Dupin in London

fan fiction based on characters created by Edgar Allan Poe

It was in the year 18—— that my friend Dupin and I set sail to London to stay with a sponsor for whom Dupin had rendered a most invaluable service when they were caught in a “cooping” incident, a most disreputable practice whereby a man is plied with drink and then forced to visit polling stations to vote for his assailants’ chosen candidate. The sponsor was a wealthy but naive young dandy from New York, visiting New Orleans just as Dupin had also gone to sample the local culture for a piece to be published in Blackwood’s. Dupin had discovered him dumped and almost dead in a graveyard overgrown with kudzu vines. Dupin took care of him, summoning a doctor, and based on the poor fellow’s rantings about “our Dixie” deduced what had happened, eventually tracing the crime to two Klansmen fled from West Virginia.

Now the man was in London, an occasional guest of minor royalty and renowned for certain papers on mathematics. His mother had been an Englishwoman, and his education concluded at Oxford University. On what business he had summoned Dupin we did not know, but Dupin was loath to either press or deny the man who helped to keep him in tolerable luxury. And so the patronised sailed to the kingdom in search of his patron.

When we alighted at the royal docks a bracing wind was all that was there to greet us. We made our way furtively to a cab and allowed ourselves to be driven through several insalubrious streets, punctuated by public houses on various corners and from which drunkards and bawds made frequent exits.

The quality of our surroundings finally started to improve and we pulled up outside a townhouse marked by tall iron gates, below which the windows of a cellar could be seen. From this smoke drifted, indicating that dinner preparations were underway. Dupin paid the cabman what I’m sure was an exorbitant fee for our needless tour of London vice and debauchery, before we ascended the steps to be greeted by a purse-lipped old footman.

We were shown into a drawing room where we waited some minutes while our host was summoned. I took the opportunity to question the coldness of our greeting, with no one to meet us and now not even Dupin’s sponsor in readiness for his requested guests’ arrival. Dupin only smiled and rested his head on his hands, which were leant on the handle of his cane. Our host joined us. Dupin had introduced him to me in America as D———, of the family whose name is most associated with shipbuilding, but this was my first time laying eyes on the man.

He cut a much less impressive figure than that for which my friend’s characterisation had prepared me. Stooped and frail, his cane seemed less the affectation of a gentleman and more mere necessity. ‘I have been… much troubled’ he said, clinging to Dupin’s shoulders following embrace. ‘But please, follow me into my library. We will have less disturbance there.’

Cocooned within this room which had but one high window, small and covered with wrought-iron latticework giving out onto a meagre yet well-stocked rose garden, D——— apprised us of his predicament. He had been due to marry L——-, an English heiress to her father’s interests in India. She had not been in England since she was a small girl, yet being independent of will decided to make the trip alone once D——- was settled and sent for her. She apparently took her own cab from the docks, and on arrival at this very house had blown past the footman ‘as if the ‘ounds of ‘ell were at ‘er feet’, clutching the right pocket where she kept her purse. D——- (who will heretofore be referred to as the shipbuilder), was detained on business matters that night and did not ascertain what had happened to his wife until the next morning when, knocking at her door, he went unanswered, and trying the door found it locked. He succeeded in crashing it down and there to his horror he found L——- (who will heretofore be known as the fiancée) dead upon the hearth, her blouse undone and a puncture wound at her waist. The wound was surrounded by a small amount of dried blood, suggesting a stiletto, although no weapon could be found. And, more to the point, no means of ingress or egress. The door had been locked from the inside, the key concealed within her skirts, while the one window remained firmly fastened and unmolested. In a pocket of her skirts was found as well a bottle of whiskey, which Dupin found most curious.

Naturally, Scotland Yard were consulted and a principal of that force went over the house with a tooth-comb so fine it belonged in a Frenchwoman’s toiletry set. ‘If he was as discerning and thorough as our prefect of Paris’ remarked Dupin once we were closeted together, ‘the wench’s death shall proceed unavenged.’

‘I understand your reference, but I hardly think that it’s appropriate to refer to this woman as a wench’ said I in high dudgeon. Dupin gave me one of his enigmatic smiles. ‘To you and I no’ he said, ‘but I may have ascertained some aspects of this mystery.’

Earlier that day he had asked to see the late unfortunate’s clothing, after we were shown the room in which she had expired. The shipbuilder, prefatory to summoning his detective friend, had preserved his fiancée’s belongings as if in amber. Dupin was pleased to see that the clods of London’s police had not soiled the scene beneath their size 9 boots. He ascertained that only the footman and the housekeeper had been in the house on the night of the fiancée’s expiry, and neither could be supposed to have either the motive or genius to kill their mistress from outside a locked boudoir.

The clothes, lain reverently across a three-leaved table in an upper room, appeared like a museum piece before us as Dupin began his examination. The jacket was of a light and flashy sort, worn by young women unafraid to announce their gaiety. It was marked by an unusual jewel stuck seemingly at random to the lower right. ‘She’d flung it over a chair’ said the shipbuilder. ‘She must have been sitting in just her open blouse before the fire when…’ he couldn’t find it in himself to continue.

‘You ask me, sir, someone was followin’ ‘er’ said the footman during our interview with him in the cellar, which served as the servants’ quarters as well as the main kitchen. ‘I reckon some scallywag saw ‘er in the street and recognised ‘is chance. She saw what ‘e was about and came ‘ere fast as you like and then…’ He trailed off.

‘And then your villain climbed a sheer and pebble-dashed wall, clambered in through a locked window, killed your mistress, and left. All while preserving a scene arranged to the utter stupefaction of your London police, no signs of exit or entry, no witness at all.’

The footman grinned. ‘Them villains is allied with the devil’ was his cryptic reply to my friend.

We took a day to see the sights of London, assuring our host that his fiancée’s death would be resolved within a week, although how this would happen I hadn’t (as they say) a clue. As Frenchmen in England we were treated to the hospitality due our patronage, and before five hours were out our shoes had been vomited upon, our countenances flashed by street women, and our Republic described in terms that would make a sixty-something madam blush. Still, we saw Big Ben and Westminster, and those stations of the Thames where once traitors’ heads were impaled; smoked a little bit of opium in Chinatown, on divans of the finest Oriental silk; and partook of “fish and chips”, letting the gulls partake second-hand when we chucked it all up at their feet. We also drank tea with a fellow by the name of Holmes, a renowned consulting detective to whom Dupin had wished to promote his method of “ratiocination” (intense thought, not unlike this Holmes’ own “deductive reasoning”, although Dupin insisted that he’d thought of the principle first).

It was as we were taking a cab to a gentleman’s club, the Diogenes, that my friend had his moment of inspiration. The cabman we noticed had taken a thoroughly unnecessary detour through a London market, pausing to feed his horse from a vegetable cart while all manner of hawkers clustered about our windows. ‘We shall dock his pay for this’ said I in a grump, but Dupin seemed wrapped in ecstasy.

‘Dock it?’ he said, turning from a contemplation of goods pressed against the cab window, ‘I shall give him the rest of my gold; he’s solved the mystery for us!’

That evening after dinner we retired to the library with our host. The shipbuilder was in a state of agitation, perhaps perceiving that we were about to bring him his relief from this dreaded puzzle. ‘If you had told me the matter on which you wanted assistance before we set sail’ said Dupin, ‘I might have solved it before I arrived at your house.

‘You are, of course, a mathematician as well as the heir to shipbuilders. Mathematics, design, and industry. Three disciplines, you’d think, that would make one uniquely qualified to solve the puzzle of how a woman can be knifed inside a locked room, with no clue as to how or why. But mathematicians, they think only in terms of the immediate problem and its variables. They assume too much. They cannot account for such vagaries as chance, coincidence, even when they themselves have fallen prey, as you did thirteen years ago. You were accosted in the street by two men who did not recognise you as a wealthy son of noted family, and so saw fit to make you their mark. To them, you were just the proverbial man in the street, drunk and tottering about, vulnerable. It was by chance that you fell into their hands, and coincidence that I found you half-dead on that tomb, among the kudzu vines. And think how remote that second chance was. I, a Frenchman of diminished circumstance, reduced to writing occult romance for Blackwood’s magazine. It was I who found you, on my first stay in the United States, and snatched you out from under the Reaper’s scythe.

‘Unfortunately, chance did not collude to save your fiancée. As my friend and I have noticed twice now, it is the habit of cabmen in this area to take detours down insalubrious streets and across marketplaces, hoping to prolong the journey and thereby increase their fee. I propose that your fiancée’s cabman, on the night of her arrival in London, played this trick as well. Only, she was susceptible to drink, and so on passing several taverns, the temptation grew too much. She paid the man to stop and wait for her while she took a drink. And in her intoxicated state she was confused (this is now mere speculation of course) by a villain for one of his women of the night, who owed money to or had otherwise unbalanced him. He stuck a stiletto into her side as he passed. She felt a sharp pain but assumed it to be a result of the drink, and so staggered out to continue her journey homewards. She paid the driver handsomely and rushed upstairs before the footman could discern her intoxication, confusing it for fear of some pursuer. Entering her room she pulled off her jacket, ripping the stiletto from its cut-glass handle so that the former remained inside her, while the latter appeared to be an oddly placed jewel on the garment. She sat before the fire to gather her senses, and it was there that she died, no doubt drifting into sleep in full expectation that she would wake refreshed tomorrow.’

We consoled the shipbuilder as best we could and prepared for our return to Paris by the soonest boat. Dupin left the shipbuilder with these words, which would later appear by their own weird chance in the tongue of a great Spanish poet:

‘Le bonheur est toujours une coïncidence.’