainly would have been robbed.”

We had walked across the Waterloo Bridge twice by now and this time continued walking north towards the Strand. Somewhere to the west along the river here was the Warren’s Blacking Factory, where Katey Dickens had once told me her father had been sent to labour as a child. He had mentioned it to her in an almost joking manner, but Katey confided in me that she felt it may have been the most upsetting and formative event of his life.

“I know where your Drood is, Inspector,” I said as we turned right on the Strand towards Somerset House and Drury Lane.

Field stopped. “You do, sir?”

“I do, sir.” I let the silence between us fill the air under the rumble and roar of passing traffic. “Dickens is Drood,” I said at last.

“I beg your pardon?” said the inspector.

“Dickens is Drood,” I said again. “There is no Drood.”

“That seems highly unlikely, Mr Collins.”

I smiled almost patronisingly. “I’ve said before that Drood appears to be a figment of the writer’s imagination, Inspector. Now I know that the phantom is no more than that. Dickens has created Drood to suit his own purposes.”

“And what might those purposes be, sir?”

“Power,” I said. “A mischievous sense of power over others. For many years, as I’ve told you, Dickens has played with magnetic influence and mesmerism. Now he invents this Master of Mesmerism as his alter ego, as it were.”

We had resumed walking east and now Inspector Field tapped the pavement with his heavy stick. “He could hardly have invented Drood, Mr Collins, seeing as I have been pursuing the blackguard for twenty years come this August.”

“Have you ever seen him, Inspector?” I said. “Drood, I mean.”

“Seen him?” repeated the older man. “Why no, sir. I believe I’ve told you that I have never personally laid eyes on the murderer. But I have apprehended some of his agents and I have certainly seen the results of his work. More than three hundred murders in those twenty years, not the least terrible of which was the grisly death of Lord Lucan in 1846. You yourself told me the story that Dickens reported Drood telling him—and the identity of Lord Lucan, who was long rumoured to have had a son in Egypt, fits perfectly.”

“Too perfectly,” I said smugly.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“You may be a detective, Inspector Field,” I said, “but you have never plotted and written a story with detective work in it. I have.”

Inspector Field continued striding and tapping, but he looked my way and listened.

“Certainly there has been a legend of a murderous Egyptian named Drood for these two decades or so,” I explained. “The shadowy dockside murderer. The phantom Oriental mesmeriser, sending his agents out to rob and kill. The unreal occupant of the very real Undertown. But he is only a legend, with no more real history to him than there is actual physicality. Charles Dickens has walked these riverside and dockside slums for years and years. He certainly has heard of this Drood—perhaps before you did twenty years ago, Inspector—and for his own purposes, he has incorporated actual events such as the murder of Lord Lucan (with its delicious element of the man’s heart being ripped from his chest) into his biography of the unreal personage.”

“What would those purposes be, Mr Collins?” asked Inspector Field. We had just passed Somerset House. Once a royal residence, the newer structure had housed government offices for the past thirty years. I knew that Dickens’s father and uncle had been employed there.

We crossed the Strand and took a narrow lane as a shortcut in the direction of Drury Lane, where the fictional David Copperfield had ordered beef in a restaurant and where a very real Wilkie Collins hoped to have a successful staging of Armadale before too much more time passed.

“To what purpose, sir?” repeated the inspector when we were alone in the lane. “To what purpose would Mr Dickens lie to you about the existence of Drood?”

I smiled and swung my own walking stick. “Let me tell you a little story from Dickens’s reading tour, Inspector. I heard it last week from George Dolby.”

“As you wish, sir.”

“The travel part of the tour ended in Portsmouth at the end of May,” I said. “Dickens had a little time that was his own so he led Wills and Dolby on one of his walking expeditions and they found themselves in Landport Terrace. ‘By Jove!’ exclaimed Dickens. ‘Here is the place where I was born! One of these houses must be the one.’ And so he led Wills and Dolby from house to house, explaining that one must be it because it ‘looked so like my father.’ Then, no, another must be the correct one ‘because it looked like the birthplace of a man who had deserted it.’ But no again, a third must be it because it was ‘most definitely like the cradle of a puny, weak youngster…’ and so on through the row of homes.

“Then, Inspector, in an open square in the town, all lined with redbrick houses dotted by white window frames, Dickens decided to imitate the clowning of Grimaldi.”

“Grimaldi?” said Inspector Field.

“A pantomimist whom Dickens adored,” I said. “So, with Wills and Dolby watching, the famous writer Charles Dickens mounted the steps to one of these houses, gave three raps to the brass-plated green door, and lay down on the top step. A moment later when a stout woman opened the door, Dickens leapt up and took off running, with Dolby and Wills beating a hasty retreat behind him. Dickens would point behind them at an imaginary policeman pursuing and all three distinguished gentlemen would pick up their pace. When the wind blew off Dickens’s hat and scuttled it ahead of them, the pursuit became real enough as all three chased the hat in comic pantomime.”