Bryant & May 03; Seventy-Seven Clocks b&m-3

by Christopher Fowler

  “There are certainly more than fifteen, possibly as many as thirty. Peter Whitstable had a wife who divorced him in the late sixties, so she’s not represented on the tree. There are two sons from the marriage, but they’re living abroad with an uncle. There’s also a Charles Whitstable living somewhere overseas. The rest are up here.”

  “If Jacob looked after the fortunes of the whole family, it shouldn’t be hard finding a motive for his death.”

  “Cherchez la femme,” said one of the workmen, wiping his hands on his blue overalls and relighting the blowtorch. “You can bet there’s always a woman involved.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Bryant icily. “If we need your help, we’ll ask for it.”

  “I reckon you could do with a hand, judging by what the papers are saying about you lot,” said the other workman.

  “Perhaps you’d like to handle the investigation while we do the window frames.” Bryant turned to face the door, where Jerry waited awkwardly. The girl had wet shoulders and a pale, anxious face. She looked much younger than her seventeen years. “Could you possibly stop appearing like this?” he cried. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. Well, come in then,” he said, exasperated. “Have you got anyone else out there you’d like to bring in?”

  “I brought you some evidence,” said Jerry, embarrassed to be speaking in front of the workmen, who had stopped tackling the paintwork and were watching the proceedings with fascination.

  “What sort of evidence?” asked May.

  Jerry withdrew the Bible from her jacket and set it on the desk.

  May carefully opened the book and studied the flyleaf. “Where did you get this?”

  “I found it in Mr Jacob’s room. The police missed it.”

  “What were you doing in there?” Bryant asked. “Just having a look around.”

  “And why do you think it’s of any interest to us?”

  “There are some passages underlined,” she said. “They might mean something.”

  “You mean you’ve been withholding evidence?”

  “No,” she said indignantly, “I was looking around the room and – ”

  “Suppose his murderer had been looking for this?” said Bryant. “You could have put your own life in danger. Did you stop to think of that?”

  “No,” said Jerry, bowing her face. Suddenly Bryant saw how much of a toll her recent experiences had taken. She had knotted her pale hands over each other to keep them still. Death had unforeseen effects on the living. He wondered about the nature of the discovery it had brought to her.

  ♦

  “She keeps turning up like some kind of awful wraith,” said Bryant as the squad car turned into another waterlogged avenue lined with sycamores. “She obviously has some kind of morbid fascination with this case. She’s starting to give me the creeps. I wish she’d smile occasionally.”

  “You can’t blame her for wanting to be part of the investigation,” replied May. “The hand of Death has given her a good old shaking.”

  “It can’t hurt, can it? You taking her around with you?”

  “She’s bright enough, and I could do with the help. So long as we don’t let anyone else know.” May braked to a halt and killed the engine. The sound of rain continued to drum above their heads.

  “If you need anything, you can call me on this number.” He handed his partner a slip of paper. “Or use your walkie-talkie.” Bryant reluctantly accepted the note and made a show of pocketing it as May watched him with suspicion.

  “You haven’t got it, have you?” he said finally.

  Bryant gave him a wide-eyed innocent look, and saw that it wasn’t going to work. “Er, no,” he admitted.

  “What is the point of me providing you with a walkie-talkie if you don’t remember to bring it with you?”

  “I put it in my jacket this morning,” Bryant explained earnestly, “but it, er, ruined the cut of the pocket.”

  “What are you talking about?” May studied his partner, who had owned four secondhand suits in the last twenty years, all of them brown and shapeless. “You’ve lost it again, haven’t you?”

  “Not lost, John, mislaid. Anyway, they don’t work properly.”

  “Not the way you use them, filling them up with soup and fluff and bits of dinner.” May unclipped his own and passed it to his partner. “Take mine, I’ll get another. If you lose this one, you’re a dead man.”

  Bryant climbed out of the car and watched as May drove away. Then he walked in the shadow of the dripping sycamores to the front door of Bella Whitstable’s house.

  The property was situated in a pleasant part of suburban West London where only the company cars gave any hint of the area’s invasion by young professionals. Bella had rarely visited here in the past few years, preferring the peace of the country. Until recently she had allowed a lodger to stay rent-free in return for looking after the property.

  Bryant pushed open a wrought-iron gate and crossed the overgrown garden. The sun, invisible during the course of the day, was making a faint embarrassed flourish through the fluctuating rain before dropping dismally behind the encroaching cloud of night.

  When he had managed to fit a key to the front door lock, he entered the hall and tried the lights, but nothing happened. The electricity had already been turned off. He dug out a pocket torch and switched it on.

  Bella’s house proved to be the opposite of her brothers’, decorated in a gloomy, spartan manner which suggested that the owner was little interested in comfort or the vagaries of fashion. These rooms were uncluttered by all but the simplest furniture, the walls adorned by a handful of sporting prints. Only the graceful decor of the bedroom upstairs gave any hint of warmth.

  Wardrobes and cupboards proved mostly empty. A single unlabeled key lay beneath the lining paper in the empty chest of drawers. The belongings Bella Whitstable required for daily use were presumably stored at her house in the country.

  Bryant shone his torch to the landing and up at the ceiling. There was no sign of a loft. He carefully descended to the ground floor again, pausing at the landing window to listen. Incredibly, it had begun to rain again. The sound suggested a long, dank winter filled with harsh saffron sunsets and flooded footpaths, the season of murder and suicide.

  Bryant pulled his scarf tighter to his throat and shone the torch across a set of ugly Victorian hunting prints. For a brief second, his reflected face flared back at him. Perhaps there was a basement. Upon reaching the kitchen, he cast the torch beam across the walls, searching for a door.

  He soon found it – a narrow wooden panel painted gloss white – but it was locked, and no key on his ring fitted the lock. Digging into his coat pocket he withdrew the unlabeled key from the bedroom and inserted it, turning the handle. The damp wood had swollen in its frame. Jerking it hard, he unstuck the door and peered inside.

  Below him, a flight of stone steps led off into blackness. Beneath ground level, the temperature of the cellar was several degrees lower than in the rest of the house. There was an unhealthy, mushroomy smell.

  As he descended, Bryant could see his breath condensing in the beam of the torch. Gardening equipment stood at one side of the steps. Behind the rakes and shovels were fence posts and bales of wire, presumably for use on Bella’s country property. Somewhere in front of him, water dripped steadily onto sodden wood. There was no such thing as a completely dry Victorian house in London.

  The torch beam revealed the side of a large packing crate. Here were stacks of forgotten games that touched off childhood memories of his own: Lotto, Escalado, Flounders, Tell Me, Magic Robot. Setting down the torch, he reached in among ruptured teddy bears, grotesque china dolls with missing limbs and eyes, pandas and golliwogs with their stuffing protruding, and withdrew a sepia photograph in a mildewed frame of grey cardboard.

  Three children stood arm in arm on a manicured lawn, tentatively smiling, as if they had been instructed to do so by an impatient parent. The girl, pale and heavyset, wore a lumpy linen froc
k decorated with large, unflattering bows. The two boys were older, and were dressed formally in suits and gaiters, adults in miniature. There was an air of melancholia about all three, as though the photograph had been taken during a brief moment of sunlight. Behind them, the ground floor of an imposing country residence could be glimpsed.

  On the flyleaf of the frame was handwritten in violet ink: Will Whitstable, aged 11. Bella Whitstable, aged 8. Peter Whitstable, aged 13. Summer, 1928.

  The portrait exhibited a lack of warmth that Bryant had so often found in photographs of the upper-middle classes. He pushed the picture into his pocket, aware that it might be of some future use.

  Behind the crate was an identical box, filled to overflowing but harder to reach. The beam of his torch was dimming.

  It was then that he heard the sound of shallow breathing in the dark beside him.

  Someone, or something, had just woken up.

  He must have disturbed a sleeping tramp. That was it, a tramp had gained entry to the house and had fallen asleep in the cellar. He swung the torch around and tried to trap the nearby figure in its barely visible beam, only to hear a rapid shift of movement to the far side of the room.

  As the torch beam fluctuated once more, darkness pressed in. Bryant inched his way across the cellar floor. There was an odd, perfumed smell in this part of the room, a scent he associated with the hippies of the sixties. As he reached the stairs, he sensed the change in air pressure rather than hearing any movement; it was all that saved him from being knocked unconscious.

  Armed with a wooden club of some kind, his assailant only succeeded in grazing his shoulder and thudding the weapon against the wall. His hand grabbed the detective’s coat, trying to pull him over. Bryant held tightly to the torch, shining its pulsing beam in his attacker’s face. Wide brown eyes stared back as the figure released a frightened cry. Bryant swung the torch hard and connected with flesh. The hand clutching his coat suddenly released its grip.

  Bryant stumbled to the stairs and was halfway up when he was tackled from behind. This time, strong arms pulled his legs from under him. He felt himself falling, the torch beam flaring and whirling as he crashed over the steps into a pile of boxes. By the time he had righted himself, his attacker had climbed the stairs and slammed the door behind him, turning the key in the lock.

  Bryant groaned, more in fury than in pain. He thumped the side of the torch, but the batteries were dead. Somewhere above a door slammed shut, then another. If he ever managed to get out, he would never live this down. No one knew he was here except May, and his partner was used to not hearing from him for days.

  He pulled himself from his perch on top of the squashed boxes and felt in his pockets. Although he was a non-smoker, he always kept a light on him because of the name of the match company. Bryant & May were the bearers of illumination; it was an old joke, and one which still brought comfort. He removed the matchbox from his pocket and struck a light.

  In the flare of the burning splinter he found himself sitting opposite a four-foot-high painting in an ornate gilt frame. He must have dislodged it from its packing crate as he had fallen.

  Now the painting, in turn, began to topple forward. As it did so, in the moment before the match burned Bryant’s fingers, he saw the figure of a Roman emperor feeding his pigeons. The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius.

  The sulphurous smell of the match filled his nostrils, and he was in darkness again. Bryant fumbled another from the box. Even in the flickering light that was afforded, he could see the signature: it was the mark of John William Waterhouse.

  ∨ Seventy-Seven Clocks ∧

  16

  The Coming of Night

  John May stood at the foot of the Staircase Hall and carefully refurled his wet umbrella. On either side of him stood pallid marble statues, offering representations of the four seasons. Overhead, a gigantic electrolier hung suspended from the gilded central dome. The supporting spandrels bore the arms of Richard II, by whose charter the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths had been incorporated in 1393.

  The Goldsmiths’ Hall stood behind a pair of discreet iron gates in Foster Lane, and nothing outside had prepared him for the dazzling sights within. Golden heraldic mouldings shone down from every wall. Mirrors held an eternity of reflected crystal. Ornamental carvings had been created purely for the delight of the beholder. Displays of ceremonial plate glowed with exuberance, filling the discreet glass cabinets which lined the corridors.

  May had called Alison Hatfield, the public-relations officer representing the Worshipful Company of Watchmakers. He was interested in discovering the extent of the Whitstable family’s dealings with the Watchmakers’ Guild. Her heels ticked across the marble floor as she approached, donning a raincoat as she walked. Miss Hatfield had enormous pale eyes set in a slender face, and all the nervous energy of someone excessively underweight.

  “We’ll try not to make this too boring for you,” she said, shaking his hand. “Do let us know if we rattle on too much. There’s a lot of history here.”

  “I’m here to learn,” said May.

  “Well, where to start?” Miss Hatfield smiled generously. “The front rooms were badly damaged by bombing in 1941, and of course much of the building isn’t open to the public. Mostly that’s the part involved with the day-to-day running of an active livery company. The craft guilds still support their own trade, of course.”

  “I was admiring the silver plate.” May attempted to keep pace with his guide.

  “It’s not just for display, you know. It serves a practical purpose. Many of the silver pieces were created to act as a reserve fund in times of need. I’m afraid much of it was sold off in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

  They stepped into the grey, rainswept street. “It’s not very far.” Miss Hatfield marched on, unbothered by the downpour. “The Watchmakers are a relatively new organization, of course. The first portable timepieces didn’t appear until shortly after 1500, when a German locksmith figured out how to replace weights with a mainspring. The guild wasn’t formed until 1625, after iron movements had been superseded by brass and steel. Quite late, as craft guilds go. Here we are.” She stopped before another iron gate and rang the bell. A buzzer sounded in reply, and she pushed open the gate.

  “I’ll hand you over to my opposite number,” she said, leading him briskly along a richly decorated corridor. “Well, he’s actually the Company’s general secretary.”

  “Would the Watchmakers have a list of members readily available?” asked May.

  “The guilds maintain entirely separate identities,” Miss Hatfield explained. “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Mr Tomlins about that.” She ushered May into a small modern office which contrasted starkly with the elaborate embellishments outside. Seated behind an absurdly large desk, a rotund man in a tight grey suit was speaking softly into his Dictaphone. His hooded eyes made him appear half-asleep.

  “He’ll be with you shortly,” said Miss Hatfield, clasping her hands together.

  “Thank you very much, Miss – ”

  “Please, call me Alison.” She plainly felt that she was trespassing on alien terrain, and took her leave with a nervous smile. May studied the bare room as Tomlins continued to ignore him. The official finally looked up, but made no attempt to offer his hand.

  “I understand you want to know more about the Watchmakers,” he said in an alarmingly high voice. “Perhaps I may ask why?”

  Something about his manner instantly annoyed May, who decided to divulge as little as possible. “We have an ongoing investigation that could indirectly involve the guild,” he said. “I’m collecting background information that may throw some light on the matter.”

  “If I am to provide that, I need to know the exact nature of the investigation.”

  “I’m afraid it’s out of the question at the present time,” said May. “But you could help by showing me around.”

  Tomlins was clearly reluctant to provide anything but the most m
inimal service. This was surprising, considering that he acted as the guild’s main contact with the public. As they walked from room to room, each one filled with display cases of ornate gold and silver watches, he spoke only when he was asked a direct question.

  “What is your company’s link with the Goldsmiths?” asked May, genuinely interested in what had always been, for him, a hidden side of the city.

  “The Goldsmiths were founded nearly three centuries before us.” Tomlins’s small, highly polished shoes protested as they walked. “The craft of watchmaking is one of ornamentation as well as mechanics. The Goldsmiths helped our members to become adept in the use of rare and precious metals. Obviously, gold and silver are still the most popular materials for watch cases.” They passed a pair of matching portraits, Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, unrecognizably youthful.

  “There seems to be a lot of symbolism in the decoration of these items,” said May.

  “Indeed. Craftsmen have always included certain personal images and signs in their engravings.”

  “Have you ever seen one like this?” He produced a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal the circled flame symbol they had first traced from William Whitstable’s cane.

  “I don’t think so, no.” Tomlins shook his head, but May was unconvinced by his hasty rebuttal.

  “Do you all meet socially?”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “The guild members. The old Watchmaker families. You still hold regular meetings?”

  “There are certain annual functions to attend, yes. Whether we wish to meet outside of these engagements is entirely up to individual members. Many of our members are also Masons, and naturally some of these gatherings overlap.”

  “Then you probably know the Whitstable family?”

  There was a brief flicker behind the hooded eyes. “I believe we have met on occasion.”

  “I imagine you’ve heard about the deaths of William, Peter, and Bella Whitstable?”

  “Only what I’ve read in the papers, Mr May.” He turned, tapping at one of the display cases. “This contains some of our finest fob watches. Although two were traditionally worn, one either side of the waistcoat, one of them was usually false.”