The lodging-house keeper, scenting the possibility of profit, had changed his demeanour. Sly ingratiation had taken the place of surly defensiveness.
‘This ’ere count,’ he said.
‘What do you know of him?’
‘Nothing much. But he might have left some things. Here in the house.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Some val’able things,’ Mr Pradd suggested hopefully.
‘We can be the judges of that. Let us see what he left.’
The man seemed to be weighing up the potential advantage to be had either in showing what Jinkinson had left or keeping them to himself. In the end, he decided to let Adam and Quint see what he had. He moved across the office and pulled a small, brassbound mahogany box from beneath a rickety chest of drawers which was standing against the far wall. He put it on the table in the centre of the room. Then, suddenly dropping his left hand into the innermost recesses of his greasy trousers, he began a strange, writhing dance. His visitors watched him in astonishment.
‘The bleedin’ key’s down ’ere somewhere,’ he said.
Adam and Quint continued to watch as Pradd struggled to locate the missing key. Eventually, with a yelp of triumph, he pulled it from the innards of his trousers like a conjuror revealing a hidden rabbit. He thrust the key into the lock and the mahogany box opened. He took out a small cloth bag, unfastened the drawstrings that closed it and emptied the contents on the table.
‘I’ve been keepin’ these things what the count left. What he left under his bed,’ he said. ‘Keepin’ ’em in trust, you might say.’
‘Very praiseworthy, Mr Pradd.’
‘Worth a bob or two, that is. Keepin’ ’em in trust.’
Adam was turning over the handful of items the bag had contained. There was nothing in it that warranted the lodging-house keeper’s suggestion of value. There were two buttons which looked to have detached themselves from one of Jinkinson’s flamboyantly coloured waistcoats, and a clay pipe. There were half a dozen small scraps of paper torn from a notepad, on which Jinkinson had scribbled some lines of verse. Looking closely at them, Adam realised they were taken from what could only be love poems. The enquiry agent had been lying on his bed in this seedy lodging house and writing love poetry. When he had been dissatisfied with the promptings of his muse, he had torn the paper into bits and thrown them under the bed.
‘So you sure them things ain’t val’able?’ Pradd asked, reluctant to let go of his dreams of financial reward.
‘They are merely buttons and bits of paper, Mr Pradd.’
‘There’s writing on them bits of paper, though.’ Pradd, Adam decided, could not read. It would explain the ridiculous aliases in the register. Visitors to the lodging house could sign in under any name they wanted and the keeper would be none the wiser. However, illiterate though he was, he seemed to have an almost mystical belief in the power of words and writing. It explained why he had kept the tattered scraps of paper and why he continued to hope that they held some value.
‘It’s nothing of significance. Merely lines of poetry.’
‘Ain’t poetry of significance?’
‘Very much so. I would not wish to denigrate the significance of the Muses. In the past, I have even been responsible for committing verses to paper myself.’
Pradd looked puzzled.
‘In this particular case, however,’ Adam went on, ‘the poetry seems to be of importance only to the poet. And perhaps to the person the poet was addressing.’
The lodging-house keeper, realising at last that there was no profit to be made from the items he had preserved, began to put them back into the bag.
‘Jest tryin’ to be ’elpful.’
‘You have been helpful, Mr Pradd. Most helpful. And now, before we leave you, we would like to see the bed where the count slept on the last night he was here.’
‘Don’t want much, do ’ee?’ Pradd’s brief dalliance with courtesy was over. Seeing his chance of reward disappearing, he reverted to his earlier bad temper. ‘And I ain’t got nothing to do, o’ course, but run around after every nosey bugger as wants to know the far end of everythin’.’
‘You are, I am sure, a busy man,’ Adam replied, ‘and I appreciate the time you have given us. But I must beg this one further favour of you.’
Adam held out a silver coin, which Pradd promptly pocketed. The gift seemed to do little to placate the man, since he turned on his heel without a word and marched out of his office. Adam and Quint followed as he left and headed up the stairs.
Once upon a time, the building had been a handsome dwelling place, but it had long since degenerated into a slum. Paint was peeling from all the walls. The landings were bare of carpets or any other covering. The glass on the windows that looked out onto the street was so grimy that only a little light could penetrate it. Several panes had been broken and inexpertly mended with balls of rags that had been screwed up and thrust into the openings. The stairs themselves looked half-broken and potentially dangerous. For one flight, the wooden handrail had disappeared and been replaced by a grubby length of rope. Adam could peer beneath it and down the stairwell to where one of the lodgers had left the kitchen fireplace and was looking up at the three of them mounting to the top floor. When he realised that Adam was gazing back at him, he returned immediately to the kitchen.
The dormitory where Jinkinson had slept was on the second floor. Pradd stood in its doorway and gestured towards its far corner. Adam and Quint looked in. A dozen dilapidated beds were crowded into a room that Adam, examining it with mounting disbelief, thought too small for one. Quint, more used to such scenes, was less astonished.
‘He crams ’em in as close as barrelled herrings, don’t he?’ he remarked, noticing his master’s surprise.
‘But how can this be allowed? What of the regulations?’
Adam became aware of a noise like wheezing bellows at his elbow. It was Quint laughing.
‘Bless you, guv’nor. The regulations are right enough. It’s just that there’s not that many regulators as is interested in ’em.’
‘What about the book we saw downstairs?’
‘The book must have names,’ Pradd reiterated, as if Adam was questioning this requirement.
‘The names go down in the book,’ Quint said. ‘If that’s done, there’s precious few regulators as’ll look much further. What I can’t fathom is why the gent would come here at all.’
‘Maybe he brought Ada here. Unsavoury though the place is, it might have been the only place they could meet. It might have been possible for them to snatch some time together when the other lodgers were out.’ Adam sounded doubtful that this was likely. Pradd was outraged by the suggestion.
‘I keeps a very decent house here,’ he said. ‘If I finds any of ’em dancing the blanket hornpipe behind my back, they’re out.’
‘How can you prevent men and women from consorting one with another?’
Pradd stared at Adam in bewilderment.
‘ ’Ow can you stop ’em doing the double-buttock jig?’ Quint asked.
‘Can’t always. But there’s one floor for the men, one floor for the women. If any of ’em is ketched on the wrong floor, it’s a ticket out the door for ’im. Or ’er, o’ course.’ The man thought a moment. ‘It’s mostly ’im, though.’
‘Well, I can scarcely believe that Jinkinson would entertain his doxy here. We have reached a dead end, Quint.’ Adam turned to leave. ‘We have detained Mr Pradd long enough. We must go.’
Quint and Adam left Pradd and his lodging house and returned to Golden Lane. As they turned the corner into Old Street, a man was waiting for them. It was the lodger who had left the fireside to watch them climb the stairs. Up close, Adam thought, he looked like an animated scarecrow. The man was exceptionally thin-faced, his cheeks so caved in he seemed to be permanently sucking at the air. In some long-vanished historical era, the object on his head had been a black felt billycock. Now it squatted on his greasy hair like a diseased cat about to spring on a mouse. The cuffs of his linen shirt, tattered and filthy, poked out from the sleeves of an ancient velveteen jacket. The brown corduroy trousers he wore had been made for a much taller man and had suffered some kind of abrupt amputation below the knee to enable them to fit. They were so patched with oddments of fabric cut from other garments that there seemed little original material left. The outfit was completed by a battered pair of black boots with holes in them from which small puffs of dust emerged as he shifted uneasily from foot to foot.