‘Maybe he ain’t in,’ Quint suggested after another minute had passed.
‘If he is not here, where is everybody else?’
‘Maybe there ain’t nobody else.’
‘A man like Creech. Living in a house like this. He would have servants. Where have they gone?’
Adam tugged again at the bell-pull. They heard once more the muffled sound of ringing within the house. No further noise, no clicking of footsteps across parquet flooring, nor opening and closing of inner doors, could be heard after the bell ceased to ring. Herne Hill Villa, it seemed, was deserted.
‘This is monstrous, Quint,’ Adam said with mock outrage. ‘A man invites us to his house. He specifies the day, the time. He speaks mysteriously of secrets that cannot be divulged. And yet when we come visiting at the appointed hour, he is nowhere to be found.’
‘Could be he’s round the back,’ Quint said, jerking his thumb leftward to where the driveway curved around the side of the house.
‘Unlikely, but we shall investigate. When the host flouts the laws of hospitality so egregiously by not being present, the guests are surely entitled to go in search of him.’
The rear of Creech’s villa faced west and the afternoon sun was shining fiercely on the windows that opened onto the gardens. A neatly kept lawn extended some forty yards to a group of trees. In the centre of the lawn was a small fish pond. In the centre of that was a fountain in the shape of some indeterminate mythological beast. Was it supposed to be a griffin? Adam wondered, as he gazed at it. What watery connotations did a griffin possess? He gave up the conundrum and turned his attention to the back of the house. A series of five long glass casements let light into the rooms at the rear. Adam began to peer through each one in turn, using his hand to shade his eyes against the glare of the sun.
‘Nothing and no one in sight,’ he reported to Quint, who was trudging and muttering in his wake.
At the penultimate casement, he stopped and leaned further towards the glass, like a small boy pressing his nose against the window of a sweet shop.
‘I’m damned if I can make anything out clearly with the sun as it is,’ he said. ‘There seems to be someone in this room, though.’
He stood there another thirty seconds, face fixed to the casement window. Then he stepped back swiftly. ‘Break the glass, Quint.’
Out of habit and sheer cussedness, Quint was usually ready to dispute any orders given to him, but the urgency in Adam’s voice was unmistakeable. Thinking quickly, Quint removed the boot from his left foot and used the heel to shatter the central panes in the window. Broken glass flew in all directions. Adam reached inside the frame, pulled at its handle and opened the casement. He stepped over the glass and into the room. Quint replaced his boot and followed him, scrunching fragments of glass beneath his feet as he went.
The room was long and, because the rays of the sun fell only on the first few feet of its length, it was dark. Creech seemed to have used the place as a library, and two massive tables with heavy, claw-foot legs sat in its centre. Bookshelves stretched from window to far wall along both sides. The sombre leather bindings of the volumes which sat on them added to the sense of gloom and claustrophobia. The smell of the books pervaded the room. A book was open, face up on the furthest end of the second table. A chair had been pulled up to the table and someone was sitting in it. But this person was not bowed over the book as if reading it. Instead, his head was thrown back at an awkward angle. As Adam and Quint approached him, he made no movement.
Samuel Creech was dead. Of that there could be no doubt. Two bullets, probably from a pocket pistol, Adam judged, had entered his forehead. One had exited through the back of his skull and looked to have lodged itself in a walnut secretaire and bookcase behind the chair in which he was sitting. The other was presumably still inside the skull. Creech was slumped leftwards in the chair, with blood and brain matter covering the back of it. The metallic smell of blood mingled with the sweet aroma of some pomade that he must have been using on what remained of his hair. It seemed unlikely that he would be answering any of Adam’s questions now.
‘There is little we can do for Creech, poor devil.’ Adam looked down at the slouched and bloody figure of the man he had met at the Speke dinner. He reached out and briefly touched its upper arm. ‘We need to contact the police. I shall walk down to the road and look for assistance.’
‘You leaving me here with ’im?’ Quint gestured at the corpse. He sounded unhappy at the idea.
‘The man’s dead, Quint. He can do you no harm. And whoever killed him is long gone.’
‘’Ow can you be so sure of that?’
‘Feel the arm. Creech has clearly been dead for hours. Rigor mortis has already begun to set in. Who would stay for hours having killed him?’ Confident in his conclusion, Adam turned the pages of the book on the table in front of the dead man. It was Henry Tozer’s Researches in the Highlands of Turkey. Adam had read it himself earlier in the year. Tozer, he recalled, had described his own travels in the same Macedonian hills that had interested Creech so much. Creech had been pursuing his peculiar researches to the very end. On the table beside the book was a pair of binoculars, which Adam picked up. He turned them over in his hands, looking for the maker’s name.
‘Negretti and Zambra,’ he said after a moment. ‘They have an establishment in Cornhill. Creech wanted the best for himself. They have a great reputation, I believe. I have long been intending to make a journey to Cornhill myself to inspect their cameras.’
Quint, standing beside the bookshelves, continued to look unhappy at the prospect of being left alone with a dead man. Adam remained unmoved. His servant must stay in the house.
‘There is no help for it, Quint. You must hold the fort while I look for reinforcements. Perhaps you should take the time to look around. Who knows what you might find? Creech is going nowhere and he is in no position to object to the invasion of his privacy.’
The manservant looked as if he was still disposed to dispute his instructions but eventually he moved towards the door which led out of the library. He cast a single reproachful look over his shoulder as he went, but Adam did not see it. He was striding back towards the window they had broken, and the distant sunshine.
‘Every Englishman’s home is his castle, eh? Isn’t that what they say, sir?’ The voice was as cheery as if its owner and Adam were conducting a friendly conversation over a glass of port. ‘Well, this here dead gentleman’s had his castle well and truly stormed, ain’t he? By you, sir, if no one else.’
‘Look here, Inspector. You’re surely not suggesting I broke in and murdered Creech, are you? Why would I loiter around like a damn fool and answer your questions if I were a murderer? I’d be back in town and strolling down Piccadilly by now rather than standing here exchanging pleasantries with you.’
The man to whom Adam spoke was, like him, tall and well built. He had the kind of rosy red face that suggested long exposure to the elements and a greying moustache that bloomed and burgeoned luxuriantly around the lower part of his face. He was dressed in chequered trousers and a black jacket that seemed just one size too small for him. In other circumstances, he might have been mistaken for a country farmer on a visit to town, but there was sharpness in his eye that spoke of wide knowledge of the ways of the city. When he had arrived at Herne Hill Villa, accompanied by two constables, he had strolled around the downstairs rooms with the air of a man visiting an auction room before a sale, examining Creech’s possessions with a critical eye as if trying to decide whether or not to place a bid on them. On reaching the body in the library chair, he had raised his hat as a token of respect and then peered closely at the wounds to the head. He had walked around the corpse, looking at it from all angles before bending to examine the bullet lodged in the secretaire. Only then had he bothered to introduce himself to the watching Adam. His name, he said, was Pulverbatch and he was an inspector in the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police. He wanted a little chat with the gentleman that had found the body. The little chat had gone on for some time, interrupted by occasional conferences between the inspector and his constables.