“In name only,” said Dickens. “And only for a few weeks before the poor boy came into his majority and his full inheritance. He thought he was doing me an honour by naming me such, and I allowed him to think so. It certainly was no one’s business other than Dickenson and myself.”
“But the money…” I began.
“Withdrawn, on Dickenson’s request, the day after he turned twenty-one and could do anything he wished with it, my dear Wilkie. I had the pleasure of writing him a cheque for the full amount that same day.”
“Yes, but… why through your account, Charles? It makes no sense.”
“Of course it does not,” agreed Dickens, chuckling again. “The boy—still thinking I had saved his life at Staplehurst—wanted to see my signature on the draught that would start his life anew as an adult. All nonsense, of course, but it cost me nothing other than the energy of receiving the payment and writing my own cheque to the lad. His former barrister and advisor—a Mr Roffe, I believe—made all the arrangements with both banks.”
“But you say that you have no idea where Dickenson went…”
“And so I do not,” he said. “He talked of visiting France and then truly beginning his life anew… South Africa, perhaps, or even Australia. But I received no letters from him.”
I started to speak again and realised that I had nothing to say. When I had rehearsed this confrontation in my mind, I had imagined Sergeant Cuff surprising the culprit into an admission of murder.
Dickens seemed to be inspecting my face as we walked. He was clearly amused. “When you heard all this from this amazingly ubiquitous Mr Barnaby or Benedict or Bertrand, my dear Wilkie, did you imagine that I had insinuated myself into the position of guardian for poor young Dickenson and then murdered him for his money?”
“What!? I… Of course I did not… Ridiculous… How could you…”
“Because that would be what I would have made from all these otherwise circumstantial clues,” Dickens said brightly. “An ageing writer, perhaps suffering from money problems, happens to save this rich orphan’s life and soon realises that the boy has no friends, no family, no close acquaintances to speak of—only a doddering old barrister who tends to forget whether he has had lunch that day or not—and the writer then arranges to have the trusting boy appoint him, the avaricious writer with money problems, to a position as guardian.…”
“Are you having money problems, Charles?”
Dickens laughed so loudly and easily that I almost laughed with him.
“How would I have killed him, do you think, Wilkie? And where? Gad’s Hill Place? Frightfully public with so many visitors coming and going all the hours of the day and night.”
“Rochester Cathedral,” I said dully.
Dickens glanced up over the green trees. “Yes, so it is. We are almost there. Oh-hoh! No, wait, you mean… I would have killed Dickenson at Rochester Cathedral. Yes, of course. It all fits in. You are a genius of deduction, my dear Wilkie.”
“You like to show it to people at night, in the moonlight,” I said, not believing that I was saying these words aloud.
“Indeed I do,” laughed Dickens. “And Mr Dradles and the cathedral’s cleric, whom I shall call Septimus Crisparkle in my novel, have given me keys to gain access to the tower at all hours when I bring guests there.…”
“And the crypts,” I muttered.
“What’s that? Oh, yes! Very good. The same keys would give me access to the crypts. So all I would have to do would be to invite young Dickenson on a private outing with me—showing off Rochester from its cathedral tower in the moonlight; why, I took you and Longfellow’s brother-in-law and his daughters up there in the moonlight just last year—and, at the appropriate second, as I urged the boy to lean over better to see the moonlight on the sea around the base of the tower… just give him the slightest shove.”
“Let us stop this, Charles,” I said raggedly. I felt the rheumatical gout creeping behind my right eye like a geyser of pent-up blood and pain.
“No, no, it is too wonderful,” cried Dickens, twirling his walking stick as if he were leading a parade. “No pistol needed—nor hammer, nor shovel, nor any grimy, heavy instrument needed to do the deed and then to be cleaned or disposed of—only gravity. A brief cry in the night. And then… what then? Say the boy had impaled himself on one of the black iron spikes rising from the fence surrounding the sacristy, or dashed out what few brains he had on one of the ancient headstones… what then, Sergeant Cuff?”
“Then the lime pit,” I said.
Dickens actually stopped and seized his forehead with his free hand. His eyes were wide, his smile broad and beatific.
“The lime pit!” he exclaimed. A rider trotting past on a bay mare looked over from the road. “Of course! How could I have forgotten the lime pit? And then, perhaps in a few days’ time… the crypts?”
I shook my head, looked away, and bit my lip until I could taste blood. We resumed walking.
“Of course,” said Dickens, swinging his stick absently at a weed, “I would then need old Dradles as an accomplice, to take down and put back up the crypt walls, I mean. This is how murder plots are found out, you know, Wilkie—taking an accomplice is too often a step towards the gallows.”
“Not at all,” I said, my voice still flat and lifeless. “You will have used your power of magnetic influence on poor Dradles. He will have no memory of his aiding and abetting of your disposal of Dickenson’s corpse… skeleton… watch, glasses, and other metal effects.”
“Mesmerism!” cried Dickens. “Wonderful! Shall we add laudanum to the mixture here, my dear friend?”
“I don’t believe that is required, Charles. Mesmeric control alone will account for the accomplice’s unwitting help.”
“Poor old Dradles!” cried Dickens. He was almost skipping in his delight. “Poor young Dickenson! Those few people in this world who even knew he had ever lived believe him—on the word of his murderer! — to be off to France or South Africa or Australia. No one to mourn him. No one to bring a single flower to his sealed and shared crypt. And the killer solves his… money problems… and goes on as if nothing has happened. This is too wonderful, my dear Wilkie.”
My heart pounding wildly again, I decided to explode the bombshell I had dropped perhaps so prematurely. “Yes, Charles, but this is all predicated on the murderer in question knowing that he is the murderer… knowing that he has done murder.”
“But how can he not know…” began Dickens, and then ran his hand furiously through his scraggly beard. “Of course! The murderer, the same man who has mesmerised his crypt-keeper accomplice into compliance, has been acting under the control of magnetic influence himself!”
I said nothing but watched Dickens’s face as we walked.
He shook his head. “I fear it breaks down here, Wilkie.”
“How so, Charles?”
“Professor John Elliotson, my first instructor in the magnetic arts—you quoted him yourself, Wilkie! — and all other experts I have read and conferred with, insist that someone under the magnetic influence of another, stronger will, still cannot commit any deed which he would not perform or agree to when not under mesmeric control.”
“But you had old Dradles help you dispose of the body,” I said.
“Yes, yes,” said Dickens, walking more quickly even as he ran his hands through his hair and beard, lost in deep contemplation of the plot elements here. “But burying the newly dead in graves and the crypts—transporting them when necessary—then walling up the corpses, is Dradles’s job. The controlling mesmeriser would simply construct a waking dream of a story around him. But to command murder… No, I think that will not work in our story, Wilkie. Not if the murderer is a sane man.”