Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  The inspector bellowed again. ‘Get yourself downstairs.’

  * * * * *

  Up on the first floor of Herne Hill Villa, Quint had heard Adam return. He had called down to him and had been given instructions to continue looking around the rooms upstairs. Twenty minutes later, he had heard the arrival of Inspector Pulverbatch and his constables. Long familiarity with officers of the law meant that he had had little difficulty interpreting the sound of the voices drifting up the staircase; they had the characteristic tone of policemen wanting to know what was going on. Quint had spent the hour since Adam had left him to summon the police roaming the upstairs rooms. He had found nothing that he would not have expected to find in the house of a man like Creech. On several occasions he had come across items of value – a gold watch, a silver cigarette case engraved with the initials ‘SC’ – which he had seriously considered pocketing. Quint had no objections in principle to petty larceny but he had finally decided that any monetary benefit from what he might filch would be more than outweighed by the aggravation that would follow if the filching was discovered. He had left the items where they were.

  Now, listening to the voices from below, Quint had already decided that his only option was to join Adam and the policemen on the ground floor. The roars from Pulverbatch merely confirmed him in his decision. He took one last look around what was clearly Creech’s bedroom before leaving it. He caught his own reflection in a large cheval glass which stood in the corner. Then, as his eyes continued to scan the room, they fell on a small table to the left of the bed. On it was an octavo-sized book bound in morocco. Seized by a sudden impulse, Quint crossed swiftly to the table and picked the book up. Opening it, he riffled briskly through its pages.

  Quint had but the vaguest memories of his schooldays. This was unsurprising since they dated only to his seventh year and had lasted less than six months. He could just about recall a dark room in Holborn where two dozen grubby boys sat unwillingly at the feet of an elderly dame deputed by the foundling hospital to teach them how to read and write. The elderly dame in question was usually drunk, and drink made her either so tired that she fell asleep in front of them or so furious that she belaboured any boy who ventured within striking distance with her walking stick. Somehow, Quint had emerged from his schooling not only with a grudging respect for elderly dames in their cups, but with a basic knowledge of his letters. He could read. And what little he was able to read in this small leather-bound book suggested to him that further reading of it would be interesting. Here were Samuel Creech’s own words. Here was his journal. Quint wasted no time in stuffing the volume into the depths of his coat pocket before making his way down the stairs and joining Adam to face the guardians of the law.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I do believe that that was not the first time you have encountered the inspector, Quint.’ Back in Doughty Street, Adam was stretched out in a chair by the fireside. His feet rested comfortably on the fender and his hands were clasped behind his head. Quint was pouring whisky from a crystal decanter. The two men had been back in the rooms but a few minutes. The inspector had not kept them long once Quint had joined Adam downstairs. Policeman and manservant had eyed one another suspiciously as Quint had sidled into Creech’s library but the interview between them had been brief. Quint had done little more than confirm what his master had said. When Pulverbatch had asked what the devil he meant by roaming around a house that was the scene of bloody murder, he had muttered about looking for signs of the murderer. The inspector had grunted as if he had heard likelier tales in his time but had said no more. Once names and address had been noted, he and Adam had been dismissed from the policeman’s presence, and apparently from his mind, almost immediately. Their return from Herne Hill had been free of much conversation, both men sobered into silence by thoughts of Creech and mortality. Now, sitting once again by his own hearth, Adam had recovered his spirits.

  ‘Oh, I knows Pulverbatch all right.’ Quint handed his master the drink.

  ‘I thought as much. You circled one another in that room like two prizefighters about to climb into the ring. And what do you know of him?’

  Quint paused to consider the question.

  ‘Well, he’s what you might call a chickaleary cove is Jem Pulverbatch.’ Seeing Adam’s raised eyebrow, his manservant decided to expand his description. ‘In other words, putting it pretty plainly, you’d have to get up very early in the morning to catch him on the hop.’

  ‘But you have done so, Quint. I can deduce from the wicked glint in your eye that you have done so. You have the demeanour of a man who has bested a chickaleary cove.’

  With something approaching a flourish, Quint brought the little leather-bound book from his pocket. ‘I don’t reckon Pulverbatch’ll miss this. I found it up in Creech’s bedroom.’

  Adam took the journal from Quint’s hand and began to flick through its pages.

  ‘I should condemn your shameless thievery unequivocally, Quint.’

  ‘You prob’ly should.’

  ‘I should chastise you for stealing what might be evidence from under the eye of the law.’

  ‘But you ain’t going to.’

  ‘No, you are right. I’m not. Despite the terrible death of the man Creech, I remain curious about the secrets he claimed to know. Perhaps it is because of his death that I remain so curious.’ Adam had stopped at one page and was looking at it closely. ‘This journal may hold the key to Creech’s interest in those barbarous villages we visited in sixty-seven. So I propose to read it from cover to cover.’

  An hour passed. Nothing was heard in the sitting room at Doughty Street save the sound of the small clock on the mantelpiece striking the quarter hours. Adam was engrossed in reading Creech’s writings. Quint, who had an almost oriental capacity for withdrawing from the world when action in it was not required, simply stood by the door to the room and waited for Adam to finish. He appeared, when his master glanced up at one point, to have entered a state of near-trance. Eventually, the reading was over. Adam threw the book onto the side table beside his chair.

  ‘Well, Quint, this is all very intriguing.’

  ‘Thought it might be.’ Quint emerged immediately from his state of abstraction. ‘That’s why I swiped the thing.’

  ‘Creech, poor chap, wrote a damnably bad hand but I have managed to decipher nearly all the entries in his journal. In truth, it’s not much of a journal. No revelations of his private life. Much of the latter part of it is a record of his dealings with a man named Jinkinson. Creech was paying Jinkinson. Paying him quite large sums of money. Two guineas a week at least for the best part of four months. Five guineas in one week. Creech records the transactions very carefully. Although it’s not quite clear what they meant.’

  ‘Maybe this Jinkinson had some hold on Creech. Maybe he was milking him.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He was paying him for something but I don’t think it was that. Look at this entry. “24th July – Jinkinson reports as usual. All three subjects in the week. No change. Two guineas to Jinkinson.” That doesn’t sound like blackmail.’

  ‘Paying him for something he was bringin’ ’im?’

  ‘Possibly, but there’s no apparent record of anything. There are other names in the journal, however. Names I recognise. Lewis Garland. James Abercrombie. Sir Willoughby Oughtred.’

  ‘Toffs,’ said Quint shortly.

  ‘I suppose you could call them that. What else? All Members of Parliament. All members of the Marco Polo, for that matter. But why are they in Creech’s book? Look at this entry, for example. What do you make of that, Quint?’

  Adam handed the journal to his servant, his finger indicating a particular point on the page. Quint took the book and painstakingly read the entry aloud: ‘ “Lewis Garland to SJW, no purpose in visit save the usual, Abercrombie in Paris for the week, no contact, Oughtred followed to Westminster and to HH, no other excursions. Two guineas to Jinkinson.” If you ask me, this Jinkinson’s some kind of sn
ooper.’

  ‘Snooper?’

  ‘Creech is giving ’im the rhino to watch what the toffs are doing.’

  ‘That certainly does seem to be the most obvious explanation.’

  ‘No knowing why he’s got such a powerful interest in what they’re doing, though.’

  ‘No knowing why, as you say. And there is a further puzzle.’ Adam took the notebook back from Quint and flicked through it until he reached the last page. He showed it to his servant. The page was empty except for a single row of scribbled symbols in the middle of it. Quint peered at them.

  ‘Greek, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘I’d reckernise them twisted letters anywhere.’

  ‘Greek it is, although Creech writes as poor a hand in that language as he does in his own.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘ “Euphorion”. As far as I can tell.’

  ‘And what the bleeding ’ell does Euphorion mean?’

  ‘A good question. It is a Greek name. Do I have a vague memory from my Cambridge days of a Greek poet named Euphorion? But why should Creech devote a page of his journal to the name of a Greek poet?’

  ‘More bleeding questions. We could do with some answers.’

  ‘We could, and I can think of one obvious way to go in search of them, Quint. Here is an address written in Creech’s infernal scrawl. It makes its first appearance in these pages at the same time that Jinkinson does and I take it to be his. 12 Poulter’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I have never before heard of Poulter’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but I think I should pay it a visit as soon as possible.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That night Adam slept poorly. He lay awake for hours in his room in Doughty Street, listening to the never-ending sounds of the city around him. Even in the small hours of the morning, London was never quiet. Traffic could still be heard on the Gray’s Inn Road. The shouts of men and the braying of beasts still echoed down the darkened streets. Adam watched the shadows chasing one another across the ceiling and fell eventually into a fitful sleep. In his dreams, the figure of Creech rode a costermonger’s ass whilst driving a herd of scrawny goats through the single muddy street of a Macedonian village. Fields, waving his mortarboard, was shouting the name ‘Euphorion’ over and over again. Slowly the face of Fields melted and was replaced by that of Adam’s father, who was chastising his son for his failure to win the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry during his time at Cambridge.

  In reality, as Adam was aware even within his dream, Charles Carver had shown little, if any, interest in poetry. He had shown little interest in any of the subjects that attracted his son. Bluff, occasionally brutal in manner, the railway entrepreneur had been proud of the education he could buy for his only child but indifferent, even antagonistic, towards the enthusiasms that education inspired in Adam. Money was the object of the elder Carver’s fascination, and for years he had been enormously successful in accumulating it. Throughout the boom days of the 1840s and 1850s, when Adam was growing up, Charles Carver’s fortunes had expanded as rapidly as the rail network which created them. Only in the following decade did he begin to skate on thin financial ice. By the time his son arrived at Cambridge in the autumn of 1865, his father, unbeknownst to Adam, was plunged into reckless investments in a series of ventures, all of which ended in disaster. While Carver Junior read Horace and punted on the River Cam, Carver Senior struggled to keep his head above the rising waters of impending bankruptcy.

  Faced by the final destruction of his fortune and by exposure of the fraudulent means he had been using to prop it up, Charles Carver hanged himself in a room in the newly opened Langham Hotel. The scandal was largely hushed up, but the money to maintain his son at university was gone. In a matter of weeks, Adam had been forced to leave behind his comfortable life of wining, dining and classical scholarship at Cambridge to face the unexpected prospect of earning his own living. A few weeks later, he was with Professor Fields on a boat approaching the harbour at Salonika, their adventure in Macedonia about to begin.

  * * * * *

  Poulter’s Court, when Adam found it the following day, turned out to be one of the less prepossessing addresses in the vicinity of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. One entered it through a stone archway, which led into a small, paved yard. In that courtyard, the air was filled with the unmistakeable scent of neglected drains. Adam took another look at the paper on which he had written Jinkinson’s address. The building for which he was searching was the third in a row on the left-hand side of the court. A tarnished brass plaque on its door announced that ‘Jinkinson & Hargreaves, Private Enquiry Office’ occupied the first floor. Adam pushed at the door and, slightly to his surprise, found that it was ajar. He entered and mounted the staircase. At the top of the first, uncarpeted flight of stairs was another door and another sign – this one wooden with painted lettering – which read ‘Jinkinson & Hargreaves’. One of the nails holding the sign to the door had come out and it hung at an angle. Opening the door and going in, Adam nearly dislodged the wooden sign completely.

  A boy of about fourteen was sitting at a desk, black with ink stains, in a small and otherwise unfurnished room. He was reading. As Adam approached him, the boy, apparently startled by the arrival of a possible client in Jinkinson’s outer office, attempted to thrust what he was reading beneath the desk. He was too slow and the desk too flimsy to succeed in hiding the penny dreadful he was enjoying. Adam looked briefly at the cover. The title, The Dead Monk’s Curse, was emblazoned across it in large black lettering, half obscuring a scene in which several figures in monastic dress were menacing a young woman whose upper garments had gone missing.

  ‘I likes a good story,’ the boy said defiantly, as if Adam was about to impugn his literary taste.

  ‘It certainly looks exciting.’

  ‘I likes it when the women gets the chop.’ He leered at Carver, revealing an array of blackening and broken teeth. Adam decided to ignore this remark.

  ‘May I speak to Mr Jinkinson?’

  The boy said nothing.

  ‘Or to Mr Hargreaves, perhaps?’

  ‘Speak to Mr Hargreaves? Oh, that’s a good ’un, that is.’ The boy was clearly tickled by this idea. He laughed throatily and slapped his hand on the inky desktop. ‘You can speak with ’im all right, but ’e might not do much speaking back.’

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘Cos ’e’s dead.’

  ‘Ah, that would make conversation difficult.’

  ‘Bin dead more years ’n I’ve bin alive. Old Jinks only keeps the name on the plate cos he thinks two names is more respectable than one.’

  ‘And what about “Old Jinks”? Is he in?’

  ‘Oh, ’e’s in all right.’ The boy gestured towards another door, which presumably led to Jinkinson’s inner sanctum. ‘But you won’t get much more sense out of ’im than out of ’Argreaves.’

  ‘And why do you say that?’

  ‘ ’E’s been out on the spree, ain’t ’e? ’E’s so corned ’e can hardly stand.’

  ‘None the less, I would like to speak to him.’

  ‘’E’s through there, then,’ said the boy, thrusting his thumb once more towards the inner room and returning to The Dead Monk’s Curse.

  Adam pushed open the door the boy had indicated. He entered another, larger office. Across the room and behind a desk as ramshackle as the one under which the boy had thrust his penny dreadful, an elderly and paunchy man was asleep in a chair. He was snoring loudly. As a very young man, Adam decided, Jinkinson must have been mightily impressed by the swaggering worldliness of society swells. Perhaps he had admired their images in the windows of the print shops in St Paul’s Churchyard. Now, ageing and decrepit as he was, he still dressed like an 1830s dandy down on his luck. Although they had certainly seen better days, his extravagantly coloured silk cravat and ornamented waistcoat would mark him out in the more sombrely dressed crowds of 1870. It was not, Adam reflected, the kind of outfit ideally suited to a private enquiry agent.
Enquiry agents, he assumed, needed to blend into the background. Perhaps Jinkinson’s flamboyant taste in clothing went some way towards explaining why, to judge by the shabby state of his office, he was not a very successful enquiry agent. And yet this was the man to whom Creech had paid all those guineas. Where, Adam wondered, had all that money gone? Not, it seemed, on the decoration of his professional premises.

  As Jinkinson continued to snore, Adam looked about the office. It had, like its owner, seen better days. There was little in the way of furniture beyond a desk and a chair. To the left, a black mark on the ceiling indicated where a gas lamp had once been. The decoration consisted of two engravings on the walls. To Adam’s left was a gloomy Dutch pub scene. Almost certainly, he decided, it was entitled Boors Carousing. The boors, three of them, all had pipes clamped in their mouths and were caught in the act of smacking their thighs as an indication of drink-fuelled abandon. On the opposite wall, a Spanish hidalgo stared haughtily at the viewer from the frame of his portrait. The overall effect of the two images was profoundly depressing. Looking back at the stout toper behind the desk, Adam noticed him open first one bleary eye and then the other, and struggle into something approaching consciousness. Jinkinson eventually looked at his visitor as if he had been half expecting him to come calling.

  ‘You have the air of a varsity man, sir,’ he said, loudly but irrelevantly.

  ‘I was up at Cambridge for a few terms,’ Adam acknowledged.

  ‘Ah, Cambridge, Cambridge!’ Jinkinson now had a dreamy look on his face, as if remembering happy days spent punting along the Cam to Grantchester. ‘Always fancied myself as a Trinity man. But it was not to be. The streets of London have been my alma mater. Or should I say, my not so alma mater? Not such a nourishing mother at all, sir. London can be a cruel parent, indeed.’

  Having said this, the ageing dandy seemed to have shot his conversational bolt. His eyes slowly closed and he began to nod off once more. Adam was about to cough to claim his attention but Jinkinson suddenly jerked back to life and stared sternly at him.