The Detective and Mr. Dickens Read Online Free PDF Page B

puffing from the exertion of our mad gallop across London.
    “You wonder what?” I gasped.
    “If that could be the very station house out of which our friend Inspector Field works?”
    It took me a long moment to figure out what he was talking about. It had been more than fifteen months since Dickens had met Field for the first and (to my knowledge) only time, yet the Detective Inspector was suddenly our mutual friend. A street marker bolted to the brick wall of a building immediately behind our position on the street corner beneath the gaslamp read: “BOW STREET, West London.”
    “Perhaps it is,” I finally answered. “It has been more than a year, but I believe he did say Bow Street Station that morning at the gaol.”
    “Splendid!” Dickens exclaimed, and set straight off across the street.
    “Let us go in, and see if our friend is on duty,” he said, as we read the words etched on the glass of the door:
METROPOLITAN POLICE
Bow Street Station
    “Let us go in,” he urged, and, of course, we did.
    The reception area of the station house was a drab open room with a blue-uniformed constable sitting at a desk near its back wall. Low wooden benches sat along both side walls. A door, closed, in the back wall directly behind the constable’s desk, was the only break in the whitewashed monotony of the room’s interior decoration.
    “My name is Dickens,” he said, addressing the constable on duty, “a friend of Inspector Field. Might I inquire if he is in tonight?”
    “Oh, aye, sir,” that blue worthy answered in immediate recognition. “He surely is sir. In the bullpen sir. Go right on back sir.”
    I think if he would have fired off one more overeager “sir,” I would have slammed my walking stick down on his desk in protest. Even the Peelers read Dickens , I thought, with my usual dose of petty envy.
    Dickens swept past the obliging constable into the inner sanctum of the Bow Street Station. The bullpen was a larger open room filled with desks, bookcases, wide message boards on each side wall, with layers of notices on white paper pinned atop one another so thickly that the boards looked like ruffled chickens, a large metal cage (bars from ceiling to floor) filling one corner, a smaller barred holding cell filling the other corner, both cages occupied, the small one by a quiet woman with a child at her breast, the larger with an octopus of tattered rags which turned out to be three drunken tramps sleeping loudly in a pile, a fireplace built into the opposite corner, and four cushioned wooden rockers pulled up to the dancing blaze.
    Two of the rockers were occupied. At our unannounced entrance, the two men turned quickly to identify us, on alert. One was a constable in blue uniform. The other, in his sharp black coat and sharp inquiring eyes, was unmistakably Inspector Field, whom I had met only once some fifteen months before. He seemed to recognize Dickens immediately and his face broke into a cordial smile as he rose to greet us.
    “Dickens, a welcome surprise, good to see you again.”
    “This is my friend, Wilkie Collins,” Dickens said, presenting me.
    “Of course, Mister Collins,” Field said, as he extended his oversized hand. “I remember you well. You were one of the party at ’Orsemonger Lane when the Mannings ’ad their last dance. I remember the large pocketwatch you wore on a chain and kept in the front pocket of your brocade vest that evening. I remember thinking ’ow you would be a lucky man to go away from that crowd with such a ’andsome watch still in your possession.”
    We shook hands heartily. Needless to say I was stunned at the unerring accuracy of his memory.
    His eyes took on a mischievous glint: “You don’t seem to be wearin’ your elegant pocketwatch this evenin’. It must be a ’eavy trinket to carry around everyday?”
    “Interesting you should ask,” I said, as I walked, unsuspecting, into his trap. “I seem to have lost it. About a month ago, it just