The Dons and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  “Stadler dead!” Dickens exclaimed. “Why, he was our prime suspect.” Dickens said it as if he felt betrayed by the murdered man, who was showing exceptional bad taste in being dead at this particular stage of our investigation.

  But Dickens quickly recovered himself, sat Rogers down on the loveseat, which still had the imprint of my sleeping form, and commenced to interrogate that worthy as to the details of the case.

  “Found by the wooman ’oo cleans ’is rooms,” Rogers officiously began his narrative. “’Is door was open on the corridor when the wooman reported for work. She thought ’ee’d just forgot to close it tight when ’ee went out, so she went in to start ’er cleanin’. Found ’im at the worktable in ’is laboratory stabbed in the back. Porter says she let out a scream so loud you could ’ear it all through the buildin’: Sounded like a train whistle, ’ee said. Police called in. Morse sent for us when ’ee found out ’oo it was. Inspector Field sent me to fetch you two.” He said the last as if something distasteful had flown into his mouth.

  We wasted no time in washing, dressing, and making our way the short distance across the quadrangle to the crime scene. The blood lust was upon Dickens. When it came to crime, he was like one of those mythical vampires. An excitement stirred his soul that could only be sated by a close examination of the corpse, a personal inventory of the room, the stage where the murder played itself out. Field and young Morse were waiting for us in Stadler’s rooms. An Oxford constable, guarding the door, waved us in. Morse escorted us through the sitting room to the laboratory. The body of the murdered man had not been moved. It was little more than half ten on that morbid morning.

  Little seemed out of place in Stadler’s laboratory, except of course that large form slumped over the worktable with what looked like a garden stake protruding from the middle of its back. The microscope which the Chemistry Don might well have been consulting when he was stabbed was tipped over just to the side of his wide-open eyes. A large metal water pitcher, of the sort employed in hospitals, lay overturned as well, which accounted for one of the two very different pools of liquid on the floor beneath the feet of the corpse. The water from the overturned pitcher had run off the edge of the table, splashed to the floor, and finally settled into a small clear puddle next to the legs of the high wooden stool upon which the wide-eyed corpse sat. But those stool legs themselves sat in the middle of a much larger, darker, thicker, more sinister pool that had formed beneath the body of the dead man. The sweet smell of death rose out of this horrible pool of lifeblood. It made me shudder to think of it dripping steadily all night long from that wound where the knife protruded from the corpse’s back. It made me think of sap running out of a spigot driven into a tree to be collected to make sweet syrup. But there was nothing sweet about this black pool.

  Inspector Field moved around the corpse, the worktable, the laboratory, in concentric circles as if creating ripples outward from that dark pool of blood. His eyes raked the room. Suddenly, like a bird of prey descending upon its victim, he glided swiftly to where a waist-high wooden smoking table mounted on a single heavy iron leg supported by three curled black iron feet sat guarding the doorway. This sentinel, placed at the doorway for visitors or the resident scientist himself to extinguish their cigars upon entering the volatile chemical atmosphere of the laboratory, looked as if it were a refugee from some Pall Mall gentleman’s club fallen upon hard times. Its lucifer case holder rose like an abandoned stump out of the wooden tabletop while the large round brass ashtray in its center was filled to overflowing with discarded cigars. Burn marks stained the wood over every inch of the smoking table’s top and a dirty ring of ashes stained the floor around the black wrought-iron feet. Out of the round brass ashtray filled to brimming with the butt ends of cigars, Field extracted one thin, twisted cigar stub and held it up to us.

  “’Ee’s been ’ere,” Field growled. “This one’s right on top of the ’eap. ’Ee’s been ’ere all right and I’ll wager ’ee smoked while ’ee did this bit of business,” and he nodded at the knife buried in the corpse’s back. “But ’ee only smoked it ’alfways down.” Field was talking to himself now, utterly unaware that any of the rest of us were even in that room. He held that cigar end up in front of his face. “’Ee was smokin’ it when ’ee came in, but then ’ee put it out before ’ee left. It only took ’im a minute to come up behind Stadler and stab ’im in the back, but ’ee didn’t just leave, ’ee stayed, and ’ee put ’is cigar out. Why did ’ee do that?”

  We had all formed a close circle around Field—Dickens and Dodgson and I on one side, Morse and Rogers on the other. Field delivered this soliloquy while holding the twisted cigar end before him like Hamlet with his skull. After he arrived at that question and posed it to the room, it was as if he suddenly realized that the rest of us were there with him, that he hadn’t been just holding a private conversation with his detective’s mind.

  “Because ’ee needed both ’ands,” Field answered his own question while tossing off a look of triumph that instantly encompassed all of us ranged in the circle around him. “’Ee needed both ’ands to carry somethin’ away, ’ee did. But wot somethin’?” and he began to prowl the room once again.

  “Wot isn’t ’ere?” He moved slowly around the worktable and the dead man.

  “Wot should be ’ere, and isn’t?” He stopped and stared over the dead man’s shoulder as if trying to visualize Stadler, alive, at work.

  “Wot?”

  We had all followed him to the worktable like a pack of rats under the spell of a piper.

  “’Allo, wot’s this?” Field broke the heavy silence and reached down over the corpse, over the toppled microscope and the overturned water pitcher, to pick up what looked like a Lilliputian hammock, a small rack made of wooden legs and sides and hung with braided string. It looked like a tiny version of a rack for explosive cannon balls on one of Her Majesty’s warships.

  “Wot’s this?” Field repeated himself, holding up this undersized rope hammock for all of us to see.

  None of us had the slightest idea and our confused silence clearly attested to that fact.

  Field’s lips suddenly pursed and a slow, satisfied grin spread itself across his face as he set his mysterious artifact down on the dead scientist’s table.

  “Nitroglycerine,” he snapped in little more than a whisper, but startlingly enough to make the whole pack of us take one step backwards.

  “Nitroglycerine. That is wot you said ’ee was workin’ with when you talked to ’im in the pub t’other night. Nitroglycerine cannot be shaken or bumped or dropped, remember? Or it will blow up in yer face, ’ee said. It ’as to be treated gently, ’ung in a soft sling, suspended on air,” and he paused for dramatic effect, “…in this!”

  All our eyes fixed on that little hammocklike rack.

  “And the nitroglycerine is gone.” Dickens was the first to catch Field’s drift.

  “Yes, that is wot the murderer took away with ’im”—Field spoke quickly and directly, no longer caught in the birth throes of deduction—“carrying it carefully, with both ’ands, knowing that if ’ee dropped it, ’ee would be blown to bits.”

  “Very good, Inspector Field,” a quiet voice from the doorway diverted attention from Field’s triumph of deduction to its corpulent, dark-suited, cravatted source. It was our avuncular friend from the Home Office, Mycroft Holmes Esquire, who evidently had been eavesdropping upon us since near the beginning of Field’s soliloquy upon a cigar stub.

  “Yes, very good indeed,” Field glared at that intruder. “’Olmes of the ’Ome Office, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, quite right, Inspector Field,” he answered jovially. “I stopped around at Bow Street to inquire about our case of the murdered Don in Limehouse and…”

  “Our case?” Field cut him off.

  “Your case, of course. I misspoke,” Holmes apologized. Field glowered at him in silent indignation.

  “I went round to Bow Street,” young Holmes broke the awkwar
d silence, “and they told me that you had decamped to Oxford to pursue the case.”

  “They told you, eh? ’Oo told you?” Field thumped the worktable with his angry forefinger as if he would like to bury it in the skull of his betrayer.

  “Why, your desk constable, sir.” Holmes held his ground against Field’s virulent displeasure. Field looked as if he would like to hang anyone involved with Mr. Mycroft Holmes of the Home Office’s presence in that room. “I identified myself as Home Office before he would tell me anything.”

  “Damn ’im and damn the ’Ome Office.” Field made no attempt whatsoever to hide his anger at Holmes’s meddling. “Wot are you doin ’ere? Wot does any of this ’ave to do with you?

  “Perhaps it has nothing to do with the Home Office,” young Holmes answered with complete equanimity, “or perhaps it has a great deal to do with us. I do not know. But I have been ordered by my superiors to pursue this murder in Limehouse Hole and I am trying to do just that. As I told you at our previous meeting, I will not interfere in any way with your investigation. It would be stupid for me to do so. You are the best detective in London. Everyone says so. I have an eccentric younger brother who thinks that you are a genius, though I must admit I had never heard your name until that night in Limehouse Hole. I simply wish to follow the progress of your case.” His explanation (laced with rather transparent flattery) done, Holmes did a strange thing. Placing his two hands together in front of his chest, he made a Chinaman’s bow to Field and moved one step back as if to say, “I am your servant.”

  Field seemed momentarily confused by young Holmes’s rapid-fire speech of explanation and flattery. He scowled, but decided not to vent his dislike for this personage and his masters any further. “Stay if you must,” he grudgingly consented, “but stay out of my way.”

  Holmes of the Home Office veritably beamed at this concession that his obvious powers of diplomacy had extracted. “Might I ask,” the round young man pressed his advantage, “is this another Don murdered, or is it a robbery of nitroglycerine?”

  “Both, wouldn’t you say?” Field muttered dryly, underscoring the obviousness of the question.

  “But why?” Dickens entered into the debate between these two thinly disguised antagonists. “Why kill Stadler? And why steal his nitroglycerine?”

  Dickens’s questions seemed to bring all the confrontations in the room to a silent, sudden halt. Nobody seemed to have an answer. Field looked at Holmes, Holmes looked at Dickens, and I looked at the three of them.

  “Look at this,” Serjeant Rogers broke our awkward silence from across the room. “It’s a writing book of some kind,” he advanced towards us holding the found object out for Field’s inspection, “with some of its pages torn out. See, the whole second ’alf ’as been ripped out.”

  “It’s a notebook of ’is experiments,” Field announced, after taking a long look at Rogers’s find, “and it is dated. The last date is July 26, late summer, more than three months ago. All the rest ’as been torn away.”

  “It is like the appointments book in Ackroyd’s room,” Dickens speculated aloud. “Someone does not want us to read the full texts of these books. Someone is systematically destroying the historical records of what these dead Dons were working on, don’t you think?” And he turned to Field for affirmation.

  But Field had fallen silent. He had sat himself down on a wooden stool directly across from the slumped-over corpse. The torn experiment book was still in his hands, but he was no longer looking through it. It was as if he had withdrawn into some detective’s world of his own and was carrying on a dialogue with himself, perusing the clues in search of an answer. We all watched him as he tried to read all the torn texts he had collected in his mind’s eye.

  “They were goin’ to blow somethin’ up,” Field finally said quietly in a voice tinged with the wonder of discovery. “They were buildin’ an explosive bomb to blow somethin’ up!” and he suddenly bolted out of his deductive trance, sprang to his feet, and thumped the table decisively with his triumphant forefinger. “That’s what those two was up to—a bomb!”

  “A bomb?” Dickens repeated, the idea obviously never having occurred to him.

  “A bomb, of course.” Holmes feasted upon Field’s conclusion as if it were a succulent rack of roast lamb.

  “It all fits.” Field paced back and forth in the excitement of his discovery. “The chemist, expert in explosives, experimenting with this nitroglycerine. The ’istorian, expert in the Gunpowder Plot, planning the tactics, knowing everything that could go wrong.”

  “But why then were they murdered?” Dickens brought Field back to the reality of the present.

  Field pondered that question.

  Serjeant Rogers stroked his chin, pondering in concert with his master.

  I had not a clue why these bombmakers had been killed, and when I looked at Dickens, who had posed the question, it was clear that he was as bereft of an answer as was I.

  “Because someone else wanted their bomb,” a quiet voice from behind us broke the silence. It was Holmes, and this time Field did not growl at him.

  “Yes, of course, that’s good, that is.” Field actually was complimenting the intruder, much to the amazement of all of us who knew well Field’s absolute inability to tolerate interference. “They built it and made the plans ’ow to use it, and then some’un took it away from ’em.”

  Our eyes all darted to Holmes, who had the good sense not to say a word, but simply stood benignly nodding his assent to Field’s genius.

  “Some’un was usin’ ’em.” Field sat back down on his stool at the dead chemist’s worktable and stared hard at the torn book as if he were reading the missing pages. “Lettin’ ’em plan it and build it, and then ’ee killed ’em for it.”

  Now all of us were nodding in assent along with Holmes as Field drew us in the wake of his deduction.

  “But who killed ’em and what does ’ee want the bomb for?” Field posed the question softly to himself, the common man carrying on a dialogue with the detective. Field was both, and he pondered his own question for a long moment, then gave it up because he knew that neither part of him had the answer.

  “Who knows? I don’t,” and his frustrated forefinger gouged at the corner of his right eye. “Do you know, Mister Home Office?” and his mocking forefinger pointed accusingly at Holmes. “Or you Charles, or Wilkie, or any of you?” and his waving forefinger took us all in with a single sweep. “Some ’uns got this nitroglycerine and a plan to use it, and we better find it afore ’ee gits the chance, eh?”

  We all looked at one another.

  “Well, yes, very good.” Holmes of the Home Office stepped forward and extended his hand to Field. “Thank you, Inspector Field, for letting me eavesdrop on your deliberations. Most informative, most informative indeed.”

  Field shook his hand as if it were a rock that had been held out to him to be crushed.

  Holmes winced, withdrew his crumpled hand, and took leave of the rest of us with a general bow of his head.

  After he had left, Field turned to the rest of us with his suspicions in full display on his sleeve.

  “That ’uns up to somethin’ and knows more than ’ee lets on,” Field declared. “I don’t like this. Wot’s the bloody ’Ome Office got to do with two dead Dons?”

  Since no one seemed inclined to offer an immediate answer, we all filed out like mourners, leaving the corpse slumped over his microscope as if he were still at work.

  Two dead Dons, indeed! We all sensed that life in this supposedly peaceful University town of Oxford had been turned completely upside down, but as yet we did not know how to right it.

  “We must bide our time,” Field cautioned us as we emerged onto the grey, frozen grass of the Christ Church quadrangle. “We must wait and watch in ’opes that whoever is doin’ these murders will give ’imself away.”

  * * *

  *This could only be a reference to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the
New Prometheus, published in 1818.

  Waiting and Watching

  December 4, 1853–December 8, 1853

  Dickens, true to his word, left the next morning, Sunday it was, on the railway for London. Much to all of our surprise, Inspector Field went with him, leaving Serjeant Rogers alone in Oxford to monitor the proceedings.

  Perhaps it was a good thing for all, this brief break in the detecting. Thompson, of course, stayed on as Ellen’s bodyguard as she played her barmaid’s role in the Bulldog. Rogers was left to follow young Morse about and try to tie up some of the loose ends of the investigation. And Dodgson and I were left to our own devices in his tower aerie with its telescope poised for spying. We speculated that Dickens and Field must have had a great deal to talk about on their railway journey back to the city. We were sure that they minutely sifted every shred of the evidence, reconstructed every movement of our murderer, examined every motive of every person connected to the case. We were very sure that our young acquaintance, Holmes of the Home Office, came in for a good bit of their detective scrutiny.

  Before he departed, Charles left me with a clear assignment. “Wilkie, I must attend to my business in London,” he began, by way, I think, of an apology for leaving me with all of the responsibility in Oxford, “but you must keep a close eye on Ellen. I know that Thompson never lets her out of his sight, but you too can watch out for her. You and Dodgson can go to the pub in the evenings. It will reassure her to see you there. She will know that a good friend is close by.”

  Perhaps Ellen was grateful for my presence in Oxford, my nightly attendance at the pub, but if she was, she never showed it. Like a stage actress a week or two into her play’s run, she seemed to be becoming quite comfortable in her role. She made friends, it seemed, with everyone who frequented the establishment, smiled her way into their confidences.