Inspector Field stoppped. I stopped. After a moment, he said, “Your point, Mr Collins?”

“My point, Inspector, is that Charles Dickens, although chronologically fifty-four years of age, is a child. A mischievous child. He manufactures and plays the games he enjoys and—through his fame and force of personality—bullies those around him to play the game as well. We are now involved, you and I, in Charles Dickens’s Game of Drood.”

Field stood there, scratching the side of his nose while seemingly lost in thought. He suddenly looked very old to me. And not at all well. Finally he said, “Where were you on nine June, Mr Collins?”

I blinked at this. Then I smiled and said, “Didn’t your agents inform you, Inspector?”

“Yes, sir. In truth, they did. You went to your publisher’s offices in the late morning. Your new book was released that day. Then you went to several bookshops from Pall Mall along the Strand to Fleet Street, where you signed several copies of the volumes for certain friends and admirers. That evening you dined… there…”

Field was pointing his cane at the Albion, opposite Drury Lane Theatre.

“… with several artists, including one older gentleman who was a friend of your father’s,” continued the inspector. “You returned home a little after midnight.”

He had managed to wipe the smile off my face and it irked me that he had. “The point of this intrusive and unwarranted recitation, Inspector?” I asked coldly.

“The point is that both you and I know where you were on the ninth of June, Mr Collins. But neither of us knows where Mr Dickens was on that important anniversary.”

“Important anniversary?” I said and then remembered. It was the first anniversary of Dickens’s near thing in the railway accident at Staplehurst. How could I have forgotten?

“Mr Dickens was at Gad’s Hill Place that day,” said Inspector Field without looking at any notes, “but took the four thirty-six PM express to London. Once here he began one of his long walks, this one in the general vicinity of Bluegate Fields.”

“Opium Sal’s,” I ventured. “The entrance to Undertown through the crypt in the cemetery he called Saint Ghastly Grim’s.”

“Not this time, sir,” said Inspector Field. “I had seven of my best agents following Mr Dickens. We felt that the odds were great that the author would contact Drood on this first anniversary of their meeting. But your friend gave my men and myself—I was involved in the tailing that night—quite a merry chase. Just when we were sure that Dickens had gone to ground, he would pop out of some ruin or slum, hail a cab, and be off. Eventually he left Bluegate Fields and the dock areas there and came quite close to where we stand at this moment.… To Saint Enon Chapel north of the Strand near the eastern entrance to Clement’s Inn, to be precise.”

“Saint Enon Chapel,” I repeated. The name rang a faint bell. Then I remembered. “The Modern Golgotha!”

“Exactly, sir. A charnel house. The vaults under Saint Enon had so filled with unclaimed corpses that in 1844, after I had begun work in the Police Bureau but before I became Chief of Detectives, the commissioner of sewers sealed it off while creating a drainage tunnel beneath the building. Still the bodies festered there for years, until the premises were purchased by a surgeon in 1847 with the purpose of removing the remains to—I believe he called it—‘a more appropriate place.’ The exhumation continued there for almost a year, Mr Collins, with two giant heaps accumulating in the alleys above those vaults—one heap a pile of human bones, the other a mountain of decaying coffin wood.”

“I went to view that as a young man,” I said, turning slightly to look off in the direction of St Enon. I remembered the stench then on that cool February day I had viewed the awful spectacle. I could not imagine what the smell would be like on a hot and humid summer day such as this one.

“You and some six thousand other Londoners came to stare,” said Inspector Field.

“What does Saint Enon Chapel have to do with Dickens and June nine?”

“He managed to vanish from our view near there, Mr Collins,” said Field, tapping angrily at the cobblestones with his heavy brass-headed stick. “Seven of my best agents and myself, perhaps the finest detective London has ever known, in pursuit, and your writer gave us the slip.”

I had to smile again. “He is enjoying this, Inspector. As I said, Dickens is a child at heart. He loves mysteries and ghost stories. And upon occasion he has a cruel sense of humour.”

“Indeed, sir. But more to the point, somehow your friend knew about a secret entrance to that very drainage tunnel dug in 1844 when all the thousands of leaking and rotting corpses were still there. We found the tunnel eventually—it opens into scores of leaking, stinking holes where hundreds of squatters are living beneath the streets of London—and that in turn opens to another labyrinth of tunnels, sewers, and caverns.”

“But you couldn’t find Dickens?”

“We did, sir. We saw his lantern in the maze ahead of us. But at that point, we came under attack—hand-thrown and slingshotted stones, many as big as your fist, sir.”

“The Wild Boys,” I said.

“Precisely, sir. Detective Hatchery actually had to fire his weapon before the attackers—mere shadows, emerging from side tunnels and flinging at us, then retreating into deeper shadows—fled and we could continue our pursuit of your friend. But by then it was too late. He gave us the slip in the flooded labyrinth.”

“It sounds to be very frustrating, Inspector,” I said. “And exciting. But what, exactly, is your point?”

“My point, Mr Collins, is that it seems rather doubtful that Charles Dickens—the Charles Dickens—should go to such absurd lengths to lose us while traipsing through the Undertown of London all night… unless there is a man named Drood waiting for him.”

I was able to laugh. I was unable not to laugh. “I would suggest just the contrary, Inspector. It is the fun of the pursuit and the fiction of the mystery he has created that brings Dickens to waste so much time leading you on this wild goose chase through the tunnels under London. Had he not been aware that your men would be following him, I assure you that he would not have come to London that night. There is no Drood.”

Inspector Field shrugged. “Have it as you wish, sir, but we appreciate your continued cooperation in helping us track down the murderer and mastermind whom you do not believe exists. Those of us in police work who have come up against Drood and his agents know him to be a real and frightening force.”

There was nothing to be said to that.

“Was your query about the brigands in Birmingham the only reason you asked for this meeting, Mr Collins?”

“No, actually,” I said, shuffling unconsciously in my embarrassment. “I wished to take you up on an offer you made to me.”

“Ninety Gloucester Square and Mrs Shernwold?” said Field. “I am working on that, sir. I remain confident that you and your… Mrs G—… shall have the place by this time next year.”

“No,” I said. “The other offer. When you said that I might borrow the good services of Detective Hatchery should I wish to go back to Saint Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery, move the slab in the crypt, and find my own way down to King Lazaree and his opium den in the catacombs there. The rheumatical gout has been all but intolerable in recent weeks… the laudanum helps almost not at all anymore.”

“Detective Hatchery will be at your service whenever you wish,” the inspector replied crisply with no discernible tone of censure or victory in his voice. “When would you like him to report for duty, Mr Collins?”

“Tonight,” I said. I could feel my pulse accelerate. “Tonight at midnight.”