Carver's Truth

Nick Rennison, Nick Rennsion

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781782394082
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

London, 1871. Traveller, photographer and sometime intelligencer Adam Carver is asked by a friend from the Foreign Office to find Dolly Delaney, a West End dancing girl who has been involved with a diplomat and since disappeared. What seems a straightforward case soon proves otherwise. Carver is discomfited to come across alluring daguerreotypes of Dolly and he seeks answers from one of her fellow dancers, the feisty Hetty Gallant. Soon, Carver and his stoical manservant Quint are drawn north to York, where they are implicated in a shocking death. The pair flee across the Channel, but soon encounter new treacheries in Berlin, the imposing and dangerous capital of the nascent Germany. Carver's Truth is both a compelling murder mystery and a splendidly full-blooded portrait of mid-Victorian England.

PART ONE

LONDON

CHAPTER ONE

The street was not smart but the vehicle which turned into it was. Costermongers’ carts were far more familiar here than broughams, and passers-by stared with unaffected interest at the brightly painted carriage, seemingly fresh from a Long Acre workshop, which came to a halt outside one of the terraced houses.

A young woman, dressed in blue, emerged from the basement area of the house and stepped into the street. She was wearing a veil, also blue, which hid her face from the group of idlers that had swiftly gathered to admire the brougham. Its driver sat impassively on his box seat at the front as the door to the carriage was opened from within. The woman in blue moved towards it, the small crowd parting to let her through. A gentleman in a grey morning suit alighted from the carriage and politely handed her into it, following her into the carriage’s dark interior after she was safely settled into her seat. The door closed, the driver flicked his whip above the horse’s head and the brougham moved off, making its way towards the parts of town where its appearance would cause much less of a stir.

The loiterers on the pavement watched it go and, as it rounded the corner of the street and disappeared, began to speculate idly on the reasons for its visit to their dull corner of north London.

* * * * *

Adam Carver, sometime traveller, intelligencer and occasional photographer, was surprised to see the man from the Foreign Office at the burial of Mr Moorhouse, his long-standing and fond acquaintance from the Marco Polo Club. He could think of no reason why the Honourable Richard Sunman should be there, standing in a remote corner of Kensal Green Cemetery, as the old man’s body was committed to the ground.

It was a cold but bright spring morning and Adam knew why the other people gathered around the newly dug grave were present. The large, middle-aged lady to his right, weeping noisily behind her black veil, was Mr Moorhouse’s niece and sole surviving relative. During their conversations at the Marco Polo, the old man had occasionally spoken of her. Although Mr Moorhouse had been far too much of a gentleman to say anything directly, Adam had gained the impression that his friend had thought little of this niece. ‘Flora,’ he had once said as they were both sitting in the club’s sitting room, ‘is a woman who observes all the social proprieties.’ His tone of voice had suggested that he might have warmed to her more if she had not. Today, Adam thought, her loudly expressed grief sounded much more the result of respect for funereal convention than genuine loss. He doubted if she had seen her uncle more than a handful of times in the last years of his life.

The thin and sour-faced woman on Flora’s right was her companion. Her hand was clutching the niece’s arm as if she was arresting her and taking her into custody. Adam had been mildly surprised to see the two of them. Women did not always, or even usually, attend funerals. Moorhouse’s niece had not entirely observed the social proprieties on this occasion. He guessed that the lives of Flora and her companion were so starved of drama that they could not bring themselves to miss the ceremony, even if the strictest etiquette demanded that they should stay away.

Grouped in a semi-circle to Adam’s left were Moorhouse’s other friends from the Marco Polo. Baxendale, the club’s secretary, was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot and looking as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world than Kensal Green. Duncan Farfrae – a man whose chief claim to fame in the club was that, as a small boy in Edinburgh, he had once sat on the explorer Mungo Park’s knee – was gazing mournfully into the middle distance. With Moorhouse’s death, he had become the Marco Polo’s oldest member and he looked as if intimations of his own mortality were preying on his mind. There were, perhaps, a dozen other men Adam recognized from his regular visits to the club in Pall Mall. He was surprised that there were not more. Mr Moorhouse, he had always assumed, had been a popular member of the Marco Polo. He had certainly been an almost permanent fixture in its smoking room since before many of the other members had been born. Everyone had known him but it seemed that only a handful of people had been prepared to make the journey to the West London cemetery to mourn his passing.

Sunman had not joined the group around the grave. He was standing some fifty yards away on one of the paths that criss-crossed the cemetery. Whenever Adam glanced in his direction, he appeared to be inspecting an elaborate monument on which two stone angels were playing harps and gazing heavenwards.

It was only when the ceremony was over and Adam, his commiserations offered to the still-weeping niece, was making his way back to the main entrance of the cemetery that Sunman approached. He was immaculately dressed in a black frock coat and looked as calm and collected as he always did. It was as if the two of them had met while strolling along Piccadilly rather than in a burial ground in the further reaches of the London suburbs. ‘Poor old Moorhouse,’ he said, reaching out to take Adam’s hand in greeting. ‘He was quite a friend of yours, I understand.’

‘We met frequently at the Marco Polo. A gentleman of the old school.’

‘He was, indeed.’

‘I had no notion you knew him.’

Sunman waved his hand in the air as if to suggest that there were few people in London he did not know.

The two men began to walk in the direction of the Harrow Road, and Adam found himself wondering just why his companion had engineered this meeting. He had known Richard Sunman since his schooldays but never very well. Early in his Foreign Office career, the young aristocrat had informally recruited Adam, then about to travel to European Turkey, as an off-the-record agent to report on his journeys through this especially sensitive part of the Ottoman Empire. The previous year, on his second and more eventful expedition to that part of the world, Adam had again supplied Sunman with his thoughts and impressions on what he saw. His friend had seemed to set rather more store on them than had Adam himself. However, since Adam’s return from a journey that had ended in betrayal, murder and the extraordinary death of his former Cambridge tutor, Professor Burton Fields, there had been little communication between the two men. Now Sunman, a creature of Whitehall and the West End, had turned up unexpectedly in an out-of-town cemetery. Adam was intrigued, but the man from the Foreign Office gave no indication that he was ready to explain what he was doing in Kensal Green Cemetery. The two of them walked on.

‘Well, would you credit it?’ Sunman came to a sudden halt. ‘I knew this chap. I had no idea he’d joined the great majority.’ He moved to the left of the path and pointed his malacca cane towards a red granite memorial, which looked to have only recently been erected. ‘Well, Pater knew him. I met him. That’s probably a more accurate way of putting it.’

Adam leaned forward to read the inscription: ‘Sacred to the memory of Mr James Henry Dark who died 17th October 1870, aged 76. For many years Proprietor of Lord’s Cricket Ground.’

‘Pater was doing something for MCC,’ his companion continued. ‘Sitting on some committee or other back in the early sixties. This fellow wanted them to buy the lease of the ground from him.’

Adam, who had never heard of James Henry Dark and certainly never met him, could think of nothing to say. His thoughts had returned to Mr Moorhouse, whom he had known and much liked. His companion continued to gaze at the memorial.

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave, eh, Carver?’ he remarked. He did not sound unduly troubled by the prospect. Perhaps he thought that, in deference to his social standing, he would be excused from treading them.

Adam nodded his head in brief agreement. He was certain that his friend from the Foreign Office had not travelled all the way to Kensal Green simply to indulge in commonplace observations about the inevitability of death. But the languid young aristocrat showed no signs of being in a hurry to divulge his other motives, whatever they might be. Instead, he turned away from the last resting place of Mr Dark and continued to amble along the path.

Adam followed him. The only sounds were the crunching of gravel beneath their feet and birdsong overhead. When a minute had passed and Sunman had shown no sign of disturbing the silence of the burial ground, Adam felt constrained to speak. ‘I am surprised to see you here, Sunman. I would have thought you rarely strayed this far west of town.’ ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Historical Notes
• Author Biography
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements