Carver's Quest (17 page)

‘You need to be dressed in something that don’t scream, “I’m a swell. Come and wallop me.” ’

‘Golden Lane is dangerous territory, then?’

‘A sight more dangerous than the arse-end of Greece.’

‘There were brigands in those hills we travelled, though.’

‘Maybe. But you can whistle up worse brigands round Golden Lane any time you like. Wear those flash togs and you won’t even need to whistle.’

‘I yield to your greater knowledge of these matters, Quint. What do you suggest?’

‘I got me some old fustian. Jacket and trousers. Had ’em for years. Thought they was about ready for Rag Fair but maybe they got one last wear in ’em here.’

Quint departed for his room and returned holding what looked more like a pair of dead animals than a suit of clothing. Very reluctantly, Adam took them and retired to change. When he entered the
sitting room once more, he was wearing both the suit and a look of profound distaste.

‘This is revolting, Quint. Little wonder that you were about to dispose of it.’ He shook his shoulders in an attempt to settle the jacket more comfortably on them. Adam’s
manservant was several inches shorter than his master and there was little chance that any suit he had once owned would prove a perfect fit. ‘It feels as if it contains a small menagerie of
things that once crept and crawled on the face of the earth. And now they are creeping and crawling through the folds of the jacket.’

‘It may not be what the quality wears,’ said Quint, sarcastically, ‘but it’s the kind of thing the nobs round Golden Lane do. So, if you wants to look like you belong
there, you’d better keep it on.’

Quint now made a great show of consulting the watch in his weskit pocket. He was mightily proud of this fob watch which, in one of his more expansively autobiographical moments, he had told Adam
was a family heirloom inherited from his grandfather. In fact, he had chanced upon it many years earlier, stripping it from a corpse he had found washed up from the river at Rotherhithe.

‘The time,’ he announced, ‘is now ten minutes afore ten. We can be in Golden Lane by eleven.’

* * * * *

As the two men walked down Golden Lane towards Old Street, Adam could see that a second-hand-shoe seller had taken possession of part of the pavement opposite. His stock of
boots and shoes stood in a line along the kerb. It looked as if a small queue of the ill-shod had once stood there and that they had all been miraculously spirited away, leaving only their footwear
behind. The seller had no customers. Indeed, the entire neighbourhood was surprisingly unpopulated. A costermonger’s barrow laden with potatoes and turnips trundled past, the costermonger
perched precariously upon it, encouraging his mangy donkey forwards, but there was little other traffic in the street.

The lodging house was a brick building halfway along Golden Lane. A wall ran along the side of it, topped with mortar and broken glass to deter any passing thief with a mind to climb it,
although it was difficult to imagine that the building held anything much worth stealing. It looked exceptionally uninviting. A man would have to be desperate, Adam thought, to choose it for his
accommodation. Several windows on the ground floor had broken panes. A dingy yellow blind was half pulled down one of them. On it the words ‘Good Single Beds at Threepence Halfpenny’
had been clumsily scrawled.

The door to the lodging house was open to the street. Adam and Quint entered warily and walked along a long narrow passage to what was, they quickly realised, the communal kitchen. At one end of
the room was a large fireplace and around it were gathered a dozen men. Several held long skewers and were toasting bread over the flames. The men were all dressed in an assortment of filthy and
mismatched old clothes. None of them looked as if he’d had recent acquaintance with soap and water. The smell in the kitchen was like a physical presence squatting in the corner of the room.
Adam was about to take out a handkerchief and hold it to his nose but thought better of the notion.

The men took little or no notice of the arrival of Quint and Adam. Two glanced briefly over their shoulders. The concentration of the others was focused fiercely on their toasting bread. A
staircase ran off the room to the left and, before Adam or Quint could hail any of those gathered round the fire, they heard the sounds of heavy footsteps coming down it. Judging by the reactions
of those by the fireplace, the man who now entered the room was the power in the land. Unlike the arrival of Adam and Quint, this man’s entry meant something to the lodgers. It meant that it
was time to leave off what they were doing and fawn upon him.

‘Morning, Mr Pradd.’

‘You’re looking well, Mr Pradd.’

‘Pleasure to see you, Mr Pradd.’

‘Would you be wanting a tot of something warming, Mr Pradd?’

A chorus of voices surrounded the man as he came into the kitchen.

Pradd ignored them all and concentrated his attention on the new arrivals. The lodging-house keeper wore a dirty shirt that might once have been white, and a pair of greasy black trousers held
up by a leather belt. His face was slate grey, as if he had not ventured into the sunlight for several years and, during that time, all his colour had slowly seeped away. One of his eyes was quite
clearly a product not of nature but of the glassmaker’s art. This false eye moved as freely as the real one but, disconcertingly, the two eyes did not move in harmony. As the real, right eye
focused on Adam and Quint, the false, left one was rolling upwards and examining the dusty rafters above their heads.

‘Ain’t no beds to be had here. We’re full.’

‘We require no accommodation, my good man,’ Adam said. ‘What we need is information. We are looking for someone who may have stayed with you in the last few weeks.’

‘Oh,
hin
-for-mat-ion, eh? It’s
hin
-for-mat-ion you wants, is it?’ Pradd’s mockery of the young man’s all too obviously educated accent was met
with howls of laughter from his sycophantic audience. It seemed as if they had seldom, if ever, heard a more crushingly comic response to a presumptuous remark.

‘Well, I ain’t so sure there’s much hinformation to be had ’ere. And I ain’t your good man neither. I ain’t nobody’s good man.’

‘Of that I have no doubt. But if you want to keep your police licence, you would do well to be civil, at least to me.’

‘I can be as civil as the next man, if I chooses.’ Pradd’s false eye rolled alarmingly in its socket. ‘But maybe I don’t choose. I ain’t going to be vexed by
every young pup what walks in off the street.’

Murmurs of approval came from his fireside supporters. The conversation was not going as Adam had planned. He glanced at Quint but his servant refused to catch his eye. There was to be no help
from that direction. Adam was on his own. He was suddenly aware of how little experience he had of speaking to those outside his own class. He wondered what his next words should be.

‘Perhaps you should reassess your decision,’ he said after an awkward pause. ‘Or
I
might choose to speak with my good friend Inspector Pulverbatch.’

Adam decided to introduce the police officer’s name more out of desperation than hope. He was only too aware that, while struggling to sound authoritative, he was actually sounding
priggish and petulant. However, the name of Pulverbatch seemed to have a magical effect. Pradd stared hard at Adam for a moment.

‘You’d best come in ’ere,’ he said and then turned abruptly on his heel. Adam and Quint followed. The lodging-house keeper led them to a small office to the right of the
kitchen. The floor was covered in what had once been a plain green oilcloth. It was now black with dirt and torn in a dozen places. A cage containing two bedraggled linnets stood on a rickety table
in one corner of the room. One of the birds made a half-hearted attempt at song as they entered. The only other furniture in the room was a small desk. Pradd went up to it and, opening a drawer,
took out a black leather-bound book. He turned its pages and then thrust it ungraciously towards Adam.

‘See for yourself ’oo’s been staying ’ere.’

Adam took it and began to leaf through it. He laughed mirthlessly at what he saw there.

‘You are obliged by the terms of the Lodging House Act to record the names of your guests, are you not?’ he said.

‘The book must have names,’ the lodging-house keeper acknowledged with a surly edge to his voice.

‘But these names here’ – Adam pointed to one of the pages – ‘ “Admiral Tom”, “Hindoo Bill”, “Cock Robin”, “Cock’s
Mate”. You would surely not claim that these are the real names of your lodgers?’

Pradd shrugged. ‘Ain’t no business of mine what folks calls themselves. The book needs names. The book gets names. Right names. Wrong names. Who cares?’

Adam continued to look down the lists of names in the book. Many were, like the ones he had quoted, obvious pseudonyms. Others looked genuine, but there was no Jinkinson amongst them. Adam was
about to give up and return the book to the lodging-house keeper, when one surprising name caught his eye.

‘Ha!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think we have him, Quint.’

He pointed to the page where the name ‘Count D’Orsay’ was written in a flamboyant, copperplate hand.

‘Ain’t much of a billet for a count,’ Quint said.

‘No – and the real Count D’Orsay died in France twenty years ago. But I’m willing to wager a sizeable sum that the only person likely to appropriate his name for use in a
place like this is the man we pursue. Remember what Simpkins said? A letter addressed to “The Count” would find him.’

Adam looked again at the entry in the lodging-house register. ‘According to this, the count graced this establishment with his presence on two nights in the last week. He was here but two
days since. What can you tell us of the gentleman in question, Mr Pradd?’

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.’