It was a warm evening, the garden was alive with birdsong, wasps, butterflies, and he could hear, a short distance away, the swish . . . swish . . . swish of a secluded neighbour’s lawn sprinkler. Summer was officially coming to an end in a few days. How many more summers would he see? he wondered.

How many more did he want to see?

Any?

Everyone he had ever loved was now dead. His mother in a hail of bullets in her bedroom. His father dragged away into the night. He had buried two wives and his brother-in-law. Now, when the Coroner released her body, he would be burying his sister.

He did not know how many years he had left before his son would be burying him. He was still mobile, and, despite the walking stick, he remained fairly agile. Thanks to the skills of a local plastic surgeon, his face still looked two decades or so younger than his years. He’d beaten off heart trouble with a triple bypass, although he had angina now. He’d had his prostate removed. He’d reached what everyone called a ripe old age. But he did not feel ripe. He felt rotten.

And unfulfilled.

He twisted the key and pushed the door open, then stepped inside, carefully using his walking stick to steady himself on the floor plates the SOCOs had laid down, the smells of the place instantly saddening him further. Old age. Furniture polish. Decaying fabrics. And the new smells of the Crime Scene chemicals. He looked at the empty space, a darker colour than the rest of the floor, where a particularly fine hall table had stood for decades. At the rectangles on the walls where his sister’s stunning art collection had once hung. The silence was so leaden he felt it on him like a heavy coat.

His aunt used to take him and Aileen to church every Sunday. But he’d not had any time for religion as a child. And even less so now. Sure, there had been a time when he was happy – or at least content. He’d been one of the biggest players in antiques in the country. He’d enjoyed the entertaining, the celebrity that went with it, the customers he befriended. But all the time it had been clouded by his sadness that he and Ruth could not have children. The Daly name would live on with his one idiot son from his first marriage, to Sinead.

Now, as he looked around the emptiness in here, it seemed to him that life was little more than a bad joke. An endurance test. Every person a Job if you were into that Old Testament stuff.

Well, one thing he was determined to do, was to get an item back, even if it killed him. And he had a name to begin the search with. The name of a very nasty little shit.

He walked through into the drawing room, with its faded green flock walls, green sofas and armchairs. More shadows on the walls. The marble mantelpiece, on which had once sat a stunning Giacometti sculpture, was bare, apart from one framed photograph of happier times.

Aileen, a beautiful, raven-haired twenty-eight-year-old, with the love of her life, Bradley Walker, a USAF pilot and Cary Grant lookalike. He’d flown as a B24 bomber pilot on Operation Tidal Wave, a huge and unsuccessful mission to bomb the oil refineries around Ploiesti, in Romania, in August 1943. His was one of fifty-four Liberator aircraft that never returned, and he was one of hundreds of airmen reported missing, presumed killed.

For years she had harboured a hope that somehow, miraculously, he had survived. She’d kept up her spirits, somehow. She’d kept them up better than he ever had. That was women for you, he rued. Many seemed to have inner resources that were denied to males.

He climbed the stairs to the landing, past the radiator that Aileen had been left chained to for two days, and went into her bedroom, which was directly opposite. After her husband had died she’d had their marital double bed replaced with a single. It looked strange to see it in this large room that still smelled very faintly of her scent. Propped up against the pillows was Mr Stuffykins, the ragged little one-eyed, one-eared bear she’d brought from New York. He made a mental note to ensure he put it in the coffin with her. He removed a pair of her long black Cornelia James gloves, from her dressing table, to put those in the coffin with her as well. Aileen would like that, he thought; she always believed a woman was not properly dressed unless she was wearing gloves. He took a brief walk through into her bathroom, then went downstairs and into her book-lined study.

First he peered inside the opened wall-safe again, just to double-check nothing had been overlooked. But it was bare. And that dark void pained him, and angered him in so many ways. It had contained their father’s pocket watch. The only truly personal thing belonging to him that either of them had.

He sat down at Aileen’s walnut bureau. A black Parker pen, in a holder embossed with gold letters reading HSBC – probably a Christmas gift years ago from the bank, he thought, sat on the curling leather surface of the writing area. Tiny oval-framed photographs of her husband, her children and himself were arranged on the top of it. The drawers were stuffed with correspondence, bills, stamps. There was a fresh sheet of blue headed writing paper, with an envelope beside it, and an unwritten birthday card. A letter she had been going to write to someone, which now would never be written, and a card that would never be sent. Her diary was gone, he noticed, and assumed the police had taken it.

He pulled open one of the deep side drawers and immediately, along with a faint woody smell, caught a whiff of her scent again. After a few moments of rummaging through papers, he pulled out a leather photograph album containing pictures that had been taken of the highest-value items in the house, mostly for insurance purposes. His sister had a fine collection of oil paintings, clocks and furniture, all of which he had advised her on, and some of which he had bought for her, at knock-down prices, at rigged auctions.

He laid it in front of him and opened it up. The first photograph should have been the uninsured gold Patek Philippe pocket watch, still with a slim gold chain attached, that their father had always worn in his waistcoat. The glass had splinter cracks, and the crown was bent at an angle, the winding arbor frozen, with the pinion inside disconnected from the centre wheel so that the hands would not move when the crown was rotated. He hadn’t seen the watch for a long time, since he’d moved it to Aileen’s safe. But he could still picture every detail, vividly. The last time he had looked at it was to check the serial number, after he had become an expert in watches and realized it possibly had a high value. He had been right.

The watch was extremely rare and even in its busted form had a value of at least two million pounds today. Not that he or Aileen needed the money or would ever have sold it. They had both wanted to keep it as it was, the day he had been given it. Often he had thought of having it repaired and using it, wearing it with pride, but he could never bring himself to do it. With this busted watch he felt a connection with his father and he was scared to lose that.

He had never questioned in his mind how his father, a humble stevedore, had come by something so valuable. He’d stolen it from somewhere, almost certainly.

As executor of his sister’s will, Gavin knew she’d left everything to her granddaughter, with the exception of some bequests to her staff and to charity. As he stared at it, tears welling in his eyes, a voice from the past came back to him, like a ghost. It was long, long, ago.

On the Manhattan wharf in 1922. As he stood there, a small boy, with his sister and his aunt, the youth with a cap, pushing through the crowd, thrusting a heavy brown-paper bag into his hand, containing a gun, the watch and the newspaper front page.

Watch the numbers.

He had been trying to puzzle out what the boy had meant for ninety years. He was scared he would go to his grave never knowing.