Angelmaker (12 page)

From her bag, she withdrew a small parcel of bunched tissue paper, and this she placed in front of him, with some considerable misgiving.

“It is Asian,” he said, “and I think it is beautiful, but there is no hallmarking, so I do not really know that it is gold.”

Daniel Spork made haste to assure her that the craftsmen of Asia were capable of splendid things, though he worried that he would be forced, when the thing was revealed, to tell her that her husband’s impulsive purchase had been an error. Many travelling gentlemen, lulled perhaps by a sense of north-western superiority, are gently gulled of large sums by enterprising persons in the streets and shops of Asian cities, and deserved in Daniel Spork’s opinion no less for their hubris. He did not extend this judgement to their families, however, and did not relish telling little old ladies with treasured gifts that they were not gold and emeralds but leaf and glass.

He glanced at her, and when she nodded, picked it open with long, unsteady fingers.

The timepiece itself was unexceptional; well made and simple, the face a thin wafer of polished ebony in a gold oval, with a flat glass cover. It was the bracelet which arrested Daniel’s attention, which clenched about his heart and stopped his breath in his throat. He had, until now, never seen its like. Rumours had reached him, and he had dismissed them. Now he held the thing in his hands, and knew it to be almost as far beyond him as it was beyond this nice, unknowing old dame who had brought it in. The difference was that after a lifetime of gears and movements, of gold and lamé and carats and weights, he knew when he was surpassed, when he was in the presence of a master’s work. He passed it back to her, very gently.

“Your husband is—is?”

“Was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was long ago.”

“He was a very wise man, madame. And this thing you have brought me, which he found for you, it is a thing for which a lesser man might search a lifetime. You must treasure it.”

“I do.”

“So, good. And if ever you should meet anyone who can repair such a thing—who understands how this is done—please say to them that you know a man in Quoyle Street in London who dares not ask if they will tell him the secret, but would count it more than a privilege
to drink a cup of tea with them and know that someone, somewhere, retains the trick of this, and will make sure it is never lost.” He sniffed.

“I have made you sad.”

“No, madame. You have made me more than happy. I can fix the mechanism for you, but I will not touch the strap. I would not know where to begin. Come back when I am old. Perhaps I will learn.”

Woven Gold. And that is not the most remarkable thing about the doodah. Joe Spork saw what was inside it for the first time twenty minutes ago. He has no idea what it does.

First, there is the matter of the lock. It is, in fact, five locks, each one tiny and rotated by a different section of the whojimmy, each one unlocking the next one, until the last twist releases a clasp and allows the whole to open. These locks are distributed around the interior of the ball in a strange cage-like architecture which reminds Joe distantly of the aviary at London Zoo. Disconnected from one another, they flip back like the wing-cases of a glorious beetle, clasped loosely around the ball’s clockwork heart. That, by itself, is enough to attract his most alert scrutiny. It is good work, and that modest assessment is in the trade tongue, the dour speech of craftsmen looking at their own:
Not bad, your Taj Mahal, old son. Bit bald about the edges, mind
. And,
Oh aye
, replies the master builder,
it’s all right. You don’t think the water feature’s a bit loud? Wish I’d had time to build t’other one in black, that would have been something … Still, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, I suppose. You can’t get everything right
.

That kind of good work.

Rare work.

Brilliant work.

White-gloved and with a pair of softwood tweezers (better they should break than this object should be scratched) he examines it again, unfolds the locking mechanism—not without a slightly filthy feeling that he’s undressing a sleeping princess—and examines the mechanism within under his thick, jeweller’s lens.

The largest cog is perhaps two-eighths of an inch across. The smallest is so tiny that Joe has no idea how it could have been made, except that he knows exactly: someone made a special tool, a thing which mimics the gestures of a normal-size tool on a far smaller scale. Write your name normally on the left, and it is scratched into the panel on the right small enough to fit on a grain of rice. Half a grain. And then—this is the part which boggles his mind—each individual piece, each spring and cog and counter, was made by hand and fitted
together. It is a rippling, shifting landscape of interlocking gets and pins, tracks and catches.

The envisioning of this apparatus, the planning, without a computer or even a photocopier, must have taken a year in itself. If a normal piece of clockwork is a person, this thing is a great city. It is folded on itself, each section fulfilling several roles, turning in one axis, then another, then another. There is, just here, a yet smaller case which performs some outré function he cannot fathom, but which itself is also the weight driving some manner of self-winding system. The cog which is the output stream, which pokes through the ball at the north pole and meets whatever remarkable thing is driven by this tiny engine (although it’s not an engine, of course, it’s something far more strange and powerful: a storage medium, a computer’s hard disk made of brass), is actually just a dust cover. When the thing is active it slides to one side to reveal a plug of gears so complex that Joe Spork has come to call it in his mind by a modern name. He calls it an
interface
.

Enigma, he wonders. Colossus? Is this a wartime thing? A code-breaker or a code-maker? He has no idea. He knows only that it is unrecorded, magical, genius. Hence: priceless.

And yes, there is a small flaw, but hardly a surprising one after decades in a sack somewhere. He reaches in—and stops. A tiny sparkle beneath his tweezers.

Impossible.

Joe peers, leaning down, adjusts the lamp. Then he brings two more lights closer, and a hand lens which in combination with the main one gives him a truly ludicrous magnification.

Absolutely impossible.

Beside the smallest cog, driven by a secondary ratchet on the face of the tiny thing, there is a glimmer of metal. Through the double lens he peers, and yes, there it is, appearing to hang in space: another layer of clockwork so small that it’s barely visible even now, a tracery of gossamer meshed and geared and fading away into the interior of the ball.

He stares at it, awestruck and even a little upset. He can do nothing with this. He would need other tools, a cleanroom, practice in micro-gauge engineering … he is utterly outclassed.

Except …

Except.

If there’s damage to the microscopic part, he’s out of his depth.
There’s probably no one on Earth who has experience with this. It is unique—and mad, because if you can make this, why wouldn’t you use printed circuitry? Unless, of course, there was no such thing when you made it.

That aside: the macro part is familiar enough. And yes, the central section lifts out as a single piece. This problem was foreseen (of course).

He goes to the kitchen and cleans a glass casserole dish, dries it thoroughly, and lifts the impossible heart of the ball into the dish, then covers it with the lid. Then he turns his attention to the rest of the mechanism.

Yes. This he can fix. A weak pin has sheared away, leaving a small arm flapping. It’s a matter of … well … it might take a little longer, actually …

At some point he finishes, and closes his eyes for a quarter of an hour to rest them. Catnapping is a skill everyone should have.

He checks his work and finds it good. The rest of the mechanism is perfect. There isn’t even any dust.

He cleans and oils it anyway, out of respect.

You, who made this: I wish we could have met
.

One thing is plain to a hedgehog, as his unlamented father would have had it: this is not your average music box. He should call a newspaper. He should call Harticle’s. He should call his mother—not because of this but just in general.

He doesn’t.

Slowly, he begins to assemble the other pieces of the doodah. They’re splendidly done, but they look brutish and plain now. The puzzle comes together under his hands without effort. After a second, he realises he’s mimicking the patterns of the ball. As above, so below. More elegance.

He’ll have to give the whojimmy back. It wouldn’t be right to separate it from the machine itself. Although if they were to give him a long-term maintenance contract, he could always …

He looks at his task and his tools, and allows his body to work without interference. Now that the puzzle is solved and the tasks are set, he knows how to do this at such a low level it’s important not to think too much. This is the part he loves, the vanishing of self.

When he finishes, he realises how long he has been working, and has to rush.

C
ourse of irritating stimulation in line with overall strategy,” Billy Friend says, as the train to Wistithiel rolls out of Paddington station only a little tardy, “eight letters.”

Joe Spork is tempted to think that this is not a bad description of his journey with Billy Friend. He shakes his head.

“Billy, where did it come from?”

“Blank, blank, C, et cetera. A gentleman never tells.”

“Billy, this is serious.”

“So am I, Joseph. Client confidences are sacred.” Billy gives a pompous little sniff, as if to say they’re particularly sacred among those people who habitually lie and steal. “If eleven down is ‘London,’ then it ends in ‘l’.”

“I have no idea. I’m terrible with crosswords.”

“Well, so am I, Joseph, but this is how we learn.”

“Billy, just tell me it’s not stolen.”

“It’s not stolen, Joseph.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart.”

“It’s stolen.”

“Who can ever be entirely sure, Joseph? None of us.”

“Jesus …”

“Keep working on the clue, if you please. Hm. It could be ‘lactose,’
which I believe is a form of sugar found in milk. Well, no, it couldn’t, but it had points of congruence.”

“For God’s sake,” says the woman in the opposite seat, “it’s ‘tactical.’ ‘Tack’ like on a boat, then ‘tickle.’ ”

“All right, all right,” Billy Friend murmurs, and then, rather waspish, “I notice you haven’t done yours, missus.”

“I set it,” she replies icily. “It’s the easy one today.”

Billy’s eyebrows climb involuntarily up his face, and his mouth turns down at the corners. He goes a bit pink on the top of his head.

“They’re putting Vaughn Parry up for parole next month,” Joe says quickly, because Billy doesn’t stay civil long when he thinks someone’s laughing at him. “Or whatever you call it when it’s medical. They say he’s cured.”

“What, seriously?” Billy looks taken aback. For nearly a year now—since the appalling security-camera footage was obtained by a red-topped newspaper, and Vaughn Parry’s effortless dance of death, liquid and horrible, was shown to a voyeuristically appalled public—he has been hinting that he knew the Fiend of Finsbury as a boy, and can offer unique insights or possibly salacious and horrid gossip about Vaughn Parry, if only someone would ask him. No one has.

“Seriously.”

“Bloody hell. I wouldn’t be on that parole board, I will say.”

“He’s hardly going to come at them across the courtroom, is he?”

“Oh, no. No, not like that. But what they’re going to see, Joseph, I mean, I’ve no idea. Except I can sort of guess, I can imagine, and I’d rather not. I think you could go mad yourself, sitting on that bench. I wonder if that ever happens.”

“Perhaps they get counselling and so on.”

“Fat lot of use that would be. Some things, once you know them, Joe, nothing’s quite the same again. Things you see and do, they make you what you are. Seeing inside Vaughn, well.”

“Did you really know him?”

“Met him, yes. Know him … no. Thank God, Joe, and I don’t believe, as you are aware, but when I think of Vaughn I thank God in the most genuine terms, that I did not know him in any real way.”

“What happened? I mean, how did you meet?”

“It’s a bit … well. It’s unpleasant, is what it is. It’s not nice stuff, Joseph.” Billy looks down at his hands. He brushes something off the palm of the left one, and fiddles with his fingernails.

“If you don’t want to, Billy, that’s fine. We can talk about something else.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s just more of a chat for the pub, you know. Cosy corner, after a couple of glasses, not in front of strangers.” He glances around, and the other occupants of the carriage studiously do whatever they are doing a bit more obviously. Joe shrugs.

“Let’s walk, then. Get a packet of crisps or something.”

The huffy woman tosses the sports section of her paper onto Billy’s chair as they leave.