was running faster than a March hare, but she still couldn’t decide if this was a good sign or not.
Just at that moment her right arm cramped and buckled. Luckily that was also the exact moment when a hand like iron locked onto her upper arm.
“Let go!” Harrison Thorne barked. He was hanging from the balcony, with his legs wedged in the iron work, but he had a good grip on her. Never had a man looked more like an angel. She smiled and with uttermost faith, obeyed.
He pulled her in, and gave her a rough hug that knocked the remaining breath out of her. It was only a moment before he pushed her back just as roughly. “What do you think you were doing young lady? Did you not hear a word I told you?”
He was angry and outraged, and in an instant Verity went from relieved to embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she stuttered, completely at a loss for an explanation. “I…I just thought…”
He waved an admonishing finger at her. “No Verity Fitzroy, it is perfectly clear that you didn’t think at all.”
It was the typical attitude from an adult. They always thought a child’s head was full of fluff. In this instance however she was not about to disabuse him of the notion.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “But I think everyone was looking for something…”
By way of explanation she scrambled back into the room. Walking around the it, she tilted her head like a magpie.
“Verity…” Her rescuer trailed in wake, but she held up her hand for silence. Remarkably, he gave it to her.
Locating the point where the sound was the loudest, Verity dropped to her knees and ran her fingers over the floorboards. One stood fractionally prouder than the other. With a small knife from her pocket she was able to prize it open.
Beneath was the device responsible for the ticking that only she could hear. It was a circular device—no bigger than a pocketwatch—yet every tiny gear was visible and moving. It was light in her hand—far lighter than it had any right to be.
“What is that?” Agent Thorne crouched down and leaned over her shoulder.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, “but I recognise it. It was in my father’s collection.”
“What is it doing here then?”
She turned it over in her hands, mesmerised by its perpetual motion that seemed to have no winding mechanism. “I have no idea,” she murmured.
Harrison Thorne sank back on his heels. “Did he know what it was?”
She shook her head, wrapping her fingers around it tightly. “As far as I am aware he didn’t. It was something he found on a dig in Cyprus. I thought it was lost in when our house burned to the ground.” Her voice cracked on the last few words, as the emotion she thought she had a grasp on welled up.
Luckily the Ministry agent made no move to take it from her. If he had—even being who he was—she would have fought him. Quickly she wrapped the device in her handkerchief and secreted it in her pocket. Best to get it out of the way and out of his mind.
She look up at him and smiled. “I have found your Mr. Clayton for you. He is in a returned serviceman’s establishment not far from here.”
“Yes, thank you,” Agent Thorne sighed. “We found his body not far from here. He’d been strangled and thrown into an alleyway. That’s why Liam bought me here.”
“Then you don’t need us any more?” She hoped she sounded casual about the whole thing. Locating Clayton was after all, the only thing Agent Thorne had asked her to do. The device was not part of this, and Uncle Octavius she would keep quiet about too. This was her life, her quest, and the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences did not need to know about it.
Agent Harrison Thorne trusted her, for he slipped the agreed sum into her palm. “No, you have done you part. This is where your job ends and mine begins once more.”
As they walked downstairs together she pondered just how wrong the Agent from the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences was being. It was in fact the end of his mission, and the start of something far more personal for her.
The strange little device’s tick-tock was beginning to feel comfortable…like her own heartbeat returned. She felt Father would have been very pleased about that.
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