‘I ain’t got the first notion what you’re talking of,’ Quint said.
‘But you are content that we should pursue our enquiries?’
The servant nodded.
‘Good!’ Adam clapped his hands together and leaped from the chair. ‘So we are left to confront the puzzle of Jinkinson and what he knows and does not know. Why was he so unforthcoming?’
‘He was probably trying to work out what you was after. And whether there was any tin to be had out of helping you.’
‘Possibly.’ Adam sounded unconvinced. ‘In that case, he must have decided I had no tin to offer since he was exceedingly unhelpful. But I thought he was more scared than anything else. Maybe of the police. Maybe of somebody else.’
‘Course he was scared. As I say, nobody wants his name spoke in the same breath as a dead man.’
‘No, it was more than that, Quint. Jinkinson knows something that I should like to know.’
‘He ain’t about to tell you, though.’
‘Most certainly not. Which is why I propose to follow him when he leaves his office tomorrow and see whether or not his actions reveal more of the truth than his words.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eight o’clock the next morning found Adam once more in the vicinity of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was a surprisingly cold morning for June and he was shivering from the icy breeze that was blowing along the street. To his left, a small platoon of labourers from one of the gas companies had arrived to dig up the road. The men were shouting cheerfully at one another as they unloaded their tools from the back of a cart. From where Adam was standing, he could just see through the arched entrance that led into Poulter’s Court. A minute earlier, Jinkinson had descended his staircase in company with his boy assistant and the two were now engaged in some kind of spat. Simpkins was pointing back up the staircase and gesticulating. Jinkinson aimed a cuff in the direction of his clerk’s head but missed by a good foot. With a shouted instruction which Adam could not hear well enough to interpret, he set off down Serle Street in the direction of the Strand and Fleet Street. The boy returned to the office. Jinkinson was clearly in good spirits. Once again he was dressed to stand out from the crowd in a mustard-yellow jacket and chequered trousers. For a man who had drunk so fully and so freely the previous day, he seemed remarkably cheerful. It was difficult to believe, Adam thought, that he was not suffering the pains of a hangover, but he showed no obvious signs of it. Nor were there indications of the fears that Jinkinson had showed when told of Creech’s murder. A night’s sleep seemed to have dispelled them. There was an unmistakeable spring in his step. He was not actively twirling the ivory-knobbed stick he was carrying as he walked, but he had the air of a man who would do so at any moment. Adam followed him at a discreet distance. Jinkinson showed no sign that he suspected or feared that anyone might be tailing him. Two urchins, amused by the colour of his jacket, pestered him as he walked, but he waved them amiably on their way.
From Serle Street he turned into Carey Street. Outside the door of a pub named the Seven Stars he stopped briefly, as if contemplating early morning refreshment. Instead, he crossed the road and walked into Bell Yard. There were few people about and Adam was no more than ten yards behind his quarry, but Jinkinson seemed still to be oblivious of his follower. Emerging onto Fleet Street opposite Middle Temple Lane, both pursued and pursuer were suddenly caught up in the bedlam of a London crowd as they turned towards Ludgate Hill. Traffic, funnelled through the bottleneck of Temple Bar, had come to a halt. Adam looked swiftly to his right where Wren’s stone edifice squatted in the middle of the highway. Pedestrians, squeezed under its side arches, jostled past one another. A light, perhaps a gas lamp, could be seen in the room above the central archway, which was an office of Child’s the bankers. He turned his attention once more to his quarry. Jinkinson had wasted no time in pushing his bulk through the crowds and Adam soon feared he would lose sight of him. He made his own way through the press of bodies, elbowing others out of the way before they elbowed him. As he walked on, the source of the chaos became clearer. There was another obstruction further up Fleet Street and the road had become a tangle of stalled vehicles. Omnibuses, cabs, horses and carts, waggons and drays had all come to a halt and their drivers, shouting and cursing, added their own contributions to the city’s unceasing roar. There was no clear way across the street. Over the heads of the jostling men and horses, Adam saw Jinkinson dodging into one of the innumerable alleyways that branched off Fleet Street. For the moment, he was unable to follow him.
Eventually, Adam pulled himself free of the crowds and reached the spot where Jinkinson had disappeared. He was temporarily uncertain which way to go. Either side of a tobacconist’s shop, two narrow lanes ran in parallel. Which one had the man taken? Adam had little time to decide. He chose the right. The roar of the traffic was left almost instantly behind. He had gone no more than twenty yards down the alley when another obstruction appeared. A boy, barefoot and filthy, stood in his path. He held out a hand so black with dirt that mustard and cress could have been grown in it, and begged for ‘Just a ha’penny, sir.’ The boy’s clothing was astonishingly threadbare. He looked as if he had simply crawled naked through a pile of disintegrating rags and trusted to chance that some of them would attach themselves to his body. Only a handful had. Adam moved past him but the urchin followed, still calling for his halfpenny. Adam stopped and reached into his pocket for a coin. He held a penny in his hand so that the boy could see it.
‘Did a gentleman in yellow pass this way?’
The boy grabbed for the penny. Adam moved his hand. The boy turned a grubby and sulky face up at him. Then he pointed to another, even narrower, alley, which branched off the first. Adam had not even noticed the entrance to this second alley.
‘He went dahn there,’ the boy said.
‘Thank you. The penny is yours.’
The boy snatched it from Adam’s hand before he had finished speaking and ran off. Adam turned into the second passage and found, to his surprise, that it doubled back on itself. Within moments, he was once more on Fleet Street. What was Jinkinson doing? Adam’s first thought was that the enquiry agent had observed his follower and was attempting to shake him off but, as he looked up Fleet Street towards St Paul’s, he saw the man still ahead of him. Jinkinson was loitering outside a barber’s shop, standing beneath its red-and-white striped pole and peering intently into its window. Eventually he moved on and Adam was able to continue his pursuit. Passing the barber’s, Adam looked briefly into the window himself but he could see nothing more interesting than a sign which advertised shaves at a penny and haircuts at twopence.
Jinkinson, twenty yards in front of him, suddenly dodged into the traffic that trundled towards Ludgate Hill. For a moment, Adam was seized by the mad thought that the man had decided to commit suicide by casting himself beneath the passing vehicles. However, it was almost immediately clear that Jinkinson was an experienced London pedestrian. The cries and shouts of enraged drivers drifted back to where Adam was standing, but Jinkinson, showing unexpected agility in one so fat, had glided through the traffic and had safely reached the other side of Fleet Street. Now, to the astonishment of his pursuer, he turned back towards the Strand and began to walk purposefully in that direction. Perplexed, Adam stood on the pavement opposite, jostled by the crowds and wondering what to do. He decided that he had little choice but to follow Jinkinson’s example and cross through the traffic. Slipping between two cabs that had been forced to a halt, he evaded a cart piled high with baskets of fruit heading in the other direction and gained the far side. Jinkinson was still in sight but marching briskly into the distance. Within a couple of minutes, both the enquiry agent and his pursuer were past Middle Temple Lane and heading towards Westminster.