Usher named some ridiculous price then the game was over.
Usher shrugged. “I think it’s all nonsense,” he said. “I happen to believe that time is like water pouring out of a tap, that once it’s been spilled there’s no calling it back again, not for love nor money nor any of these new- fangled gadgets. The man who gave me that clock offered it to me because he thought it was valuable but I accepted it because I liked it. I thought it was beautifully made.”
“But surely he can’t have believed it was a time machine? It looks like an ordinary carriage clock to me.”
Usher smiled. “How else would you describe a clock if not as a time machine?” He narrowed his eyes, locking them on mine for a moment as if challenging me to a duel then glanced off to one side, shaking his head. “But in the way you mean, no, it’s not a time machine. From what I gather it’s one of his ‘dry’ clocks, designed to tell the time and nothing more. It’s accurate of course and rather lovely but the case is brass, not gold, and in today’s market that makes it practically worthless. If you like it that much you can have it for nothing. The deal you just did on the house has solved a lot of problems. Call it a little extra bonus on top of your fee.”
My heart leapt. I had to concentrate hard to stop myself snatching the clock right off the shelf there and then, just so I could feel its weight in my hand.
“Is the maker still alive, this Owen Andrews?” I said instead.
“I have no idea,” said Usher. “I know nothing about him other than what I’ve told you.”
I think it was in that moment that I made my decision, that I would seek out Owen Andrews and discover the truth about him. I told myself that this was because the little brass clock had been the only thing to excite my interest since my wife died. There was more to it than that though. Somewhere deep inside me I was nursing the crazy hope that Owen Andrews was a man who could turn back time.
“Are you sure you want to get involved with this man, Martin?” Dora said. “He’s bound to be under surveillance.” She dragged on her cigarette, leaning to one side to knock the ash into the chipped Meissen saucer she kept permanently at her elbow for this purpose. I had long since given up going on at her about her smoking. Like Samsara perfume and the fake leopardskin coat she wore it was simply a part of her. She was wry and canny, with the kind of piercing, analytical intelligence that had sometimes caused me to wonder why she had left her job with the Home Office. The freelance legal work she did now earned her a steady and fairly comfortable income but it was hardly big money and only a fraction of what she was really worth. Once in the early days of our friendship, when for a brief while I imagined there might be the possibility of romance between us, I got drunk and asked her about it.
“I can’t work for those people any more,” she said. “I don’t believe in doing deals with the devil.” She laughed, a brisk ‘ha,’ then changed the subject. Later that same evening I found out she was married to a chap called Ray Levine, an ex-airline pilot who now grubbed around for work shuttling government ministers to and from their various conferences and crisis summits.
“Ray’s a bit of an arsehole, I suppose,” Dora said. “But we’ve known each other since we were kids. We used to smoke rollups together in the teachers’ toilets. That’s something you can’t replace. I don’t care what he does on those trips of his, just so long as he doesn’t bring it home with him. I learned a long time ago that trust is a lot more important than sexual fidelity.”
I first met Dora when I sold her her flat, a three-room conversion in Westcombe Park occupying part of what had once been a private nursing home. It was an attractive property, with high windows, a stained glass fanlight, and solid oak parquet flooring, but it had serious disadvantages, most crucially the access, which was via a fire escape belonging to the neighbouring property. I knew this could pose legal problems if she ever wanted to sell, and because I found myself liking her I broke all the usual rules of the business and told her so. The forthrightness of her reaction surprised me but as I came to know her better I realised it was typical of her.
“I can’t make a decision to buy something based on whether I might want to get rid of it later,” she said. “This is about a home, not a business investment. This is where I want to live.”
Then she smiled and told me she was a lawyer. She knew all about flying freehold and compromised access but she was adamant she wanted the flat, as she was adamant about a lot of things. After she moved in I took the liberty of contacting her and asking if she was interested in doing some freelance contract work. Within a year she was working two full days a week for me, clarifying the deadlocks and stalemates that occasionally threatened to upset some of our more lucrative sales. She had a genius for finding a loophole, or for finding anything, really. It was for this reason that I asked her if she could help me track down Owen Andrews. I didn’t go into any details and Dora being Dora didn’t ask questions. A couple of days later she called me at home and asked me if I could come round to her place.
“I’ve got things to show you,” she said. “But it’s not the kind of stuff I want to bring into the office.”
She opened the door to me dressed in a pair of Ray’s old camo pants held up with elastic braces. “Andrews is alive and well,” she said. “Would you like a drink?” She poured Glenlivet and wafted Samsara, the kind of luxury items that were often difficult to find on open sale but readily available if you had the right contacts and I supposed the whisky and the perfume came via Ray. Levine himself was rarely at the flat. Dora said he spent most of his nights on airbases or in the bed of whichever woman he was currently trying to impress.
“It’s like being married to your own younger brother,” she said. “But to be honest I think I’d kill him if he was here all the time.”
I occasionally wondered what would happen if I tried to spend the night with her. The prospect was tantalising, but in the end I suppose I valued our friendship, not to mention our business relationship, too highly to risk ruining it through some misconceived blunder. Also she had liked Miranda.
She handed me my drink then pushed a small stack of papers towards me across the table.
“Here,” she said. “Have a look at these.”
The papers comprised a mixture of photocopies and typed notes, with markings and annotations everywhere in Dora’s spiky black script. There were photocopies of a civil service entrance exam and a standard ID card, together with a passport-sized photograph and a copy of an article from a magazine I had never heard of called
“This is amazing,” I said. “Where did you get all this stuff?”
“There’s more,” Dora said. She pulled some papers from the stack and riffled quickly through them until she found what she wanted. “He worked for the MoD on classified projects. That means they could have wiped his whole ID if they’d wanted to, or altered it in some way, anything. The really weird thing is that he was dismissed from his post but left alone afterwards. That never happens. Normally they’d have you in prison, at least for a while, at least until the work you were doing was no longer relevant. The fact that Andrews is still out there means he’s valuable to them in some way, or that he’s a spy. The very fact that he was working for them at all is some kind of miracle. He’s a dwarf, a non-person. It’s getting harder for people like him even to be granted a work permit.” She paused and stubbed out her cigarette. I caught the sweet reek of Marlboro tobacco. “The thing is, they’ll have their eye on him. If you go near him they’ll have their eye on you, too. Is that what you want? This isn’t a very good time to be getting yourself on somebody’s blacklist.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“So you say. And I’ve read that article. What’s all this about, Martin?”
“It’s not about anything. I have a clock he made, that’s all. I was just curious.”
“Well, you know what they say about curiosity killing the cat.”
It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. We sat side by side at the table, neither of us saying anything. I wanted to reassure her in some way, to at least thank her for what she had done for me, but neither of these things seemed possible. I realised we were on new ground, the unstable territory that springs into being whenever the conversation between two people begins to trespass beyond its usual limits. Politics was something that didn’t get discussed much, not even in private.
“Can I take all these papers with me?” I said in the end.
“Please do. I don’t want them. I had to use my old passwords to get hold of some of that stuff. I’d be instantly traceable, if anyone had a mind to go looking. It’s a ridiculous risk to take. God knows what I was thinking.” She ran her hands through her hair, making it stand out about her head like a stiff black halo. “It was fun,
