Chapter 15: The Sixth Clock

The six stopped clocks in Mrs. Farquhar's drawing room had not, it turned out, been stopped accidentally. Crane revisited the original crime scene — the Farquhar townhouse, with Inspector Osei's authorization — and looked at the clocks with the benefit of everything he now knew. The clocks were set to six different times. He had originally noted this as potentially significant and had filed it as a detail requiring later attention. With the chess player's instruction set now decoded and the case's full picture assembled, he looked at the times again. Four, seven, eleven, two, nine, one. He worked through the notation systems Mrs. Farquhar might have used. Not letter substitution — she was an engineer. Mechanical notation. Position notation. Gear ratio equivalents. He tried it as a combination lock sequence: 4-7-11-2-9-1. Six numbers. Six positions. In the workshop's second day, he had noticed a compartmentalized cabinet that he had not been able to open — a lockbox mechanism, unusual for a workshop cabinet. He had noted it and not attempted it, not knowing the combination. He went back to the workshop. The combination was correct. Inside the cabinet: a seventh envelope, labeled simply THE SOCIETY'S FUTURE. And a mechanical component he recognized as the completed instruction set for the second chess player — the one she had been building when she died. 'She finished it,' he said aloud, though he was alone. The envelope contained a draft proposal for the Society's reorganization — a legal structure that would permanently prevent the kind of commercialization Harwick had attempted. She had written it before she died. She had been building toward it. He brought both to Merriweather. 'She wanted the Society to survive this,' he said. 'She spent her last months ensuring it would,' Merriweather said.