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He didn't move. The mug left a ring on last Thursday's Eastern Daily Press, and the radiator beneath the window ticked without conviction. Below, the souvenir shop wouldn't open until eleven this time of year. Mrs. Pettigrew, who ran it, had stopped asking him down for a chat sometime around February. That suited him.
The office was a single room above the shop, reached by an outside staircase that groaned in anything stronger than a light breeze. A desk pushed against one wall, two filing cabinets he'd inherited from the previous tenant, a chair for clients that still smelled faintly of the charity shop it had come from. He kept his licence in a frame on the wall, and the frame was the cleanest thing in the room. Process serving, mostly. Insurance claims. The odd background check for a suspicious employer. Nothing that required him to care very much, and nothing that kept him awake.
He lifted the mug, remembered it was cold, and set it down again.
The knock, when it came, was three short raps. Not the postman. Not Mrs. Pettigrew, who favoured a single thump with the flat of her hand. James straightened in his chair and ran a thumb along the edge of the newspaper, folding it over. Then he called out.
“It's open.”
The door swung inward and brought the wind with it, and then her.
She was tall and dark haired, forty perhaps, though the light in the stairwell made it hard to tell. Her coat was charcoal wool, cut clean, and her shoes were the sort that didn't come from a shop in Cromer. She closed the door behind her without fumbling for the handle, and for a moment she simply stood there, taking in the room. The filing cabinets. The dead geranium on the sill. The man behind the desk who hadn't shaved since Tuesday.
“Mr. Watt,” she said. It wasn't a question.
“That's right.” He gestured at the client chair. She didn't sit.
“My name is Elena Vane. My husband died three weeks ago.”
She said it the way someone might announce a change in the weather. Flat. Measured. James had heard grief in enough variations to know when it was being held on a tight rein, and this was that. He waited.
“The police have closed the case,” she said. “Accidental death. He fell from the cliffs at West Runton.”
“I read about it.”
“Then you'll know they found nothing to suggest otherwise.”
“That's usually what accidental means.”
She looked at him for a long moment. The radiator ticked again. Somewhere down on the street, a delivery lorry reversed with a steady beeping that faded into the side lane.
“May I?” She indicated the chair.
James nodded. She sat, and the chair creaked once, and then she opened the handbag she'd been holding against her hip. It was leather, dark brown, and the clasp made a small, precise click when she undid it. From inside she withdrew something wrapped in a white handkerchief.
She placed it on the desk between them.
“I found this in my mailbox four days ago,” she said. “No note. No postmark. Just this.”
James reached forward and folded back the cloth.
The watch was silver, tarnished along the seam of the case, heavy for its size. The chain was looped neatly beneath it, and the face was clean except for a single dark smear that had dried into the groove where the glass met the metal. Blood. Old enough to have gone brown at the edges. He turned it over. On the back, engraved in a careful, sloping script, were two letters: B.V.
“It isn't Thomas's,” she said. “I'd never seen it before.”
James set the watch down on the handkerchief. “You're certain.”
“My husband didn't carry a pocket watch. He wore a wristwatch. A Longines. It was on him when they found the body.”
“And the initials?”
“His middle name was Arthur. Thomas Arthur Vane. Not B.”
James leaned back. The chair complained. He looked at the watch, then at the woman, and then at the window, where the gull had returned to its post on the opposite gable. The wind was picking up.
“Mrs. Vane, if the police have already ruled it an accident, there isn't much a private investigator can do that they haven't.”
“The police didn't find this.”
“No. You did. In your mailbox.” He paused. “Which means someone wanted you to find it.”
“Yes.”
“And you've no idea who.”
“No.”
“Or why.”
She didn't answer that one. Her gaze dropped to the watch, and something moved across her face that wasn't quite grief. James had spent enough years reading people across interview tables to recognise the particular stillness of someone choosing their words.
“What did your husband do, Mrs. Vane?”
“He was in business. Import and export. The family firm.”
“The Vane family.”
“Yes.”
“And recently? The weeks before the accident?”
She smoothed the front of her coat, a gesture that looked practised. “He was working. Travelling a little. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Where did he travel?”
“London, mostly. Sometimes the Continent.” She met his eyes. “I don't see how that's relevant.”
“You're asking me to investigate his death. His movements before he died are about as relevant as it gets.”
“I'm asking you to investigate this.” She touched the edge of the handkerchief with one finger. “Someone put it in my mailbox. Someone who wanted me to know that whatever happened on those cliffs wasn't an accident. That's what I need you to find out. Who. And why.”
James looked at the watch again. The blood had settled into the engraving, darkening the loops of the B and the V. He thought about the cliffs at West Runton, the chalk face dropping sixty feet to the shingle, the tide coming in hard from the north. He thought about a man falling in the dark, and a silver watch turning up three weeks later in a widow's mailbox, and the careful way she had said nothing out of the ordinary.
“My rate is forty pounds an hour,” he said. “Plus expenses.”
“That's acceptable.”
“And I'll need the watch. For now.”
She hesitated. Only for a second. Then she nodded.
“Keep it,” she said. “I don't want it in the house.”
She stood, and he stood with her, and she held out her hand. Her grip was firm and cool, and she didn't let go immediately. “You'll call me when you have something.”
“I will.”
She walked to the door and opened it, and the wind came in again, lifting the papers on his desk. He put a hand on them without thinking. She paused in the doorway, half turned, and for a moment she seemed about to speak. Then she didn't. The door closed, and her footsteps descended the iron staircase, and then there was only the wind and the ticking radiator and the watch on the desk.
James sat down. He folded the handkerchief over the watch and set it to one side, then picked up his mug. The tea was cold. He drank it anyway.
Through the window, the street below was empty except for a black saloon parked on the far side, facing the sea. It was the kind of car that didn't belong in Cromer, sleek and dark and too clean for a town where the salt air ate through paintwork in a season. He couldn't see through the windows. The engine was running; a thin trail of exhaust unspooled in the cold air.
He watched it for a long moment. Then the car pulled away from the kerb, smooth and unhurried, and turned the corner onto the coast road. The sound of the engine faded into the wind.
James looked at the folded handkerchief on his desk. He reached for it, drew back the cloth, and turned the watch over in his palm. The initials caught the grey light from the window. B.V.
He set it down and picked up the telephone.
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