Another reason why Gavin Daly and his son had travelled, in a hurry, to New York.

There had to be.

And he had a feeling he knew what it was.

He ran past the Central Park pond, then headed on, threading his way along the pathways, towards the huge, circular Jacqueline Onassis reservoir, determined, as he had tried to do on a couple of past visits, to run right around the gravel track of its circumference without stopping.

Thinking all the time.

And getting increasingly worried about the task in front of him.

That the watch was merely a sideshow. And the true reason for Gavin Daly’s journey here was revenge. The settling of a very old score.

88

At 6.30 a.m. Gavin Daly lay in his fourteenth-storey hotel room, propped up against the pillow, as he had been since 2.15 a.m. when he had woken, and had been unable to sleep again. He could not get the air-conditioning right, so half the night he had been too hot; now he was too cold, and there was a constant tick-tick-tick sound accompanying the air-con every time it cycled.

All the time, his brain had been spinning. He was back in the city of his birth. Back in a place that still, in so many ways, felt like home to him. Back to fulfil a tearful promise he had made all those years ago, on the stern of the Mauretania.

A memory as vivid in his mind now as it had been then. And the words just as clear.

One day, Pop, I’m going to come back and find you. I’m going to rescue you from wherever you are.

He ordered English Breakfast tea from room service, with milk, not cream. After he had hung up he remembered how weak they served tea here, phoned down again and asked for an extra teabag. Then he closed his eyes again.

He had woken thinking with deep sadness about his second wife, Ruth, and realized he had been crying in his dream. She was still so vivid in his mind. Some people said that all people only ever really love once in their lives, and he wasn’t sure that was true. There had been a time, so many years back, when he had loved Sinead, really loved her. Until the day, ten years into their marriage, when the private detective’s photographs showed her startled face, in a bed in some hotel room with her lover, another antiques dealer in the city. It had taken him a long time after that to trust any woman again – many years. Then he had met Ruth, with her red hair and freckles, and the loveliest smile he had seen in all his life.

He could feel her in his arms now. He had loved to stand behind her, holding her slender body tightly, their cheeks pressed together, her hair tickling his face, feeling intoxicated by her scent and by his love for her. She was the most precious gift in all the world. The most precious gift he had ever known since his father. But, it turned out, the poor darling did not have the gift of health.

Firstly she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; then a few years after her hysterectomy, the cancer came back. Everywhere. He tried specialists around the world. Jetted her in private planes to hospitals and clinics in America, Switzerland, Thailand, to any doctor he could find good words about. But it didn’t make one bloody bit of difference.

Money could buy you comfort and luxury, but it couldn’t buy you the only thing in the world of real value, which was health. It couldn’t buy you a cure. It was ironic, he thought. He was lying in this big bed, in this big suite, with enough money stacked away, in banks, in stocks, in properties, to do almost anything he wanted and to buy almost anything he wanted, and it meant absolutely nothing. Except, right now, just one thing.

His chest pains came shooting back, suddenly, like a firework burning inside his chest. He reached out to the vial beside the bed for a nitroglycerin pill. A few minutes later, as the pain subsided, the doorbell rang.

He climbed out of bed and stood for a moment, in his pyjamas, feeling stiff, shaky, old. Very old. Too old. His eyes were tired. Using his stick because he did not trust his legs or his balance, he let the waiter in, waited for him to set the tea down, signed the bill and tipped him a bunch of dollar bills.

Then he padded over to the huge window and opened the curtains. The view was straight out across Central Park. It promised to be a fine day, just like the little card that had been left on his pillow last night predicted. A light mist hung over the trees. He saw a man, the size of an ant from here, jogging. Keeping healthy.

Gavin had never had truck with exercise. It was all in the genes, he believed. Ruth had been a health fanatic – all salads and fish and just the occasional glass of wine at celebrations; yoga every day; tennis; cycling. But she hadn’t made old bones. At least he had outlived the bitch Sinead. And he would go to his grave knowing she wasn’t around to dance on it. Although bloody Lucas would be.

And he did not like that thought.

He fiddled with the air-conditioning control, wrestled his way into a bathrobe, turned his attention to the huge parcel with the FedEx label and the customs stamp, addressed in his own handwriting to a New York antique watch and clock dealer. It had been brought to him at the hotel last night by its recipient, Jordan Rochester, another very old friend in this city. Rochester had kindly booked the room in his own name, and used his credit card. Gavin Daly did not want anyone finding him in New York. And particularly not Detective Superintendent Grace, or any of his New York Police Department associates. Not until he had finished his business here.

As a precaution, he hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside the door and engaged the security lock. Then he put the teabags into the pot, and while he waited for them to steep, he removed his tools from his suitcase, and began to open the package.

Ten minutes later, he took a sip of his tea, then gently lifted the Ingraham chiming mantel clock from its nest of shredded paper, which lay inside the polystyrene outer casing he had fashioned for it a fortnight ago.

Carefully he removed the round, brass gong from inside the clock’s casing. Then even more carefully still, he opened up the two halves of the gong.

And smiled for the first time since his plane had landed.

89

The yellow cab was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a fine, cloudless morning; Roy Grace, squashed in the cramped rear alongside Jack Alexander and Guy Batchelor, stared out at the sparkling water of the East River. He was all too mindful that it had been less than a mile from here where the horrors of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack had taken place – and that Pat Lanigan had lost a cousin in it.

A short time later the driver, who spoke only mumbling English, pulled over. Grace recognized, from his last visit here, the Brooklyn police HQ office building, housing the Mafia-busting team to which Lanigan was currently assigned. To their left, across the street, was a square slab of a building with a yellow sign on which was written BARCLAY SCHOOL SUPPLIES, and in front of it was an open elevator-system car park that looked like a giant Meccano construction.

They clambered out, paid the driver, then entered the modern skyscraper, and gave their names to the security guard. A couple of minutes later, holding their visitor passes, they waited as the lift stopped on the tenth floor.

Pat Lanigan, wearing a yellow polo shirt, cream chinos and trainers, greeted them cheerily; Grace was relieved, from past experiences with Lanigan, that he’d chosen to dress casually today, as had his two colleagues.

The detective led them through a door with an NYPD shield and combination lock, and along a labyrinth of carpeted corridors, through an open-plan office full of empty cubicles with high-sided partitions. Each little space had a clean waste bin with a neat bin bag and clinically tidy desk. They passed a Stars and Stripes flag with the wording FLAG OF HONOR pinned to a wall, followed by a black and white map of Brooklyn, gridded and numbered, and all the other boroughs of New York beyond it.