THUS ENDS THE FIRST CHAPTER. Extremely short. And Loredana, who after some initial stumbling has acquired a certain graceful fluency, apparently wants to go straight on to the second, just as a young lady of 1870 would have done, with that same bound copy in her hands and the Victorian family circle hanging on her rosy lips. At last, a new Dickens! There had been nothing from his pen since 1865, when Our Mutual Friend came out, and his vast public of admirers, from the Queen downwards, had been waiting impatiently ever since.
But no one here is listening for the sheer pleasure of it. Here – the reader must not forget – we are surrounded by a host of scrupulous, even fanatical, analysts. Their attitude is understandable: from the business point of view, they have a professional obligation to the Japanese sponsors; and on the level of personal prestige, none of the detectives wants a single detail of the interwoven mysteries of the MED to escape him. And, of course, as the reader well knows, there is a pinch of exhibitionism in one or two of these people.
So, with a wave of his hand, Dr Wilmot checks Loredana’s eagerness, and invites Holmes, who has raised his magnifying-glass, to speak.
‘There is one small point I would like to clear up,’ says the expert in fluorescent hounds. ‘The man who comes hurrying into the cathedral of X and who joins the choir in intoning “When the wicked man”: is this the same man we saw leaving the opium-den at dawn? I would have you note that the author does not say so explicitly.’
The editor of The Dickensian sighs. The proceedings are likely to be lengthy, with a quibbler of this calibre.
‘An interesting point,’ he concedes courteously, ‘but I would prefer not to discuss it just now. For the moment we can take it for granted that the opium-addict and the chorist are the same person. Dickens does not reveal his name at once, and the character is thus introduced to us (in a highly effective way, if I may say so) enshrouded in an aura of mysterious ambiguity, or, if you prefer, of seeming duplicity. But,’ he adds with a faint smile, ‘if we will wait until the next chapter, the character’s duplicity will become more obvious.’
‘Thank you.’ Holmes smiles back. ‘It is what I feared.’
‘Too obvious, too obvious,’ comes a raucous voice from the back.
This obscure pronouncement leaves everybody puzzled for a moment, and a lady without a name-badge takes advantage of this to address Father Brown directly.
‘So the Wicked Man,’ she asks, ‘is supposed to be him? The opium-addict, I mean?’
‘The allusion,’ says Father Brown into the microphone handed to him briskly by Loredana, ‘seems clear enough to me. But . . .’
‘Too clear, too clear,’ the raucous voice again croaks from the back.
‘. . . but,’ the priest continues seraphically, ‘it is by no means a forced or artificial allusion. The evening service of the Anglican liturgy opens with this verse from Ezekiel (18:27), and Dickens’s use of it is thus quite natural. I might add that the verse in its complete form opens up new possibilities: “And when the wicked man turneth himself away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.” Therefore there is a hope of redemption for him, despite his evil secret.’
The lady expresses surprise. ‘Why evil? My brother, who’s a senior consultant in Arezzo, told me that in Dickens’s time drug-addiction wasn’t considered so very scandalous or reprehensible. They prescribed opium quite routinely as a pain-killer, and addicts weren’t particularly ashamed of their vice.’
Here tact seems called for. The lady has failed to understand that the opium-addict’s secret has nothing to do with opium. And, once again, Popeau (who takes this opportunity to introduce himself as ‘an ex-high-ranking officer of the Préfecture de Paris and subsequently private investigator in the service of Mrs M. Belloc Lowndes’) reveals that he has understood even less.
‘Mais si secret il y a,’ he asks, ‘if there is a secret, is it not rather the one that le sujet, the subject, tries to learn from the lips of his companions in the den?’
The chairman clears his throat and turns to Maigret, who is filling his pipe with ostentatious concentration. ‘Your former colleague’s interpretation is, perhaps . . .’
‘Quite. But we must acknowledge that the text, especially when rendered . . . ehm . . . into Latin, can be misleading. Because, yes, it is true that the subject listens keenly to what his companions mutter in their fitful sleep; and it is also true that his first “Unintelligible!”, through some cleverness on the author’s part, might be occasioned by disappointment. But the gist lies in his “gloomy smile”, and in his “reassured” nodding. We must therefore conclude that it is he who has a terrible secret, and that he wished to ascertain whether it might have slipped out while he was under the influence of the opium.’
‘An open secret, an open secret,’ the raucous voice interrupts once again.
The reader undoubtedly wishes to know to whom this subversive voice belongs, but the man’s name, alas, is not known. De Quincey, in his essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, calls him merely Toad in the Hole (which is a kind of sausage-pudding), but this nickname should not mislead us into underestimating him. Toad is in fact a fastidious connoisseur of murder, an insatiable gourmet of criminal mystery, who was so disgusted by the coarse level of London homicides at the beginning of the nineteenth century that he withdrew to the country for a while. An extremely demanding and hypercritical expert, from whom we must expect, unfortunately, further pungent interruptions.
But now Dupin, who has been showing signs of impatience, leans into the microphone: ‘I have nothing against allusions, first impressions, or connections, whether obvious or not, which might lead to results later on. But I would like to point out that so far no one has posed the purely technical question of times and places. Where is this opium-den? Where is this cathedral? And at the time of the events, with the means of transport then existing, how long would it take to get from one to the other?’
A murmur of approval rises from that formidable gathering of time-table experts and clock-watchers, all accustomed to seeking out truth in the tiniest of chronological chinks. And the editor of The Dickensian satisfies their curiosity at once: ‘The opium-den is in London. We know, from reliable witnesses, that when Dickens was doing his research for the book, he visited one such den, which he then took as a model, with its hostess and its clients. It was situated near the port, in the notorious district of Shadwell, to be precise, in . . . But this is hardly relevant . . .’
But, reader, how could we omit the fact that the opium-den was not only in Shadwell but on the corner of the Ratcliff Highway, the scene of the Ratcliff Road Murders, which De Quincey elevated to the ‘dignity of a national event’, thus restoring Toad’s faith in crime? And how could we fail to add that Dickens carried out his reconnaissance in the company of a Scotland Yard officer, who under the name of Bucket appears in another of his novels and is the first-ever detective inspector in English literature.
Nor should we pass over the fact that a Baltimore collector, after the writer’s death, had the happy idea of visiting that den; he found the bedstead in the same ‘tumbled’ state as ever, bought it for a pound, and took it back with him to the U.S.A., where it can still be seen.
‘As for the cathedral town,’ Dr Wilmot goes on to explain, ‘its fictitious name in the novel is Cloisterham. But it is unanimously agreed among scholars that it is, in fact, Rochester, where the great writer spent part of his childhood, where he set some immortal scenes of Pickwick, and where – or near where – he was to die on June 9, 1870. The novel is clearly set in the early 1840s, when the rail link with London was not fully established. From the MED itself we gather that the journey, some thirty-five miles, was made partly by train and partly by omnibus, and took three hours.
‘But,’ observes the Carabinieri colonel, ‘that means that the culprit can’t have left London before one o’clock, given that he arrived just in time for the service. What was he doing all that time in-between?’
‘Good point,’ says Wilmot, ‘but one that has remained unanswered. It’s a pity, the more so since we find the same situation in Chapter Twenty-two, the last we have. Once again, the . . . well, not exactly the culprit, let’s say the suspect . . . emerges from the opium-den at dawn and returns to Cloisterham on an afternoon train – or, rather, an evening train. But we are told nothing of how he spent the intervening time.’
Dr Wilmot looks around with a courteous smile, but his tone has the sharpness of a sickle poised to lop off all the upraised arms. ‘Speaking of time, we should perhaps be getting on, so if our kind assistant would care to resume her reading . . .’
For a moment the embarrassed flush rekindles Loredana’s cheeks, but then she plucks up courage and begins: ‘Chapter Two . . .’