Some of this was known to Adam and passed through his mind as the sad servant ushered him into Sir Willoughby’s presence and withdrew. He looked at the Oughtred portraits and at the head of a stag which held pride of place above the hearth, its glass eyes visibly protruding as if it had met its death by strangulation rather than shooting. He tried not to feel intimidated by the weight of Oughtred history hanging in the air of the vast drawing room.
The present baronet looked little less pop-eyed than the stag and just as dissatisfied with the world as his ancestors in the portraits. He had a glass in one hand and was puffing on a large cigar. Neither appeared to be giving him much pleasure. He took the cigar from his mouth to greet his visitor.
‘Come in, Carver. Bargate here will get you a drink. Whiskey and soda do?’
Sir Willoughby spoke as if it would have to do because no other drink was on offer. Bargate, a man who looked no less doleful than his fellow servant but several decades older, emerged from the shadows in which he had been lurking. He set off towards the decanters. Bald and astonishingly wrinkled, his head jutting forward as he shambled across the room, he was like a 200-year-old tortoise, stripped of its shell and sent out into the world to serve drinks to its betters. The baronet returned the cigar to his mouth. A blast of smoke erupted from it and hung in clouds in the air. These clouds seemed, suddenly and miraculously, to gain motive power from somewhere and began to make their way towards Adam. In seconds his head was swathed in them and he was hard pressed not to break down in a coughing fit.
‘I knew your father, Carver,’ the baronet said. ‘Saw a lot of him when he was putting together that Lincolnshire Railway Company. But I do not believe I have had the pleasure of meeting you. Came across your name in the papers, of course, when you returned from European Turkey. Even had Bargate buy that book of yours. Never got round to reading it, mind. But we haven’t been introduced. Have we?’
The MP sounded suddenly uncertain, as if aware that he met dozens of people in the course of an average day and that he couldn’t trust himself to remember every single one of them.
‘No, sir, we have not met.’ Adam fought his way out of the poisonous miasma of Sir Willoughby’s cigar smoke in order to reply. ‘Although we have acquaintances in common. And we are both, I believe, members of the Marco Polo.’
‘Ah, the Marco Polo. Were you at the Speke dinner?’ The MP did not bother to wait for an answer. ‘The food was foul, was it not? Lord knows who the chef is. Some filthy Frenchman, I suppose.’
Sir Willoughby waved his hand towards the centre of the room where a round mahogany table stood, surrounded by half a dozen chairs.
‘Shall we take a seat?’
Again without waiting for an answer, and looking far from confident that it would support him, Sir Willoughby walked across and lowered himself gingerly into one of the chairs. Adam pulled another out from the table. Bargate reappeared to hand him his drink.
‘How can I help you, my boy?’ The MP was clearly prepared to cast himself in the role of a benevolent father figure, ready at all times to dispense his wisdom to the younger generation.
Adam hesitated. How much should he tell Sir Willoughby? He was aware that he might blunder unwittingly onto treacherous ground. Yet questions had to be asked. If the baronet found some of them offensive, there was little Adam could do about it.
‘Little to do with the Marco Polo, sir. Although it was at the Speke dinner that the story began.’
Sir Willoughby looked politely puzzled. What story beginning at the Speke dinner could possibly have anything to do with me? his half-raised eyebrow seemed to say.
‘It was there that I met a gentleman named Samuel Creech.’
In an instant, the baronet’s expression changed from puzzlement to curiosity. He looked long and hard at Adam and then turned to his servant.
‘Leave us, Bargate,’ he said. As the doddering retainer made his slow way to the door, Adam and Sir Willoughby stared at one another in silence. The younger man felt uncomfortable. It was a relief to him when he heard the door to the drawing room close.
‘Creech is dead,’ the baronet said. ‘Slain in some outrage in the suburbs.’
‘Yes, that is so. He was murdered on the Wednesday of last week. It is evident that you knew the gentleman in question.’
‘Most certainly I knew Creech. I knew him for forty years and more. We were at school together.’
‘May I risk an impertinent question and ask how you learned of Creech’s murder?’
‘Impertinent or not, I cannot see its significance.’ The baronet thought for a moment. ‘Either I read about it in the Morning Post or a mutual acquaintance told me.’
‘Could that mutual acquaintance have been Lewis Garland or James Abercrombie?’
‘It might have been Garland, yes. Abercrombie is out of the country.’ The baronet was beginning to sound annoyed. He was not a man used to being questioned in so direct a manner. ‘It might have been someone else entirely.’
‘But Garland and Abercrombie both knew him?’
‘Certainly they knew him.’ Sir Willoughby spoke now as if Adam was insisting on displaying almost inconceivable imbecility. ‘We were all four at Eton at the same time. Garland arrived the year before me and Abercrombie the year after, but we were all there together.’
‘I have arranged to see Mr Garland at the House later in the week.’
Sir Willoughby grunted as if to suggest that Adam’s social calendar was of little interest to him.
‘Sound enough fellow, Garland,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Although bit too much of a reading man. When we were at school. When we were up at Trinity. Probably reads too much now, to judge by his speeches in the House. All very well being on nodding terms with the classics but a gentleman shouldn’t make a fetish out of them. Nobody wants Homer dropped into a debate about married women’s property. Not sure anybody wants a debate about married women’s property at all, but that’s a different matter.’
‘So I am right in thinking, sir, that you and Creech and Garland and Abercrombie have known one another for many years?’
‘Have I not already said as much?’ The baronet was becoming very irritated. ‘Look, what is all this about, Carver? I agreed to see you out of respect for your late father. I assumed you had something to say that related to the railway company. To the dealings I had with him before his unfortunate demise. And yet all you do is ask me questions about someone from my schooldays. Some poor devil who has met a dreadful end.’
‘It was perhaps not reported in the press but Creech’s body was found by a visitor to his house. I was that visitor.’
‘Good God!’ The baronet seemed genuinely shocked by Adam’s revelation. ‘But what has all this to do with me? I assume you cannot be scouring London for every one of Creech’s old school friends in order to tell them the unhappy news. Why have you come to me?’
‘I found something else at the house. A notebook with transactions in Creech’s handwriting. Transactions with a private enquiry agent named Jinkinson.’
Silence descended again on the room. Adam could hear nothing but a clock ticking quietly in the background.
‘I ask you again.’ Oughtred took another pull on his cigar. ‘What has this to do with me?’
‘Your name appeared frequently in the notebook.’
‘I cannot imagine why. I have scarcely seen Creech more than half a dozen times in twenty years. He spent much of that time abroad, I believe.’ Sir Willoughby’s voice was now icy. ‘And I have never had any dealings with any enquiry agent of any name.’
‘I am sorry to have to say this, sir, but I find that statement rather difficult to reconcile with the evidence of my own eyes.’