The Curious Case of the Clockmaker’s Key
The brass bell above the door of Fenwick’s Clock Shop had not rung since Thursday. This was, in the considered opinion of Edith Bramble, entirely the wrong sort of silence for a Tuesday morning.
Edith paused on the cobbled pavement of Nettlewick High Street, her canvas shopping bag looped over one arm and her reading glasses pushed up onto her silver hair in the manner she had never quite managed to break. She peered through the bow window at the rows of clocks — carriage clocks, mantel clocks, one magnificent longcase clock with a painted moon face — all ticking away in their dutiful fashion. But the shop door bore a handwritten sign: *Closed due to unforeseen circumstances.*
Old Gerald Fenwick never closed on Tuesdays. Not in thirty-seven years.
She found him twenty minutes later, sitting in the back room of the Nettlewick Community Hall, a mug of sweet tea going cold beside him and Constable Harding hovering nearby with a notebook that appeared to contain very little of use.
“Gerald,” said Edith, taking the chair beside him with the quiet authority of a woman who had managed the village library for four decades. “Tell me everything.”
Gerald Fenwick was seventy-one, small, and precise — a man who wore waistcoats even in August and wound every clock in his shop himself every single morning. His hands, she noticed, were trembling slightly.
“The Hartley bracket clock,” he said. “Queen Anne case, original movement. It came in last Friday for restoration — belonged to the Hartley family at Barrow Grange, you know. Worth a considerable sum. When I arrived this morning, the cabinet was unlocked and the clock was gone.”
Constable Harding cleared his throat. “No signs of forced entry. We believe Mr. Fenwick may have forgotten to lock up on Friday evening.”
“I did not forget,” said Gerald, with quiet dignity.
Edith said nothing to Harding, which was generally more effective than saying a great deal. Instead she asked Gerald to walk her through Friday. He had closed at half past five, locked both the cabinet and the front door, and gone to the Wheatsheaf for his customary Friday pie and a glass of bitter. He had the receipt, as it happened — he kept all his receipts, being that sort of man.
“And who knew the clock was there?” Edith asked.
Gerald considered. “Well — the Hartley family, naturally. Young Marcus Hartley brought it in. And I’d mentioned it to one or two people at the Horticultural Society meeting on Thursday evening. It was a rather exciting acquisition.”
“One or two people,” Edith repeated. “Such as?”
“Reverend Stokes was there. Dorothy Marsh. That new fellow — Cavanaugh, the one who’s rented Appleby Cottage. He seemed very interested, actually. Asked quite a lot of questions about restoration timelines.”
Edith filed this away neatly, the way she had once filed away overdue book notices.
She visited Appleby Cottage that afternoon under the perfectly reasonable pretence of delivering a welcome casserole — she had been meaning to introduce herself to the new tenant for a fortnight, and a casserole was never unwelcome. Philip Cavanaugh answered the door in paint-spattered trousers, which was interesting because she had heard he was an antiques dealer, not a decorator.
He was perhaps forty-five, pleasant enough, with the particular manner of someone being carefully pleasant. He accepted the casserole, offered tea, and answered her questions about the village with just slightly too much ease.
What caught Edith’s attention — and it was the sort of thing one only noticed if one had spent a professional lifetime cataloguing the precise location of objects — was the mahogany bracket on the wall of his sitting room. It was exactly the right size and age for a Queen Anne clock. And it bore four small marks in the varnish, the ghost-impressions of feet that had rested there recently and then been removed.
The bracket was empty. But it had not always been empty. Not today, at any rate.
She did not confront him. She was not, she often reflected, a confrontational sort of person. She simply excused herself, walked to the post office where Dorothy Marsh held unofficial court most afternoons, and asked a few gentle questions about Philip Cavanaugh’s recent movements.
Dorothy, whose observational powers were considerable if somewhat indiscriminate, mentioned that she’d seen Cavanaugh loading something large and blanket-wrapped into the boot of his estate car that very morning, just after eight o’clock. He’d told her it was a piece of furniture going to be refinished in Shrewsbury.
Edith telephoned Constable Harding from the red telephone box outside the post office, which still worked perfectly well and which she had campaigned strenuously to preserve.
She explained, patiently, about the bracket on the wall. She explained about the four small marks. She mentioned the estate car and the blanket. She suggested, gently, that an inquiry to antique dealers in Shrewsbury might prove productive before close of business.
Harding began to say something about coincidences.
“The marks in the varnish were fresh,” said Edith. “You could see where the dust around them had not yet settled back. Gerald Fenwick winds every clock each morning. That clock had been on that bracket this morning, and removed in a hurry, and not very long before I arrived.” She paused. “Also, Mr. Cavanaugh’s trousers had no paint on them when he answered the door to me yesterday at the Horticultural Society, when he wore exactly the same pair.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“I’ll make some calls,” said Harding.
The Hartley bracket clock was recovered from the back of a dealer’s premises in Shrewsbury by four o’clock. Philip Cavanaugh, it emerged, had accumulated a rather disappointing history in three other counties under two other names.
Gerald Fenwick came to Edith’s door that evening with a small carriage clock, gift-wrapped in brown paper.
“I couldn’t possibly,” said Edith.
“It needs a home,” said Gerald firmly. “And it needs someone who’ll listen to it properly.”
Edith accepted it, set it on her mantelpiece, and found that its steady tick was, in its own small way, rather like the turning of a well-loved page.
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