‘THE D CASE may call for “outside inquiries”, but a little punctuality would do no harm either,’ says the editor of The Dickensian in some irritation, as he re-examines the blue slips of paper from yesterday. ‘Besides, Poirot did ask us to proceed without him. So, since there seem to be no further messages,fn1 I would suggest . . .’
‘Quite right,’ says the colonel of the Carabinieri, who has arrived with his customary punctuality, and pretends not to notice the curious eyes directed towards him from all sides.
‘We might begin,’ says Magistrate Petrovich, ‘by recapitulating and comparing the main theses. Of which I believe there are three.’
‘Four,’ Maigret corrects him. ‘Let’s not forget the false vagabond.’
‘Ah, well . . .’ The accuser of Raskolnikov smiles. ‘But maybe you have a point. We know that in the Cloisterham of the novel, as in Rochester in reality, there was a continual to and fro of tramps on their way from Gravesend to Dover and vice versa. Now, on the grounds of . . . well, literary absurdity, as one might put it, we’ve ruled out the idea that Drood was assaulted and killed by a true vagabond, for theft, like the poor pilgrim countess on her way to Rome. But what if the murderer were the unknown Oriental assassin disguised as an Occidental vagabond? I know that this would still not satisfy our friend Toad, but it is by no means impossible. It is a variation, however, on the theme of the unknown assassin, and so the main theses remain three in number.’
‘They can be reduced even to two,’ says Dupin, ‘because . . .’
‘One moment, one moment,’ the chairman cuts in, ‘let’s first state what these three are. Otherwise we’ll get confused.’
‘Absolutely right,’ says Colonel D’Attilio (at last we are provided with his name).
By common accord, then, Dr Wilmot is asked to expound the three main theses.
This is the thesis put forward by Wilson and later refined by Forsyte: Not only is Jasper the murderer, but his motive and modus operandi are precisely as expected. Jasper’s jealousy of Rosa and hatred for his nephew is so intense that he plans to strangle him and in addition hurl him from the top of the tower; after which he will decompose the body in the quicklime and hide the bones in the Sapsea tomb. But Datchery/Bazzard will identify the bones thanks to the ring, and the uncle-murderer will finally confess.
The obvious objection to this thesis is that the mystery is no mystery, for we already know everything. The answer to the objection: The mystery lies in Jasper’s split-personality, which will be dramatically revealed to the reader only at the end.
The main criticism of this answer, made by the supporters of Thesis B: However dramatic the revelation of Jasper’s splitpersonality may be, the public, who has already been introduced, by Wilkie Collins, to the mystery novel, will be terribly disappointed. Dickens could not have been so simple as to fail to see this.
If I may add a criticism of my own (Wilmot says), the motive of jealousy, whether or not it is connected with a split personality, is completely out of proportion with the ferocity of the modus operandi. Why should Jasper, not content with disposing of his nephew in order to gain access to Rosa, want to vent his rage on the corpse as well? Why must he see him struggling and pleading at his feetfn2 before strangling him? After all, it is he who is the betrayer; it is not as if Drood perfidiously stole the girl from him!
Therefore, if the murderer really is Jasper, there has to be a deeper motive. And here is where the real mystery might lie. I would remind you of the subtle question put at the very beginning by Colonel D’Attilio: ‘The opium-addict, who left the den at dawn, doesn’t get to the cathedral until that afternoon, when he arrives all out of breath for the service. This means that he can’t have left London before one o’clock. Where was he and what was he doing until that time?’ The author doesn’t tell us, and we let it pass the first time. There might be nothing to it. But the same thing is repeated in the last chapter: Once again Jasper leaves the den at dawn, but as the author deliberately stresses (without, however, giving us a word of explanation), he doesn’t set out for Cloisterham again until six p.m. It is thus clear that Jasper has some business in London that has nothing to do with opium. What does it have to do with Drood? A question that the supporters of Thesis A would do well to consider.
This is the thesis of the ‘unknown hired assassin’, developed by Aylmer, who gives two possibilities: i) the family vendetta of Muslim origin; 2) a terrorist action in response to a grave affront committed by Drood’s father against Islam. Aylmer opts for the family vendetta, since in the other case the plagiarism of The Moonstone would be too blatant.
Anyway, in Thesis B, as we saw yesterday, the plan concocted by Jasper is designed entirely to protect Drood and not to harm him. What is particularly interesting and even persuasive is the explanation of the ‘ghostly cry’ that Durdles heard on the night of Christmas Eve the previous year. On that night too (the anniversary of the grave affront to the family), an unknown assassin was in Cloisterham; but, finding Drood still engaged to Rosa, he postponed the execution. Even so, he ascended the cathedral tower to reconnoitre the territory, and accidentally fell, letting out the aforementioned cry. Jasper, who not only heard the cry but also the crash, found the corpse, guessed that it must be the assassin, and threw it into the river. This accident inspired his ruthless plan of action in dealing with the assassin that would come the following year. As for Jasper’s mysterious business in London, Aylmer’s explanation ties in neatly with his thesis: Being Egyptian on his mother’s side, Jasper speaks the language perfectly and furthermore is olive-skinned; thus he has been able to infiltrate the Islamic community around the port-district of London, in the hope of identifying the new assassin when he arrives.
WILMOT: This is what we might call the Scotland Yard thesis. It was formulated by Sergeant Cuff, with the assistance of his colleagues Inspector Bucket and Superintendent Battle. I believe it now has the added support of Dupin, Inspector Maigret, and of course our friend Toad. For the first time in the history of MED criticism, the two Landlesses are identified as the murderers.
TOAD: The choice is between the so-called twins and the false vagabond! I totally reject both Thesis A and Thesis B. Nor do I see how the three theses could be reduced to two, in the words of our friend Dupin.
MAIGRET: Actually, they can be reduced to one.
DUPIN: Possibly, but before we synthesise, let us analyse. Well, then. Thesis B and our Thesis C both involve a hired assassin. But in B, the assassin is unknown to everybody, including the reader, since he is none of the characters we have met. A most unsatisfactory device, for it is against all the rules of Father Knoxfn3 for a criminal case to be solved by bringing in a complete stranger at the last moment. In C, on the other hand, the assassin is unknown only temporarily; it will finally be revealed that he – or, rather, they – figured in the novel from the very beginning.
To sum up, one might say that the two theses complement one another, although naturally several things remain to be explained. For example, Aylmer insists that Drood is not dead but has fled in the belief that it was Jasper who wanted to kill him. But we say he is dead and that his remains, with the ring, lie in the Sapsea tomb. How did they get there? That is what we must find out. Meanwhile I’ll just observe that in both cases we have an inadequate, bungling assassin. Aylmer’s is supposed to be an expert strangler, but he leaves Drood merely choked. Our killer, instead of proceeding ritually as his iron-willed fanatical sister would have him do, kills half-heartedly and haphazardly with a walking-stick.
TOAD: Excellent.
DUPIN: As for the question of motive, a family vendetta and religious fanaticism need not be mutually exclusive. We do not think – as Aylmer does, and as do the supporters of Thesis A – that Dickens would have allowed the question of plagiarism to deter him from choosing the plot that suited him best. After the relative lack of success of his previous novel and the striking success of The Moonstone, his feelings of jealousy towards his former protégé, collaborator, and friend had turned into bile and contempt. ‘A skilful craftsman, and not even that skilful,’ as he said to his sub-editor, Wills. He was writing his own mystery now, and probably wanted to show his public that he could do it better: perhaps using the very same ingredients.
F. BROWN: I fear this could well be the truth. Anyone who knows the human heart – and especially the artist’s heart – can imagine, from that snatch of dialogue with Wills, what Dickens’s interior monologue must have been: ‘Oh? I’m in decline, am I? Worn-out, finished? I’ll show that wind-bag and everyone else! They want a mystery, do they? Very well, I’ll teach them how to write a mystery, a great mystery, and I’ll do it using the same ingredients as that puffed-up pen-pusher, that third-rate scribbler! I’ll dignify them, give them life, create real characters, real settings, real atmosphere, drama, suspense, and, by Jove, real prose!’ Yes, it is quite possible that the MED grew out of this rage and this pride; this desire to humiliate the hack, to eliminate the parvenu with one sweep of the lion’s paw. Honour, old affection, scruples – all forgotten. If such things as Jasper’s drugs and the terrorist duo appear to be plagiarised from The Moonstone, so much the better: it will be a deliberate, mocking plagiarism.
P. PETROVICH: I began by supporting Thesis A. Jasper’s split-personality, which anticipates Jekyll, symbolising the struggle between Good and Evil, struck me (and indeed strikes me still) as worthier of Dickens’s pen. However, so far the author has shown us only the Evil side of Jasper: what about the Good side? The struggle, it seems to me, is rather slow in getting off the ground.
So I don’t rule out my support for Thesis C, provided the Grand Guignol ‘family vendetta of Muslim origin’ could be eliminated. Something similar to the Rushdie case would be more interesting, as well as more in character with what we know of the Landlesses. Besides, there is no need for us to limit ourselves to ritual terrorism of Islamic or Hindu origin (the latter represented by the well-known Vama çara, or Way of the Left Hand). It was in March 1869 that the twenty-year-old Netchaev arrived in Geneva, to propagate that explosive Revolutionary Catechism, a book much admired by Bakunin. It stirred young people of every nation to the wildest forms of terrorism. Might not Dickens have taken inspiration from this? In August that same year, he wrote to Forster: ‘I have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not a communicable idea (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work.’
TOAD: Hear, hear!
F. BROWN, N. WOLFE, G. FELL say nothing, but from their faces it is clear that they, too, are beginning to favour Thesis C.
SERGEANT CUFF: The ‘family vendetta of Muslim origin’ doesn’t satisfy us at Scotland Yard either. A terrorist action of the Netchaev-Bakunin kind, or such as the one planned against Rushdie, strikes us as far more in keeping with the character of Helena (the classic fanatic who’ll stick at nothing) and Neville (the classic backslider). Think of the new meaning this would give to the ‘evil rapport’ that the author inserts in Chapter Sixteen: those rumours that Neville would be capable of almost anything ‘but for his poor sister, who alone had influence over him, and out of whose sight he was never to be trusted’.
And there’s the business of the papers that Neville destroys before his attempted flight. What papers, if it’s a family vendetta? What need would there be for him to bring papers over from Ceylon? Whereas it’s typical of the political terrorist to lumber himself with pamphlets and booklets of subversive propaganda (though not Netchaev’s Revolutionary Catechism, since in 1842 it didn’t exist yet).
Finally, notice that in Thesis B, although Neville is not the assassin, Jasper suspects he is. Which explains both Jasper’s behaviour towards him and the kind of understanding (re Rosa’s engagement) that seems to exist between the two and which I myself had already assumed to exist. But if we do away with the family vendetta idea, we’ll need some other link between Edwin’s execution and the breaking of the engagement.
TOAD: We’ll find it!
WILMOT: Or the computer will. But we should work on the solution in its broad outline.
Things don’t look good, reader. The morning session is over and the afternoon one has begun, and still no sign of either Poirot or Thorndyke. The participants are beginning to wonder what contribution the two could make anyway. By now, Thesis C has the support of the majority, even though it has not yet been fully expounded.
‘In my opinion,’ Dupin is saying, ‘the main problem still to be solved is the one I referred to this morning. If Drood did not survive, contrary to what Aylmer believes, and his remains are found in the Sapsea tomb along with the ring, how did they get there? Perhaps the Landlesses put them there to incriminate Jasper, knowing of his plan to thwart the unknown assassin. But how could they have known of his plan?
‘The explanation may be less difficult than it at first seems; it also removes an improbability that none of our predecessors noticed. You will remember that on the night of the crime, for all their anxiety about their young charges, neither Jasper nor the Reverend Crisparkle waited up for them. My hypothesis is that Neville has carefully drugged both with the laudanum he found in Mrs Crisparkle’s medicine-closet. Then Helena (who, as I further suggested, changed bedrooms in order to be able to leave the college unobserved) slips into the Gate House to check that the drug is working. There she finds Jasper, who under the effect of the drug falls into his usual monologue and thus unwittingly reveals his plan to her!
‘Helena takes the key to the tomb and runs to the river. There she finds Neville, who has killed Drood, albeit not ritually. But what’s done is done. She pockets the watch and the pin (which she will throw into the weir the next day) but purposely leaves the ring, to identify the body. The two of them (the young woman has the strength of a man) carry the corpse into Durdles’s yard and plunge it into the quicklime. They then pull out the remains and hide them in the coffin, which Jasper previously unscrewed.’fn4
CUFF: As for Datchery/Bazzard, after his encounter with Jasper in the tomb, he directs his inquiries along different lines. Unlike Rosa, Crisparkle, Grewgious, and the rest – and unlike all who have analysed the Drood case before us – Bazzard is not under the mawkish, twisted influence of Helena. Once Jasper has convinced him with his frank explanation, the two will work together to get a confession out of the Landlesses – and they will succeed. But I believe Inspector Maigret has a word to say on this.
MAIGRET: One might think that Neville would be the first to confess, given his weak character and his leanings towards penitence. But in Victorian England a murderer, however sincere his confession, could not hope to escape the death-sentence. Neville knows perfectly well that he’ll go to the gallows regardless (and remember how in Chapter Nineteen Jasper prophetically casts their shadow over his sister as well).fn5 His weakness could thus result in a stubborn silence. His sister (or ‘sister’) is stubborn for different reasons. Remember Thesis A, in which Jasper’s confession is wrested from him by Helena’s hypnotic powers. As she says to Rosa, she doesn’t fear Jasper’s power because she feels that she is stronger than he. But it’s possible that in a final trial of hypnotic strength Jasper might come out on top. Thus it would be Helena who confesses under hypnosis; and she would confess in precisely the way Thesis A (based on what Dickens supposedly revealed to Forster) says Jasper will confess: recounting everything in detail, but as if describing another man’s crime. This is why I said that the three theses can be reduced to one.
POIROT: But you also mentioned a fourth thesis, Inspector, which we could name Thesis D.
Yes, reader. None of those present, absorbed as they were by the fascinating conclusions of Thesis C, noticed Poirot’s arrival. He has been there for some time, in fact, but stayed discreetly by the door.fn6 Nobody shows any sign of surprise; nobody asks him premature questions. They know it would be in vain.
The only remark comes from Colonel D’Attilio.
‘Thesis D,’ he says. ‘Quite right.’
MAIGRET, to Poirot while the latter takes his seat: I deduce that you have sublistened to us, cher ami. You know therefore that I was referring to the false vagabond. And from your messages I deduce that you have been with Thorndyke to the district of Arezzo, after which Thorndyke went to Pisa airport, from which he no doubt left for London.
DUPIN: I would further deduce the complicity of Colonel D’Attilio, who was also absent yesterday afternoon. Because there is no way one can be in Rome at 1415, in Spoleto at 1445, in the district of Arezzo at 1530, and in Pisa at 1600, without the use of a helicopter belonging to the Carabinieri.
D’ATTILIO: One can hide nothing from you, Dupin. I admit that I supplied the helicopter, at Poirot’s request, after taking a statement from the relatives of the lady whose brother, by her own admission, is a senior consultant in Arezzo.
As for the reader, he will be able to deduce the importance that Poirot eventually attributed to the telepathic hallucinations of this lady. But when? What persuaded Poirot to trouble the Carabinieri for a helicopter so he could pursue external inquiries with Thorndyke in that direction?
POIROT, as if reading our minds: In an investigation, as we all know, it is not the frank admission but almost always the lies, the things omitted or suppressed, that put us on to the right track. Our inquiry into the Drood case is no exception to this rule. Almost immediately I suspected that one of us was concealing the truth; later, that there were two such people. But it was not until yesterday morning that I obtained definite proof. I proceeded at once, therefore . . .
POPEAU, his spiteful voice rising above the exclamations of surprise from all: What proof? What are you talking about? Have you gone mad?
POIROT: Thank you. When someone asks me this, it generally means that the case is solved. As for the proof, well, it is a matter of: Videntes non vident.
LATINIST: Videntes non vident et audientes non audiunt. Eyes they have, and see not. They have ears, and hear not.
POIROT: Yes, you all had the proof before your eyes, and didn’t see it. Someone, and I’m afraid I’m referring to Porfiry Petrovich, also had ears to hear and heard not. But more of this later. I was saying that, having obtained the proof, I at once informed the Carabinieri. And they, in the person of our Colonel D’Attilio . . .
D’ATTILIO: Soon identified the wanted woman. She belongs to a distinguished Arezzo family, and, it appears, attended the convention out of mere curiosity. From the telephone statement we took from her relatives, it also emerged that on Tuesday afternoon the lady returned to Monte San Savino, where the family live, still in a mentally agitated state, talking of dogs, jugs, windows, and false-vagabond murderers. That same evening, eluding the surveillance of her family, she proceeded to Spoleto, where she was found late that night raving amidst the ruins of the ancient theatre. According to local witnesses, she mentioned, among other things, a fatal Scottish owl and an Italian mouse-trap.
DUPIN, enigmatically: This fits Thesis C.
POIROT: Exactly. Before proceeding to Monte San Savino, we therefore touched down at Spoleto, where the witnesses confirmed what has just been said. One of them also told us that according to the deranged woman, the owl and trap were linked to a murder. She apparently shouted several times: ‘That’s why he killed him!’
DUPIN: But this does not fit Thesis C!
POIROT: But it does fit Thesis D. We ourselves saw the patient – or, rather, the telepath – and, despite her brother’s objections to a formal interrogation were able to obtain a description, if somewhat vague, of the murderer. Strangely, for a vagabond, whether true or false, he wore glasses. It was on hearing this that I finally saw the light.
HOLMES, as pale as a ghost: No! . . . Poirot, in God’s name, no!
POIROT: I’m sorry, Holmes. You know that when I seek the truth, I do not stop half-way.
WILMOT, curtly: Gentlemen, may I remind you that we have very little time. And I don’t think this convention is the most suitable place for deductions based on telepathy and spiritualism.
POIROT, no less curtly: No doubt, Dr Wilmot. We would have all preferred to base our deductions on the facts, if you had not deliberately kept them from us.
LOREDANA: This is outrageous! Unheard of! It’s . . . it’s crazy!
POIROT: I can only answer you as I did Popeau, my dear girl. As far as spiritualism is concerned, it was in fact my utter scepticism towards it that first made me suspect Holmes. It could not possibly be a question of spirits. But if a detective of his calibre was convinced that Dickens did not want the truth about the Drood case to come out, there had to be a definite reason. Holmes, as we know, had studied the case long before us. And, I told myself, he must have reached conclusions that frightened him. Must have unconsciously dismissed them from his mind and replaced them with the story of the spiritualist séance. But his memory, to judge by his remarks a moment ago, has now returned to him.
HOLMES sits silently, head bowed, ignoring his colleagues’ stares and Watson’s whispered questions.
WILMOT sits grim-faced, also silent, ignoring Loredana’s anguished questions.
POIROT: But let us return to Monte San Savino. Or, rather, let us leave it again: Thorndyke en route to London via Pisa, and myself to Rome, where I spent this morning in biographical and bibliographical research. First-hand research.
TOAD: Very wise, seeing that here we can’t trust anyone.
POIROT: I followed several trails, and you will have to bear with me while I go over them all. Let’s begin with the theatre. It is clear that the ‘fatal Scottish owl’ that had insinuated itself into the mind of the lady from Arezzo, and which originated, without any doubt, from Holmes’s or Wilmot’s mind, was the ‘owl, the fatal bellman’ that Lady Macbeth hears while her husband is killing the unfortunate Duncan.
DUPIN: Perfectly clear.
POIROT: It is no less clear that the ‘Italian mouse-trap’ refers to ‘The Mouse-Trap’ in Hamlet, the fictional Italian tragedy that the prince has the travelling company of actors perform before his murderous stepfather and his own ‘most pernicious’ mother. Now, Dupin had already pointed out the persistent allusions in the MED to both Hamlet and Macbeth. And he had also noted how in both tragedies (indeed, in all three, if we include the fictional one, where the murderer is called Lucianus) we have a criminal couple that corresponds, in ruthlessness – especially the woman – to our couple, Helena and Neville. But he had not paid sufficient attention, it struck me, to the question of the play within the play.
COL. D’ATTILIO, F. BROWN, P. PETROVICH, LATINIST and OTHERS: Maybe because we get such an overdose of that stuff nowadays.
POIROT: I quite agree. But the fact is, the MED teems with theatrical allusions, beginning with the macabre-grotesque pantomime ‘How Do You Do Tomorrow?’ of the false Italian clown Signor Jacksonini. The neo-detective Bazzard (there is no doubt that he is Datchery) is himself a playwright, an unusual occupation for a solicitor’s clerk, in those days at any rate. I think it unlikely that all this was not intended to lead towards something decidedly theatrical, in the latter part of the MED.
DUPIN: You mean, Bazzard would resort to a play within a play to unmask the murderers?
POIROT: More that Dickens, in the finale, would resort to a play within the novel. This, I think, was the new idea, the twist, the surprise that the novelist – who was always so keen on theatre – had up his sleeve for the readers.
POPEAU, sarcastically: Did the lady from Arezzo tell you this as well?
POIROT: No, it was my Latinist friend. But in a way Inspector Maigret had already stumbled on the truth, when he remarked that at the end, whoever it was who confessed, the confession would take that special form that Dickens had mentioned to Forster. A story that the murderer narrates or writes, as if the action and the characters were purely imaginary. A kind of script for a sensational drama. But perhaps our friend from Juan-les-Pins can explain things better than I.
ANTONIA, very proud: You’ll see, he’s wonderful!
LATINIST, also proud, but containing it: A brother and sister of uncertain nationality, perhaps of gipsy origin, and who indeed may not even be brother and sister, plan to kill an Englishman. The brother has qualms and would like to back out, but she insists ruthlessly. It is she in fact who devises the murder-plan: the body will be destroyed chemically and the remains hidden in a secret, inaccessible place. And so it happens, and for several months no one knows whether it was a voluntary disappearance or a crime. But the place was not so secret and inaccessible as they thought! The remains are identified thanks to an object that the chemical agent could not destroy.
ANTONIA: Isn’t he wonderful!
LATINIST: At this point, a relative of the murdered man turns up, who is actively involved in theatre. He suggests to the ‘sister’, who possesses mesmeric powers and is a prey to dark fancies, that she should write him a script for a sensational drama of the Elizabethan kind. She does this, and the result is a perfect theatrical reconstruction of the crime, played out, as in Hamlet, by characters who differ from their originals only by name.
ANTONIA, while the Latinist takes his seat again in satisfaction: I think he’s wonderful!
LOREDANA: I don’t understand. What’s so wonderful about it? All François (the Latinist’s name) has done is give us a summary of the complete plot of the MED according to Thesis C.
POIROT: So it would seem. But he has also given us, as I myself have managed to check by consulting the rare volume, a very faithful summary of the plot of The Haunted House, a novel by Wilkie Collins which came out in 1878.
Poirot has no mysterious powers of divination, reader. The fact that he went and looked up that mediocre and practically unknown novel by Collins, which no MED scholar had ever concerned himself with before,fn7 is due to his having overheard the conversation between the Collinsian Latinist and Hastings the other evening. And that is why he himself stayed and chatted so long with the Latinist before leaving.
It is easy to imagine the difficulty Poirot found himself in after this discovery. Ruling out pure and simple coincidence, there were only three possibilities. The first was that Collins had reconstructed the plot of the MED himself, including the theatrical twist, and used it for his book (with different settings and trappings).fn8 But why should he do this, if he considered the MED ‘the melancholy work of a worn-out brain’? The second possibility: Dickens himself revealed the plot to his former friend and collaborator. But, again, why on earth should Dickens do this, fearing Collins, though he called him a hack, as a rival? And the third possibility . . .
POIROT: The third possibility is that the original twist and its development were Collins’s; that Collins himself had spoken of them to Dickens before their relations deteriorated; and that Dickens, in his boundless egotism, coolly appropriated them.
The reader will no doubt imagine that at this point the room resounded with protests and shocked cries. He would be wrong. A dazed silence fell on the Drood work-group. And in that silence, Poirot continued his exposition, his voice neutral, his tone factual.
POIROT: This explains many things. It explains, for example, a second, most singular point of similarity between the MED and Collins’s novel. In the latter, the script that the murderer is supposed to hand over to the person who commissioned it breaks off half-way – at the point where the crime has been committed but the murderer’s (murderers’) subsequent movements remain to be told. The playwright is in fact found on the floor, beside her manuscript, having died of a brain haemorrhage. The manuscript itself, written in an increasingly confused hand, reveals all the ‘signs of an overwrought brain’. Shall we now look at Figure 3, which is to be found in Forster’s volume, but which Dr Wilmot did not think it appropriate to show us?
The attendant with the projector, who has entered without our noticing, projects Figure 3. And Loredana, as in a dream, dims the lights.
POIROT: You see. We have here the last tormented page of the MED and, below it, for comparison, a clear manuscript page from Oliver Twist. But we also have here a story that breaks off half-way, we have the ‘signs of an over-wrought (or worn-out) brain’, and we have, on the same day, a death from brain haemorrhage. I have no doubt that in Collins’s ghost-ridden novel (whose only ghosts were in the author’s head), this terrible triple allusion was inspired by Figure 3 and the obsessive, inextinguishable hatred that Collins still harboured for Dickens: the man who had not only humiliated and insulted him, but had also stolen his plot and the central idea of the play within the novel. I have my doubts, however, about the ‘brain haemorrhage’. Shall we look at Figure 1 again for a moment?
At this point, reader, the silence is almost palpable. But one can sense that the tension is about to snap. While we wait, and everybody’s eyes are fixed on the screen, let’s have a look at Figure 1 ourselves. Had a good look? But now a strangled cry from Loredana:
‘The jug!!! . . .’
POIROT: Quite. By the window. The jug of water that Dickens always kept on his desk, and which Dr Wilmot apparently forgot all about. You will recall that when we taxed him, he admitted calmly, ‘I might have forgotten dogs or jugs, but a false vagabond, well, I think I’d remember him.’ The classic trick of admitting to what hardly matters in order better to deny what really matters! He knew he couldn’t get out of showing us the famous Figure 1; but he reckoned that nobody would notice the jug. And he would have been right, had it not been for . . . ahem, Hercule Poirot, who thus obtained the concrete proof, the final link in the chain.
POPEAU: Proof of what? Link in what chain? What’s all this got to do with the Drood case?
POIROT: Nothing, at least not directly. Drood’s murderers have already been rumbled by Scotland Yard, with the help of Dupin. We are now considering Thesis D, which does not concern the Drood case but the crime of the false vagabond.
WILMOT, having come to a decision: All right, Poirot. But could we talk about it alone, for a moment?
POIROT: Certainly, cher ami. But maybe Holmes would like . . .
HOLMES: Yes, I should be present, too.
The three men go into the corridor, where we hasten to join them. They are talking quietly and calmly. Holmes nods several times with satisfaction, and the chairman’s expression relaxes somewhat. Dr Wilmot then goes off to a telephone box; he comes back two minutes later, and they all return to the Dickens Room, where Poirot resumes his account.
POIROT: When I said that Dr Wilmot had deliberately withheld the facts from us, I did not intend to accuse him of having deceived us from the beginning. Just like Holmes, after dimly intuiting the truth about the D case, he unconsciously dismissed it from his mind. But then he began to remember, perhaps when he saw the jug enlarged on the screen. That is why immediately afterwards he tried, although clumsily, to suppress the incident of the dogs.
WILMOT: Why clumsily? I merely refrained from mentioning the incident.
POIROT: Too late, however. When you described the afternoon of rest that Dickens allowed himself on June 7, the day before his death, you were on the point of telling us about the dogs. But suddenly you couldn’t say the names of Don and Linda. So you told us that on the afternoon in question Dickens ‘took Mamie and Georgina for a walk’, his elder daughter and sister-in-law. But the slight hesitation that followed the ‘took’ was not slight enough to escape Hercule Poirot! Nor could he fail to notice the incongruity of the expression ‘take for a walk’ applied to an elderly writer, sick and lame, accompanying two robust women on a stroll. And in fact, as I discovered in the course of my research this morning, it was Don and Linda that Dickens took for a walk, the two big guard-dogs (a Newfoundlander and a Saint Bernard) which were kept chained in his garden. Mamie wasn’t even there, having gone to London to visit her sister, Kate.
P. PETROVICH: It’s true! Odd that I didn’t notice, even though I’ve read Forster’s book and remember his description of that day perfectly.
POIROT: So you, too, averted your eyes from the terrible truth. There is no doubt that the telepathic lady from Arezzo was referring to those two guard-dogs when she transmitted the thought, thats why the dogs didnt. ‘Didn’t’ what? For constructors like ourselves, it should not be too difficult to complete this fragment. ‘That’s why the dogs didn’t . . .’
LOREDANA, almost inaudibly: ‘That’s why the dogs didn’t bark.’
POIROT: And why should they have barked?
LOREDANA, as before: Because of the false vagabond, who came into the garden and approached the window with his phial of poison.
POIROT: And why didn’t they bark?
LOREDANA buries her face in her hands and doesn’t reply.
ANTONIA, plucking up courage: Because the vagabond was not only false, he was also known to the dogs, though they hadn’t seen him recently.
POIROT: Exactly. Collins, before he –
POPEAU, staggered: Collins? You don’t mean to say Dickens was murdered? And that it was Collins who did it?
POIROT: But of course, cher ami.
POPEAU, showing himself to be the kind of plodding policeman who gets there long after everyone else: Ça alors!
POIROT: As I was saying, Collins, before he and Dickens fell out, was a frequent visitor to Gadshill. And so not only did the dogs know him well, but he was well acquainted with his former friend’s habits. He knew that Dickens, in the summer, worked in the chalet of the ‘Wilderness’ and stayed there until the afternoon, when he would come back and see to his correspondence in his study on the ground-floor. He knew about the jug on the desk, by the window. And finally, he knew from Kate Dickens, who had married his brother Charles, that her father’s health had deteriorated and that there was a threat of brain haemorrhage hanging over him. Collins’s modus operandi was therefore extremely simple, if we except the glasses. He was in fact very short-sighted and had to keep them on, even at the risk of being recognised through his vagabond disguise, while he loitered on the Gadshill road near the house, waiting for the right moment. The right moment came when Georgina left the afternoon-post on the desk, changed the water in the jug, and withdrew to her rooms upstairs. Mamie, as we know and as he also knew, was not at home. The only risk was that Dickens might arrive before he had time to pour the contents of the phial into the jug and disappear.fn9 Dickens, however, hard at work writing the page we’ve just seen, did not return until late.
MARLOWE, taking advantage of Poirot’s dramatic pause: Very clever, Poirot. But where’s the proof? You talk of poison, yet the symptoms described by Dr Steele, and by the two specialists who came running from London, match those of brain haemorrhage.
POIROT: But Dickens would die from a brain haemorrhage if the poison used were digitalin. It is well-known that the glycosides of digitalis produce a powerful and rapid increase in blood pressure. In Dickens’s state of health, it would have taken only a few centigrams to cause the rupture of an aneurysm.
ARCHER: Well, how about a few centigrams of evidence while you’re at it? No jury would convict Collins on that pile of circumstantial guesswork. We need some concrete proof!
POIROT: Of course. And that is why Dr Thorndyke has gone to London. But we don’t need to wait for his return – he has clearly been held up by some air-strike. The telex he sent me this morning consists of just one word, but it is eloquent enough for anyone who has guessed the purpose of his journey.fn10 He draws the telex from his pocket and hands it to the editor of The Dickensian. It is for your eyes only Dr Wilmot; as soon as you have read it you may destroy it.
fn1 No further messages have arrived so far, reader. Should any come, Antonia is poised at the reception desk, ready to bring them at once to our attention. So it strikes us, too, as a good idea to begin now.
fn2 As Jasper says to the opium-den woman, referring to his ‘fellow-traveller’ on the tower.
fn3 Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957), Roman Catholic priest and classical scholar, laid down the ‘Ten Commandments of Detection’ in 1928.
fn4 All this business with the quicklime and the carrying of the corpse might strike the reader as exceptionally difficult. But as S. Netchaev explains (words which apply to the religious fanatic as well): ‘The terrorist must have only one science, that of destruction. To this end he will study engineering, physics, chemistry, even medicine.’
fn5 ‘You do care for her peace of mind,’ he says to Rosa. ‘Then remove the shadow of the gallows from her!’
fn6 Also, on his return, he first went to the Technicians’ Room to sublisten to the minutes of the last two sessions.
fn7 Perhaps because of the misleading title. There are no ghosts in the story; the ‘haunting’ refers to the protagonist’s mesmeric powers. It is curious that many Droodists have insisted, instead, on the much more tenuous resemblances between the MED and another book by Collins, Miss or Mrs?, of 1871.
fn8 In Collins’s novel, the murderess already has theatrical leanings and writes her drama-confession under auto-suggestion, whereas Helena, according to Thesis C, will write hers under the hypnotic influence of Jasper. But it is possible that she too has literary ambitions, a far from uncommon phenomenon among terrorists.
fn9 True, the victim might not drink from the jug, though he kept it on the desk because of the various pills that he had to take during the course of the day. But if anybody else drank from it, the effects would not be lethal.
fn10 It is obvious that from London Thorndyke went to Gadshill. There, disguised as a vagabond, he managed to approach the window of Dickens’s study (which has not been altered, because the house is a museum) and remove the jug from the desk for the instant needed to extract the dregs, which he later analysed in his own laboratory. It is equally obvious that the word in the telegram is DIGITALIN.