Seventy-Seven Clocks

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘No, I can handle it by myself.’ She made a fist.

  ‘So tough. What are you going to do, fetch her a punch up the bracket when she questions you? Assault and battery. Great.’

  She was about to reply when the front door opened. After pausing to examine her gold pocket watch in the hallway, Peggy Harmsworth stepped on to the drive in a full-length mink coat and head scarf. They pressed back against the trees as their quarry set off across the estate on foot.

  ‘Get on the bike,’ Joseph hissed. ‘We can follow her with the engine off.’ He kicked away the stand and they mounted the Triumph, rolling silently into the road. Mrs Harmsworth marched purposefully to the far side of the street, then turned into the thickening fog within the culde- sac.

  ‘She can’t get out of there,’ Joseph whispered over her shoulder.

  ‘Maybe she’s visiting a neighbour.’

  When she reached the end of the road, Peggy Harmsworth skipped between two tall mock-Tudor apartment buildings and faded from sight.

  ‘Damn, there’s an alleyway.’ After several hundred yards the path opened out onto a hill. On the other side stood the iron gates of Highgate Cemetery.

  ‘Where the hell is she going?’ Joseph rolled the Triumph to a standstill. Ahead of them, Mrs Harmsworth rattled a padlock in her hands and let it drop, passing through a smaller gate set within the large entrance. ‘Jesus, she’s got her own keys.’

  The padlock was refastened on the other side of the railings, and the figure in the mink coat began to retreat once more into the mist.

  ‘We’ll lose her if we’re not quick,’ warned Jerry, helping to lean the motorcycle against a tree. She stowed her helmet in the rear pannier and pocketed the ignition key. Then she headed for the gates.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Joseph. He had agreed to go with Jerry to ask this woman a few friendly questions, not follow her into a graveyard. ‘We can’t get in there, and even if we could—’

  Too late. Jerry was already halfway over the gate.

  High heels clicked on cement as the mink coat moved through the thickening fog. They followed as closely as they dared, the cemetery gates lost somewhere behind them. The main path was illuminated to deter dopesmoking hippies, but the light barely reached the ground.

  Mrs Harmsworth switched from the main route on to a smaller path that led uphill, through a less accessible part of the cemetery. Jerry and Joseph could barely keep pace with her. Here, new graves gave way to the older family vaults.

  Despite their general air of neglect, several monuments had fresh wreaths at their feet. As she passed, Jerry glimpsed the half-eroded epitaphs. There were Germanic Victorian names and grim little platitudes carved in stone, children ‘Joyously Accepted into the Bosom of the Lord’ as if death were a privilege; adults ‘Departing This Vale of Tears for Eternal Peace.’ She sensed lives of dutiful toil passed in the anticipation of acceptance into a golden kingdom. She saw crumbling monuments to the Victorian conviction of everlasting life. And she watched as Peggy Harmsworth stopped before an ivy-stranded mock-Grecian mausoleum of disproportionate immensity.

  Instinctively dropping from sight, Jerry knelt behind a gravestone. Seeing her, Joseph did the same. Mrs Harmsworth descended the few stone steps and produced another key, inserting it into the portal. She shoved back the door, stepped inside, and pulled it half-shut behind her. Jerry mouthed, ‘Now what?’

  ‘Wait,’ Joseph signaled back.

  The chill settled about them. Water droplets coated Jerry’s jacket in a gelid frost. Far in the distance a lorry laboured up the hill, engine noise fading in the encroaching silence. A light showed faintly through the doorway of the crypt.

  ‘What can she be doing in there?’ Joseph whispered. Somewhere nearby, a branch broke beneath a shoe. They looked at each other and dived back behind their respective gravestones. A figure appeared beside the crypt, moving with a spiderlike gait, a man wearing a brown slouch hat and a tattered greatcoat. As he paused before the door, Jerry looked over at her accomplice, puzzled.

  After waiting for a moment or two at the entrance, the tattered man stepped through the gap, entering the crypt. Barely able to contain her excitement, Jerry ran over. ‘That’s the man,’ she said. ‘The one who attacked me in the theatre. At least, I think it is.’ Uncertainty nagged at her.

  ‘Well, is it or not?’

  ‘He’s dressed the same, but—he’s a lot taller.’

  ‘Great,’ said Joseph. ‘A murderer who changes height. Why not?’ He rose, exasperated. ‘Why not add it to the rest? Add it to the vandalism, explosions, and poisonings. What is it with you, anyway? If you’re so scared of the dark, what the hell are we doing in a graveyard at night?’

  Before she could think of a reply, there was a guttural grunt followed by a squeal, and the door of the crypt was shoved open. As they ran towards it, the tattered man emerged. Peggy Harmsworth had fallen to the floor of the mausoleum and was thrashing from side to side. Joseph ran down the crypt steps towards her, only to slip over in the blood that had been smeared across the flagstones.

  The tattered man threw something aside as he ran, an instrument that shone with a steel edge. Jerry closed in behind him, running hard. The figure in front moved quickly across the slick grass between the gravesites, coattails flapping behind. For an instant, the tunnel of trees and the fleeing dark figure threw her back into the searing panic of her nightmares and she stumbled, slamming her hip against a memorial slab.

  By the time she had pulled herself up and resumed her pursuit, the tattered man had almost reached the main gate. Jerry ran back on to the path and limped toward the cemetery entrance, just as he flew at the lock with a kick that smashed open the small gate through which Peggy Harmsworth had entered. Then he dashed across the road, hauling himself into a small white van parked at the side of the road. Seconds later, Jerry reached the Triumph and painfully straddled it, keying the ignition.

  The van pulled away down the hill with a squeal of skipping tyres. Jerry jerked out into the road, her crash helmet still locked in the rear pannier. The bitter wind tore at her skin, blasting aside rational thought. Although she’d borrowed the bike before, she’d never ridden it at high speed. She tried to keep the van in her sight, but the fog grew thicker with their descent.

  Van and motorcycle shot across one junction, then another. The roads were virtually deserted this close to Christmas. For the moment no other vehicle appeared in their way. Then the van swung right so hard that it seemed it would topple over, and cut across the path of an oncoming bus.

  Sounding her horn, Jerry skidded in an arc around the vehicle, mounting the pavement but holding her position behind the van. Together they raced over Dartmouth Park Road and down towards the city.

  She tried to pull out ahead of the van, intending to force it over, but the blinking amber lights of open roadworks warned her back. Her quarry was still picking up speed.

  Jerry knew that if she jumped the lights, collision with another vehicle would be unavoidable. The only way to cut off the van would be to do it right now. She twisted the throttle, opening it wide, praying that her tyres would keep their grip on the shining road surface.

  In the next moment she had drawn alongside the van. The figure within had opened his window and was waving something in his hand. As soon as she saw the shotgun, Jerry’s grip on the bike throttle instinctively relaxed, and the Triumph fell back, wheels slipping as they tried to bite on wet tarmac.

  They hit Kentish Town Road at seventy-seven miles per hour. An oncoming Peugeot and a Morris Minor swerved as the van burst from the fog, catching the first car by the front bumper and spinning it into the path of the other. Jerry pushed ahead as the van struggled to right itself, taking to the oncoming lane of the road as she raced towards the red and green Christmas lights of Camden.

  The Triumph drew along the inside of the van, and then into the lead. As the van’s radiator grille touched her rear mudguard, she knew that the driver was planning to push h
er off the road. The grille slammed against her back wheel as the van accelerated.

  A crowd of pub-crawling revelers scattered in their path. Jerry swung the bike aside, resuming her position at the rear of the speeding vehicle. It was a stalemate.

  Where the hell were the police when you actually wanted to be pulled over? They usually swarmed all over the West End at Christmas. Jerry’s face and hands were dead, her fingers locked and frozen, her eyes stinging from the intensity of staring into the pulsing fog. She was surprised at how well she handled the bike, but knew she would have to stop before she killed herself, or someone else.

  The van began to slow down.

  Jerry eased back as it cut through the red lights of an intersection, ploughing across Camden High Street into Delancy Street. She suddenly realized that the driver was lost. The tattered man had missed his turning somewhere and no longer recognized his surroundings.

  As she tore on to the empty streets circling the railway lines above the city, she knew that the van would have to stop. Here in this corner of North London, all the roads were effectively sealed off by the tangled network of rail tracks fanning out fifty feet below them. There was no way to safety. The triangular area beyond was known to locals as the Island, hemmed in on each side by Regent’s Park, the railway, and the canal systems.

  The van was in trouble. Following raids, getaway cars usually turned left because they followed the traffic flow. Her quarry was doing the same thing. They tore into the street, and Jerry knew that it was over. Ahead was a brick wall, a humpbacked pedestrian bridge, and a long drop to the railway tracks. There was everything but a road.

  The van slammed its brakes on hard, to no avail. The vehicle continued to charge forward, fishtailing over tarmac as if the brakes had not even been applied. It hit the metal fencing beside the wall and uprooted two concrete posts. For a moment Jerry thought that the chickenwire might hold. Then the van tore through, the fence screaming over its roof, and slid down the embankment to the lines below.

  She had just pulled the bike over and dismounted, planning to head down into the cutting, when blue lights reflected on the walls ahead, and she turned to find herself facing a pair of arriving squad cars.

  As Joseph ran down into the Whitstable family crypt to attend to Peggy Harmsworth, the door was pulled shut behind him and an oppressive darkness closed over his senses.

  For a moment he heard and saw nothing, nothing at all. Now he knew how Jerry must feel in the dark. There was someone else breathing right next to him. With a shrill shriek of laughter Peggy thrust out her hands, raking her fingernails across his face, spinning him away from the faint light around the entrance. His legs slipped from under him and he hit the stone floor heavily. She leapt on to his back, pulling at his hair, trying to dig her fingers into his eye sockets.

  He lashed out at her throat, or where he imagined it to be, and hit stone instead. Trying to force her body away from him, he moved towards the door, but his sense of direction had been confounded.

  Before he could think further she was upon him again, shouting laughter in his face, digging her nails into his skin, sinking her teeth into his shoulder, kicking and screaming and lashing him with her hair like an inmate of Bedlam.

  As he fought for the door, blinded by his own blood, carrying the ranting maniac on his back, it seemed that he had left the realm of the sane to enter someone else’s nightmare. He fell painfully to his knees as the madwoman dug deeper into him, screaming and howling in an echo chamber of her own insanity.

  27 / Guilty Parties

  ‘Welcome back, Miss Gates,’ said May wearily. ‘We had almost begun to miss you.’

  Jerry wanted desperately to lie down and go to sleep. It was after midnight, and she ached like hell. A few minutes ago she had rung Gwen from the station pay phone, and the call had quickly disintegrated into a shouting match. The last thing she wanted now was an official interrogation as well as a parental one.

  ‘Where’s Joseph?’ she asked, her voice hardly rising above a croak.

  ‘Your friend is next door,’ said Bryant. ‘He’s all right, no thanks to you. Congratulations, we don’t often find you in the company of live people.’

  ‘Can I have a cup of tea? I can’t talk.’

  May eyed her suspiciously for a moment, then opened the door and spoke to someone. ‘You can have a shot of brandy in it,’ he told her, ‘only because it’s Christmas. This had better be good. I was about to go home when they brought you in.’

  May pulled out a chair for his partner. ‘Peggy Harmsworth was attacked in her family vault in Highgate Cemetery.’

  ‘My God, is she dead?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘No, but she’s of little use to us as she is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She appears to have taken a vacation from reality. They took her away tied to a stretcher, raving about the power of the moon.’

  ‘What was she doing in a vault, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘I really have no idea, but guess what? This young lady was on hand to apprehend her murderer. In case you’re not keeping score, this is the third life-threatening experience Miss Gates has managed to witness. If you ever lose your job at the Savoy, you might consider becoming one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Miss Gates. The full gory details, please.’

  Jerry tried to explain how she and Joseph had come to be there, but to do that she found herself having to backtrack to the blackmailing of Kaneto Miyagawa and the withdrawal of the Japanese consortium from the Savoy to make way for Peggy Harmsworth’s theatre society. Which meant explaining everything that had happened to her, including the assault in the theatre.

  May looked angrier the more he heard. Bryant nodded every once in a while, suggesting that he had guessed as much already.

  ‘So you deliberately withheld information from us.’ Bryant sighed. ‘I thought you had more brains than this.’

  ‘Mr Herrick has been quite taken aback by the events of the evening,’ said May. ‘The poor bloke thought he was helping you by going along with your half-baked plans. Instead he spent his evening shut inside a crypt being mauled by a madwoman. Luckily one of the door bolts was out and it couldn’t swing completely shut, otherwise no one would have known he was inside. There’s a guard living on the premises, and he raised the alarm.’

  ‘You should be pleased,’ said Jerry hotly. ‘I caught your murderer. I saw him run out of the crypt seconds after he attacked Mrs Harmsworth.’

  ‘You think he also murdered Max Jacob?’ asked May.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Peter, William, and Bella Whitstable?’

  ‘Well—yes.’

  ‘What about kidnapping Daisy Whitstable? He did that as well?’

  ‘Probably. Ask him.’

  ‘He’s also the one who assaulted you at the theatre?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Jerry faltered.

  ‘You don’t sound too sure.’

  ‘Well, he’s much taller than I remember. Different looking, thinner.’

  ‘Good,’ said May, draining his tea. ‘I thought for a minute you’d solved the entire investigation and we could all go home.’

  His sarcastic tone bothered Jerry. It seemed out of character.

  ‘You’re holding him in custody, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t let him get away?’

  ‘He couldn’t exactly run off,’ replied May. ‘Seeing as both his legs were broken. He fell out of the van as it bounced down the embankment, where it finally came to rest on his head.’

  ‘He’s not dead, is he?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Was he a member of the family?’ Jerry asked nervously. ‘Was he a Whitstable?’

  ‘No, he was a gentleman from India. A windowcleaner.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You obviously didn’t read the side of Mr Denjhi’s van.’

  ‘You mean he didn’t do it? But I saw him—’ Jerry was aghast.

  ‘We won’t know what he did until the body has b
een blood-typed and fingerprinted, and his clothes have been sent to a forensic lab. There’s a bit of a queue these days. There are still several Whitstables in the line ahead of him. But there’s certainly no reason to assume that he has any connection with the other murders.’

  ‘He has to be the one,’ said Jerry desperately. ‘It said in the papers that the man who abducted the little girl was driving a white van. I saw him leave the crypt, we both did. It couldn’t have been anyone else.’

  ‘Did you get a good look at him?’

  ‘No, not exactly. His head and shoulders were in shadow.’

  ‘What I fail to understand,’ said Bryant, ‘is what you were hoping to achieve by following Peggy Harmsworth. All right, you thought you could get your friend compensation for losing his job. There had to be an easier way of doing that, surely? The motorcycle isn’t registered in your name. Then there’s a charge of reckless driving. Do you have insurance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about a licence?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Foolish of me to ask. You really think you can screw us about, don’t you?’

  Jerry shifted uncomfortably on her seat. ‘The man was trying to kill me.’

  ‘What is it that keeps you coming back?’ asked Bryant. ‘You always manage to be in the right place at the right time. Is it merely a ghoulish interest in police procedure, or were you planning to trap the killer by yourself?’

  Jerry wanted to describe how she felt, but in the harsh light of the crime unit’s interview room, she knew her explanation would sound foolish.

  May was watching her. ‘Tell me about your family, Jerry,’ he said, sensing something unspoken between them.

  ‘Family.’ She shook her head, as if failing to recognize the word. ‘If you met them you’d understand. Gwen’s been following the whole thing in the papers. She really admires the Whitstables. My father’s company even worked for them once. They represent everything my parents aspire to, and I’m supposed to be like them. The Whitstables know what’s going on. Families like that always do. They’re just trying to protect themselves from something they don’t want to face.’