Arthur nodded miserably. ‘Yes.’
‘So you slipped it into someone’s coat,’ Theo said quietly, ‘so they wouldn’t find it on you.’
Arthur’s voice trembled. ‘If he’d searched me, I’d have been arrested on the spot. I didn’t know whose coat it was; I just knew I had to get it off me.’
Horace’s voice broke when he spoke. ‘Andrew was innocent. He didn’t deserve that.’
Arthur looked down again. His shoulders shook.
Theo stood abruptly. ‘An innocent man suffered because of both of you,’ he said. ‘Your actions destroyed a family. They had to move away. Change their name. Start again. All because you couldn’t face the consequences. Grandfather, I don’t even know who you are anymore, and Horace… you stole his designs. You contributed to all of this.’
Pippa was thinking about the carving in the workbench in The Clock House. She looked at Horace. ‘Andrew thought it was you; that’s why he carved that message. And you wanted it removed in case it was ever discovered.’
Horace nodded. ‘He came back to the island after he was arrested, but Walter and Agatha refused to listen to him. He must have carved it out of frustration, blaming me.’
Theo pulled out his phone. Pippa noticed his hands shook slightly as he dialled. No one spoke while he waited for the call to connect.
‘Yes,’ Theo said, voice clipped, ‘I need to report a theft. From 1965. And a wrongful accusation.’
Pippa watched him, still trying to take in everything she’d just heard. It couldn’t have been easy to call the police on his own grandfather, or on the man he’d once aspired to be. Most people would have avoided it or pretended it wasn’t their problem. But Theo didn’t. He just… handled it, and she felt a warmth spread through her body. She couldn’t help admiring him for doing the right thing.
Everyone listened to the conversation. Theo didn’t miss anything– the watch, the letter, the carving on the table. When he hung up, the room was quiet again.
Theo looked at Arthur. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ Theo said. ‘If you and Agatha were planning to run off together… why didn’t you?’
Arthur’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘Because she thought I’d double-crossed her. She thought I’d kept the watch. She didn’t believe that I’d lost it in my haste not to get caught with it.’
Horace let out a slow breath, leaning back heavily in his chair, his eyes closed.
Pete rubbed his forehead, overwhelmed.
Pippa looked at Theo, who was still staring at his grandfather in disbelief.
As the old saying went: time had a way of catching up with everyone eventually.
ChapterThirty-Two
St Swithin’s Day– 15 July, one year on
The rain hammered against the windows so loudly it sounded like someone was shaking a bucketful of pebbles at the glass.Classic St Swithin’s Day weather,Pippa thought. Puffin Island clearly liked to take traditions seriously.
She flipped the bacon in the pan while Theo stood beside her buttering toast, the two of them dancing around each other in the small kitchen of Clockmaker’s Cottage like they’d been doing it for decades. The cottage felt different now: lighter, warmer, lived-in. The beams were polished, the floorboards revarnished, and the once damp corners now housed cheerful plants or baskets of blankets. All fifty of the clocks had been removed by Horace Vale, who was now disgraced in the horology world.
The frame on the wall caught her eye, the newspaper article mounted behind the glass staring back at her. She couldn’t help but glance at it.
SHOCK REVELATIONS IN DECADES-OLD VALE BROTHERS SCANDAL
Wrongfully accused right-hand man finally cleared after more than sixty years
Puffin Island was shaken this week after new evidence emerged overturning one of the most infamous chapters in local history: the collapse of the Vale Brothers’ clockmaking company and the 1965 accusation against apprentice Andrew Wetherby.
Wetherby, who died in 1998, had long been believed to have stolen what has now been revealed as a confidential government commission– a highly valuable prototype watch designed for MI5 as part of an intelligence project during the height of the Cold War. At the time, the scandal made national news and effectively ended the prestigious partnership between brothers Walter and Horace Vale, whose handcrafted timepieces were regarded as the finest in the country.
a watch that never should have vanished
For decades, the stolen commission was presumed lost forever. But a recent discovery on Puffin Island, combined with a newly uncovered audio recording, has dramatically rewritten the story.
The recording, preserved by an internal magnetic mechanism, captures an intimate conversation between Arthur Blake, a senior designer in the Vale workshop, and Agatha Vale, wife of co-founder Walter Vale. The pair were involved in an affair and discussed taking the commission for themselves, hiding it during heavy storms on Puffin Island, and allowing suspicion to fall on Wetherby.
