THE FINAL SPEECH RECEIVES particularly warm applause, almost an ovation; and for a second or two the members of the Drood work-group, who have finished reading almost at the same moment, are under the impression that it is Dickens who is being so vigorously clapped. After all, that was how the great writer was greeted when he toured the theatres, electrifying the audiences with his histrionic (and highly lucrative) readings from the more dramatic passages in his novels.
But it is only the inauguration drawing to its conclusion. None of those now trooping forward to the refreshments has paid with an entrance ticket. Do we need to dwell on the crowd that seethes around the long table, foraging, battling for the exotic titbits arrayed there? The reader is familiar with such scenes: the lunging arms, the swooping bodies, the jabbing elbows, the sloshed sauces and spilt drinks. We might as well move smoothly forward in space and time, to find the Drood work-group all together once again (give or take a detective or two) in an undisturbed side-room.
The plates have all been filled in the random, desperate haste of such occasions, and every diner now finds himself confronting a culinary puzzle. We hear such words as:
‘A date – with a prawn inside? Ça alors!’
‘Do I really want to know what lies beneath this greeny-grey goo?’
‘The circumstantial evidence says pigeon, but the stuffing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is mango.’
‘Salami with crème caramel topping?’
‘The aim is laudable,’ Dr Wilmot observes, separating a banana fritter from its bed of sauerkraut, ‘that of culinary completeness. There’s absolutely everything in this dinner.’
‘Cooking,’ states Nero Wolfe, who has decided to avoid surprises by limiting himself to a stick of raw celery, ‘is not a matter of chaotically combining comestibles. The art of cooking consists in calculation, in meticulous premeditation, just as with the art of the novel. Take Dickens. Take what he does with Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823), an Italian archaeologist who narrowly escaped death by suffocation in the second pyramid of Gizeh. Dickens has Rosa name him in Chapter Three, with a vague reference to the dangerous misadventure. Thus he prepares the ground for Durdles, who in his own way, in a comic and strictly English context, is an archaeologist too, and who employs the same, so-to-speak, echographic methods. This in turn sets the stage for the murderer’s probable modus operandi, and indeed, looking still further ahead, for the eventual discovery of the victim. Precisely the kind of subtlety required in haute cuisine.’
DUPIN: Not to mention the subtlety of the keys. The idea of having a musicologist clink three keys, one against the other, so that he’ll be able to recognise the right one, when he needs to, by its sound, strikes me as exquisite. Which I’m afraid I cannot say of this cocoa-coated pig’s trotter.
TOAD: You call that subtlety? Burying Jasper beneath a mound of transparent evidence, like this poor little pepper-squashed frog? Just look at what happens: Jasper hits on the blatant pretext of the tombstone in order to visit Sapsea and thus meet Durdles and thus identifies the keys which will then open the tomb in which he plans to conceal the corpse! And then another ‘chance’ nocturnal encounter with Durdles, and this time right outside the burial-ground!
WILMOT, scooping up the shark-meat cubes oozing out of his pancake: I should point out that this last coincidence is not due to clumsiness or carelessness, of which Dickens is sometimes accused. It was forced upon the author, owing to the fact that the novel came out in instalments. He had concluded the first number with Chapter Four and had already written a good deal of the next number, in which the nocturnal encounter with Durdles took place in Chapter Eight. But at the last moment the printer realised that the issue wasn’t long enough: they were six pages short of thirty-two. Hence the transformation of Chapter Eight into Five and its inclusion in the first instalment.
WOLFE: Haute Cuisine once again! Whipping up something new in the face of the unforeseen is a gift only the greatest chefs possess. Because quite apart from this regrettable ‘coincidence’, there is another incongruous detail: on his way back from Sapsea’s house in High Street, which is opposite the Nuns’ House, Jasper had no need to pass the burial-ground . . .
This exercise in detective pedantry is greeted by appreciative if indistinct murmurs from the circle of full mouths.
WOLFE, continuing: . . . and yet I consider that the ending of the April number is clearly improved in this way: The character of Durdles is rounded out, and we make the acquaintance of the street urchin, Deputy. There is something Londonish about him, something not quite in keeping with the surroundings of the ancient cathedral, but he appears at just the right moment to set off the provincial respectability of Cloisterham. Dickens thereby assures us that this peaceful little town contains a stratum of society which is, if not exactly criminal, at least ready to dispense with the rules.
TOAD: But that doesn’t stop the author piling up the evidence against Jasper! The shady uncle actually asks to be taken on as Durdles’s apprentice, to learn all about tombs and burials. And when he comes home, we see him gaze upon his sleeping nephew with a peculiar concentration, and then ‘deliver himself to Spectres’ which the pipe brings at midnight. What are these spectres if not his future crime? No, it’s too easy, too . . . obvious.
HOLMES, who has found the Completeness dinner completely inedible and is holding nothing more than a glass of mineral water, seems to shudder at the word spectres. He sips his water and, looking rather pale, addresses Toad:
‘Too obvious, you say? You find the case too easy, open-and-shut? Yes . . . So it would appear . . . And yet Conan Doyle, the man for whom I worked for so long, was not of that opinion. Indeed, in 1927, as a firm believer in spiritualism (chairman of the British Society for Spiritualist Research) he decided to devote a séance to the Drood case, with the intention of questioning Charles Dickens’s spirit on the subject.
POIROT: You mean he asked Dickens directly who the murderer was?
HOLMES: Yes. He invoked the spirit of ‘Boz’, as Dickens signed himself in his early journalist years.
POIROT: And Boz came, and answered?
HOLMES: Yes, my friend. He came. He answered.
ALL: And so what did he—?
But at that moment a slurred voice interrupts from the far end of the room.
‘So that’s where you all are!’
In comes Loredana, on rather unsteady legs.
ALL: For God’s sake, Holmes!
HOLMES, rapidly, almost under his breath: Boz said that behind the mystery of Edwin Drood lay something that he would rather did not come to light. And during that séance I myself had – indeed, still have – the feeling that it might be better to proceed no further in this business.
POIROT: Not today, at any rate.
Then they all make their way out on to the terrace, where Loredana has been settled for some time now, in the company of Archer and Marlowe, drinking and dancing to Turkish-Brazilian rhythms.