"Another way,"--Jasper not only fails to strangle Drood, but fails
to lock the door of the vault, and Drood walks out after Jasper has
gone. Jasper has, before his fit, "removed from the body the most
lasting, the best known, and most easily recognizable things upon
it, the watch and scarf-pin." So Dickens puts the popular view of
the case against Neville Landless, and so we are to presume that
Jasper acted. If he removed no more things from the body than
these, he made a fatal oversight.

Meanwhile, how does Edwin, once out of the vault, make good a
secret escape from Cloisterham? Mr. Proctor invokes the aid of Mr.
Grewgious, but does not explain why Grewgious was on the spot. I
venture to think it not inconceivable that Mr. Grewgious having
come down to Cloisterham by a late train, on Christmas Eve, to keep
his Christmas appointment with Rosa, paid a darkling visit to the
tomb of his lost love, Rosa's mother. Grewgious was very
sentimental, but too secretive to pay such a visit by daylight. "A
night of memories and sighs" he might "consecrate" to his lost lady
love, as Landor did to Rose Aylmer. Grewgious was to have helped
Bazzard to eat a turkey on Christmas Day. But he could get out of
that engagement. He would wish to see Edwin and Rosa together, and
Edwin was leaving Cloisterham. The date of Grewgious's arrival at
Cloisterham is studiously concealed. I offer at least a
conceivable motive for Grewgious's possible presence at the
churchyard. Mrs. Bud, his lost love, we have been told, was buried
hard by the Sapsea monument. If Grewgious visited her tomb, he was
on the spot to help Edwin, supposing Edwin to escape. Unlikelier
things occur in novels. I do not, in fact, call these probable
occurrences in every-day life, but none of the story is probable.
Jasper's "weird seizures" are meant to lead up to SOMETHING. They