garden – to keep people in, not out. She shivered, the sun’s warmth momentarily eclipsed by the shadow of a large plane tree.
‘How many watches does he make a year?’ she asked, changing the subject.
‘New? Not many. Maybe three or four.’ Tom shrugged. ‘His main business is upgrades.’
‘What sort of upgrades?’
‘It depends. Retrofitting manufactured components with handmade titanium or even ceramic ones, improving the balance wheel and mainspring design, engraving certain parts of the movement, adding new features, modifying the face…The only way you’d know it was one of his is from the orange second hand that he fits to everything he touches.’
‘So you buy a watch that tells the time perfectly well and then pay him more money to take it apart and rebuild it to do exactly the same thing?’ she asked incredulously.
‘Pretty much.’ Tom grinned. ‘People do it with sports cars.’
‘But that’s to make them go faster. A watch either tells the time or it doesn’t. It can’t do it better.’
‘That’s not the point. It’s not what it does but the way it does it. The ingenuity of the design. The quality of the materials. The skill with which it’s been assembled. It’s like people. It’s what you can’t see that really counts.’
‘Some people, maybe.’
The front door was sheltered under an ornate cast-iron canopy at the top of several shallow steps. It was open and they stepped inside, finding themselves in a large entrance hall lit by a flickering emergency exit sign.
Her eyes adjusting to the gloom, Allegra could see that the room rose to the full height of the building, an oak staircase zig-zagging its way up to each floor capped off by a glass cupola far overhead. To their right was what had clearly once been the reception desk, the yellowing visitors’ book still open at the last entry, a gnarled claw of desiccated flowers drooping over it as if poised to sign in. Up on the wall was a large carved panel lauding the generosity and wisdom of the asylum’s founder and marking its opening in 1896. Next to this, another panel commemorated those who had served as directors over the years, the final name on the list either incomplete or deliberately defaced, it was hard to tell. To the left, a straitjacket had been left slung over the back of a wheelchair at the foot of the staircase, its leather straps cracked, the buckles rusting. Behind it was a grandfather clock, its face shrouded by a white sheet.
Allegra had the strange feeling that she was intruding, that the building was holding its breath, and that as soon as they left the straitjacket would deftly fasten itself, the doors would swing wildly in their frames, the clock chime and silent screams rise once again from the basement’s dank shadows.
‘Up here,’ a voice called, breaking the spell.
She looked up through the darkness and saw a man peering down at them over the secondfloor banisters. Swapping a look, they made their way up to him, the wooden staircase groaning under their unexpected weight, their footsteps echoing off the flaking green walls.
‘So you’ve come to visit at last, Felix?’ Ziff grinned manically, thrusting his hand towards them as they stepped on to a landing lit by sunshine knifing through the gaps and cracks in the shuttered windows. He spoke quickly and with a thick German accent, his words eliding into each other.
‘A promise is a promise.’ Tom smiled, shaking his hand. ‘Max, this is Allegra Damico.’
‘Friend of yours?’ Ziff asked without looking at her.
‘I wouldn’t have brought her here otherwise,’ Tom reassured him.
Ziff considered this for a few seconds, then gave a high-pitched, almost nervous laugh, that flitted up and down a scale.
‘No, of course not.
Ziff stepped forward into the light. He was tall, perhaps six foot three, but slight, his reedy frame looking as though it would bend in a strong wind, dyed black hair thinning and cropped short. His features were equally delicate, almost feminine, his face dominated by a neatly trimmed moustache that exactly followed the contours of his top lip and had been dyed to match his hair. He was wearing a white apron over green tweed trousers, gleaming brown brogues and an open-necked check shirt worn with a yellow cravat. His sleeves were rolled up so she could see his thin wrists, the slender fingers of his right hand tapping against his leg as if playing an unheard piece of music, the left gripping an Evian atomiser. Strangely, given his occupation, he wasn’t wearing a watch.
She shook his hand, his skin feeling unnaturally slick, until she realised that he was wearing latex gloves.
‘I was so sorry to hear about your father.’ Ziff turned back to Tom, gripping him firmly by the elbow and leaning in close. ‘How have you been?’
‘Fine,’ Tom nodded his thanks. ‘It’s been a while now. Almost three years.’
‘That long?’ Ziff let him go, his head springing from side to side in bemusement. ‘You know me: I try not to keep track. I find it too depressing,’ He licked the corner of his mouth absent-mindedly, then repeated his shrill laugh.
The sight of a round mark on the wall behind him where the clock that had once hung there had been removed made Allegra wonder if perhaps Ziff hadn’t been joking when he had told Tom his reasons for buying this place. Maybe he really did believe that a life spent watching time leak irresistibly away would condemn him to insanity, and that by removing a clock here and covering another there, he might in some way avoid or at least delay his fate.
Ziff seemed to guess what she was thinking, because he glanced up at the ghostly imprint of the missing clock behind him.
‘Time is an accident of accidents, signorina.’ He gave her a sad nod.
‘Epicurus,’ she replied, recognising the quote.
‘Exactly!’ His face broke into a smile. ‘Now tell me, Felix. What accident of accidents brings you here?’
SIXTY-SIX
20th March – 11.14 a.m.
Ziff led them through a set of double doors into a sombre corridor, its grey linoleum unfurling towards a fire escape at its far end. Several gurneys were parked along one wall, while on the other wall patients’ clipboards were still neatly arranged in a rack with the staff attendance record chalked up on a blackboard – further confirmation that the building’s former occupants had left in a hurry and that Ziff had made little effort to clean up after them.
He stopped at the first door on the left, sprayed its handle with the atomiser, then opened it to reveal one of the asylum’s former wards. Here, too, it seemed that nothing had been touched, until Ziff flicked a power switch and Allegra suddenly realised that all the beds were missing and that in their place, lined up between the floral curtains dangling listlessly from aluminium tracks, were pinball machines. Sixteen of them in all, eight running down each side of the room, backboards flashing, lanes pulsing, drop targets blinking and bumpers sparking as they happily flickered into life. Allegra read the names of a few as she walked past – ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘Playboy’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘The Twilight Zone’ – their titles evocative of a distant, almost forgottenchildhood. Every so often one of them would call out a catchphrase or play a theme song, and this seemed to set the other machines off, their sympathetic chorus building to a discordant crescendo before dying away again.
‘They’re all vintage,’ Ziff explained proudly, stepping slowly past them like a doctor doing his rounds. ‘Each one is for a private commission I’ve completed. A tombstone, if you like. So I don’t forget.’
‘How many have you got?’ Allegra asked, pausing by ‘The Addams Family’
‘About eighty,’ he said after a few seconds’ thought. ‘I’ve almost run out of bed space.’
‘Which one’s your favourite?’
‘Favourite?’ He looked horrified. ‘Each one is unique, each different. If you were to try and choose one over the others…’ He tailed off, as if afraid the machines might overhear him.
He stopped by a battered wooden desk marooned in the middle of the ward. Its top was covered in red felt,
