“I did,” said Dickens. “I heard about it upon my return from America and made it my business to enquire at the Metropolitan Police Force Detective Bureau to discover what had happened to him.”

“And what did they tell you?”

“That former detective Hibbert Hatchery had been murdered in the same crypt in Saint Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery where I had led you sometime earlier in our faux expedition into the underground world there.”

“I fail to see what was ‘faux’ about that descent into Hell,” I said. “But that is irrelevant right now. Did they tell you how Hatchery died?”

“He was struck unconscious during an attempted robbery and then they disemboweled him,” Dickens said softly. The words seemed to give him pain. “I guessed at the time that you were almost certainly there—down in Lazaree’s den—and I know that coming upon his corpse when you emerged must have been horrible.”

I had to smile. “And who is the they that the Detective Bureau thought responsible, Charles?”

“Four Hindoo sailors who had jumped ship. Thugs. Evidently they had followed you and Hatchery to the crypt—the police did not know it, of course, Wilkie, but I assumed that you were down in King Lazaree’s den below and knew nothing of this—waited until the huge detective was sleeping in the crypt sometime before dawn, and attempted to rob him. Evidently they wanted his watch and the money he had in his pocket.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Given the size of our late detective friend, I agree,” said Dickens. “And Hatchery did manage to break the neck of one of his four assailants. But this incensed the others, and after they knocked Hibbert unconscious with some sort of sap, they… did what they did to him.”

How very tidy, I thought. Scotland Yard would have an explanation for everything they did not understand. “And how did the Detective Bureau know that it was four Hindoo sailors?” I asked.

“Because they caught the three living ones,” said Dickens. “Caught them after the body of the fourth man was found floating in the Thames. Caught them and made them confess. They still had Hatchery’s inscribed watch, purse, and some of the money with them. The police were not gentle with them… many of the officers had known Hatchery.”

I had to blink at this. They are very thorough in their lies. “My dear Charles,” I said softly but with some irritation, “none of this was in the newspapers.”

“Of course it was not. As I said, the police did not deal gently with these Hindoo policeman-killers. None of the three survived to see trial. As far as the press was concerned, there had never been an arrest in the case of the murder of Hibbert Hatchery. Indeed, none of the details of the murder ever reached the press, Wilkie. The Metropolitan Police Force is, all in all, a good institution as government institutions go, but they have their dark side, as do we all.”

I shook my head and sighed. “And this is what you wanted to apologise to me about, Charles? Lying to me about Drood? Staging such a farce with the crypts and gondola? Not telling me about how—you believe—Detective Hatchery died?” I thought of the many times I had seen Drood, talked to Inspector Field about Drood, listened to Detective Barris talk about Drood, seen Edmond Dickenson after his conversion to Drood, and seen Drood’s minions in Undertown and his temples in Overtown. I had seen a note from Drood and seen Drood himself sitting and talking with Dickens in my own house. Dickens’s simple lie on this beautiful Sunday was not going to make me believe that I was mad.

“No,” he said, “that is not what I want to chiefly apologise for, although it is a subsidiary element of my larger apology. Wilkie, do you remember that first day you came to my home and office after the Staplehurst accident?”

“Of course. You told me all about your initial encounter with Drood.”

“Before that. When you first came into the room. Do you remember what I was doing and what we talked about?”

I had to work to recall this, but eventually I said, “You were fiddling with your watch and we talked for a moment about mesmerism.”

“I mesmerised you then, my dear Wilkie.”

“No, Charles, you did not. Can you not recall that you said you would like to and began to swing your watch, but that I simply waved it all away? You yourself agreed that my will was too strong to submit to magnetic control of any sort. And then you put away the watch and told me about the Staplehurst accident.”

“Yes, I said that your will was too strong to be mesermised, Wilkie, but that was after ten minutes of having you in a mesmeric trance.”

I laughed aloud at this. What game is he playing here? I adjusted my hat brim to keep the bright sun out of my eyes. “Charles, now you are lying… but to what purpose?”

“It was a sort of experiment, Wilkie,” said Dickens. He was literally hanging his head in a way that reminded me of Sultan. If I’d had his shotgun right then, I would have dealt with Dickens precisely the way that Dickens had dealt with Sultan.

“Even then,” continued Dickens, “even then, I had some vague notions of writing a novel in which a man carries out certain… actions… while under an incredibly extended period of mesmeric post-trance suggestion. I confess that I was especially interested in how such a suggestion of belief would affect a creative artist. That is, someone with a well-honed professional imagination to begin with and—I confess even more—such a creative person, a writer, who was, even then, using large quantities of opium, since opium was to be a leit motif in the mystery tale I had in mind.”

Here I not only laughed but I slapped my leg. “Very good! Oh, very good, Charles! And you’re telling me that you simply commanded me—via your mesmeric control—to believe in the Drood tale that you then told me when you awoke me from the trance?”

“I did not command such belief,” Dickens said morosely. “I merely suggested it.”

I patted both knees with both hands. “Oh, very good. And now you will tell me that you made up the entire idea of our friend Drood from whole cloth, using that incredible Charles Dickens imagination and love of the macabre!”

“Not at all,” said Dickens. He looked towards the west and I could have sworn that there were tears in his eyes. “I had dreamt of Drood the night before—dreamt of the creature moving amongst the dead and dying at Staplehurst, just as I described to you, my dear Wilkie, mixing and interweaving the fantasy of Drood with the horror of the real experience.”

I could not keep from smiling broadly. I removed my spectacles, mopped my brow with a paisley handkerchief, and shook my head in admiration of the audacity of what he was telling me and of the game he was playing. “So now you say that you dreamt Drood into existence.”

“No,” said Dickens. “I had first heard the legend of Drood from Inspector Charles Frederick Field more than a decade before Staplehurst. Why I interwove the old inspector’s obsessive fantasy into my nightmare about what happened at Staplehurst, I shall never know.”

“Field’s fantasy?” I cried. “Now it is Inspector Field who invented Drood!”

“Before you and I first met, my dear Wilkie. You remember that I did a series of essays on crime and the city that were published by my old magazine Household Words as far back as eighteen fifty-two. I was actually introduced to Inspector Field by other actors who had known Field when he had been an amateur actor at the old Catherine Street Theatre more than a decade earlier. But it was indeed Police Detective Charles Frederick Field, during our long walks through the night streets of the Great Oven back in the early eighteen fifties, who told me about the spectre in his mind whom he called Drood.”

“Spectre,” I repeated. “You are telling me that Inspector Field was insane.”