Carver's Quest (11 page)

‘’Ere, moisten your chaffer on this.’ Quint handed Adam a glass of beer. ‘There’s more of the story to come. Jinkinson’s standing there in the court and
I’m a-loiterin’ in the street, tryin’ to keep half an eye on him, when this gent comes up the Strand from Trafalgar Square end. All togged up to the nines like a right swell. And
’e joins our man in the court.’

‘A swell, you say?’

‘Thought at first he might be some Champagne Charley out on a spree. But ’e knows old Jinks.’

‘So he was the man for whom Jinkinson was waiting? Any distinguishing marks to this swell?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ Quint shrugged. ‘Enough moustache for ten men. Can’t hardly see his mouth for lip-thatch. But nothing else.’

‘And why was he meeting Jinkinson in some pub alley?’

‘Old your ’orses. I’m comin’ to that. Now Jinkinson don’t know me, do ’e? There’s no harm, I think, in getting a bit closer. So, I stagger into the
court as if the drink has just took me and fall into a heap.’

‘Quick thinking, Quint.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Quint complacently. ‘You get the picture, then. There’s our man. And there’s his friend, all dressed up like Christmas beef.
Both of them standing in the court. And then there’s me, playing the drunk and sliding down the wall. They give me a quick glance and then they forget me. They begin to talk. Whispering, mind
you, but I can catch some of what they say.’

‘And what do they say?’

‘The gent’s name is Garland. Mr Garland, I hear Jinkinson say, not once but several times. Same name as was in the book I filched.’

‘Lewis Garland. He’s an MP.’

‘Well, this here Lewis Garland is fit to be tied. Angry as a dog chasing rats, by the sounds of ’im. Not that he raises his voice or anything. But I can tell ’e’s
raging.’

‘He was threatening Jinkinson, was he?’

‘I reckon so. But our man ain’t too fussed. Sounds like ’e’s doing a bit of ’is own threatening in return. Something about the papers and a scandal.’ Quint
sat down at the table with a plateful of food and fell upon the cold mutton and bread.

‘And how did Garland respond to what our friend Jinkinson was saying?’

‘He didn’t say more ’n a few words. But he looked as if he was like to have forty fits, didn’t ’e? Then Jinkinson was off again, yammering and chattering at
’im a bit more.’

‘Could you catch any more of the conversation?’ Adam asked.

‘Not much.’ His mouth full of meat and bread, Quint’s voice was indistinct. Crumbs sprayed upon the table.

‘You eat as if you’d had no sustenance in weeks, Quint. Lions rending the flesh from their prey have nothing on you attacking cold mutton.’

‘All very well for you to say,’ Quint responded, sounding aggrieved and still tearing chunks from the bread in front of him. ‘You ain’t the one who’s been chasing
old Jinkinson all afternoon and spent his time face down in the muck. You’ve prob’ly been greasing your gills down some chophouse.’

‘Not guilty, your honour. However, your courage in casting yourself down amidst the inn yard’s effluvia certainly deserves acknowledgement. Please accept my apologies. But do slow
down, man, or you’ll choke yourself and I will have no idea how to save you.’ Adam took a long pull from his glass of beer. ‘So, what more did you hear from Jinkinson and Garland
as you were lying so selflessly in the gutter?’

‘As I say, not much.’ Quint drank his own ale. ‘Our man, he says something about an ’arbour in the woods, whatever that might mean. Then there’s some pretty choice
insults exchanged atween the two of ’em. Not that I can hear ’em exactly on account of my ear’s next door to a pile of horseshit, but I can get the general drift of ’em.
Then Garland makes to leave. You come bothering me again, he says, and I’ll darken your bleeding daylights for you. Or words to that effect. And he stomps off up the Strand in the direction
he come from.’

‘What about Jinkinson? What did he do?’

‘What d’you think? He goes into the pub for a drop of the lush. And I picks meself up and heads back here.’

‘Well done, Quint. Thanks to your initiative in hurling yourself into the filth of that pub yard, we now know that Jinkinson has approached two of the men who were named in that notebook.
And at least one of them was extremely displeased when he did so. But why did he contact them?’ Adam stared into his now empty glass of beer as if the answer to his question might be lurking
among the dregs. ‘To blackmail them, we must suppose.’

‘What if this Jinkinson we’ve been trailing around town for days is the cove what killed Creech?’ Quint asked. ‘What if he was putting the squeeze on him as well, and
things got a bit out of hand? You given that a thought?’

‘I have, indeed.’

‘Any result from giving it a thought?’

‘I have come to the conclusion that Jinkinson is not the stuff of which murderers are made. He may well be a bit of a rogue, I grant you, but he is not the man who despatched poor Creech
from the world. He was utterly astonished when I told him of Creech’s death. He would have had to be a Kean returned from the grave to feign the surprise I saw on his face that day in his
office.’

Quint stood and moved towards the fire where Adam was slumped low in the depths of his favourite armchair. He gathered up the empty glass that the young man had rested on one of its arms.

‘You want another of these?’ he asked, dangling the glass in front of his master’s eyes. Adam shook his head. The servant retreated to the kitchen.

‘You come up with any more ideas about Creech getting hisself killed, then?’ he called. He returned to the sitting room clutching a green beer bottle and began to paw at its cork
stopper. ‘Like who might have done it?’

Adam shook his head again. ‘No, I have not yet come to any conclusion about the identity of the murderer.’ The young man gazed up at the ceiling. ‘However, I have not been
entirely idle while you have been trailing down the Strand after our friend.’

Quint grunted, as if to suggest that he wasn’t sure he believed this. He had succeeded in removing the cork from his bottle and was now pouring its contents gently into his own glass. He
stared at the beer with a look of intense concentration as he did so.

‘I have travelled out once again to Herne Hill,’ Adam continued. ‘The place already looks nearly as deserted as a haunted house. Pulverbatch and his men appear to have no
further interest in it. Its only inhabitant is a young man named John. He was one of Creech’s servants. He is the only one who has not yet moved on to another situation, although he was eager
to assure me that he has had offers from several most respectable families in the neighbourhood.’

‘He’s there on his own?’ Quint looked up in surprise. He had almost finished his careful decanting of his beer into the glass. ‘I raise my ’at to him.
Wouldn’t catch me lying down to sleep in a dead man’s ’ouse.’

‘Well, not everyone is as plagued by his imagination as you are, Quint. John is a phlegmatic character – a man unlikely to be troubled by the spirits of the dead.’

Quint grunted again and tipped half the contents of his glass down his throat.

‘This ’ere John tell you anything?’ he asked, after allowing his drink to settle.

‘Not as much as I had hoped,’ Adam admitted. ‘Creech used an agency in Cheapside to hire his servants. None of them knew anything of him other than that he was a gentleman
arrived recently in London from abroad. John thought he had been, and I quote his words exactly, “living with the heathen, sir”. But John’s ideas about geography were a bit hazy.
He appeared to believe that Greece was in Africa.’

‘Where were all the servants when Creech got topped?’

‘He had given them the day off. John and the others thought that this was strange but none of them was going to turn his back on an extra day of freedom.’

‘We was coming to see ’im. Maybe ’e didn’t want his drudges to know about us.’ Quint had picked up his glass and was staring reflectively at the liquid inside.
‘This John say anything about visitors?’

‘He had none.’ Adam hauled himself to his feet and began to pace about the room. His manservant watched him, occasionally sipping at what remained of his beer. ‘The consensus
below stairs seemed to be that this was odd.’

‘Sounds odd to me.’

‘The desire for solitude is not always to be condemned as eccentric. There might have been perfectly innocent reasons why Mr Creech wanted to see no one.’

‘Maybe,’ Quint sniffed, ‘but you don’t believe that any more ’n I do.’

‘No, you are correct. I don’t.’ Adam had stopped by the window. He twitched the curtain aside and looked down to the pavements below. Doughty Street, gated at both its ends,
was quiet. Only a solitary man, dressed in a long black coat and carrying a malacca cane, was in view. Adam watched as the man made his way down the street and disappeared from sight. Then he
turned back into the room. ‘And our friend John did have one tale to tell of a visitor.’

Quint, who had finished his beer and had been engaged in pushing his empty glass aimlessly back and forth on the table, looked up.

‘Anyone we know?’

‘Difficult to tell. It was several weeks before the murder. Creech had given all the servants time off. Apparently, he did this fairly frequently. John would have been going to spend time
with his sister and his young niece in Stepney. He had walked as far as the railway station when he remembered that he had a present for the girl which he had left in his room. He came back to the
villa and let himself in at the servants’ entrance.’

‘And there was some’un else in the house.’

‘You run ahead of me, Quint, but you are right. John heard voices coming from the library as he made his way past its door. And then the door opened and his master stormed out. He was
furious already, and he was even more furious when he saw John. He ordered him to leave immediately. He was not to go up to the attics to retrieve what he had returned for. So the young lady in
Stepney had to wait for her gift.’

‘Did John see the cove Creech was with?’

‘Sadly, he did not, but he heard his voice.’

Quint cocked his head inquisitively.

‘He was a gentleman,’ Adam said. ‘The voice was that of a gentleman. That was all John could say.’

‘That ain’t a fat lot of ’elp.’

‘Of no use to us at all, really. “Gentleman” is such an elastic term. But John did hear something of the discussion that was taking place just prior to his master emerging
hotfoot from the library. I suspect that, although he would die rather than admit it, John had been loitering outside the door, listening to the conversation for some time.’

‘Nosy little bleeder.’

‘Absolutely. He was indulging in one of the worst crimes a servant can commit. But his sin provides us with a little more knowledge of Creech’s mysterious visitor.’

‘Did he ’ear his name?’

‘Nothing quite so useful as that, I’m afraid. He heard voices raised in anger. He heard the word “gold” which, unsurprisingly, piqued his curiosity. He heard the unknown
visitor shouting about travelling to Greece. Indeed, that was when I learned that John labours under the misapprehension that Greece is in Africa. He then heard Creech shouting back about going
without him.’

‘Without ’oo?’

‘The enigmatic visitor, presumably.’

Quint sat back and twisted his face into an expression suggestive of deep thought and the careful consideration of different possibilities.

‘I ain’t sure we’re any further on than we was before you spoke to this John cove,’ he said after a moment. ‘We still ain’t got no name for the bloke Creech
was raising his organ-pipe with.’

‘No, we have not,’ Adam agreed reluctantly. ‘But we do have more knowledge than we had. We know that Creech spoke to someone else of travelling to Greece. Several weeks before
he met me at the Speke dinner.’

The young man crossed the room and threw himself once more into the armchair by the fire.

‘There is some connection between the argument that John witnessed and Creech’s conversation with me at the Marco Polo. There must be. And the solution to the riddle lies with this
name, Euphorion. I am sure of it.’

* * * * *

Adam stood outside the newly finished Italianate building which housed the Foreign Office and other government departments, and watched as his friend, the Hon. Richard Sunman,
emerged from its interior. It was Sunman he had been visiting on the occasion when, if Cosmo was to be believed, his presence had been noted by that infernal bore Chevenix. It was Sunman who had
first recruited him into the Foreign Office’s ranks of unsalaried and unofficial travelling observers when he had been about to set out on his visit to northern Greece three years earlier. An
older contemporary at Shrewsbury, the son of Baron Sunman of Petersfield had also been in his final year at Cambridge when Adam had arrived there. He had, to Adam’s surprise, sought him out
at his college and insisted that they should dine together. Adam, who had always been rather in awe of the languid young aristocrat, had agreed. He had assumed that Sunman had looked him up because
they had both been favoured pupils of Fields.

In the confusion following his father’s death, when Adam was obliged to go down from Cambridge, Sunman, newly ensconsed in the Foreign Office, invited him twice to meet him in his London
club. On the second occasion, he had suggested that Adam might like to pass on any observations of Turkey in Europe he might make during his recently announced expedition with Professor Fields.
After they had arrived in Salonika, Adam had dutifully despatched reports back to London. He had been uncertain what might or might not be of value to the Foreign Office so he had ended by sending
enomously detailed accounts of very nearly everything he had seen and heard. On his return from Macedonia, he was at first doubtful that Sunman could have found these at all helpful but it soon
became clear that his friend had been impressed by Adam’s thoroughness. Several times in the last eighteen months he had, in the politest possible way, issued instructions that Adam should
meet him in Whitehall. There he had, again with the utmost courtesy, questioned the one-time traveller closely on news from European Turkey. Now, for the first time, it was Adam who had sent word
to Sunman and requested a meeting.