Quint paused to consider the question.
‘Well, he’s what you might call a chickaleary cove is Jem Pulverbatch.’ Seeing Adam’s raised eyebrow, his manservant decided to expand his description. ‘In other words, putting it pretty plainly, you’d have to get up very early in the morning to catch him on the hop.’
‘But you have done so, Quint. I can deduce from the wicked glint in your eye that you have done so. You have the demeanour of a man who has bested a chickaleary cove.’
With something approaching a flourish, Quint brought the little leather-bound book from his pocket. ‘I don’t reckon Pulverbatch’ll miss this. I found it up in Creech’s bedroom.’
Adam took the journal from Quint’s hand and began to flick through its pages.
‘I should condemn your shameless thievery unequivocally, Quint.’
‘You prob’ly should.’
‘I should chastise you for stealing what might be evidence from under the eye of the law.’
‘But you ain’t going to.’
‘No, you are right. I’m not. Despite the terrible death of the man Creech, I remain curious about the secrets he claimed to know. Perhaps it is because of his death that I remain so curious.’ Adam had stopped at one page and was looking at it closely. ‘This journal may hold the key to Creech’s interest in those barbarous villages we visited in sixty-seven. So I propose to read it from cover to cover.’
An hour passed. Nothing was heard in the sitting room at Doughty Street save the sound of the small clock on the mantelpiece striking the quarter hours. Adam was engrossed in reading Creech’s writings. Quint, who had an almost oriental capacity for withdrawing from the world when action in it was not required, simply stood by the door to the room and waited for Adam to finish. He appeared, when his master glanced up at one point, to have entered a state of near-trance. Eventually, the reading was over. Adam threw the book onto the side table beside his chair.
‘Well, Quint, this is all very intriguing.’
‘Thought it might be.’ Quint emerged immediately from his state of abstraction. ‘That’s why I swiped the thing.’
‘Creech, poor chap, wrote a damnably bad hand but I have managed to decipher nearly all the entries in his journal. In truth, it’s not much of a journal. No revelations of his private life. Much of the latter part of it is a record of his dealings with a man named Jinkinson. Creech was paying Jinkinson. Paying him quite large sums of money. Two guineas a week at least for the best part of four months. Five guineas in one week. Creech records the transactions very carefully. Although it’s not quite clear what they meant.’
‘Maybe this Jinkinson had some hold on Creech. Maybe he was milking him.’
‘No, I don’t think so. He was paying him for something but I don’t think it was that. Look at this entry. “24th July — Jinkinson reports as usual. All three subjects in the week. No change. Two guineas to Jinkinson.” That doesn’t sound like blackmail.’
‘Paying him for something he was bringin’ ’im?’
‘Possibly, but there’s no apparent record of anything. There are other names in the journal, however. Names I recognise. Lewis Garland. James Abercrombie. Sir Willoughby Oughtred.’
‘Toffs,’ said Quint shortly.
‘I suppose you could call them that. What else? All Members of Parliament. All members of the Marco Polo, for that matter. But why are they in Creech’s book? Look at this entry, for example. What do you make of that, Quint?’
Adam handed the journal to his servant, his finger indicating a particular point on the page. Quint took the book and painstakingly read the entry aloud: ‘ “Lewis Garland to SJW, no purpose in visit save the usual, Abercrombie in Paris for the week, no contact, Oughtred followed to Westminster and to HH, no other excursions. Two guineas to Jinkinson.” If you ask me, this Jinkinson’s some kind of snooper.’
‘Snooper?’
‘Creech is giving ’im the rhino to watch what the toffs are doing.’
‘That certainly does seem to be the most obvious explanation.’
‘No knowing why he’s got such a powerful interest in what they’re doing, though.’
‘No knowing why, as you say. And there is a further puzzle.’ Adam took the notebook back from Quint and flicked through it until he reached the last page. He showed it to his servant. The page was empty except for a single row of scribbled symbols in the middle of it. Quint peered at them.
‘Greek, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘I’d reckernise them twisted letters anywhere.’
‘Greek it is, although Creech writes as poor a hand in that language as he does in his own.’
‘What’s it say?’
‘ “Euphorion”. As far as I can tell.’
‘And what the bleeding ’ell does Euphorion mean?’
‘A good question. It is a Greek name. Do I have a vague memory from my Cambridge days of a Greek poet named Euphorion? But why should Creech devote a page of his journal to the name of a Greek poet?’
‘More bleeding questions. We could do with some answers.’
‘We could, and I can think of one obvious way to go in search of them, Quint. Here is an address written in Creech’s infernal scrawl. It makes its first appearance in these pages at the same time that Jinkinson does and I take it to be his. 12 Poulter’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I have never before heard of Poulter’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but I think I should pay it a visit as soon as possible.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
That night Adam slept poorly. He lay awake for hours in his room in Doughty Street, listening to the never-ending sounds of the city around him. Even in the small hours of the morning, London was never quiet. Traffic could still be heard on the Gray’s Inn Road. The shouts of men and the braying of beasts still echoed down the darkened streets. Adam watched the shadows chasing one another across the ceiling and fell eventually into a fitful sleep. In his dreams, the figure of Creech rode a costermonger’s ass whilst driving a herd of scrawny goats through the single muddy street of a Macedonian village. Fields, waving his mortarboard, was shouting the name ‘Euphorion’ over and over again. Slowly the face of Fields melted and was replaced by that of Adam’s father, who was chastising his son for his failure to win the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry during his time at Cambridge.
In reality, as Adam was aware even within his dream, Charles Carver had shown little, if any, interest in poetry. He had shown little interest in any of the subjects that attracted his son. Bluff, occasionally brutal in manner, the railway entrepreneur had been proud of the education he could buy for his only child but indifferent, even antagonistic, towards the enthusiasms that education inspired in Adam. Money was the object of the elder Carver’s fascination, and for years he had been enormously successful in accumulating it. Throughout the boom days of the 1840s and 1850s, when Adam was growing up, Charles Carver’s fortunes had expanded as rapidly as the rail network which created them. Only in the following decade did he begin to skate on thin financial ice. By the time his son arrived at Cambridge in the autumn of 1865, his father, unbeknownst to Adam, was plunged into reckless investments in a series of ventures, all of which ended in disaster. While Carver Junior read Horace and punted on the River Cam, Carver Senior struggled to keep his head above the rising waters of impending bankruptcy.
Faced by the final destruction of his fortune and by exposure of the fraudulent means he had been using to prop it up, Charles Carver hanged himself in a room in the newly opened Langham Hotel. The scandal was largely hushed up, but the money to maintain his son at university was gone. In a matter of weeks, Adam had been forced to leave behind his comfortable life of wining, dining and classical scholarship at Cambridge to face the unexpected prospect of earning his own living. A few weeks later, he was with Professor Fields on a boat approaching the harbour at Salonika, their adventure in Macedonia about to begin.