The Clocks

‘Miss Pebmarsh couldn’t have done ’im in, could she?’ he suggested yearningly.

‘Don’t talk so silly,’ said his mother. A thought crossed her mind. ‘I wonder if I ought to have told him—’

‘Told him what, Mom?’

‘Never you mind,’ said Mrs Curtin. ‘It was nothing, really.’

CHAPTER 6 (#u83b3c6de-0ee7-520d-9037-12f4f66d2525)

Colin Lamb’s Narrative

When we had put ourselves outside two good underdone steaks, washed down with draught beer, Dick Hardcastle gave a sigh of comfortable repletion, announced that he felt better and said:

‘To hell with dead insurance agents, fancy clocks and screaming girls! Let’s hear about you, Colin. I thought you’d finished with this part of the world. And here you are wandering about the back streets of Crowdean. No scope for a marine biologist at Crowdean, I can assure you.’

‘Don’t you sneer at marine biology, Dick. It’s a very useful subject. The mere mention of it so bores people and they’re so afraid you’re going to talk about it, that you never have to explain yourself further.’

‘No chance of giving yourself away, eh?’

‘You forget,’ I said coldly, ‘that I am a marine biologist. I took a degree in it at Cambridge. Not a very good degree, but a degree. It’s a very interesting subject, and one day I’m going back to it.’

‘I know what you’ve been working on, of course,’ said Hardcastle. ‘And congratulations to you. Larkin’s trial comes on next month, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Amazing the way he managed to carry on passing stuff out for so long. You’d think somebody would have suspected.’

‘They didn’t, you know. When you’ve got it into your head that a fellow is a thoroughly good chap, it doesn’t occur to you that he mightn’t be.’

‘He must have been clever,’ Dick commented.

I shook my head.

‘No, I don’t think he was, really. I think he just did as he was told. He had access to very important documents. He walked out with them, they were photographed and returned to him, and they were back again where they belonged the same day. Good organization there. He made a habit of lunching at different places every day. We think that he hung up his overcoat where there was always an overcoat exactly like it—though the man who wore the other overcoat wasn’t always the same man. The overcoats were switched, but the man who switched them never spoke to Larkin, and Larkin never spoke to him. We’d like to know a good deal more about the mechanics of it. It was all very well planned with perfect timing. Somebody had brains.’

‘And that’s why you’re still hanging round the Naval Station at Portlebury?’

‘Yes, we know the Naval end of it and we know the London end. We know just when and where Larkin got his pay and how. But there’s a gap. In between the two there’s a very pretty little bit of organization. That’s the part we’d like to know more about, because that’s the part where the brains are. Somewhere there’s a very good headquarters, with excellent planning, which leaves a trail that is confused not once but probably seven or eight times.’

‘What did Larkin do it for?’ asked Hardcastle, curiously. ‘Political idealist? Boosting his ego? Or plain money?’

‘He was no idealist,’ I said. ‘Just money, I’d say.’

‘Couldn’t you have got on to him sooner that way? He spent the money, didn’t he? He didn’t salt it away.’

‘Oh, no, he splashed it about all right. Actually, we got on to him a little sooner than we’re admitting.’

Hardcastle nodded his head understandingly.

‘I see. You tumbled and then you used him for a bit. Is that it?’

‘More or less. He had passed out some quite valuable information before we got on to him, so we let him pass out more information, also apparently valuable. In the Service I belong to, we have to resign ourselves to looking fools now and again.’

‘I don’t think I’d care for your job, Colin,’ said Hardcastle thoughtfully.

‘It’s not the exciting job that people think it is,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, it’s usually remarkably tedious. But there’s something beyond that. Nowadays one gets to feeling that nothing really is secret. We know Their secrets and They know our secrets. Our agents are often Their agents, too, and Their agents are very often our agents. And in the end who is double-crossing who becomes a kind of nightmare! Sometimes I think that everybody knows everybody else’s secrets and that they enter into a kind of conspiracy to pretend that they don’t.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Dick said thoughtfully.

Then he looked at me curiously.

‘I can see why you should still be hanging around Portlebury. But Crowdean’s a good ten miles from Portlebury.’

‘What I’m really after,’ I said, ‘are Crescents.’

‘Crescents?’ Hardcastle looked puzzled.

‘Yes. Or alternatively, moons. New moons, rising moons and so on. I started my quest in Portlebury itself. There’s a pub there called The Crescent Moon. I wasted a long time over that. It sounded ideal. Then there’s The Moon and Stars. The Rising Moon, The Jolly Sickle, The Cross and the Crescent—that was in a little place called Seamede. Nothing doing. Then I abandoned moons and started on Crescents. Several Crescents in Portlebury. Lansbury Crescent, Aldridge Crescent, Livermead Crescent, Victoria Crescent.’

I caught sight of Dick’s bewildered face and began to laugh.

‘Don’t look so much at sea, Dick. I had something tangible to start me off.’

I took out my wallet, extracted a sheet of paper and passed it over to him. It was a single sheet of hotel writing paper on which a rough sketch had been drawn.

‘A chap called Hanbury had this in his wallet. Hanbury did a lot of work in the Larkin case. He was good—very good. He was run over by a hit and run car in London. Nobody got its number. I don’t know what this means, but it’s something that Hanbury jotted down, or copied, because he thought it was important. Some idea that he had? Or something that he’d seen or heard? Something to do with a moon or crescent, the number 61 and the initial M. I took over after his death. I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s something to find. I don’t know what 61 means. I don’t know what M means. I’ve been working in a radius from Portlebury outwards. Three weeks of unremitting and unrewarding toil. Crowdean is on my route. That’s all there is to it. Frankly, Dick, I didn’t expect very much of Crowdean. There’s only one Crescent here. That’s Wilbraham Crescent. I was going to have a walk along Wilbraham Crescent and see what I thought of Number 61 before asking you if you’d got any dope that could help me. That’s what I was doing this afternoon—but I couldn’t find Number 61.’

‘As I told you, 61 is occupied by a local builder.’

‘And that’s not what I’m after. Have they got a foreign help of any kind?’

‘Could be. A good many people do nowadays. If so, she’ll be registered. I’ll look it up for you by tomorrow.’

‘Thanks, Dick.’

‘I’ll be making routine inquiries tomorrow at the two houses on either side of 19. Whether they saw anyone come to the house, et cetera. I might include the houses directly behind 19, the ones whose gardens adjoin it. I rather think that 61 is almost directly behind 19. I could take you along with me if you liked.’

I closed with the offer greedily.

‘I’ll be your Sergeant Lamb and take shorthand notes.’

We agreed that I should come to the police station at nine thirty the following morning.

I arrived the next morning promptly at the agreed hour and found my friend literally fuming with rage.

When he had dismissed an unhappy subordinate, I inquired delicately what had happened.

For a moment Hardcastle seemed unable to speak. Then he spluttered out: ‘Those damned clocks!’