‘And where does Ada live?’
The boy shrugged again. ‘She’s a tart. She don’t live anywhere.’
‘But where would Mr Jinkinson go if he was visiting her?’
‘I told you.’ Simpkins had swapped his tone of indignation for one of exaggerated patience. Adam, he implied, was being extremely slow on the uptake. ‘She’s a working girl. He’d go where she’d go. And she’d go anywhere, if you takes my meaning.’ Simpkins indulged himself in another ostentatious wink. In his own mind, he was now a man of the world exchanging pleasantries with another man of the world.
‘How can you be so sure the lady in question is a working girl?’
‘Well, old Jinks give her a sov at least twice to my knowledge.’ Simpkins tapped the side of his nose. ‘And I think I knows what he give her it for.’
‘And what would that be, Mr Simpkins?’
The boy looked at Adam with withering pity. He shook his head wearily as if he could scarcely credit such naivety.
‘What d’you think, guv?’ he said. ‘He’s been paying her to get amongst her frills. And, if that don’t make her a tart, I’d like to know what does.’
Adam realised he would get no further asking after Ada.
‘I assume, Mr Simpkins, that you would have no objection if my associate and I were to have a look around your employer’s office. It is important that we find him.’
‘I ain’t so sure about that.’ The boy sounded doubtful. ‘I don’t know as you can just march in and start a-rummaging around in old Jinks’s things.’
Quint, who had been quiet up to this point, was beginning to lose his patience. He made as if to raise his right fist. Simpkins noticed the movement.
‘Although,’ he added with alacrity, ‘I suppose there ain’t any harm in it.’
‘None whatsoever,’ said Adam soothingly. ‘Indeed, there might be a half crown in it. For you, that is.’
The boy’s face brightened. ‘Well, in that case, it’s a business transaction, ain’t it? And old Jinks, he’d want me to look after his business transactions, wouldn’t he?’
‘Indubitably.’ Adam slipped the coin into the boy’s hand.
‘Come this way, gents.’ Simpkins opened the connecting door between his own office and his master’s with a flourish. He ushered Adam and Quint inside with the dignified air of a butler inviting visitors into a stately home. ‘I shall leave you to your rummaging. If you wants me, I shall be next door. Attending to matters appertaining to the private enquiry business.’
The boy left the room. Quint walked over to Jinkinson’s desk and ran his finger across its surface. He examined the dust on his fingertip.
‘He ain’t lying. Been nobody here for days.’ He wiped his finger on his jacket and looked around Jinkinson’s shabby and sparsely furnished office. The carousing boors and the haughty hidalgo stared down from the prints on the wall. ‘What exackly are we after, anyways? Can’t hide nothing here. Or nothing worth hiding.’
‘Some clue that might indicate Jinkinson’s whereabouts.’ Adam pulled at the handle of a drawer to the desk. To his slight surprise, it opened immediately. ‘He keeps his desk unlocked, I see. Which suggests that he keeps his valuables elsewhere.’
‘If he has any.’
Adam began to empty the desk drawer of its contents. A small saucer with the remains of several penn’orth of pickled whelks on it. A length of string and a lump of very ancient-looking sealing wax. A piece of writing paper on which Jinkinson appeared to have been practising his own signature. A chipped enamel vesta box. Quint picked the latter off the desktop.
‘Like something I could buy in a cheap swag shop,’ he said dismissively.
‘You could find a similar one for sixpence at the Baker Street bazaar,’ Adam agreed. ‘And still have the change to take in the waxworks at Madame Tussauds while you were about it.’
The young man pulled the drawer entirely out of the desk. He shook it and the last of its contents fluttered to the floor.
‘This is a curious thing for him to keep,’ he said, slotting the drawer back into its place and picking up something that had fallen in the dust. He held it up for Quint to see. It was a fragment of cloth clearly torn from the corner of a larger piece, perhaps a sheet. Written on the fabric in black and seemingly indelible ink were the words: ‘Stolen from Bellamy’s Lodging House, Golden Lane’.
‘Why would he have this?’
‘Reminder of a client’s address?’ suggested Quint.
‘It’s an odd reminder to have. Why not just write the address down? And, in any case, someone living in a lodging house would be unlikely to have the money or the inclination to employ an enquiry agent. And why leave the lodging house with a sheet or a blanket or whatever this comes from?’
Quint was swift with an answer to the last question. ‘Bedding gets thieved from these paddingkens all the time. Fetches a bob or two down any market. That’s why the keepers of the kens mark it like that. Maybe Jinkinson has took to lifting the stuff. Maybe he’s that desperate for rhino.’
‘Why rip off just the corner?’ Adam knew the answer as soon as he had asked the question. ‘Ah, of course, it’s the only means of identifying the lodging house to which it belonged. But why keep it? Why not simply throw it away?’
This time Quint had no ready answer.
‘Maybe the boy would know,’ Adam said.
The boy was no longer in the outer room. In the ten minutes that Adam and Quint had spent in the inner office, Simpkins had clearly decided that his work was done and had left.
‘Where’s that young varmint gone?’
‘The half crown I gave him was doubtless crying out to be spent,’ Adam said. ‘Find the nearest alehouse and I wager you will find Master Simpkins.’
‘There’s the Seven Stars in Carey Street. That’s just around the corner.’
‘We shall try the Seven Stars first. I recall I passed it on the first day I was dogging Jinkinson’s footsteps.’
A brewery dray had stopped in the middle of the street outside the pub. Its driver and his assistant had climbed out of their vehicle and were pulling down the ropes they would need to ease the barrels of beer into the cellar. The publican emerged carrying two tankards of ale for the men. It was clear that this would be no speedy delivery.
Adam and Quint walked past the dray and turned into the Seven Stars. Adam raised his hat to the landlord as they passed. The man nodded briefly. Inside the taproom, three young men with a fine sense of their own importance, articled clerks perhaps, stood by the bar with glasses of stout in their hands. They were shouting to one another about a river excursion they had made at the weekend.
‘There ain’t no fish dinner to match a Greenwich fish dinner,’ the noisiest of the young men was proclaiming truculently as if the others might be prepared to disagree with him. ‘And there ain’t no Greenwich fish dinner to match the one they gives you at the Ship.’
Far from disagreeing, his companions hurried to concur with him. ‘You ain’t wrong there, Walter,’ one said. The other raised his glass and saluted his friend’s good taste ‘That’s the truth of it,’ Walter went on, still seeming to detect a hint of dissent somewhere in the room. ‘And anybody as argues differently ain’t worth a cobbler’s curse.’
Next to Walter and his friends, propped nonchalantly against the wooden bar and intent on giving the impression that he was as much a man of the world as they were, was Simpkins. He was drinking from a tumbler of gin and surveying the room with a lordly air. A cheap stovepipe hat was jammed on his head at what he clearly considered to be a jaunty angle. He didn’t look delighted to see Adam and Quint again, but nor did he look worried by their appearance.