"My dear sir!" he bellowed, spewing frothy spittle that fell as softly as snow on the detective's greatcoat. "How do you do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!"
"M-M-Mr. Scrooge?" Bucket stammered, unnerved that the old bedlamite thought him an acquaintance.
Bucket had never met the man, but he knew him by (foul) reputation. Scrooge was a usurer, a lender of money at such fantastic rates that the interest compounded not so much annually, monthly or even weekly but by the second. The almshouses were packed wall-to-fetid-wall with his former clients ("prey," some called them), and many a London child would spend Christmas shivering on the street instead of nestled before the family fireplace because a penniless father had defaulted to the pitiless Scrooge.
"Yes!" Scrooge crowed. "That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness-" The old man pulled the detective closer and whispered in his ear. "-to accept a donation of two hundred pounds toward your most excellent charity."
Bucket realized then that Scrooge's strange behavior wasn't born of natural dementia, but arose instead from the vapors of a Chinaman's pipe: The bitter smell of opium clung to the old man's clothes.
"My dear sir, I don't know what to say to such munificence," Bucket said, peeling Scrooge's gnarled hand from his arm and giving it a hearty shake. Best to just placate the man and let him go his mad, merry way, the detective had decided. There was, after all, no law against putting poppy seed to whatever use one wished. And what's more, Bucket wanted to go home.
"Don't say anything, please," Scrooge replied, delighted. "Come and see me. Will you come and see me?"
"I will."
"Thank you." Scrooge reached up to tip his top hat to Bucket. There was no such hat upon his head, but he tipped it all the same. "I am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty times. Bless you!"
And with that Scrooge turned, took a few zigzagging steps away, and stopped before a stray cat that stared at him from the front steps of a poulterer's shop.
"Is your master at home, my dear?" Scrooge asked the cat.
"Meow."
"Where is he, my love?"
"Meow meow."
"Thank you."
And so on. There followed a brief conversation with a heap of dirty snow Scrooge addressed as "Fred" and a cart of roasted chestnuts he called "Bob," after which he christened a discarded sack of rotten potatoes "Tim" and proceeded to give it a piggy-back ride.
When the old man dropped the potatoes and darted into the street to wish a very merry Christmas to a steaming pile of horse dung, Bucket finally decided to restrain the old man for his own good. But before the detective could take a step, the tree-wagon came rolling along-and Scrooge was rolled out as flat as a Christmas cookie.
Scrooge's passing produced nary a tear from those who witnessed it. What it did yield-from Inspector Bucket, anyway-was a mixture of curiosity and guilt. The detective regretted not moving more quickly to restrain the old man, and he resolved to make amends for it by gathering up both Scrooge's body and the information needed for the inquest with as much alacrity and discretion as possible.
A half-penny secured the services of a gawking street urchin as his runner, and Bucket dispatched the lad on two errands, both of vital importance: firstly, to take news of Scrooge's death to the nearest station house; secondly, to take Bucket's wife the news that he would be late for supper. He then recruited as navvies a group of laborers repairing gas pipes nearby, directing them to move Scrooge's freshly pulped body to the curb. The driver of the tree wagon hopped down and followed them, pleading his case to Bucket.
"He ran right in front of me, he did! How was I to see him coming in this fog? It ain't my fault what happened!"
"Now, now, my friend-calm down. It's plain you're not to blame," Bucket said soothingly. A pear-shaped man of five-and-forty years, he had a softness about him that usually put others at ease-when he wanted it to. "Nevertheless, I'll need to know your name."
"My name? What for?"
"For the inquest, of course."
"Inquest? It was an accident, I tell you!"
"That is for the inquest to determine," Bucket snapped, narrowing his eyes. Suddenly, he wasn't portly. He was imposing. "Your name."
"Percy Thimblewitt, sir," the wagon driver mumbled, cringing.
Bucket smiled, and once again he seemed about as threatening as a well-stuffed pillow. "Thank you, Mr. Thimblewitt. Now… did you know the deceased?"
Thimblewitt said he did not, and once Bucket finished questioning the man (who had little to add beyond further proclamations of his freedom from fault), the detective moved on to the witnesses lingering nearby.
"Came skipping out a few minutes before you happened along, Scrooge did," said a chestnut vendor who parked his cart near Scrooge's office each evening. "Had a 'merry Christmas' for everyone in sight. Every thing, too."
"The gentleman was eccentric then?" Bucket said with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows that was meant to whisper, "An opium-eater, eh?"
"Eccentric? No, sir. Sour as spoilt milk, he was, but he weren't balmy. Not until tonight."
The other witnesses who knew Scrooge said the same: While the moneylender was notoriously understocked on scruples, there had been no indication that he was similarly short on marbles. No one picked up on Bucket's hints about a penchant for the pipe, either.
Eventually, the clatter of hooves and the steadily growing growl of wagon wheels on stone announced the approach of a police ambulance. When the driver pulled the small, boxy vehicle to a stop before Bucket, the back doors swung open and two men clambered out.
"Police Constable Thicke! Dr. Charhart!" Bucket said. "So good of you to join me tonight!"
"Sir," Thicke said, putting on his regulation stovepipe hat and straightening his blue uniform jacket as best he could over a belly twice as prodigious as Bucket's (which was hardly insubstantial in its own right). He jerked his head at the doctor and waggled his eyebrows-a warning to Bucket to brace himself.
"Good of me?" Charhart sneered. "For it to be 'good of me,' coming here would have to be voluntary!"
Dr. Crispus Charhart was a tall, lanky man with a face so overgrown with gray whiskers it would be impossible to say whether he was smiling or frowning were it not a commonly known fact that he never smiled. Despite his wild beard and fiery eyes, however, the doctor had the regal, rigid bearing of a gentleman of property and position-though perhaps one for whom both were now but a memory.
"As it so happens," he snarled, "I was dragged from my dinner simply so a man of medicine can affirm that the miserable old sod who was run over by a wagon before a dozen witnesses was killed by-gasp, shock, alarum!-being run over by a wagon. As long as I'm out here in the freezing cold, shall I write out certificates for everyone else present testifying to the fact that they are indeed still alive? It would be a task just as worthy of my time and talents, I tell you."
"It would be a fine thing, I agree, if more people would schedule their dying with our convenience in mind," Bucket replied cheerfully. "Alas, we must accommodate those rude souls who allow themselves to be shepherded from this earth at the time of Another's choosing. Such is one's lot when one signs on with Scotland Yard-or accepts a coroner's warrant, Dr. Charhart."
The doctor's eyes blazed as bright as the fire he no doubt longed to be warming himself by.
"Fine-step aside and let me at the old villain!" he snapped, pushing past Bucket before the inspector had time to move. The old man's body was lying in the gutter nearby, and Charhart stomped over and knelt down beside it.
"Do I take it that you knew the gentleman?" Bucket asked.