Carver's Quest Page 27

  The moustachioed gentleman inclined his head ever so slightly in response to Jardine’s greeting.

  ‘He knows you, it would seem,’ Adam remarked.

  ‘I was introduced to him at Gatti’s the other night.’

  ‘I remember the piece we went to see now. Nonsense, as you say, but enjoyable nonsense.’

  ‘Gilbert is a talented man. No doubt the world will hear more of him before long.’

  A waiter materialised at their table. He took their orders for coffee and disappeared as swiftly and silently as he had arrived.

  ‘So this is to be our last meeting for a while,’ Jardine said. ‘Before you shake the dust of England from your feet for several months?’

  ‘Yes, Fields has arranged it all. As soon as the long vac is upon him, we travel once again to Greece.’

  ‘And which of the beauties of ancient Hellas draws you there this time?’

  ‘We go to Athens. Whether we travel further depends on what we find there.’

  Jardine raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  ‘We shall be on the trail of lost manuscripts,’ Adam said. ‘Of this writer Euphorion I have mentioned. Fields has an acquaintance in the French School at Athens who claims to have seen a manuscript of which Cambridge scholarship knows nothing.’

  ‘I thought that anything of which Cambridge scholarship knew nothing was scarcely deemed knowledge.’ The young painter crossed his arms behind his head and leant back against his seat. ‘Well, it is not a journey I envy. Although I shall be sorry to see you go. London is a dreary enough place as it is in the summer.’

  ‘You will have no distractions. There will be no excuses for not finishing King Pellinore and the Questing Beast.’

  ‘True. Although I seldom find it difficult to fashion an excuse for not working. But I shall miss the mysteries which seem to have followed you around town in the last month: the maiden in possible distress; the men murdered just as you were eager to converse with them.’

  ‘I fear that they must all remain mysterious, Jardine.’ Adam sounded sombre and downcast. ‘The maiden in possible distress, together with her mother, has disappeared from Brown’s.’

  ‘She deserted you on the dance floor at Cremorne, did she not?’ the painter remarked, with the slightest hint of malice in his voice.

  ‘Not quite on the dance floor,’ Adam said defensively. ‘We spent some time together. We talked of several inconsequential subjects. We danced. And then she said that she must return to Brown’s before her mother returned from Lombard Street. We walked together to the gate where the cabs gather. As you can imagine, I offered to accompany her back to her hotel.’

  ‘Of course. The very least a gentleman could do. But she spurned your offer?’

  ‘She did. “I’m not in the least bit afraid of a London cab by myself,” she said, and before I could make any reply, she had climbed into one. In truth, she all but jumped into it and shouted for the cabbie to take her to Albemarle Street. She disappeared in the general direction of town within seconds.’

  Adam was only slightly ashamed of himself for providing this largely fictional account of Emily Maitland’s departure. Cosmo’s curiosity about the young woman was obvious but his friend felt little urge to satisfy it. He was so far from understanding Emily’s motivations himself that he had no desire to tell Jardine any more and then be obliged to listen to the discourse on the fickleness and unpredictability of women that the painter would inevitably give.

  ‘So Cinderella had to flee the ball.’ Cosmo continued to probe for further information.

  ‘And long before midnight’s witching hour. It was barely seven in the evening. The gardens were only beginning to grow busier.’

  ‘This capricious belle of Cremorne left you none the wiser as to her reasons for seeking you out in the first place?’

  Adam shook his head. The ghostly waiter shimmered into view again, served them with their coffee and departed.

  ‘You have visited Brown’s in the days since?’

  ‘Twice. I was there only yesterday.’ In truth, Adam had been to Albemarle Street more than twice since the meeting at Cremorne but he was embarrassed to admit to his friend how frequently he had haunted the hotel in hopes of catching a glimpse of Emily. Indeed, he was shy of admitting even to himself how eager he was to see her again. ‘But they are no longer there. I can only assume that they must have done as Miss Maitland suggested that they might and travelled to Switzerland.’

  Jardine took a silver cigarette case from his pocket. He selected a cigarette, tapped it gently on the case and put it in his mouth. The waiter, miraculously reappearing from whatever spectral limbo he inhabited when his services were not required, held out a match. Jardine sucked in smoke from the first pull on the lit cigarette and blew it out. He nodded his thanks to the waiter, who left them once again.

  ‘Meanwhile the dead men are doing no talking,’ the artist said.

  ‘Indeed not. The police inspector in charge of investigating their deaths, who is either one of the greatest fools in Christendom or a man of subtle and devious wisdom – I cannot decide which – appears to have convinced himself that Creech was killed in the course of a bungled robbery. Quint believes that he is interested only in pinning the murder on somebody. Anybody would do and this man Stirk has simply been singled out as the unfortunate sacrificial lamb.’

  Jardine shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that, in this wicked world, Quint’s theory might well be true.

  ‘And the other man?’ he asked.

  ‘The inspector seems to care little for the fate of poor Jinkinson. He was associating with villains and received much what he deserved for doing so. That appears to be the police opinion on the matter.’

  ‘But you have not been content with the police view of the killing.’ Jardine blew out smoke again and sipped at his black coffee. ‘You tell me that you have played the intrepid explorer and ventured into the city’s most abandoned and desolate regions. With Quint as your improbable Virgil, you proved a latterday Dante and descended into the pits of hell in search of news of the lost soul of this fellow Jinkinson.’

  ‘If you consider Holywell Street and the Palace of Westminster to be the pits of hell,’ Adam said.

  ‘Oh, I do. Particularly Westminster.’

  ‘Certainly one of its inhabitants seems to have played the very devil with at least one poor woman.’

  ‘I would be astonished if only one of the members of the House had proved a devil with the women.’

  ‘Well, there is but the one of whom I know. As you say, doubtless there are plenty of others. But I am sure it was Garland who ruined Ada.’

  ‘The woman your late friend Jinkinson was seeing?’

  ‘The very one. I am convinced that she was Garland’s maid and that he seduced her. Then he turned her out of his house.’

  ‘And Jinkinson was employed by Creech to find her.’

  ‘Jinkinson discovered a great deal about Garland’s women. He located the pied-à-terre where Garland kept the actress he visited. He told me about that love nest himself. But he omitted to mention Ada.’

  Adam now reached over to extract a cigarette from his friend’s case which was still lying on the table. Before he had completed the manoeuvre, the waiter was there again, holding a flaming match. The man was certainly earning his tip.

  ‘Was this enquiry agent tupping the girl himself, do you suppose?’ Jardine asked.

  ‘Simpkins – the boy Jinkinson employed – assumed that he was. But I think it unlikely that he was right. Jinkinson merely suggested Ada join him in a plot to take her revenge on her seducer.’

  ‘And she was eager to do so.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not. I believe Ada was past caring about revenge. But she has a mother. Quint tells me the mother is an avaricious old soak. She probably saw an opportunity to extract money from her daughter’s disgrace.’

  ‘What a quagmire you have stumbled into, Adam. Death and deception on all sides. It will b
e a relief for you to swap such dark scenes for the bright light of Greece. When do you go?’

  ‘At the end of the month.’

  ‘You will be able to renew your activities on behalf of the Foreign Office. Did you not tell me that the great panjandrums there valued your opinions on matters Greek and Turkish?’

  Still curious about their conversation some weeks ago, Jardine was very obviously fishing for more information about the exact nature of the relationship between his friend and the people he had been seen visiting in Whitehall. Adam was unwilling to satisfy his curiosity. The truth was that he had visited Sunman soon after the professor had first mooted the journey to Athens. The languid young aristocrat had encouraged the idea that despatching his thoughts and impressions of the Greek capital back to London might be a valuable one while simultaneously suggesting that it was entirely Adam’s decision whether or not he should do so. ‘Always glad of an extra pair of eyes in a place like Athens, old man, but no need to put yourself out too much.’ Those had been his exact words, Adam recalled, but he felt no urge to report the conversation to Cosmo.

  ‘I doubt the great panjandrums will be hanging on my every word,’ he said mildly.

  ‘I shall have no opportunity to see you again before you go,’ his friend continued, seeming to realise that he would learn no more. ‘I would raise a glass to the success of your expedition with Fields but there is no glass on the table at present. This will have to do as a substitute.’

  Cosmo Jardine lifted his coffee cup into the air. Adam smiled and followed suit. The two young men touched the delicate porcelain cups carefully together.

  PART TWO

  ATHENS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Adam awoke with the sound of one of the tunes he had last heard at the Cremorne Gardens in his ears. At first he imagined that some Athenian hurdy-gurdy player had added the Pretty Kitty Quadrille to his repertoire, but even within a delicious state of half-sleep, he was aware that the song was only in his head. He continued to lie beneath the sheets, enjoying the memory of Cremorne and his encounter with Emily Maitland. He remembered the warmth of her body pressed against his as they danced and the unexpected but delightful touch of her lips to his.

  Two weeks had now passed since he had left England in the company of Quint and Fields. The journey to Greece had unfolded much as the professor had predicted on the afternoon he had eaten burnt muffins in Adam’s rooms in Doughty Street. They had travelled through France at breakneck speed in order to catch a steamer from Marseilles to Malta. A short stay there had been enlivened only by an altercation on the Valletta waterfront between Quint and a sailor which had escalated from mutual insults in English and Maltese to a sudden and inconclusive bout of fisticuffs. The three men had then travelled onwards to Athens. They had docked at Piraeus three days earlier and had been driven from there to the Hotel d’Angleterre in Constitution Square. Fields had insisted, at some length, that this was the finest hotel in Athens and that its manager, Polyzoïs Pikopoulos, was a particular friend of his. They could not think of staying anywhere else. In the three days they had been there, ‘Polly’, as every English guest appeared to call him, had been a model of respectful politeness, but there had been not the slightest indication on his part that he knew Fields of old or that he could distinguish him from any of the many other Englishmen who passed through his hotel.

  On the second day after their arrival in Athens, Adam and the professor had visited the latter’s friend at the French School. To Adam’s amusement, Professor Masson had fitted almost exactly the caricatured image of the average Frenchman presented in the comic papers. He was small and moustachioed and exceedingly voluble. He waved his arms vigorously and very nearly unceasingly, like a man trying to pluck a swarm of flies from the air. He spoke torrentially of his own impending excavations near Eleusis and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he could be brought round to the question of the Euphorion manuscript. At this point his face had fallen and he had slapped his forehead as if he were close to distraction. He was wretched, he was desolé, so desolé. His friends, his chers amis, how could they forgive him? He had brought them to Athens on what they would call a chase of the wild duck. There was no manuscript of Euphorion? Au contraire, there were two manuscripts of Euphorion. Mais, hélas, they were both the wrong Euphorion. They were the work of Euphorion the poet not Euphorion the traveller. How could his chers amis anglais forgive him? Even more importantly, how could he forgive himself ? His life had become an insupportable misery to him. It had been a full thirty minutes before Adam and the professor had been able to extricate themselves from the conversation and leave. By that time the diminutive Frenchman had succeeded in forgiving himself and was discoursing happily on the worship of Demeter in sixth-century Athens. The two Englishmen had returned to their hotel in a dejected mood to contemplate the chase of the wild duck on which they had come all this way across Europe.

  A bell somewhere in the city was chiming eleven when Adam finally emerged from the bedclothes and stumbled towards the luridly floral washbowl and jug the hotel provided for his ablutions. It was close to noon when he finished dressing and made his way down to the hotel restaurant. The place was almost empty. Only a handful of tables were occupied. The professor was sitting at one of them, drinking coffee. He waved cheerfully at Adam. His recovery from the disappointments of the previous day seemed complete.

  ‘There you are, my boy. While you have been such a slug-abed, wasting precious morning hours in the arms of Morpheus, I have been busy. I have seen Masson again. I have spent time at the National Library. For an institution that has been established for no more than a few decades, it is an admirable one.’ Fields, whose usual opinion of everything in Athens less than two thousand years old seemed to be one of contempt, was in a surprisingly gracious mood.

  ‘As I have had occasion to remark before, sir,’ Adam said, joining the professor at the table, ‘there is more now to the city than just the ancient sites.’

  ‘And, as I have had occasion to reply, nothing of any significance, my boy.’ Fields was amiably dismissive. ‘The delights of the National Library notwithstanding, the modern town is but a mushroom growth of the last forty years. Since the moment it became the capital of a newly liberated Greece. There is nothing of any consequence intermediate between us and the age of Plato.’

  ‘But we have seen so much ourselves of a new Athens taking shape. And we have been here but a few days.’

  ‘It is true that the city is expanding. By the hour, it sometimes seems. But Greece has no modern history of such a character as to obscure its classical past.’

  It was becoming a familiar argument to Adam and one that he knew he could not win. He turned briefly to survey the restaurant. There was a solitary waiter in evidence, a tall and gangling youth, and he indicated to him that he, too, would welcome coffee.

  ‘Your visit to the library has proved useful, has it, sir?’

  ‘Enlightening, if not of any immediate use. Our French friend Masson did indeed mislead us. The manuscripts of which he wrote to me so excitedly are fine specimens of Byzantine calligraphy from the time of the emperor John Komnenos. But, as he told us yesterday, somewhat belatedly, they consist of the work of Euphorion of Chalcis.’ Fields picked up a spoon and began to stir his coffee vigorously. ‘Fragments from an epic poem which is shockingly poor. And lines of amatory verse which are merely shocking. I am surprised that the scribe, who was almost certainly a cleric of some kind, could bring himself to write them down. But that is by the by. The point is that they are not by our Euphorion.’

  The long-legged waiter sidled awkwardly to the table and served Adam his drink. It was a small cup of what looked like boiling mud. The young man stared at it, black and bubbling, and braced himself to raise it to his lips.

  ‘I have also paid a visit to the embassy and arranged to see someone there,’ the professor went on. ‘Samways. Felix Samways. He was up at the college not so many years ago. Perhaps you re
call him?’

  ‘I have no memory of anyone of that name.’

  ‘He must have been before your time. The man’s a fool but even fools can have their uses. He is attached to the embassy.’ Fields took a napkin and dabbed at his lips. ‘With luck, he will be able to expedite any journey out of Athens we might wish to make.’

  ‘What journey out of Athens might we wish to make?’

  ‘Who can tell where we might wish to travel?’ The professor replaced the napkin on the table. He had adopted an air of mystery like a stage magician about to pull a rabbit from a hat. ‘But this Dilessi business earlier in the year has made it exceedingly difficult for us to come and go as we please. After the kidnapping and murder of several Englishmen so close to Athens, no one is eager to allow others to leave the safety of the city. A voice raised in our favour at the embassy might well prove invaluable.’

  ‘But where might we wish to go?’ Adam persisted. ‘I would think that our only journey should be back to England. After our disappointment with Masson, what is there to keep us here?’

  ‘Why should we not stay a while longer? The land where Pericles ruled and Plato thought must always have a strong claim on our hearts,’ Fields said, picking his teeth as he spoke.

  ‘I do believe that you have learned something more at the National Library, Professor.’ Adam swallowed a mouthful of the hot mud and found it surprisingly flavourful.

  ‘I have spoken with the librarian there. He is a charming man. He had a suggestion to make.’

  ‘And that was?’

  ‘That there are manuscripts still awaiting discovery and proper cataloguing in many of the Greek monasteries. That we might wish to mount an expedition in search of some to take back to Cambridge.’

  There was a silence as Adam thought about this.

  ‘What of these monasteries?’ he asked after a few moments. ‘Is the librarian right, do you think? Is it possible that they could contain unknown manuscripts? Lost manuscripts?’