Samuel Warden of the Detective Police had been forewarned. A message reached him at home that very morning suggesting he should 'settle his immediate affairs' and arrive at the detectives' headquarters, Great Scotland Yard, just off Trafalgar Square, ready for 'a few days in the country'. He was to travel to Cloisterham, a town on the Medway, where six months before a young man, Edwin Drood, had disappeared, and find him "whether he be dead or alive".