The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
She saw people streaming away from the pagoda and decided that it was as good a time as any for her to go too. There was no need to be here for the last minute. Thirty seconds to go down the stairs, there was time for that.
She was just beginning to turn around when the door banged open and Thaniel was there, telling her to get out. Confusion took over on the run down the stairs as she tried to understand why he was there, but her brain had run out of fuel and she couldn’t think of anything but not tripping. When they reached the ground floor, she went to the firework shop and dragged out Mr Nakamura and his wife, who were both crying. There was no sign of Yuki. They said he had been taken away, but couldn’t put together the English to explain why or how.
She jumped when someone touched her arm. Thaniel had come down the stairs quietly. She couldn’t read his expression.
TWENTY-NINE
The outside air was hazy with vapour, and frost crunched beneath their shoes. Crows sat in the trees and watched the smaller birds in Hyde Park, which was on the other side. Thaniel aimed to walk under the big oaks rather than over the open grass. It was very fractionally warmer in their shade. Beside him, Grace was in her own clothes again, the hem of her dress scratching as it brushed over twigs and old acorns. The garden was at the back of the hospital so that the ward windows opened on to fresh air rather than train steam.
At last, he said, ‘The only way to make a bomb he can’t follow is to put it on something that moves randomly. It was on Katsu. I heard him in the elevator shaft.’
Her brown eyes flared. ‘Are you certain? What does a clockwork octopus in an elevator shaft sound like?’
‘Seawater. You broke in and stole him, didn’t you? I heard someone. It was your footprints outside. And then, with a watch and a shop full of fireworks I don’t think it would have taken you long to put something together. No one would have noticed. It was too busy. Mr Nakamura thought it was Yuki who took the chemicals.’
There was a long silence, long enough for him to notice the crows calling. Grace sighed, and her breath curled white.
‘I never meant to hurt him,’ she said. ‘I intended for there to be an explosion, that’s all – just something dangerous. I went up to Matsumoto’s room and I was about to go back down when you arrived. I thought that if you believed I’d almost been killed in a way he could have prevented, then … you would tell him to leave us alone. All I want is for him to leave us alone.’ She glanced up at him. ‘I had no idea he’d send you. There was no need.’
‘He sent me because he needed the rain. I had it, he had made some weather vials so I could choose the weather for our wedding. So he took it to the roof and I fetched you. He didn’t know you would have come down of your own accord later. He couldn’t remember living long enough to see you.’
He saw her take a breath to ask how, and then accept that Mori could arrange the weather. ‘I see.’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘What I don’t see is, how you knew that you would have time to come to the village and make a bomb, and wait, without his stopping you.’
‘I don’t know that either. I knocked him out underground, I punched him. But … I shouldn’t have been able to.’
‘It’s his fault you knocked him out?’
She pushed her hand over her mouth. ‘You’re going to tell him.’
‘No, of course I’m not, because I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on then if he did hit you with a steam engine.’
‘I suppose.’ Grace folded her arms more tightly in the cold. She was very white above the upturned collar of her coat. ‘But you must know that this was all a magnificent trick. He knew about all of this, right from the start. You are clever enough to wonder if he chooses things for you, so he let you stray away with me for a while to give you an illusion of freedom before reining you back. Yes, argue away. I’m sure he’s said that it was all so unlikely that he didn’t recall, but it’s so beautifully organised. Cogs don’t make themselves into a watch in the wind.’
‘This isn’t a watch, it’s a mess.’
‘And you’re never going to doubt him again, are you?’ she snapped. ‘You blind fool.’
Thaniel was quiet, and she looked away. They had reached the conservatory door. He opened it for her.
‘Why didn’t you just report him to the police? You saw us. You said so. What kind of tea do you drink in the dark? That would have been enough, from a Belgravia lady. I thought that’s what you meant to do.’
‘Those never stand up in court, it’s impossible.’
‘It would have. Scotland Yard had him pegged for the bombings but on no evidence. The Superintendent was boiling to get him for something.’
‘Oh, well, lucky for you I didn’t know that, did I. I thought they’d left him alone. But you won’t mind terribly if I divorce you,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘I’m at your mercy and I know I should be saying I wish you all the best. But … I don’t.’
‘Let me sign your house over to you first.’
‘Why are you being kind?’
‘I’m not. If I keep it, he’ll know something’s going on.’
She looked as though she preferred that to kindness. She nodded, a quick, broken nod, and went on alone to the front door. He stopped to let her go on ahead. He turned back up the stairs. A nurse tried to stop him, but he brushed past her. In the attic ward, Mori was reading a newspaper, or pretending to; the nurse looked as though she had just forced it on him. He put it down when Thaniel came in.
‘It’s not tomorrow,’ he said. Thaniel could hear the clockwork in his mind grinding. He hated not knowing what was going on, and the edge of it was brushing against his voice. Just for a moment, Thaniel enjoyed being the more informed. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Settle down,’ the nurse told him.
‘You settle down,’ he growled.
‘I won’t be long,’ Thaniel promised her. She sighed but waved toward the bed as though she would wash her hands of Mori if he died of over-strain. Thaniel sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You really don’t know what happened, do you?’
He frowned. ‘I did, in the underground. I don’t know now. Do you?’
‘No. No, I don’t know,’ Thaniel lied again. He bit the inside of his lip. He wanted to tell him everything, but to say anything now would be to tempt fate, or worse, tempt Mori. He sighed. ‘Listen, I’ve a question. I don’t very much want to ask it. Will you forget what you’re saying halfway through your answer if I don’t?’
Mori nodded apologetically.
‘All right. Yuki tried to kill Ito yesterday. And I was there, in the orchestra, three feet away from him and conveniently able to speak Japanese.’ He hesitated. ‘I spoke to Ito. He didn’t seem to have much time for you these days, but he’s going to be the prime minister soon. Did you save me from the Yard bomb so that I would be there to stop Yuki? You got me into the Foreign Office where I learned Japanese, you arranged for me to work with Sullivan on the operetta. You always said that you would stop Yuki if he tried anything, and you said just now that that was why I was there.’
‘I came to England for you.’
‘What?’
Mori breathed in so deeply that Thaniel saw his chest move under his shirt. ‘Look, there are only so many people in the world who can put up with me, and of those, not many who I like too. You are my best friend, you have always been that. I worked for Ito while I waited for you to grow up. I didn’t arrange for you to play the piano for Sullivan because I wanted you to save Ito, I did it because you’re a pianist. You saved him because you could. If you couldn’t have, there would have been something else. It was just … efficient. And slapdash. I didn’t think you would have to do it.’
‘Oh,’ Thaniel said softly. He looked away. ‘I wish you’d turned up five years earlier. You needn’t have been so long working for Ito.’
‘You weren’t my Thaniel yet. You weren’t finished. You wouldn’t have liked me.’
Thaniel smiled slightly. It was true. Befo
‘I’m sorry,’ Mori said.
‘Don’t apologise for having made me better. I was … ’ He shook his head. ‘If I hadn’t seen the Yard go, I’d have died a clerk instead of a pianist.’
Mori smiled, then turned away and coughed.
Thaniel frowned. ‘Have you caught something here?’
‘No, it’s the cold. They won’t shut the windows.’
‘You should be more careful,’ Thaniel said, aware that he sounded hennish, but also aware, suddenly and sharply, that Mori was much older than him. In a flash, he saw that by the time he was in his fifties, it would all be over: he would be one of the lonely men who walked in Hyde Park in the early mornings, feeding the starlings and not thinking. He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, I ought to go before they frog-march me out. I’ll come back in the morning.’ He stopped halfway to rising. ‘Don’t go without me.’
‘I won’t,’ Mori said, looking puzzled.
Thaniel glanced at the nurse, who stared hard at him. He stood up and shook Mori’s hand. ‘Sleep well, Keita.’
Mori smiled slowly, and nodded.
THIRTY
He had heard, either from an article in the Illustrated London News or something else that used the same typeface, that total immersion would cure a fear. It was untrue. When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel’s never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future.
Outside, the snow kept on. London ground to a halt. Usually Thaniel would have complained, but Fanshaw had given him the week off, so the furthest he was forced to venture was the grocer’s. Since the surface snow never had time to freeze solid before more snow arrived, it remained more like powder than ice for days; the Haverly children’s snowballs disintegrated into miniature blizzards of their own, and the wind blew streams of it along Knightsbridge.
The workshop came steadily back to life. A clockwork forest grew in the front window, its branches warped and host to a flock of tiny birds, its floor carpeted in the white, coralline moss that grew in Scandinavia. In a lull between chapters of Tolstoy, Mori walked around the workshop with a basket of tiny glass balls, each magnetised and charged with phosphorescent dust, lobbing them gently in the air, where they hovered and formed constellations around the orrery. One afternoon, a swarm of clockwork fireflies soared in through the kitchen door and arranged themselves into a bell jar, where they pulsed different shades of yellow and orange.
‘I didn’t want to say I’d made them,’ he said when he saw Thaniel watching. ‘I hadn’t got one to show you. I think if you go about claiming at strangers that you make clockwork flying things they start to feel doubtful about any sort of elongated tenancy. But I showed you Katsu, didn’t I? Maybe I didn’t think at all. Anyway, I made them,’ he said, lifting the jar a little, then sighed. ‘I’ve forgotten something, haven’t I?’
‘No.’
‘Tell me if I have. Please? I don’t like being a future goldfish, it makes me perpetually mistrustful of my past self.’
‘I don’t think you have,’ Thaniel said dishonestly. Anything else would have sounded accusatory, and he didn’t want it to. He was nearly sure that Mori had known the fireflies would be important, but hazily, like other people saved money in a special account for some unforecast rainy day, or absently made more than the necessary number of friends because of a bad feeling about a business venture. Lately he was starting to think that they were surrounded by things that had been made for the same reason, but had missed their purpose as time overtook them. The gold locust clock was striking, and strange, but it had no reason to be a locust. Grace’s watch had had its irrelevant swallow, and now, there was the half-finished music box in the desk drawer. He had seen Mori looking at it yesterday as if it were a fossil whose original shape he couldn’t make out.
Mori looked tiredly at the window. ‘When I forget something, I forget what I’ve said about it. Or written. It’s like having learned some French at school and then forgotten it later, but being able to recall that you used to understand.’
Thaniel felt a pang, as if he’d seen him catch himself on the tip of the soldering iron. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Not wrong. But the police are coming now. They found another bomb at the new Yard. I can stay and we can talk to them together. Or I can go out for an hour and … leave you to it, and by the time I come back it will be over and I’ll have forgotten they could have come. That’s cowardly, but I’m still held together with thread. I don’t normally mind a few pushes, but it will hurt more than usual. Do you mind if I … ’
‘Christ, go. Why are you staying to ask me, you idiot?’
‘I’ll just write it down so I know what you’ve done. You ought to have some credit for this,’ he said ruefully.
Thaniel took the pen from him. ‘I’d rather have some more of that good coffee from the pretentious shop on Knightsbridge, actually.’
‘Pretentious-shop coffee. All right.’
‘I’ll start out with you, I think I’ll wait for them at the top of Filigree Street. Is Dolly Williamson with them?’
‘Yes. How do you know him?’ Mori said curiously. He handed over Thaniel’s coat, being nearest the hooks.
‘Just over the telegraph wires. I used to take his messages at the Home Office. Do you know who made the bomb? Might help to convince him it wasn’t you.’
He had not meant it to come out so suddenly, and realised what he had done halfway through the question when Mori stopped winding on his scarf and only held the ends of it wrapped over his hands, close to his breastbone. ‘Yes. I should have told the police before, I know that,’ he said carefully. He seemed to see that he had frozen and, very slowly, in a way that looked as though his gears were being pulled in the wrong direction, finished the knot of his scarf. ‘But there was … well, you wouldn’t have stayed if I had. I don’t know why. I have a note of it, it’s underlined.’
Thaniel stared at him and Mori mistook his expression and looked down.
‘No … no.’ He closed one hand over his elbow and tried to think what to say. He wanted never to say that he had worked for Williamson. It was bad enough that Mori had let six policemen tear his workshop apart for the sake of not being abandoned, without knowing that they had come because Thaniel had told them to. ‘Thank you,’ was all he could find in the end.
Mori gave him the kind smile of a reprieved man. ‘Frederick Spindle,’ he said.
They went slowly in the snow, but since it was all powder, it wasn’t slippery. It blew from the ends of gutters like the thin waterfalls on mountainsides, pattering as it hit windows crosswise and drifted against the bicycles propped up outside the shops, most of them frozen into place and unused for days. Mori left him to go on along Knightsbridge. Thaniel waited against a lamp-post. It was still broad daylight, but the snow made the roads difficult, and the lamplighters were already out.
He didn’t wait long before the black police four-wheeler turned on to Filigree Street, inching along as the horses struggled against the wind, even with their blinkers. He stepped out in front of it to stop them, then went round to the door. He tapped on it.
‘Dolly.’
Williamson opened the door. ‘You’, he said, ‘should thank your lucky stars I haven’t done anything about your little escape from house arrest. If it weren’t for the Foreign Office telling everyone you’re a bloody hero, you would be in a cell by now. Step back and let us get on.’ He paused. ‘How did you know to come out?’
‘What are you here for?’
Williamson sighed irritably and climbed down. He looked ill. ‘I’ll meet you there,’ he said to the others, and then, to the driver, ‘On you go.’
Thaniel stepped back to avoid t
‘We found another bomb. It was hidden in the ceiling above my office. Full of his clockwork of course. Fred Spindle has just confirmed that it’s the same workmanship as the first. Perhaps your wife might tell us what really happened to her now we have proof coming out of our ears.’
‘What happened is what she told you. She went walking round London for a while.’
‘And then happened to miss being blown up in a firework shop explosion by about ten seconds the following evening—’
‘Come with me,’ said Thaniel, suddenly too angry to bother with a logical pretext.
‘What? No, the others are waiting—’
‘No, you’re going to come with me and I’m going to show you who did it before your officers arrest the wrong bloody man. You’ll just have to make the effort.’ He pulled Williamson by his elbow toward Belgravia. They had to take a cab, because although it was only a short distance, Williamson began to cough.
The bell rang demurely in Mr Spindle’s shop when they came in. Behind the desk, Spindle himself straightened and smiled.
‘Superintendent Williamson—’
Thaniel dragged him out from the desk by his shirt front. Williamson swore and Spindle gasped as the back of his head knocked against his meticulously organised counter. Thaniel ignored both of them. ‘It was you. I came in here with that watch, and you thought Mori knew all about the bomb, so you made up that rubbish about the diamonds knowing full well he had the money to buy them himself. You’d already used his clockwork to be sure of the accuracy, so it was only a matter of spooking me and stressing it to the police. All you needed to do then was show them the comparable parts.’