For a moment, Sir Willoughby looked as if Adam had slapped him across the face. He had been leaning forward in his chair to reach for his drink. He stopped and pulled back. Red dots of colour appeared on his cheeks.
‘What do you mean by that, you impudent young cub? Are you accusing me of being a liar?’
‘I hope not, sir. I hope there is some simple explanation for events. But I was in contact with the enquiry agent, Jinkinson. I followed him one day as he went about his business. He met you on Westminster Bridge. I saw the two of you in conversation together.’
‘The devil you did! And you are accusing me of being a liar. I tell you I have never met this man. Have you sunk to such a level that the word of a gentleman is not good enough for you?’
Sir Willoughby stood up and walked to the bell-rope by the fire-place, which he pulled sharply.
‘I have rung for Bargate to return. I must ask you to leave my house.’
‘But this man Jinkinson has gone missing, Sir Willoughby. He has not been seen for more than a week. Perhaps the conversation you had with him might throw some light on his disappearance.’
‘I doubt that very much. I suggest you leave at once, sir. I have no time for Jinkinsons and those who skulk about the city in pursuit of them.’ The door opened and the antiquated servant reappeared. ‘Bargate, Mr Carver is leaving. Be so good as to show him out.’
Adam had no choice but to pick up his hat and depart. He strove to look the baronet in the eye before he left, but Sir Willoughby had already performed the aristocratic trick of dismissing from his attention anything or anyone he no longer wished to acknowledge. Adam had ceased to exist for him. The young man could only turn and follow Bargate, leaving Sir Willoughby alone with his ancestors. Enveloped in cigar smoke from head to foot, the baronet remained standing impassively beneath the portraits of long-dead Oughtreds.
CHAPTER TWENTY
And so this man Creech or Sinclair or whatever he chose to call himself was a blackmailer?’
‘It looks very much like it.’
Cosmo Jardine laughed. He and Adam were sitting in the painter’s studio. The rays of the setting sun were drifting through the room’s large windows and falling unforgivingly on King Pellinore and the Questing Beast. The young artist was staring intently at his painting. As Adam spoke, he stood and moved towards his easel. He picked up a sheet from the floor and threw it over the canvas, hiding the image of the Arthurian knight.
‘It is just my confounded luck,’ he said. ‘The only man to show any interest in my paintings in months and he turns out to be a wrong ’un. And then he is discovered dead only days after visiting me.’
‘You do seem to make a poor choice of potential patrons.’
‘Creech-Sinclair chose me, if you recall.’ Jardine returned to his chair. ‘Who was the not-so-gentlemanly gentleman blackmailing?’
‘He was paying the man Jinkinson to follow three MPs. So the assumption must be that he had knowledge of all three of them that they would not want made public. Or was assuming he’d get that knowledge.’
‘Who were these men with secrets to hide?’
‘Willoughby Oughtred. James Abercrombie. Lewis Garland.’ Adam counted them off on his fingers.
‘There are Oughtreds everywhere, aren’t there? Not sure I’ve heard of a Willoughby Oughtred, though.’ Jardine stretched out his legs and stared at his shoes. ‘Abercrombie is some man of business,
isn’t he? Richer than Croesus. Garland I know. His constituency includes some of the same verdant Cotswold acres as my father’s see. What has Mr Garland been doing to attract the attention of a blackmailer?’
‘If Jinkinson and my other informant are to be believed, he is keeping a mistress. In St John’s Wood.’
Jardine laughed again, louder than before.
‘How drearily predictable,’ he said. ‘But what if Lewis Garland does have a bit of muslin on the sly? That is not exactly news that would rock the nation to its foundations.’
‘No, but embarrassing enough for him that he might wish to pay to keep it quiet. I don’t suppose your father and his fellow clergy would be delighted to know that their representative in Parliament has a fondness for bedding actresses.’
‘I cannot see how this matters very much.’ Jardine, smothering a yawn, was unconvinced. ‘Men of the cloth can be surprisingly tolerant when it comes to such affairs. At least when gentlemen like Garland are involved. They find it easier to turn a blind eye than to cast the first stone.’
‘In the great scheme of things, Cosmo, it may not matter much. No doubt all will be one a hundred years hence, but for the moment, I would say that it matters a great deal to Lewis Garland. I bow to your superior knowledge of ecclesiastical opinion but I still think that he would not wish his constituents to learn of his misdeeds. And if ensuring that meant paying a blackmailer, he might just do so.’
‘I suppose that you are correct,’ Jardine acknowledged. ‘But our parliamentary Lothario would scarcely go so far as to kill said blackmailer.’
‘No, that is true. I suppose he might hire someone to do his killing for him.’
Jardine waved his hand in dismissal of the idea. ‘You have spent too long in the lands ruled by the Turk, Adam. That sort of thing might happen in Constantinople or Salonika but you are in London now. Prominent men don’t hire assassins to dispose of their enemies.’
‘No, you are, of course, correct. It does seem unlikely.’
‘Impossible. I suppose one could just about imagine Mr Disraeli hiring bully-boys to kidnap Mr Gladstone and cast him into the Thames in a sack, but there is no other politician capable of such ruthlessness.’
Jardine lit a cigar and blew smoke towards the windows.
‘I must give up that theory, then,’ Adam said. ‘Creech’s death must have some other explanation.’
‘And you are the man to smoke out the truth, are you? To sneak surreptitiously through the city streets in pursuit of the villains and unmask them for the murderous swine they are?’
‘I am not sure I am able to do much in the sneaking line. I am under surveillance myself. The widow Gaffery twitches her parlour curtains every time I leave the house. She is convinced that I am smuggling women in and out of my rooms with the sole aim of ruining her reputation with the neighbours.’
‘And are you?’
‘I have no opportunity to do so.’
‘And yet it would be so easy. A cab pulls up at the door. The door is opened. There is a rustle of skirts and another young maiden is hurried into the love nest of the gallant Adam Carver.’
Adam laughed. ‘It is a pretty picture you paint but it would not be possible. Not in Doughty Street.’
‘Ah, I had clean forgot. Doughty Street is none of your common thoroughfares to be rattled through by cabs. It has a gate at either end to prevent any rude incursions by mobile vulgus.’
‘Precisely. And besides, as I say, La Gaffery stands guard at all hours like Cerberus at the gates of Hades.’
‘Not three-headed, surely?’
‘No, but quite as fierce and just as relentless.’
‘But you escape her vigilance occasionally, do you not? You have opportunities to pursue your curious investigations into the death of Creech-Sinclair?’ Jardine held up his hands, fingers splayed, and examined them in the light. Traces of paint, relics of his morning’s work, remained on them. ‘I must confess that I find it difficult to understand your continuing interest in the whole sordid business.’
There was a slight pause. The artist looked enquiringly at his friend.