Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Kestrel Road ·
The Watches That Stopped Together
A newsagent taking the mender's paper order counts sixteen stopped watches on his bench, every face standing inside the Thin Hour, every one wound, and none of them sent in.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: "Iris Mundy, newsagent"
I keep the paper stall at the top of Kestrel Road, and half past seven is my beat into Sidney Crane's watchmending shop for his order, and to warm my hands at his little stove while he reads the racing page. That is the whole of my trade with him: papers, order book, two minutes by his own rule, because a mender's shop is not a table to sit at.
This is about the bench on the Thursday before last. Ordinary, the bench carries three or four dead watches waiting for parts, each on its pale green ticket with the wearer's name and the fault in Sidney's hand. This morning the bench was in a line from the vice to the lamp, and I counted them, because I count — it is my trade. Sixteen stopped watches, no tickets among them, every pale face up.
It was the faces that kept me at the door long past my two minutes. Every one of them was stopped inside the half hour. Not one alike: the near one stood at three straight, the far ones at so-past and so-past, the lot of them spread along between three and half past like washing pinned out on one line. None before the hour and none beyond it. I know a bit about stopping-in-place myself, a stall clock that refuses a quarter twice a year, and I have never seen sixteen faces inside one band of half an hour that were not set there by one hand.
Sidney let me lift the near one to the lamp. The crown was hard at its stop, wound to the full, and he said what any watchman would say: run down is run down, but a watch wound and stopped has been stopped, by somebody, on purpose, between three and half past three in the morning. Then he turned his Morning Book round on the stand to show me the page, which is his habit when a thing wants proving: the day's page carried the heading and nothing under it. No job came in that morning. And nothing comes onto his bench without a pale green ticket in his own hand, and I have handled his benches ten years: those sixteen came to the bench with nobody's hand that he wrote.
He says twelve if he says anything. He says I counted the dial lamp and the light off the glass, and that I came before he had tidied, and a bench that is being tidied can look like anything to a woman at the door with her gloves off. The carrier I ask Thursdays took nothing out of the shop that week, boxes or scraps, and says his van went out empty both ways. Widow Fenby, who calls Tuesdays with his crossword, looked the next time she was in and says the bench was bare and the lamp unplugged.
Unplugged I will allow to be tidying. The rest I will not. So it stands confirmed by nobody: Sidney to twelve, Widow Fenby to none, the carrier to no load whatever, and me to sixteen, and I will not shave my sixteen to make the sum easy. Here is what I keep, and it is papers, so it is mine: sixteen watches, wound to a stop, faces shut inside the Thin Hour, and not one of them booked in by anyone. Watches do not wind themselves along a bench in a row. Somebody wound them, somebody stopped them, and nothing of it passed either of our books. If they were not sent in by any of us, whose are they, and who mean to call for them?