Free Carver's Quest by Nick Rennison

And there is a further puzzle.’ Adam took the notebook back from Quint and flicked through it until he reached the last page. He showed it to his
servant. The page was empty except for a single row of scribbled symbols in the middle of it. Quint peered at them.
    ‘Greek, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘I’d reckernise them twisted letters anywhere.’
    ‘Greek it is, although Creech writes as poor a hand in that language as he does in his own.’
    ‘What’s it say?’
    ‘ “Euphorion”. As far as I can tell.’
    ‘And what the bleeding ’ell does Euphorion mean?’
    ‘A good question. It is a Greek name. Do I have a vague memory from my Cambridge days of a Greek poet named Euphorion? But why should Creech devote a page of his journal to the name of a
Greek poet?’
    ‘More bleeding questions. We could do with some answers.’
    ‘We could, and I can think of one obvious way to go in search of them, Quint. Here is an address written in Creech’s infernal scrawl. It makes its first appearance in these pages at
the same time that Jinkinson does and I take it to be his. 12 Poulter’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I have never before heard of Poulter’s Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but
I think I should pay it a visit as soon as possible.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    T hat night Adam slept poorly. He lay awake for hours in his room in Doughty Street, listening to the never-ending sounds of the city around him.
Even in the small hours of the morning, London was never quiet. Traffic could still be heard on the Gray’s Inn Road. The shouts of men and the braying of beasts still echoed down the darkened
streets. Adam watched the shadows chasing one another across the ceiling and fell eventually into a fitful sleep. In his dreams, the figure of Creech rode a costermonger’s ass whilst driving
a herd of scrawny goats through the single muddy street of a Macedonian village. Fields, waving his mortarboard, was shouting the name ‘Euphorion’ over and over again. Slowly the face
of Fields melted and was replaced by that of Adam’s father, who was chastising his son for his failure to win the Chancellor’s Medal for Poetry during his time at Cambridge.
    In reality, as Adam was aware even within his dream, Charles Carver had shown little, if any, interest in poetry. He had shown little interest in any of the subjects that attracted his son.
Bluff, occasionally brutal in manner, the railway entrepreneur had been proud of the education he could buy for his only child but indifferent, even antagonistic, towards the enthusiasms that
education inspired in Adam. Money was the object of the elder Carver’s fascination, and for years he had been enormously successful in accumulating it. Throughout the boom days of the 1840s
and 1850s, when Adam was growing up, Charles Carver’s fortunes had expanded as rapidly as the rail network which created them. Only in the following decade did he begin to skate on thin
financial ice. By the time his son arrived at Cambridge in the autumn of 1865, his father, unbeknownst to Adam, was plunged into reckless investments in a series of ventures, all of which ended in
disaster. While Carver Junior read Horace and punted on the River Cam, Carver Senior struggled to keep his head above the rising waters of impending bankruptcy.
    Faced by the final destruction of his fortune and by exposure of the fraudulent means he had been using to prop it up, Charles Carver hanged himself in a room in the newly opened Langham Hotel.
The scandal was largely hushed up, but the money to maintain his son at university was gone. In a matter of weeks, Adam had been forced to leave behind his comfortable life of wining, dining and
classical scholarship at Cambridge to face the unexpected prospect of earning his own living. A few weeks later, he was with Professor Fields on a boat approaching the harbour at Salonika, their
adventure in Macedonia about to begin.
    * * * * *
    Poulter’s Court, when Adam found it the