Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On 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.

  The room was long and, because the rays of the sun fell only on the first few feet of its length, it was dark. Creech seemed to have used the place as a library, and two massive tables with heavy, claw-foot legs sat in its centre. Bookshelves stretched from window to far wall along both sides. The sombre leather bindings of the volumes which sat on them added to the sense of gloom and claustrophobia. The smell of the books pervaded the room. A book was open, face up on the furthest end of the second table. A chair had been pulled up to the table and someone was sitting in it. But this person was not bowed over the book as if reading it. Instead, his head was thrown back at an awkward angle. As Adam and Quint approached him, he made no movement.

  Samuel Creech was dead. Of that there could be no doubt. Two bullets, probably from a pocket pistol, Adam judged, had entered his forehead. One had exited through the back of his skull and looked to have lodged itself in a walnut secretaire and bookcase behind the chair in which he was sitting. The other was presumably still inside the skull. Creech was slumped leftwards in the chair, with blood and brain matter covering the back of it. The metallic smell of blood mingled with the sweet aroma of some pomade that he must have been using on what remained of his hair. It seemed unlikely that he would be answering any of Adam’s questions now.

  ‘There is little we can do for Creech, poor devil.’ Adam looked down at the slouched and bloody figure of the man he had met at the Speke dinner. He reached out and briefly touched its upper arm. ‘We need to contact the police. I shall walk down to the road and look for assistance.’

  ‘You leaving me here with ’im?’ Quint gestured at the corpse. He sounded unhappy at the idea.

  ‘The man’s dead, Quint. He can do you no harm. And whoever killed him is long gone.’

  ‘’Ow can you be so sure of that?’

  ‘Feel the arm. Creech has clearly been dead for hours. Rigor mortis has already begun to set in. Who would stay for hours having killed him?’ Confident in his conclusion, Adam turned the pages of the book on the table in front of the dead man. It was Henry Tozer’s Researches in the Highlands of Turkey. Adam had read it himself earlier in the year. Tozer, he recalled, had described his own travels in the same Macedonian hills that had interested Creech so much. Creech had been pursuing his peculiar researches to the very end. On the table beside the book was a pair of binoculars, which Adam picked up. He turned them over in his hands, looking for the maker’s name.

  ‘Negretti and Zambra,’ he said after a moment. ‘They have an establishment in Cornhill. Creech wanted the best for himself. They have a great reputation, I believe. I have long been intending to make a journey to Cornhill myself to inspect their cameras.’

  Quint, standing beside the bookshelves, continued to look unhappy at the prospect of being left alone with a dead man. Adam remained unmoved. His servant must stay in the house.

  ‘There is no help for it, Quint. You must hold the fort while I look for reinforcements. Perhaps you should take the time to look around. Who knows what you might find? Creech is going nowhere and he is in no position to object to the invasion of his privacy.’

  The manservant looked as if he was still disposed to dispute his instructions but eventually he moved towards the door which led out of the library. He cast a single reproachful look over his shoulder as he went, but Adam did not see it. He was striding back towards the window they had broken, and the distant sunshine.

  * * * * *

  ‘Every Englishman’s home is his castle, eh? Isn’t that what they say, sir?’ The voice was as cheery as if its owner and Adam were conducting a friendly conversation over a glass of port. ‘Well, this here dead gentleman’s had his castle well and truly stormed, ain’t he? By you, sir, if no one else.’

  ‘Look here, Inspector. You’re surely not suggesting I broke in and murdered Creech, are you? Why would I loiter around like a damn fool and answer your questions if I were a murderer? I’d be back in town and strolling down Piccadilly by now rather than standing here exchanging pleasantries with you.’

  The man to whom Adam spoke was, like him, tall and well built. He had the kind of rosy red face that suggested long exposure to the elements and a greying moustache that bloomed and burgeoned luxuriantly around the lower part of his face. He was dressed in chequered trousers and a black jacket that seemed just one size too small for him. In other circumstances, he might have been mistaken for a country farmer on a visit to town, but there was sharpness in his eye that spoke of wide knowledge of the ways of the city. When he had arrived at Herne Hill Villa, accompanied by two constables, he had strolled around the downstairs rooms with the air of a man visiting an auction room before a sale, examining Creech’s possessions with a critical eye as if trying to decide whether or not to place a bid on them. On reaching the body in the library chair, he had raised his hat as a token of respect and then peered closely at the wounds to the head. He had walked around the corpse, looking at it from all angles before bending to examine the bullet lodged in the secretaire. Only then had he bothered to introduce himself to the watching Adam. His name, he said, was Pulverbatch and he was an inspector in the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police. He wanted a little chat with the gentleman that had found the body. The little chat had gone on for some time, interrupted by occasional conferences between the inspector and his constables.

  Now, as Adam was making his protestations, Pulverbatch was waving his plump hands in the air as if attempting to swat them like troublesome flies.

  ‘Oh, no suggestion of murdering was meant to pass my lips, sir. None at all. But a body can’t help a-wondering what you was doing here. Inside a house you probably ought to have been outside of.’

  ‘I’ve told you once already, Inspector. I had an arrangement to see Mr Creech. I arrived at the appointed time but the place was deserted.’

  ‘It seems the gentleman had sent his servants away for the day. One of ’em come back only a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Does he know anything of what might have happened?’

  ‘Constable Smithers has
been a-talking to him. Says that the man looks about as comfy as a billy goat in stays but that ain’t to say he’s a-feeling guilty. That’s the effect us gentlemen in blue and white has.’

  Pulverbatch picked up Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, examined its spine, grunted and put the book back on the table.

  ‘I’ll be speaking to him myself in a little while. And he’ll look even less happy when that happens. But, at present, I’m a-listening to you, sir. If you would be so good as to go on.’

  ‘I looked through a window on the ground floor.’ Adam ran his fingers through his hair as he continued. ‘I could see that something was amiss. I could see someone sitting in a chair at the far end. He was not moving and his head was awry. I decided to break a window and climb in. It was Creech and he was dead.’

  ‘As a doornail,’ Pulverbatch said. ‘Sitting in his library with his legs under his own mahogany when someone bursts in and strews his brains all around the room. So what did you do next, sir? When you realised he was dead.’

  ‘I walked back to the road and stopped a gentleman in a fly who was passing. I asked him to send word immediately to the police that they were needed. Then I came back to the house and Quint and I waited here until you and your men arrived.’

  ‘Ah, Quint. That would be your man, sir, would it? And whereabouts might he be while we’re here chatting so amiably?’

  ‘Quint is upstairs, I believe.’

  ‘And what might he be a-doing upstairs?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Pulverbatch took a red cotton handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead with it. He returned it to the innermost recesses of his jacket and sighed. ‘Perhaps we should call him and ask him,’ he said.

  ‘By all means, Inspector.’

  Pulverbatch ambled out of the room and made his way to the foot of the main staircase. He lifted his head and bellowed. ‘You, sir, upstairs.’

  The sudden roar echoed around the house. Quint would have had to be as dead to the world as Creech not to hear him, but there was no sound from the first floor.