Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘Well, not everyone is as plagued by his imagination as you are, Quint. John is a phlegmatic character – a man unlikely to be troubled by the spirits of the dead.’

  Quint grunted again and tipped half the contents of his glass down his throat.

  ‘This ’ere John tell you anything?’ he asked, after allowing his drink to settle.

  ‘Not as much as I had hoped,’ Adam admitted. ‘Creech used an agency in Cheapside to hire his servants. None of them knew anything of him other than that he was a gentleman arrived recently in London from abroad. John thought he had been, and I quote his words exactly, “living with the heathen, sir”. But John’s ideas about geography were a bit hazy. He appeared to believe that Greece was in Africa.’

  ‘Where were all the servants when Creech got topped?’

  ‘He had given them the day off. John and the others thought that this was strange but none of them was going to turn his back on an extra day of freedom.’

  ‘We was coming to see ’im. Maybe ’e didn’t want his drudges to know about us.’ Quint had picked up his glass and was staring reflectively at the liquid inside. ‘This John say anything about visitors?’

  ‘He had none.’ Adam hauled himself to his feet and began to pace about the room. His manservant watched him, occasionally sipping at what remained of his beer. ‘The consensus below stairs seemed to be that this was odd.’

  ‘Sounds odd to me.’

  ‘The desire for solitude is not always to be condemned as eccentric. There might have been perfectly innocent reasons why Mr Creech wanted to see no one.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Quint sniffed, ‘but you don’t believe that any more ’n I do.’

  ‘No, you are correct. I don’t.’ Adam had stopped by the window. He twitched the curtain aside and looked down to the pavements below. Doughty Street, gated at both its ends, was quiet. Only a solitary man, dressed in a long black coat and carrying a malacca cane, was in view. Adam watched as the man made his way down the street and disappeared from sight. Then he turned back into the room. ‘And our friend John did have one tale to tell of a visitor.’

  Quint, who had finished his beer and had been engaged in pushing his empty glass aimlessly back and forth on the table, looked up.

  ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘Difficult to tell. It was several weeks before the murder. Creech had given all the servants time off. Apparently, he did this fairly frequently. John would have been going to spend time with his sister and his young niece in Stepney. He had walked as far as the railway station when he remembered that he had a present for the girl which he had left in his room. He came back to the villa and let himself in at the servants’ entrance.’

  ‘And there was some’un else in the house.’

  ‘You run ahead of me, Quint, but you are right. John heard voices coming from the library as he made his way past its door. And then the door opened and his master stormed out. He was furious already, and he was even more furious when he saw John. He ordered him to leave immediately. He was not to go up to the attics to retrieve what he had returned for. So the young lady in Stepney had to wait for her gift.’

  ‘Did John see the cove Creech was with?’

  ‘Sadly, he did not, but he heard his voice.’

  Quint cocked his head inquisitively.

  ‘He was a gentleman,’ Adam said. ‘The voice was that of a gentleman. That was all John could say.’

  ‘That ain’t a fat lot of ’elp.’

  ‘Of no use to us at all, really. “Gentleman” is such an elastic term. But John did hear something of the discussion that was taking place just prior to his master emerging hotfoot from the library. I suspect that, although he would die rather than admit it, John had been loitering outside the door, listening to the conversation for some time.’

  ‘Nosy little bleeder.’

  ‘Absolutely. He was indulging in one of the worst crimes a servant can commit. But his sin provides us with a little more knowledge of Creech’s mysterious visitor.’

  ‘Did he ’ear his name?’

  ‘Nothing quite so useful as that, I’m afraid. He heard voices raised in anger. He heard the word “gold” which, unsurprisingly, piqued his curiosity. He heard the unknown visitor shouting about travelling to Greece. Indeed, that was when I learned that John labours under the misapprehension that Greece is in Africa. He then heard Creech shouting back about going without him.’

  ‘Without ’oo?’

  ‘The enigmatic visitor, presumably.’

  Quint sat back and twisted his face into an expression suggestive of deep thought and the careful consideration of different possibilities.

  ‘I ain’t sure we’re any further on than we was before you spoke to this John cove,’ he said after a moment. ‘We still ain’t got no name for the bloke Creech was raising his organ-pipe with.’

  ‘No, we have not,’ Adam agreed reluctantly. ‘But we do have more knowledge than we had. We know that Creech spoke to someone else of travelling to Greece. Several weeks before he met me at the Speke dinner.’

  The young man crossed the room and threw himself once more into the armchair by the fire.

  ‘There is some connection between the argument that John witnessed and Creech’s conversation with me at the Marco Polo. There must be. And the solution to the riddle lies with this name, Euphorion. I am sure of it.’

  * * * * *

  Adam stood outside the newly finished Italianate building which housed the Foreign Office and other government departments, and watched as his friend, the Hon. Richard Sunman, emerged from its interior. It was Sunman he had been visiting on the occasion when, if Cosmo was to be believed, his presence had been noted by that infernal bore Chevenix. It was Sunman who had first recruited him into the Foreign Office’s ranks of unsalaried and unofficial travelling observers when he had been about to set out on his visit to northern Greece three years earlier. An older contemporary at Shrewsbury, the son of Baron Sunman of Petersfield had also been in his final year at Cambridge when Adam had arrived there. He had, to Adam’s surprise, sought him out at his college and insisted that they should dine together. Adam, who had always been rather in awe of the languid young aristocrat, had agreed. He had assumed that Sunman had looked him up because they had both been favoured pupils of Fields.

  In the confusion following his father’s death, when Adam was obliged to go down from Cambridge, Sunman, newly ensconsed in the Foreign Office, invited him twice to meet him in his London club. On the second occasion, he had suggested that Adam might like to pass on any observations of Turkey in Europe he might make during his recently announced expedition with Professor Fields. After they had arrived in Salonika, Adam had dutifully despatched reports back to London. He had been uncertain what might or might not be of value to the Foreign Office so he had ended by sending enomously detailed accounts of very nearly everything he had seen and heard. On his return from Macedonia, he was at first doubtful that Sunman could have found these at all helpful but it soon became clear that his friend had been impressed by Adam’s thoroughness. Several times in the last eighteen months he had, in the politest possible way, issued instructions that Adam should meet him in Whitehall. There he had, again with the utmost courtesy, questioned the one-time traveller closely on news from European Turkey. Now, for the first time, it was Adam who had sent word to Sunman and requested a meeting.

  ‘Shall we take the air?’ the tall and elegantly dressed young man asked as he approached, waving his arm vaguely in the direction of St James’s Park.

  ‘By all means,’ Adam replied, falling in step with his companion. They crossed Horse Guards Parade and entered the park. As they strolled along the paths through the green trees and over the bridge across the lake, Sunman seemed disinclined to address the subject on which Adam had asked to see him. Instead he spoke lengthily and eloquently about Disraeli’s novel Lothair, newly published and all the literary rage. Adam, who disliked the politician’s fiction and had not read the book, grew imp
atient.

  ‘Are you able to assist me with the business of this man, Creech?’ he said eventually, breaking into his friend’s monologue about Lothair and the women who competed for his attention. He was aware that he was being unconscionably rude but he could restrain himself no longer. Sunman glanced at him briefly but gave no other indication that he had noticed the abruptness with which Adam had spoken.

  ‘A gentle word has been dropped into the ear of your acquaintance at Scotland Yard,’ he said, as the two men turned into Birdcage Walk. ‘Cumberbatch? Is that the fellow’s name?’

  ‘Pulverbatch.’

  ‘Well, whatever he calls himself, he will not trouble you any further with impertinent questions. It has been strongly suggested to him that he would do better to share what information he has with you rather than to treat you as a suspect in the case.’

  ‘I am grateful, Sunman.’

  Adam was eager now to atone for his earlier impoliteness. He strove to locate a subject for discussion which his friend would find congenial. He found it in the Mordaunt divorce case, Sunman proving a surprising and well-informed connoisseur of society gossip. They walked on into Great George Street in animated conversation. As Westminster Bridge and Parliament came into view, they prepared to say their farewells.

  ‘Oh, by the by,’ Sunman said, a shade too casually, ‘it seems that the fellow Creech used to be one of us.’

  ‘One of us?’

  ‘In the service. Years ago. He was at the embassy in Greece back in the forties.’

  ‘But what the man was doing in Greece in the forties can scarcely have any bearing on his murder in Herne Hill in the year of our Lord 1870.’

  ‘Don’t know about that, old man. One or two rumours flying about.’

  ‘Rumours?’

  ‘Almost certainly nothing in them.’ Sunman, so indiscreet a few moments earlier on the subject of the Prince of Wales’s supposed amours, seemed unwilling to enlighten Adam as to the nature of the rumours. ‘This fellow Creech left the service long ago. Before the war in the Crimea. Bit of a scandal, as far as I can gather. Something about being in possession of funds that he oughtn’t to have been in possession of. You know the kind of thing I mean.’

  The man from the Foreign Office looked at Adam, who indicated that he did, indeed, know the kind of thing that he meant.

  ‘And yet I cannot believe that the events of a quarter of a century ago have any relevance today,’ insisted Carver.

  Sunman came to a halt and stood as though admiring the view of the bridge along the street.

  ‘You may well be right. But the feeling is that there is no harm in his death being looked into.’ The young aristocrat paused in his speech and looked around him, like a man in fear of being overheard. ‘By someone other than Pulverbatch. In an unofficial kind of way.’

  ‘So any further curiosity about Creech on my part would not be frowned upon by the powers that be?’

  ‘Not at all, old chap. More likely to be smiled upon, I would say. The police are all very well, in their own way. But a fellow like yourself…’

  ‘… might find something the police couldn’t.’

  ‘Exactly, old chap.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Stop here, cabbie.’ Adam rapped on the roof of the hansom with his cane and the driver drew up at the kerbstones. They had just turned into High Holborn. Adam, who had hailed the cab outside the Marco Polo, now decided to leave it and walk the remainder of the journey to Poulter’s Court. He was about to climb down when he became aware of sounds of disturbance further along the street. Shouts and cries and the noise of dispute could be heard amidst the usual, unending hubbub of the traffic. Up ahead, an omnibus had also come to a halt at the side of the road and the driver was engaged in a vigorous discussion with a passing pedestrian.

  The debate involved much arm-waving by both men. Was the driver touting for business? Adam wondered. It was a common enough practice amongst the busmen who were rarely willing just to wait passively for passengers to present themselves. Yet this seemed a more personal argument. Customers already aboard the omnibus were beginning to get restless. Voices demanding that the bus get underway again could be heard. Up on the roof, half a dozen young men sitting back to back on the knifeboard bench were all shouting down to the driver.

  The pedestrian, Adam realised as he peered from his cab, was Jinkinson. Still shouting and gesticulating at the omnibus, the enquiry agent now turned away from the altercation and began to walk back down the street. He saw the cab by the kerbstones and waved at it. His walk turned into something between a trot and a waddle as he approached. So eager was he to get into the cab that he stumbled as he hauled himself in. With a yelp of anguish, he fell into its interior, nearly landing in Adam’s lap. He cried out in surprise.

  ‘I beg your pardon most profoundly, sir. I had no notion that the cab was taken. I was so anxious to remove myself from a vulgar scene.’

  ‘There is no need to apologise, Mr Jinkinson. I am happy to share a cab with an old acquaintance.’

  ‘Do I know you, sir?’ Jinkinson, settling himself on the well-cushioned cab seat, peered short-sightedly at the man he had joined.

  ‘My name is Carver. I called upon you in Poulter’s Court a few days since.’

  There was a momentary silence and then Jinkinson spoke again, warily. ‘Mr Carver, of course. I recognise you now. I must apologise again. I cannot think how I did not see you.’ He took out a large polka-dotted handkerchief and mopped his brow with it. He was sweating profusely. ‘My excuse must be my distress at the behaviour of those scoundrels in the omnibus.’

  ‘The driver seemed angry with you, Mr Jinkinson.’

  ‘His anger is as nothing compared to my own.’ The enquiry agent’s outrage overcame his wariness. ‘The villain attempted to run his vehicle over me. Had I not moved quickly, I would have been beneath the wheels.’ Jinkinson returned his handkerchief to his pocket. A trickle of sweat continued to run down his left cheek. ‘When I attempted to remonstrate, I was met with nothing but vulgar abuse.’

  ‘The average jarvey is certainly one of the most dangerous men in London. And one of the swiftest to indulge in invective.’

  ‘They drive their chariots with all the fury of Jehu,’ Jinkinson agreed, warming to his theme. ‘The unhappy pedestrian is less than the dust beneath their wheels.’ The enquiry agent caught Adam’s eye and then swiftly looked away.

  ‘However, I must not detain you with my complaints about these rogues of the highways. I shall leave you with apologies for disturbing you and seek out another cab. It has been a pleasure to renew our acquaintance, however briefly.’ He began to shift his bulk across the seat and prepare to disembark.

  ‘But our meeting is most fortuitous, Mr Jinkinson.’ Adam placed a restraining hand on the investigator’s arm. ‘I was on my way to see you. I have one or two new questions to put to you. Ones which did not occur to me when I saw you in your offices last week.’

  ‘I will answer them if I can, sir.’ Jinkinson stopped his shuffling across the seat. He looked uncomfortable. Although a cool breeze was blowing through the hansom, he was still perspiring freely. ‘However, I doubt if I can help. As I said when we met before, I know little of the unfortunate Mr Creech beyond what I told you.’

  ‘My new questions do not necessarily concern Mr Creech. They involve a gentleman named Oughtred and a gentleman named Garland.’

  Once again Jinkinson’s inability to mask his initial response to Adam’s words let him down. He struggled to replace immediate dismay with a semblance of bewilderment.

  ‘I do not think I know the gentlemen in question.’

  ‘Ah, but I think you do, Mr Jinkinson. I think that you have met with them both in the last week. I also think that it is time that cards were placed more openly on the table. Otherwise a police inspector at Scotland Yard by the name of Pulverbatch might well come to hear of you and your recent activities.’

  There was a long pause during which Jinkinso
n twice appeared to be about to speak before thinking better of it. He drew several deep breaths and noisily exhaled them.

  ‘Let us not be too hasty, Mr Carver,’ he said at last. ‘I must confess that I have not been entirely frank with you.’

  ‘I had suspected as much.’

  ‘I was not employed by Creech to locate his relative’s watch.’

  ‘It seemed to me unlikely that you had been.’

  ‘My business with him was not as trifling as I may have given the impression it was.’

  ‘I did not believe it could have been.’

  Jinkinson began to pat his pockets, as if looking for something. Adam waited for him to speak again. After a few moments, the enquiry agent appeared to lose interest in his search. His hands dropped to his sides and he stared glumly out of the cab window at the passing traffic.

  ‘You may not credit it, Mr Carver, but I have been a prodigious toper in the past.’ Jinkinson now swerved in a new conversational direction. ‘Rivers and lakes of liquor have flowed down my unregenerate gullet.’

  ‘Many a man enjoys a drink, Mr Jinkinson.’ Adam was surprised by the new turn the enquiry agent’s confession had taken. He did not know quite what to say but this did not seem to matter greatly since Jinkinson ignored his remark anyway.

  ‘I would be embarrassed to admit to you, sir, how many of the nights of my youth I have wasted at idle bacchanals. And the drink that was at those gatherings…’ There was a look of the deepest nostalgia in Jinkinson’s watery eye. ‘You might have swum in it. If you’d a mind to do so.’

  ‘We have all of us overindulged in our time, I am sure.’

  ‘But those days are now gone.’ The fading dandy appeared to have forgotten that the days of which he spoke included one from the previous week. ‘I am now a man of sobriety and self-possession.’

  ‘I congratulate you on your new status, sir.’

  ‘Like prodigious topers, however, men of sobriety and self-possession need to live.’