Chapter 4: The Language of Clocks

Crane worked in his Shoreditch flat that night, the six times written on a card propped against his lamp. 2:14 — 11:40 — 7:03 — 9:27 — 4:51 — 6:16 He tried them as coordinates. As a cipher keyed to the alphabet. As musical notation. As a reference to dates, to years, to page numbers in books he could think of that Mrs. Farquhar might have owned. Kepler sat on the card for twenty minutes, which didn't help. At two in the morning, he made a fresh pot of tea and returned to the beginning. Not the clocks. The automata. The 'next step' Fenn had mentioned. He thought about the secondary mechanism in the chess player and what purpose it might serve. Mechanical automata of the current era were precise but bounded — they performed their programmed sequences and repeated them. The frontier the engineers were pushing toward was something more adaptive. Machines that could respond to circumstances. That could, in theory, learn. He thought about a machine that could learn. He thought about six clocks, each stopped at a specific time. Then he thought about the chess player's hand, raised mid-game. He had assumed it was a theatrical pose. But if the mechanism beneath it was adaptive — He was back at the estate by seven the following morning. The chess player's raised hand held a card. Tucked between two fingers, so precisely placed that it had been invisible in the chaos of the crime scene. On the card were six numbers. Not the same as the clock-times, but related to them — each one the difference between a clock-time and the hour on either side. A message. Left by the machine. Intended for someone who would know to look. Crane stood in the drawing room and felt the specific chill of a case that had just become considerably larger than a murder. "Someone taught you to communicate," he said to the chess player. The chess player's gears turned slowly, as if considering its response.