Dead Man's Time

aunt put the gun into her purse, then removed the watch. It was a man’s gold-case pocket watch, on a chain, with a moon-phase on the dial. The crystal was cracked and the crown
slightly buckled. The moon hands were stopped at five minutes past four. He snatched it from her hand and stared at it. ‘Pa’s watch,’ he said. ‘It’s
Pa’s.’
    There was a long, loud, single blast of the ship’s horn. That and the five gunshots in the night and the screams of his mother were the sounds by which the boy would, for the rest of his
life, remember New York.
    Together with the image of the watch.

16
    2012
    In the hushed warm air of the Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the old man, tired from his flight back from the South of France, sat beside the
unconscious woman, holding her frail, veined and liver-spotted hand. Somewhere near he heard the swish of a curtain being pulled.
    ‘Aileen, I’m here, can you hear me?’
    He felt a faint squeeze back. Her silver hair, normally elegantly coiffed, looked ragged and matted. Her face, beneath the bandages, was puffy, bloated, mottled with black and orange bruises,
and there were a mass of what he had been told were cigarette burns all around her neck. The patches of her bare flesh that were unmarked were the alabaster colour of a cadaver.
    Anger seethed in him. He was thinking about the long journey through life they had both made. To end up like this. He was not a man who often cried, but at this moment, he was crushing tears
with his eyelashes.
    She had compound and depressed skull fractures, a lesion to the cervical region of her spinal cord, from where someone had stamped on her, which was likely to leave her a paraplegic if she
survived, as well as an almost irrelevant – at this stage – fractured right clavicle and fractured pelvis.
    Aileen had been in steady decline throughout the day, and although he was still clinging to a desperate, increasingly irrational hope, he was starting to sense a terrible inevitability.
    Every few moments he heard the
beep-beep-bong
of a monitor alarm. He breathed in the smells of sterilizing chemicals, the occasional tang of cologne, and a faint background smell of
warm electrical equipment.
    She was in the bed, bandaged and wired, endotracheal and nasogastric tubes in her mouth and nostrils. She had a probe in her skull to measure her intracranial pressure, another on one finger,
and a forest of IV lines and drains from bags suspended from drip-stands running into her crinkly arms and abdomen. Eyes shut, she lay motionless, surrounded by racks of monitoring and life-support
apparatus. Two computer display screens were mounted to her right, and there was a laptop on the trolley at the end of the bed with all her notes and readings on it.
    ‘Aileen, I’m here with you. It’s Gavin. I’m here.’
    Then he saw her lips moving, although he could not hear her voice. He leaned down, close to her lips, but still could hear no sound. He looked back at her.
    ‘What did they take?’ she mouthed.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what they took yet, but none of that matters. Only you matter.’
    Again she mouthed the words. ‘Did they take the watch? It was all we had of him. Remember the message that boy gave you.
Watch the numbers?
’
    And suddenly he was back ninety years. To the quay on Ellis Island, waiting to board the
Mauretania
. The youth in the cap with the heavy brown-paper bag. And he remembered those words
too now.
    ‘What do you think he meant, Aileen?’
    But there was no reaction.

17
    The elderly blue Mercedes limousine, with its darkened rear windows, wound down the potholed drive. Music was playing loudly. The ‘Ode To Joy’ chorus from the
Philharmonic Orchestra. His boss’s choice. The boss liked cultural stuff like this. Choral, ethereal. Music that sounded like the gods were calling you. That kind of shit.
    The grand Edwardian house sat below them, fronted by mature shrubbery, a rockery and a steep lawn. The drive went all the way around to the rear. At the bottom, in the wide space between two
decrepit garages, was a whole cluster of vehicles. Two marked police cars, and what looked like two unmarked ones, and a white van with the Sussex Police crest and the words SCIENTIFIC SUPPORT UNIT emblazoned along the side. Blue and white crime scene tape sealed off the pathway to the house itself, in front of which stood a uniformed woman police officer
with a