January 28, 1852—late afternoon
The hanged man’s lodgings were a jumble. Neither I nor Field nor any of the others was immediately able to determine whether that chaos of medical books, scientific journals, and blue books strewn thither and hither amongst dirty shirts and stockings and all manner of soiled apparel, boots, shoes, and eating utensils was simply the ordinary housekeeping arrangement of our Doctor Vasconcellas, or the result of a violent struggle. The bittersweet smell of opium smoke still hung in the air. The rope from whence Field had cut the dead man down had been looped over an exposed ceiling beam and secured to the leg of a heavy chest on the far side of the room. Beneath that ceiling beam had been pushed, cutting a swath through the clutter of the room, a heavy oaken desk. Field later speculated that Rodrigo had either climbed up or been dragged up upon that desk, gotten the noose placed around his neck and jumped or was pushed off. A long-throated clay pipe, its bowl stained with that black oily residue of opium, lay abandoned on the floor beside a low divan of Oriental design. The pipe’s bowl was cold, and thus Field was not readily able to determine if the man had smoked the opium just prior to taking his own life the night before or if this was but a discarded pipe from a previous session with the drug. A note in English on white writing paper rested beneath a flowered paperweight in the desk from which, it was speculated, the suicide jumped. That was the text of the poor dead man’s lodgings that Inspector Field was, I am sure, prepared to read.
For the longest time, Field bent over the corpse looking hard into its empty eyes.
The corpse stared back wide-eyed, that silent scream contorting its face.
Field’s right hand ran over the rope burns upon the corpse’s neck. Their feel, evidently, caused him to scratch once, twice, speculatively, at the side of his eye.
Straightening up from his kneeling position, Field moved to the pipe, felt its bowl, examined its ashes. Returning it to exactly where he had found it, he next moved to the suicide note upon the desk. It was printed in block letters, not written in script. It was also unsigned. Taking it up, Field read aloud to the rest of us.
I KILLED HER. HE MOURNS HER DEATH, AND REJECTS MY LOVE. WITHOUT HIM, I CAN NOT LIVE.
“My God!” Dickens exclaimed as Field finished reading. “He has committed suicide out of unrequited Sodomite love for Palmer. That is it. That is what it means, does it not?”
“This is no suicide,” Field scoffed, handing the note over to Serjeant Rogers. “’Ee didn’t ’ang ’imself.”
“What?” Now it was Dickens’s turn to be perplexed. As for me, I was so utterly confused by all of it that my head was spinning and I felt as if I needed to sit down.
“Oh, ’ee ’ad plenty o’ reason ta commit suicide.” Field chuckled slyly at Dickens’s consternation.
“But he did not commit suicide?” I expressed in my tone of voice both my skepticism at Field’s chosen stance and my support for Dickens, whom Field’s surprising declaration had momentarily unsteadied.
“No indeed, Mister Collins, ’ee did not.” I could sense Field smugly poking fun at my imperception.
“Now just how do you know that?” I was quietly petulant, though trying my best to keep sarcasm out of my voice. Nothing seemed to bother Dickens. In fact, he seemed rather amused at this exchange between Field and me.
“Yes, enlighten us please, Inspector Field,” Dickens chided him good-humouredly. “I can promise you that we shall prove a rapt audience for your instruction in the fine art of detectiving.”
Field glanced at Dickens as if to say: Aha! So the gentlemen are ready to listen to the facts, are they? But he did not say it. Instead, he dwelt directly upon the ill-kept secrets of that text written in the signs there before us in Doctor Vasconcellas’s room.
“One cannot speckalate as ta whether Doctor Rodrigo’s twisted love for Doctor Palmer wos ever answered,” Field began, “but one can speckalate that ’ee wos bein’ blackmailed a’cause o’ it.”
“By whom?” Now Dickens was truly interested.
“Probly by Palmer, ’oo, it seems, wos the object o’ that love. Per’aps by Dunn, ’oo ’ee may ’ave killed in order ta silence ’im, either consarnin’ the murder o’ the two wimmin or ’ee an’ Dunn’s sexual tendencies.”
“What!” Again, it was Dickens’s turn to be taken utterly by surprise by Field’s pronouncement.
“We searched Dunn’s room hin the cellar hov the theatre,” Serjeant Rogers took this opportunity both to explain and to gloat that he was possessed of information to which Dickens and I were not privy, “hand his trunk wos full o’ wimmin’s dresses.”
“Both men were Sodomites, it seems,” Inspector Field took up the speculative narrative once again. “Perhaps both were bein’ blackmailed. In fact, if Palmer wos responsible for all this, they probly were bein’ blackmailed by ’im. ’At’s why Dunn lured Thompson inta the middle o’ the murder. ’At’s why Rodrigo in ’is cloak an ’ood played ’is ghostly game.”
“But how can you be so sure he didn’t commit suicide?” Dickens asked. “Perhaps he felt how close your investigation was getting to him, perhaps he despaired that he could escape justice for poisoning those two young women.”
“’Ee didn’t poison those wimmin,” Field insisted patiently, “an’ ’ee didn’t commit suicide.”
“How…how can you be so sure?” Dickens persisted.
“’Is eyes.”
We all stared at Field, no one, not even Rogers, able to interpret that cryptic declaration. I, and the others, all looked down at the corpse. There seemed nothing unusual about its eyes. They were the wide-open, empty eyes of a dead man.
“An “is neck, an’ thet note, an’ this ’ole muddle o’ a room.”
“Please, I am at sea in all this,” Dickens pleaded for explanation for all of us, even Rogers, who was equally adrift.
“’Is eyes were wide open when I cut ’im down,” Field explained patiently. “I’ve seen more than fifty ’angin’s an’ their eyes always roll all the way back in their ’eads when they choke. They don’t bulge out an’ stare at yew like this ’un does.”
“He’s right.” Rogers leapt at this opportunity to toady. “Hafter the hangin’s, the hundertakers has ta roll the hanged man’s heyes hout with his finger. Hi’ve seen hem do hit.”
“This ’un wos dead afore ’ee wos ’ung.” Field took up the narrative again. “’Is neck proves it.”
We all bent to inspect the hanged man’s neck, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary. No one else seemed to either. Like supplicants to some riddling Sphinx, we all turned back to Inspector Field.
“The rope burn”—he directed our attention with his commanding forefinger—“’tis too narrow an’ reg’lar. There’s no wide rubbin’ o’ the sort yew git when a dyin’ man struggles an’ kicks on the end o’ the rope.”
“Hit’s has hif he didn’t fight hat hall.” The light dawned in Rogers’s voice as if he were emerging from the Dark Ages. “Has hif he niver danced Jack Ketch’s jig.”
It certainly could have been more sensitively put, but Rogers’s vulgar version struck a vivid image in the air and expressed what all the rest of us were thinking.
“An’ then, lastly, there’s the note,” Field dangled his final lure of evidence before us.
“And what, pray tell,” Dickens’s voice dripped with sarcasm, “is wrong with the note? It certainly seems clear enough.”
“Look ’ow ’tis written,” Field prompted Dickens, who read the note through once more.
“I am sorry,” Dickens did not pronounce those words as an apology, “but I do not see anything out of the ordinary in this note. He says he killed Palmer’s wife. He admits to a Sodomite love for Palmer. He declares that he can not continue to live. That is all that it says.”
“’At’s wot it says all right.” Field chuckled. “But ’tis not wot it says but ’ow it says it which is important. Yew, a great writer, ought ta know that.” Field could not resist ending with a friendly taunt.
Dickens threw up his hands in frustration: “What? I cannot see it, I’m sorry. What?”
“Look ’ow ’tis written.” Field had become the patient teacher. “Is ’at the style o’ a foreigner? Would the man yew interviewed at Bart’s write such a note? The last sentence”—WITHOUT HIM I CANNOT LIVE; we all looked at it over Rogers’s shoulder—“is inverted as a foreigner speakin’ in an unfamiliar tongue might, but the second sentence”—He mourns her death, and rejects my love, we all read it again—“words like mourns an’ rejects, an’ punkchooated jus’ so, an’ not inverted a’tall. Would a foreigner write like that?”
“You are absolutely right.” Dickens’s head was nodding up and down like one of the swinging ducks in Captain Hawkins’s Shooting Gallery. “’Tis all too neat, is it not?”
“An’ wouldn’t ’ee write ’is suicide note in Portuguee if Portuguee is the langwidge ’ee speaks?” Inspector Field was but warming to his task. “An’ why would ’ee print it in big letters like that, an’ not in ’is own ’and. A’cause, like that ’tis in nobody’s ’and. Those printed letters are unidentifiable. A suicidal man doesn’t care if ’is ’andwritin’ is recognised. ’Ee don’t care about nothink, an’ ’ee an’t thinkin’ straight either. This bloody note is jus’ too bloody sane an’ correct.”
“So…” Dickens was thinking this all through as he went, “so what do you think really happened here, Field?”
“I’m not sure I know,” Field admitted right away, but Dickens had offered Field the detective the opportunity to once again become Field the playwright, composer of bloody revenge tragedies in the Ford and Webster way,* and Field was not at all inclined to turn down that offer. “I think Palmer drugged ’im, then poisoned ’im, then ’ung ’im ta make it look like a suicide.”
“It does look like, his face I mean, like that curious ‘curare’ death rictus which the others had,” I interjected as they stalked the text of that corpse, that room.
“Yes, that is exactly wot bothers me the most.” Field stared down at the stone face of the dead man. “If ’ee’s a suicide, then all the Medusa Murders fall right inta line. But if ’ee’s not a suicide, if ’ee’s been poisoned too, then the book is still open on all o’ this.”
“But you are certain that this is not a suicide, are you not?” Dickens was puzzled, since Field had just offered four different arguments against suicide.
“Oh yes,” Field assured us, “I bleeve this is murder…an’ yew bleeve all my reasoning on it, don’tchew?”
“Why, of course, why shouldn’t we?” I was becoming more and more puzzled by the insecure turn our conversation was taking.
“Because it is all circumstantial, all too speculative upon Inspector Field’s part,” Dickens spoke slowly as if he had just realised the import of Field’s dilemma. “This suicide ties everything up all clean and neat, does it not?”
“’At’s right!” Field tapped the desk against which he sat lightly with his demonstrative forefinger. “Yew would wear well in my line, Dickens!”
“What is so clean and neat?” I must admit that I was utterly confused. “Why do you still talk on this as suicide if you have ruled it out?”
“Because we cannot prove to a court, Wilkie, that it is not suicide,” Dickens spoke like a great teacher’s apt pupil instructing the class dunce. “Because Doctor Vasconcellas’s death seemingly solves all.”
“Don’tchew see, Mister Collins”—Field looked around in a kind of mild despair—“all the proof for solvin’ yer Medusa Murders is right ’ere in this room, ’as been dropped right into our laps by this suicide. Evrythin’ ’as been neatly tied up in a bow for us like the last chapter o’ one o’ Mister Dickens’s three-decker novels. Only thing is, in the detectin’ line, that an’t the way it normal ’appens.”
“He is right, Wilkie.” Dickens had quickly picked up the resignation in Inspector Field’s voice. “Suddenly, just with this suicide of Doctor Vasconcellas, all the questions seem answered, all the mysteries seem solved.”
“Except you two do not believe any of it.” I was beginning to understand.
“Except ’oo gits the money o’ it all?” Field’s voice was hard as saber steel.
“And who gets off free as the American colonies?” Dickens formed a chorus with Field.
“Palmer does,” I answered their chorus of questions as if I had just been delivered the news by an angel.
“Aye, Palmer does,” Field’s voice had gone grim again. “Damn, ’ee’s guilty an’ we ’ave no way in Gawd’s world o’ provin’ it.”
*John Ford is the author of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629) and John Webster wrote The Duchess of Malfi (1613).