The Girl in the Face of the Clock (16 page)

But why did Willie the Weasel want Grandmother Sylvie's clock so badly? You hear about lunatic collectors—Jane had recently worked for one, in fact—but this was ridiculous. Bogen had just shelled out over a hundred thousand dollars for a lighthouse clock.

“A man like that isn't going to break into my house for a hideous piece of junk, no matter how collectible it is,” said Jane aloud.

A woman strolling past on the sidewalk took one look at Jane talking to herself, grabbed her daughter's hand, and hastened away. More Japanese tourists took more pictures. A clock tolled ironically in the distance. Jane shook her head.

This was crazy. The
Times
had a circulation of hundreds of thousands. Someone else—a total stranger—could have seen the picture of the clock in the article, read the obituary, looked up her address in the phonebook, and broken in. Or it could have been just a random burglary, as Lieutenant Folly said. How could a man like Valentine have had anything to do with such a thing?

But then she didn't really know anything about Valentine Treves, Jane reminded herself. She didn't know what kind of man he was or what he was capable of. Just because he could write a sonnet on cue didn't mean he couldn't also break into an apartment on orders.

Jane stood up. The sun still beamed on the ancient buildings of London. Birds still sang in the trees. Somehow, however, everything had changed.

As Jane started off again, a single thought consoled her: at least there was still nothing to suggest that Valentine might be involved in her father's murder. Royaume Israel had not been mentioned in the
Times
article and there would be no easy way for anyone to have found out that Aaron Sailor had been brought to Yorkville East End for tests.

The only person who had known about that was Perry Mannerback.

Jane awoke at a Quarter after six the next morning feeling anything but refreshed after a fitful night of anxious dreams.

Yesterday she had wandered down Fleet Street and the Strand from the City, struggling without success to make connections between Willie Bogen, Perry Mannerback, Isidore Rosengolts, Valentine Treves. Eventually she had tired of walking and made her way back to her hotel aboard a red double-decker bus. Feeling jet-lagged and exhausted, she had pecked at a fish-and-chips dinner from one of the cleaner-looking Cromwell Road joints, more out of curiosity than hunger, and gone to bed at nine—four o'clock in the afternoon New York time.

This morning, things were even less clear. The bathroom was down the hall and there was no shower, only a huge tub. As Jane washed her face and brushed her teeth, she tried to laugh off yesterday's disconcerting events and the chain of logic with which she had tried to tie everything together. Was it really reasonable to believe that Willie Bogen was some kind of criminal mastermind, pursuing ceramic clocks across decades and continents? Wasn't it more likely everything that had happened over the last week had just made her paranoid?

Jane went back to her room and dressed quickly, then headed down the stairs of the fussy little hotel into a gray London morning. Maybe things would make more sense over a bagel and a cup of coffee.

Unfortunately, this part of London bore little resemblance to the Upper West Side in the eat-any-kind-of-food-you-want-at-any-hour-of-day-or-night department. There were no bagel joints anywhere, and neither the Italian restaurant across the street nor a “Workmans Café” down the block were open yet. The streets were fairly deserted.

It began to drizzle. Jane walked with her hands in her pockets, trying to figure out what to do. For a moment, she actually thought of going back to Mr. Rosengolts and asking how he knew Valentine Treves, but quickly decided against it.

Somewhere in the pit of her stomach she knew that it had been a mistake to have given her mother's dragonfly cross to Rosengolts. She felt she had betrayed herself, but she didn't know about what or with whom.

Jane had been walking for ten minutes when she found herself at the Gloucester Road entrance of the London subway, the famous Tube. Torturing herself over things she didn't understand wasn't going to help. She needed more information, and there was only one person left in London who might be able to tell her anything.

It was time to see Leila Peach.

Jane descended the station stairs and waited on an astonishingly clean platform until the train arrived. According to the address on the last Christmas card Leila Peach had sent to Imre Carpathian, she now lived in Whitechapel, which Jane's map revealed to be in London's East End, past the City on the other side of town.

Jane had successfully negotiated the New York subway system all of her life, so the Tube didn't present many problems. Straight through on the District line, the ride took less than half an hour. At half-past seven, Jane emerged into a neighborhood far different from those she had wandered through the previous day. Threadbare ornate structures from the area's Victorian past (this was where Jack the Ripper had done his work) stood shoulder to shoulder with postwar apartment monstrosities. The streets seemed smaller here somehow, the dreary sky lower.

There were a surprising number of people on the street considering the hour, but they were much different from the shoppers and businesspeople Jane had seen swarming the busy streets of tourist London yesterday. The faces here were streetwise, with suspicious eyes and hard features. The ethnic mix varied wildly: Anglo-Saxons, Asians, Middle Easterners, and even an occasional Hasidic Jew. On some streets there were so many veiled women and men in turbans that this almost could have been a neighborhood in Bangladesh or Pakistan. Signs on buildings advertised tea and Polaroid film, solicitors and snooker, lager beer. There were even familiar signs for McDonald's and Pizza Hut, Jane shuddered to see.

It took another ten minutes to find Leila's house, a drab two-story brick building with a dry cleaner on the ground floor. Identical structures abutted it on either side, one housing a drab little clothing store, the other a place that sold “artificial jewelry.” Down the street was a scaffolded derelict building which, judging from the plant life growing up the walls, must have been empty for years. For someone who had been subletting a loft on Greene Street eight years ago, Leila must have come down considerably in the world to be living in a neighborhood like this.

It was too early in the morning to pay a call on a stranger, but Jane didn't care. If Leila had a job, she'd be leaving for work soon, and Jane didn't want to miss her. She climbed the cracking concrete steps and pressed the doorbell.

After a minute, the door was opened by a tall woman with unnaturally black hair and eyebrows plucked into calligraphic thinness. She was dressed in a pink bathrobe littered with embroidered daisies. A cigarette dangled from her pale lips.

“So what are you sellin'?” said the woman, who bore no resemblance to the nude in Perry's painting. “D'you know what bleedin' time it is?”

“I'm looking for Leila Peach,” said Jane.

“You're not going to find her then, are you?”

“She's left for work already?”

“She's left, flat. Cleared out Sunday, when I was at me mum's. Stuck me for two months' rent, she did. Left half her stuff. I'm going to be cleaning up the cow's garbage for a month.”

Scowling, the woman went to close the door.

“Please,” said Jane, stopping it with her hand. “It's very important.”

“Leila owes you money, too?”

“No,” said Jane, “it's nothing like that. Do you know where she went?”

The woman made a disgusted face and shrugged. The ash on her cigarette was dangerously long but miraculously didn't dislodge onto her ample chest.

“Back to New York, according to the bleedin' note she left. Leila saw a bit about some artist in the New York newspaper a week back and got very excited. Said she knew this bloke, see, and now he's famous. From the greedy look in her eyes, I should have known right then. I'm sure she's figured out a way she can cash in on him.”

“She won't,” said Jane, bitterly disappointed. Leila wasn't even here. She had crossed an entire ocean for nothing.

“Oh, she'll find some way to get money out of it,” said the woman. “You don't know Leila.”

“The man was my father,” said Jane. “He's been in a coma since he fell down a flight of stairs eight years ago. He died last week.”

The woman's hard face suddenly seemed to transform itself.

“You mean
he
was the one in the paper?” she exclaimed. “The same poor sod Leila left at the bottom of the stairs like that?”

Jane opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out for a moment.

“Left at the bottom of the stairs?” she finally managed.

“You don't know about that? No, how could you? What's the matter with me?”

“I don't understand,” said Jane, suddenly feeling weak in the knees.

“Are you all right, luv? Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't know, really I didn't. Please come in, won't you? I'm Suzy, by the way. Suzy McCorkle.”

“Jane Sailor.”

The woman ushered Jane up a rickety flight of steps and through a battered doorway, past a neat sitting room and into a small but bright kitchen. An old kettle was steaming on the stove. A little table, set for one, featured a vase of violets and the remains of a bowl of cereal.

“Maybe you should eat something,” said Suzy McCorkle. “Cheerios, perhaps? Very good for one, beneficial for the digestion and all. And a pleasant name to start the morning with, that. Cheerios.”

“No, thanks.”

“A biscuit? Cuppa tea? No, you'd probably prefer coffee. Well, I got just the thing. Instant in a bleedin' little jar. It was Leila's and I've no use for it. I wish you'd take some. You look a bit shaky.”

“All right,” said Jane. “Thanks.”

Suzy McCorkle flashed a pleased smile and stubbed out her cigarette into an ashtray on the table next to her Cheerios. Then she went to a cupboard, brought out a jar of coffee, spooned a teaspoon into a cup painted with flowers, and poured from the kettle. She put a tea bag into another cup and poured for herself.

“Thanks,” said Jane, as Suzy returned to the table with the steaming cups.

“Feelin' a bit better? I really didn't mean to upset you like that.”

“I'm not upset,” said Jane. “I just don't understand what you meant about Leila leaving my father at the bottom of the stairs.”

“No, of course not, you poor thing,” said Suzy, pouring what looked like an unnatural amount of milk into her tea, then spooning in an equal portion of sugar. “Well, I don't know why I shouldn't tell you. I owe her nothin'. Here it is, then. Leila told me this one night a few months back. We was drinking brandy and eating ice cream, feeling sorry for ourselves, comparing sob stories. Leila told me that when she lived in the New York SoHo, there was this artist she was involved with, see? She had a loft and he lived upstairs. It was startin' to get pretty serious, I gather.”

Jane nodded.

“Then they had this terrible row and a big public breakup, your father and Leila,” Suzy went on, looking down into her tea. “Leila has a fierce temper and had made threats. People had heard. A few days later, she comes back to her loft from a party and she sees some bloke rushing out of the building, all upset-like.”

“Who was it?”

“Leila said she didn't know, but when she opened the front door, she found her artist—your father—on the floor in the vestibule. She thought he was dead. His head was all cracked open. There was blood all over the place. Leila figured he had fallen down the stairs or something, but figured the police might not think it was an accident if she was involved. A year before this, Leila had shot another lover, see?”

“Shot him?”

“Well, just grazed him, actually, according to her. I told you, Leila has a terrible temper, and she claimed that anybody in New York City can get a gun any time they want to. Is that true?”

“I don't think so,” said Jane, taking a sip of her coffee. It tasted like furniture polish with a slight hint of old shoe.

“Leila was always bragging that she knew six different places in different parts of town where a person could get a gun, day or night. 'T'isn't wholesome.”

“New York has very strict gun control laws,” said Jane, adding as much milk and sugar as her cup would hold. “There are mandatory jail terms just for having one.”

“Yeah,” said Suzy. “That's just what Leila said—you can get in more trouble for having a gun than for shooting somebody with it. That's why she got rid of hers after she shot the bloke.”

Jane took another sip of her coffee, a mistake she wouldn't repeat again.

“The judge eventually threw out her case,” Suzy continued, “but Leila was terrified that if the police came now and found her with another lover dead on the stairs, they'd never believe she hadn't done it—especially after the way she'd threatened him. So in a panic she went back to the party to give herself an alibi. She'd never been missed. Nobody ever came looking for her. Apparently, the authorities reckoned it was an accident.”

“Why did Leila threaten my father?” asked Jane. “What did she say?”

“Oh, Leila was going to kill him if he interfered with her plans,” said Suzy, making a face. “Didn't care if he was the father, said she'd kill him. Screamed this in a crowded restaurant, she did.”

“Father?”

Suzy looked down.

“Leila was preggers, see? Your dad was probably the one, but she'd been seeing another man at the same time, a really rich bloke, some kind of buttonmaker. Leila had decided she was going to tell the rich chap that he was the dad, since his prospects were so much the better.”

Jane took a deep breath and let it out. It was even worse than she had thought. Leila, pregnant by Aaron Sailor and about to pin the paternity on a man who still all these years later couldn't bear to admit he even knew her name.

“Perry Mannerback,” Jane muttered under her breath.

“Beg pardon?”

“Perry Mannerback was the man Leila saw coming out of the loft that night.”

“No,” said Suzy, shaking her head. “I told you, Leila didn't know who it was that she saw that night. Figured it was just somebody who didn't want to get involved.”

“It had to have been Perry,” said Jane bitterly. “He was the rich guy that Leila was going to claim was the father of her child. The buttonmaker.”

“No,” said Suzy, taking a decisive sip of tea. “That wasn't his name.”

“Yes, of course it was,” said Jane. “Perry Mannerback. The greatest buttonmaker in the world.”

“He may be that, but he wasn't the one Leila had been fooling around with. Believe me, I know the name of Leila's buttonmaker very well indeed. I'm reminded on a meal-to-meal basis.”

As if on cue, a fat gray cat leaped into Jane's lap.

“Leila named her cat after him, you see,” said Suzy. “Meet Mr. Danko.”