The Clockmaker's Secret

Chapter 1

1

The hike wasn’t going to plan.

The looming granite stacks of Rough Tor were a poor compass marker, shifting along the skyline as Slim Hardy attempted to realign himself with the trace of path which had led him up the hill from the car park.

To his right a small herd of wild moorland ponies blocked the direct route to the ridgeline and the tallest stacks. Their defiant eyes watched every step as Slim skirted around, moving slowly over the boggy, uneven terrain, wary of the granite scree poking through the tuffs of moorland grass.

Slim sighed. He was way off course now, Rough Tor’s long ridge rising almost straight on, and the flat peak of Brown Willy with its sprinkling of rocks appearing straight ahead across a wide, gentle valley. He reached by habit for the hip flask that was no longer there, shook his hand as though to punish himself for his forgetfulness, then sat on a rock to take a breather.

Up on the ridge, the two hikers he had followed from the car park jumped down from among the rocks and headed on towards Brown Willy. As they disappeared from sight, Slim felt a sudden pang of loneliness. At the very bottom of the slope, there were three cars in the car park alongside the blur of red that his pushbike, but of the other walkers there was no sign. Besides the ponies, he was alone.

After a bite of a leftover sandwich and a swig from a water bottle, Slim looked up at the peak, torn by indecision. He had a long cycle ride ahead of him down winding, potholed country lanes, and the battery in his light was flat. As he turned, though, the sun briefly broke through the clouds, and far to the south the English Channel glittered between two hills. To the northwest Slim looked for the Atlantic, but a bank of clouds hung low over the fields, obscuring all but the tiniest triangle of grey that might have been water.

With a persevering grunt he shouldered his rucksack and got back to the hike, but had taken no more than a few steps when a loose rock rolled under his boot, plunging him knee-deep into a pit of grimy water. Grimacing, Slim pulled his foot free of the bog and staggered forward onto drier ground.

As he removed and emptied his left boot, he gave a wistful grin, remembering that a spare pair of socks lay on the bed in his room, left out of his bag to make space for an old paperback from the guesthouse’s borrowing shelf.

Again the sun briefly emerged from the clouds, the granite stacks sparkling in the sudden brightness. The herd of ponies had moved across the hill, leaving Slim with a straight route to the ridgeline.

‘Come on,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Not a quitter, are you?’

His boot squelched as he pulled it back on, but with a grimace rarely leaving his face, he finally made it to the ridgeline fifteen minutes later, clambering up the granite stacks to the highest viewpoint. Fog had rolled in, obscuring everything but the slopes of the hill. The old China clay quarries to the southwest were ghosts in the fog, but beyond a murky grey sheet hung over the world.

With the water’s grit like sandpaper between his toes, Slim paused only long enough to take a quick drink before beginning his downward journey. A warm early spring day was quickly reverting to a late winter evening, and only an hour of light remained before complete darkness. Even though the fog hadn’t yet absorbed the little gravel car park into its amorphous grey palette—a speck of red near the lower wall identified his bike—it looked a lot further than the peak had seemed when he was starting out.

He was staring off into the distance, counting the sheep huddled into a natural bowl further down the slope as a way of putting the chill gusts of wind out of his mind, when something shifted under his foot.

He fell hard, catching himself with his hands. He had fallen on the same foot, but this time he turned his ankle, and a blistering pain raced up his leg. He rolled on to his back, eased off his boot and sat rubbing his ankle for a few minutes. Removing his sodden sock revealed the beginnings of an angry bruise, and the exposure to the air sent February chills through his body. The ground here was at least dry, and he sat up and stared upslope, feeling both angry and stupid. Fool me once, fool me twice, he remembered the beginning of a saying his ex-wife had been fond of, although he had forgotten the rest.

He looked around, wondering which rock had tripped him, and frowned. Something poked up between two tufts of grass, fluttering in the breeze.

The corner of a plastic bag, shredded and frayed, its old colour long faded to a grey-white. Slim hesitated before making to pick it up, remembering his tour of Iraqi with the Armed Forces, when such a thing might have indicated a landmine, a marker for local militants still using the area. Every bit of rubbish could have meant death, and in the suburbs of some dirty, dusty towns, Slim had barely dared take a forward step.

To his surprise, it resisted his sharp tug. He pushed his hands into the turf and eased his fingers around the hard, angular shape the bag contained. It spread out beneath the turf, a couple of hand spans across, and his heart began to race. Lost military ordinance? Dartmoor, to the northeast, was used for army drills, but Bodmin Moor was supposedly safe.

He pressed a finger into the hard surface, and it gave a little. Wood, not plastic or metal. No bomb he had ever known had been made from wood.

He pulled back turf that yielded easily and twisted the wrapped object out of the grass. Square corners and carved grooves aroused his curiosity. He untied the knot on the bag and withdrew the object inside.

‘Huh…?’

The bag contained a beautiful, ornate cuckoo clock. Delicate wooden carvings surrounded a pretty central clock face. To his surprise it was still functioning, as a little cuckoo suddenly blasted out of a door above the 12-numeral, its cry a tired puff into Slim’s stunned ears.