Chapter 23: A collector nobody has ever seen buys the market clock

The great clock of the Long Hall hangs from the middle girder on two iron chains. Its face is as wide as a cartwheel, its hands are black iron, and its pendulum swings inside a tall wooden case with a little glass window, slow and steady as a long-distance runner.

Every Sunday for forty-one years Walter Yelland has climbed a ladder to wind it. He first went up at fourteen, the week the old winder retired, and the porters still call that ladder Walter's stairs.

The paper ticket on the case says 40, and the answer is printed in the catalogue on every chair in the hall. On the twentieth of December, at six in the evening, the Old Market holds its farewell auction.

The café counter, the Fish Hall's enamel sign, the toy stall's rocking horse and the wool stall's painted sign are all for sale. Lot forty is the clock.

You have walked under that clock every working day of this year, and checked your watch by it more times than you could count. It is strange to see a price ticket on it, like a medal hung on the wrong player.

First: Lot forty goes to a name nobody has seen

Bidders register at a desk by the door, where Tilly Quayle writes each name in a register and hands over a wooden paddle with a number painted on it. Known collectors may bid on account and pay after the New Year. That is how the auction house has always done it.

At twenty past six a man in one of the café's green-and-white farewell scarves, which half the hall is wearing tonight, registered as Quintus Royle, a collector of old clocks who buys by letter and whom nobody in the market has ever seen.

Tilly gave him paddle twenty-three. She hardly saw his face. “Chin down in his scarf,” she says, “one hand in his pocket, signed in a hurry and gone. Half the hall looked like that tonight.”

The auctioneer, Xenia Vane, runs the sale with a voice like a starting pistol. At seven o'clock lot twelve, the wool stall's painted sign, goes to the old lady who has kept the wool stall longer than anyone can remember, in her green hat with the pearl pin, and the whole hall claps.

At twelve minutes past eight, lot forty, the clock, is knocked down to paddle twenty-three for more than the clock-winder earns in five years. A long sigh goes round the hall, the sound a crowd makes when a penalty sails over the bar. Somebody nobody knows has bought the market's time.

At half past eight a telephone message comes through for Xenia. Quintus Royle is at home in bed with a fever. He has sent no letter, no bid and nobody.

Xenia, who has run sales for thirty years without one false bid, goes pale and then very angry. She does not have far to send for the police. You are standing at the urn, and Inspector Elena Dorn is halfway through a pastry.

Second: The paddle behind the pillar

Paddle twenty-three is found on the floor behind the pillar in the middle of the hall, right under the clock. Its wooden handle is smeared with something black, and when you lift it to your face it smells sharply of brass polish.

You hold it by the very end, the way you would hold a dart, so as not to add prints of your own.

Tilly opens her register for you. Beside the name Q. Royle, in the margin, is a small black thumbprint she had not noticed in the rush.

Dorn has the doors closed. Three men were seen near that pillar during the bidding for lot forty, and all three are still in the hall, all in green-and-white scarves. None of them will say he held paddle twenty-three.

Third: Where three men stood when the hammer fell

Walter Yelland stood under his clock, as he has stood under it at every fair for forty-one years. The auction house asked him to wind and oil it one last time at five o'clock, so that it would be ticking through the sale, and he did it with a rag and a tin of polish. His fingertips are rimmed with black.

Ulric Stavely, a dealer in old enamel signs, wears white cotton gloves, as he always does when he handles enamel. They are spotless. He wanted the clock, he says freely, to sell on to a collector, but the price went mad. He went to Mrs. Odile Fenn's urn for a mulled wine just before the hammer fell.

Mrs. Fenn remembers him perfectly. “He was standing right here when the hammer came down, holding out his cup. He groaned that he'd missed the clock and spilled half of it on my cloth.” Her urn stands by the front door, half the hall away from the pillar.

Yannick Torvald, a young man bidding for his grandmother's old stall sign, held paddle nine. He has been eating the café's sugared pastries from a paper bag all evening, and his fingers are white with sugar.

Yannick wanted the clock too. His grandmother met his grandfather under it, waiting out a thunderstorm, and he had hoped to give it to her.

Tilly, at her desk, watched the bidding on the clock go back and forth like a tennis rally: paddle nine from the left aisle, paddle twenty-three from the pillar, nine, twenty-three, nine, until nine dropped out at the last bid but one.

You walk along the three of them with the paddle in your hand, like a referee checking studs before a match, and look at each pair of hands in turn. Then Dorn gives you her list in a whisper, under the noise of the next lot.

Check the hands, and then check what the hands left behind. Oil, ink, sugar and soot all travel.

Check where each person was at the one minute that matters, and who saw them there.

Check who was bidding against whom. Two paddles that answer each other across a hall are held by two different people.

Fourth: The first way, by the black on the paddle's handle

Start with the paddle. Its handle carries black smears that smell of brass polish, and a black thumbprint sits beside the false name in the register. So the man who held it had black, polish-smelling hands by twenty past six.

Ulric Stavely's white gloves are spotless, so they never held that handle. Yannick's hands are only sticky with sugar from the café's pastries.

Walter Yelland oiled and polished the clock at five, with a rag and a tin of polish, and his fingertips are still black. You saw all three pairs of hands yourself, close enough to smell them. Only Walter's could have left that mark.

Fifth: The second way, by the bids that crossed the hall

Now forget the black and use the hammer. At twelve past eight, Ulric was at the urn by the front door, half the hall away, groaning that he had missed the clock while Mrs. Fenn mopped up his wine. He could not have been raising a paddle behind the pillar.

Yannick was holding paddle nine, and Tilly watched nine and twenty-three answer each other from two different places, the aisle and the pillar, bid after bid. Nobody bids against himself from across the room, however much he loves his grandmother. That leaves only the man who never left the foot of his clock.

Walter Yelland does not argue. He takes off his scarf and folds it very small. “I couldn't let it go to a stranger,” he says. “Forty-one years of Sundays. I thought I'd find the money somehow.” He chose Royle's name from the catalogue's list of absent bidders, because no auction house in the land would ask a famous clock collector for a deposit.

Xenia Vane puts lot forty up again at the end of the sale. The market's history society buys it for the town museum, at a fair price, and asks for one condition in writing: that Walter Yelland goes on winding it every Sunday. Quintus Royle, from his sickbed, sends word that he wants nothing more than an apology, and gets a long one.

On the first morning of the New Year, when the halls are finally empty, the museum's men will come with a cart to take the clock down. Walter has already asked to be there. He means to go up his stairs one last time first, wind it full, and stop the pendulum with one finger at exactly noon, so that it can start again at the right hour in its new home.

Mrs. Fenn, packing up her urn, says the café will feel wrong without the clock's tick coming faintly through the wall on quiet afternoons. She has heard it for thirty years without once noticing it.

There is one thing you cannot make sense of as you help stack the chairs. At half past six Pim walked the old lady of the wool stall home through the snow with a streaming cold, and you watched them go. At seven she was in the hall in her green hat with the pearl pin, bidding for her own stall's sign, without a single sniff. How could she be in bed and at the auction on the same evening?