I smiled at them lopsidedly and said to Ursula, ‘We’ll get through it somehow.’
‘I hope so.’ Forlorn hope, she was saying.
‘I’ll be back,’ I said, not knowing if I meant it, but meaning anyway that anything I could do to help her or Gervase, I would do.
I let myself out of the front door quietly, and back at Cookham telephoned to the Canders in Lexington. I talked to Mrs Cander; Sally.
Malcolm had gone to Stamford, Connecticut with Ramsey, she said. She thought they were fixing some kind of deal. She and Dave had really enjoyed Malcolm’s visit and Malcolm had just loved the horse farms. Yes, of course she had Ramsey’s phone number, he was an old friend. She read it out to me. I thanked her and she said sure thing and to have a nice day.
Ramsey and Malcolm were out. A woman who answered said to try at five-thirty. I tried at five-thirty Connecticut time and they were still out. The woman said Mf Osborn was a busy man and would I like to leave a message. I asked her to tell Mr Pembroke that his son Ian had phoned, but that there was no special news. She would do that, she said.
I went to bed and in the morning rode out on the Downs, and afterwards, from the house of the trainer whose horses I was riding, got through to Superintendent Yale’s police station. He was there and came on the line.
‘Where are you?’
‘At the moment in a racing stable near Lambourn.’
‘And your father?’
‘I don’t know.’
He made a disbelieving grunt. ‘What time could you meet me at Quantum House?’
I looked at my watch. ‘In riding clothes,’ I said, ‘in forty-five minutes. If you want me to change, add on an hour.’ ‘Come as you are,’ he said. ‘Mr Smith says there’s something to see.’
Fifteen
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,