‘Of no use to us at all, really. “Gentleman” is such an elastic term. But John did hear something of the discussion that was taking place just prior to his master emerging hotfoot from the library. I suspect that, although he would die rather than admit it, John had been loitering outside the door, listening to the conversation for some time.’
‘Nosy little bleeder.’
‘Absolutely. He was indulging in one of the worst crimes a servant can commit. But his sin provides us with a little more knowledge of Creech’s mysterious visitor.’
‘Did he ’ear his name?’
‘Nothing quite so useful as that, I’m afraid. He heard voices raised in anger. He heard the word “gold” which, unsurprisingly, piqued his curiosity. He heard the unknown visitor shouting about travelling to Greece. Indeed, that was when I learned that John labours under the misapprehension that Greece is in Africa. He then heard Creech shouting back about going without him.’
‘Without ’oo?’
‘The enigmatic visitor, presumably.’
Quint sat back and twisted his face into an expression suggestive of deep thought and the careful consideration of different possibilities.
‘I ain’t sure we’re any further on than we was before you spoke to this John cove,’ he said after a moment. ‘We still ain’t got no name for the bloke Creech was raising his organ-pipe with.’
‘No, we have not,’ Adam agreed reluctantly. ‘But we do have more knowledge than we had. We know that Creech spoke to someone else of travelling to Greece. Several weeks before he met me at the Speke dinner.’
The young man crossed the room and threw himself once more into the armchair by the fire.
‘There is some connection between the argument that John witnessed and Creech’s conversation with me at the Marco Polo. There must be. And the solution to the riddle lies with this name, Euphorion. I am sure of it.’
Adam stood outside the newly finished Italianate building which housed the Foreign Office and other government departments, and watched as his friend, the Hon. Richard Sunman, emerged from its interior. It was Sunman he had been visiting on the occasion when, if Cosmo was to be believed, his presence had been noted by that infernal bore Chevenix. It was Sunman who had first recruited him into the Foreign Office’s ranks of unsalaried and unofficial travelling observers when he had been about to set out on his visit to northern Greece three years earlier. An older contemporary at Shrewsbury, the son of Baron Sunman of Petersfield had also been in his final year at Cambridge when Adam had arrived there. He had, to Adam’s surprise, sought him out at his college and insisted that they should dine together. Adam, who had always been rather in awe of the languid young aristocrat, had agreed. He had assumed that Sunman had looked him up because they had both been favoured pupils of Fields.
In the confusion following his father’s death, when Adam was obliged to go down from Cambridge, Sunman, newly ensconsed in the Foreign Office, invited him twice to meet him in his London club. On the second occasion, he had suggested that Adam might like to pass on any observations of Turkey in Europe he might make during his recently announced expedition with Professor Fields. After they had arrived in Salonika, Adam had dutifully despatched reports back to London. He had been uncertain what might or might not be of value to the Foreign Office so he had ended by sending enomously detailed accounts of very nearly everything he had seen and heard. On his return from Macedonia, he was at first doubtful that Sunman could have found these at all helpful but it soon became clear that his friend had been impressed by Adam’s thoroughness. Several times in the last eighteen months he had, in the politest possible way, issued instructions that Adam should meet him in Whitehall. There he had, again with the utmost courtesy, questioned the one-time traveller closely on news from European Turkey. Now, for the first time, it was Adam who had sent word to Sunman and requested a meeting.
‘Shall we take the air?’ the tall and elegantly dressed young man asked as he approached, waving his arm vaguely in the direction of St James’s Park.
‘By all means,’ Adam replied, falling in step with his companion. They crossed Horse Guards Parade and entered the park. As they strolled along the paths through the green trees and over the bridge across the lake, Sunman seemed disinclined to address the subject on which Adam had asked to see him. Instead he spoke lengthily and eloquently about Disraeli’s novel Lothair, newly published and all the literary rage. Adam, who disliked the politician’s fiction and had not read the book, grew impatient.
‘Are you able to assist me with the business of this man, Creech?’ he said eventually, breaking into his friend’s monologue about Lothair and the women who competed for his attention. He was aware that he was being unconscionably rude but he could restrain himself no longer. Sunman glanced at him briefly but gave no other indication that he had noticed the abruptness with which Adam had spoken.
‘A gentle word has been dropped into the ear of your acquaintance at Scotland Yard,’ he said, as the two men turned into Birdcage Walk. ‘Cumberbatch? Is that the fellow’s name?’
‘Pulverbatch.’
‘Well, whatever he calls himself, he will not trouble you any further with impertinent questions. It has been strongly suggested to him that he would do better to share what information he has with you rather than to treat you as a suspect in the case.’
‘I am grateful, Sunman.’
Adam was eager now to atone for his earlier impoliteness. He strove to locate a subject for discussion which his friend would find congenial. He found it in the Mordaunt divorce case, Sunman proving a surprising and well-informed connoisseur of society gossip. They walked on into Great George Street in animated conversation. As Westminster Bridge and Parliament came into view, they prepared to say their farewells.
‘Oh, by the by,’ Sunman said, a shade too casually, ‘it seems that the fellow Creech used to be one of us.’
‘One of us?’
‘In the service. Years ago. He was at the embassy in Greece back in the forties.’
‘But what the man was doing in Greece in the forties can scarcely have any bearing on his murder in Herne Hill in the year of our Lord 1870.’
‘Don’t know about that, old man. One or two rumours flying about.’
‘Rumours?’
‘Almost certainly nothing in them.’ Sunman, so indiscreet a few moments earlier on the subject of the Prince of Wales’s supposed amours, seemed unwilling to enlighten Adam as to the nature of the rumours. ‘This fellow Creech left the service long ago. Before the war in the Crimea. Bit of a scandal, as far as I can gather. Something about being in possession of funds that he oughtn’t to have been in possession of. You know the kind of thing I mean.’
The man from the Foreign Office looked at Adam, who indicated that he did, indeed, know the kind of thing that he meant.
‘And yet I cannot believe that the events of a quarter of a century ago have any relevance today,’ insisted Carver.
Sunman came to a halt and stood as though admiring the view of the bridge along the street.
‘You may well be right. But the feeling is that there is no harm in his death being looked into.’ The young aristocrat paused in his speech and looked around him, like a man in fear of being overheard. ‘By someone other than Pulverbatch. In an unofficial kind of way.’
‘So any further curiosity about Creech on my part would not be frowned upon by the powers that be?’
‘Not at all, old chap. More likely to be smiled upon, I would say. The police are all very well, in their own way. But a fellow like yourself…’
‘… might find something the police couldn’t.’