At Quantum, the heap of rubble had reduced to merely a mess. I walked round to the back of the house and found two men in hard hats barely ankle deep as they methodically removed debris brick by brick from house to rubbish skip. The wind had abated and the clouds had relented to the extent that a pale sunshine washed the scene, making it to my eyes more of a wasteland than ever.
Superintendent Yale stood beside a trestle table that had been erected on the lawn, with the explosive Smith in his beige overalls and blue hat standing close beside him, heads bent in conference. There were no spectators any more on the far side of the rope across the lawn, not even Arthur Bellbrook. I walked over to the experts and said good morning.
'Good morning,' they said, looking up.
'Glad you came,' Smith said.
He stretched out a casual hand and picked up an object from the table, holding it out to me. 'We've found this,' he said. 'What do you think?'
I took the thing from him. It had been a coil of thin plastic- coated wire, but the coils had been stretched so that the wire was straighter, but still curled. It was about eighteen inches long. The plastic coating had been white, I thought. About an inch of bare wire stuck out of the plastic at each end. Onto the plastic, near one end, someone had bonded a hand from a clock. The hand pointed to the bare wire, so that the wire was an extension of the hand.
I looked at it with despair, though not with shock. I'd been fearing and hoping… trying not to believe it possible.
When I didn't ask what it was, Yale said with awakening suspicion, 'Does your silence mean that you know what it is?'
I looked up at the two men. They hadn't expected me to know, were surprised by my reaction, even astonished.
'Yes,' I said drearily. 'I do know. Did you find any other bits?'
Smith pointed to a spot on the table. I took a step sideways and stared down. There were some pieces of metal and plastic, but not those I'd expected. No cogwheels or springs. A grey plastic disc with a small hole in the centre. 'Was this a clock?' I said dubiously.
'A battery-driven clock,' Smith said. 'There's the coil from the electric motor.'
The coil was tiny, about a centimetre in diameter.
'How did you find it in all this rubbish?' I asked. 'We found various remains of the padded box which used to stand at the foot of Mr Pembroke's bed. These small pieces became embedded in the lid when the box blew apart. The wire with the clock's hand on it, and this' – he picked up the flat plastic disc – 'were in the same area.' He turned the plastic disc over to reveal a clock face on the other side. 'There should also be at least one other piece of wire somewhere, and some of the clock case and a battery or two, but we haven't found those yet. This was not actually an alarm clock, I don't think. We've found no sign of an alarm mechanism.'
'No, it won't have been an alarm clock,' I said.
The superintendent had been growing restive during Smith's account and could contain himself no longer.
'Will you please explain your familiarity with this device,' he said formidably. 'Did the gardener use this sort of thing for blowing up the tree trunk?'
'No, I don't think so. This device wasn't meant for setting off bombs. It was a toy.'
'What sort of toy?'
'Well… it was for switching things on. Torch bulbs, mostly. Like the lights we had on a station in a train set. A buzzer, sometimes. It was incredibly simple.'
'Explain,' Yale commanded.
I glanced at Smith. He was nodding resignedly.
'You get an old or cheap clock,' I said. 'We had wind-up clocks, not a battery clock. You fix a length of wire to one of the hands, like this, so that a bare bit of wire sticks out and makes the hand much longer.'
'The hands are still on the clock, I take it?'
'Oh yes. Though sometimes we'd pull the minute hand off and just use the hour hand, because it's stronger, even though it's shorter. All you need is for the bare wire to reach out beyond the edge of the clock face. We used glue to stick the wire to the hand. Then you have a long bit of wire coming out from the centre of the front of the clock, and you fasten the free end of that to a battery. One of those nine-volt batteries with things like press-studs at the end.'
Smith was still nodding. Yale looked very much as if I shouldn't know such things.
'We made quite a lot of other gadgets,' I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. 'Buzzers for morse codes. Rudimentary telephones. Not just time-switches. I made a lock once which could only be operated with a straight piece of wire.' And it still worked fine, although I wasn't going to show him.
Yale sighed. 'So in this case, we've got the wire fixed to the clock's hand at one end and to a battery at the other, right? Go on from there.'
'You need two more lengths of wire. One goes from the battery to whatever you want to activate. In our case, it was usually a torch bulb screwed into a metal holder. We fastened a bare end of wire to the metal holder. Then the third wire went back from the metal holder to the clock. We fixed this wire with glue to the clock case itself, not to the hands, in such a way that the bare end of wire was pointing out forwards, towards you if you were facing the clock like this.' I demonstrated with the clock face. 'We usually stuck it on over the number twelve, at the top, but you could fix it anywhere you liked. Then you wind up the clock and set the hand with the wire where you want it, and just wait. The wired hand travels round towards the jutting out wire and eventually hits against it at right angles. The circuit is thus complete from the clock wires to the battery to the light and back to the clock, so the light goes on. The clock hand keeps on trying to go round and the jutting wire keeps stopping it, so the light stays on. Well…' I finished lamely, 'that's what happened when we made them.'
'Them?' Yale said with apprehension.
'They were easy to make. They were interesting. I don't know how many we had, but quite a few.'
'my God.'
'There might be one still in the playroom,' I said. 'The old train sets are there.'
Yale looked at me balefully. 'How many of your family saw these devices?' he asked.
'Everyone.'
'Who made them?'
'I did, Gervase did, and Ferdinand. Thomas did. I don't remember who else.'
'But your whole family knows how to make a simple time-switch?'
'Yes, I should think so.'
'And why,' he said, 'haven't you mentioned this before?'
I sighed and twisted the wired clock hand round in my fingers. 'Because,' I said, 'for starters I didn't think of it until after I'd left here the other day. After we'd been digging out the black powder and so on, and I'd been looking back to the past. I didn't want you to find this. I wanted you to find something sophisticated, that no one in the family could have thought up.'
'Hm,' he said, seeming to accept it. 'How many people outside your family knew about these clocks?'
'Several did, I suppose, but it was such a long time ago. No one would remember, would they?'
'They might.' Yale turned to Smith. 'This toy, is this really what set off the bomb?'
Smith nodded. 'It sounds just right. Wire in a detonator where the Pembroke children had a torch bulb…' He spread his hands. 'it wouldn't need more current than that.'
Not surprisingly, they decided to take a look in the playroom. They picked their way cautiously across the ankle-twisting rubble and headed for the passage which was comparatively clear by this time. The playroom, when we reached it, was shadowy inside, with the windows boarded up. Light of sorts seeped in through the door, but it took a few minutes for eyes to acclimatise, during which Yale bumped into the bicycles, knocking them over. I helped him pick them up. He wanted to know whose they were, and I told him about Peter and Robin.
He made no especial comment but watched while I went over to the shelves and began peering into boxes. I hadn't been in the room at all since the twins had gone, and their own playthings had overlaid those outgrown and abandoned by their elder brothers and sisters so that most of what I was looking at was unfamiliar and seemed to
