Seventy-Seven Clocks

∨ Seventy-Seven Clocks ∧

22

Lux Aeterna

John May strode along the marble-faced corridor, his dark mane bouncing at his shirt collar. Having had enough of Tomlins’s refusal to return his phone calls, he had decided to pay a surprise visit to the Goldsmiths’ Hall.

He pushed open the door at the end of the main chamber and entered, sweeping past a pair of startled secretaries. Tomlins was seated at his desk, fountain pen poised above a sheaf of documents. His eyes bulged in his florid face as he recognized the detective.

“Mr May, I told you I’d call you once I had found someone you could talk to,” he said, attempting to preempt May’s complaint.

“And when might that be?” asked May. “As I see it, you’re deliberately attempting to obstruct an investigation.”

“It’s not as easy as you think.” Tomlins recapped his pen with deliberate care. “I mentioned the fact that you would like to discuss certain aspects of the Whitstable family’s lives with someone who knew them, but I’m afraid I’ve had very little response. Perhaps people have no wish to speak ill of the dead.”

“Why would anyone speak ill?” May seated himself in the only other chair. “Weren’t they liked? You told me you barely knew them. How many guild members do you have here?”

“Oh,” Tomlins waved his hand airily, “it would be hard to estimate…”

“Mr Tomlins, let me make things simpler for you.” May was beginning to lose his patience. He had seen such men in every walk of life, ‘clubbable’ men who used the privilege of membership as a class weapon. “I want exact figures from you right now, this morning, or I’ll have you brought in and your files sequestered as evidence. I want to know how many members of the Worshipful Company of Watchmakers there are, and how many of those belong to this little inner circle of yours, the one which uses the symbol you couldn’t recognize, the sacred flame. Then we’ll start going through names and if necessary we’ll interview every single person on your list.”

Tomlins’s smile froze on his face. “You must understand that this is information we never give out…” His voice climbed even higher than usual.

May waved the objection aside. “You send your members mailings; every organization does. Your secretary must have the names and addresses. I’ll ask her.” He rose.

“All right, I’ll get you the list,” said Tomlins hastily. “But I don’t know what you mean by an inner circle.”

“We’ll go through the names first, then we’ll come back to the sacred flame. I’ll have a number of other requests in due course. Until then, I suggest you make yourself busy, because you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’m going to ask you to do for me tomorrow.”

♦

Alison Hatfield stood waiting for him at the foot of the main staircase, dwarfed by the white statues of the four seasons. As May approached her through the temple of chalced marble, he wondered if she had come to a decision. Last night he had called her and asked for her help. As she was employed outside the Watchmakers’ Company but within the same system, he figured she would be the ideal person to assist him.

“Thanks for meeting me, Miss Hatfield,” he said, as she led him to the deserted Court Room in the northwest corner of the building. “I need a guide through all of this.” He tapped his folder.

“Please, call me Alison. We won’t be interrupted in here.” She pushed open a pair of heavily carved doors. May’s mouth fell open as he gazed upon the elaborate gold and silver cornices of the Court Room.

“Impressive, isn’t it? That stone behind the Prime Warden’s chair is a Roman altar from the second century. Some workmen discovered it in the building’s foundations about a hundred and fifty years ago. The figure on the side is Diana, or Apollo, we’re not sure which.”

“Extraordinary,” he agreed. “It makes you wonder how much more of London is still hidden away from public view.” They seated themselves at the mahogany banjoshaped table that dominated the room. “I thought the guilds were created for the benefit of artisans and their families.”

“They still carry out a lot of work for charity, but they’ve accumulated great wealth.”

May emptied the folder on to the leather surface of the table. “I’ll be honest with you, Alison,” he said with a sigh. “There are unusual pressures being brought to bear on us, and I’m desperate for some outside help. These murders occurred within a respected family during Common Market fortnight. Could William Whitstable have died when an incendiary device of his own making exploded? I know the whole family belongs to the Watchmakers. Their ancestors were men with mechanical minds. Are they doing this to each other? If so, why would they abduct a small child? Are the Whitstables members of some private club which exists within the Watchmakers? How can I find out if they are?” He sat back in his chair and turned to her. “You see my problems.”

“What can I do to help?”

“I need you to find me the name of anyone who can tell me the truth about the Whitstables. Either Mr Tomlins is too scared to talk, or he genuinely knows nothing about what’s going on, or he is somehow involved. I fear it’s the latter. Can you honestly say that no one here has ever seen this sign?” He held up the picture of the sacred flame once more. He didn’t want to tell her that the only person to recognize it as a guild symbol was Arthur’s butcher.

Alison carefully examined it. “Actually, I have seen it somewhere,” she told him.

“Where?”

“I think it was on a brochure. We help the Watchmakers send out their mailings. I don’t know whether it was to do with them directly; there are many associated companies. I think it was something connected with their charity work.”

“Would you have any brochures left?” asked May.

“There are bound to be some in the basement. We never throw anything away.”

“Can we go and look?”

“It’ll be cold and dark. A real mess. No one ever goes down there.”

“It would be easier than trying to find them by myself.”

“All right,” she said finally. “I’ll take you down. But we’ll have to get a couple of torches.”

♦

The old trellis lift shook and rattled as they descended into musty darkness. Bare concrete walls rose around them. It was as if they were leaving the guild hall for the ruined Temple of Diana that lay buried far beneath it.

“Why aren’t there any lights down here?” asked May, watching his breath turn grey in the chill air.

“I don’t know. There are emergency lights, but they must operate on a separate circuit. I think it’s a different voltage or something.” Alison pointed to the tiny red bulb set in the ceiling of the lift. Standing in the gloom with her nose tilted and her hair brushed to the back of her long neck, Alison looked like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. He wanted to touch her skin, to see if it could really be that soft and delicate.

The lift groaned. May remembered his partner’s dictum that bad things happened when the lights went out. They stopped with an echoing thump, and Alison pulled open the trellis. She clicked on her torch and shone it along a dim corridor.

“This way,” she said, holding back the gate for him. They passed nearly a dozen darkened doorways before she turned into a tall, windowless storeroom. “If the brochures are down here at all, they’ll be in one of these.”

“Okay, you start at one end and I’ll start at the other,” said May.

For the next half hour they tore open the lids of damp-smelling cartons and checked the mildewed contents. May was just resealing one of the boxes when he heard a scuttling noise in the darkness beyond the room, like tacks being scattered across tiles. “What was that?”

Alison looked up at him, her pale eyes catching the light like some kind of nocturnal animal. “I think there might be rats,” she said calmly. “Hardly anyone ever comes down here because of the leak.”

“What leak?” May looked down at the torch. The beam had begun to falter.

“The river drains run right under here. Sometimes, after very heavy rainfall, you can hear a dull rumbling beneath the floor. It’s a really creepy sound. There’s a leak in one of the corridors below, and the rats get in. They breed in the river. They’re supposed to be as big as cats.”

“There’s another floor below this?”

“Yes, but they damned it up with cement because of the danger of flooding.”

May found himself listening for the rush of the underground current. The torch flickered again. He tapped the glass with his hand.

On the other side of the room, Alison ripped open a carton and emptied it. “I think I’ve found them,” she called.

May clambered over the boxes and joined her just as his torch beam dwindled to nothing. She held one of the brochures high and shone her light on it.

The back page bore the stamp of the golden flame burning in heavenly light. The words LUX AETERNA were written in neat Tudor script beneath it, and beneath this were printed the words Alliance of Eternal Light. May took the brochure from her. The headline across the front read: Renovating London’s Most Beautiful Theatres: How You Can Help. Below was a reproduction of a Victorian painting showing an excited first-night audience. May opened the front cover and found himself gazing at a pair of photographs, smartly bordered in gold.

One showed the late William Whitstable. The other was a portrait of James Makepeace Whitstable, a man who had been dead for the best part of a century. A man, thought May, studying the stern face in the photograph, who still exerted such power over his descendants that nothing, not even death, would allow them to share their secrets with the outside world.