THE SAFE KEEPER’S TALE
Without intending to, Marion slept straight through the afternoon. In fact, had someone not set off a series of fireworks in the Grand Corridor (presumably stolen leftovers from the Friday night Circus Ball), which echoed through the residence quarters, rattling the doors, she might have slept all through the night, too.
She sat on the edge of her bed and examined the array of newly blossomed bruises formed on her limbs. Her head throbbed with exquisite ferocity, as did the rest of her body. She stumbled to the washbasin and doused her face and neck in icy water while examining the gaunt reflection staring back at her. Her eyes were dull; gray circles like pits of ash encircled them. Her lips were dried and cracked and stung with dehydration, and her skin was etched with streaks of leaked mascara, or perhaps they were bruises, too. She’d never looked so destitute or weak, or felt more agitated. She feared she’d slept too long. She had to hurry.
She pulled on a change of clothes, then removed the two small black buttons she’d pilfered from the Gadgetry Department. She checked their wiring and connections, then placed one in the most obvious position she could think of—just below her blouse collar. She threaded its wire down her front and attached it to a minuscule battery on her skirt belt. With the second device, however, she was more creative. She fit the microphone button to the underside of her bra and attached it—via a short line of wiring—to a separate battery beneath her arm. She checked each bug’s placement in the mirror and, once satisfied, pulled on a coat and made her way down to the cafeteria.
Though she wasn’t hungry, she forced an egg sandwich down her throat followed by a cup of coffee. Neither did anything but make her nauseous, awakening the lurching dread that had been lingering in the pit of her stomach. She left the cafeteria, just as a group of Inquirers appeared for dinner service. She didn’t have time for greetings. She slipped into the passageway outside and followed it until it met the Grand Corridor, made her way up the lift, through the bookshop and into the street.
It was a warm evening, though the sun had already sunk behind a blanket of cloud and smog. Marion had an idea of where Holly Grove was, having visited Peckham on numerous occasions while on expeditions to find particular shades of cotton yarn for Dolores’s never-ending knitting projects. The memory felt heavy on her chest, an old and familiar pressure neither pleasant nor uncomfortable, and for a fleeting moment she thought of Dolores and of Number Sixteen Willow Street. Had her grandmother made it to America by now? Did she ever think about what she’d left behind, about the house, about Marion?
She kept a brisk pace as she marched down the narrow, quiet streets that surrounded the bookshop until she found a taxi. She hopped inside and handed over the clockmaker’s address.
After a half-hour drive and ten-minute walk, she found herself in a particularly run-down neighborhood. While most of the buildings here were nondescript redbrick blocks in disrepair, Number Twelve Holly Grove seemed out of place. The shop was small and square with a low wooden door and two stained-glass windows on either side, through which a stream of light filtered—a kaleidoscope of color that glowed like a jewel amid its otherwise grim, battered surroundings.
Marion knocked on the highly polished wooden door. It opened immediately, though apparently by no one.
“We’re closed,” said a woman’s voice from the shadows.
Marion made her way to the counter. All around her, antique clocks hung precariously on the walls, rested dismantled on workbenches or sat proudly in glass display cabinets. The air hummed with their unsynchronized ticking and somewhere deep within the back of the shop, a boiling kettle whistled incessantly.
In perfect unison, the kettle lid began to rattle and a woman shuffled into view. She was short with a fossil-like face—crusted in dirt and older than Marion had expected. Her eyes were dark gray, her hair, too, which fell to her shoulders in oily wisps.
“Hello, ma’am,” Marion said above the rattling kettle. “I’m not here to buy anything,” she added quickly. “I’m looking for Helena.”
The woman, far plumper than Marion had pictured, a large belly protruding from under her dirty apron, rested her hands on her hips. “That’s me. What d’you want?”
Marion extended a hand in greeting but removed it when the woman did not reciprocate. “I was wondering if you could help me with something.”
The woman’s left eye twitched. “Who are you?”
Marion thought it best not to lie; there’d be no point if she hoped to extract what she needed from Helena. “Marion Lane. I’m an apprentice at Miss Brickett’s and a friend of Professor Uday Bal.”
The woman’s face went from static discontent to liquid fury. Her eyes narrowed, her lips quivered, her forehead furrowed.
Marion took an automatic step backward.
“That man!” she spat. “Any friend of his is an enemy of mine! Get out! Out!”
Marion brought her hands in front of her in defense. “Sorry, I just—” She stumbled backward, crashing into the glass display cabinet.
The old woman picked up a rag attached to her apron and flung it about in the air as if swatting away a pesky fly. “Out!” she repeated, shooing Marion toward the door.
Marion placed her hand on the doorknob but paused. “Someone came here to buy a clockwork safe seven years ago,” she said in a nervous hurry. “I know you sold it to him—Edgar Swindlehurst.”
The woman paused midswat and lowered the rag to her side. Though her face still looked as if it were able to melt steel, her body language gave Marion the impression that whatever she despised about Professor Bal (a person Marion couldn’t believe anyone could truly hate) she had to put aside for this more important matter. “Seven years ago, you say?”
“April 11, 1951. You set it to open April 11 of this year.”
The woman secured her rag back under her apron. “And what of it?”
“Well, it’s just that someone other than Mr. Swindlehurst found out when the safe was going to be opened, and I can only presume you were the one who told them.”
Helena sank her hands into her apron pockets. Her face, again, had changed. Now awash with anguish.
“I’d really like to know why you did that,” Marion went on when Helena said nothing. “And I need to know what was inside the safe.”
Helena’s chest began to heave and a bulbous vein on her forehead to pulsate. For a long moment she appeared to hover between two decisions: to whack Marion over the head with her rag or to give in to a mess of confessions.
Fortunately, she chose the latter.
“Do you know how the professor and I knew each other? Did he tell you?” she began on an unrelated note. Though the professor had made it plain he and Helena did not get along, he’d been vague on why. The history between them would’ve interested Marion at another time, but right now she felt it would only delay her.
“No,” she said impatiently. “But I’m afraid I don’t have time—”
Helena cut in. “You want to know about Edgar or not?”
Marion breathed. “Go on, please.”
Helena nodded. “Like I was saying, Bal and I used to work together. You’ve heard of the Factory, I’m sure. I’m sure you’ve heard how clever all the things the professor designed there are? Yes, but did he tell you they were my idea? All of them.” She smirked. “Didn’t think so. The professor and I worked there together during the war, you see. We made and sold all types of brilliant things. Bugs, wire taps, spy cameras. You wouldn’t believe how much business we got in those days. Not just from the British, either.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’ll leave it to your imagination as to who else was in need of them types of devices in those days.
“Anyway, Bal was good with the making and fixing of the things, I’ll give him that. But I was better at the designing, the ideas. And clockwork safes? My idea, of course.” She spat the words out, a vicious show of dislike, distrust.
“The Factory closed down after the war. Not to say there was no business—there were plenty of spies around then, maybe even more than during the war. It was just that London had been brought to its knees, no one had any money, rent was more expensive than ever and Bal and I just couldn’t afford to run the place no more.” She sighed, her hard face creased with the memory. “So we had to close down and that’s why we were without a job when that Nancy woman came sniffing around. She said she’d like to reopen the Factory, that she could pay the rent and give us back our jobs. She said there was just one change she’d like to make. One change. What a joke...” She trailed off, muttering to herself.
And again, Marion felt agitated, impatient. She decided not to show it this time, however, as Helena did not seem like the sort of person who took kindly to interruptions.
“Anyway,” the old woman went on, “when I heard what this change was, what Nancy wanted to do, I wasn’t impressed at all. She wanted to move the whole production underground, away from intrusion and restrictions. Away from the law, too. The professor jumped at the opportunity, ’course he did,” she added with a sneer. “But not me. I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. Living down there in a dark hole, never seeing the light of day, hidden from everyone. I smelled a rat, I did.” She paused to lumber over to a Morris chair. A wooden clock stood next to it, carved into the shape of a rather aggressive-looking female face. The clock had only a second hand, which rotated around its center in an anticlockwise direction and at least three times faster than it should.
“Eventually I realized I didn’t have the luxury of turning down the opportunity and I decided to work for the agency on a contract basis. It was a strange situation, now I think of it. Me sitting up here, the only person on the outside who knew so much about the agency, about what they did down there and how they did it.” She looked up at Marion, disgust evident on her face.
“In the beginning I kept my distance, just did what I was told and carried on. It was easy, really. All I did was design parts for the gadgets. Not just the stuff sold through the Factory, but the stranger stuff, too. The stuff you only use down there.” She stamped the ground with her shoe. “Vagor Compasses, Distracters, the lot. But things changed when Nancy hired the first apprentices. She used to send them up here to spend the afternoon with me. I’d show them how to fix the gadgets, how to clean them. I, well, I s’pose I liked it.” She looked up at Marion, her eyes now softer. “Never had children of my own, you see. And that was the problem, really, because I became attached to them, involved with them. And I think they realized I was the only one on the outside they could talk to about their problems.”
Marion felt a twinge of warmth for the woman, imagining how it must have been to have someone like her to speak to, someone who knew the agency’s secrets and yet was unhindered by the weight of it herself. Helena would have been an outlet for the apprentices, no doubt.
“They were all very different, that first group,” she went on. “There was young Edgar—the leader of the pack, I s’pose you could say. He was brilliant. Really, he was. But also...” She thought about it for a moment. “Superior, I think’s the right word. He thought he was smarter than everyone. Which was probably true, he just liked to make sure you knew it. Then there was Barbara Simpkins.” She smiled. “I liked her. Yeah, I liked her a lot, almost as much as she liked her wine.” She chuckled to herself. “There was also—” She seemed to check herself.
Marion waited, but when Helena did not continue, she prompted. “Also?”
“Well, his name was Ned Asbrey, very good friend of Edgar’s. Two of them thick as thieves. Came to a bad end, though, the poor lad.” She looked up. “You heard of him?”
Marion’s stomach churned. “Only rumors.”
Helena nodded but said nothing further on the matter. “And finally, there was Michelle—dull as a plank and bitter. The odd one out, you might say. She never did well on her assessment reports, maybe because no one liked her, maybe because she botched up everything. Either way, by the end of her first year, Nancy told her she was never going to make it as an Inquirer. She gave her a choice—either she had to leave, get the sack or she could stay on as night duty filing assistant. Michelle chose the latter, of course. It was that or unemployment and in those days...well, you took what work you could get. Then, couple months later, that old man Gillroth suggested another role for Michelle on top of filing assistant. I can’t remember exactly what he called it...”
“Border Guard?” Marion provided.
Helena raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s it. Border Guard.” She grimaced. “But even so, seeing all her friends training to be Inquirers while she filed papers ate away at her. And I think she wanted to even out the field, if you know what I mean. She made it her life’s work to get her colleagues in trouble, to point out where they’d gone wrong. No one could deny she was good at that at least. Somehow, she always managed to be in the right place at the right time. Or wrong place, wrong time, you could say. She knew the layout of the agency better than anyone. She...” Helena paused, distracted. The vein in her forehead pulsated madly. She rubbed it absently. Marion wondered if she knew about the map White had once owned.
“Anyway, you said you wanted to know about the safe?” Helena went on, her face now relaxed a fraction. “I sold one to Edgar seven years ago, yes. But that’s all I can say. Anything more goes against the—”
“Safe Keepers’ oath?” Marion supplied. “I know. I also know you’ve already broken that oath.” She tensed her shoulders as she waited for the reaction.
Helena surveyed her, studied her. “Bal told you that, eh?” Her face reddened but at last she appeared to reach a decision and nodded to herself. “Clockwork safes are something only a certain type of person would buy. Spies, governments, lawyers. People with secrets they don’t trust even themselves to keep. I liked Edgar, I did. But I always knew there was something not quite right about him. There was a sickness in there.” She jabbed a knobbly, arthritic finger at the left side of her chest.
“The day he came to me and asked for the safe, he was in a rush,” Helena recalled, “and very nervous. He wasn’t worried about the price, said his parents had died a while back and left him a bit of money. Hardly anything but enough to pay for the safe. I explained to him how it worked and that he’d have to make sure he was around to open it at the exact right time. I asked if he had a secure location for it—you can’t just leave a clockwork safe lying on your dining room table, you see. He said of course, what safer place is there than the agency lock room.” She raised an eyebrow. “I then asked him how long he wanted it set for.” She paused and turned around. Marion wondered if there was someone else in the back of the shop. The thought unsettled her.
Helena turned back to Marion and continued, apparently satisfied they were alone. “He wanted it set for seven years. I’d set safes for longer, so it wasn’t a shock. But I did wonder, what did he have that he’d only need in seven years? I said to him again, just to make sure he understood, ‘If I set it for seven years, you can only open it in seven years or whatever’s inside will be destroyed.’ He nodded, said he knew, then he pulled it from his pocket. A little glass tube of black liquid.”
At that moment and all at once, every single clock in the shop—one hundred at least—began to chime. The chorus reverberated through the tiny shop like an earthquake. Though Helena appeared completely unconcerned by the blaring racket, Marion scrunched up her shoulders and covered her ears. The jewel-colored windows rattled, the glass cabinet looked ready to shatter and Marion’s eardrums felt ready to burst. Eventually it came to a stop. Helena cast her eyes around the shop, as if waiting for something. And then it came. One last blast as the oldest and loudest grandfather clock joined in, a minute later than the others.
Marion shook her head in an attempt to regain her senses. She pulled herself upright and took a breath before trying to remember where their conversation had left off.
“Thing is,” Helena said, resuscitating the conversation, “I thought the vial was made of glass, but it wasn’t.”
“I don’t understand?”
“When he handed it to me to put in the safe, I’d never felt nothing like it before. Soft like rubber, cold like ice. It burned my skin, nearly right off.” She took a stifled breath. “Edgar laughed, I remember that very well. He laughed at how shocked I was. Then he said not to worry, said it couldn’t do much harm yet.”
“Yet?” Marion said, thinking out loud. “Did he explain what he meant by that?”
“Well, no. Not exactly, but he did say something about it being a formula, something that had been attempted during the war, something Miss Brickett’s had been keeping a secret. I didn’t really know what he meant by that but the whole thing gave me the chills. Not just what he said, but the way he said it. Was almost as if he was trying to scare me.” She moved off across to the other side of the shop, opened the glass cabinet and removed one particularly decrepit-looking wristwatch. She sat down at her workbench and proceeded to mend the wristwatch as if Marion were no longer there.
But Marion herself had slipped into a state of thoughtful absence. She had dared to assume that the awful substance she’d seen Swindlehurst remove from the safe had been the missing component of the clockwork bomb, the one piece of the puzzle she hadn’t found—the alchemic explosive. Fifteen times more powerful than dynamite, an acid that burns, singes, destroys.
“Like I said, I don’t know what it was,” Helena said. “If that’s what you’re here for, I can’t help you.”
“But you must have known. You sent a letter to Michelle White the night the safe was to be opened, didn’t you?”
Helena looked up. “Who says I did?”
“Michelle is dead. She was murdered the night you sent that letter.”
Helena went pale. She did not, however, look surprised. “You think Edgar did it?”
“I know he did. The stuff he locked in that safe, I think it’s part of a bomb that was designed for a covert chemical weaponry project in 1943. Do you know anything about it? Did Swindlehurst mention anything like that?”
Helena hesitated, but only for a moment. She shook her head. “No, of course not. I didn’t know what it was. But that’s why it frightened me. I’d never seen nothing like it before, maybe that’s why I knew it was dangerous.” She sighed. “It seems obvious now, looking back, but at the time I didn’t realize.”
Marion waited as the old woman rearranged her thoughts, her memories.
“It was just a few weeks ago when Michelle came to me. She said she needed some advice, that I was the only one who listened, the only one who took her seriously.” She chuckled menacingly. “I didn’t, but I s’pose it only mattered that she believed it. Anyway, she said she’d lost something. Actually, she said it had been stolen. A very special map. She said she knew who’d taken it, but she didn’t give a name.”
Marion tensed. She tried to relax her features, to not give anything away.
Helena continued without encouragement. “Michelle said she was concerned because if this person—the one who’d taken the map—found the monocle needed to read it, which she kept hidden in her office, then they’d be able to find it, was how she put it. She didn’t tell me exactly what she was afraid this person would find, just said it was dangerous. An agency secret she was supposed to protect. But the more I thought about it, the more sure I became that I already knew what it was. I’d seen it myself, seven years ago—”
“The stuff in Swindlehurst’s vial?” So the secret Michelle White had been tasked with protecting had already been discovered seven years earlier. Marion wondered, of course, why Swindlehurst had gone to all the trouble of finding the laboratory and reproducing the alchemic explosive, just to hide a sample of it in the agency for seven years.
Marion refocused when Helena spoke again. “Anyway, as soon as Michelle left I put two and two together and realized what I had to do. I had to tell her about Edgar and the clockwork safe. I made a note in my diary and decided I’d send her a letter explaining everything right before the safe was to be opened.” She drew a small hammer from her tool kit and began to tap some tiny metal part with just the corner of it. “’Course, when the day came, I had second thoughts. I knew what I was about to do might cause trouble at the agency.” She slammed the hammer onto the table and slouched back in her chair.
“But I made up my mind at last,” she went on. “I wrote a letter addressed to Michelle. It was short but I knew it would get my point across. I said Edgar was going to open a clockwork safe that night in the lock room at exactly midnight. I said I didn’t know what was inside, but said I suspected it might have to do with that secret she told me about, the one she was supposed to protect. I then asked that the letter be destroyed as soon as she’d read it. I didn’t want no one coming around asking questions after the fact.” She glowered at Marion. “Didn’t work, obviously. I knew Michelle worked night duties in the Filing Department and that she’d get the letter. It seemed like a good plan, at the time.” Her hand began to tremble. She slipped them into her apron pocket and looked up. “I thought there was a chance it would put her in danger, but...I...didn’t know what else to do.”
There was a short and sharp silence. Interrupted only by the ticking of unsynchronized clocks.
“Edgar has taken the vial and disappeared,” Marion went on. “We really need to find him. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”
Helena picked up the hammer once more. It almost seemed as if she were doing so in defense. An anxious look came over her. It was as if she’d just realized she’d said too much. “I don’t know nothing about that.”
The lights in the shop appeared to have darkened, the air cooled. It had become claustrophobic. Marion heard something outside in the street, like footsteps. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t come to the shop alone, or at least she wished she’d told someone where she was going. She looked up at one of the clocks on the wall. It was already seven-thirty. “Please, Helena. I need your help.”
Helena moved over to the shop door and slid three large bolts into place. “It’s no good being afraid now,” she said, “it’s too late.” She turned her back to the shop door. There was a single knock.
Marion jumped about a foot in the air. But Helena did not move an inch. The person outside the door then moved off and, across the window, their figure formed a silhouette behind the jeweled glass. Helena turned off the shop light. “There’s a way out the back,” she said. “Come on.”
Marion could only just make out the movement of Helena’s plump figure through the darkness. “What did you mean?” she asked anxiously as she followed the shadow toward the back of the shop. “Too late for what?”
They reached a second door, made of steel and secured with five large padlocks. Helena produced a flashlight from her apron pocket and then a ring of keys. Desperately slowly, she began to unlock each padlock in turn. “You shouldn’t have got involved, you shouldn’t have come here.” The third lock clicked open, the fourth, then the fifth. Helena turned the handle and pushed the door open into the street that ran behind the shop. She all but kicked Marion outside. “Do not come back here. Not ever.”
“Wait, p-please—” Marion stammered, but was cut short as Helena slammed the door shut in her face.
The small alleyway behind the shop was littered with rubbish bins and smelled of urine. The night had brought with it an icy breeze that did not quite suit the time of year. She turned to where the alleyway wound around the left wall of the shop. She was certain someone was standing on the verge, just beyond the light of the nearest streetlamp. There was a crunch of gravel, the swoosh of a coat and then...
“Lane!” Kenny said, stepping quickly into the light of the streetlamp. “Thank the blazes it’s you.”
“For goodness’ sake. Why were you creeping around like that?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said, looking left and right over his shoulders.
“What are you doing here?”
Kenny shoved his hand inside his coat pocket and removed a small brass compass. He flipped it open.
In the darkness of the quiet street, the compass’s green light glowed more brightly than ever.
“He’s here,” Kenny whispered.