The Clockmaker's Secret

by Jack Benton

  ‘I’d like to see it.’ She lifted a hand to her cheek and flicked away a tear before it had much chance to leave a trail. ‘My God. This is crazy.’

  Slim waited. He wanted to ask, but Celia was staring at the copy of the note, her lower lip trembling.

  At last she looked up. ‘Who are you, Mr. Hardy?’

  ‘Call me Slim. Everyone does.’

  ‘Slim. Who are you really?’

  ‘I’m a private investigator.’

  ‘No. That’s just a label. Who is the man behind it?’

  Slim felt uncomfortable beneath her searching gaze, but the sorrow in her eyes suggested a woman searching for kinship.

  ‘I used to be a husband. I was a brave and powerful man and I worked as a soldier. Then I found ghosts waiting for me beside an Iraqi highway. Real ones, not the kind in stories, and they wouldn’t let me go. I never recovered, although I played the game a few more years. When I was about done with war and ready to come home, I lost my wife to a butcher called Mr. Stiles, my unborn child to a packet of prescription pills, and my sanity to a sideways glance and a razor blade. That’s what I was. What am I now? I’m not sure. I’m an alcoholic. I’m also a lost boy, searching for meaning and purpose in life. With each case I pray that I’ll find it, and while I haven’t yet, I’m not done trying.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll find it in the pot of gold at the end of the Birch family rainbow.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I had a daughter,’ Celia said, playing with the skin on the back of her hands. ‘She was three years old. Her name was Charlotte. And I had a father. Amos. They were the two dearest people in the world to me, and one day they disappeared. I wasn’t a great mother. I tried my best but I was too young, and to be honest, my own mother was hardly a good role model. When I failed my father picked up the slack. He was always with Charlotte, to the point where it made me jealous to see them together. Then one night, he carried her off onto the moor and he never came back.’

  Slim let out a long breath. ‘He took your daughter with him?’

  ‘Yes. They disappeared together.’

  ‘But how? I read nothing about him being with a little girl.’

  ‘No one knew she existed. She was three when she vanished. I wanted to call the police but my mother … she….’

  Slim put a hand on her arm. ‘It’s okay—’

  Celia jerked her arm away. ‘No, it’s not okay. It was never okay. I was young and stupid and I let that woman manipulate me with her lies.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘My mother, Mary.’ Celia bared her teeth in a way that stripped away her humanity and made her into something wild and feral.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard all sorts of lies about my family, but there was only ever one true monster. My mother, Mary Birch. If there was a worse woman in the world, I’ve never met her.’

  24

  ‘She told me I’d go to prison if I went to the police,’ Celia said. ‘She managed to convince me I’d be in serious trouble for never registering Charlotte, even though it was her decision to keep Charlotte’s existence a secret. Everything was her idea. My father … he was eccentric. Maybe a little autistic even, but he was never officially diagnosed. He could make the most beautiful, ornate clocks, but in other senses he was helpless. He couldn’t cook. My mother used to tell him what to wear each morning. Everything, all his international acclaim, it was down to my mother and her obsession with getting him up on a pedestal.’

  ‘She sounds terrifying.’

  ‘After they disappeared, she convinced me to say nothing about Charlotte, told me she’d frame me, ensure I was implicated in both my father’s disappearance and that of Charlotte’s, because it had to be my fault, didn’t it? My daughter whom no one knew about, she was the catalyst for his disappearance, and who did she belong to? Me. I couldn’t escape it. My mother drummed it into me at every available opportunity, and eventually I stopped fighting it and just believed her. Over time life just became a habit, and then she was slipping so close to her grave that I just waited her out. I got rid of the farm as soon as I could.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. I doubt “I’m sorry” would quite cover it.’

  Celia smiled. ‘You don’t need to say anything. It’s helped a lot to finally tell someone. Catharsis, of a sort. My father was a good man. At the time I blamed him, because I felt he should have stood up to her so much more. My mother set the rules and pulled the strings, and my father let her. Charlotte … I don’t know what went through his mind when he took her, but perhaps he wanted to take her away from the hostility of that place. Most people thought he died somewhere out on the moor, but they didn’t know about Charlotte. My father, he could have set up a life somewhere else, but she would have been noticed. He might have just left her on the steps of an orphanage, put her in care. I don’t know. She could still be alive.’

  ‘But, couldn’t she tell them—’

  Celia lifted a hand. ‘Charlotte couldn’t speak. She was mute. Perhaps she was just a late developer … I’ll never know. But at the time I lost her, she’d never uttered a single word.’

  Slim put out an arm as Celia leaned in to his shoulder, the tears coming fast. He looked out at the beautiful, rugged view and wondered how it must feel to see ghosts out there, shadows moving among the scattered field of stones that could be a daughter or a father returning home.

  ‘There’s more,’ Celia said, ‘but I can’t face it right now. I have a place I need to be tonight, but we can meet again soon. I doubt you’ll be able to help me find either of them … but you might.’

  ‘I wasn’t looking for a job,’ Slim said.

  Celia smiled, then gave him the kind of affectionate pat on the cheek a mother might give to a grown son.

  ‘Well, you’ve found one.’

  25

  ‘I had a call about a booking,’ Mrs. Greyson said. ‘A party of six. I’d need all three rooms available.’

  Slim decided to call her bluff. ‘I was planning to stay at least another week. The story of Amos Birch hasn’t run its course for me just yet. It’s quite intriguing. I’m interested in investigating it further.’

  Mrs. Greyson rolled her eyes. ‘All you’ll find there is an endless series of lies and rumours. You should give it up. Everyone else did.’

  ‘You know, everyone talks about Amos Birch, but what of his wife? What of Mary? No one has much to say about her.’

  Mrs. Greyson visibly recoiled. ‘There’s not much to say. She was a hard-faced old farm wife. That’s all really.’

  ‘I was just thinking that it’s possible she killed him.’

  The cup Mrs. Greyson held struck the floor with a crack like a gun going off. Slim scrambled to pick up pieces of crockery as Mrs. Greyson stood wringing her hands as though to punish them for a misgiving.

  ‘Let me help you with that—’

  Mrs. Greyson brushed him out of the way with a full flourish of her arm. ‘I’ll deal with it, Mr. Hardy. Honestly, if I had other guests I’d be inclined to ask you to leave.’

  ‘Didn’t you say something about a party of six?’

  ‘It was just an enquiry,’ she snapped, then retreated into the kitchen before returning with a dustpan and brush. ‘You should be careful about saying such things,’ she continued, sweeping up chips of china clay. ‘Some people might be a little sensitive.’

  ‘It wasn’t meant as an accusation, just a possibility.’

  ‘It was impossible that she could have killed him,’ Mrs. Greyson said. ‘Mary Birch was in a wheelchair. She had some sort of degenerative disease. The only weapon she had was her mouth, and while that was bad enough, it couldn’t have caused a murder.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know.’

  ‘She was a thorny old woman,’ Mrs. Greyson added, ‘but she would never have hurt Amos even if she could have. He was everything to her.’

  ‘As her husband, you’d hope he’d be.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Mrs
. Greyson said with a sudden venom surprising even for her. ‘She was a no one. Amos was her ticket to a better life. She was fiercely protective of him. You couldn’t get near him unless she said so. She ruled that accursed place.’

  Slim nodded. ‘Their marriage must have been tense.’

  Mrs. Greyson gave a dismissive shrug. ‘I wouldn’t know, would I? Not my place to go putting my nose into other people’s business.’

  And with that, she disappeared back into the kitchen. By the time Slim had finished his breakfast, she still hadn’t come back out.

  26

  Nick Jones kept looking over his shoulder into the scraggly stands of moorland trees that lined Siblyback Reservoir, as though searching for a hidden camera crew. He had even dressed for the occasion, his hair recently trimmed, a tweed jacket turned up at the collar as though he expected Michael Caine to pull up in a Bentley and whisk him off to a covert operation on the continent.

  ‘Were you worried we would be overheard?’ Slim asked as the wind buffeted off the water’s surface like a landing biplane and curled its chilly fingers down his neck. He wished he’d worn a thicker sweater under his light wind-cheater, but he hadn’t been expecting a drive out of Liskeard up to the lake.

  ‘In small towns, everyone knows everyone else,’ Nick said. ‘It’s best to be safe. Plus, I like it up here. It’s peaceful, but rugged in its way.’

  Slim considered suggesting Nick looked into a career as an actor. He was already convinced he was wasting his time, when Nick added, ‘You know, there was always something wrong about that family.’

  Slim stuffed his hands into his pockets as far as they would go and asked, ‘How was Celia at school? Generally? Good girl? Withdrawn?’

  Nick smiled, nodding at the same time as though flicking through a picture book of memories. ‘She was a talker. One of those kids always leaning over the desk behind, laughing and joking. She was fairly spiky; kept it just the safe side of rude.’

  ‘She liked to talk back at the teacher?’

  ‘Yeah, if she thought she could get away with it.’

  ‘Did she bully other kids?’

  ‘Not that I recall. Certainly she had a lot to say, but her attention was always wandering. She couldn’t focus on anyone long enough to bully them. She certainly wasn’t bullied, though. No one would dare.’

  ‘She was tough?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. But her mother was a battleaxe. You could see where it came from. I’d have her in there on parents’ evening and she’d snap at Celia right in front of me. Her dad would sit there quietly, watching everything. Celia would redden, then glare at her father as though wanting his defense. It never came.’

  ‘He didn’t stick up for her?’

  ‘He was a bit creepy, was Amos Birch. He’d be gazing off into space then he’d turn and look at you, but it wouldn’t be just a look, it would be a stare, and he wouldn’t blink, just keep staring until you looked away. Then you’d look back and he’d still be staring, only to give a little shake of his head as though he’d fallen asleep while looking at you, with his eyes open.’

  ‘I’ve heard he was a little autistic.’

  ‘Maybe. He was odd for sure. And you never know with quiet types, do you?’

  ‘Celia … did she ever have boyfriends?’

  Nick laughed. ‘She was one of those girls forever making up or breaking up. I’m sure you remember the type. Fun to be around if you were part of the in-crowd.’

  Slim nodded. ‘Avoided a couple of them myself.’

  ‘You must have been a hit, seeing as you ended up working for the BBC.’

  Slim almost forgot himself before he remembered the guise he was operating under.

  ‘Well, you know, it’s just a job, and at fourteen I was still a kid like everyone else.’

  ‘I’d love to be involved with television,’ Nick said, staring wistfully off into the distance.

  ‘Involved’. Not ‘on’, or ‘work in’, but ‘involved’. Slim suppressed a sigh.

  ‘Nick, what can you tell me about Celia leaving school?’

  ‘Rumours were everywhere before she dropped out,’ Nick said. ‘You could see something was up in her demeanor. I mean, she was so full of herself. Then, like overnight, she turned all withdrawn, like someone had finally pulled her down a peg or two.’

  Slim frowned. ‘Could it have been trouble at home?’

  Nick laughed. ‘She was fifteen. I doubt a day passed when there wasn’t trouble at home. Anyway, it looked as though the little slapper got taught a lesson.’

  ‘Little slapper?’

  Nick shrugged, giving Slim a guilty smile. ‘A bad choice of words, I guess. But kind of appropriate. Used to flirt with me something rotten. I was only in my early twenties at the time, so wasn’t much older than the kids, really. She was a pretty girl, was Celia. Boys were always after her, and she was always out at those discos they’d let the kids into. The ones where they all start getting together. Don’t need to think too hard about what went on, do you?’

  Slim shrugged, a little concerned about Nick’s slut-shaming of a former pupil, but then he wouldn’t be the first teacher to fancy one of his class. There were stories in the news all the time about the ones who had taken it too far.

  Nick was still talking. ‘This was back in the nineties when girls would be going out with t-shirts with “whore” and “easy” and that kind of thing written on them. Love, if you could call it that, was as easy to come by as it was in the sixties.’

  ‘And Celia was one of those girls?’

  ‘Walking down the corridor on a Monday morning, you’d overhear all kinds. That girl was always with someone, if the rumour mill was true.’

  Slim nodded. ‘And you said she dropped out?’

  Nick shifted, tossing his hair in the wind. ‘You want to get this stuff down on tape?’

  Slim shook his head then remembered what organisation Nick thought he worked for. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But this is good stuff. This is exactly what we’re looking for. Tell me about what you told me before.’

  Nick, clearly in love with his own voice, nodded. ‘She started putting on weight. Like, suddenly. You remember how except for those girls with the thyroid, all they cared about was keeping thin enough to get hooked up on a weekend? Well, a couple of girls called her out on her weight gain in games class, so I heard. Then, we’re a month from the GCSEs, and she’s gone, dropped out.’

  ‘She was sixteen though, right? You can leave school at sixteen.’

  ‘Not many do, not these days. She got good grades, she’d have done okay. Not straight As, but she’d have passed everything without much fuss.’

  ‘And you told me that rumour about her father? If she was as promiscuous as you’ve suggested, couldn’t it have been anyone?’

  ‘See, that’s where it got odd. School rumours are all over the place. They change with the Cornish weather. But for this, they polarized. Everyone was saying the same thing.’

  ‘And what makes you think it wasn’t just a hot rumour that got jumped on? Kids can be worse pack animals than wild dogs.’

  Nick gave a frantic shake of his head. ‘See, you’d need to understand the Birch family dynamic. The mother, she was a dragon. Celia hated her. The dad, Amos, he was quiet, introverted, but nice. Pure, even, in a simplistic kind of way. Celia despised her mother, and I mean despised. You could see her doing something just to hurt Mary. But you know what made it so much more concrete?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kids were saying it came from Celia herself. That she said her own dad got her knocked up.’

  27

  After Nick had left, leaving Slim a handwritten note with his phone number and a couple of email addresses, Slim found a printing shop on the high street to print out the photos he had taken of the farmyard at Worth Farm. With the ones he had taken of Amos Birch’s old workshop, he first enlarged them until the door and its padlock filled the screen, so that if such things had brand markings, an expert in the
field would know.

  Using the shop’s fax, he sent them to a London number then went outside to make a call.

  ‘Alan, it’s Slim,’ he said, when the voice of an old friend came on the line. ‘I need a favour.’

  Alan Coaker, an old roommate during their training days at Harrogate, coughed a punctured laugh. The gravelly sound of his voice suggested he was yet to give up the twenty-a-day habit he’d maintained throughout their time together in the army.

  ‘John? Is that you? Going by Slim now, are you?’

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Been a while since you’ve called me, too. Wasn’t that last time when you wanted to break into your girlfriend’s house?’

  ‘Ex-wife. Although we weren’t ex at the time, and it was still my house.’

  ‘That was it. What happened? You just get let out?’

  ‘I got drunk instead.’

  ‘Figures. Always had more bark than bite, didn’t you, John? Anyway, while I’d love to chat, I have customers waiting. What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve just sent you a fax.’

  ‘Don’t you do emails yet? I guess I’d better go turn the old thing on, then. It’s in a box in the back room somewhere.’

  Alan put down the phone. Slim, unsure whether Alan was joking, waited while his old squad mate was gone. It sounded as though Alan was doing well for himself. They had served together in the first Gulf War, but unlike Slim, Alan had got out with his record intact after two decades of unblemished service, and had used his generous payoff to start up a locksmith’s company in London.

  ‘Got it, Slim. What is it? These pictures something I need to shred after I finish this call?’

  ‘I hope not. I need to get into that shed. I need to know what that lock is and how I can get past it.’

  ‘Isn’t there a window?’

  ‘Barred.’

  ‘And I’m guessing the owners don’t want you poking about?’