The mournful man on the neighbouring table had reached the end of his penitential meal. His plate was empty. He paid the waiter and left. On his table Adam saw a copy of the morning newspaper which had been forgotten. He thought briefly of calling after the man but decided against it. He stretched his arm across to the table and picked up the newspaper. He began to turn the pages, his eyes flickering idly from column to column. The news today, he thought, was little different from the news of a week ago, the last time he had bothered to look at a newspaper. Prussian and French politicians were still squabbling over who should sit on the Spanish throne. As if it was of any real concern to either of them. It would presumably not be long before one side or the other found the pretext for war. The pages were also full of tributes to Dickens, who had recently died, worn out by his creative exertions, at the age of fifty-eight. Adam, who had never forgotten the sheer joy of reading Pickwick and David Copperfield when he was no more than a boy, had been saddened when Jardine had told him of the author’s death a few days earlier. But now he could not concentrate on all the columns of praise for the great humorist’s genius. Instead, his eye was drawn to a few short paragraphs at the bottom of a page that were headed: ‘Outrage in Herne Hill’.
‘We are given to understand,’ the article began, ‘that a man well known to Scotland Yard as a most audacious villain has lately been apprehended in reference to the brutal murder which was committed in Herne Hill earlier this month.’ Adam read the rest of the piece and threw the newspaper to one side in exasperation. What did these scribblers know of what they wrote? How wonderfully they combined ignorance with arrogance in their presumption that they knew more than they truly did. In his indignation, he forgot altogether that, on his return from European Turkey, he had himself earned sums of money as a newspaper scribbler and that he continued to place articles in the press from time to time. One not so long ago in the very newspaper he had just cast aside. He picked it up again and looked at the article for a second time: ‘That renowned and perspicacious agent of the law Inspector James Pulverbatch…’ He could not continue. Perhaps Pulverbatch did merit the adjective ‘perspicacious’ but what did he know of this case? How could he believe that the half-witted Stirk could be the perpetrator of the crime at Herne Hill?
‘’Ere, mister.’
Adam looked down at the ragamuffin standing by the entrance to the Marco Polo. The boy was dressed in jacket and trousers of threadbare black cloth and wore a look of scowling concentration on his face. Adam was surprised that Gilzean, the Crimean veteran who was the club’s doorman, hadn’t moved the child on, but there was no sign of the old soldier.
‘The other gent told me to give you this.’
‘What other gent?’
‘And you’d give me another sixpence.’
‘Who said this?’
‘On top of the sixpence he give me.’
‘Who was the gentleman who told you this?’
‘He says to say Quint and you’d know him.’ The boy was holding a grubby scrap of paper. Adam took it from him and looked at it. Quint was not the best penman in London but he was able to scrawl enough words to convey his meaning. ‘Charing X Otel. 8 oclock. See yew ther. Owtside.’
‘You was to give me a sixpence, he says.’
‘Did the gentleman named Quint say no more?’
‘Just to give me a sixpence.’ The boy was single-minded in his pursuit of his earnings, Adam thought, as he reached in his pocket.
‘Here,’ he said, holding out a shilling. ‘Take this. I haven’t a sixpence about me.’
‘Thanks, mister.’ The boy looked at the more valuable coin. He seized it and then turned and ran off as quickly as he could, probably terrified that Adam might change his mind and demand the money back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Was you in search of poses plastiques, gentlemen? Very voluptuous ladies, sirs, but entirely artistic. Only poses from the Greek and Roman. This way, if you please, gentlemen.’ The speaker was short and fat, flesh pouring into the inadequate container of a corduroy suit and spilling over its confines. He had red eyes, a bulbous nose and a mouth from which vile exhalations of poorly digested meat, gin and tobacco issued forth to assail passers-by as relentlessly as his patter. He gestured leeringly towards a darkened doorway behind him. ‘Beauties fresh from the bagnios of Paris, sir. All as nature intended them to be.’
Quint took Adam’s arm. The young man looked too much like what he was, an innocently basking dolphin amid a sea of sharks. His manservant manoeuvred him past the foul-breathed tout.
Evening was falling and the two men were making their way through a warren of narrow streets and ill-lit alleyways off the Strand. Unaccustomed to this secret London behind the façade of the better-regulated streets and squares he usually frequented, Adam was lost. They had entered the maze soon after he had descended from a cab outside the new Charing Cross Hotel and found Quint waiting for him there. Quint had said little in greeting but beckoned him to follow. Almost immediately, Adam had lost track of where he was, rapidly resigning himself simply to continuing on the twisting and turning route on which his manservant led him. Other than the belief, founded more on faith than evidence, that the Strand was somewhere to his right and Covent Garden somewhere to his left, he had no idea where he was. Slightly to his surprise, he found the sensation of being so lost in London exciting rather than disconcerting.
They may have been striking out beyond Adam’s beaten path but, for others, this was clearly home territory. The streets were crowded. Men, women and children, nearly all poorly dressed, hastened along them. Shops were still open. Suits of clothes, like emaciated corpses on a gallows, hung from a rail above one of them. Further along the narrow street, a butcher had removed the burners from his gas lamps in search of brighter illumination for his premises and great tongues of flame shot into the air. Glistening pigs’ heads revolved in the light he had created, which also shone on the sides of beef and mutton lying on his stall, revealing every vein and lump of fat in them. Next door to the butcher’s was a bookmaker’s whose shopfront was lit with almost equal brilliance. A blind beggar stood outside it, as if bathing his body in the light he could not see. Somewhere an unseen street organ was playing and its jingling music could just be heard above the constant roar of the crowds.
People were intent on their own business and swarmed purposefully through the streets. On several occasions, Adam was obliged to move swiftly to avoid collisions. The barker for the poses plastiques was not alone. Others of his ilk begged and cajoled the crowds to enter the halls of entertainment that employed them. On one particularly squalid lane, a series of luridly coloured posters invited passers-by to enter a cheap theatre and enjoy performances of ‘Red-Handed Ralph, the Fiend of Shoreditch’. On its corner, where it crossed another alley, a family of street acrobats was performing its routine. Paterfamilias, dressed in an outfit reminiscent of a pantomime harlequin, held a long wooden pole upright, its base lodged firmly in his waistband. Perched precariously near its top, his two small children, a girl and a boy, adopted a series of poses and attitudes. All three wore expressions of extreme ennui on their faces. Few passers-by had stopped to watch and those that had seemed as bored as the performers. Amidst the swirling crowds, Adam, so obviously well dressed and well fed, was feeling uncomfortably conspicuous.