Seventy-Seven Clocks Read online

  ‘Leave me be and none of you shall suffer,’ he said, low menace sharpening his voice. ‘I must warn you that I am armed.’

  ‘Did you press the alarm?’ whispered Stokes to one of the others.

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ the boy whispered back. ‘Soon as he started running.’

  ‘Then we must keep him from harming anything until the police get here.’

  Wentworth could hardly see how. The most lethal item he had on him was a plastic comb. He knew none of the others was likely to be packing a pistol. For want of a better course of action, all four stood watching as the old man stooped and reached inside his carpet bag.

  As soon as Wentworth realized what he was about to do, he started out across the floor toward the far side of the chamber, but he had not given himself enough time to prevent disaster.

  For now the gentleman’s arms were free of the bag and rising fast with a jar held firmly in his right hand, the broad rubber stopper being deftly removed by the fingers of the left, and the contents of the glass were flying through the air, the liquid splashing across one of the canvases, searing varnish and paint and filling the air with the stinging smell of acid. As Wentworth dived to the floor and slid hard into a wall, the vandal hurled the emptied jar at him. The glass shattered noisily at his side.

  Now the other wardens were running past his head, and further footfalls came from one of the distant halls. Wentworth heard a shout and then a shot, both small and sharp. Stokes fell heavily beside him, blood gushing from his nose. Acid was pooling along the base of the skirting board, crackling with acridity, the fumes burning Wentworth’s eyes. He realized that it was no longer safe to lie still, and scrambled to his feet.

  The attendants were in disarray. Stokes was unconscious. Another appeared to have been shot. One of the paintings was dripping and smouldering. The police had arrived and were shouting into their handsets. Of the Edwardian gentleman there was no sign at all.

  ‘Excuse me, please.’

  The scruffy man they had accidentally assaulted in the side corridor was tapping a policeman on the shoulder.

  ‘I said excuse me.’

  The constable turned around and began to push the scruffy man back toward the chamber’s entrance. ‘No members of the public allowed in here,’ he said, holding his arms wide.

  ‘I am most certainly not a member of the public,’ said the man, hiking his endless scarf about his neck like the coils of a particularly drab snake. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Arthur Bryant, and you’ve just allowed your criminal to escape.’

  George Stokes stared unhappily from the tall windows like a man preparing to face the scaffold. He was obviously concerned for the future security of his position.

  Arthur Bryant crossed the floor of the gloomy staffroom and stood beside him. ‘How’s the nose?’ he asked.

  ‘A bit bruised,’ said Stokes, gingerly touching his tissue-filled nostril. ‘The poor lad, though. Fancy being shot at.’

  ‘He’ll be fine. The bullet just nicked the top of his arm. Went on to make a nasty little hole in a still life by Peter de Wint.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Mr Bryant,’ said Stokes, watching the rain sweep across the deserted square below. ‘We’re the custodians of the treasures of the empire. The paintings housed here form part of the very fabric of our heritage. They are entrusted to us, and we have failed to maintain that trust.’

  ‘Human beings are fallible creatures, Mr Stokes. We never attain the perfection of those exquisite likenesses in the gallery. This sort of vandalism has occurred before, hasn’t it?’ Bryant shucked off his sepia scarf and draped it over a chair. He turned back to the steaming mugs on the table and withdrew a silver hip flask from his overcoat, pouring a little cherry brandy into each.

  The police were clearing away the mess downstairs, and several agitated members of the board were already waiting to speak to their head guard. Bryant wanted to interview Stokes while the guard’s memory was fresh, before the recollection of the event had hardened into a much-repeated statement.

  ‘Yes, it has happened before. The da Vinci Madonna was damaged. There have been other small acts of violence toward the paintings.’ Stokes shook his head in bewilderment. ‘The people who do these things must be deranged.’

  ‘And do you think this gentleman was deranged?’

  Stokes thought for a moment, turning from the window. ‘No, actually I don’t.’

  ‘Why not? You say he had an odd manner of speaking.’

  ‘His speech was archaic. He looked and sounded like a proper old gentleman. Turn of the century. Funny sort of an affectation to have in this day and age.’

  Bryant pulled out a chair and they sat at the table. The detective made unobtrusive notes while the guard sipped his laced tea. ‘Was there something else apart from his speech that made you think of him as Edwardian?’

  ‘You must have glimpsed him yourself, Sir. His clothes were about seventy years out of date. When he first came in, he reminded me of someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh, nobody still alive. He looked like the painter John Ruskin. Because of the whiskers, you see.’

  ‘And he seemed to know his way around the building?’

  ‘He must have been familiar with the floor layout, because there’s only one exit from that side of the gallery and he ran towards it immediately after the attack. You just have to go through two rooms, thirty-four and fortyone, before reaching the stairs that lead down to one of the exits.’

  ‘You don’t think his act was one of arbitrary vandalism? He couldn’t have been equally happy, say, knocking the head from a statue?’

  ‘Oh, no, certainly not. I had the feeling he knew exactly where he was heading.’

  ‘Which was where?’

  ‘Toward the new Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in the British Rooms. He was looking for a specific painting in the exhibition. The acid went all over one picture.’ ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius by John William Waterhouse. It’s quite a large canvas, but he covered the whole thing.’

  ‘I don’t know much about restoring,’ said Bryant. ‘Do you think they’ll be able to save it?’

  ‘It depends on the strength and type of acid used, I imagine. From an international point of view, this is very embarrassing for us, Mr Bryant,’ said the warden. ‘Many of the paintings in the show are on loan from the Commonwealth.’

  ‘Including the one that was attacked?’

  Stokes nodded miserably.

  ‘Where had it come from?’

  ‘A gallery in Southern Australia. Adelaide, I believe.’

  ‘The painting is insured, though.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Stokes drained his mug and set it down. ‘It’s not a particularly important picture, but even so it’s quite irreplaceable. If it can’t be saved, Mr Bryant, a piece of history has been eradicated for ever.’

  4 / Liquefaction

  The stalking man halts dead in his tracks, and I rush up behind him at such a terrible speed that I can’t stop, and the future turns, and the vile beast is at once both familiar and strange, horrific and inevitable. My mouth stretches wide to scream, but he reaches out and fills the betraying cavity with his hand, and I can’t breathe. His fingers reach into my throat, nails tearing at my mouth, reaching deeper and deeper towards my soul, and I know that I will die in a matter of seconds. . . .

  Her scream was muffled by the bedclothes knotting themselves around her. Jerry fought her way free and jumped from the sweat-soaked bed. She fell to the floor and lay naked on the carpet, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal.

  She had never seen anyone die before. Was it any surprise she was having nightmares? He was supposed to have suffered a heart attack. But why had there been so much blood? The man was old enough to die, perhaps his time had come—and yet—to be confronted with such sheer, overpowering finality. Her childhood had passed in the quiet frustration of being seen and not heard, in the patient wait
for a chance to show the world what she could do—and to be confronted with mortality now, to be gripped by a man in the very act of leaving the world, what could be a more terrible omen for the future?

  The dream was an old one in a new guise. As she angrily thumped the pillows, determined to blot out visions of darkness, she knew that something had awoken inside her.

  The therapist would want to know why she had missed her last session; he’d be waiting to report her latest imagined ailment back to Gwen. At least lying to him gave her something to look forward to.

  Daily Telegraph, Tuesday 7 December 1973

  VANDALIZED PAINTING

  SPARKS SECURITY ROW

  The National Gallery is at the centre of an escalating international row following an incident yesterday afternoon when a valuable artwork was vandalized beyond repair. The painting, The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius, by the Victorian artist John William Waterhouse features seven Roman dignitaries, and was one of several pictures on loan from the Australian government for the largest exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art assembled in England this century.

  The Australian minister for the arts, David Carreras, has lambasted the National Gallery for its ‘shoddy and inadequate’ security arrangements, and is said to be considering legal action against the British government.

  As this year’s Commonwealth Congress is expected to examine new European rulings on the movement of national treasures between member countries, Mr Carrera’s rebuke could prove to be an ill-timed embarrassment for the government. In the light of the vandalism, the Greek government is expected to renew its campaign for the return of the Elgin marbles.

  Leslie Faraday, the newly appointed junior arts minister, is now likely to head an inquiry into the gallery’s security arrangements. Faraday’s appointment is a highly controversial one. It is only two weeks since he allowed New York’s Museum of Modern Art to purchase Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola Bottle from the Tate Gallery, describing the sale as ‘good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  The offices of North London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit had finally been settled directly above the red-tiled arches of Mornington Crescent Tube station. After two months the space was still cramped and overflowing with packing crates, most of which were filled with bulky pieces of technical equipment.

  The unit had left its old home in Bow Street (where it had been housed for more than thirty years) to devote more time to its specialized investigations away from the distractions of round-the-clock petty crime. Set up by a far-sighted government during the war, the PCU remained the last resort for unclassifiable and sensitive cases. Police stations like Bow Street and West End Central were occupied by the daily churn of ordinary criminal offences, crowded with colleagues asking for advice and reports waiting to be filed. Too much procedural paperwork, too little room to think. One day, the detectives hoped, the Peculiar Crimes Unit would be freed from the Met’s interference in their business, but that time was still a long way off.

  Here, above a busy junction pulsing with traffic, it would at least be possible to concentrate on complex cases serially, with less interference and interruption. Only time would tell whether the new system worked or not. Failure would prove costly for police and public alike.

  A series of piercing horn blasts caused John May to tip his chair forward and watch from the arched window as, two floors below, another black diplomatic limousine was escorted through a red traffic light by police motorcycles. He’d read that Common Market delegates were gathering in London for next week’s conference. That meant the usual abuse of diplomatic immunity privileges, traffic accidents and shoplifting charges quietly folded away. Momentarily distracted, he missed what Oswald Finch was saying.

  ‘Repeat that?’ he asked, pressing the receiver closer to his ear.

  ‘. . . Vascular dilation to an extraordinary degree, and tissue lesions you could poke your fingers through . . .’

  ‘Wait, backtrack a minute, Oswald, you’re losing me.’

  There was a sigh of impatience on the other end of the line. ‘Really, John, it would be better if you came and saw this for yourself. He’s laid out right in front of me. It’s absolutely incredible.’

  ‘Oswald, do I absolutely have to?’ John grimly recalled the stench of chemicals and cheap aftershave that always accompanied his meetings with the pathologist. Finch was a brilliant man, but possessed the same graveyard enthusiasm for his job that troubled children had for picking insects apart. His was not just a career chosen by individuals for whom death holds no terror. It was chosen because he really, really liked it.

  ‘You know, autopsies usually only take a couple of hours, but so far I’ve spent over seven on this one. It’s playing havoc with my timesheet. You really should see what I’m seeing, John.’

  ‘All right. Give me fifteen minutes.’ May replaced the receiver, checked the baleful sky beyond the window, and reached for his raincoat. He needed to find his partner, and he had a good idea where to look.

  The strength of John May’s surprisingly handsome features, the straightness of his spine, and the clarity of his eyes commanded immediate attention. Those unfamiliar with his profession would have marked him for a corporate head, a natural leader. He continued to dress fashionably, although it was difficult in a London currently enslaved by cheap Lord John suits with foot-wide lapels, and although his immaculately groomed mane showed a few grey flecks he continued to enjoy the fascinations of his youth, those fascinations being, in no particular order: police investigations, gadgets, women, classic cars, television (all three channels), and science fiction. Members of what were once called The Fair Sex still featured in John May’s life; he would always turn to appreciate an attractive face or figure, and would be flattered to find his attention still reciprocated. The minefield of modern sexual politics lay waiting in the future.

  The girl standing behind the multicoloured counter of the Brasilia Coffee House smiled when she saw him enter. ‘If you’re looking for Arthur, he’s back there,’ she told May, pointing to the rear of the steamy café. ‘He’s very moody this morning. It’s about time you did something to cheer him up.’

  ‘All right—I get the hint.’ He threaded his way to the back of the room.

  May’s partner could not have been more unlike himself. Arthur Bryant was three years his senior and considerably more shopworn. Perched on a counter stool, he looked like a jumble sale on a stick. He seemed shrunken within a voluminous ill-fitting raincoat picked out by his landlady; a small balding man with no time for the urgency of the modern world. Bryant was independent to the point of vexation and individual to the level of eccentricity. While his partner embraced the latest police technology, he proudly resisted it. He was a literate and secretive loner, whose mind operated—when it found something worthy of its attention—in tangential leaps that bordered on the surreal.

  It should have irritated Bryant that his partner was so gregarious and popular. May was a methodical worker who grounded his cases in thorough research. For all they had in common, their friendship should not have worked at all. They made a rather ridiculous couple, but then, they were little concerned with orthodoxy.

  Although they had grown a little more like each other with the passing years, it was the clash of their personalities that remained the key to their success as detectives. Neither man had much regard for the politics of power, and none of their investigations ever followed the official line. They were tolerated because of their success rate in solving serious crimes, and were admired by the younger staffers because they had chosen to remain in the field instead of accepting senior positions. During the part of their week not taken up with teaching, the pair would arrive for work early so that they could filch the most interesting cases from other officers’ files. At least, they had been able to do that until two months ago. Now they were out on their own.

  ‘Want another?’ May pointed at his partner’s empty coffee cup.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Bryant listlessly, unstrangling his
scarf. ‘There’s been no sign of my acid-thrower.’

  ‘Somebody must have seen him leaving the gallery. Sounds as if he was wearing fancy dress. Barking mad, obviously.’

  ‘That’s the point. I don’t think he was.’ Bryant’s aqueous blue eyes reflected the café lights. ‘He pinpointed a particular painting for destruction. He knew exactly where to find it. The exhibition had only opened the previous week, so he must have visited it earlier to work out his escape route. Perhaps the opportunity didn’t arise for him to inflict damage on his first trip. Also, this was sent up from Forensics.’ Bryant rummaged around in his overcoat and produced a typed note. His sleeves were so long that they covered the ends of his fingers. ‘The acid used was a compound, ethyl chlorocarbonate, chloracetyl chloride, something else they can’t identify—it was constructed to do the maximum amount of damage in the shortest possible time. And it did. The painting isn’t salvageable.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘A little at the edges. The canvas has been eaten right through. It would mean starting from scratch, and although there are transparencies of the work on file they don’t reproduce the exact pigments used. Apparently we can’t produce paints in the same manner any more. Their reflective qualities are hard to reconstruct accurately. The original has gone for ever. I dread to think what will happen when the Australian government finds out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Their arts minister is trying to get a number of aboriginal artefacts returned, but we’ve been refusing to give them up. The Aussies were extremely reluctant to loan us any Pre-Raphaelites at all. This will only prove that their fears were well founded.’

  ‘Do you have anything to go on?’

  ‘Not much,’ admitted Bryant, sipping his fresh coffee. ‘There were no prints on the acid bottle, and no one in the surrounding streets saw him, despite his extraordinary appearance. The weather was terrible. People tend to keep their heads down in the rain. I’m one of the few reliable witnesses.’