The Twelve Stopped Clocks

The constable would not go in alone, and so it fell to Imogen to break her great-uncle's door.

She had begged the workshop key off him only last spring, and never used it; Silas Hadley trusted no lock but the kind he could disassemble with his eyes shut, and the door of his shop on Carrow Lane was barred from inside by an iron drop-bolt he had forged himself. It took two men and a crowbar to spring it. The bolt fell to the boards with a sound like a dropped spoon, and then there was only the smell — cold solder, machine oil, and beneath it something the constable's face refused to name.

Silas sat in his chair at the long bench, head tipped back, eyes shut, as though he had merely closed them to listen better. He was a week shy of seventy and had buried two wives and a son, and Imogen had loved him the helpless way you love the last of your blood. She did not cry yet. She was looking at the clocks.

Every wall of the workshop wore them — carriage clocks, longcase clocks, a brass ship's chronometer, a cuckoo with its little door ajar — and Silas mended each one as though it were a wounded bird, so that the shop on any ordinary day was a single soft thunder of ticking. Now it was silent. Every clock in the room had stopped.

"His heart, most like," the constable said, too quickly. "Door bolted, window barred — see the bars — chimney no wider than my arm. No way in, no way out. Anatural death, miss, hard as it sits." He wanted it to be natural; a sealed room with a corpse in it was paperwork he did not know how to write.

But Imogen had grown up under these clocks, had learned her numbers reading their faces, and she knew what they did not say. A workshop full of clocks does not stop all at once. They run down at their own private speeds — a day apart, a week apart — each according to when it was last wound. For every one of them to be stopped together, someone had halted each by hand.

She went round the room with the constable's lamp, reading the stilled faces aloud, and writing each in the dust on the bench with her fingertip, the way Silas had taught her to take an inventory.

Nine. Then four. Then twelve, the cuckoo. The ship's chronometer at five. The little enamel clock his second wife had loved, at one. On and on, twelve clocks, twelve different hours, none of them agreeing, none of them the hour the constable's pocket-watch now showed.

"They're wrong, all of them," the constable said over her shoulder. "Stopped at every which time. Means nothing."

"It means everything," Imogen said softly. "He set them. A man who could feel a clock lose four seconds in a month did not let twelve of them disagree by accident." She looked at the numbers smeared in the dust under her hand — 9, 4, 12, 5, 1 — and felt the floor of the ordinary world tilt very gently beneath her. "He stopped them on purpose. He was leaving me something to read. And then he sat down to wait for me to find it."

Outside, the church bell told the true hour, indifferent. Inside, twelve frozen faces kept the only time that mattered now, and Imogen drew up Silas's stool, and began to listen to the dead.