‘All very well for you to say,’ Quint responded, sounding aggrieved and still tearing chunks from the bread in front of him. ‘You ain’t the one who’s been chasing old Jinkinson all afternoon and spent his time face down in the muck. You’ve prob’ly been greasing your gills down some chophouse.’
‘Not guilty, your honour. However, your courage in casting yourself down amidst the inn yard’s effluvia certainly deserves acknowledgement. Please accept my apologies. But do slow down, man, or you’ll choke yourself and I will have no idea how to save you.’ Adam took a long pull from his glass of beer. ‘So, what more did you hear from Jinkinson and Garland as you were lying so selflessly in the gutter?’
‘As I say, not much.’ Quint drank his own ale. ‘Our man, he says something about an ’arbour in the woods, whatever that might mean. Then there’s some pretty choice insults exchanged atween the two of ’em. Not that I can hear ’em exactly on account of my ear’s next door to a pile of horseshit, but I can get the general drift of ’em. Then Garland makes to leave. You come bothering me again, he says, and I’ll darken your bleeding daylights for you. Or words to that effect. And he stomps off up the Strand in the direction he come from.’
‘What about Jinkinson? What did he do?’
‘What d’you think? He goes into the pub for a drop of the lush. And I picks meself up and heads back here.’
‘Well done, Quint. Thanks to your initiative in hurling yourself into the filth of that pub yard, we now know that Jinkinson has approached two of the men who were named in that notebook. And at least one of them was extremely displeased when he did so. But why did he contact them?’ Adam stared into his now empty glass of beer as if the answer to his question might be lurking among the dregs. ‘To blackmail them, we must suppose.’
‘What if this Jinkinson we’ve been trailing around town for days is the cove what killed Creech?’ Quint asked. ‘What if he was putting the squeeze on him as well, and things got a bit out of hand? You given that a thought?’
‘I have, indeed.’
‘Any result from giving it a thought?’
‘I have come to the conclusion that Jinkinson is not the stuff of which murderers are made. He may well be a bit of a rogue, I grant you, but he is not the man who despatched poor Creech from the world. He was utterly astonished when I told him of Creech’s death. He would have had to be a Kean returned from the grave to feign the surprise I saw on his face that day in his office.’
Quint stood and moved towards the fire where Adam was slumped low in the depths of his favourite armchair. He gathered up the empty glass that the young man had rested on one of its arms.
‘You want another of these?’ he asked, dangling the glass in front of his master’s eyes. Adam shook his head. The servant retreated to the kitchen.
‘You come up with any more ideas about Creech getting hisself killed, then?’ he called. He returned to the sitting room clutching a green beer bottle and began to paw at its cork stopper. ‘Like who might have done it?’
Adam shook his head again. ‘No, I have not yet come to any conclusion about the identity of the murderer.’ The young man gazed up at the ceiling. ‘However, I have not been entirely idle while you have been trailing down the Strand after our friend.’
Quint grunted, as if to suggest that he wasn’t sure he believed this. He had succeeded in removing the cork from his bottle and was now pouring its contents gently into his own glass. He stared at the beer with a look of intense concentration as he did so.
‘I have travelled out once again to Herne Hill,’ Adam continued. ‘The place already looks nearly as deserted as a haunted house. Pulverbatch and his men appear to have no further interest in it. Its only inhabitant is a young man named John. He was one of Creech’s servants. He is the only one who has not yet moved on to another situation, although he was eager to assure me that he has had offers from several most respectable families in the neighbourhood.’
‘He’s there on his own?’ Quint looked up in surprise. He had almost finished his careful decanting of his beer into the glass. ‘I raise my ’at to him. Wouldn’t catch me lying down to sleep in a dead man’s ’ouse.’
‘Well, not everyone is as plagued by his imagination as you are, Quint. John is a phlegmatic character — a man unlikely to be troubled by the spirits of the dead.’
Quint grunted again and tipped half the contents of his glass down his throat.
‘This ’ere John tell you anything?’ he asked, after allowing his drink to settle.
‘Not as much as I had hoped,’ Adam admitted. ‘Creech used an agency in Cheapside to hire his servants. None of them knew anything of him other than that he was a gentleman arrived recently in London from abroad. John thought he had been, and I quote his words exactly, “living with the heathen, sir”. But John’s ideas about geography were a bit hazy. He appeared to believe that Greece was in Africa.’
‘Where were all the servants when Creech got topped?’
‘He had given them the day off. John and the others thought that this was strange but none of them was going to turn his back on an extra day of freedom.’
‘We was coming to see ’im. Maybe ’e didn’t want his drudges to know about us.’ Quint had picked up his glass and was staring reflectively at the liquid inside. ‘This John say anything about visitors?’
‘He had none.’ Adam hauled himself to his feet and began to pace about the room. His manservant watched him, occasionally sipping at what remained of his beer. ‘The consensus below stairs seemed to be that this was odd.’
‘Sounds odd to me.’
‘The desire for solitude is not always to be condemned as eccentric. There might have been perfectly innocent reasons why Mr Creech wanted to see no one.’
‘Maybe,’ Quint sniffed, ‘but you don’t believe that any more ’n I do.’
‘No, you are correct. I don’t.’ Adam had stopped by the window. He twitched the curtain aside and looked down to the pavements below. Doughty Street, gated at both its ends, was quiet. Only a solitary man, dressed in a long black coat and carrying a malacca cane, was in view. Adam watched as the man made his way down the street and disappeared from sight. Then he turned back into the room. ‘And our friend John did have one tale to tell of a visitor.’
Quint, who had finished his beer and had been engaged in pushing his empty glass aimlessly back and forth on the table, looked up.
‘Anyone we know?’
‘Difficult to tell. It was several weeks before the murder. Creech had given all the servants time off. Apparently, he did this fairly frequently. John would have been going to spend time with his sister and his young niece in Stepney. He had walked as far as the railway station when he remembered that he had a present for the girl which he had left in his room. He came back to the villa and let himself in at the servants’ entrance.’
‘And there was some’un else in the house.’
‘You run ahead of me, Quint, but you are right. John heard voices coming from the library as he made his way past its door. And then the door opened and his master stormed out. He was furious already, and he was even more furious when he saw John. He ordered him to leave immediately. He was not to go up to the attics to retrieve what he had returned for. So the young lady in Stepney had to wait for her gift.’
‘Did John see the cove Creech was with?’
‘Sadly, he did not, but he heard his voice.’
Quint cocked his head inquisitively.
‘He was a gentleman,’ Adam said. ‘The voice was that of a gentleman. That was all John could say.’
‘That ain’t a fat lot of ’elp.’