Free Carver's Quest by Nick Rennison Page A

following day, turned out to be one of the less prepossessing addresses in the vicinity of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. One entered
it through a stone archway, which led into a small, paved yard. In that courtyard, the air was filled with the unmistakeable scent of neglected drains. Adam took another look at the paper on which
he had written Jinkinson’s address. The building for which he was searching was the third in a row on the left-hand side of the court. A tarnished brass plaque on its door announced that
‘Jinkinson & Hargreaves, Private Enquiry Office’ occupied the first floor. Adam pushed at the door and, slightly to his surprise, found that it was ajar. He entered and mounted the
staircase. At the top of the first, uncarpeted flight of stairs was another door and another sign – this one wooden with painted lettering – which read ‘Jinkinson &
Hargreaves’. One of the nails holding the sign to the door had come out and it hung at an angle. Opening the door and going in, Adam nearly dislodged the wooden sign completely.
    A boy of about fourteen was sitting at a desk, black with ink stains, in a small and otherwise unfurnished room. He was reading. As Adam approached him, the boy, apparently startled by the
arrival of a possible client in Jinkinson’s outer office, attempted to thrust what he was reading beneath the desk. He was too slow and the desk too flimsy to succeed in hiding the penny
dreadful he was enjoying. Adam looked briefly at the cover. The title,
The Dead
Monk’s Curse
, was emblazoned across it in large black lettering, half obscuring a scene in
which several figures in monastic dress were menacing a young woman whose upper garments had gone missing.
    ‘I likes a good story,’ the boy said defiantly, as if Adam was about to impugn his literary taste.
    ‘It certainly looks exciting.’
    ‘I likes it when the women gets the chop.’ He leered at Carver, revealing an array of blackening and broken teeth. Adam decided to ignore this remark.
    ‘May I speak to Mr Jinkinson?’
    The boy said nothing.
    ‘Or to Mr Hargreaves, perhaps?’
    ‘Speak to Mr Hargreaves? Oh, that’s a good ’un, that is.’ The boy was clearly tickled by this idea. He laughed throatily and slapped his hand on the inky desktop.
‘You can speak with ’im all right, but ’e might not do much speaking back.’
    ‘And why would that be?’
    ‘Cos ’e’s dead.’
    ‘Ah, that
would
make conversation difficult.’
    ‘Bin dead more years ’n I’ve bin alive. Old Jinks only keeps the name on the plate cos he thinks two names is more respectable than one.’
    ‘And what about “Old Jinks”? Is he in?’
    ‘Oh, ’e’s in all right.’ The boy gestured towards another door, which presumably led to Jinkinson’s inner sanctum. ‘But you won’t get much more sense
out of ’im than out of ’Argreaves.’
    ‘And why do you say that?’
    ‘ ’E’s been out on the spree, ain’t ’e? ’E’s so corned ’e can hardly stand.’
    ‘None the less, I would like to speak to him.’
    ‘’E’s through there, then,’ said the boy, thrusting his thumb once more towards the inner room and returning to
The Dead
Monk’s Curse
.
    Adam pushed open the door the boy had indicated. He entered another, larger office. Across the room and behind a desk as ramshackle as the one under which the boy had thrust his penny dreadful,
an elderly and paunchy man was asleep in a chair. He was snoring loudly. As a very young man, Adam decided, Jinkinson must have been mightily impressed by the swaggering worldliness of society
swells. Perhaps he had admired their images in the windows of the print shops in St Paul’s Churchyard. Now, ageing and decrepit as he was, he still dressed like an 1830s dandy down on his
luck. Although they had certainly seen better days, his extravagantly coloured silk cravat and ornamented waistcoat would mark him out in the more sombrely dressed crowds of 1870. It was not, Adam
reflected, the