The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Not that I know. I don’t know much about my mother’s family though. Shall I tell you about the watch or are there papers you need?’

  Williamson shook his head. ‘No, go on.’

  He held it out. Williamson took it from him and turned it over twice before opening it. ‘I told you before how I found it. I went to see the maker yesterday night. His name is Keita Mori, he’s Japanese. He says the watch went missing from his workshop six months ago. He doesn’t know who took it, but look at this.’ He opened the front and the back, and showed him the dials, and explained the alarm. ‘I don’t think that somebody stole any random watch. This is perfect for warning someone about a bomb, but you wouldn’t know how it works to just look at it. I had months with it and didn’t. I think Mori has either met the man or one of his customers has. Someone would have had to explain how to use it.’

  Williamson rubbed his beard and was quiet for a while. He looked much less happy than he ought to have.‘I’m in trouble, aren’t I?’ Thaniel said quietly.

  Williamson glanced up at him, then waved his hand once. ‘No. You put the wind up us, that’s all, disappearing like that. Your flat was almost empty. Looked like you’d bolted.’

  ‘I cleared everything out, in case my sister had to … ’

  ‘Christ. Yes.’ He sighed. ‘Do you know anything about clockwork?’ He was speaking more quietly than before, and lower. The change of shade was the same as when the shadow of a cloud crossed a field. Things dulled and sharpened.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I do. I’ve brushed up, since February. The main thing is— it seems to be bloody difficult to keep accurate time. It’s why people never made bombs out of the stuff before, it’s too unreliable —’

  ‘The springs—’

  ‘Shift depending on the temperature, yes. The point is— there isn’t much that can keep time down to the second. There are naval prizes for that kind of thing. This watch was superlatively accurate. But if that’s what it was for, a warning, then it was also relying on the bomb being just as accurate. I … would find it hard it believe, if they were not made by the same person.’

  Thaniel fell still. ‘Dolly … ’

  ‘I’d like to send this for analysis. We have a man who has been consulting in the bomb cases since Victoria station. We must compare the clockwork. And in the meantime – we should keep an eye on this Mori. You’ve met him already. How good are you at making friends?’

  He thought about the Japanese marks on Mori’s brown boots. And last night, when there had been two cups of tea. Mori had been expecting someone. He had been surprised, but no doubt that was because through some administrative error or other, the wrong person had arrived. Any idiot would have seen it, or any idiot not so very busy feeling sorry for himself that the promise of tea and a few kind words brought on selective blindness.

  ‘Thaniel?’

  ‘The beggar outside my flat said he thought he saw a boy with some kind of foreign writing on the heels of his boots. Mori’s about … ’ He touched his knuckle against his collarbone. He let his hand drop and it bumped his pocket, where the steam toy still sat. ‘I’m seeing him again tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. I know I’m landing you in it,’ Williamson said, as though he expected to argue for a while. But there was a subtle edge in his voice, and Thaniel realised that if he were to argue, he would be quietly reminded that he had been under suspicion five minutes ago.

  ‘No.’ His voice sounded wrong. He tried again. ‘No, it’s sensible. What should I look for?’

  ‘For now, just let me know if he suddenly disappears. May I have that watch back?’

  ‘No,’ Thaniel said. He had to grip the edge of his chair to keep his resolve when Williamson’s grey eyes narrowed. ‘If he is involved and I go without it tomorrow, he’ll know something’s the matter, he’s sharp. Who’s your consultant?’

  ‘I’d rather not—’

  ‘Please; I’ll do this, I’m happy to, but don’t make me do it hobbled. He will notice if I don’t have the watch.’ He swallowed. ‘And I know I’m not in uniform, but I’m certain I’ve signed more secrecy oaths than you have.’

  ‘Right.’ Williamson sighed down at his desk and it was plain he was still unhappy. Thaniel waited. ‘I haven’t got a card, I don’t leave things lying around. Can you remember a name and an address?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Frederick Spindle. Throckmorton Street, near Belgravia.’

  Thaniel rubbed the back of his neck, which ached again. He felt frayed, whether from relief or worry he couldn’t tell. ‘No Chinamen from Limehouse for you, then.’

  ‘Wealthy men are hard to bribe,’ Williamson said drily. ‘And he’s the best.’

  ‘If he’s the best, then I want to know why my ironing isn’t being done by a mechanical man singing Die Fledermaus, because Mori has got a clockwork octopus.’

  ‘You’re angry,’ Williamson said, sounding too surprised to snap back at him. ‘I know this is difficult, but if he knows you already then—’

  ‘Sorry. God, I didn’t mean to snap.’

  ‘Everyone’s nerves are shot to bits. It’s all right.’

  Thaniel gave up. ‘He was kind, Dolly. He sat me down at his kitchen table and made tea for me. With scones, for Christ’s sake. I don’t remember the last time—’ He stopped himself and looked down at the desk, with its chalk-marked inbox. ‘I’m going to order you some proper stationery, you look like you’re playing hopscotch.’

  ‘Look, it could have happened to anyone. Especially anyone in your position—’

  ‘And a bin. You can’t use that bloody hat.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he sighed.

  Thaniel nodded once and went back upstairs to fill out the order forms. He was forging a signature when the senior clerk stopped by him.

  ‘Good God, Steepleton, go home. Before you bleed all over the telegraphs.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Is that my signature?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He considered. ‘Good. Carry on.’

  EIGHT

  The steam toy woke him. It rolled out of his pocket and over the blanket, where it pushed itself about in zigzags.

  He had gone home thinking he was more or less well, and had continued to do so until he collapsed into bed. He had no time to undress or to check the cut on his arm before his mind switched itself off. He did not dream. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t tell how much time had passed, though he could see that it had. The room was bright and warm, and the sun had burned away the mist.

  He felt around for the watch, his sleeve stiff with dried blood. Apart from its ticking, the only sound was the cotton quilt cover creaking against his fingernails. It was past one. He pressed his face against the pillow. He could feel the watch chain digging into his hip, but couldn’t summon the will to move. When he did sit up, the room didn’t look the same as it had before yesterday. It was tiny and bare, and clean, as though nobody had lived there at all. In the overhead of his thoughts, he hadn’t much expected to return. He sat looking at the dust in the sunbeam. It was exactly the same now as it had been four years ago when he had first taken the tenancy. Everything since then had been nothing but laps.

  When he stood up at last, the sleeve of his borrowed shirt was brown and stiff. He had to ease it off little by little because it had stuck to the cut and the fine hairs on his arm. Once he had cleaned the blood from his skin, he boiled the kettle and put the shirt in the sink to soak, but it did no good. He would have to apologise to Mori’s neighbour. The idea of going back brought on a fresh wash of lethargy. What Williamson wanted was straightforward, but doing it wouldn’t be. He was by far the worst man for a job that involved spying objectively on somebody built of paternal kindnesses.

  He pushed a handful of cold water through his hair. It woke him up. He cut part of the hem from the ruined shirt and used it as a bandage in the absence of anything else, put on a new shirt of his own and then found his map of London. Throckmo
rton Street was, as Williamson had said, just off Belgravia. His eyes strayed to Knightsbridge, where the inward curl of Filigree Street was so small that it wasn’t named. He folded the map with a snap.

  Spindle’s watchmaking shop was in fact not far from Mori’s, nor from three or four other watchmakers in neighbouring streets. When Thaniel opened the door, which clanged a loud bell, Spindle himself was dissecting a tangle of clockwork with two pairs of tweezers. Flat on the desk lay a green velvet cloth marked into numbered squares, and in each square lay a tiny clockwork part. Spindle looked up from his work. Behind the several lenses of his glasses, his left eye, pale green, was more magnified than his right. He took them off and pulled a cloth over whatever the subject of the dissection was, hiding all but the outline of it.

  ‘You took me by surprise,’ Spindle said, smiling. ‘I was rather absorbed in this. Government work, you know. These are the remains of the Scotland Yard bomb. Is something the matter?’

  Thaniel had stopped five feet shy of the desk. Williamson had told him the man was consulting, so he should have known the bomb would be here, but he hadn’t expected to see it. ‘No,’ he said, and came the rest of the way. ‘Superintendent Williamson sent me, actually.’

  ‘My report isn’t ready yet—’

  ‘No, he wanted you to look at this.’

  Spindle glowed until Thaniel took out the watch, when his face changed. He took it with his delicate fingers and clicked it open. ‘This was made by Keita Mori.’

  Thaniel nodded. ‘What can you tell me about it?’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Well, the mechanisms it uses to tell the time are in perfect working order. As usual,’ he added bitterly. He prised apart something in the case and lifted out the glass face to expose the cogs below, and was silent. After a moment, he put his spectacles back on and clicked two extra lenses into place. He examined the watch for long enough for Thaniel to lose interest in him and glance around the workshop instead. The display cabinets contained only watches; there was no evidence of anything like Mori’s flights of whimsy. Behind the desk was a bank of square drawers, each labelled in even handwriting. It was seventeen drawers wide and seventeen down. He studied them for any sign that some were used more than others, but all of them had worn patches on their handles. Nothing like the chaos of loose parts over Mori’s desk.

  Spindle made an interested noise. Thaniel willed him to hurry along. Despite its wide front window, the shop was dark, and the light that did come in only glittered on the dust motes. The dead bomb under its shroud kept catching his eye.

  ‘This clockwork behind the main mechanism was made to work for only fourteen and a half hours,’ Spindle said at last. ‘Powered by self-winding springs.’ He slid it under the microscope beside him. ‘God knows what it was supposed to do. Typical Mori. Has he paid you to come and annoy me with this?’

  Thaniel blinked. ‘No.’

  ‘No, no, forget I said that, pardon me. Do you know, I used to make clockwork for the royal family? Not since Mori arrived in London.’ He smiled what he probably hoped was a self-deprecating and sportsmanlike smile, but it was more of a grimace.

  ‘So you can’t tell me what the extra clockwork is for?’

  Spindle adjusted the microscope so that the lens almost touched the workings of the watch. ‘I cannot tell you what it was for, but I can tell you what it did,’ he said. ‘It has a microscopic compass and spirit gauge, to which everything else is connected. This watch would know if you twitched. The weighting is such that one cog here turns by … ’ He picked it up and swung it experimentally by the chain, ‘yes, turns by one tooth with every step you take. It compares that to a pre-set distance, represented by a fine-toothed and slow-turning cog in the centre here, and to that is connected an alarm bell, which was set to go off across a range of three or four seconds, or not at all, depending on where you were at – when did it go off? It would have been a big noise.’

  ‘About half past nine at night.’

  Spindle became very still. His hands stopped flicking over the settings of the microscope. ‘I see. So just before the bomb.’

  Thaniel said nothing. Spindle took off his glasses again and looked toward the bomb with his lips pressed together hard. He had seemed nearly happy before, taking it apart, but he was frightened now.

  ‘Mori,’ he said, as if he were having to look at the idea from different angles. Thaniel thought he would say something else, but he took a deeper breath then and shook his head slightly. ‘You know you’re carrying this around awfully casually for something made with about two hundred pounds’ worth of diamonds.’

  ‘Two hundred pounds?’

  The watchmaker nodded. ‘There are about ten times more jewel bearings in here than even the best chronometers need. Something like this is … well, it would be only a method of hiding jewels, not using them.’

  ‘Hiding them.’

  ‘Yes.’ He pulled his fingers down his long nose and touched his already-perfect cravat. Having peered into the watch again, he twitched aside the cover he had placed over the remains of the bomb, and lifted out a blackened metal coil with a pair of tweezers. ‘Bimetallic mainsprings,’ he murmured.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Thaniel.

  ‘One of the problems of clockwork is lost time. A solution is to use a mainspring made of two different metals. They expand and contract at different rates in heat and cold, which evens out the time loss caused by using just one. It is a signature of Mr Mori’s to use steel and gold, so that you can see the colour difference. Like you can here.’

  He held up the watch. Thaniel leaned close. The mainspring gleamed silver on the outside and gold inside. Without speaking again, Spindle lifted the tweezers to present the bomb’s mainspring. Although it was charred, the colour difference was still clear.

  ‘Don’t springs come from factories?’

  ‘Raw parts, yes, but the man who mentioned bimetallism to factories would be lynched. We do that ourselves. Every watchmaker makes his clockwork differently. This is not a business of patents. If factories got hold of our secrets, we would be finished.’

  Thaniel took a breath to say he understood, but Spindle went on over him.

  ‘There is no such thing even as a standard cog; they arrive rough-cut and we all file them down ourselves. Each watch has unique cogs, each maker has his own methods, and his own inventions. This is one of Mori’s, for certain. But, of course, anyone could have taken it from one of his watches knowing it was the best, and put it in here. Which is why I would not go so far as to suggest the provenance of this quite yet.’ He touched the bomb and Thaniel clenched his hands. ‘However, this is his watch, and it is full of diamonds, and whatever the purpose of these extra mechanisms, they were measuring where the bearer was at half past nine yesterday. May I ask who was carrying it?’

  ‘I was.’

  There was a pause. ‘Do you know Mori, then?’

  ‘No. That watch was left in my flat months ago. I think it must have been meant for a different Steepleton.’

  ‘Indeed.’ He looked worried.

  ‘You know, Williamson is going to some pains to keep you a secret and you’re here telling everyone you’ve got the Yard bomb. Are you sure you should be?’

  Worry turned to indignation. ‘How I do business is rather my own affair, don’t you think?’

  ‘All right,’ said Thaniel.

  Having been charged a punishing fee for the inspection – probably revenge for owning something of Mori’s – he left the shop slowly and stopped in the sun. If he had been an organiser for Clan na Gael charged with the execution of a bombing, he knew what he would have done. He would have found a very good clockwork maker to put together the bomb, a long while before the fact so that there would be no demonstrable contact between the maker and the group in the months running up to the explosion. He would have had it planted, though, only a few minutes before it went off, or certainly after nine o’clock, because t
he chances of the police finding it in their own headquarters during their extensive searches was otherwise too great. He would have given the man who planted the bomb a watch made with identical clockwork and an alarm set to go off just before the explosion, so that he would know exactly when to get undercover as he left the Yard. And he would have put the bombmaker’s payment in that watch, so that he would only receive it if the alarm worked and the bearer was not blown up before he could return it.

  Of course it all went wrong if the watch was delivered to the wrong man. He watched a pair of white horses sail by and could not think how it had been delivered to the wrong man. It had been his name and his room. Williamson was probably checking census records now to see if there were other Steepletons in Pimlico.

  There was a post office a short way from Spindle’s shop, so he ducked in and wrote out a short telegram for Williamson, outlining what Spindle had said about the clockwork and the diamonds. When he took it to the desk, the woman glanced at the message, which he had written ready in code, and smiled at him.

  ‘Telegraphist?’

  He nodded and touched the call code he had pencilled in automatically in place of an address. ‘I know half the wires are down in Whitehall. Is it still possible to get this to the police headquarters?’

  ‘Everything for Whitehall is going through the Foreign Office, actually. Theirs are the only working lines. I’d think there’s quite a delay by now,’ she said, looking at the service box he had ticked. ‘There’s probably no use sending it expedited. You may as well send it as a day letter.’

  ‘No, I’ll try this all the same. The clerk at the other end might take it downstairs before lunch rather than after.’

  ‘I shan’t charge you,’ she said. ‘You’ve done all the work for me.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  ‘Which office are you?’

  She meant which post office, and a second later he saw he should have lied, but his attention was not wholly there and so the truth came by default. ‘The Home Office.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and her expression closed into something tangled around pity and wariness. ‘Well, good meeting you.’