Dead Man's Time

used to know the waters around New York like the back of my hand,’ Rosenblaum said. ‘Sailing up the East or West River on a fine day, looking at glorious Manhattan and all
the surrounds. Could never tire of it. Go around into the Harlem River, in summer, and all you can see is trees on both banks; you can’t see a building at all. You could be in a wilderness
anywhere in the world.’ He rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out a scrolled sheet of paper that was held by an elastic band.
    ‘
4 0 4 2 4 0 4 0 7 3 5 9
,’ Rosenblaum said. ‘I have an idea.’ He unrolled the sheet, and Gavin Daly could see out of the corner of his eye that it looked like a
nautical chart. ‘If I’m right, there are three digits missing. And a few letters and symbols. Okay, first we add an
N
in front of the
40.
Then a
degree
symbol
after it. Forty degrees north. We add a minute sign after
42.
That’s forty-two minutes. Then the 404. We stick a
W
in front of
073
and a degree sign. And a minute
sign after
59.
And that puts us three digits short, as I thought.’
    ‘Short of what?’ Gavin Daly asked. ‘Three digits short of what?’
    ‘These co-ordinates put you in the area of the Manhattan Bridge, Gavin. But it’s a big bridge, covers a huge area. We need those last three digits.’
    Gavin Daly glanced down once again at the watch. And then he realized.
    It had been staring him in the face for ninety years.

111
    In the back of the Crown Victoria, Roy Grace was aware of the minutes ticking away. With each one that passed, the chances were increasing that Eamonn Pollock had offloaded the
watch, and was on his way out of town and probably out of America, doubtless under one of his aliases.
    ‘Hey, move it!’ Aaron Cobb shouted out of the window at a delivery van blocking the cross-street. ‘Just move it, will ya! We’re on an emergency!’
    Grace could barely contain his anger at Detective Lieutenant Cobb. If he had done his job properly, they would not be in this situation now, and instead would have had a tail on Pollock. The
crook could be anywhere in this city, or in any of its boroughs. He wasn’t necessarily even taking the watch to a dealer; it could be to a private buyer. Hector Webb, the former head of the
Brighton Antiques Squad, had told him there were rich people who got a kick out of buying famous stolen works of art, and hiding them away in private galleries in the basements of their homes
– a kind of guilty secret pleasure for the super-rich. The same could apply to this watch.
    One thing was for sure, Eamonn Pollock was no fool. He’d showed up on the hotel’s CCTV camera when checking in, but he’d managed to evade them when he had done his moonlight
flit. The hotel had only one exit not covered by a camera, which was a fire door in the kitchens. How he knew about that was anybody’s guess, but no doubt that was the exit he had used.
Besides, it was irrelevant how he had left. The fact was, he had gone.
    Guy Batchelor phoned in to say they’d had no joy at any of the dealers they’d visited so far. Moments later, Jack Alexander reported the same news.
    Grace did a quick calculation. He needed to be at Newark Airport by 7 p.m., which meant leaving Manhattan at 6 p.m. This gave him a shade under seven and a half hours to find Pollock, or return
home empty-handed. He intended leaving Batchelor and Alexander out here, but all his instincts were that today was the day that counted.
    If they didn’t find Eamonn Pollock with the Patek Philippe in his hot, sweaty palm, they weren’t going to have a hope in hell, right now, of charging him with anything.
    Pat Lanigan turned round to face him. ‘Any news from the others?’
    ‘Goose eggs,’ Grace said with a grim smile. And that’s what this felt like at the moment: a wild goose chase. Eamonn Pollock had done the rounds of the legitimate dealers on
Friday, no doubt to fix a value for the watch in the market. But now, very obviously, he was not being stupid and risking walking into a trap.
    He peered out of the window at a street vendor, with his stall selling hats and scarves. A cyclist wormed past them, bell pinging. A fire engine honked its way through traffic close by. Then he
looked up at a wall, rising sheer into the sky, with maybe a thousand windows. Eamonn Pollock could be behind any one of those at this moment. Behind any one of the millions and millions of windows
of this city.
    One man and a watch.
    A needle in a