Carver's Quest (6 page)

‘What became of Markham, do you suppose?’ Adam sounded eager to move on from the subject of Jardine’s meeting with Chevenix.

‘He joined the Colonial Office, I believe. Probably despatched to some distant outpost of the Empire to brutalise the natives as badly as he used to brutalise poor young devils like you
and me at Shrewsbury. Or to drink himself to death.’

‘He would be no great loss to society if he did so,’ Adam said.

‘His grandfather was a butcher,’ Jardine added, as if this explained everything.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Cosmo,’ Adam said, ‘
my
grandfather was an ostler at a York coaching inn. Are we still to be judged by what our ancestors did when George IV
was on the throne?’

For a moment, the artist looked disposed to argue his case but he decided against it.

‘You are right, of course, my dear Adam,’ he said, laughing. ‘Democracy marches ever onwards and soon family will count for nothing. And yet there can be no doubt that Markham
was a beast when he was a boy and he is almost certainly a beast still.’

‘On that we can agree, if nothing else.’

‘Chevenix is now at the Foreign Office.’ Jardine appeared unwilling to forget about his encounter in the Lowther Arcade. ‘You say you have not seen him of late?’

‘I have not seen him since I came down from Cambridge.’

‘That is curious. He has seen you.’

Adam said nothing.

‘In those grand new buildings in Whitehall. He was clearly wondering what on earth you were doing there: the son of some jumped-up railway builder entering the hallowed portals of the
Foreign Office. He didn’t actually put it in those terms, of course, but the implication was there.’

Adam remained silent. He moved towards the easel and made a great show of peering at the canvas on it.

‘I must confess I wonder myself what you might have been doing there,’ Jardine went on. ‘I told Chevenix that he must have been mistaken but he was most convinced it was you.
He said he called out to you but that you ignored him. And disappeared into one of the offices at the park end of the building with someone he didn’t recognise.’

Adam still made no reply.

‘What is all this, Adam?’ Jardine said, suddenly exasperated by his friend’s silence. ‘Was it you?’

‘Yes, it was I.’ Adam turned away from King Pellinore. ‘I saw Chevenix but I had little desire to renew acquaintance with him. I did not hear him call out to me. I am sorry if
I offended him.’

‘Oh, Chevenix is not an easy man to offend. But what were you doing in Whitehall? Are you about to join the ranks of the Civil Service?’

‘No, that is not very likely.’ Adam laughed at the prospect. ‘But I have a friend there who values my opinion on events in European Turkey. On the strength of the Fields
expedition, he believes me to be a greater expert on the subject than perhaps I am.’

‘So you visit the FO to put them right on the subject of cruel Turks and liberty-loving Greeks, do you? It is not a role in which I had ever envisaged you, Adam.’ The artist was
clearly amused by the thought.

‘It is nothing, Cosmo. Let us talk of something else.’ Adam placed his empty whisky glass on the decanter tray. ‘I have changed my mind. Let us go to the Alhambra after
all.’

* * * * *

As he came down the stairs, Adam was forced to suppress a long sigh of irritation when he saw who was waiting for him at their foot. Standing at the door that led to her own
rooms in the house was Mrs Gaffery. She was unmistakeably intent on serious conversation with him. Adam raised his hat politely and wished her good morning with more enthusiasm than he felt. His
slender hope that he might be allowed to escape without talking further with his landlady was instantly dashed.

‘I would like very much to speak to you, Mr Carver.’

‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Mrs Gaffery,’ Adam lied, ‘but I am afraid that I am running late for an appointment.’

‘None the less, I trust that you can spare a little time to join me briefly in my haven from the boisterous world.’ Mrs Gaffery indicated the door to her rooms, which was standing
ajar.

‘I am exceedingly behind my time, Mrs Gaffery. Perhaps on another occasion?’

‘I must insist on
this
occasion, Mr Carver.’

Adam suppressed another sigh and bowed to the inevitable. He followed his landlady through the door. He had never before been asked to enter her inner sanctum and he looked around the room with
curiosity. It seemed to be no more than a reception room and there were doors in its far wall which led, he assumed, to Mrs Gaffery’s bedroom and sitting room. A large jardinière stood
in each corner of the room, flowers overflowing the metal container and trailing down the stand. On the table in the centre of the room, a glass dome covered a display of wax flowers. Beneath a
window onto the street was another small table and on it another glass dome with a similar display. The bottom half of a second window had been transformed by the introduction of a Wardian case. In
its airtight glass box, a dozen ferns of the greenest and freshest hue flourished. Jungles of vines and greenery bloomed on the wallpaper. The room was like a hothouse at Kew Gardens.

As Adam surveyed the floral abundance around him, Mrs Gaffery made her way to the central table. She stood by it as if poised to point out each of the wax flowers in the display case and
identify it by name. Adam’s landlady was a woman of generous proportions. When she entered a room, her substantial bosom sailed like a galleon before her, announcing to those it encountered
that the rest of Mrs Gaffery would shortly be with them. Now that same bosom, Adam noted with alarm, seemed to be quivering with indignation.

‘You are not, I hope, an advocate of the mad and wicked folly of women’s rights, Mr Carver?’ Mrs Gaffery’s opening question was unexpected. ‘With all their
attendant horrors.’

She waved her hand towards one of the jardinières on the far side of the room, as if the attendant horrors might be gathering within it.

Adam struggled to frame a reply.

‘I have often thought that, perhaps, we men have not always done justice to your sex, Mrs Gaffery,’ he said eventually.

His landlady looked at him as if he had confessed to being Spring-Heeled Jack. ‘Away with you, sir. You will be telling me next that you are a supporter of the dreadful Mr Mill.’

‘I regret to say that I do not know enough of Mr Mill’s ideas to express an opinion upon them, ma’am.’

‘Let me assure you that his ideas are abhorrent to all right-thinking people, Mr Carver. That is all you need to know of them.’

‘I am sure that you are correct in your view of Mr Mill, ma’am. But I am struggling to understand their relevance to our present conversation.’

‘The woman who called here on Tuesday morning… and on the previous Friday. I will not enquire further into her motives for visiting my house. Nor into yours for receiving her. I
tremble at the very thought of what they might be. But I must insist that she does not do so again.’

A rosewood chiffonier stood against the opposite wall, its double doors slightly ajar. As if on castors, Mrs Gaffery moved smoothly across the carpet towards it and pushed them together. They
closed with an unexpectedly loud crash. She ignored the sound and turned to glare at her lodger.

‘I am not sure I follow you, ma’am,’ Adam said, puzzled. ‘You say that the young lady had been here on a previous occasion?’

‘She had, sir. Alone and unchaperoned at both times. As you must know only too well.’

‘But I saw the lady only once. On the Tuesday. I was away from the rooms all day on the Friday of the previous week. I was taking photographs of the new embankment.’

‘Well, Quint must have opened the door to the woman.’

‘That cannot be the case. Quint was also out. He went to Stepney to discuss the merits of a pot of half-and-half with an old acquaintance.’

‘I know only what my eyes tell me, Mr Carver.’ Mrs Gaffery was adamant. ‘And they tell me that that young woman was coming down the stairs from your rooms at half past two
o’clock on the afternoon of Friday last week.’

‘But that is impossible. How can she have entered the house? Or entered the rooms?’

‘Those are questions to which I have no answers,’ Mrs Gaffery said, brushing invisible specks of dust off the top of the chiffonier and then turning to glare at her young lodger.
‘I know only that the woman who visited you on Tuesday was also here on the previous Friday. I must ask that you promise me she shall be here no more. When my late and much lamented husband
left me this house, he had no intention that it should become a haunt of single ladies and I must respect his wishes. She must come here no more.’

Her words brooked no contradiction. And so Adam nodded with as much deference as he felt able to summon and said nothing. Mrs Gaffery waved her hand in dismissal and moved towards an enormous
aspidistra that was casting its shadow on the opposite corner of the room. Adam could see that his ordeal was at an end. Bowing politely, he took his leave, still pondering the puzzle of Miss
Maitland’s earlier appearance at his lodgings.

O
n the Thursday that Creech had chosen as the day on which they should meet again, Adam made his way to Victoria Station and boarded the London,
Chatham and Dover Railways train to Herne Hill. Quint, whose expressed wish to stay in Doughty Street had been ignored, was with him. The short journey out of town passed in silence. Adam replayed
in his mind the strange conversation he’d had with Creech at the Speke dinner and pondered what questions he should ask the man. Quint, thwarted of further hours in the company of his
foul-smelling tobacco, stared sulkily out of the train window. From the station, a short walk up the hill brought them to their destination, a large detached villa set back from the road. At the
entrance to its grounds, Adam stopped. He stared up at the house, half-hidden by the elms and birches which protected Creech’s privacy.

‘We must get him to answer our questions, Quint.’

Quint, who did not know Creech and had no particular questions he wanted him to answer, said nothing. Adam began to stride purposefully up the villa’s driveway. Quint followed, a step or
two behind him.

‘This here gent ain’t going to want to see me.’ Quint was still not entirely reconciled to losing an afternoon’s lounging around the Doughty Street rooms. ‘If he
sees the two of us coming up his garden path, he’ll most like set the dogs on us.’

‘Nonsense. He is expecting me. If he’s watching now and sees you as well, he’ll just assume I’m too shy and retiring to visit on my own. Believe me, we’ll both be
as welcome as the flowers in May.’

Quint grunted, unconvinced, but he continued to follow Adam up the winding gravel walkway. The house at the end was a substantial, three-storey property. Its architect had attempted,
unsuccessfully, to cross a Queen Anne country mansion with an ancient Greek temple. Pale pink brick on the façade contrasted with a white Doric-columned portico that looked as if it should
be welcoming worshippers of Apollo to their rites.

The two men stepped inside the porch and Adam pulled vigorously at the bell. They stood for a minute, listening to it ring inside. No one came to the door. Nothing could be heard save the sound
of a distant train making its way towards Kent and the cawing of rooks in the elms.

‘Maybe he ain’t in,’ Quint suggested after another minute had passed.

‘If he is not here, where is everybody else?’

‘Maybe there ain’t nobody else.’

‘A man like Creech. Living in a house like this. He would have servants. Where have they gone?’

Adam tugged again at the bell-pull. They heard once more the muffled sound of ringing within the house. No further noise, no clicking of footsteps across parquet flooring, nor opening and
closing of inner doors, could be heard after the bell ceased to ring. Herne Hill Villa, it seemed, was deserted.

‘This is monstrous, Quint,’ Adam said with mock outrage. ‘A man invites us to his house. He specifies the day, the time. He speaks mysteriously of secrets that cannot be
divulged. And yet when we come visiting at the appointed hour, he is nowhere to be found.’

‘Could be he’s round the back,’ Quint said, jerking his thumb leftward to where the driveway curved around the side of the house.

‘Unlikely, but we shall investigate. When the host flouts the laws of hospitality so egregiously by not being present, the guests are surely entitled to go in search of him.’

The rear of Creech’s villa faced west and the afternoon sun was shining fiercely on the windows that opened onto the gardens. A neatly kept lawn extended some forty yards to a group of
trees. In the centre of the lawn was a small fish pond. In the centre of that was a fountain in the shape of some indeterminate mythological beast. Was it supposed to be a griffin? Adam wondered,
as he gazed at it. What watery connotations did a griffin possess? He gave up the conundrum and turned his attention to the back of the house. A series of five long glass casements let light into
the rooms at the rear. Adam began to peer through each one in turn, using his hand to shade his eyes against the glare of the sun.

‘Nothing and no one in sight,’ he reported to Quint, who was trudging and muttering in his wake.

At the penultimate casement, he stopped and leaned further towards the glass, like a small boy pressing his nose against the window of a sweet shop.

‘I’m damned if I can make anything out clearly with the sun as it is,’ he said. ‘There seems to be someone in this room, though.’

He stood there another thirty seconds, face fixed to the casement window. Then he stepped back swiftly. ‘Break the glass, Quint.’

Out of habit and sheer cussedness, Quint was usually ready to dispute any orders given to him, but the urgency in Adam’s voice was unmistakeable. Thinking quickly, Quint removed the boot
from his left foot and used the heel to shatter the central panes in the window. Broken glass flew in all directions. Adam reached inside the frame, pulled at its handle and opened the casement. He
stepped over the glass and into the room. Quint replaced his boot and followed him, scrunching fragments of glass beneath his feet as he went.