It is after midnight when the murderer and his victim are abroad together. At that hour the ‘streets are empty,’ and only the storm goes thundering along them. The precincts ‘are unusually dark to-night.’ No need, then, for Jasper to fear detection as he slips the great silk scarf over Edwin’s head and pulls it tightly round his throat. ‘No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty—and yet I never saw that before.’ The maundering talk of Jasper in the opium woman’s den need not be taken literally. The difficult and dangerous journey ‘over abysses where a slip would be destruction’ may have no reference to the actual tower, but to the perils of the scheme and the risk of detection. Among other modes of killing, however, the idea of flinging Edwin from the tower may have occurred to Jasper, and been abandoned. Hence his outcry, ‘Look down! look down! You see what lies at the bottom there!’ Dr. Jackson thinks Jasper departed so far from his original plan that he chose the crypt instead of the Sapsea monument as a hiding-place. I think it far more likely that, if ever he intended to hurl Edwin from the tower, he set aside this plan when he found that it meant the making of two duplicate keys. Suppose that in the days following the crime, when the names of Edwin Drood and Jasper were in every mouth in Cloisterham, a small tradesman in some obscure lane were to ask his neighbours why the choirmaster needed these two large keys. The conjecture might be sufficient to destroy him. I venture to think that Miss Stoddart is right in assigning the place of the body to the Sapsea monument, but I incline to agree with Dr. Jackson that, in order to do justice to the ‘Night with Durdles,’ and the confessions to the opium woman, we must give some place to the tower as connected with the murder. But I do not understand how Jasper should have seen Drood lying beneath him dead if he had merely pushed him down the tower stairs. Would it not have been more likely that Jasper should have pushed Drood from the galleries, and seen him fall into the space beneath? We cannot lay great stress on the topography of Cloisterham. The Sapsea monument is a pure invention, having no counterpart in Rochester, and Dickens manifestly used the utmost freedom in dealing with his materials. Mr. Lang, by the way, makes a strange mistake in saying, ‘As he walks with Durdles that worthy explains (in reply to a question by Jasper) that, by tapping a wall, even if over six feet thick, with his hammer, he can detect the nature of the contents of the vault.’ {139} The wall is not six feet thick. The words are: ‘six foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.’