Carver's Quest (28 page)

The only other person in this first room was the man behind the bar but, through a door at the back, Adam could see another room. In it was a billiards table and two men were moving around it,
cues in hand. One settled to play his shot. He was tall and so fat that he had great difficulty bending over the table. His opponent had noticed Adam enter the bar and he muttered something in his
companion’s ear. The fat man heaved his bulk off the baize and looked back into the bar room. Wagging his finger at the man who had whispered in his ear, he left the table. A small white,
strikingly ugly terrier trotted after him as he exited the billiard room and approached the bar.

Several of his chins wobbling with the effort of moving, he was smiling a ghastly smile of greeting. ‘Six penn’orth of hot brandy and water here, Toby. And whatever this gentleman is
having.’ He looked questioningly at Adam.

‘That is kind of you, sir, but—’

‘No buts, guv’nor. I insist on standing you a drink. The least I can do for a young gent what comes down Wapping way.’

‘Thank you. I’ll take a half pint of your…’ Adam looked again at the poster behind the bar. ‘Your matchless stout.’

‘That’s more like it,’ the fat man said, flicking his fingers at Toby the barman, who began to pour the drinks. ‘Not often we get visitors down the Cat. Not visitors like
yourself at any rate.’

‘Like myself?’ The ugly terrier was nipping at the bottoms of Adam’s trousers and he was struggling to concentrate on what was being said.

‘Down, Billy. Leave it, sir, leave it.’ The dog barked once and then retreated. The fat man moved closer, bringing a strong smell of corduroy, sweat and cheap pomade with him.
‘Of a gentlemanly nature. Of a not-usually-seen-in-this-neck-of-the-woods nature.’

‘I’m looking for someone, Mr…?’

‘Brindle, guv. Jabez Brindle. At your service.’

Jabez Brindle looked, Adam thought, as if he was never at anyone’s service but his own. He was not an attractive man. Even had he shed several stones and thus returned himself to the
average weight of a London publican, he would have attracted no admiring glances from the ladies. His head was shaven and his nose was flatter than noses are meant to be. He had the look of a man
for whom violence was a first resort, not a last.

‘And who would you be looking for, I wonder?’ Brindle’s voice was quiet but carried the hint of a threat. ‘Ain’t very likely to be any others of a gentlemanly
nature in the Cat. No gents here, Toby, eh?’

The barman guffawed at the very notion.

‘I’m looking for—’

But Adam had no chance or need to reveal who he was looking for. At just that moment, a door from the street opened into the billiard room and a familiar figure lumbered into the pub. It was
Jinkinson, looking very much the worse for wear. His shoulders slumped, his yellow silk cravat twisted into a knot beneath one ear and his plaid waistcoat spotted with the stains of drink and dirt,
he was a picture of unrelieved misery. He took off his hat and was about to place it on the billiard table when he glanced through the connecting door towards the bar and saw Adam. His reaction was
immediate. A look of mingled surprise and fear appeared on his face and he turned to flee.

Adam moved swiftly to follow him but, surprisingly, Brindle was even swifter. He stuck out his leg and sent the young man tumbling. As Adam fell, his head struck a glancing blow on the rim of
one of the tables. Briefly stunned, he was unable to rise. He could only rest on all fours and endeavour to gather his briefly scattered wits. The great full moon of Brindle’s face suddenly
appeared, sideways, in his field of vision. The fat man was leaning over him.

‘Very clumsy for a handsome gent, ain’t you? You really should mind where you’re going. Or you’ll be doing yourself a severe mischief, you will.’

Adam pushed Brindle away and struggled to his feet. Having allowed Jinkinson his escape, the fat man seemed uninterested in stopping Adam from following him. Instead he began to laugh, great
heaving waves of laughter rising from the pits of his stomach. Adam staggered from the bar room into the billiard room. He reached a hand to his head. He could feel blood on his fingers. He must
have grazed his brow on the table as he fell. It was nothing serious, he decided, but he did feel decidedly dizzy. Shaking his head to clear it, he exited through the door Jinkinson had used and
nearly found himself in the river. At the back, the pub was propped on thick wooden pillars which rose directly out of the Thames mud. Only the narrowest of footpaths ran between the back wall of
the Cat and Salutation and the ooze of the river.

There was no sign of Jinkinson. Rackety wooden railings stretched along the water for twenty yards. There was a gap in the middle of them where the rotting wood had given way. Holding a
handkerchief to his nose, Adam glanced into the filth below. Had Jinkinson, he wondered, fallen into the Thames as he came dashing out of the pub’s rear door? There was no evidence that he
had. Masses of green weed floated on the surface of what was, to judge by the smell, a potent mix of water and human effluvia. What looked unpleasantly like a dead dog, swollen with putrefaction,
had washed up against the post which marked one end of the railings. Adam could hear squeals and the splashing of water as rats, alerted to his presence, made off into the darkness.

He began to walk warily along the pathway, his feet squelching in mud and possibly worse as he did so. Suddenly, there was a sound which could only be a pistol shot. It reverberated from
building to building and along the riverbank. It was followed almost immediately by several more and by a long cry of pain. Adam stopped and listened. Did the noise come from close to hand or much
further away? He could not be certain. He set off in the direction from which the shots seemed to have sounded. He had gone about fifty yards when, in the half-light, he stumbled over something. It
was something large and soft. Something that was lying half in and half out of the water. It was a body.

Gingerly, Adam reached down and took hold of the shoulder. He rolled the body onto its back. Grunting with the effort, he pulled it out of the mud into which it was sinking and hauled it towards
the top of the bank. In the faint light from the distant gas lamp, he could just make out the features. It was Jinkinson. The enquiry agent was alive but only just. Blood oozed through his
waistcoat and onto Adam’s hands. He was struggling to say something. His mouth opened and closed but no sounds emerged. His eyes were fixed on a point behind Adam’s left shoulder. He
looked as if he was concentrating intently on some object that was slipping out of focus and out of view. His legs were twitching and splashing in the murky Thames water. As Adam battled to haul
him further out of the riverside filth, the light left the enquiry agent’s eyes and he died. Adam was left to clutch the substantial shell of Jinkinson’s body, but whatever had once
animated it had gone. The old dandy, it seemed, had tied his last cravat.

Half-crouched in the mud, Jinkinson’s corpse at his feet, Adam heard the sound of movement behind him. He swung round and was in time to see a dark figure, twenty yards away, silhouetted
against the wall of one of the riverside houses.

‘You there,’ he shouted. ‘Stop, I say, stop!’

The figure turned briefly in his direction. There was something disconcertingly familiar about it, but before Adam could think what it might be, the man moved into the darkness between two
buildings and disappeared. Adam briefly contemplated the idea of pursuit but he decided against it. He turned back to the dead body in the Thames mud. He wondered how long it would be before others
joined him on the riverbank. At present it was as if he was stranded on the shore of Crusoe’s desert island but appearances, he knew, were deceptive. There were doubtless a dozen dives and
pubs within a few hundred yards of here. And out on the river, even amidst the darkness, there would be boatmen and scavengers. Plenty of people would have heard the shots fired. The sound of
shots, however, might not be so uncommon in the neighbourhood that they would attract immediate attention. And curiosity, in the circumstances, might prove dangerous. Minding one’s own
business in the worst areas of Wapping was probably thought conducive to a longer life. On reflection, Adam decided that he had time to search the body before anyone joined him.

It was not a pleasant job. Jinkinson’s body was warm and fleshy. Stifling his nausea, Adam felt hurriedly through the pockets of the enquiry agent’s mud-stained and bloody clothes.
It took him but a short time. Whatever possessions Jinkinson had owned, he had not been keeping many of them about his person. Trouser pockets surrendered only a cambric handkerchief and the stub
of a pencil. The lower pockets of the plaid waistcoat held nothing. Inserting his fingers into the waistcoat’s top pocket, Adam could feel something in it. Whatever it was, it proved
difficult to grasp and his thumb and forefinger pursued it vainly around the recesses of the pocket for a while before they closed on it. Finally, he pulled it out. It was a visiting card. Adam
took a box of matches from his pocket and struck one. The card was battered but largely dry and, in the wavering light of the match, he could make out the name ‘Lewis Garland’ printed
on it in a bold and simple font. Adam turned the card over. At first, he thought the reverse was plain, but holding it nearer the light, he could see that one word had been written on it in pencil.
The word, in English capitals, was ‘EUPHORION’.

It was the same word or name that had appeared in Creech’s journal. Now, more than ever, it seemed to Adam to lie at the heart of the mystery that had led him to this dismal stretch of the
Thames. The mystery that had cost both Creech and now Jinkinson their lives. The enquiry agent had denied all knowledge of Euphorion. So for that matter had the Reverend Dwight. But Ada, poor girl,
had recognised the name, even if she had transliterated it as ‘Yew Ferrion’. She had spoken of Jinkinson’s belief that it held the key to riches. Now here were those same nine
letters on a card belonging to Lewis Garland, whom Quint had observed meeting the enquiry agent in the pub yard near Fountain Court. And Garland, along with Sir Willoughby Oughtred and James
Abercrombie, had been mentioned in Creech’s journal.

Adam struggled to make sense of it all, his thoughts twisting and turning in search of a theory that might explain the few facts he had. His speculations were interrupted, however, first by the
match burning out and then by a sound from behind him. He spun round quickly. For all he knew, Jinkinson’s killer might have returned. A man was standing a few feet away in the mud of the
footpath. He was holding a bull’s eye lantern in his hand and appeared to be swinging it aimlessly from side to side. As it swung, its light flashed back and forth, first blinding Adam as he
stood over the body and then illuminating the man who held it. It was Toby, the barman from the Cat and Salutation.

‘Mr Brindle. He ain’t going to like this,’ he said.

‘No, well, I doubt Mr Jinkinson is entirely delighted by the turn events have taken.’ Adam swiftly pocketed the card with its enigmatic message. ‘Come over here. We need to get
the body out of this filth. We’ll have to carry it to the pub.’

S
eems to be some kind of attraction between you and those what have passed over to the other side, don’t there, Mr Carver?’

Despite the gloom of both the surroundings and circumstances, Inspector Pulverbatch was in a jovial mood.

‘Some kind of fatal attraction, you might almost say.’

‘Our paths do seem destined to cross, Inspector, do they not?’

Adam was bone weary and still covered in the mud of the river. He had rather liked Jinkinson and had been distressed to stumble across him, dying in the river’s filth. Now
Pulverbatch’s cheerfulness was the latest in the series of misfortunes the evening had inflicted on him.

‘Does Scotland Yard,’ Adam asked, ‘have no one other than your self to investigate murders?’

The two men were sitting in the bar of the Cat and Salutation. Apart from a constable standing guard at the door and the corpse of Jinkinson lying beneath a sheet on the billiards table, they
were alone. Complaining bitterly, Brindle and his cronies had been ushered out into the courtyard where another constable was watching them.

‘Oh, dearie me, yes,’ Pulverbatch replied. ‘Plenty of detectives at the Yard capable of looking into a murder or two.’

Before despatching Toby to join his employer and his customers outside, Pulverbatch had instructed the barman to pour him a half-pint of stout. He now picked it up and examined it against the
light, as if looking for flaws in the glass.

‘But only me what’s got an interest in the Cat and Salutation already,’ the policeman continued. ‘So when word reaches me that someone’s gone and found a dead body
outside that very same public house, I’m all ears. And then I further hears that that someone is none other than your good self. A man as has come across another body in Herne Hill nary a
fortnight ago. A man as has friends in high places.
Very
high places, judging by what Dolly Williamson himself tells me. Well, you can imagine how interested I was.’

Pulverbatch raised his stout to his lips.

‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll just put this where the flies won’t get at it.’

For twenty seconds, nothing was heard but the sound of beer being emptied down Pulverbatch’s throat. Then, with a sigh of appreciation, the inspector finished his drink and slammed the
glass on the pub table with sufficient force to make Adam start.

‘Well, that slipped down like soapsuds down a gully hole.’

‘I’m delighted you enjoyed it, Inspector.’

Puverbatch ignored Adam’s sarcasm.

‘So, you’ve been a-drinking and a-gassing with Jabez Brindle and his pals, have you?’ he remarked. ‘Well, they’re a bad lot, as the devil said of the Ten
Commandments.’

‘You make our meeting sound like a social occasion, Inspector. I wouldn’t describe it like that.’

‘How
would
you describe it, sir?’