The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Dickens drew in a deep breath.

  Everyone at the table hung on his answer.

  “I have no idea,” he finally said, utterly deflating all of the anticipation which the question had occasioned. “It seems much too soon to be speculating on who might be the murderer when we have barely identified the murder victim.”

  Young Reggie Morse, who to this moment had not said a word, who had silently been all ears as he seemed to busy himself with his meat pie, suddenly entered the debate with a flourish.

  “I think we should search his rooms,” the young policeman blurted out.

  All of us stared at him.

  Dickens and I looked at each other. Dickens could not believe our good fortune or repress his excitement.

  What a novel idea!

  I think I saw some dismay mixed with exhilarated joy on Dickens’s face (because, I am sure, he regretted that he had not thought of it first).

  The meat pies sat utterly decimated on the field of battle. Our pints were all limping towards their dregs. It was time for a decision. Should we order another round and continue our discussion? Or should we break into the dead man’s rooms?

  “Inspector Morse…”

  “Constable, sir…”

  “Not for long,” Dickens was already on his feet. “What a splendid idea! We shall go there straightaway. Perhaps we can find some clue that will tell us why he was murdered,” and Dickens chuckled with glee, “or even better, by whom.”

  Dickens was so utterly transparent. He was glorying in the fact that he had taken over for Field as the Chief Inspector on this case and he was setting out to collect all the evidence on his own without any other detective of authority to challenge his deductive powers.

  “Charles, do you know the man’s room?” Dickens stood over us like a general marshalling his troops for battle.

  “No, but I c-c-can find out from the p-p-porter at the Meadows B-B-Building.” Dodgson snapped to attention.

  “Excellent! Morse, how will we get into the rooms? Dare we break down the door?”

  “There will be no need for that,” the young constable answered. “My father is Oxford’s finest locksmith. He has taught me the tricks of the trade since I was a boy of eight years. I am the disappointment of his life. He wanted me to go into the business with him, but I went for the police instead. I have a set of picks that will open any door in Oxford in the time it takes to whistle ‘toor-a-loo.’”

  “Oh doubly excellent!” Dickens could not believe his continued good fortune. “Then,” and he beamed around the table at all of us, “we are off!”

  In fact, Dickens was so happy with this turn of events that he paid the bill for all. I heard him say to our host, Irish Mike, as we took our leave, that he was sure we would be back to Oxford soon and to keep his eyes peeled and his ears tuned to the dealings of those political Dons, the late Ackroyd’s friends. I am certain that Dickens made it well worth Mike the publican’s time to do as he bid.

  Sleepy Rob leapt up in the growler as we emerged from the Bulldog. We crossed St. Aldate’s, which was surprisingly busy with traffic, mainly of the bicycle sort, for the early afternoon. I am sure we looked as if we were primed to enter his cab.

  No sooner did Sleepy Rob ask, like a house dog with a stick in his mouth and a game of fetch in his eyes, “Where’ll it be now, gents?” than Dodgson assured us, “Oh, no need for the c-c-cab; we’ll just walk across the meadow.”

  Sleepy Rob sank back onto the cushions of the cab as if he had been hit on the head with a barrel of beer. Indolent as he typically was, I think Rob was growing bored by just sitting around in this small town.

  It was a pleasant enough march across the Christ Church meadows. Cows were grazing at the far end, a bend of the river glistened in the grey distance, and, though it was cold November, I could still remember sitting under the trees that formed a thick canopy over the Long Walk and reading Keats or Byron or even Dickens on sunny summer afternoons.

  It took Dodgson only a moment to obtain the location of this Ackroyd’s rooms from the porter. That done, we went up. At the dead man’s door, Dodgson, Dickens, and I formed a shield around young Morse so as not to alarm any curious eyes as he worked at the lock. True to his word, young Morse could pick a lock as well as any London housebreaker. In short minutes, he straightened up, turned the ornate antique doorknob, stepped back, inviting us in with a palm-up gesture of his hand and a smiling “Gentlemen, please.”

  As we walked through the door into the dead man’s rooms, each of us in turn stopped short in our tracks, running up against one another.

  Someone had been there before us.

  The door opened upon a parlour-library similar to Dodgson’s arrangement in his rooms, but this parlour was an utter shambles. It looked as if a mad bull had been turned loose in the room. It had been ransacked from floor to ceiling, corner to corner, window seat to wainscotting, and cover to cover. Books were strewn about everywhere, many of their covers torn from their spines. Every drawer in every desk, table, secretary was rifled and tossed. Papers drifted across the wooden floor like snow on a winter field.

  “My God!”

  “Good Lord!”

  All in unison we drew in our breaths in a low gasp of shock at the devastation.

  Morse closed the door behind us, which momentarily threw the room into a deep darkness.

  Quickly Morse lit a lucifer and found a gaslight on the near wall. In the flickering yellow light, the ruins of that room looked even more sinister. Morse went around lighting other lamps, and soon the room was flooded with light. But the other three of us had not moved. It was as if the shock of the violence that had been worked upon this room had frozen us.

  Dickens was the first to thaw. He joined young Morse at the far side of the room.

  “What do you think happened here?” Dickens asked.

  “Someone else besides us knows ’ee’s dead,” young Morse answered, “perhaps the one who killed ’im, and ’ee came lookin’ for somethin’.”

  “Yes, of course,” Dickens solemnly agreed, “but who, and what was he looking for?”

  Young Morse nodded in silent agreement. The two of them stood across the brightly lit room, their eyes darting here and there in search of some clue.

  “If Field were here, Wilkie,” and Dickens crossed back to me through the wreckage of the room, “he would say that the answers to those questions are here, in this room, if we can just see them. We must try to see this room through Field’s eyes. We have traversed crime scenes with him before. Where would he bid us look? What would he tell us to look for?” Dickens was not really talking to me, nor was he talking aloud to himself. It was as if he were invoking some spirit of the detective that resides within all of us, some powers of observation that we all possess but we do not fully trust.

  “Field would say, ‘Look for what does not belong. For what should be there but is not. For what has been left behind by the murderer.’” Dickens was almost chanting this litany as he prowled the ruins of the room.

  All of that is easy for Field to say, I thought, but how can we possibly find anything in a mess like this? Nevertheless, all four of us began moving slowly about the room pretending we were Inspector Field.

  “By the way,” Old Dodo finally broke the silence that had descended upon us, “who is this Field chap that we are supposed to be emulating?”

  That gave us all a good laugh, especially Dickens. I think it took the weight off our observation, helped us to see things that we might not have seen if the burden of being Field had not been lifted from us.

  “Mr. Dodgson,” young Morse asked, “do you know if Mr. Ackroyd smoked cigars?”

  The young constable had dropped to one knee on the floor over what appeared to be a small pile of cigar ash. He proceeded to rummage amongst a pile of torn and discarded books. “Aha!” he exclaimed, and pulled the stub end of a gentleman’s thin cigar out from beneath the pile.

  “I c-c-cannot say for certain,” Do
dgson ruminated upon the question. “B-b-but I’ll b-b-bet Mike would know.”

  Then young Morse did something I had many times seen Field do. He took a small envelope out of one of the pockets of his capacious coat and deposited the cigar stub into it.

  “Look here,” Dickens called to us from the dead man’s desk, “this must have been a manuscript he was working on. Look, the pages are numbered.” He hunted around on the floor near the desk, collecting papers that had been flung about. In this manner, he managed to reconstruct the pile of pages from back to front. He ended up holding the title page of the manuscript in his hand and reading it to us aloud: “Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.”

  “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history was his b-b-bailiwick,” Dodgson reminded us. “That must be a historical monograph in p-p-progress.”

  “It must not have been what the intruder was looking for,” Dickens turned away from it, “because it seems to be all here.”

  “Heigh ho,” Morse hailed us from yet another quarter of the room, “it’s what’s left of our dead friend’s appointments book, it seems,” and he held up a tattered piece of leather with the remains of torn pages hanging out of it.

  “Do you think someone tore it up on purpose?” Dickens asked in all seriousness.

  “They seem t-t-to have t-t-torn up almost all of the b-b-books in the room,” Dodgson observed.

  “But they tore those books at the spines,” young Morse was thinking aloud, “tore their covers off. This one they tore all of the pages into pieces.”

  “So that no one would read his appointments for the day he died,” Dickens joined in Morse’s speculations, “or for the days leading up to his death.”

  “If I could find those torn pages and piece them back together,” clearly young Morse had already decided upon his course of action.

  “Like a p-p-picture p-p-puzzle,” Dodgson was caught up in the detective enthusiasm.

  “Exactly!” Dickens seconded the motion. “We must do it,” Dickens encouraged our enterprising young constable, who was already on his hands and knees on the floor collecting bits and pieces of torn paper that seemed to match the paper of the appointments book, “it will be the first thing that Field will ask for.”

  The mere invocation of the impending presence of the great Inspector Field sharpened young Morse’s resolve and made him redouble his efforts to reconstruct the evidence.

  We all wandered about in those rooms for another thirty minutes, but no more promising clues leapt up to collar our attention. Finally, the afternoon getting on towards the departure time of our return train to London, Dickens broke off our investigations and tendered our good-byes.

  He thanked Old Dodo profusely and implored him to continue as our Oxford and Christ Church liaison on the case. Dodgson assured him that he was at our service. Little did we imagine how helpful Dodgson’s strange conglomeration of interests and talents would prove as this case unfolded.

  Dickens then proceeded to put young Morse in charge of all of the evidence—the corpse, the rifled rooms and all their contents—until Field should make his appearance on the scene. The eager constable assured him that nothing would be disturbed until the great man himself deemed it necessary.

  Finally, Dickens implored them both to keep utterly secret everything they knew about the case. He even asked Dodgson to visit Mike the publican that evening and swear him to secrecy.

  Those details attended to as we walked back across the meadow to St. Aldate’s and Tom Tower, we climbed back into the growler for our ride through the bustling town to the railway terminus. Sleepy Rob seemed in a growly, muttering mood, but we did not find out why until the coach was loaded onto the railway car and we were once again underway in a shower of ashes and sparks for our return journey to London. What a miracle, to travel forty miles and back in a single day and never leave the security of your private coach.

  As we raced through the countryside in the gathering dusk, Sleepy Rob, at the prodding of Dickens, regaled us with his grousing dislike for Oxford and its inhabitants.

  “What sorts o’ poofters ride around on those silly two-wheeled curtain rods all day?” Rob began his tirade. “One o’ those clumsy fools lost control coming down that cobblestone ’ill and ran full into the side ’o my new cab. Put a bloody long scrape in the paint, ’ee did. I cursed ’im almost all the way down the street to that bridge, but ’ee just wobbled off with ’is long black robes trailin’ behind ’im like some Methodistical preacher. That was the first one that woke me up, then another one comes tappin’ on the side o’ my new cab with his walkin’ stick. A real curious one, ’ee was. Seemed ’ee just wanted to talk about ’ow odd it was to see a shiny new London growler in such a small town as Oxford. I told ’im I was engaged. I wanted to tell ’im to go stuff ’is ’ead in a dunghill, but I didn’t, and ’ee went away.”

  “What did he look like?” Dickens inquired, purely for the purpose of making conversation to pass the time of the train journey. At least that is what I supposed at the time.

  “’Ee was a fat little one, ’ee was,” Sleepy Rob described the curious man, “with a bowler and a monocle on a ribbon and a shiny black walking stick.”

  The Plot and the Playwright

  November 26, 1853—Evening

  We steamed into Victoria Railway Station at about half seven and galloped across London to the Bow Street Police Station. To Dickens’s great delight, both Inspector Field and Serjeant Rogers were waiting for us in the bullpen. Ah, the bullpen! From its blazing hearth to its rocking chairs to its bottles of gin secreted in the storage cupboard to its metal cage attached to the back wall, it has served over the years as our meeting place, interrogation room, and the hatchery for all of our plots. This night it served as Dickens’s lecture hall as he spun out in the novelist’s most studied detail the story of our entertaining afternoon in the city of Oxford.

  When Dickens was finished, Field had a number of immediate questions.

  Is this Morse a good man?

  Can Dodgson be trusted?

  Did we warn them to keep their own counsel on these events?

  Who do you think ransacked the rooms and why?

  We answered in the affirmative all of his questions except the last, for which we could only offer the sheerest speculation.

  “The person who entered those rooms,” Dickens tried to explain, “seemed more concerned for covering things up, throwing things about.”

  He went on to tell about the possible clues that young Morse had found—the cigar, the torn “appointments” book.

  “’Ee collected all the torn pieces ’ee could find of this book?” Field’s bushy black eyebrows narrowed.

  “Yes, young Morse did, and has promised to reconstruct them for us.” Dickens beamed.

  “Excellent,” Field congratulated us all.

  “Morse promised that he would keep the dead man’s rooms exactly as they are, keep everyone off,” Dickens assured him, “in case you wish to look at them yourself.”

  “Well, now,” Inspector Field seemed satisfied as he turned to Serjeant Rogers, “I see nothing for it but to go to Oxford. Eh, Rogers, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, sir, of course,” Rogers offered his usual toadying answer.

  “We shall all go back there”—Field leaned forward towards us with his elbows on his knees like an earnest conspirator—“but not together like a plague of locusts. If the murderer is there and suspicious that someone is on ’is trail, all of us descending in a crowd will drive ’im underground. No, we will stay apart from one another except at specified times in specified places.”

  “But he was murdered here in London,” I spoke up, not relishing the idea of being away from Irish Meg, “should we not look for his murderer here?”

  “We ’ave spoken to our people in Lime’ouse ’Ole and many others, ’ave we not, Rogers?”

  “Yes, sir,” Serjeant Rogers gave his usual answer.

  “And no one knows nothin’, is t
hat not right?”

  “Yes, sir. Not our coves, nor the Chinamen who can speak English.”

  “The man was well known in the quarter,” Field elaborated as Rogers shook his head in affirmation. “We even found the opium ’ouse that ’ee frequented. But ’ee never caused any fuss, just smoked ’is pipes, dreamed ’is dreams, and left quietly as ’ee came. The Chinee never asked ’is name, simply took ’is coin.”

  “Had he been there the night of the murder?” Dickens asked.

  “Yes, ’ee ’ad. ’Ee came at about half ten and stayed until the early morning hours.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, this time.”

  “What do you mean?” Dickens had caught the sly invitation in Inspector Field’s voice to pursue the deductive possibilities of this one detail.

  “’Ee was not always solitary in the smokin’ of ’is pipes,” Field went on. “’Ee ’ad brought women with ’im before, and sometimes ’ee was accompanied by other men. Unfortunately, the Chinee could not remember what any of these others looked like.”

  “The women?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Whores, probably,” Field shrugged.

  “He was murdered upon leaving the opium house, wasn’t he?” Dickens voice quickened as he began to piece together what Field already knew. “The murderer was lying in wait for him, wasn’t he? The murderer knew his goings and comings and was waiting in ambush. That’s it, is it not?”

  “Yes, I think so,” the tiny grin around the corners of Field’s mouth showed that he was amused at Dickens’s intensity. “I think ’ee was murdered by someone ’ee knew, someone who knew that when ’ee came to London ’ee went to the opium ’ouse in Lime’ouse ’Ole, perhaps someone who ’ad actually accompanied ’im there.”

  “Then we must find out who this Ackroyd’s opium companions are,” Dickens declared, as if he were in charge of the case rather than Field.

  “Yes,” Field indulged him, “and in order to do that we must go to Oxford, but we must go discreetly.”