Dead Man's Time

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.