The Clockmaker

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘You sound like a man who is not enamoured of his job,’ Henry commented somewhat tartly.

  ‘The job, I am grateful for and fond of. The general public leaves something to be desired,’ Sergeant Terry said with equal asperity. He tapped the stack of paper and then leaned back in his chair and looked frankly at Mickey and Henry. ‘The truth is, it is a frustrating position to be in. Crime is a daily occurrence. Most of it is petty, little more serious than small theft or the occasional blow between drunken men, but these cases still require justice to be done, and to be seen to be done, and with a population that is constantly on the move, it is nigh on impossible to keep track of everything that occurs or to have the satisfaction of seeing sufficient cases brought before the courts.’

  ‘We all get frustrated,’ Mickey said in a more conciliatory tone. ‘We’ll work our way through these documents, and if we need further assistance, we’ll let you know. Meantime, some refreshments would not go amiss.’

  Sergeant Terry left with the promise of tea and biscuits and some sandwiches later on in the morning, and a constable should they require one. Henry glared after him.

  ‘Don’t be so hard on the lad,’ Mickey said. ‘He has the right to feel aggrieved, and no doubt there are few people in a position to listen to him. And here we are, come up from London, brash murder detectives on the prowl, interfering on his patch.’

  Henry turned his glare on Mickey and then laughed. ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘you are probably right. As he sees it, any glory that comes out of this will not be his. You start with the logbooks, Mickey – you are better at deciphering spidery handwriting – and I’ll begin on the reports.’

  Dividing the task between them, they spent the next ninety minutes skim-reading and setting aside anything that required further attention. The promised tea and biscuits arrived, and by the time the sandwiches had been delivered, Henry had added two more reports to the original three and Mickey found two others that he thought warranted interview. The rest, they set aside.

  ‘So, seven. And I feel we have not even scratched the surface.’ He frowned. ‘We need a map.’

  Mickey disappeared and returned a few minutes later with a map of the railway lines and a copy of the timetable. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we have two incidents at Lincoln station, one at Five Mile Junction and another at somewhere called Dogdyke, then two at Spalding and one at St James Deeping. The incidents are not necessarily reported to the stations in question; I’m guessing that they weren’t manned.’

  ‘At least two of these took place when the train was moving,’ Henry observed. ‘So presumably they were reported as and when someone could reach a station master or a constable. We cannot assume that the place recorded as reporting the incident is the same as where the incident happened.’

  ‘True,’ Mickey agreed. ‘But it’s a place to start, and what interests me is the similarity between the incidents, which might give us an insight into our own investigation. In all of these, there are two men and one woman in some way implicated, or possibly implicated.’

  ‘If we take them in sequence, starting with Lincoln. The first I’ve selected was November the eighth of last year when Mr Alfred Baines reports that he was jostled on the platform; when he checked, his wallet was missing. The woman had previously asked him directions and he had “raised his arms to point” – no doubt he needed both for emphasis.

  ‘The second, again in Lincoln, but later in the month, and again a woman with brown hair asked for the time and stood and adjusted her watch. Mr Fletcher this time reports that the station was very busy and that he was jostled by the crowd. He discovered, on leaving the station, that his wallet was missing and he had lost more than ten pounds.’

  Mickey took over. ‘Next in the sequence is the first incident reported at Spalding and initially this seems to have little to do with the railway. It was reported at the station that a man had lost his wallet and that previously he had encountered two hefty young men and a young woman in the market. The woman appeared to be in some distress and so the man asked if everything was all right. One of the men pushed him and the girl told him that she was fine and he should go away. He only realized when he reached the train that his wallet and his watch were gone.’ Mickey put the report aside and tapped it thoughtfully with his index finger. ‘The description is scanty, considering. A dark-haired young woman and two hefty young men, but they will seem larger, of course, if they are pushing you around. It’s likely it’s the same group, though.’

  Henry nodded. ‘And then we have the incident reported at Dogdyke followed by the one at Five Mile Junction. The reports aren’t clear; it’s most likely both happened on the train. These are both reports of loss, and one mentions a young woman, with red hair this time, who was trying to find her compartment and asked for help; the second simply states that a young man barged into the victim in the corridor, apologized and went on and disappeared into a compartment. The victim reports that he glanced in as he went by and saw an older couple and a young man and young woman. It’s tenuous, but possible.’

  ‘And this takes us back to a second incident at Spalding, again in the marketplace and very similar to the first. That was at the start of February this year, so all in all, our little group has been busy.’

  ‘And St James Deeping?’

  ‘Another incident on the train when a couple were robbed – she of her purse and he of his wallet. They report that they intervened in a quarrel between a young man and a young woman and took the young woman into the compartment with them, and there she remained until they got off at the next stop, St James Deeping. The girl was travelling onwards and the couple reported to the guard that she might be in trouble. Only then did they realize their possessions were missing – when the woman took a notebook and pen from her bag in order to write down their address and noticed that she had no purse.’

  ‘And a pattern now begins to emerge,’ Henry said. ‘The girl is either bait or distraction in all cases, and no doubt if we go back further, we will discover other incidents. Knowing when they began would be helpful, but I think this is a job to hand over to someone who has more time than we do. We need to send messages to the local constabularies involved and ask them to follow up interviews with the victims. I have to say, though, this little group is taking considerable risks. Geographically, all of these incidents take place in close proximity. The likelihood of travellers seeing them more than once must be quite great, I would have thought. They are confident and obviously very capable.’

  ‘And Joseph travelled this route on many occasions. So what did he do to expose himself as a target? Or was it simply random? They use their damsel-in-distress routine frequently enough, so obviously they know it is effective,’ Mickey observed. ‘So what happens if no one rises to the bait? Do they just move on to the next station and stage it there? You’d think, if they were hoping to attract attention on the station platform – which you’d assume to be the case, as that’s where they were when the girl was showing signs of distress – then they were aiming for a target on the station platform, not on the train.’

  ‘Presumably,’ Henry agreed. He frowned. ‘But you and I have both been on the station platform at Bardney. It’s not a large place. The station is substantial enough, considering the village it serves – and that is only because it is on the cross-route back to Louth and up to Lincoln – but to say it was busy or overcrowded, or that an incident would be easily overlooked …’

  ‘And yet we know it was,’ Mickey argued. ‘The Parkers noticed because the girl had been on the train and because Joseph left so peremptorily. The staff there is not large in number and the changeover between trains seems to be fast, so guards, station master and porters would be busy, distracted by the needs of passengers. And if this team is as fast as we think, there would be time for them to get off the train, rob someone and get back on again within two or three minutes. You know as well as I do that dippers work fast, and no doubt they’d already picked their targets out and no
ted where they kept their valuables.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt they’ve been at it for quite some time, so they must have records. They will have been picked up somewhere for something. So we put out a call to local constabularies, see what that brings up. Something our railway colleagues ought to have considered,’ Henry added, somewhat sourly.

  Mickey laughed. ‘They are required to report on crime that happens on the railways and to solve it where possible, but with such a mobile population, both the honest and the criminal, it’s hard to follow up anything.’

  Henry made no comment but his shoulders stiffened – he clearly did not approve of such professional clemency. ‘We should also enquire as to whether anything that was stolen was distinctive. A watch perhaps might be engraved with the owner’s name. Anything of this kind should be added to the list sent out to local pawnbrokers and jewellers. We follow the usual procedures and we will turn up results. What is needed is system, Mickey. Organization, process.’

  ‘What is needed is lunch,’ Mickey countered. ‘Fortification before we meet the family of the fiancée. And tomorrow we should head back home; there is little we can do here that cannot be done by routine police enquiry, and I am eager to discover what happened at the post-mortem.’

  Henry seemed in a better mood after lunch. They ate in a little restaurant close to the station in Lincoln, having been given directions to the street where the Goldmanns, Joseph Levy’s prospective in-laws, were living. It was ‘up hill’, they were told – quite literally up Steep Hill – and by the time they reached the junction with Well Lane Mickey was wishing he’d had something lighter for lunch. The pie and mash sat heavy on his stomach, and the hill seem to go on and upwards for ever. The street would have been pretty, Mickey decided, if he had breath enough to look around properly. Henry, of course, seemed not to notice, striding ahead and pausing occasionally for Mickey to catch up. Mickey considered himself fit enough, but this steep climb was a trial.

  The Goldmanns lived on Well Lane, a narrow, cobbled street that still had a public water pump on the corner. The house was a tall terrace looking across at the back wall of what Mickey thought might be part of the cathedral grounds, the towers of St Mary’s visible and imposing. ‘We should take a look while we’re up here,’ he said, knowing that Henry had a fondness for ecclesiastical architecture, even if he had no fondness for ecclesiastical personages.

  Oddly, the door knocker was a Lincoln imp that stared balefully at visitors and held on to a loop of cast iron, the rapping of which echoed through the house. The Goldmanns had been told to expect them, but they were greeted with a degree of suspicion that Mickey had come to expect. No one really likes it when a policeman calls.

  They were invited into the front parlour, an austere and slightly chilly room, despite the fire in the hearth. There were bookshelves on either side of the fireplace and a small, round tilt-top tea table had been set by the fire with chairs around it. Tea arrived and the family assembled and looked expectantly at Henry and Mickey. Mr Goldmann was tall and slim, and his wife was short and plump. She wore a dark-blue dress with a silver fan brooch on the shoulder and her hair was tightly curled in a fashion that was not quite a Marcel wave. The two unmarried daughters were present, and Mr Goldmann explained that their elder daughter was married and had moved abroad. The two remaining were Elizabeth and Rebecca, he said, indicating them in turn. Elizabeth was tall but also slightly plump, seeming to have inherited a little from each of her parents, but Rebecca was small and slightly built and birdlike. Light brown hair and milk and roses on her cheeks, Mickey thought. A pretty little thing.

  Henry remembered her from the photograph that he had seen, the one taken when she’d been seated on a bench with Joseph; he had been looking at the camera, but she had been looking at something behind the photographer. He still wondered what it was.

  ‘So, you found him, then,’ Mr Goldmann said. ‘At least he’s been found.’ He glanced at his younger daughter, but she sat very still and her face was utterly expressionless – almost, Mickey thought, as though she didn’t know what to think about any of it.

  ‘The body was sent back to London yesterday,’ Henry said. Mickey noticed that the girl flinched. ‘We are expecting the post-mortem to be done today and then we will know more about how he died,’ Henry continued. The girl swallowed nervously and her mother looked at Henry as though she would like to kill him.

  Mickey cleared his throat. ‘We have to ask about the last time he was here.’

  ‘We’ve already told the police all we know,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He arrived as he often did on the Friday afternoon and he left on the Sunday morning. We put him on the train and he was fine. He had spent Shabbat with us, as he often did. Sometimes he couldn’t come on the Friday and so he would arrive on the Saturday. It wasn’t very proper, but sometimes that’s just how things are. We don’t keep such strict observance that we don’t understand that.’

  ‘And did anything out of the ordinary happen while he was here? Did he seem happy? Content? Was all going well with the wedding arrangements? We understand that you quarrelled,’ Henry said, addressing Rebecca directly.

  The girl cast an anxious look at her father, but then nodded. ‘I wanted to put it off. The wedding. I wanted to wait until my sister and her husband could be there. That was all; I just wanted to delay it for a little while. It wasn’t as if I wanted to …’

  ‘And Joseph objected to the delay?’

  ‘It wasn’t Joseph. I think his family were getting impatient. His mother – his mother was not happy.’

  ‘And if she’s not happy, the world knows about it.’ It was the first time Mrs Goldmann had spoken, and her tone told Henry everything he needed to know about the relationship.

  ‘If you have problems with the family, then why approve the marriage? I believe that this was an arrangement of long standing.’

  ‘Becky wasn’t marrying the mother,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He and Becky loved one another, and anyway he wasn’t going to live there; he was going to live up here, join the family business.’

  ‘I believe you own a boarding house,’ Henry said, addressing Mrs Goldmann.

  ‘In Grimsby, yes. We have a housekeeper in place. We also have a shop here and we run that ourselves. A jeweller’s. Joseph would have been useful; he would have been happy here.’

  ‘And his family were content with that?’

  ‘His family had two sons and their wives already living with them; they didn’t need a third. We thought to keep Joseph and Rebecca with us to help with the business because Elizabeth will no doubt marry elsewhere, when she finds a man that she can actually approve of.’

  Elizabeth’s eyes flashed. But she didn’t speak. Henry found himself warming to this older sister. The younger was pretty but she seemed insipid. He reprimanded himself; he knew nothing of these young women.

  ‘Is it not a strange place to settle, Lincoln? I believe there is no community here.’

  ‘Not now; there was once. The nearest active community is in Grimsby, which is why we have a boarding house there. It is close to the docks; many of our people come through looking for a place to stay that is sympathetic to them. And there is a synagogue on Heneage Road and another on Hamilton Street. Of course, those who are more orthodox make their own arrangements and usually stay with members of the congregation.’

  ‘Then why not live in Grimsby?’ Henry asked.

  For the first time Mr Goldmann smiled. ‘Even the greatest of trees starts with a small seed,’ he said. ‘Once there was a thriving community here. I visited Lincoln when I was a boy and I liked the place. Just down the road from here, in fact – you will have passed it if you walked up Steep Hill – is the house of Aaron of Lincoln who lived here in the twelfth century. He was a rich man and even lent money to the king.’

  ‘The congregations in Grimsby are more orthodox.’ Mrs Goldmann seemed suddenly uncomfortable. ‘Ashkenazi so … To be truthful,’ Mrs Goldmann went on, ‘most people who know us wou
ld barely recognize us as Jewish at all. We believe in integrating – as far as it is possible to do so without betraying our heritage and culture, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mickey agreed. ‘Though I understand that Joseph’s family would be considered devout?’

  The senior Goldmanns exchanged a glance. ‘Devotion takes many forms, Sergeant Hitchens. And we had had enough of prejudice and persecution in London. We came here seeking a quieter life.’

  Mickey was about to pursue this, but Henry was clearly thinking about something and Mickey didn’t think that it was the murder.

  ‘As I understand it,’ Henry said, ‘the way the loans worked was that a group of families would get together to underwrite a loan. When a lender died, all his outstanding loans came to be owed not to his family but to the king. Most rulers knew that if they called in those debts, it would cause financial discomfort to a great many families, and as these families were powerful, they were reluctant to upset the status quo, shall we say. It was enough for families to know that they owed their king. And the reason the loans were spread between families, I believe, was so that when money owed was acquired by the king, the impact of that was cushioned if the consequences were more widespread. A family could have been bankrupted by the death of its patriarch, had it been otherwise.’

  He paused and then looked once more at Rebecca, changing direction again. ‘And so, what did you quarrel about?’ The question seemed to take her by surprise. She had relaxed a little during his diversion into ancient history, clearly believing that his attention was truly elsewhere.

  ‘I told you.’ She sounded a little impatient now. ‘I wanted to delay the wedding so my sister could attend.’

  ‘So it wasn’t that you found a red hair on his coat or smelt a perfume that you knew was not your own?’

  Her jaw dropped and she gaped at him, and Mickey cast an admiring look at his boss. Sometimes Henry took even him by surprise.