The woman turned unfocused eyes towards the two men. She was clearly unable to hear what Baines was saying above the noise in the bar.
‘See,’ Baines said. ‘She’s very partickler about who she lets get ’is ’ands on ’er, is Kate.’
Quint had decided that the best way to deal with the annoyance of the other man was to ignore him. He was staring fixedly at one of the dirt-encrusted windows of the pub, as if counting the motes of dust that floated in the dim light filtering into the room from the street.
But Baines was not to be ignored. ‘Is this the way to treat an old pal, cully?’ he said in a wheedling voice. ‘One as you ain’t seen for so many years?’
Quint snorted with contempt. ‘Last time I see you, Jem Baines,’ he said, ‘you was so drunk you’d ’ave opened your shirt-collar to take a piss. And, if we was ever pals, then I must’ve blinked and missed it.’
Baines, who seemed determined not to take offence, cackled cheerfully.
‘And there ain’t no cause I can see for you to stand there looking as pleased as a dog with two choppers,’ Quint said.
At this, Baines held his arms wide, the palms of his hands outspread, as if to suggest that there was no dealing with some people. ‘Why’n’t you do as my shirt does and kiss my arse?’ he remarked.
Baines was about to make his way back to the bar when there were sounds from the back room. Raised voices could be heard. One of them was clearly Adam’s. Quint stood, knocking over the stool on which he had been squatting, and began to move towards the door. Baines swivelled to face him and thrust his hand forcefully into his chest. Quint swung his fist at the other man, who ducked. Just as Quint prepared a further punch, the door opened and Adam strode out, his face red with fury. He was followed by Job Benskin, who stopped in the doorway, a smirk on his face.
‘Come, Quint,’ Adam shouted. ‘We have heard enough nonsense here. We are leaving.’
Within seconds the two visitors were out of the Three Pigs, its door swinging shut behind them with a crash.
Adam strode through the wretched courtyard at such a pace that Quint had difficulty keeping up with him. ‘You plannin’ on telling me what Benskin said to you?’ he asked as they continued to march down Leman Street.
‘Not now, Quint.’ Adam was breathing deeply, clenching and unclenching his fists. His servant could not remember seeing him in such a rage since the night in Thessaly nearly a year ago when he had discovered that Quint, on the instructions of Professor Fields, had stolen a manuscript from a monastery library in far distant Meteora.
‘You plannin’ on ever telling me?’
‘The man Benskin is a fool and a rogue. I do not wish to talk of him.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘Now, you ain’t going to talk about what happened at the Pigs.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘And we ain’t goin’ to do a blame thing about whatever it is that cove Benskin told you which you ain’t going to tell me.’
‘Equally correct.’
‘So, what in ’ell are we going to do?’ Quint tipped much of his pint of half-and-half down his throat, banged his tankard onto the table and stared truculently at his master.
The two men were sitting in the same tavern in the Gray’s Inn Road where Adam had previously spoken with Jacob Pennethorne. It was the morning following their visit to the Three Pigs.
Adam, who was drinking a glass of negus wine, leaned back in his chair. ‘The contemptible lies that rogue Benskin told me . . .’
‘Which you ain’t plannin’ to tell me.’
‘Which I am not planning to tell you. These pretended proofs of what happened to my father which he offered to sell me. These we shall ignore.’
‘Easy enough,’ Quint said. ‘I ain’t got no bleedin’ idea what they are.’
‘These lies, I repeat, we shall ignore. We shall instead concentrate our attention on the matter of the missing Dolly.’
Quint was quiet for a moment. His pained face suggested he was struggling to reconcile several different trains of thought. ‘What about this barney you was in the other night?’ he asked eventually. ‘Outside the gymnasium. You reckon that ’ad something to do with the bint?’
‘It seems most likely. I think it was one of the same men who attacked me when I was returning from Whitechapel. And they made it abundantly clear that their threats were a consequence of our interest in Dolly.’
‘And ’e ’ad a chiv?’
‘He had a knife on the occasion of our first meeting. He held it rather closer to my windpipe than I cared for.’
‘But this time ’e was going to use it?’
‘He made every effort to do so.’
Quint took another draught of his ale. ‘We got to do something,’ he said. ‘The bloke was out to croak you.’
‘What are you suggesting we do? Go to the police?’
Quint winced. ‘I ain’t that big a noddy,’ he said. ‘The bluebottles’re always more trouble than they’re worth.’
There was a silence. Adam, lost in thought, seemed almost to have forgotten Quint’s presence. His servant, his ale finished, was wondering whether his master might be prepared to pay for another.
‘You sure we ain’t going to do anything about this Benskin cove?’ Quint asked eventually. ‘I could pay ’im a little visit with my cosh.’
Adam continued to say nothing. He ran over in his mind what the down-at-heel ex-clerk had said at the Three Pigs, the allegations he had made. Could there be any truth in them? The man had claimed that his father had not killed himself. That he had not been alone in the hotel room at the time of his death, but in the company of a lady of the night. That he had been murdered by another man who had enjoyed the courtesan’s favours. Benskin had then asked for fifty guineas.
Hearing this version of events in the back room of a squalid drinking den had so enraged Adam that he had stormed out. The story could not conceivably be true, he’d thought. Now . . . he was not so sure, and acknowledged to himself that he had been remiss in choosing not to look more closely into what had happened to his father.
‘That man Baines. You said you knew him.’
Adam’s manservant grunted agreement.
‘What does he do?’
‘Do?’ Quint sounded contemptuous. ‘When he ain’t in the Pigs shunting booze down ’is neck, you mean? ’E’s an ’ooker.’
‘A hooker?’
The manservant waggled his fingers in the air. ‘Puts his mitts into other people’s pockets. Or cracks ’em on the nut and eases ’em of their purses that way. ’E’s bleedin’ useless at it, mind. ’E’s spent half his life in clink.’
‘Could he be allied with Benskin in some plot to extract money from me?’
Quint thought for a moment and then shrugged. ‘If ’e is, ’e ain’t sucked it out of ’is own thumb. ’E ain’t bright enough.’
‘And neither does Benskin seem a man of much genius. There must be someone else behind it.’
An old man in dirty corduroy trousers and jacket and a battered wideawake hat, who was the pub’s only other customer, stood and tottered towards the bar. Adam watched him go.
‘Could this fellow Wyndham, the stage-door lurker, have anything to do with all this?’ he mused. ‘His name keeps cropping up in our enquiries.’ Adam took another sip of his negus. ‘He seems an unlikely candidate for the role of Dolly’s kidnapper. If, indeed, she has been kidnapped rather than, as seems most likely, made her way to York. But could he be involved in blackmailing me?’ Adam considered the matter. ‘Why on earth would he be? I had never met him or heard of him until a few days ago. In any case, he comes of good blood.’
‘So does black pudding,’ Quint said.
‘You are right, of course.’ Adam
nodded in appreciation of his servant’s curt common sense. ‘A man could come from the finest family in the land and yet be a deep-dyed villain.’ He swirled the dregs of his wine in his glass and peered at them, as if half expecting that they would have transmuted into another, more satisfying drink. He set the glass down with a sigh. ‘He didn’t seem a man of any great intelligence, but I suppose I should speak to him again. At the very least, I could prove to my own satisfaction that he wishes neither Miss Delaney nor myself any harm.’
* * * * *
‘Dolphie, old boy, this gentleman is asking for you.’
Adolphus Wyndham looked up in surprise from the depths of the large leather armchair in which he was slumped. ‘Oh, it’s you again,’ he said. ‘Carter, isn’t it?’
‘Carver,’ Adam said. He nodded his thanks to the genial, sandy-haired man who had led him to the dimly lit bar where Wyndham was sitting, staring into space and clutching a glass of whisky.
Adam had arrived at the Corinthian Club in the early afternoon. The same drunken attendant who had been present on his first visit had been on duty in the wood and glass cubicle at its entrance, fast asleep and emitting a sequence of whistles, grunts and snores. Adam had rapped on the glass window of the cubicle several times but the only result had been to increase the volume of the noises issuing from within. He had been about to set off alone into the club in search of his quarry when a passing member had volunteered his services as guide. This gentleman now retired, leaving Adam with Adolphus Wyndham, whose expression did not suggest open-armed welcome.
‘Seems quiet,’ Adam said, looking around the room. Its only other occupants were two men in uniform, junior officers in the Royal Artillery as far as he could tell, who were engaged in an intense conversation in a distant corner. One of them looked up, caught Adam’s eye briefly and immediately returned to his discussion with his friend.
‘Always like a graveyard at this time of day,’ Wyndham said. ‘Livens up a bit once we head towards the dinner gong.’
‘But you enjoy a little peace here? Far from the madding crowd, as one might say.’
‘Don’t know about that, old boy,’ Wyndham said doubtfully. ‘Just nice to get a chance to have a bit of a think about things from time to time.’
‘Exactly,’ Adam said. Wyndham had not invited him to take a seat but he did so anyway.
‘Can I help you, old man?’ Dolly’s one-time admirer looked irritated by his visitor’s arrival, but not unduly concerned by it. ‘Thought we’d said all we had to say to one another that night I was playing billiards with Smithy.’
‘I think perhaps you may have a little more to add.’
‘Not sure that I do, old boy.’
‘I think perhaps there was something about yourself and Miss Delaney that you did not tell me.’
Wyndham now seemed distinctly uncomfortable. He was pulling at his collar and turning in his chair to look towards the door. ‘I’ve told you all I know.’
‘No, I don’t believe you have.’
‘I say, that’s rather bad form, ain’t it?’ Wyndham tried to sound offended but succeeded only in sounding plaintive. ‘Doubting a chap’s word and all that.’
‘It is somewhat ungentlemanly of me, I agree,’ Adam said. ‘But circumstances force me to it. I do have the strongest reasons for believing that you were not entirely truthful with me when last we spoke. I have had a conversation with Mr Pennethorne.’
Wyndham sighed and reached up to scratch his throat. ‘I suppose I did tell you a fib or two,’ he said. ‘No double-thumpers, but not exactly the plain unvarnished, either.’
‘Suppose you tell me the plain unvarnished now.’
‘I’d rather not, old boy. Bit embarrassing, to be perfectly honest.’
‘I think I must insist.’
Wyndham continued to wriggle in his seat and peer over his shoulder at the exit from the bar, like a penniless diner contemplating escape from a restaurant before the bill’s arrival.
‘If you’ve seen Pennethorne, he’s probably told you everything,’ he said eventually.
‘I would much prefer to hear it from your own lips.’
‘Well, not much to tell.’ Wyndham was now staring miserably at a point just over Adam’s shoulder. ‘I wander along to old Penny’s shop from time to time. Buy a few pictures from him. You know the kind of thing I mean.’
‘I do.’
‘Purely for artistic reasons.’
‘Of course.’
‘The female form divine and all that.’
‘I understand entirely.’
‘And I was looking through his wares one day when I saw a familiar face. Don’t always look too closely at the faces, to be honest, but I did with this one, for some reason.’
‘It was Dolly’s, I presume.’
‘Well, that was the odd thing. It was Dolly, I’m sure. But it wasn’t her name written on the photograph. It was another name entirely. Esther, or something similar.’
‘The pseudonym she had adopted when she posed for the camera. I would imagine many of the women protect their identity by doing so.’
‘Ah, I hadn’t thought of that.’ Wyndham sounded genuinely surprised.
He was not, Adam reflected, a very clever man. There was surely no possibility he could be behind Dolly’s disappearance. And Adam’s fleeting thought that he might be in collusion with Job Benskin to extort money from him was obviously misplaced.
‘So you saw a photograph of Dolly. What did you do next?’
‘It was quite a shock, seeing her. Not the sort of situation in which you expect to come across an acquaintance.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Pleasant kind of shock, though.’ Wyndham looked furtive and a little ashamed. ‘Maybe I told you I’d been pursuing the girl for some time. With no luck at all, I might add. Very much “Hands off, Dolphie, what sort of a girl do you take me for?” You know the routine, I imagine.’
Adam indicated that he did.
‘Well, there I’d been, dreaming of Dolly’s charms and getting nowhere, and here I was, suddenly getting an eyeful of said charms. So I did what any chap would do in the circs.’
‘And that was?’
‘I asked old Penny if he’d got any more photographs of her.’
Adam continued to ask questions for another five minutes, but it was clear enough that he would get no more information. Wyndham was exactly what he seemed to be: a dim moocher who wasted his days in his club and at the race track, and his nights at the theatre in pursuit of women who weren’t much interested in him. Pennethorne had been right about the man wanting to know more about Dolly, but his interest was not in any way sinister. It was merely idle prurience. There was nothing Wyndham could tell him that would lead him to the missing girl. It seemed as if his best informant remained Miss Bascombe, and that Dolly must indeed have left the city. Thoughts of Dolly, he found, led almost immediately to thoughts of Hetty. He had not seen her since they had spent the night together. He could not decide whether he wanted to see her again very much, or not at all. He was still debating the question as he walked into Piccadilly and hailed a cab to take him back to Doughty Street.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘You are an admirer of Browning?’
Adam looked up from the volume of poems he was reading. He was standing outside a bookshop near the British Museum. He had picked up a rather battered copy of Men and Women from a trestle table under the shop’s window and was glancing through the lines of ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’. It was a work he had read several times before but he was still uncertain exactly what thoughts and emotions the poet wished to convey. The sense of melancholy and questioning doubt in the poem, however, was clear enough. Adam was surprised when he heard the man speak by his side, as he had
not noticed his approach. Gilbert Waterton was standing at his shoulder. Adam returned the Browning volume to the table and the two men shook hands.
‘His verse is an acquired taste, Mr Waterton, but I enjoy his tangled lines and twisted metaphors.’
‘I have always found him a poet of almost wilful obscurity, but perhaps I have been missing hidden delights. Hidden from me, at least.’ As if by mutual agreement, they had both begun to walk away from the bookshop in the direction of New Oxford Street. ‘How are you, Carver?’ Waterton asked. ‘Are you any nearer a solution to the mystery of this girl’s disappearance?’
Adam described what had happened recently: the visit to the Whitechapel penny gaff; his conversations with Pennethorne and Patch; his visit to Miss Bascombe and the National Society for Returning Young Women to their Friends in the Country.
‘So the girl has travelled north?’ Waterton spoke as if he had visions of the danseuse hauling a sledge across a frozen snowscape.
‘It would seem most probable.’
They crossed New Oxford Street in silence and continued along Museum Street.
‘You have family connections in York, do you not, Carver?’ Waterton said suddenly.
‘My father was born in the city, if that is what you mean,’ Adam acknowledged, slightly taken aback. How had Waterton known this? he wondered. Could Sunman have told him? Did Sunman even know? Adam thought it unlikely that he had himself ever told very many people about his family origins. Although he was not ashamed of the fact that his father had been born in humble circumstances, the son of an ostler at a coaching inn, it was not something of which he frequently spoke. ‘But I have no other connection with the place. I have not been there since I was a child.’
‘None the less, you are familiar with the town—?’
‘I would not say that. As I say, I have not visited it for more than ten years.’
Waterton made a gesture of irritation, as if to suggest that Adam was being pedantic. ‘You must go to York,’ he said, in a tone of voice that suggested there could be no debate about the matter. ‘You must locate this wretched girl and bring her back to town.’
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