Carver's Quest Page 22

  ‘That is kind of you, sir, but—’

  ‘No buts, guv’nor. I insist on standing you a drink. The least I can do for a young gent what comes down Wapping way.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll take a half pint of your…’ Adam looked again at the poster behind the bar. ‘Your matchless stout.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ the fat man said, flicking his fingers at Toby the barman, who began to pour the drinks. ‘Not often we get visitors down the Cat. Not visitors like yourself at any rate.’

  ‘Like myself?’ The ugly terrier was nipping at the bottoms of Adam’s trousers and he was struggling to concentrate on what was being said.

  ‘Down, Billy. Leave it, sir, leave it.’ The dog barked once and then retreated. The fat man moved closer, bringing a strong smell of corduroy, sweat and cheap pomade with him. ‘Of a gentlemanly nature. Of a not-usually-seen-in-this-neck-of-the-woods nature.’

  ‘I’m looking for someone, Mr…?’

  ‘Brindle, guv. Jabez Brindle. At your service.’

  Jabez Brindle looked, Adam thought, as if he was never at anyone’s service but his own. He was not an attractive man. Even had he shed several stones and thus returned himself to the average weight of a London publican, he would have attracted no admiring glances from the ladies. His head was shaven and his nose was flatter than noses are meant to be. He had the look of a man for whom violence was a first resort, not a last.

  ‘And who would you be looking for, I wonder?’ Brindle’s voice was quiet but carried the hint of a threat. ‘Ain’t very likely to be any others of a gentlemanly nature in the Cat. No gents here, Toby, eh?’

  The barman guffawed at the very notion.

  ‘I’m looking for—’

  But Adam had no chance or need to reveal who he was looking for. At just that moment, a door from the street opened into the billiard room and a familiar figure lumbered into the pub. It was Jinkinson, looking very much the worse for wear. His shoulders slumped, his yellow silk cravat twisted into a knot beneath one ear and his plaid waistcoat spotted with the stains of drink and dirt, he was a picture of unrelieved misery. He took off his hat and was about to place it on the billiard table when he glanced through the connecting door towards the bar and saw Adam. His reaction was immediate. A look of mingled surprise and fear appeared on his face and he turned to flee.

  Adam moved swiftly to follow him but, surprisingly, Brindle was even swifter. He stuck out his leg and sent the young man tumbling. As Adam fell, his head struck a glancing blow on the rim of one of the tables. Briefly stunned, he was unable to rise. He could only rest on all fours and endeavour to gather his briefly scattered wits. The great full moon of Brindle’s face suddenly appeared, sideways, in his field of vision. The fat man was leaning over him.

  ‘Very clumsy for a handsome gent, ain’t you? You really should mind where you’re going. Or you’ll be doing yourself a severe mischief, you will.’

  Adam pushed Brindle away and struggled to his feet. Having allowed Jinkinson his escape, the fat man seemed uninterested in stopping Adam from following him. Instead he began to laugh, great heaving waves of laughter rising from the pits of his stomach. Adam staggered from the bar room into the billiard room. He reached a hand to his head. He could feel blood on his fingers. He must have grazed his brow on the table as he fell. It was nothing serious, he decided, but he did feel decidedly dizzy. Shaking his head to clear it, he exited through the door Jinkinson had used and nearly found himself in the river. At the back, the pub was propped on thick wooden pillars which rose directly out of the Thames mud. Only the narrowest of footpaths ran between the back wall of the Cat and Salutation and the ooze of the river.

  There was no sign of Jinkinson. Rackety wooden railings stretched along the water for twenty yards. There was a gap in the middle of them where the rotting wood had given way. Holding a handkerchief to his nose, Adam glanced into the filth below. Had Jinkinson, he wondered, fallen into the Thames as he came dashing out of the pub’s rear door? There was no evidence that he had. Masses of green weed floated on the surface of what was, to judge by the smell, a potent mix of water and human effluvia. What looked unpleasantly like a dead dog, swollen with putrefaction, had washed up against the post which marked one end of the railings. Adam could hear squeals and the splashing of water as rats, alerted to his presence, made off into the darkness.

  He began to walk warily along the pathway, his feet squelching in mud and possibly worse as he did so. Suddenly, there was a sound which could only be a pistol shot. It reverberated from building to building and along the riverbank. It was followed almost immediately by several more and by a long cry of pain. Adam stopped and listened. Did the noise come from close to hand or much further away? He could not be certain. He set off in the direction from which the shots seemed to have sounded. He had gone about fifty yards when, in the half-light, he stumbled over something. It was something large and soft. Something that was lying half in and half out of the water. It was a body.

  Gingerly, Adam reached down and took hold of the shoulder. He rolled the body onto its back. Grunting with the effort, he pulled it out of the mud into which it was sinking and hauled it towards the top of the bank. In the faint light from the distant gas lamp, he could just make out the features. It was Jinkinson. The enquiry agent was alive but only just. Blood oozed through his waistcoat and onto Adam’s hands. He was struggling to say something. His mouth opened and closed but no sounds emerged. His eyes were fixed on a point behind Adam’s left shoulder. He looked as if he was concentrating intently on some object that was slipping out of focus and out of view. His legs were twitching and splashing in the murky Thames water. As Adam battled to haul him further out of the riverside filth, the light left the enquiry agent’s eyes and he died. Adam was left to clutch the substantial shell of Jinkinson’s body, but whatever had once animated it had gone. The old dandy, it seemed, had tied his last cravat.

  Half-crouched in the mud, Jinkinson’s corpse at his feet, Adam heard the sound of movement behind him. He swung round and was in time to see a dark figure, twenty yards away, silhouetted against the wall of one of the riverside houses.

  ‘You there,’ he shouted. ‘Stop, I say, stop!’

  The figure turned briefly in his direction. There was something disconcertingly familiar about it, but before Adam could think what it might be, the man moved into the darkness between two buildings and disappeared. Adam briefly contemplated the idea of pursuit but he decided against it. He turned back to the dead body in the Thames mud. He wondered how long it would be before others joined him on the riverbank. At present it was as if he was stranded on the shore of Crusoe’s desert island but appearances, he knew, were deceptive. There were doubtless a dozen dives and pubs within a few hundred yards of here. And out on the river, even amidst the darkness, there would be boatmen and scavengers. Plenty of people would have heard the shots fired. The sound of shots, however, might not be so uncommon in the neighbourhood that they would attract immediate attention. And curiosity, in the circumstances, might prove dangerous. Minding one’s own business in the worst areas of Wapping was probably thought conducive to a longer life. On reflection, Adam decided that he had time to search the body before anyone joined him.

  It was not a pleasant job. Jinkinson’s body was warm and fleshy. Stifling his nausea, Adam felt hurriedly through the pockets of the enquiry agent’s mud-stained and bloody clothes. It took him but a short time. Whatever possessions Jinkinson had owned, he had not been keeping many of them about his person. Trouser pockets surrendered only a cambric handkerchief and the stub of a pencil. The lower pockets of the plaid waistcoat held nothing. Inserting his fingers into the waistcoat’s top pocket, Adam could feel something in it. Whatever it was, it proved difficult to grasp and his thumb and forefinger pursued it vainly around the recesses of the pocket for a while before they closed on it. Finally, he pulled it out. It was a visiting card. Adam took a box of matches from his pocket and struck one. The card was bat
tered but largely dry and, in the wavering light of the match, he could make out the name ‘Lewis Garland’ printed on it in a bold and simple font. Adam turned the card over. At first, he thought the reverse was plain, but holding it nearer the light, he could see that one word had been written on it in pencil. The word, in English capitals, was ‘EUPHORION’.

  It was the same word or name that had appeared in Creech’s journal. Now, more than ever, it seemed to Adam to lie at the heart of the mystery that had led him to this dismal stretch of the Thames. The mystery that had cost both Creech and now Jinkinson their lives. The enquiry agent had denied all knowledge of Euphorion. So for that matter had the Reverend Dwight. But Ada, poor girl, had recognised the name, even if she had transliterated it as ‘Yew Ferrion’. She had spoken of Jinkinson’s belief that it held the key to riches. Now here were those same nine letters on a card belonging to Lewis Garland, whom Quint had observed meeting the enquiry agent in the pub yard near Fountain Court. And Garland, along with Sir Willoughby Oughtred and James Abercrombie, had been mentioned in Creech’s journal.

  Adam struggled to make sense of it all, his thoughts twisting and turning in search of a theory that might explain the few facts he had. His speculations were interrupted, however, first by the match burning out and then by a sound from behind him. He spun round quickly. For all he knew, Jinkinson’s killer might have returned. A man was standing a few feet away in the mud of the footpath. He was holding a bull’s eye lantern in his hand and appeared to be swinging it aimlessly from side to side. As it swung, its light flashed back and forth, first blinding Adam as he stood over the body and then illuminating the man who held it. It was Toby, the barman from the Cat and Salutation.

  ‘Mr Brindle. He ain’t going to like this,’ he said.

  ‘No, well, I doubt Mr Jinkinson is entirely delighted by the turn events have taken.’ Adam swiftly pocketed the card with its enigmatic message. ‘Come over here. We need to get the body out of this filth. We’ll have to carry it to the pub.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Seems to be some kind of attraction between you and those what have passed over to the other side, don’t there, Mr Carver?’

  Despite the gloom of both the surroundings and circumstances, Inspector Pulverbatch was in a jovial mood.

  ‘Some kind of fatal attraction, you might almost say.’

  ‘Our paths do seem destined to cross, Inspector, do they not?’

  Adam was bone weary and still covered in the mud of the river. He had rather liked Jinkinson and had been distressed to stumble across him, dying in the river’s filth. Now Pulverbatch’s cheerfulness was the latest in the series of misfortunes the evening had inflicted on him.

  ‘Does Scotland Yard,’ Adam asked, ‘have no one other than your self to investigate murders?’

  The two men were sitting in the bar of the Cat and Salutation. Apart from a constable standing guard at the door and the corpse of Jinkinson lying beneath a sheet on the billiards table, they were alone. Complaining bitterly, Brindle and his cronies had been ushered out into the courtyard where another constable was watching them.

  ‘Oh, dearie me, yes,’ Pulverbatch replied. ‘Plenty of detectives at the Yard capable of looking into a murder or two.’

  Before despatching Toby to join his employer and his customers outside, Pulverbatch had instructed the barman to pour him a half-pint of stout. He now picked it up and examined it against the light, as if looking for flaws in the glass.

  ‘But only me what’s got an interest in the Cat and Salutation already,’ the policeman continued. ‘So when word reaches me that someone’s gone and found a dead body outside that very same public house, I’m all ears. And then I further hears that that someone is none other than your good self. A man as has come across another body in Herne Hill nary a fortnight ago. A man as has friends in high places. Very high places, judging by what Dolly Williamson himself tells me. Well, you can imagine how interested I was.’

  Pulverbatch raised his stout to his lips.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll just put this where the flies won’t get at it.’

  For twenty seconds, nothing was heard but the sound of beer being emptied down Pulverbatch’s throat. Then, with a sigh of appreciation, the inspector finished his drink and slammed the glass on the pub table with sufficient force to make Adam start.

  ‘Well, that slipped down like soapsuds down a gully hole.’

  ‘I’m delighted you enjoyed it, Inspector.’

  Puverbatch ignored Adam’s sarcasm.

  ‘So, you’ve been a-drinking and a-gassing with Jabez Brindle and his pals, have you?’ he remarked. ‘Well, they’re a bad lot, as the devil said of the Ten Commandments.’

  ‘You make our meeting sound like a social occasion, Inspector. I wouldn’t describe it like that.’

  ‘How would you describe it, sir?’

  ‘I received information that a gentleman whom I was anxious to meet might be staying here at the tavern. When I entered the place, Mr Brindle introduced himself to me.’

  Pulverbatch nodded slowly. He seemed to be turning over in his mind the veracity or otherwise of Adam’s tale.

  ‘This man Brindle is known to you, is he?’ the young man asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, we know Jabez Brindle down the Yard.’ The inspector paused and picked up his glass from the table once again. He tilted it slightly and examined it as if there might be more beer in it that he had somehow missed. Satisfied at last that there was no more drink to be had, he replaced it on the bar table. ‘Want to know what we know of him, Mr Carver? I’m supposed to tell you all I know, now ain’t I?’

  Adam indicated that he was.

  ‘Well, for one thing, he’s a bit of a student of the four kings is Mr Brindle.’ Pulverbatch mimed the dealing of cards. ‘Bit of a dishonest student, in fact.’

  ‘A card sharper?’ Adam was surprised. ‘Surely someone with your position at the Yard has more important tasks to perform than preventing some tuppenny ha’penny rogue from cheating at whist?’

  ‘True, Mr Carver, true.’ The inspector sounded satisfied that Adam had recognised his status in the force. ‘But there’s a bit more happening at the Cat and Salutation than a few dodgy hands of cards. There’s goods going in and out of the place as shouldn’t be going in and out.’

  ‘But that must be the case with any number of the public houses in this part of London, I would have thought.’

  ‘There’s some rummy places along the river, that’s for sure, sir.’ A tiny puddle of beer had spilled onto the table. Pulverbatch dipped his finger into it and began to trace out patterns on the wood with the beer. ‘The sort of places a gent like yourself shouldn’t go.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right, Inspector,’ Adam acknowledged. ‘And yet it was the Cat that was attracting your attention. Even before a corpus delicti was established.’

  The policeman rubbed his hand across the table, obliterating the liquid shapes he had been creating. He looked up at Adam, beaming with delight.

  ‘Never met a man with such a mouthful of half-crown words at his disposal as you has, Mr Carver,’ he said. ‘It’s a treat just a-sitting and a-listening to you. Even when I ain’t got the first notion what you’re talking about. Which, right now, I ain’t.’

  ‘I was simply curious, Inspector,’ Adam said, holding to his line. ‘You seem to have had your eye on Brindle’s pub long before any crime other than cheating at cards was committed. Before the body was found.’

  ‘Oh, that’s easily explained, sir. As I said, there’s business going on in the Cat that shouldn’t be going on. Brindle works for a bit faker, passing dud coins into circulation. Not that we can ever catch him at it. He’s up to every dodge you can think of – and plenty you can’t – is Jabez Brindle. Not to mention, we’re pretty certain the faker’s got a man inside the Yard.’

  ‘He’s corrupted one of your officers?’

  ‘As the song says, sir, “There’s sure to be a bobby as is ready for a
bob.” Not all of us are able to resist the lure of filthy lucre.’

  Pulverbatch now rested his hands on the table like a pianist about to begin playing. He was looking closely at his fingers splayed across the wood. For a moment, it looked to Adam just as if the inspector was counting them to make sure he had the correct number.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll excuse me for asking, Mr Carver,’ the policeman said, after a pause. ‘All part of my job and no offence intended. Not to you nor to those friends of yours.’

  ‘None will be taken, Mr Pulverbatch.’

  ‘I have to know what you’ve a-been doing since we last had the pleasure of exchanging our thoughts about the world.’

  Adam sighed. He had been expecting this but, weary as he was, he felt barely able to satisfy the inspector’s curiosity. He wondered where to begin his story and what to omit from it. He looked across at Pulverbatch, who was still examining his fingers. He decided to tell something of what he knew about Jinkinson without revealing how the enquiry agent’s name had first come to his attention. The inspector listened to the story without interruption, nodding to himself from time to time as if Adam’s narrative merely confirmed what he had already suspected. When it came to an end, he leaned back in his chair. He blew the air from his mouth like a small boy attempting to whistle for the first time.

  ‘I thought that Jinkinson might have something to do with Creech’s death,’ Adam said. ‘That is why I followed him. And why I endeavoured to find him once he had disappeared.’

  ‘Very interesting, Mr Carver, very interesting. All these fine gents that friend Jinkinson was seeing.’ The inspector ran his hands through his hair as he spoke. ‘But I don’t reckon as how he could have anything to do with the murder out at Herne Hill. I showed you the man we collared for that one, sir.’

  ‘I regret to say this, Mr Pulverbatch, but I have no confidence that you have the right man behind bars.’

  ‘Oh, it was Ben Stirk as shot Creech, all right.’ The inspector’s confidence remained undented. ‘Although, I suppose this Jinkinson fellow might have put him up to it. Who shot Jinkinson, though? That’s the question.’