The two men walked side by side in silence for a while.
‘Perhaps it would be as well if I left town temporarily,’ Adam said eventually, nodding to himself.
Waterton raised an eyebrow in query, and Adam described what had happened when he had left the German Gymnasium two days previously.
‘This man attacked you?’ Waterton stopped in the street, his hand on Adam’s arm. He looked shocked.
‘Yes. As I say, he had a knife. I suppose I was lucky to escape injury.’
‘And this murderous assault could only have been a consequence of your enquiries into Miss Delaney’s whereabouts?’
‘What other reason could there be for it? I lead an otherwise blameless life, Mr Waterton.’ Adam smiled. ‘In any case, I had been knocked to the ground a few days earlier – possibly by the same rogue, although I cannot be sure – and told in no uncertain terms that I should put an end to my interest in Dolly.’
‘But you chose to ignore the threats?’
‘I object rather strongly to ruffians informing me of what I can and cannot do. Their blusterings made me only more committed to finding the girl.’
‘So you will go north in pursuit of her.’
‘I think I probably will.’
‘And you will go on as if this attack upon you had never taken place?’
‘What would you have me do, Mr Waterton? Retire ignominiously from the fray? I owe it to my honour as a gentleman to continue the search for poor Dolly.’
‘I suppose you do,’ Waterton said, ‘although preservation of one’s honour is sometimes an over-rated virtue. Preservation of one’s life should surely take precedence. If you do journey to York, you must take the greatest care. Sunman and I would never forgive ourselves if something were to happen to you.’
They had stopped at the corner of Museum Street. Waterton pointed his cane in the direction of High Holborn. ‘I am going this way,’ he said.
‘And I am making towards the Strand,’ Adam said, but he did not move. ‘There is one other complication,’ he continued after a pause.
Waterton looked at him enquiringly. Adam stepped to one side to allow a young mother and her sailor-suited child to pass by and then, rather to his surprise, found himself telling the older man the story of Benskin and his father.
Waterton listened carefully, nodding from time to time in encouragement. ‘Let me ask you but one question, Carver. Did this man Benskin want money?’
Adam hesitated slightly before he replied: ‘He asked me for fifty guineas. In exchange for further proofs.’
Waterton raised his arms like a clergyman about to bless his congregation. ‘Well, there you are. He is no more than a commonplace extortioner out to fleece you with his lies. You did not give this bloodsucker what he asked, did you?’
‘I am not such a fool as all that, Mr Waterton.’ The young man smiled ruefully. ‘Besides, I have not it to give him. I am not so well off that I can throw away that amount of money. I told Benskin as much.’
‘And what did he say in reply?’
‘He cursed me several times. Told me that I would get no more information from him unless I paid him what he asked.’
‘And where did you say this encounter took place?’
‘In a pot-house in Whitechapel.’
‘Not a very salubrious locality.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘If you wish for my advice, Mr Carver – and I assume that your reason for telling me this is to solicit my opinion – I would ignore what the man said. It sounds like a cheap and grubby story told in a cheap and grubby location. It is unlikely to be true. And now, I must take my leave of you.’ Waterton raised his hat and made an almost imperceptible little bow. ‘Remember what I have said. If you travel north in search of Harry’s tawdry mistress, you must be prudent and vigilant.’
Adam watched Waterton’s tall, dark figure as it strode away. Then he turned and took his own path through the crowded London streets.
* * * * *
‘And that, I believe, is mate.’ Cosmo Jardine took his hand from the bishop he had just moved and smiled triumphantly at his companion.
He and Adam were sitting at a table in the chess room at the cigar divan in the Strand. The place had been one of their regular haunts when they had both first arrived in London from Cambridge. They had not visited it for more than a year but had kept up their subscriptions – ‘What is a mere two guineas?’ Cosmo had asked with the kind of insouciance that led him so permanently into debt – and this afternoon it had suddenly seemed to both men the ideal place at which to rendezvous.
Adam looked down at the pieces arrayed on the chess board for a little while and then raised his palms in submission. ‘Mate it is,’ he said. ‘You are a positive Staunton.’
Cosmo waved a hand at the waiter who was circumnavigating the room and then pointed to the two cups in front of them. The waiter nodded and scurried away. Clearly pleased with himself, the painter surveyed the other tables in the room, where a dozen pairs of players were hunched over their boards. ‘I saw him here once, you know,’ he said.
‘Staunton?’
‘Yes, it was the year you were in northern Greece, I think. Your first visit. He was playing against another old timer. George Walker, was it? Lord, the amount of fawning and flattery he received! It was sickening to behold. It was as if Zeus had descended from Olympus.’
‘He was a great player.’
‘It is more than likely that he still is. I read his chess articles in the Illustrated London News occasionally and they are most illuminating. I did not object to the man himself, but to the obsequiousness of his admirers.’
The waiter had returned and, crouching deferentially, placed two more cups of hot coffee on the table.
‘How goes the search for the missing Dolly?’ Jardine asked, beginning to set up the pieces for another game.
Adam considered the question for a moment, holding his cup and staring at the black liquid within it as if he were unsure what it might be. ‘I have yet to find her,’ he said. ‘I am of the opinion that she has left London. I think maybe the answers to all the questions lie up north.’
As Cosmo sipped his coffee, his friend spoke of the dancer’s probable flight to York and the proposal by Waterton that he should follow her there.
‘But you do not wish to go? You would prefer to stay in town?’ The painter had caught a note of ambivalence in Adam’s voice as he spoke.
‘No, I shall go,’ the young man said. ‘But the truth is that I have had much to trouble my mind recently. I have not been able fully to concentrate on the matter of Dolly’s disappearance.’
‘Pray tell, dear boy,’ Jardine drawled. ‘An affair of the heart, perhaps?’
‘Nothing to arouse your prurient interest, Cosmo. An odd man who approached me in the street some days ago.’
‘The streets are full of odd men, old chap. Sometimes I think that half of London should be on the omnibus to Bedlam. Without a return ticket.’
‘This particular one said something that has provided me with much food for thought.’
‘An Ancient Mariner, a grey-beard loon who held you with his skinny hand and had a strange tale to unfold?’
Adam laughed uncomfortably. The painter, he thought, was curiously close to the truth. ‘In a manner of speaking, yes. This man – his name is Benskin – was once a clerk who worked for my father. He has very obviously gone down in the world since the death of my father and the loss of his fortune.’
‘A smaller ship sinking in the wake of the larger vessel.’
‘Something like that. Later in the week, he called at Doughty Street and left a note asking me to meet him in a dingy public house in Whitechapel.’
‘And you went?’ Jardi
ne was aghast at the thought. Adam nodded. He doubted whether his friend had ever set foot east of Aldgate.
‘I was curious to know more of what he had to say.’
‘It is easy enough to guess what the general tenor of his remarks would have been.’ Jardine tasted his drink once more. ‘Mendacity mixed with mendicity. A series of lies about the bitter blows fate has dealt him, followed swiftly by a begging request for financial assistance. There was no need to venture into darkest Whitechapel to be certain of what he wanted.’
Adam said nothing.
‘Am I not correct?’ Jardine persisted. ‘He proposed transferring monies from your pocket into his?’
‘He wished for imbursement, yes.’ Adam hesitated. Should he confide in the painter? Cosmo was not renowned for his discretion. And yet he was his oldest friend. He should surely trust him. ‘He said he had something to tell me about my father . . .’
‘What could he tell you that you did not already know?’
‘This must go no further than ourselves, Cosmo.’
‘I swear a solemn oath to that effect.’ The painter held up his hand in mocking parody of a witness in court.
‘I am serious, Cosmo. This is not a matter for jest.’
Jardine, noticing the anxiety in his friend’s eyes, lowered his hand. ‘In that case, old man, I shall jest no more.’
‘When Quint and I went to the tavern in Whitechapel, Benskin was in a room at the back. I left Quint in the bar with some grubby acquaintance from his past and spoke alone to Benskin.’
‘And what did the fellow have to say for himself?’
‘He told me that my father was murdered.’
Jardine raised his eyes in surprise and leaned back in his chair. ‘That is absurd, Adam,’ he said, after a moment’s silence. ‘The man has spent too much of his newfound leisure in reading The Mysteries of London. Or other penny dreadfuls.’
‘That is more or less what Waterton said.’
‘Waterton?’
‘Gilbert Waterton. He works with Sunman at the FO.’ Adam thought it unwise to volunteer more details about the man. ‘I met him earlier today.’
‘And you told Waterton of Benskin’s claims?’
Adam nodded. ‘Benskin had more to say for himself. Something I did not tell Waterton.’ Adam hesitated again and then continued. ‘He told me that my father was with a tart when he died.’
‘Perhaps he was,’ Jardine said warily. He did not wish to offend Adam, but the idea of an older, wealthier man entertaining a younger woman in a hotel bedroom did not strike him as entirely improbable.
‘That may have been the case,’ Adam acknowledged. ‘It is not a subject on which I wish to dwell. What is more important is that Benskin claimed my father was killed by another of the woman’s admirers who surprised them together. A man of wealth and influence.’
‘And the police were not informed?’
‘The murderer had the power to keep everything quiet.’
‘That is not very likely, is it? In England no one has that power. Not even the royal family. Not even Mr Gladstone.’
The waiter was approaching their table once again. Jardine noticed him out of the corner of his eye and waved him impatiently away. The man retreated. Adam was staring miserably into the middle distance.
‘What am I to do?’ he asked. ‘If the man is right, I should not be wasting time in York – I should be exerting myself to the utmost in discovering the identity of the woman’s other admirer and bringing him to justice for the murder of my father.’
‘He cannot be right.’
‘He might be.’
‘He is not. Think no more of it, Adam,’ Jardine said. ‘It is a cock-and-bull story he has invented while he has been brooding over his beer in some backstreet tavern.’
‘He said he had proof of what he alleged. If I handed over the money he wanted, he would provide me with it.’
‘And you gave him the money?’
‘The man was asking for fifty guineas, Cosmo. Even if I had such an amount of ready cash, I would not be such a fool as to give it immediately to a rogue like Benskin.’
‘No, of course not.’ Cosmo had lit one of the cigars the divan provided for its customers. He leant back and blew a series of smoke rings into the air. The two young men watched them spiral upwards and then disintegrate one by one.
‘But I do need to find out whether or not he was telling the truth,’ Adam said. ‘In all likelihood, as you say, he is spinning me an improbable yarn in an attempt to extort money from me.’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘But there is the smallest chance that he is not.’
Jardine sighed and reached out to tap ash into the brass ashtray on the table. ‘This is what I would do if I was in your position, old man,’ he said. ‘Absent yourself from the hurly-burly of the city for a while. Follow Dolly’s trail northwards. Finding her seems to have become a matter of importance to you. I am not sure I understand why, but I do not think you will be able to concentrate on other aspects of your life until you have located the girl.’
‘You are right. I have begun to think it a matter of honour to do as I said I would do.’
‘But before that, I would seek your revenge on the chessboard.’ Jardine waved his hand towards the pieces between them. ‘And then I would join an old friend in a trip to the Grecian.’
‘I am not certain that I am dressed for the theatre.’
‘I am not talking of Her Majesty’s, you know,’ Jardine said. ‘This is the City Road, not the West End. There will be no requirement for evening dress. No ban on frock coat and coloured trousers.’
Adam took a cigar himself and allowed his mood to brighten. ‘You are right, Cosmo,’ he said, moving a pawn forward. ‘I will now trounce you on the black-and-white squares. Tonight I shall accompany you to the Grecian. I shall forget Benskin and his ridiculous tale. And then, tomorrow morning, I will arrange to travel to York and find this girl.’
PART TWO
YORK
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Adam emerged from York’s railway station into weak and watery spring sunshine. Quint followed him, carrying their luggage. To their left ran the city’s walls, a modern arch breaching the ancient fortifications to allow access for the railway engines. As they turned towards the city, the twin towers of the Minster’s western front met Adam’s eyes.
‘What a magnificent sight, eh, Quint?’ he said, ‘One that makes the petty discomforts of the journey pale into insignificance.’
His servant, who was still suffering the not so petty discomforts of hauling his master’s handmade leather suitcases out of the station entrance, merely grunted.
Little more than forty-eight hours had passed since Adam had told Cosmo Jardine of his decision to travel north. The following day a telegram had been despatched to a hotel in Coney Street, York, to book rooms for himself and Quint. The day after that, the two men had climbed aboard a Great Northern Railway train leaving King’s Cross station at 10 a.m. They had been lucky, and had managed to find a compartment to themselves. At Grantham, they had been joined by an elderly clergyman with a wispy grey moustache and a look of amiable vacuity. After raising his hat politely to them, he had taken out a book in which he had been lost for the rest of the journey. Adam had been amused to notice that the book was not the Bible nor a work of theology, but one of Routledge’s Railway Novels. By twisting his head slightly Adam had been able to see that it was Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii.
The train had made good time. The clergyman had been so absorbed by his tale of Roman death and destruction that he had not noticed their arrival in York. Adam had touched him gently on the shoulder to return him to the nineteenth century.
‘Ah, we are here so soon,’ the ol
d clergyman had said, struggling to his feet and reaching up to the luggage rack for his shabby leather valise. ‘The hectic rush of modern life.’
As he and Adam stepped onto the platform, he had nodded his head in farewell and shuffled off, his valise in one hand and his novel in the other.
‘Get our bags, Quint,’ Adam had ordered, watching the old man depart. With a muttered curse, Quint had hauled their cases from the luggage rack.
Now both man and master were outside the railway station, looking across the River Ouse to the heart of the ancient capital of the North.
‘How fine a day it is!’ Adam inhaled and exhaled with exaggerated delight. ‘Is the air not purer outside London? We shall walk to our hotel and relish every breath of it we take.’
‘What about these bleedin’ cases?’ Quint asked.
‘Tell one of the porters to arrange for their delivery to the hotel.’
Their luggage entrusted to a beefy porter who guaranteed its arrival at the hotel within the hour, Adam and Quint paid the halfpenny toll to cross the new bridge that spanned the Ouse and took them from the railway towards the Minster and the centre of the city.
Halfway across, Adam paused and leant against the bridge’s ironwork. He looked down at the waters of the river swirling beneath them. ‘I do hope that we can find this young woman for whom we seek.’
Quint joined him at the parapet, releasing a long stream of tobacco-stained spit which dropped into the Ouse. ‘Ain’t no reason to worrit,’ he said. ‘She’s jest jumped at the gelt that Bascombe woman give her and come up ’ere to spend it.’
‘I pray you are correct, but I have real fears for her safety. There was her eagerness to leave London, for one thing.’
Quint had himself only ever left the capital reluctantly. He thought back to his own departure from the city several years before, when he had joined Professor Fields’s first expedition to escape a particularly persistent creditor. ‘Mebbe someone’s got ’is claws into ’er for rhino,’ he said.
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