Carver's Quest Page 20

  ‘Leave us, Bargate,’ he said. As the doddering retainer made his slow way to the door, Adam and Sir Willoughby stared at one another in silence. The younger man felt uncomfortable. It was a relief to him when he heard the door to the drawing room close.

  ‘Creech is dead,’ the baronet said. ‘Slain in some outrage in the suburbs.’

  ‘Yes, that is so. He was murdered on the Wednesday of last week. It is evident that you knew the gentleman in question.’

  ‘Most certainly I knew Creech. I knew him for forty years and more. We were at school together.’

  ‘May I risk an impertinent question and ask how you learned of Creech’s murder?’

  ‘Impertinent or not, I cannot see its significance.’ The baronet thought for a moment. ‘Either I read about it in the Morning Post or a mutual acquaintance told me.’

  ‘Could that mutual acquaintance have been Lewis Garland or James Abercrombie?’

  ‘It might have been Garland, yes. Abercrombie is out of the country.’ The baronet was beginning to sound annoyed. He was not a man used to being questioned in so direct a manner. ‘It might have been someone else entirely.’

  ‘But Garland and Abercrombie both knew him?’

  ‘Certainly they knew him.’ Sir Willoughby spoke now as if Adam was insisting on displaying almost inconceivable imbecility. ‘We were all four at Eton at the same time. Garland arrived the year before me and Abercrombie the year after, but we were all there together.’

  ‘I have arranged to see Mr Garland at the House later in the week.’

  Sir Willoughby grunted as if to suggest that Adam’s social calendar was of little interest to him.

  ‘Sound enough fellow, Garland,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Although bit too much of a reading man. When we were at school. When we were up at Trinity. Probably reads too much now, to judge by his speeches in the House. All very well being on nodding terms with the classics but a gentleman shouldn’t make a fetish out of them. Nobody wants Homer dropped into a debate about married women’s property. Not sure anybody wants a debate about married women’s property at all, but that’s a different matter.’

  ‘So I am right in thinking, sir, that you and Creech and Garland and Abercrombie have known one another for many years?’

  ‘Have I not already said as much?’ The baronet was becoming very irritated. ‘Look, what is all this about, Carver? I agreed to see you out of respect for your late father. I assumed you had something to say that related to the railway company. To the dealings I had with him before his unfortunate demise. And yet all you do is ask me questions about someone from my schooldays. Some poor devil who has met a dreadful end.’

  ‘It was perhaps not reported in the press but Creech’s body was found by a visitor to his house. I was that visitor.’

  ‘Good God!’ The baronet seemed genuinely shocked by Adam’s revelation. ‘But what has all this to do with me? I assume you cannot be scouring London for every one of Creech’s old school friends in order to tell them the unhappy news. Why have you come to me?’

  ‘I found something else at the house. A notebook with transactions in Creech’s handwriting. Transactions with a private enquiry agent named Jinkinson.’

  Silence descended again on the room. Adam could hear nothing but a clock ticking quietly in the background.

  ‘I ask you again.’ Oughtred took another pull on his cigar. ‘What has this to do with me?’

  ‘Your name appeared frequently in the notebook.’

  ‘I cannot imagine why. I have scarcely seen Creech more than half a dozen times in twenty years. He spent much of that time abroad, I believe.’ Sir Willoughby’s voice was now icy. ‘And I have never had any dealings with any enquiry agent of any name.’

  ‘I am sorry to have to say this, sir, but I find that statement rather difficult to reconcile with the evidence of my own eyes.’

  For a moment, Sir Willoughby looked as if Adam had slapped him across the face. He had been leaning forward in his chair to reach for his drink. He stopped and pulled back. Red dots of colour appeared on his cheeks.

  ‘What do you mean by that, you impudent young cub? Are you accusing me of being a liar?’

  ‘I hope not, sir. I hope there is some simple explanation for events. But I was in contact with the enquiry agent, Jinkinson. I followed him one day as he went about his business. He met you on Westminster Bridge. I saw the two of you in conversation together.’

  ‘The devil you did! And you are accusing me of being a liar. I tell you I have never met this man. Have you sunk to such a level that the word of a gentleman is not good enough for you?’

  Sir Willoughby stood up and walked to the bell-rope by the fire-place, which he pulled sharply.

  ‘I have rung for Bargate to return. I must ask you to leave my house.’

  ‘But this man Jinkinson has gone missing, Sir Willoughby. He has not been seen for more than a week. Perhaps the conversation you had with him might throw some light on his disappearance.’

  ‘I doubt that very much. I suggest you leave at once, sir. I have no time for Jinkinsons and those who skulk about the city in pursuit of them.’ The door opened and the antiquated servant reappeared. ‘Bargate, Mr Carver is leaving. Be so good as to show him out.’

  Adam had no choice but to pick up his hat and depart. He strove to look the baronet in the eye before he left, but Sir Willoughby had already performed the aristocratic trick of dismissing from his attention anything or anyone he no longer wished to acknowledge. Adam had ceased to exist for him. The young man could only turn and follow Bargate, leaving Sir Willoughby alone with his ancestors. Enveloped in cigar smoke from head to foot, the baronet remained standing impassively beneath the portraits of long-dead Oughtreds.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  And so this man Creech or Sinclair or whatever he chose to call himself was a blackmailer?’

  ‘It looks very much like it.’

  Cosmo Jardine laughed. He and Adam were sitting in the painter’s studio. The rays of the setting sun were drifting through the room’s large windows and falling unforgivingly on King Pellinore and the Questing Beast. The young artist was staring intently at his painting. As Adam spoke, he stood and moved towards his easel. He picked up a sheet from the floor and threw it over the canvas, hiding the image of the Arthurian knight.

  ‘It is just my confounded luck,’ he said. ‘The only man to show any interest in my paintings in months and he turns out to be a wrong ’un. And then he is discovered dead only days after visiting me.’

  ‘You do seem to make a poor choice of potential patrons.’

  ‘Creech-Sinclair chose me, if you recall.’ Jardine returned to his chair. ‘Who was the not-so-gentlemanly gentleman blackmailing?’

  ‘He was paying the man Jinkinson to follow three MPs. So the assumption must be that he had knowledge of all three of them that they would not want made public. Or was assuming he’d get that knowledge.’

  ‘Who were these men with secrets to hide?’

  ‘Willoughby Oughtred. James Abercrombie. Lewis Garland.’ Adam counted them off on his fingers.

  ‘There are Oughtreds everywhere, aren’t there? Not sure I’ve heard of a Willoughby Oughtred, though.’ Jardine stretched out his legs and stared at his shoes. ‘Abercrombie is some man of business,

  isn’t he? Richer than Croesus. Garland I know. His constituency includes some of the same verdant Cotswold acres as my father’s see. What has Mr Garland been doing to attract the attention of a blackmailer?’

  ‘If Jinkinson and my other informant are to be believed, he is keeping a mistress. In St John’s Wood.’

  Jardine laughed again, louder than before.

  ‘How drearily predictable,’ he said. ‘But what if Lewis Garland does have a bit of muslin on the sly? That is not exactly news that would rock the nation to its foundations.’

  ‘No, but embarrassing enough for him that he might wish to pay to keep it quiet. I don’t suppose your father and his fellow clergy wou
ld be delighted to know that their representative in Parliament has a fondness for bedding actresses.’

  ‘I cannot see how this matters very much.’ Jardine, smothering a yawn, was unconvinced. ‘Men of the cloth can be surprisingly tolerant when it comes to such affairs. At least when gentlemen like Garland are involved. They find it easier to turn a blind eye than to cast the first stone.’

  ‘In the great scheme of things, Cosmo, it may not matter much. No doubt all will be one a hundred years hence, but for the moment, I would say that it matters a great deal to Lewis Garland. I bow to your superior knowledge of ecclesiastical opinion but I still think that he would not wish his constituents to learn of his misdeeds. And if ensuring that meant paying a blackmailer, he might just do so.’

  ‘I suppose that you are correct,’ Jardine acknowledged. ‘But our parliamentary Lothario would scarcely go so far as to kill said blackmailer.’

  ‘No, that is true. I suppose he might hire someone to do his killing for him.’

  Jardine waved his hand in dismissal of the idea. ‘You have spent too long in the lands ruled by the Turk, Adam. That sort of thing might happen in Constantinople or Salonika but you are in London now. Prominent men don’t hire assassins to dispose of their enemies.’

  ‘No, you are, of course, correct. It does seem unlikely.’

  ‘Impossible. I suppose one could just about imagine Mr Disraeli hiring bully-boys to kidnap Mr Gladstone and cast him into the Thames in a sack, but there is no other politician capable of such ruthlessness.’

  Jardine lit a cigar and blew smoke towards the windows.

  ‘I must give up that theory, then,’ Adam said. ‘Creech’s death must have some other explanation.’

  ‘And you are the man to smoke out the truth, are you? To sneak surreptitiously through the city streets in pursuit of the villains and unmask them for the murderous swine they are?’

  ‘I am not sure I am able to do much in the sneaking line. I am under surveillance myself. The widow Gaffery twitches her parlour curtains every time I leave the house. She is convinced that I am smuggling women in and out of my rooms with the sole aim of ruining her reputation with the neighbours.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘I have no opportunity to do so.’

  ‘And yet it would be so easy. A cab pulls up at the door. The door is opened. There is a rustle of skirts and another young maiden is hurried into the love nest of the gallant Adam Carver.’

  Adam laughed. ‘It is a pretty picture you paint but it would not be possible. Not in Doughty Street.’

  ‘Ah, I had clean forgot. Doughty Street is none of your common thoroughfares to be rattled through by cabs. It has a gate at either end to prevent any rude incursions by mobile vulgus.’

  ‘Precisely. And besides, as I say, La Gaffery stands guard at all hours like Cerberus at the gates of Hades.’

  ‘Not three-headed, surely?’

  ‘No, but quite as fierce and just as relentless.’

  ‘But you escape her vigilance occasionally, do you not? You have opportunities to pursue your curious investigations into the death of Creech-Sinclair?’ Jardine held up his hands, fingers splayed, and examined them in the light. Traces of paint, relics of his morning’s work, remained on them. ‘I must confess that I find it difficult to understand your continuing interest in the whole sordid business.’

  There was a slight pause. The artist looked enquiringly at his friend.

  ‘I find it difficult to understand myself, Cosmo,’ Adam said eventually. He remained half-puzzled about his own motivations in making his enquiries. Was he driven to these investigations by boredom? He had not been aware of late of any particular feelings of ennui. He had found a genuine sense of purpose in his photography and in his plans to record the disappearing architecture of the city. However, there was no doubt that even the capture of the most artistic image of a half-timbered building in the city was not as exciting as the pursuit of a murderer. As he spoke, he felt his determination to find the truth about Creech grow. ‘Somehow I feel half-responsible for the man’s death. That if he had not spoken to me at the Marco Polo, he would be alive still.’

  ‘I cannot see how the two events can be connected.’

  ‘No more can I – but the feeling remains.’ Adam was hauling himself onto firmer ground, reaching more confidently for justifications for his actions over the last weeks. ‘And I dislike mysteries. There is mystery surrounding this man’s death. And now a new mystery with the seeming disappearance of this enquiry agent Jinkinson.’

  ‘The truth is, my dear chap, that you have too little to occupy your time.’ Jardine had found a rag and was wiping his paint-stained fingers. ‘All those months with nothing to do but tote your camera round town and take sun-pictures of ancient buildings. And then along comes this villain, Creech-Sinclair, and gets himself killed. Little wonder that you seized upon the opportunity for a little excitement.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right, Cosmo.’ Adam smiled at his friend.

  ‘I am right. Depend upon it.’ Jardine threw the rag into a corner of his studio. ‘But I gain no satisfaction from being so. With the blackmailer dead, my search for a rich art-lover must continue.’

  * * * * *

  The following evening, Adam was ushered into a wood-panelled room deep in the hidden recesses of the Houses of Parliament where Lewis Garland was waiting for him. The walls of the room were covered with paintings of politicians from the last century and the MP was gazing intently at a full-length portrait of Pitt the Elder. He looked as if he was memorising the face in case he met the long-dead prime minister in the streets and needed to recognise him. He turned as Adam approached him and pointed up at Pitt.

  ‘There was a man with whom to reckon, eh, Mr Carver? I should have relished facing him across the floor of the House. A worthy opponent. Worthier than some of those in government today.’

  Garland was a tall and vigorous man in his late fifties. He was languid in his speech and movements and yet carried with him an air of barely suppressed energy. His moustache was as abundant as Quint had said it was. Despite Garland’s years, his hair was also so black that Adam was certain he must be dyeing it. It was blacker than nature ever intended the hair of men in their fifties to be.

  ‘You wrote in the note you sent me that you wished to talk about a gentleman named Samuel Creech. I understand that Mr Creech has been found dead. Murdered.’

  ‘He was indeed. But you knew him.’

  ‘As you say, I knew him. But I am not entirely clear how you and Creech are connected.’

  As concisely as he could, Adam described the meeting with Creech at the Marco Polo, the curious conversation between them, the journey out to Herne Hill and the discovery of the body. He said nothing of the notebook or of the names within it. Garland listened impassively. When the story was finished, he gave a chilly smile before making any comment.

  ‘A strange encounter indeed, Mr Carver. I do not know how it is that you have discovered that Creech and I were acquainted, although it is no particular secret. I knew Sam Creech for many years. Since we were both boys. And God knows that is a long time ago.’

  ‘Have you seen him in recent months?’

  Garland looked up at Pitt the Elder once again.

  ‘An interesting face, is it not? Strong features but a look of melancholy, would you not say? Around the eyes?’

  Adam agreed that there was a suggestion of melancholy in the portrait.

  ‘What is it exactly that you want to know, Mr Carver?’ the MP asked.

  ‘I want to know why Creech was killed. There is also a gentleman named Jinkinson who had something to do with Creech and who has now disappeared. I want to know what connection this man had with Creech and where he has gone.’

  Garland walked away from Pitt the Elder and waved his hand dismissively.

  ‘Sam Creech’s death is no doubt a great tragedy. But you should leave the investigation of it to the police. They are the experts in murder, are th
ey not? As for this other man – Jinkinson, did you say his name is? – he might be anywhere. London, as I’m sure you have noticed, is a large city. It is a place in which it is only too easy to disappear. People do so every day.’

  Adam had already decided he would not allow himself to be browbeaten by the older man. He was determined to stand his ground in this encounter.

  ‘Nonetheless, I cannot help feeling – perhaps foolishly – that Creech died because he was in contact with me. An d that Jinkinson’s disappearance is linked to my visit to his offices. I want to know the answers to my questions. I want to know more about Creech. Perhaps I will then be able to discover why he was killed.’

  ‘We should be careful in deciding what it is we want, Mr Carver. Perhaps you know the story of Colonel Pierpont?’

  ‘I have never heard of the gentleman,’ Adam said stiffly. He was aware that Garland was, in some subtle way, laughing at him.

  ‘The colonel was a fellow member of my club in Pall Mall. The Marco Polo – I seem to recall that you are also a member. Anyway, several years ago, he developed a fear of crossing over to St James’s Square. Too much traffic for the poor man. He paid for a small island to be constructed in the middle of the street. Somewhere he could stand and look in all directions before venturing on the second half of the journey across the road. When it was built, Pierpont was delighted. He rushed out of the club to admire it. Alas, he was so excited, he failed to notice the cab travelling along the street. Pierpont never reached his island. The cab knocked him down and he expired the same day from his injuries.’

  ‘A sad story, but I fail to see its relevance to our conversation.’

  ‘Pierpont should have been more careful in choosing what he wanted. Had he not wanted his island so much, he would have been with us still.’

  Garland looked at Adam and then gave a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders.

  ‘Ask your questions, Mr Carver, if you must. I can see that you will not be satisfied until you have done so. But I do not think I will be able to help you.’