Poulter’s Court, when Adam found it the following day, turned out to be one of the less prepossessing addresses in the vicinity of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. One entered it through a stone archway, which led into a small, paved yard. In that courtyard, the air was filled with the unmistakeable scent of neglected drains. Adam took another look at the paper on which he had written Jinkinson’s address. The building for which he was searching was the third in a row on the left-hand side of the court. A tarnished brass plaque on its door announced that ‘Jinkinson & Hargreaves, Private Enquiry Office’ occupied the first floor. Adam pushed at the door and, slightly to his surprise, found that it was ajar. He entered and mounted the staircase. At the top of the first, uncarpeted flight of stairs was another door and another sign — this one wooden with painted lettering — which read ‘Jinkinson & Hargreaves’. One of the nails holding the sign to the door had come out and it hung at an angle. Opening the door and going in, Adam nearly dislodged the wooden sign completely.
A boy of about fourteen was sitting at a desk, black with ink stains, in a small and otherwise unfurnished room. He was reading. As Adam approached him, the boy, apparently startled by the arrival of a possible client in Jinkinson’s outer office, attempted to thrust what he was reading beneath the desk. He was too slow and the desk too flimsy to succeed in hiding the penny dreadful he was enjoying. Adam looked briefly at the cover. The title, The Dead Monk’s Curse, was emblazoned across it in large black lettering, half obscuring a scene in which several figures in monastic dress were menacing a young woman whose upper garments had gone missing.
‘I likes a good story,’ the boy said defiantly, as if Adam was about to impugn his literary taste.
‘It certainly looks exciting.’
‘I likes it when the women gets the chop.’ He leered at Carver, revealing an array of blackening and broken teeth. Adam decided to ignore this remark.
‘May I speak to Mr Jinkinson?’
The boy said nothing.
‘Or to Mr Hargreaves, perhaps?’
‘Speak to Mr Hargreaves? Oh, that’s a good ’un, that is.’ The boy was clearly tickled by this idea. He laughed throatily and slapped his hand on the inky desktop. ‘You can speak with ’im all right, but ’e might not do much speaking back.’
‘And why would that be?’
‘Cos ’e’s dead.’
‘Ah, that would make conversation difficult.’
‘Bin dead more years ’n I’ve bin alive. Old Jinks only keeps the name on the plate cos he thinks two names is more respectable than one.’
‘And what about “Old Jinks”? Is he in?’
‘Oh, ’e’s in all right.’ The boy gestured towards another door, which presumably led to Jinkinson’s inner sanctum. ‘But you won’t get much more sense out of ’im than out of ’Argreaves.’
‘And why do you say that?’
‘ ’E’s been out on the spree, ain’t ’e? ’E’s so corned ’e can hardly stand.’
‘None the less, I would like to speak to him.’
‘’E’s through there, then,’ said the boy, thrusting his thumb once more towards the inner room and returning to The Dead Monk’s Curse.
Adam pushed open the door the boy had indicated. He entered another, larger office. Across the room and behind a desk as ramshackle as the one under which the boy had thrust his penny dreadful, an elderly and paunchy man was asleep in a chair. He was snoring loudly. As a very young man, Adam decided, Jinkinson must have been mightily impressed by the swaggering worldliness of society swells. Perhaps he had admired their images in the windows of the print shops in St Paul’s Churchyard. Now, ageing and decrepit as he was, he still dressed like an 1830s dandy down on his luck. Although they had certainly seen better days, his extravagantly coloured silk cravat and ornamented waistcoat would mark him out in the more sombrely dressed crowds of 1870. It was not, Adam reflected, the kind of outfit ideally suited to a private enquiry agent. Enquiry agents, he assumed, needed to blend into the background. Perhaps Jinkinson’s flamboyant taste in clothing went some way towards explaining why, to judge by the shabby state of his office, he was not a very successful enquiry agent. And yet this was the man to whom Creech had paid all those guineas. Where, Adam wondered, had all that money gone? Not, it seemed, on the decoration of his professional premises.
As Jinkinson continued to snore, Adam looked about the office. It had, like its owner, seen better days. There was little in the way of furniture beyond a desk and a chair. To the left, a black mark on the ceiling indicated where a gas lamp had once been. The decoration consisted of two engravings on the walls. To Adam’s left was a gloomy Dutch pub scene. Almost certainly, he decided, it was entitled Boors Carousing. The boors, three of them, all had pipes clamped in their mouths and were caught in the act of smacking their thighs as an indication of drink-fuelled abandon. On the opposite wall, a Spanish hidalgo stared haughtily at the viewer from the frame of his portrait. The overall effect of the two images was profoundly depressing. Looking back at the stout toper behind the desk, Adam noticed him open first one bleary eye and then the other, and struggle into something approaching consciousness. Jinkinson eventually looked at his visitor as if he had been half expecting him to come calling.
‘You have the air of a varsity man, sir,’ he said, loudly but irrelevantly.
‘I was up at Cambridge for a few terms,’ Adam acknowledged.
‘Ah, Cambridge, Cambridge!’ Jinkinson now had a dreamy look on his face, as if remembering happy days spent punting along the Cam to Grantchester. ‘Always fancied myself as a Trinity man. But it was not to be. The streets of London have been my alma mater. Or should I say, my not so alma mater? Not such a nourishing mother at all, sir. London can be a cruel parent, indeed.’
Having said this, the ageing dandy seemed to have shot his conversational bolt. His eyes slowly closed and he began to nod off once more. Adam was about to cough to claim his attention but Jinkinson suddenly jerked back to life and stared sternly at him.
‘What can I do for you, young man?’ he asked. He appeared to be under the impression that he had never seen Adam before in his life.
‘I am looking for a Mr Jinkinson, and I presume that you are he.’
‘Presumption correct, sir.’ The man attempted a polite bow to his visitor but his paunch and his position in his chair conspired to produce no more than a vague shifting of his bulk. ‘You see before you the wreck of the human being that goes by the name of Herbert George Jinkinson. And you, sir? You are…?’
‘My name is Carver. I have learned of your name and your address through a mutual acquaintance: Mr Samuel Creech.’
To say that Jinkinson was startled by the introduction of Creech’s name, Adam decided, would have been a gross understatement. He seemed poleaxed by it. The blood drained from his face. A look of apparently intense pain twisted his features.
‘Are you unwell, Mr Jinkinson?’
‘It is no matter, sir.’ Jinkinson struggled manfully to regain his composure. ‘I am suffering from a derangement of my interior. No more than that, I can assure you. Would you believe that no food save a small milk pudding has passed my lips in the last twenty-four hours, and yet a storm still rages in the inner man?’ He patted briefly at his sizeable stomach as if to calm the tempest. ‘A Mr Creech, you say? I believe I have some small recollection of the name.’