Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘So you do know him.’

  Dwight realised that he had now said too much to continue quibbling over the extent of his familiarity with the missing man. He bowed his head to indicate that, although it pained him to acknowledge it, he did indeed know Jinkinson.

  ‘Do you have any notion, Reverend Dwight, where Mr Jinkinson might be? His friends have not seen him for several days.’

  Dwight made no reply. Instead, he waved his arm towards a long, wooden instrument with a glass front, which was hanging on the right-hand wall of his chapel.

  ‘Over there is what I call my spiritual barometer, Mr Carver. Come, let me show you how it works.’

  Adam could see some kind of dial covered with writing on its front. He followed his host as the clergyman pushed past one of the rows of chairs and made his way towards the wall.

  ‘When the pointer is directed to the right,’ the reverend gentleman began to explain, ‘it is moving towards glory of the spirit and contempt for carnal lusts. When it is in the middle, it indicates a soul in a state of spiritual indifference. When it travels towards the left…’ Here Dwight heaved another of his unctuous sighs. ‘It moves through all the stages of damnation.’

  As the two men approached the spiritual barometer more closely, Adam could see some of the gradations on the left. Minus thirty – ‘Visits to the theatre and the pleasure gardens’; minus forty – ‘Parties of pleasure and drunkenness on the Lord’s Day’. Minus seventy, which seemed to be the lowest point to which a lost soul could sink, was simply marked ‘Perdition’.

  Dwight paused for a moment. Adam wondered if perhaps he was about to tap the spiritual barometer as he might a more conventional instrument before taking its reading. But the minister merely peered briefly at the dial before carrying on.

  ‘By my reckoning, Jinkinson has reached minus fifty-five, Mr Carver, and is heading ever downwards. Ever downwards. He is an ancient reprobate. When a soul is so lost, it matters not where its physical vessel might be.’

  ‘So I would be right in thinking that you have no notion of his present whereabouts?’

  ‘For all I know, he may have departed this transitory scene. If he left with his sins still fresh upon him, I tremble for his immortal soul.’

  Dwight did not look as if he was trembling. If anything, Adam thought, he seemed rather stimulated by the thought of Jinkinson’s possible damnation.

  ‘But when did you last see him, Reverend?’

  ‘In his unrepentant flesh? The day before yesterday. He came with a young woman.’

  ‘With a young woman?’

  ‘The old recreant must have added Lust to Gluttony and Sloth in his list of deadly sins. Like the women we saw at the door just now, she was a harlot.’

  ‘Why did he come here, Reverend? Why should he wish to parade his sins before you?’

  ‘He came first to the Tabernacle some months ago. In a state of inebriation.’ Dwight twisted his face into an expression of distaste. ‘He wanted to join our congregation. I told him to return when the light of reason had once more been lit within the darkness of his soul.’

  ‘And did he come back when he was sober?’

  ‘He did. And in a moment of weakness brought on by an overabundance of God’s celestial charity, I allowed him to attend our services.’

  ‘And that was a mistake?’

  Dwight made no reply. He returned instead to his spiritual barometer and stared fixedly at it, as if in hope of discovering an answer to the question. Adam began to wonder whether or not the reverend had quite forgotten him.

  ‘The Lord demands that we should strive to ignore as much as possible the concerns of our all too perishable flesh,’ Dwight said eventually. ‘Jinkinson did no such striving. The man was an indurate and incorrigible sinner.’

  Were we not, Adam asked himself, all sinners? And was the object of religion not to redeem us from our sins and their consequences? Did missions such as this one not exist to save sinners from themselves and accept them into fellowship? Yet the Reverend Dwight appeared to have other ideas about the purpose of his Tabernacle.

  ‘Would I be correct in assuming,’ Adam asked, ‘that it was Mr Jinkinson’s drinking to which you most objected, Reverend?’

  From the evidence of his own words and the writing on his spiritual barometer, there seemed little doubt that the minister had a particular animus against alcohol.

  ‘Strong liquor makes woeful wrecks of men, sir. Ay, and of women, too.’ Fine words, it seemed, rarely deserted Dwight. Perhaps, Adam speculated, they were present even when careful thought was not immediately forthcoming. The minister was now well launched on the waves of his own oratory.

  ‘Oh! Thou invisible spirit of drink,’ he roared at Adam, gazing at the young man as though he might be the power he was addressing, ‘if thou hast no other name to go by, let us call thee Devil.’

  Adam prepared himself to endure more blasts of the reverend’s rhetoric but Dwight turned abruptly on his heel and marched towards a door to the left of what he had called his communion table.

  ‘I shall be with you again shortly,’ he bellowed over his shoulder as he pulled open the door and disappeared through it.

  Waiting for Dwight to return, Adam examined the prints that were hanging on the wall opposite the spiritual barometer. Most were illustrative of the dangers of strong drink. A woman sank to the floor holding her brow as a bearded gentleman with a glint in his eye drank furiously from a bottle. Small children clutched the legs of their father in fruitless efforts to keep him from entering a public house. The same father expired in a garret room stripped bare of furniture as wife and children wept in the corner. Death and degradation, it seemed, were the inevitable fates awaiting those who took too great an interest in the delights to be found in a bottle of gin.

  The minister had now re-emerged from whatever back room he had visited. He hastened towards Adam, clutching a bundle of papers in his hands, and thrust them towards him.

  ‘You will find these of interest, Mr Carver. Would that that scapegrace Jinkinson had taken the trouble to read them.’

  Without thinking, Adam took what Dwight was offering him. It was a pile of perhaps half a dozen small pamphlets.

  ‘Several small disquisitions I have written on the workings of grace,’ the reverend gentleman said, a modest pride in authorship evident in his voice. ‘Privately printed, of course. But I believe that reading them may help a man take his first uncertain footsteps on the path towards salvation.’

  ‘You are very kind, reverend.’ Adam could see no option but to take the booklets. He squinted at one of the titles. ‘What We Must Do To Be Saved,’ it read. ‘I shall lose no time in perusing them.’ He tucked the minister’s literature awkwardly under one arm. ‘But can you tell me no more about the man Jinkinson?’

  ‘I have told you all I know, sir. The sinner came here. I showed him the light of the Lord. He turned his back upon that light and retreated once more into the darkness. There is no more to be said.’

  Adam fumbled in his jacket pocket. ‘Perhaps I can leave you something in return.’ He held out his card to Dwight, one of several he had hidden in the darker recesses of Quint’s fustian suit before leaving Doughty Street. Dwight took it and turned it over in his hand, as if he had never before seen a calling card and was unsure what it might be.

  ‘One further question, reverend, and then I shall leave you in peace. Does the word “Euphorion” mean anything to you?’

  ‘Euphorion?’ Dwight was still twisting the card in his hand. ‘That is Greek, surely?’

  ‘A Greek name, I think. Perhaps a poet.’

  ‘I fear my knowledge of Greek is limited, Mr Carver. So, too, is my knowledge of poetry. I have no time to think of dactyls and spondees when unhappy souls come daily to the door of my Tabernacle in search of spiritual nourishment.’

  ‘Of course not. I quite understand that you are a busy man, Reverend. I must apologise for taking up so much of your Sunday afternoon.’
r />   Adam, reaching up to doff his hat to Dwight in farewell, remembered at the last moment that he was bare-headed and transformed his movement into an awkward salute. The minister bowed his head slightly in response. Adam turned and made his way out of the Tabernacle of the All-Conquering Saviour and into Whitecross Street. It had not, he thought, been a particularly successful visit. He was little more knowledgeable about Jinkinson’s whereabouts than he had been earlier in the day. It was time to make his way back to Doughty Street.

  * * * * *

  ‘What’s the ’oly roller got to say for himself, then?’ Quint asked, as he ushered his master into the sitting room.

  ‘Nothing very illuminating. He knows Jinkinson and disapproves of him heartily. But he doesn’t know where he is. He believes him to be an awful example of the destructive powers of the demon drink. The Reverend Dwight has a strong objection to the demon drink.’

  Quint grunted and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Another of them interfering bastards as wants to snatch the working man’s beer out of his hands, then.’ He spoke as if the interfering bastards might be hiding behind the furniture in the rooms, waiting to leap out and seize his tankard. ‘I hate ’em.’

  ‘Probably. But he is firmly of the belief that he is doing work the Lord has called him to do.’

  ‘I particularly ’ate the buggers as reckons they’ve got Gawd Almighty on their side.’

  ‘Certainly Dwight seems to assume a high degree of intimacy with the Lord of Hosts. Like the Prince of Preachers, Mr Spurgeon, he has the habit of addressing Him as if He were sitting at the back of the meeting room and cheering his every word.’

  Quint decided there was no more to be said of the Reverend Dwight. Instead, he handed Adam a letter and a telegram. ‘This ’ere missive come with the one o’clock post,’ he said as the two men walked into the sitting room.

  ‘What about the telegram?’

  ‘The boy brought it about ’alf an hour since. ’E was wanting to wait for a reply but I told ’im you wasn’t around.’

  Adam picked up a brass letter opener in the shape of a miniature sabre from his desk and slit open the letter. He began to read it.

  ‘This is from the stunner who visited us the other week, Quint. And left us so abruptly.’ Adam read on in silence for but a moment. ‘This is extraordinary! She wants to meet me again: “… affairs to discuss of consequence for both of us.” And – even more extraordinary – she is suggesting that we meet in Cremorne Gardens.’ Adam waved the letter in front of Quint’s nose.

  ‘It’s signed “Emily Maitland”. Which I thought at the time was a curious name for a lady who was so obviously from the Continent.’

  Quint only grunted in reply, as if both her suggestion of a meeting place and the name she was choosing to adopt merely confirmed suspicions he had held of the woman from the moment he had opened the door to her.

  ‘Cremorne Gardens, though!’ Adam looked at the letter again, half expecting to see that he had misread the name of the place where Miss Maitland was proposing to meet him. ‘Does she not know the place? A single lady arranging to meet a single gentleman by the dancing platform at Cremorne Gardens. Does she have no care for her reputation?’

  ‘Maybe she ain’t got none.’

  Adam ignored Quint’s comment.

  ‘Perhaps, as a visitor from abroad, she has no notion of the impropriety of meeting a gentleman alone in such a place.’

  ‘Who can tell wiv a foreigner?’ Quint said. It was very clear that the unfathomable ways of those unfortunate enough not to be English held little interest for the manservant.

  ‘I shall accept her invitation, unconventional though it is. The letter has come from Brown’s Hotel, which is presumably where she is staying. I shall write back to her there and agree to meet her as she requests.’

  ‘What about the telegram?’

  ‘Ah, I had almost forgot it.’

  Adam unfolded the telegram the boy had delivered. Its wording was as laconic as such messages tended to be. He showed it to Quint: ‘New developments Creech killing. Request immediate attendance Room 311 Scotland Yard. Pulverbatch.’

  ‘The detectives at the Yard keepeth not the Sabbath day, I see,’ Adam said.

  ‘You going to join ’em?’ Quint asked.

  ‘Curiosity dictates that I must. But, equally, I must first rid myself of these pestilential clothes of yours and take a bath.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A sergeant ushered Adam into Room 311. Inspector Pulverbatch was sitting at a large, baize-covered desk in the middle of what proved to be a comfortably furnished office. On the wall behind him was a portrait of the queen, looking much younger than the middle-aged widow of Windsor she had become. Little more than a girl, she nonetheless stared down at the inspector with an air of faint disapproval. Carver approached the desk.

  ‘How are you today, Inspector?’

  A touch liverish, Mr Carver, if truth be told, but I have news as makes a dicky liver seem a trifle. You got my telegram, I’m reckoning.’

  ‘I did, indeed. And hastened to follow your instructions and present myself here at the Yard.’

  ‘Not every day as I send out a telegram to all and sundry in a case. But, with a gent like yourself, I thought I’d make an exception.’ Pulverbatch, beaming with self-satisfaction, now looked anything but liverish. He seemed in the peak of health.

  A gent like myself?’

  A gent who has been making his own enquiries. On the sly, you might say, if you was so inclined.’ The inspector continued to smile broadly. ‘Not that I am so inclined. But I’d hate to think of you toiling away at your investigations for no reason, Mr Carver.’

  ‘I am not sure that I take your meaning, inspector.’

  Adam was wary in his reply. How much, he wondered, had the police officer learned of his recent activities? According to Sunman, a gentle word had been dropped into Pulverbatch’s ear that he should share information with him, but there was no reason to believe that the inspector would relish doing so. However, Pulverbatch seemed to have decided to adopt an attitude of benevolent bonhomie. He wagged his forefinger at Adam in mock admonition.

  ‘I ain’t such an ass as anyone can ride me, Mr Carver. I know you’ve got friends in higher places than what I get to visit. But I also know what you’ve been a-doing of late. I know you’ve been speaking with that fat fool Jinkinson. Much good it’ll do you.’ The inspector settled his hands comfortably on his embonpoint. ‘Because I know one more thing. I know the man as killed your friend Creech. So you can stop ferreting around like Paddington Pollaky on the case.’

  ‘I’m not certain that I could say Creech was ever a friend,’ Adam said. ‘And I know of Mr Pollaky and his private enquiry office only through the newspapers. But I am delighted to hear that you have learnt the identity of the murderer.’

  ‘We’ve not just learnt about the villain,’ Pulverbatch declared. ‘We’ve got him. Got him sitting in a room not five yards from where the two of us is having this little chat. Clanking his cuffs and brooding on his misdeeds.’

  ‘I congratulate you, Inspector.’

  Pulverbatch inclined his head, as if to demonstrate a modest conviction that congratulations were entirely in order.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting it to a gent like yourself, Mr Carver, who won’t hold it against a man, but there’ve been times in the last few days when I’ve been well and truly fogged.’

  ‘We have all been fogged, Inspector.’

  ‘That’s as may be, Mr Carver, but I’m the man as is paid not to be fogged.’ The inspector leaned across the desk and pushed a pile of papers to one side. He took a small pistol from his pocket and placed it on the green baize. ‘And I’m happy to report that I ain’t fogged now.’

  ‘That is the murder weapon, is it?’ Adam looked at the small gun with distaste.

  ‘That is, indeed, the pistol as blew out a portion of the poor gentleman’s brains. We found it in a hedge further down Herne Hill.’ Pulverb
atch picked up the pistol. He pointed it briefly in the direction of the ceiling and then replaced it on the desk. ‘Don’t look much more than a toy, do it?’

  ‘And what about the man who used it? You say you have him in your custody?’

  By way of reply, the inspector stood up and beckoned Adam to follow him. He made his exit from Room 311 and walked along the corridor outside. Adam was just behind him as he opened a door into another, smaller room where a uniformed constable stood guard over a shabbily dressed man, sitting at a desk. At a gesture from the inspector, the constable left the room. The man behind the desk stared vacantly into the middle distance. There were two other wooden chairs in the room and Pulverbatch, waving Adam into one, settled himself into the other. He pushed it back on to its rear legs and pointed across the desk.

  ‘This is the cove as killed Mr Creech. This is Thomas Benjamin Stirk, of Monmouth Street, Seven Dials. Take a bow for the gentleman, Stirk.’

  Adam looked doubtfully at the man who sat in cuffs opposite him. Stirk was round and red of face. He was wearing a dirty fustian jacket and a pair of dilapidated flannel trousers which might once have been blue. At the inspector’s words, he ceased gazing into the air and concentrated on his two visitors. He nodded cheerfully at Adam, who turned to look at Pulverbatch.

  ‘He’s a lot like a winter’s day, ain’t he?’ the inspector remarked. ‘Short and dirty.’

  ‘He seems... ’ Adam was unsure what exactly to say. He was still trying to work out how much Pulverbatch knew about Jinkinson. Did he know about the blackmail? Was he aware of the notebook with the names of Garland and Oughtred and Abercrombie in it? Of Euphorion? He realised that the inspector was waiting politely for him to finish his sentence. ‘He seems rather a mild sort of fellow for a murderer, Inspector.’

  ‘Looks can be terrible deceiving, Mr Carver. He’s a villain, sir, a light-fingered rogue. Ain’t nothing and nobody safe when Stirk’s around. If his mother was a cripple, he’d steal her crutches.’

  ‘Thieving is a long way from murder, though, Inspector.’

  ‘But he’s a pugnacious varmint is Stirk, sir. A very pugnacious varmint. You’d be surprised to hear what Stirk is a-capable of. He’d kick a man’s lungs out, soon as look at him.’