Seventy-Seven Clocks

by Christopher Fowler

  Also by CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  THE WATER ROOM

  FULL DARK HOUSE

  And coming soon from Bantam

  TEN SECOND STAIRCASE

  SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS

  CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

  BANTAM BOOKS

  SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS

  A Bantam Book / December 2005

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2005 by Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 0-553-90211-3

  www.bantamdell.com

  v1.0

  To Jim.

  Fortune aids the brave.

  Each culture produces the delinquency proper to it.

  —Kellow Chesney

  Judgement drunk, and brib’d to lose his way,

  Winks hard, and talks of darkness at noon-day.

  —William Cowper

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1 / Lights Out

  2 / Seizure

  3 / Vandalism

  4 / Liquefaction

  5 / Malacca

  6 / Mother & Daughter

  7 / Detonation

  8 / Horology

  9 / Losing Light

  10 / Severance

  11 / Ancestry

  12 / Savoyards

  13 / Pandemonium

  14 / Occultation

  15 / Oubliette

  16 / The Coming of Night

  17 / Art Appreciation

  18 / Family

  19 / Lured

  20 / Tontine

  21 / Connectivity

  22 / Lux Aeterna

  23 / Transgression

  24 / Closing Ranks

  25 / Sevens

  26 / Madwoman

  27 / Guilty Parties

  28 / Visited by Devils

  29 / Brotherhood

  30 / Machinery in Motion

  31 / Purpose

  32 / Ensemble

  33 / Into Darkness

  34 / Assailant

  35 / Darkness Descending

  36 / Internecine

  37 / Whispering

  38 / Illumination

  39 / The Rain Gauge

  40 / Automaton

  41 / Tiger, Tiger

  42 / Proposition

  43 / Mechanism

  44 / Loyalty

  45 / Seventy-Seven Clocks

  46 / The Engineer

  47 / Chandler’s Wobble

  48 / Bringing Back the Day

  49 / Under Siege

  50 / Glorious Sacrifice

  51 / The Finger of Blame

  52 / Inundation

  53 / Captain of Industry

  54 / Mother & Daughter Revisited

  55 / Turning On the Lights

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Those with long memories will spot a couple of small anomalies concerning the year 1973. These are Mr Bryant’s memories, of course, and are intended to be very slightly imperfect. Recalling the dark days of that miserable English winter, I’d like to thank those who brought this case back from darkness into light: my energetic and charming editor Kate Miciak, my suave U.S. agent Howard Morhaim, and my fearless British agent Mandy Little. Anyone familiar with the origin of my detectives’ names will find this tale particularly apposite.

  Visit www.christopherfowler.co.uk or email me at www.chris@cfowler.demon.co.uk.

  Prologue

  ‘Talk me through peculiar.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Arthur Bryant.

  ‘I mean,’ said the young biographer, ‘why does this special police unit of yours only get the peculiar cases?’

  ‘There, you can speak properly when you try,’ said Bryant. ‘I don’t hold with slang.’ He fiddled with his trouser turn-up and extracted the stem of his pipe. ‘I’ve been looking for that all morning. When we were founded as an experimental unit, “peculiar” meant “particular,” as in “specialized.” But we started to attract certain types of case, ones which were potentially embarrassing for the government, ones nobody else could get to grips with. Before we knew it, we were dealing with goatbothering bishops and transvestite Conservatives, not that the latter constitutes much of a peculiarity these days. We acquired the cases that proved too obtuse for traditional police methods.’

  ‘Like the business with the Water Room.’ The biographer had just finished recording Bryant’s thoughts about this case because it had only just concluded, and everyone’s memories of it were still fresh, even though they displayed Rashomon-style discrepancies. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever dealt with anything like that before.’

  ‘Actually, you’re wrong; there was another case involving water and art, although it was very different. And it happened much earlier, in 1973.’ Bryant eyed the young man and wondered if he could get away with lighting his pipe in the small closed room.

  ‘All right, we’ll try that. What do you remember about it?’ The biographer had given up attempting to keep his subject’s recollections in chronological order. He switched on his recording equipment in hope.

  ‘Not a lot,’ warned Bryant. ‘I wouldn’t make a very good elephant.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Memory.’ Bryant tapped the side of his bald head with a wrinkled forefinger. ‘Or rather, lack of it. Information and experience. I mean, I have them both, but I’m for ever losing the former and forgetting the latter.’

  ‘If you could try to think hard,’ the biographer pleaded. His patience had been worn down over the last few weeks of interviews. He was beginning to regret embarking on his project: Bryant and May: A Life of Peculiar Crime. No one had written about London Peculiar Crimes Unit’s legendary detective team before, and he could see why.

  ‘1973, let’s see.’ Bryant raised his watery azure eyes to the ceiling and thought for a moment. ‘It was the year we joined the Common Market, although I don’t think anyone noticed. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Hume, had drawn up paperwork for the agreement, and I recall it had to be accepted on the fifteenth-floor landing of the Common Market headquarters in Brussels, because there was no one left in the office. Luckily, the building’s concierge remembered to run up a Union Jack. An inauspicious start to the year, I thought.’ Bryant’s memory veered between two points: hopelessly vague and absurdly detailed.

  ‘I meant could you remember the case, not the year. Do you have any details about the investigation?’ asked the biographer.

  ‘We had a terrible heat wave,’ said Bryant, providing the answer to an entirely different question. ‘President Nixon had started a second term, even though the Watergate investigation was well underway by then. There were still antiwar protests in Trafalgar Square. Spiro Agnew was done for tax evasion, wasn’t he? And Gerald Ford started to fall over a lot. I’m pretty sure Elton John released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which had “Funeral For A Friend” and Princess Diana’s memorial song “Candle In The Wind” on it, isn’t that strange?’ Bryant pursed his lips, thinking. ‘Picasso died at ninetyone, a ripe old age. We were involved in the so-called Cod War with Iceland, over fishing rights. It was a dreadful year for haircuts. My partner John had gone in for sideburns, not a good idea at his age. I think the Bahamas got their independence, because I remember laughing when a canopy dropped on Prince Charles’s head during the handover ceremony. The ceiling of the Shaftesbury Theatre fell in as well, and Hair had to close. Such a shame, I loved that show. “Let The Sun Shine In,” what a nice sentiment. There was the IRA bombing campaign, of course, and strikes everywhere. The unions had more power in those da
ys. We had blackouts, and everyone stockpiled candles. There was a fuel crisis. We all had to queue for petrol. Arab terrorists attacked an American jet at Rome airport, didn’t they? And I bought some new shoes from Mr Byrite, but the soles came off.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the biographer, exasperated, ‘but can you remember anything at all about the crime?’

  ‘Well, of course. I kept it all here in my notebook.’

  ‘You mean you had it written down all the time?’ The biographer was aghast.

  ‘Yes, but I transcribed it in a hieroglyphic code.’ Bryant riffled through the pages, puzzled. ‘I wrote everything in code back in those days. I don’t know why I bothered; my handwriting’s illegible. I numbered all the translation keys, and kept them together for safekeeping in my landlady’s cow.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She kept a china cow in her kitchen cabinet. An Edwardian milk jug. Hardly an heirloom, but it served its purpose.’

  ‘So you can decipher your notes?’

  ‘No, she threw the cow away when the Queen Mother died, I have no idea why—wait, I do remember something. The newspapers referred to it as the case of the seventy-seven clocks. There was quite a fuss at the time. We got into terrible trouble. But you probably know all about that.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ the biographer admitted.

  ‘You don’t? Dear fellow, it was one of our most truly peculiar cases. Hardly seems possible, looking back. You have to remember that we had no computers in those days, no mobile phones. Most equipment was still mechanical. Typewriters and carbons and telexes—it slowed you down. The whole awful business could have been so easily avoided. Instead, there were frightful deaths, and I had to deal with that appalling family. I remember as if it was yesterday.’ This was patently untrue, for Bryant remembered very little about yesterday.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it?’ the biographer suggested.

  1 / Lights Out

  She recognized the symptoms immediately. The stipple of sweat in the small of her back. Ice-heat prickling her forehead. A sense of skittering panic in the pit of her stomach. As she walked faster, she thought: This is absurd, it can’t harm me. But beneath her mind’s voice ran another, dark and urgent. It’s not the night, but what waits in it.

  The sun had barely set, but the road ahead was indistinct in the fading light. She refused to consider what might be out there. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman, hissed the voice, a phrase recalled from her schooldays. She had no intention of meeting the prince this evening, and quickened her pace, not daring to look back. The clouds of night opened like ink blossoming in water, threatening to overtake her. Blackbirds skirted the trees, taking measure of the rising wind.

  For as long as she could remember, Jerry Gates had been terrified of the dark. The cause of this nyctophobia was beyond the reach of recollection: some early trauma at the top of the stairs, perhaps. Her mother accused her of having an overactive imagination; she made it sound like a harmful thing. Others would have seen misted fields on either side of the road, bare elm trees blurring in the dusk. Jerry could see demons swarming.

  She tried to read her watch, but it was too dark. Screw Nicholas and his country weekend, she thought. If he’d shown some warning sign of his intentions, she would never have come in the first place. The man should have been wearing a red toggle, Pull To Inflate Ego, like a life jacket. His personality had changed the moment he’d realized that she wasn’t going to bed with him.

  Now it was almost dark, and she was stuck in the deserted Kent countryside on a Sunday night, without a car, in the freezing cold, with an irrational dread nipping at her, goading her into a trot. She was a town girl, used to city lights and cars and sirens and people. It’s so quiet around here you could hear a cow break wind five miles away. Where the hell is everybody?

  She thought back over the weekend, and the mistake she had made in accepting his invitation. On Saturday morning they had ‘motored down to the lodge’— Nicholas’s words, as if they were living in the roaring twenties—in the red MG that kept stalling, its roof folded back to admit the freezing country air.

  The ‘lodge,’ a damp Victorian monstrosity situated on the far side of Dettling, had been designed in such a way that the watery warmth of the winter sun was excluded from it through every phase of the earth’s rotation. The ground floor was surrounded by tall wet nettles, the brickwork obscured by reeking fungus. The rooms were virtually devoid of furniture. There was no central heating. Nicholas’s family might have breeding, but they obviously had no money. The upkeep of such property, he’d explained, was staggering, and his parents preferred to stay in their Knightsbridge flat.

  It didn’t take her long to realize that Nicholas used the empty house for sex. One look at the bedrooms was all she needed to know. Adult magazines, wine bottles, mirrors, and candles, a lad’s pathetic idea of what would please women. The blinds were drawn tight in all the upper rooms, and probably remained so throughout the year.

  Her partner’s dinner conversation had consisted of college tales laden with sexual innuendo. Nicholas was a different person on his home ground, all smirk and swagger, and she hated it. It was as if she had ceased to be his friend, and had become his quarry. The second time he brushed her breast while reaching for the wine, Jerry had announced that she was going to bed. No amount of persuasion could keep her downstairs.

  She’d spent a sleepless night barricaded into her room, wearily listening to his pleas and insults through the door.

  She had never looked forward to dawn so much in her life. Rising at the earliest opportunity, she had listened to the farming forecasts of incoming rain while frying herself bacon. Shortly after ten Nicholas had appeared in his dressing gown. The blackness of his mood barely allowed him to acknowledge her presence. The rest of the morning passed in gelid silence. Denied his conquest, Nicholas had regressed to a sullen schoolboy.

  Her uppermost concern had been the problem of getting home. Trouble with the car—beneath which he passed most of the afternoon—prevented Nicholas from driving her to the station. Typically, there was no cab service operating in the area. Jerry found herself left alone to wander the rooms of the old farmhouse. As she examined the shelves of discoloured paperbacks, she grew more bored and upset. Finally she had collected her overnight bag and struck out across the field in the direction of the main road.

  She would have been happy never to see him again, but he would be there the next morning, at work. They even shared the same damned counter. Good judgement call, Jerry, she thought. You really know how to pick them.

  She studied the dim road, hoping to see a light, but there was nothing. There was no rising moon. The darkness was nearly complete. The thought punched the air from her chest.

  She began to run along the narrow lane as a downpour started. The rain added to her deepening panic. Bare branches entwined overhead like the spiny legs of insects. The trees and hedgerows were filled with scampering black imps that dropped with the rain and tried to catch her, but she ran on, hugging the curve in the road.

  The dark drew forth stalking men. They lay in wait for her, appearing in clumps of wet leaves, unfolding their fingers like scythes. They could not survive in London, where there was always light even in the darkest hour, but here in the black woods and meadows they could pursue their pleasures without restraint . . .

  Then she saw the light of the telephone box.

  A red one, familiar as an old friend, with rectangular windows and directories and a buttery lightbulb that glowed through the torrent. She smothered her crawling fears and concentrated on the sanctuary ahead. Wrenching back the door on its leather straps, she threw herself inside.

  Relief, afforded by the single bare lightbulb, washed over her, and she sank to her knees, filling the booth with angry sobs, furious at her own weakness. Everything had gone wrong. She had intended to use the weekend as a protest. Instead of attending some horrible charity dinner at Claridges with her parents, instead of
keeping an appointment with her therapist, she had taken off for a weekend with a man she barely knew. She might even have had sex with Nicholas if he’d proved to be a halfway decent human being. She’d only wanted to show everyone that she had a mind of her own, but even carrying out this simple task had been beyond her.

  As the rain pounded the roof, she drew the knees of her fringed jeans up beneath her chin and wept, crouching low in the fetid booth, protected from surrounding blackness as hostile as the surface of an alien planet.

  She remained trapped in the haven of light, not daring to move, until a passing motorist found her over two hours later.

  2 / Seizure

  Daily Telegraph, Monday 6 December 1973

  MONDAY’S OUTLOOK

  The fine sunny spells of the last few days are set to end as we bid farewell to the capital’s unseasonably clear skies. Tumbling temperatures and strong northerly winds are on their way, bringing with them moderate to heavy rain. This will affect all parts of the Greater London area by nightfall. No one in London should ever be surprised by the weather, but this year we can expect winter to arrive with a vengeance.

  The elderly lawyer dropped his newspaper on to the marble surface of the washroom counter. Nothing in the business section about the Japanese bid, he thought. At least that’s something to be thankful for. Besides, he had something else on his mind. He was still annoyed about his hotel room. But there was no way he could pursue the matter further. He had complained as much as he dared; to say any more would risk drawing attention to himself.

  He filled the sink with fiercely heated water and splashed some on his face. What a business; never in all his years of dealing with the family had he heard of such a thing. He stared back at himself from red-rimmed eyes. He needed a good night’s sleep. He could do with being ten years younger, too. He was tired of doing the dirty work for others. His profession had once been a noble one.