The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Detective Stories

by Michael Sims

  The Frenchman followed in despair; the ape, razor still in hand, occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at his pursuer, until the latter had nearly come up with it. It then again made off. In this manner the chase continued for a long time. The streets were profoundly quiet, as it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. In passing down an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive’s attention was arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L’Espanaye’s chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it perceived the lightning-rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility, grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and, by its means, swung itself directly upon the headboard of the bed. The whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by the Ourang-Outang as it entered the room.

  The sailor, in the meantime, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but when he had arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, habited in their night clothes, had apparently been occupied in arranging some papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the window, and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the wind.

  As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye by the hair (which was loose, as she had been combing it), and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrensy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just discernible.

  The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation; throwing down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter, and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady, which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.

  As the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it, hurried at once home—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman’s exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute.

  I have scarcely any thing to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two about the propriety of every person minding his own business.

  “Let him talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. “Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery, is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna—or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.’”

  Charles Dickens

  (1812–1870)

  “Although I am an old man,” says the narrator of The Old Curiosity Shop, “night is generally my time for walking.” Night was Charles Dickens’s favorite time for walking as well. In his letters and essays he often mentions nocturnal rambles across the countryside or down ill-lit London alleyways, for reasons ranging from his inability to sleep after hours of writing to cooling down from an argument with his wife. By 1851—fifteen years after attaining celebrity at the age of twenty-four, with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club—Dickens had long since achieved the status of household name. When he wanted to take a nighttime tour of London’s most abject and frightening slums, he could depend upon a police escort. Dickens used this kind of anthropological safari in part to inform his role as adviser to philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, with whom he had worked to rehabilitate prostitutes, create inexpensive housing, and launch other efforts at improving the lot of the poor. On the occasion described in this article, as on others, he was guided (and protected) by one Inspector Field.

  Soon after Robert Peel formed the metropolitan police force in 1829, Charles Frederick Field was listed as a sergeant in the E Division, headquartered in Holborn in central London. Four years later he was promoted to inspector. When the Detective Department was created in 1842, he was one of the first to sign up, eventually rising to the rank of detective inspector. In the summer of 1850, Dickens wrote about his new acquaintance, barely disguised as Inspector Charley Wield, in two articles called “A Detective Police Party” and “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes.” As noted in the introduction, the word detective began to be seen during the 1830s, but it was still unfamiliar enough in 1850 for Dickens to place quotation marks around it in his title. In the autumn of 1850, Field complained about the way Dickens quoted him in “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes,” but Dickens insisted, as usual, that he was correct. Nonetheless, the next year, when fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton claimed that his ex-wife was threatening to disrupt a benefit performance of his play Not So Bad as We Seem, Dickens arranged for Field to provide security. “He is discretion itself,” Dickens said, “and accustomed to the most delicate missions.”

  The always busy author would soon employ these nightmarish glimpses in Bleak House, especially as background for the slum called Tom-all-Alone’s, where Jo the crossing sweeper makes his dreary way through the alley properties set adrift by the endless Chancery suit. Dickens used other experiences with Field in a different way: they helped inspire his most important detective character, Inspector Bucket, who is called in by Tulkinghorn to investigate Lady Dedlock. (See the introduction for more information about Bucket in the context of the genre.) Dickens called outings with the inspector “Field days,” a term tha
t next showed up as an inside joke in Bleak House, when the author repeatedly used “field-day” to describe Bucket’s investigative expeditions. In 1852 Field retired from the police force and set up shop as a private inquiry agent. The same year, Dickens began publishing Bleak House.

  Over the years you can see Dickens’s determination to unify his narratives ever more, especially from the time of Dombey and Son, which began serial publication in 1846, and its immediate successors—David Copperfield and Bleak House. Gradually each book contains not only a tighter plot and more unified symbolism, but also less farce and more dark poetry. Plots become Byzantine and eventually, in the case of his penultimate novel, Our Mutual Friend, almost indecipherable—yet the lyricism and poignant imagery keep improving. Sadly for the genre, Dickens died halfway through the writing of what seems to have been planned as his first full-fledged detective novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

  Naturally detectives appealed to Dickens. Their authority came as much from street experience as official fiat; they understood the system well enough to work outside it when necessary; and their very identity was defined by savvy intelligence and attention to detail—all qualities that Dickens admired in himself. Before Bleak House he had brought a pair of blundering Bow Street Runners into Oliver Twist and a private investigator named Nadgett into Martin Chuzzlewit. Later an otherwise unnamed inspector investigates two deaths in Our Mutual Friend (although, in the postscript, Dickens explicitly denied constructing the book like a whodunit); and, although we will never know for certain, Dick Datchery in Edwin Drood may be a detective in disguise.

  “On Duty with Inspector Field” appeared in the June 14, 1851, issue of Dickens’s own weekly periodical, Household Words, filling both columns on the cover and continuing inside—followed, in the eclectic way that kept Dickens’s journals lively and inviting, by a history of Madagascar. In lesser hands, this material would have been merely reportage or screed. With his usual playful imagination, however, Dickens brought it all to life. He even described scenes he didn’t witness, as in what Field might have been doing at the British Museum before meeting him for their nighttime prowl: “Suspicious of the Elgin marbles, and not to be done by cat-faced Egyptian giants with their hands upon their knees, Inspector Field, sagacious, vigilant, lamp in hand, throwing monstrous shadows on the walls and ceilings, passes through the spacious rooms.” Throughout, Dickens demonstrates his usual attentive curiosity, eye for vivid details, and compassion for the starving, abandoned poor who flocked in the alleys alongside rats and pigeons. Along the way, he quotes from Macbeth, demonstrates that he is so rich in analogies he can invest them in off hand remarks, and invents an entertaining way to represent profanity before it was legal to actually print it.

  On Duty with Inspector Field

  How goes the night? Saint Giles’s clock is striking nine. The weather is dull and wet, and the long lines of street lamps are blurred, as if we saw them through tears. A damp wind blows and rakes the pieman’s fire out, when he opens the door of his little furnace, carrying away an eddy of sparks.

  Saint Giles’s clock strikes nine. We are punctual. Where is Inspector Field? Assistant Commissioner of Police is already here, enwrapped in oil-skin cloak, and standing in the shadow of Saint Giles’s steeple. Detective Sergeant, weary of speaking French all day to foreigners unpacking at the Great Exhibition, is already here. Where is Inspector Field?

  Inspector Field is, to-night, the guardian genius of the British Museum. He is bringing his shrewd eye to bear on every corner of its solitary galleries, before he reports “all right.” Suspicious of the Elgin marbles, and not to be done by cat-faced Egyptian giants with their hands upon their knees, Inspector Field, sagacious, vigilant, lamp in hand, throwing monstrous shadows on the walls and ceilings, passes through the spacious rooms. If a mummy trembled in an atom of its dusty covering, Inspector Field would say, “Come out of that, Tom Green. I know you!” If the smallest “Gonoph” about town were crouching at the bottom of a classic bath, Inspector Field would nose him with a finer scent than the ogre’s, when adventurous Jack lay trembling in his kitchen copper. But all is quiet, and Inspector Field goes warily on, making little outward show of attending to anything in particular, just recognising the Ichthyosaurus as a familiar acquaintance, and wondering, perhaps, how the detectives did it in the days before the Flood.

  Will Inspector Field be long about this work? He may be half-an-hour longer. He sends his compliments by Police Constable, and proposes that we meet at St. Giles’s Station House, across the road. Good. It were as well to stand by the fire, there, as in the shadow of Saint Giles’s steeple.

  Anything doing here to-night? Not much. We are very quiet. A lost boy, extremely calm and small, sitting by the fire, whom we now confide to a constable to take home, for the child says that if you show him Newgate Street, he can show you where he lives—a raving drunken woman in the cells, who has screeched her voice away, and has hardly power enough left to declare, even with the passionate help of her feet and arms, that she is the daughter of a British officer, and, strike her blind and dead, but she’ll write a letter to the Queen! but who is soothed with a drink of water—in another cell, a quiet woman with a child at her breast, for begging—in another, her husband in a smock-frock, with a basket of watercresses—in another, a pickpocket—in another, a meek tremulous old pauper man who has been out for a holiday “and has took but a little drop, but it has overcome him after so many months in the house”—and that’s all as yet. Presently, a sensation at the Station House door. Mr. Field, gentlemen!

  Inspector Field comes in, wiping his forehead, for he is of a burly figure, and has come fast from the ores and metals of the deep mines of the earth, and from the Parrot Gods of the South Sea Islands, and from the birds and beetles of the tropics, and from the Arts of Greece and Rome, and from the Sculptures of Nineveh, and from the traces of an elder world, when these were not. Is Rogers ready? Rogers is ready, strapped and great-coated, with a flaming eye in the middle of his waist, like a deformed Cyclops. Lead on, Rogers, to Rats’ Castle!

  How many people may there be in London, who, if we had brought them deviously and blindfold, to this street, fifty paces from the Station House, and within call of Saint Giles’s church, would know it for a not remote part of the city in which their lives are passed? How many, who amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses, with all their vile contents, animate, and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe this air? How much Red Tape may there be, that could look round on the faces which now hem us in—for our appearance here has caused a rush from all points to a common centre—the lowering foreheads, the sallow cheeks, the brutal eyes, the matted hair, the infected, vermin-haunted heaps of rags—and say, “I have thought of this. I have not dismissed the thing. I have neither blustered it away, nor frozen it away, nor tied it up and put it away, nor smoothly said pooh, pooh! to it when it has been shown to me”?

  This is not what Rogers wants to know, however. What Rogers wants to know, is, whether you will clear the way here, some of you, or whether you won’t; because if you don’t do it right on end, he’ll lock you up! “What! You are there, are you, Bob Miles? You haven’t had enough of it yet, haven’t you? You want three months more, do you? Come away from that gentleman! What are you creeping round there for?”

  “What am I a doing, thinn, Mr. Rogers?” says Bob Miles, appearing, villainous, at the end of a lane of light, made by the lantern.

  “I’ll let you know pretty quick, if you don’t hook it. WILL you hook it?”

  A sycophantic murmur rises from the crowd. “Hook it, Bob, when Mr. Rogers and Mr. Field tells you! Why don’t you hook it, when you are told to?”

  The most importunate of the voices strikes familiarly on Mr. Rogers’s ear. He suddenly turns his lantern on the owner.

  “What! You are there, are you, Mister Click? You hook it too—come!”

  “What
for?” says Mr. Click, discomfited.

  “You hook it, will you!” says Mr. Rogers with stern emphasis.

  Both Click and Miles do “hook it,” without another word, or, in plainer English, sneak away.

  “Close up there, my men!” says Inspector Field to two constables on duty who have followed.

  “Keep together, gentlemen; we are going down here. Heads!”

  Saint Giles’s church strikes half-past ten. We stoop low, and creep down a precipitous flight of steps into a dark close cellar. There is a fire. There is a long deal table. There are benches. The cellar is full of company, chiefly very young men in various conditions of dirt and raggedness. Some are eating supper. There are no girls or women present. Welcome to Rats’ Castle, gentlemen, and to this company of noted thieves!

  “Well, my lads! How are you, my lads? What have you been doing to-day? Here’s some company come to see you, my lads!—There’s a plate of beefsteak, sir, for the supper of a fine young man! And there’s a mouth for a steak, sir! Why, I should be too proud of such a mouth as that, if I had it myself! Stand up and show it, sir! Take off your cap. There’s a fine young man for a nice little party, sir! An’t he?”

  Inspector Field is the bustling speaker. Inspector Field’s eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks. Inspector Field’s hand is the well-known hand that has collared half the people here, and motioned their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, male and female friends, inexorably to New South Wales. Yet Inspector Field stands in this den, the Sultan of the place. Every thief here cowers before him, like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster. All watch him, all answer when addressed, all laugh at his jokes, all seek to propitiate him. This cellar company alone—to say nothing of the crowd surrounding the entrance from the street above, and making the steps shine with eyes—is strong enough to murder us all, and willing enough to do it; but, let Inspector Field have a mind to pick out one thief here, and take him; let him produce that ghostly truncheon from his pocket, and say, with his business-air, “My lad, I want you!” and all Rats’ Castle shall be stricken with paralysis, and not a finger move against him, as he fits the handcuffs on!