Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  Mr Moorhouse shuffled forwards in his chair. He looked to the left and to the right like a man preparing to cross a busy road and then leaned towards Adam.

  ‘She’s an actress.’ He spoke as if this were the most surprising of all professions that Garland’s lady friend might pursue. Adam, who had already heard of Garland’s amatory arrangements from Jinkinson, was not surprised.

  ‘Not just any actress,’ Mr Moorhouse went on. ‘Lottie Lawrence.’

  Adam had heard the name. Had she not been one of the actresses in Fechter’s company when he had charge at the Lyceum a few years earlier? Mr Moorhouse, who seemed by this point breathless with excitement at the thought of Garland’s love life, immediately confirmed his memory.

  ‘Beautiful woman. Saw her myself at the Lyceum. In The Lady of Lyons.’ There was a pause as Mr Moorhouse drew energetically on his cigar. ‘She played the Lady,’ he added.

  Adam took out his cigarette case, extracted a cigarette and lit it. He was half intrigued and half disappointed by his elderly friend’s revelations about the identity of Garland’s lover. It was interesting to learn that she was well known in her own right. Perhaps her fame as an actress granted first Creech and then Jinkinson an extra advantage in their financial negotiations with Garland. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, one or both of them had approached Lottie Lawrence herself in an effort to extort additional money from her. And yet he had discovered little more than he already knew about the amorous MP. He had learned a name. That was all.

  ‘Is there anything more to tell, Mr Moorhouse?’

  The old man appeared to have entered a pleasant reverie in which, perhaps, the images of the actresses he had seen on stage in a lifetime of theatre-going were drifting through his mind. He started when Adam spoke.

  ‘What was that, old chap?’

  ‘Did your friend Beattie let slip any further revelations about Garland?’

  ‘None that I can recall.’ Mr Moorhouse had decided that he had smoked his cigar to its end and was looking around for the ashtray in which to deposit the butt. Adam passed him the brass one from the small table by his side.

  ‘But you said “women”,’ he remarked. ‘You said that the gossip surrounding Garland concerned “women”. In the plural rather than the singular.’

  ‘Did I, old chap? Just my way of putting it, I suppose.’ Mr Moor-house was having difficulty dousing his smouldering cigar in the ashtray and his attention was concentrated on performing this task. ‘Although, now I come to think of it, Beattie did say that Garland was a devil with his maidservants as well.’

  The old clubman had finally succeeded in extinguishing the cigar and he turned to Adam with a look of triumph on his face and ash on his fingertips.

  ‘A devil?’

  ‘Always after them. Forcing his attentions on them.’ Mr Moor-house’s delight in his victory over the cigar stub disappeared and he shook his head sadly. ‘I do think behaviour of that kind is exceedingly caddish. Poor girls! They’re not in a position to refuse his advances, are they? And the consequences can be so cruel. One fall from virtue and a woman’s reputation is gone for ever.’

  Mr Moorhouse had thoroughly depressed himself with thoughts of the moral dangers that threatened female servants. He sighed, as if at the wickedness of the world, and began to search his pockets for another cigar.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Le dimanche anglais, eh, Quint! A phenomenon to make the heart sink and the soul quiver. What do you say to a Sunday excursion?’

  Quint poured his breakfast tea into his saucer and raised it to his lips. He sucked in the liquid with a noisy slurp. His expression suggested that anything he might say to a Sunday excursion would be short and unprintable. The two men were sitting in the kitchen at Doughty Street. Adam had broken his own fast and was now watching Quint eat and drink. Undeterred by his manservant’s lack of enthusiasm, he continued to speak.

  ‘We know that our missing dandy has gone to ground somewhere. We know that part of an item abstracted from Bellamy’s Lodging House, Golden Lane was in said dandy’s office. Ergo, we reasoned, Mr Jinkinson had been in Bellamy’s Lodging House in the past. The boy Simpkins confirmed our reasoning. So now the time has come to see if he has visited there again. The hour has arrived for us to travel to Golden Lane.’

  ‘I ain’t doing anything on a Sunday,’ said Quint flatly. ‘Sunday’s a day for loafing and liquoring, not gallivanting around Golden Lane after some dozy old josser who’s prob’ly fluttering after some judy in the streets.’

  ‘Oh, Quint, Quint. You disappoint me. Have you lost the spirit of adventure which carried us both through the mountains of Mace-don? What has become of all the daredevilry you showed in the land of Alexander and Aristotle?’

  ‘I ain’t lost a thing.’

  ‘I think perhaps you have been corrupted by comfort, Quint. Two years in Mrs Gaffery’s luxurious lodgings, and you have become a positive sybarite. The stout-hearted hero of yesteryear has departed for ever.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing departed, I tells you.’

  ‘To Golden Lane, then.’

  ‘Hold hard.’ Quint’s resolve to stay in Doughty Street was crumbling but he still had reservations. ‘Ten minutes around Golden Lane looking like that and you’d not have the shirt left on your back.’

  Adam glanced down at the immaculately tailored suit he was wearing. ‘Ah, I need to be dressed in something more discreet?’

  ‘You need to be dressed in something that don’t scream, “I’m a swell. Come and wallop me.” ’

  ‘Golden Lane is dangerous territory, then?’

  ‘A sight more dangerous than the arse-end of Greece.’

  ‘There were brigands in those hills we travelled, though.’

  ‘Maybe. But you can whistle up worse brigands round Golden Lane any time you like. Wear those flash togs and you won’t even need to whistle.’

  ‘I yield to your greater knowledge of these matters, Quint. What do you suggest?’

  ‘I got me some old fustian. Jacket and trousers. Had ’em for years. Thought they was about ready for Rag Fair but maybe they got one last wear in ’em here.’

  Quint departed for his room and returned holding what looked more like a pair of dead animals than a suit of clothing. Very reluctantly, Adam took them and retired to change. When he entered the sitting room once more, he was wearing both the suit and a look of profound distaste.

  ‘This is revolting, Quint. Little wonder that you were about to dispose of it.’ He shook his shoulders in an attempt to settle the jacket more comfortably on them. Adam’s manservant was several inches shorter than his master and there was little chance that any suit he had once owned would prove a perfect fit. ‘It feels as if it contains a small menagerie of things that once crept and crawled on the face of the earth. And now they are creeping and crawling through the folds of the jacket.’

  ‘It may not be what the quality wears,’ said Quint, sarcastically, ‘but it’s the kind of thing the nobs round Golden Lane do. So, if you wants to look like you belong there, you’d better keep it on.’

  Quint now made a great show of consulting the watch in his weskit pocket. He was mightily proud of this fob watch which, in one of his more expansively autobiographical moments, he had told Adam was a family heirloom inherited from his grandfather. In fact, he had chanced upon it many years earlier, stripping it from a corpse he had found washed up from the river at Rotherhithe.

  ‘The time,’ he announced, ‘is now ten minutes afore ten. We can be in Golden Lane by eleven.’

  * * * * *

  As the two men walked down Golden Lane towards Old Street, Adam could see that a second-hand-shoe seller had taken possession of part of the pavement opposite. His stock of boots and shoes stood in a line along the kerb. It looked as if a small queue of the ill-shod had once stood there and that they had all been miraculously spirited away, leaving only their footwear behind. The seller had no customers. Indeed
, the entire neighbourhood was surprisingly unpopulated. A costermonger’s barrow laden with potatoes and turnips trundled past, the costermonger perched precariously upon it, encouraging his mangy donkey forwards, but there was little other traffic in the street.

  The lodging house was a brick building halfway along Golden Lane. A wall ran along the side of it, topped with mortar and broken glass to deter any passing thief with a mind to climb it, although it was difficult to imagine that the building held anything much worth stealing. It looked exceptionally uninviting. A man would have to be desperate, Adam thought, to choose it for his accommodation. Several windows on the ground floor had broken panes. A dingy yellow blind was half pulled down one of them. On it the words ‘Good Single Beds at Threepence Halfpenny’ had been clumsily scrawled.

  The door to the lodging house was open to the street. Adam and Quint entered warily and walked along a long narrow passage to what was, they quickly realised, the communal kitchen. At one end of the room was a large fireplace and around it were gathered a dozen men. Several held long skewers and were toasting bread over the flames. The men were all dressed in an assortment of filthy and mismatched old clothes. None of them looked as if he’d had recent acquaintance with soap and water. The smell in the kitchen was like a physical presence squatting in the corner of the room. Adam was about to take out a handkerchief and hold it to his nose but thought better of the notion.

  The men took little or no notice of the arrival of Quint and Adam. Two glanced briefly over their shoulders. The concentration of the others was focused fiercely on their toasting bread. A staircase ran off the room to the left and, before Adam or Quint could hail any of those gathered round the fire, they heard the sounds of heavy footsteps coming down it. Judging by the reactions of those by the fireplace, the man who now entered the room was the power in the land. Unlike the arrival of Adam and Quint, this man’s entry meant something to the lodgers. It meant that it was time to leave off what they were doing and fawn upon him.

  ‘Morning, Mr Pradd.’

  ‘You’re looking well, Mr Pradd.’

  ‘Pleasure to see you, Mr Pradd.’

  ‘Would you be wanting a tot of something warming, Mr Pradd?’

  A chorus of voices surrounded the man as he came into the kitchen.

  Pradd ignored them all and concentrated his attention on the new arrivals. The lodging-house keeper wore a dirty shirt that might once have been white, and a pair of greasy black trousers held up by a leather belt. His face was slate grey, as if he had not ventured into the sunlight for several years and, during that time, all his colour had slowly seeped away. One of his eyes was quite clearly a product not of nature but of the glassmaker’s art. This false eye moved as freely as the real one but, disconcertingly, the two eyes did not move in harmony. As the real, right eye focused on Adam and Quint, the false, left one was rolling upwards and examining the dusty rafters above their heads.

  ‘Ain’t no beds to be had here. We’re full.’

  ‘We require no accommodation, my good man,’ Adam said. ‘What we need is information. We are looking for someone who may have stayed with you in the last few weeks.’

  ‘Oh, hin-for-mat-ion, eh? It’s hin-for-mat-ion you wants, is it?’ Pradd’s mockery of the young man’s all too obviously educated accent was met with howls of laughter from his sycophantic audience. It seemed as if they had seldom, if ever, heard a more crushingly comic response to a presumptuous remark.

  ‘Well, I ain’t so sure there’s much hinformation to be had ’ere. And I ain’t your good man neither. I ain’t nobody’s good man.’

  ‘Of that I have no doubt. But if you want to keep your police licence, you would do well to be civil, at least to me.’

  ‘I can be as civil as the next man, if I chooses.’ Pradd’s false eye rolled alarmingly in its socket. ‘But maybe I don’t choose. I ain’t going to be vexed by every young pup what walks in off the street.’

  Murmurs of approval came from his fireside supporters. The conversation was not going as Adam had planned. He glanced at Quint but his servant refused to catch his eye. There was to be no help from that direction. Adam was on his own. He was suddenly aware of how little experience he had of speaking to those outside his own class. He wondered what his next words should be.

  ‘Perhaps you should reassess your decision,’ he said after an awkward pause. ‘Or I might choose to speak with my good friend Inspector Pulverbatch.’

  Adam decided to introduce the police officer’s name more out of desperation than hope. He was only too aware that, while struggling to sound authoritative, he was actually sounding priggish and petulant. However, the name of Pulverbatch seemed to have a magical effect. Pradd stared hard at Adam for a moment.

  ‘You’d best come in ’ere,’ he said and then turned abruptly on his heel. Adam and Quint followed. The lodging-house keeper led them to a small office to the right of the kitchen. The floor was covered in what had once been a plain green oilcloth. It was now black with dirt and torn in a dozen places. A cage containing two bedraggled linnets stood on a rickety table in one corner of the room. One of the birds made a half-hearted attempt at song as they entered. The only other furniture in the room was a small desk. Pradd went up to it and, opening a drawer, took out a black leather-bound book. He turned its pages and then thrust it ungraciously towards Adam.

  ‘See for yourself ’oo’s been staying ’ere.’

  Adam took it and began to leaf through it. He laughed mirthlessly at what he saw there.

  ‘You are obliged by the terms of the Lodging House Act to record the names of your guests, are you not?’ he said.

  ‘The book must have names,’ the lodging-house keeper acknowledged with a surly edge to his voice.

  ‘But these names here’ – Adam pointed to one of the pages – ‘ “Admiral Tom”, “Hindoo Bill”, “Cock Robin”, “Cock’s Mate”. You would surely not claim that these are the real names of your lodgers?’

  Pradd shrugged. ‘Ain’t no business of mine what folks calls themselves. The book needs names. The book gets names. Right names. Wrong names. Who cares?’

  Adam continued to look down the lists of names in the book. Many were, like the ones he had quoted, obvious pseudonyms. Others looked genuine, but there was no Jinkinson amongst them. Adam was about to give up and return the book to the lodging-house keeper, when one surprising name caught his eye.

  ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think we have him, Quint.’

  He pointed to the page where the name ‘Count D’Orsay’ was written in a flamboyant, copperplate hand.

  ‘Ain’t much of a billet for a count,’ Quint said.

  ‘No – and the real Count D’Orsay died in France twenty years ago. But I’m willing to wager a sizeable sum that the only person likely to appropriate his name for use in a place like this is the man we pursue. Remember what Simpkins said? A letter addressed to “The Count” would find him.’

  Adam looked again at the entry in the lodging-house register. ‘According to this, the count graced this establishment with his presence on two nights in the last week. He was here but two days since. What can you tell us of the gentleman in question, Mr Pradd?’

  The lodging-house keeper, scenting the possibility of profit, had changed his demeanour. Sly ingratiation had taken the place of surly defensiveness.

  ‘This ’ere count,’ he said.

  ‘What do you know of him?’

  ‘Nothing much. But he might have left some things. Here in the house.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Some val’able things,’ Mr Pradd suggested hopefully.

  ‘We can be the judges of that. Let us see what he left.’

  The man seemed to be weighing up the potential advantage to be had either in showing what Jinkinson had left or keeping them to himself. In the end, he decided to let Adam and Quint see what he had. He moved across the office and pulled a small, brassbound mahogany box from beneath a rickety chest of drawers which was
standing against the far wall. He put it on the table in the centre of the room. Then, suddenly dropping his left hand into the innermost recesses of his greasy trousers, he began a strange, writhing dance. His visitors watched him in astonishment.

  ‘The bleedin’ key’s down ’ere somewhere,’ he said.

  Adam and Quint continued to watch as Pradd struggled to locate the missing key. Eventually, with a yelp of triumph, he pulled it from the innards of his trousers like a conjuror revealing a hidden rabbit. He thrust the key into the lock and the mahogany box opened. He took out a small cloth bag, unfastened the drawstrings that closed it and emptied the contents on the table.

  ‘I’ve been keepin’ these things what the count left. What he left under his bed,’ he said. ‘Keepin’ ’em in trust, you might say.’

  ‘Very praiseworthy, Mr Pradd.’

  ‘Worth a bob or two, that is. Keepin’ ’em in trust.’

  Adam was turning over the handful of items the bag had contained. There was nothing in it that warranted the lodging-house keeper’s suggestion of value. There were two buttons which looked to have detached themselves from one of Jinkinson’s flamboyantly coloured waistcoats, and a clay pipe. There were half a dozen small scraps of paper torn from a notepad, on which Jinkinson had scribbled some lines of verse. Looking closely at them, Adam realised they were taken from what could only be love poems. The enquiry agent had been lying on his bed in this seedy lodging house and writing love poetry. When he had been dissatisfied with the promptings of his muse, he had torn the paper into bits and thrown them under the bed.

  ‘So you sure them things ain’t val’able?’ Pradd asked, reluctant to let go of his dreams of financial reward.