The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street Part 30

'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 j.a.panese.' 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 j.a.panese, 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. Before the bomb, he had been a smaller version of himself.

'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 Ill.u.s.trated 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 s...o...b..a.l.l.s 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 gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s, each magnetised and charged with phosph.o.r.escent 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 the spray of snow from the wheels. Williamson hunched forward in his coat.

'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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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.'

Spindle tried to prise away his hands. 'No! No, I didn't-'

'Give the bomb to another watchmaker to look at, Dolly, and I'll bet you my life that they'll tell you it's not Mori's workmanship, even if they are his parts.'

'They forced me to!' Spindle exclaimed. He looked between them desperately. 'You can't say no to these people. I was I had boasted too much about being a consultant for the police, and they heard, and a man came to the shop. I thought he would kill me. He would have, if I hadn't made-'

'You were calm enough to make a bomb.'

'Williamson! They would have-'

Williamson had closed his eyes. He looked more tired than ever. There were new lines on his face since Thaniel had seen him last. 'You'll have to come with me now.'

Mr Spindle stared at him. 'It's treason.'

'Is this your coat? Put it on.'

They waited while Spindle put on his coat. Williamson steered him outside, then blew his whistle. A constable came running, and then another not long after him. Belgravia was well patrolled. Thaniel resisted the urge to shove Spindle in front of an approaching cab. Williamson stood by him in the snow and silence for a few moments. Although the road was busy with cabs and carriages, the snow m.u.f.fled the sound, and the only thing he could hear clearly was the clucking of water under the drain beside him.

'How do you explain how Mori knew about the Yard bomb early enough to leave you that watch?' Williamson asked at last.

'Same reason I knew to come and meet you today. You wanted to know what he said to me, before. He's a clairvoyant, Dolly, a real one. My wife proved it. In chalk, on a blackboard.'

Williamson faltered. 'What are you talking about?'

'I know it sounds ridiculous, but come and meet him.'

Williamson smiled uneasily. 'I don't go in for clairvoyants.'

'You will for him. Please. It's warm at home, and you're ill. So is he, you can complain together.'

With an expression caught between scepticism and anxiety, Williamson consented.

Mori was still out when they arrived back at number twenty-seven. Williamson murmured to the men in the waiting police carriage to go to the Kensington station, and waited awkwardly at the kitchen table while Thaniel made some tea. The kettle sang just before the front door opened.

'Can you make four cups?' Mori called from the hallway.

'Four?' He turned around, and so did Williamson. Mori came through the door with a small child in front of him. It was Six, wrapped in his scarf. She looked up at Thaniel with doubtful eyes.

'I see?' said Thaniel.

Mori looked set upon. 'It's freezing at the workhouse. Six, don't steal anything, this is a policeman.'

She studied Dolly. 'A real one?'

'A real one.' He put his hand out to Williamson, who shook it slowly. As always, Mori seemed smaller beside an ordinarily sized person, but the warm colour of his skin made Williamson look haggard. 'You think you're dying, but you aren't,' he said gently. 'You need to eat some proper fruit and go to the sea. This is the address of a house of mine in Cornwall, it's lovely there. They're expecting you there on Sat.u.r.day. It's cold there, but no snow, and there's going to be an interesting storm on Thursday. If you catch the ten fourteen train down, first cla.s.s, you'll be sharing a carriage with the woman in the blue coat who you sometimes see along Whitehall Street. She's visiting her aunt.'

Williamson stared at him. 'If you really know the future then you know who made the bombs.'

'Spindle.'

'Why the h.e.l.l didn't you report him?'

'No one would have believed me,' he said. 'I'm a little Chinaman and a business rival, and he's a government consultant.'

'I ... well. Interesting,' Williamson said, sounding shaken. Thaniel gave him the tea and they sat down together while Six looked at Williamson's whistle. He seemed grateful to have a child there; she made a good distraction, and she had several solemn questions about police work that sounded to Thaniel as though she had been talking to Mori about it beforehand.

'Don't try to take the train,' Mori told him when he said he would leave. 'There's a man about to commit suicide on the line. You won't get there in time.'

'There's ... ?'

'A cab for you outside instead.'

After Williamson had gone, Thaniel gave Six some more tea. He wouldn't have thought such a small child would go in for tea, but she had finished hers faster than any of them.

'Is your funny octopus here?' she said.