Authors: Nick Rennison
‘My landlady, Mrs Gaffery, saw you come down the stairs,’ Adam said. ‘I do believe she has as many eyes as Argus Panoptes.’
Emily continued to gaze at him. For a few seconds, he thought that she was about to speak. Instead, she leaned in towards him, her head uptilted and her lips slightly parted. Adam’s own
head moved downwards. They began to kiss. To his surprise, the young man felt Emily’s tongue enter his mouth, gently probing. He responded. For what seemed to him like many minutes, they
stood entwined on the dance floor. Then Emily broke free from his embrace and began to make her way swiftly towards one of the breaks in the perimeter fence. Rooted to the spot, the taste of her
still within his mouth, he watched her go. She did not look back. He debated whether or not to follow her. By the time he decided that he should and must, she had disappeared from sight.
A
t Sir Willoughby Oughtred’s house in Eaton Square, a pigeon-breasted and melancholic servant, whose face suggested profound disillusionment
with the world and all it contained, took Adam’s card and disappeared. Left in an entrance hall tiled in squares of black and white marble, Adam felt like a chess piece awaiting the next move
in a complicated game. The servant returned in a surprisingly short time and led him up to a first-floor drawing room. Sir Willoughby was already there, warming himself in front of the fireplace.
Above his head, on either side of the hearth, were portraits of disgruntled-looking men in eighteenth-century costume. Adam assumed they were earlier baronets. The Oughtreds were an ancient family,
so ancient that even the present-day members of it had lost track of its exact origins. They had not come over with the Conqueror. That, at least, was certain. In fact, when William the Bastard had
crossed the Channel, he had found that the Oughtreds were already there. They had been waiting for him and, in alliance with King Harold, had attempted to bloody his nose. When this failed, one
Oughtred had disappeared into the East Anglian fens with Hereward the Wake. Over the centuries, having made their peace with the Norman invaders, the Oughtreds had quietly prospered. They were
granted land in Lincolnshire by Henry I. They fought on the side of this Henry and several of those that followed him in wars against ambitious noblemen. They were granted more land in
Lincolnshire.
By the time of Henry VIII, the Oughtreds already had more acres in the county than they really needed, but as stalwart supporters of the king they accepted thousands more which had once belonged
to the monasteries. During the Civil War and the rule of Cromwell, their fervid royalism proved costly to them for the first time in several hundred years. Several Oughtreds were obliged to join
Charles II in impecunious exile in the Netherlands but luckily this proved to be only a temporary downturn in their fortunes. In the two centuries since the Merry Monarch’s triumphant return
to his throne, they had continued to sit comfortably in the upper ranks of English society. They had faced only minor setbacks. In the reign of George III, one Oughtred had sunk so low as to marry
a brewer’s daughter. The social stigma had been unavoidable but the young woman in question had brought compensating gifts to the marriage and to the Oughtred fortunes. A quarter of a million
pounds of them, in fact.
Today, the family was as ubiquitous in the life of the nation as it had ever been. Half a dozen Oughtreds or more were currently serving in the army and were kept busy dealing with potentially
restless natives in the furthest-flung corners of the empire. At least three were in the Church and one held a bishopric. And Sir Willoughby Oughtred sat in the House of Commons, as he had done
since the day after his twenty-first birthday many years before, helping in his own particular way to shape the laws that governed his fellow Englishmen.
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.’
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.
A
nd 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.