Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘So there was no suggestion that it might be felo de se? That Creech might deserve to have his body carried off to the crossroads? Is that what they still do to suicides? Off to the meeting of four roads and a stake through the heart to discourage the ghost from travelling?’

  There was an awkward pause. Jardine suddenly realised that he had spoken lightly on a subject in which his friend might struggle to find any humour.

  ‘I am truly sorry, Adam,’ he said. ‘I had forgotten for the moment… I have allowed my tongue to run away with me… Your father… ’

  ‘It is of no matter, Cosmo,’ Adam said, turning away and looking out of the studio window. He was aware that he was not speaking the truth. Such casual mention of self-murder could still stir unpleasant memories. ‘I cannot spend my entire life avoiding all talk of such things. It is years since my father’s demise.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I apologise.’

  ‘Apologies accepted, old fellow.’ Adam turned back to his friend. ‘In truth, I am not certain what happens to suicides in these enlightened times. But there is no possibility that the man killed himself. I saw the body. The wounds were such that they could not have been self-inflicted.’

  ‘What of this tippling private investigator you visited? Jenkins, was it?’

  ‘Jinkinson.’

  ‘Jinkinson, then. I stand corrected. Did he put in an appearance?’

  ‘No, he did not. I am by no means certain that the police are aware of his existence.’

  ‘Should you not alert them to his role in the drama?’

  ‘I am not at all sure what his role is, Cosmo.’ Adam lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. He blew out a series of smoke rings and watched them drift towards the ceiling. ‘I am inclined to believe that he knows nothing of the killing and that he could have made no useful contribution to proceedings at the inquest. However, the curious thing is that he seems to have disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘Quint and I followed him for several days after my first encounter with him. He was, in his own way, a man of regular habits. But we have not seen him in any of his usual haunts for nearly a week.’

  ‘There you have the proof, then.’ Jardine turned from King Pellinore and wiped his hand on his paint-smeared smock. ‘Jinkinson was known to Creech. He was employed by him to engage in nefarious activity. Creech is murdered. Jinkinson disappears. Ergo, Creech was killed by Jinkinson. Quod erat demonstrandum.’ The artist waved his brush in a triumphant conclusion to his reasoning and small flecks of paint flew into the air.

  Adam shook his head. ‘It is not as simple as that, Cosmo. Logic points in the direction of your argument, I allow. Perhaps I should just go to Scotland Yard and tell Pulverbatch what I have not so far told him. Yet there is something more to the story, I am sure of it.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I ain’t seen him, I tell yer.’ The boy’s voice quavered with indignation. ‘How many more times I got to say it? I ain’t seen the old fool in days.’

  ‘But you have been coming to the office each day and opening up?’

  ‘He give me the key last Michaelmas. I’ve been using it to let myself in. Old Jinks’d expect me to. Anyways, I got me own work to do, you know.’ Simpkins spoke with a sense of his own virtue in insisting on coming in to the office.

  Quint snorted contemptuously. Adam glanced sceptically at the copy of Varney the Vampire or The Beast of Blood which lay face upwards on the boy’s desk.

  ‘Can’t work all the time, can I?’ Simpkins said, noticing where Adam was looking. ‘A man’s got to have a bit of recreation, ain’t he?’

  A fly was buzzing around the room. The boy watched it move from desk to window frame and window frame back to desk. He rolled up his copy of Varney the Vampire and, as the fly settled on the desk for the second time, he swatted it. The rolled-up penny dreadful descended on the insect with a tremendous thwack. The buzzing was heard no more.

  ‘Got the little bugger,’ the boy said, with a leer of satisfaction. He inspected the remains of the fly, splattered across an illustration of a befanged Varney threatening a cowering female, before flicking them to the floor. ‘Don’t want you gents troubled by that bleeding buzzing.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you, Mr Simpkins. Where do you suppose Mr Jinkinson has been these few days past?’

  After the chance encounter with the private investigator in the cab in High Holborn, Adam had thought it expedient to continue his efforts to learn more of Jinkinson and what he knew about the three MPs whose names had appeared in Creech’s notebook. For this reason, either he or Quint had again been stationed at the entrance to Poulter’s Court for several hours of every day. His own curiosity and his friend Sunman’s suggestion that he should pursue his inquiries into Creech’s murder combined to make it seem time well spent. They had watched Simpkins and the other clerks who spent most of their daylight hours in the offices surrounding the court as they came and went. Of Jinkinson there had been no sign. As Adam had told Cosmo Jardine the previous afternoon, the fat enquiry agent had disappeared. Eventually, the young man had decided that the time had come to confront the boy who guarded the entrance to Jinkinson’s lair, and ask him what he knew of his master’s whereabouts.

  ‘How should I know?’ Simpkins said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘He don’t tell me everything about his life any more’n I tell him everything about mine. Maybe he’s gone off with that tart of his.’

  ‘That tart? What tart?’

  ‘The woman he’s so spooney about. Ada, her name is.’

  ‘And what can you tell me about Ada?’

  ‘She’s an obliging girl, Ada is.’ Simpkins winked horribly. ‘Ask her to sit down and she’ll lie down. If you gets my meaning.’

  ‘And where does Ada live?’

  The boy shrugged again. ‘She’s a tart. She don’t live anywhere.’

  ‘But where would Mr Jinkinson go if he was visiting her?’

  ‘I told you.’ Simpkins had swapped his tone of indignation for one of exaggerated patience. Adam, he implied, was being extremely slow on the uptake. ‘She’s a working girl. He’d go where she’d go. And she’d go anywhere, if you takes my meaning.’ Simpkins indulged himself in another ostentatious wink. In his own mind, he was now a man of the world exchanging pleasantries with another man of the world.

  ‘How can you be so sure the lady in question is a working girl?’

  ‘Well, old Jinks give her a sov at least twice to my knowledge.’ Simpkins tapped the side of his nose. ‘And I think I knows what he give her it for.’

  ‘And what would that be, Mr Simpkins?’

  The boy looked at Adam with withering pity. He shook his head wearily as if he could scarcely credit such naivety.

  ‘What d’you think, guv?’ he said. ‘He’s been paying her to get amongst her frills. And, if that don’t make her a tart, I’d like to know what does.’

  Adam realised he would get no further asking after Ada.

  ‘I assume, Mr Simpkins, that you would have no objection if my associate and I were to have a look around your employer’s office. It is important that we find him.’

  ‘I ain’t so sure about that.’ The boy sounded doubtful. ‘I don’t know as you can just march in and start a-rummaging around in old Jinks’s things.’

  Quint, who had been quiet up to this point, was beginning to lose his patience. He made as if to raise his right fist. Simpkins noticed the movement.

  ‘Although,’ he added with alacrity, ‘I suppose there ain’t any harm in it.’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ said Adam soothingly. ‘Indeed, there might be a half crown in it. For you, that is.’

  The boy’s face brightened. ‘Well, in that case, it’s a business transaction, ain’t it? And old Jinks, he’d want me to look after his business transactions, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Indubitably.’ Adam slipped the coin into the boy’s hand.

  ‘Come this way, gents.’ Simpkins opened the connecting door between
his own office and his master’s with a flourish. He ushered Adam and Quint inside with the dignified air of a butler inviting visitors into a stately home. ‘I shall leave you to your rummaging. If you wants me, I shall be next door. Attending to matters appertaining to the private enquiry business.’

  The boy left the room. Quint walked over to Jinkinson’s desk and ran his finger across its surface. He examined the dust on his fingertip.

  ‘He ain’t lying. Been nobody here for days.’ He wiped his finger on his jacket and looked around Jinkinson’s shabby and sparsely furnished office. The carousing boors and the haughty hidalgo stared down from the prints on the wall. ‘What exackly are we after, anyways? Can’t hide nothing here. Or nothing worth hiding.’

  ‘Some clue that might indicate Jinkinson’s whereabouts.’ Adam pulled at the handle of a drawer to the desk. To his slight surprise, it opened immediately. ‘He keeps his desk unlocked, I see. Which suggests that he keeps his valuables elsewhere.’

  ‘If he has any.’

  Adam began to empty the desk drawer of its contents. A small saucer with the remains of several penn’orth of pickled whelks on it. A length of string and a lump of very ancient-looking sealing wax. A piece of writing paper on which Jinkinson appeared to have been practising his own signature. A chipped enamel vesta box. Quint picked the latter off the desktop.

  ‘Like something I could buy in a cheap swag shop,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘You could find a similar one for sixpence at the Baker Street bazaar,’ Adam agreed. ‘And still have the change to take in the waxworks at Madame Tussauds while you were about it.’

  The young man pulled the drawer entirely out of the desk. He shook it and the last of its contents fluttered to the floor.

  ‘This is a curious thing for him to keep,’ he said, slotting the drawer back into its place and picking up something that had fallen in the dust. He held it up for Quint to see. It was a fragment of cloth clearly torn from the corner of a larger piece, perhaps a sheet. Written on the fabric in black and seemingly indelible ink were the words: ‘Stolen from Bellamy’s Lodging House, Golden Lane’.

  ‘Why would he have this?’

  ‘Reminder of a client’s address?’ suggested Quint.

  ‘It’s an odd reminder to have. Why not just write the address down? And, in any case, someone living in a lodging house would be unlikely to have the money or the inclination to employ an enquiry agent. And why leave the lodging house with a sheet or a blanket or whatever this comes from?’

  Quint was swift with an answer to the last question. ‘Bedding gets thieved from these paddingkens all the time. Fetches a bob or two down any market. That’s why the keepers of the kens mark it like that. Maybe Jinkinson has took to lifting the stuff. Maybe he’s that desperate for rhino.’

  ‘Why rip off just the corner?’ Adam knew the answer as soon as he had asked the question. ‘Ah, of course, it’s the only means of identifying the lodging house to which it belonged. But why keep it? Why not simply throw it away?’

  This time Quint had no ready answer.

  ‘Maybe the boy would know,’ Adam said.

  The boy was no longer in the outer room. In the ten minutes that Adam and Quint had spent in the inner office, Simpkins had clearly decided that his work was done and had left.

  ‘Where’s that young varmint gone?’

  ‘The half crown I gave him was doubtless crying out to be spent,’ Adam said. ‘Find the nearest alehouse and I wager you will find Master Simpkins.’

  ‘There’s the Seven Stars in Carey Street. That’s just around the corner.’

  ‘We shall try the Seven Stars first. I recall I passed it on the first day I was dogging Jinkinson’s footsteps.’

  * * * * *

  A brewery dray had stopped in the middle of the street outside the pub. Its driver and his assistant had climbed out of their vehicle and were pulling down the ropes they would need to ease the barrels of beer into the cellar. The publican emerged carrying two tankards of ale for the men. It was clear that this would be no speedy delivery.

  Adam and Quint walked past the dray and turned into the Seven Stars. Adam raised his hat to the landlord as they passed. The man nodded briefly. Inside the taproom, three young men with a fine sense of their own importance, articled clerks perhaps, stood by the bar with glasses of stout in their hands. They were shouting to one another about a river excursion they had made at the weekend.

  ‘There ain’t no fish dinner to match a Greenwich fish dinner,’ the noisiest of the young men was proclaiming truculently as if the others might be prepared to disagree with him. ‘And there ain’t no Greenwich fish dinner to match the one they gives you at the Ship.’

  Far from disagreeing, his companions hurried to concur with him. ‘You ain’t wrong there, Walter,’ one said. The other raised his glass and saluted his friend’s good taste ‘That’s the truth of it,’ Walter went on, still seeming to detect a hint of dissent somewhere in the room. ‘And anybody as argues differently ain’t worth a cobbler’s curse.’

  Next to Walter and his friends, propped nonchalantly against the wooden bar and intent on giving the impression that he was as much a man of the world as they were, was Simpkins. He was drinking from a tumbler of gin and surveying the room with a lordly air. A cheap stovepipe hat was jammed on his head at what he clearly considered to be a jaunty angle. He didn’t look delighted to see Adam and Quint again, but nor did he look worried by their appearance.

  ‘You two are persistent gents. I’ll say that for you.’

  ‘We found this.’ Adam showed the boy the scrap of cloth. ‘We were wondering if there is some connection between your employer and this lodging house in Golden Lane.’

  ‘Might be. Or might not be.’ Simpkins gulped at his gin and made a smacking noise of appreciation, like a wine connoisseur savouring a particularly fine vintage. Walter and his two companions had moved away from the bar and taken seats by the window where they continued to talk cheerfully of whitebait and champagne.

  ‘Does your employer have some secret that we should know?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Well, if it is a secret, I ain’t being paid to keep it one.’

  ‘So, enlighten us.’

  ‘I might like to be paid to tell it, though.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Adam acknowledged. ‘But, if you recall, a half crown has already passed from my possession into yours. A

  half crown is a substantial sum of money. It should buy a deal of information.’

  ‘That was for letting you into old Jinks’s office. I reckon this is a whole new transaction.’

  ‘Well, Mr Simpkins, I’m sorry to have to say that my friend and I’ – Adam gestured towards Quint who was glaring at the young clerk with a peculiar ferocity – ‘we reckon otherwise. We reckon it’s all part of the same transaction.’

  Simpkins glanced at Quint and decided against prolonging the discussion.

  ‘All right, guv’nor. Worth asking but no offence intended. A man’s got to make his way in the world, ain’t he? Ain’t nobody going to help him but himself, I reckon.’

  ‘I see you are a disciple of Mr Smiles, Mr Simpkins.’

  Simpkins looked puzzled.

  ‘A gentleman who is an advocate of self-help.’

  The clerk still looked puzzled. ‘A man’s got to help himself,’ he repeated.

  ‘Precisely. And the way you can help yourself in the present circumstances is to tell me all you know about Jinkinson and this Bellamy’s Lodging House.’

  ‘Don’t know much.’

  ‘Nonetheless, you can tell me what you do know. Has Jinkinson spent time there? Or does he own the place? Does it have any connection with the young lady, Ada, whom you mentioned earlier?’

  Simpkins held up his hands as if to ward off the questions. ‘I tell yer, I don’t know much. All I know is Jinks has a few hole-ups. Places where he goes when people wants to find him and he don’t want to be found.’

  ‘And this Bellamy
’s is one of them?’

  ‘I reckon so. Last year, round about July time, he went missing just like he done now. Some lawyer from the Temple was interested in a-talking to him. On account of Jinks’d took a guinea from him to track down a gent. And then gone and done bugger all but drink it.’

  ‘And your master chose to lie low for a while?’

  ‘ “Simpkins,” he says to me one morning, “it’s time for me to go to ground.” And that’s the last I sees of him for a week. “But,” he says before he goes, “a letter addressed to The Count at Bellamy’s Lodging House, Golden Lane would likely find me.” ’

  ‘The count? Who is the count?’

  ‘Search me. Never seen any kind of count round the office, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And did you need to make contact with your master during the week he was gone?’

  The clerk shook his head. ‘Nah. The lawyer gent comes round a few times, swearing like a bargee and threatening ’e’d ’ave the peelers on us. But I reckoned old Jinks wouldn’t want to know about that. Anyways, ’e come back before the week’s out.’

  ‘Did the lawyer ever have his money returned?’ Adam asked, curious to know what had happened.

  Simpkins gave a short laugh. ‘You’re joking, ain’t you? A guinea? Jinks’d have sawed his own leg off rather than give a guinea back. The lawyer gent still comes round once ev’ry month or so. A-shouting and a-yelling. But it’s more of a game now, if you see what I mean. ’E knows his guinea’s gone.’

  Simpkins downed his drink and held the glass up to the light coming in through the window, angling it this way and that as if searching for one small droplet of liquor that might still be lurking within it. Adam turned to the barman and ordered another tumbler of gin for the young clerk.

  ‘What about this young woman Ada you mentioned?’

  ‘Ada’s all right. For a tart. It’s her mother what needs the watching. She’d have the hair off a man’s head if she could get a penny a pound for it.’

  ‘Her mother?’

  ‘Fat old witch,’ said Simpkins unchivalrously. ‘Round the office all the time, poking and prying.’