Read Online The Detective and Mr. Dickens by William J. Palmer - Free Book Online

question, as if he already knew its answer, as if this were a familiar game.
    “Pleese guv’nor,” the man’s voice evidenced great dismay. “I nivver teched nothink. I knows the rules. The searchin’ is the job o’ the dirtective. All I did wos wot you said,” he protested. “Find the body. ’At’s all. ’At’s all.”
    Seemingly satisfied with the man’s protestations, Field, with a jerk of his forefinger, ordered the man to follow the police galley to shore.
    “’Ee was out so long because ’ee searched the body, stripped it of its valuables and ’id them somewhere upstream,” Field explained. “It will take us days, maybe weeks, to identify the body. That corpse won’t ’ave a shillin’ or a scrap of identification. It’ll be lucky if it’s got the gold in its teeth!”
    Within minutes, the waterman beached his mongrel boat in the mud next to ours. We watched with morbid curiosity, as, pulling hand over hand, he dragged his grisly cargo ashore. The rope was noosed beneath the dead man’s armpits. The body was coatless and bootless. A huge dark stain covered the whole back of what, by the hint of its muddy sleeves, must have been a white evening shirt. The corpse came to rest face down at our feet.
    I watched Dickens as the waterman pulled his grisly piece of salvage to us. He stared hard at the hole ripped in the center of that dark stain.
    “My God, how could this happen?” he said in a low voice.
    “’Appens once, sometimes twice each week,” Rogers replied, brusque and unfeeling. “Man’s been stabbed,” he diagnosed the body’s ailment.
    “Stabbed indeed,” Field said, taking up the diagnosis as impersonally as if describing a large river trout recently fileted for his supper, “and, from the looks of that wound, by a large, flat, quite pointed blade. Not your usual waterside robber’s blade, eh Rogers?”
    “No sir. Not at all, sir.”
    “Who are these fine gennulmen?” the waterman demanded of Field.
    Field introduced us. “This is the famous Mister Charles Dickens,” he said, grinning as if enjoying some private joke, “and Mister Wilkie Collins.”
    “Famous fer wot?”
    “For books.”
    “Don’t know nothink ’bout books.”
    The man faced Dickens and me down, and, congenially enough in his rough way, introduced himself: “I be ’Umphry ’Owse. If I worked on land they’d call me a resurrection man, but since I works the river they calls me a fisher o’ men.” He howled at his own joke.
    Rogers quickly stooped to the corpse, showing no squeamishness as he rifled its pockets. “Nothin’,” he informed Field.
    “You’ve done your usual thorough job,” Field muttered.
    Humphrey House, the waterman, flinched perceptibly and shrank backwards.
    At that moment, Rogers rolled the body over to continue his search. The corpse’s gaunt dead eyes stared up at us. Drops of moisture and smears of mud distorted that sightless face.
    Dickens started back, his face twisting in shock and recognition.
    “What is it?” Inspector Field, who missed nothing, and certainly not such a dramatic change of expression, asked immediately.
    I had never seen “the Inimitable” so discomposed. No one, not even Macready, could have imitated that startled look.
    “I…I know that face,” Dickens stammered.

The Body Will Tell Us!
    April 13, 1851
    It was midnight by the bells atop Saint Paul’s, but not for the spirit which once inhabited that sodden corpse staring up from its bed in the mud of the Victoria embankment.
    “I know that face,” Dickens repeated, his voice shaking.
    “Well, who is it?” Rogers’s impatience showed.
    “What ho, identified on the spot,” Field took a lighter tack.
    “Yes…Yes…I know the man,” Dickens uttered the words slowly as if in a daze.
    Inspector Field became positively festive.
    The corpse lay silent like some shipwrecked seaman washed ashore on an alien beach.
    “It is Lawyer Partlow of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He is an acquaintance