January 18, 1852—nearing midnight
The runner’s message to Bow Street that Serjeant Rogers relayed to us at the Lord Gordon Arms was from a surveillance constable. It requested Inspector Field’s immediate presence at the Covent Garden Theatre.
“There is only one thing could be worse than the death o’ our major witness,” Field complained as we four strode toward Covent Garden through the murky fog that had lowered itself over the streets during our brief sojourn in the public house. He paused a moment for the effect he knew such a pronouncement would produce, then continued with a touch of bitter resignation, “If Thompson, our only other witness, though an unsound one, ’ad anything ta do with it!”
Constable Timko was waiting for us outside the stage door at Covent Garden. Poor Dick Dunn was waiting for us within, on his back in the centre of the bare gaslit stage, his eyes white and wide, staring up at a hanging flat of Falstaff and Prince Hal’s tavern haunt, with a fencing foil, perhaps the very one that either he or Thompson had used that very afternoon, quivering up out of his heart.
“Wot ’appened ’ere, Timko?” Inspector Field was grim.
“We don’t know ’ow ’ee got in, sir,” the wary constable, knowing that he had severely bungled his duty of surveillance, answered in a voice burdened with the heavy weight of contrition, “but we saw ’im run out,” the last added in hope that it might provide some reason for absolution.
“Yew saw ’oo run out?” Field asked the question because he knew he must, but it was clear that he already knew and dreaded the answer.
“Tally ’O Thompson, Sir…the escaped murderer, Sir,” the dim constable answered brightly. “’Twas ’im all right, Sir. Both me an’ Hutter is sure on it. I carries the flyer right ’ere in my inside uniform pocket, Sir.”
“Well, ’at’s jus’ aces,” Field scowled at the poor writhing man. He must, however, have been impatient to get on with his investigation of the crime scene because, despite the sarcasm in his voice, he chose to forgo any immediate public humiliation or professional punishment or even disgusted tongue-lashing of his inept constable. “Did yew note the time that Thompson run out?” Field’s forefinger quivered slightly next to his eye as if he were having trouble preventing it from poking out at the stammering Constable Timko.
“Uh, no…no Sir…we, Hutter an’ me, Sir…we didn’t think ta mark the time, Sir. But it wos after the play wos ended an’ the theatre closed.”
Field turned his back quickly on the constable and walked two steps away, muttering into his hand something that sounded like “bluddydimwittedfool! “Turning back to his underling, he ordered Timko, in a clipped voice, to guard the street door. He punctuated that order with a sharp jab of his ferocious forefinger.
When the constable was gone, it took Field but a breath to reach out and grasp control, which his anger at the constable’s ineptitude had momentarily loosed. He moved to Rogers’s side and looked down at Dunn’s corpse. The sword stuck up out of the red circle of blood on his chest like an arrow from a bull’s-eye. Dickens and I ranged ourselves on the opposite side of the body, also looking down.
“Our witness ta wotever ’tis we’re inta is dead.” Field was addressing everyone and no one, perhaps wishing that the corpse would respond, “An’ that idiot Thompson seems intent upon buildin’ a better case against ’imself!”
“I cannot believe that Thompson killed this man,” Dickens took up Field’s reverie.
“Nor I,” the Inspector averred.
Rogers looked at me and I at him. It was clear that neither he nor I shared the certainty of our colleagues. He rolled his eyes. It was all I could to do suppress a grin. The man did have his moments I must admit.
“If he did not kill the two women in the first place, then there is no reason for him to kill Dunn now,” Dickens pursued. “’Tis not his style.”
I glanced at Rogers to see if he, too, was fighting off the shaken certainty in Thompson’s innocence that was assaulting me.
“In fact”—Field knocked a final nail into his conviction—“Thompson needed Dickie Dunn alive. ’Ee wos the only one could prove that Thompson got lured ta the murder scene. No, Thompson could not kill Dickie Dunn, but ’ee could try ta scare the rest o’ the truth out o’ the little weasel. Only problem was, little Dickie wos dead when Tally ’O got ’ere ta work on ’im.”
“So Thompson finds the body, takes a fright, and flees,” Dickens took up Field’s hypothetical narrative.
“At’s it,” Field concurs. “If Thompson could sneak in ’ere past Timko an’ ’Utter, someone else could as well.”
“With those two hon duty, the whole cast huv the play might huv come in here han rehearsed han those two would huv missed hit,” Rogers commented with sincere disdain. His effect, however, was to make all of us laugh. His comment broke the tension of the moment, but we all quickly realised that we were standing there laughing over a corpse. With that grim reminder staring up at us, we quickly regained our death decorum.
Field and Rogers bent to examine the body. They fretted over it for long minutes, but found nothing out of the ordinary to argue against the rather clear facts that someone had walked up close to the unarmed man and stuck that fencing foil through his heart. As they worked at the body, Dickens stood strangely silent above them. He was looking around the stage, into the darkened wings, up at the chaos of flats hanging ready to be lowered into place for each change of scene.
“What is it, Charles?” I, finally, observing his pensive stillness for long moments, moved to his side and asked.
“It is nothing, Wilkie. No, it is this death that has once again raised its pitiful face. This poor man. He did not know that in the next moment he would be dead. Look around. Look up there, Wilkie. That must have been what he saw at the last instant of his life.”
My eyes followed Dickens’s gaze upward. Hanging directly above the corpse was a painted background flat of the back wall of the Boar’s Head Tavern where Falstaff and Poins and the other highwaymen of Shakespeare’s play drank and caroused and plotted and gamed with prince Hal.* The flat, in that magical three-dimensional style of theatre artists, recreated a sloping, raftered ceiling, a dirty wooden back wall, and a small section of oaken bar (probably to be connected to a real bar to be placed against it). Standing against the dingy wall to one side was an ancient clock.
My eyes, in concert with Dickens’s prompt, looked down into Dick Dunn’s dead eyes, then jolted back to the painted panel hanging above. When I looked back at Charles, he, too, was looking intently up.
“It is as if in death he is looking up at that clock,” Dickens said in a near whisper.
My eyes careened from Dickens’s eyes to Dunn’s to the face of that painted clock upon that painted wall silent in suspension above us. The hands of that clock, frozen in time, stood together as one, straight up, midnight. Dickens stood as if paralysed, his gaze riveted upon the expressive face of that clock. I realized that he was doing it again, moving into the dimension of that dying man, feeling what he was feeling, his panic, his despair, seeing what his eyes were seeing in their final moments of sight. If I were prone to believe in melodramatic omens, that ominous image of time run out would have been one. Yet, that painted theatre flat held no particular meaning, carried no symbolic message of time or threat, was in no way a warning. Strange how our minds imbue the furnishings of our world with meaning. The ghostly fancy of my thoughts danced over that scene: Perhaps the revelers in the Boar’s Head of two centuries gone were the gaping witnesses to the murder of this hapless latter-day Poins. If only they could direct Field to the murderer, bear witness in the dock.
The haunted quality of that empty stage, of Dickens staring as if in a trance up at that stopped clock, of those two men bending over that still, dark form, of those wide, dead eyes staring up, sent a shudder of dread through my whole being. All I could feel was an overpowering need to close those empty eyes, break that sinister time-stopped spell.
Field and Rogers rose from the body, finished with their ministrations.
Without even thinking, I bent to one knee and, with my right hand, closed those terrible, empty eyes.
“There is nothin’ more for us ’ere,” Field broke our morbid silence, and I shuddered once again as if hearing those ghostly tipplers of the Boar’s Head Tavern laughing at the grim joke time had played on their drinking companion Poins.
As we left the theatre, the fog was draped like a dingy yellow curtain over the West End. And Tally Ho Thompson, shape-shifting actor that he was, had disappeared behind it.
*The reference is to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, the play being performed at the time of these murders by Macready’s Covent Garden Theatre Company, and in which first Thompson, and then Dunn, played the role of Poins.