The night was cold the way Londrivar liked it — not the clean cold of the countryside, but a damp cold, the kind that crept under your collar and stayed.
Crowe stopped on the pavement in front of the watchmaker's shop, pulled the cigarette from his waistcoat pocket, and lit it with a match struck against the brick wall. He took the first drag slowly, exhaled the smoke upward, and stood there with his thumbs hooked in his pockets and his gaze fixed on nothing in particular.
This was the moment Maren never understood.
The inspector had stayed inside — there were receipts to find, neighbours to wake, reports to fill out in bad handwriting. That was Maren's work, and Maren was good at it. Crowe wasn't. Crowe was good at standing on the pavement at two in the morning, smoking and letting his mind work undisturbed.
He reviewed what he knew.
Voss had been awake. Working on a disassembled piece, new lamp, everything organised. There was no sign of haste beforehand — but there was also no sign of Voss afterward.
The window broken from the inside with no object on the outside. That was the first knot. An object that vanishes after shattering glass does not exist within any laws Crowe knew. Therefore, either the object had returned inside — which required someone to retrieve it, and there had been no one — or there had been no object at all.
So what, then?
Pressure. Something inside the shop had generated enough pressure to blow the glass outward. Gas, perhaps — but there was no smell, and the pipes in the wall were intact. Sudden, localised heat could cause air expansion, but the clock parts on the counter showed no disturbance of any kind.
He dragged again.
The diagram on the glass. That was the second knot, and the more interesting one. Voss had drawn something on the window — circles, lines, numbering, according to Maren. It wasn't decoration. It was work. A sixty-two-year-old watchmaker doesn't spend the small hours drawing on windows out of habit. He had been trying to represent something. To communicate something.
Or to calculate something.
And then he had broken his own window.
Crowe looked at the clean pavement outside, where no object had fallen. He looked at the intact frame. He turned his gaze back to the dark interior, where the lamp still struggled.
There was a hypothesis he had formed inside and deliberately left undeveloped because it was too early, and because it was the kind of hypothesis he preferred to test before considering seriously.
The hypothesis was this: Voss had not broken the window by throwing something.
Voss had broken the window by leaving through it.
But the frame was intact on the outside. No scratches, no fabric fibres, no marks. A sixty-two-year-old man does not pass through thick glass without leaving absolutely nothing behind.
Unless he had not passed through it the way a man passes through things.
Crowe held that thought for a moment, then pushed it aside with the firmness of someone filing a document that doesn't yet have a folder.
Too early. Insufficient data.
But the note in his waistcoat pocket felt heavier than paper had any right to be.
He saw the interval.
What was the interval? An interval between what? In watchmaking, an interval was the space between two events in a mechanism — the moment between one movement and the next, the space where the gear touched nothing. In mathematics, it was a set of values between two points. In music, the distance between two notes.
In none of those definitions was there any reason to write four words in dark red ink and hide the paper among gears in the middle of the night.
Unless the interval was not a metaphor.
Unless Voss had literally seen an interval — a gap, a breach, a space between two things that ought to have been contiguous and were not.
Crowe took the final drag and dropped the cigarette onto the drainage grate in the pavement, where the steam extinguished it before it touched the ground.
The clock running backwards.
He had saved that for last because it was the hardest detail to fit into a rational framework, and Crowe always preferred to resolve the simpler problems first so as not to contaminate his reasoning. But now, alone on the pavement, he could look at it more honestly.
Clocks do not run backwards from mechanical failure. A faulty mechanism stops, seizes, loses precision. It does not reverse. For a hand to move consistently in the opposite direction, someone would have had to reconstruct the clock's interior specifically for that purpose.
Or something had interfered with the mechanism in a way that Crowe did not yet have the vocabulary to describe.
He put his hands in his pockets.
Three facts. Window blown out with no external cause. Diagram destroyed before it could be read. Note hidden with surgical precision. Clock inverted.
Voss had known something was happening. He had documented it — on the window, with urgency enough to use glass as a surface. He had left a message for whoever was capable of finding it. And then he had vanished from a sealed room without leaving a physical trace.
This was not a common crime. Common crimes had an internal logic, however crooked. This had the structure of something carefully arranged by someone — or something — that knew the rules of the world well and had chosen to disregard them.
The shop door opened behind him. Maren came out with a thin notebook in hand and the expression of someone who had found less than expected.
— Receipts from the last month — he said, handing over the notebook. — Eight clients. Six are simple repairs, already collected. One is pending — a certain Mr. Fenwick, due to collect Thursday. And the last one...
He hesitated.
Crowe turned.
— The last one has no name — said Maren. — Just a date and a description of the service. Calibration of unconventional measuring instrument. No value recorded. No signature.
— Date?
— Three days ago.
Crowe took the notebook. He looked at the entry. Voss's handwriting was small and slanted, regular as one would expect from a watchmaker — except in that last entry, where the pen pressure was visibly heavier, as though the hand had tightened without noticing.
— I want Fenwick's address — said Crowe.
— There's no address in the notebook.
— Then find it another way.
Maren exhaled sharply for the second time that night. He tucked the notebook under his arm.
— You think Voss was hired to calibrate something that shouldn't exist — he said. It wasn't a question.
— I think Voss was hired to calibrate something — said Crowe. — Whether it shouldn't exist remains open.
He looked one last time at the bronze plaque above the shop entrance.
A. VOSS — WATCHMAKER AND PRECISION INSTRUMENTS.
Time-related matters in general.
There was something almost ironic in that now, but Crowe was not given to irony. He filed the thought away and started walking.
There was one last thing he needed to see before sleeping — if he slept at all.
The upstairs flat had been left for later. But there was a detail Maren had mentioned in passing that Crowe had registered without comment: the neighbour had heard the glass shatter shortly after midnight.
And had waited until dawn to come and look.
In a city where nocturnal noises were common, that was reasonable. But there was a variation in that reasonableness that unsettled Crowe: the neighbour had not said he had chosen to wait. He had said he had waited.
The difference was small. It was exactly the size of a question.
Crowe went back to the shop door.