Chapter 28 #2
‘Andrew led the designs!’ Arthur snapped. ‘He was the main designer behind the Vale Brothers, and you know it. Everyone in the workshop knew it. He just didn’t have the name “Vale” to make it official.’
Pippa glanced at Theo, her stomach flipping over and over. They didn’t need words; she could see his thoughts written all over his face. Sebastian hadn’t been spinning lies. The messy, painful truth had been hidden for decades, and the cover-up had broken up a family.
Pippa swallowed hard. ‘Sebastian was right.’ She was unable to keep the shock out of her voice.
‘Andrew was no saint. As I said, he was blackmailing me!’
‘Only when he discovered the value of the commission. Most of that money should have been his. He should have got the credit. That money would have set him up for life,’ argued Arthur.
Horace looked around them all. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he muttered. ‘None of you understand—’
Arthur cut him off again, his voice firm. ‘Then explain it, Horace. Because for seventy years you’ve let everyone believe Andrew stole something he didn’t, and you’ve let his family suffer because of it.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with anything.’
‘You stole that commission.’
‘I did not,’ Horace said angrily.
The silence that followed was total.
But Arthur didn’t stop. Pippa could tell he had decades of frustration to get off his chest. ‘You decided to set up offices in London and take Andrew with you because then Walter wouldn’t discover that it was Andrew who was the genius.
Andrew didn’t say anything at first because he was glad of a decent job that paid well, and he liked the fact that his name would go down in history. ’
‘For all the wrong reasons,’ murmured Theo.
‘He didn’t have the confidence to go out as a designer on his own so he kept working for you, and you kept promising that one day you’d give him credit. He just got fed up with waiting.’
Pippa could feel her pulse in her ears.
Theo’s hand found hers without looking.
Pete stared at them all.
‘The Vale Brothers’ brand would not have even existed without Andrew, and Walter didn’t even know,’ added Arthur.
Horace pressed both hands to his knees, his shoulders sinking a fraction.
‘I had nothing to do with Andrew getting arrested, and I have no clue where the commission is.’ Horace’s eyes glistened with tears. ‘I trusted Agatha and I believe she let me down. She double-crossed me.’
‘How?’ asked Theo.
‘I confided in her. Our relationship went back to childhood. We were friends long before she ever showed an interest in my brother, and even after they married, I still believed I could trust her. But I was wrong. When it came down to it, greed and money can make people do things you’d never expect. ’
‘Do you mean you told her it was Andrew that had designed this commission?’
Horace nodded. ‘I told her he was claiming that the idea of the design was his, and she was furious that he was blackmailing me and trying to take the credit. She knew our business reputation was on the line, and I knew he had taken things from the office. Mementos.’
‘Didn’t we all,’ added Arthur.
‘I mentioned that to her,’ Horace continued.
‘Then the rain came, and the forecasts said it would last for weeks. With the water levels rising, the causeway was going to close, and the island would be cut off. There was one last bus off the island, and Andrew – and you, Arthur – were on it. By the time Andrew got home, his house had already been searched.’
He shook his head, looking tired. ‘It had to be Agatha who alerted the police, saying the commission was missing. Walter thought I’d taken it, but I’d handed it over to Agatha.
That’s why we fell out. He believed Agatha over me.
’ He paused, his voice tightening. ‘And as for this letter… I don’t know anything about it. ’
‘But it’s here in ink… You were in cahoots with Agatha,’ Theo pressed.
‘I was not.’
Theo leaned forward. ‘And the commission has never resurfaced? Not even on the black market? No sightings at all?’
‘Nothing,’ replied Horace.
Pippa was thinking. ‘If this commission is still out there then someone must know something.’
‘He’s in this room,’ claimed Arthur, staring Horace down.
‘You need to come clean. I have journalists knocking on my door at all hours of the day. They won’t give up.
They’ve been wanting to know for decades what the feud was about, and now someone has leaked what the commission is, people will put the pieces together.
If you come clean that you set Andrew up—’
‘I didn’t!’
‘Then we can all move on.’
‘What was the commission?’ asked Theo.
There was deadly silence.
Pete placed his mug back on the table. ‘If someone has leaked what the commission is, it’s not going to stay secret for long, and you never know, with all the publicity it might create it could resurface.’
‘The internet is saying it has something to do with MI5,’ Pippa added, looking at her dad’s text again.
Horace drew in a long breath. ‘The commission,’ he said slowly, ‘was for MI5, yes, and unlike anything we’d been asked to produce before. The Vale Brothers had always designed remarkable timepieces, you know that. But this was different.’
Pippa looked at Theo and he discreetly widened his eyes at her.
Horace continued. ‘We had to sign enough paperwork to fill a lorry. It was 1965. The Cold War was at its peak. Espionage, counter-espionage, political leaks… The government was convinced enemies were listening in on every conversation from London to Edinburgh. They wanted a device that could capture conversations discreetly; something no one would ever suspect.’
‘A watch?’ questioned Pippa.
‘A watch,’ Horace confirmed. ‘Elegant, pocket-sized, with a recording device that was impossible to detect. It recorded through micro-reel technology, miles ahead of anything else at the time. Andrew designed the mechanism and engineered the internal gears. Arthur…’ He stopped, just long enough for everyone to glance at Arthur.
‘Arthur liaised with MI5. We were visited by officials, proper suits, serious types. I remember one, a man called Donovan, who never smiled. He talked about the Soviets, leaks in local government, suspected double agents. They wanted our watch to be used during diplomatic meetings to detect corruption and gather intelligence. It felt … well, it felt important.’
Theo glanced at his grandfather. ‘You never mentioned any of this. MI5 officials? Actual spies?’
‘I’d signed contracts forbidding me from speaking about it. I’m a man of integrity, honour and loyalty,’ Arthur said firmly.
The glance he sent Horace made it clear he didn’t think those qualities could also be attributed to him.
Horace kept going, his voice steady. ‘It was revolutionary. The first of its kind. The prototype worked, though not perfectly. We were improving it. MI5 already had plans for where it would be deployed first – meetings with suspected sympathisers, people leaking information to foreign agencies. The stakes were enormous. If that watch fell into the wrong hands… It wasn’t just a trinket; it was a weapon of information. ’
He paused, then added, ‘The watch was powered by a magnetic trigger. That was Andrew’s genius idea.
When the watch was brought near a small magnetic field, it activated the internal recording mechanism.
There was one tiny switch inside, no obvious moving parts.
It looked like an ordinary pocket watch, but the magnet essentially woke the device.
In the finished design, the magnet would have been built discreetly into the clasp of the strap so it could activate automatically when worn.
But in the prototype, we kept the magnet separate.
Once triggered, the mechanism would stay active within a limited range of the magnet, but without that initial magnetic field the watch did nothing at all.
With it, the device came to life. We just hadn’t built the magnet into the strap before it went missing. ’
Pippa was intrigued. This was revolutionary for its time. ‘So the magnet was like … the “on” button, but hidden?’
‘Exactly.’ Horace nodded. ‘Completely invisible to anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for. It had to be subtle, or the whole thing would have been pointless.’
‘So when it disappeared?’ Theo said quietly.
‘MI5 shut the whole thing down. Buried it. They didn’t want the public knowing a classified device existed, let alone that it had gone missing.
But it worked. We were just about to build the strap when Andrew overheard a conversation between me and Walter about how much we were getting paid, and that’s when the situation changed. ’
Pippa caught a strange look in Arthur’s eyes. Something about this was touching a nerve.
‘What does this watch look like?’ asked Pippa.
Pippa listened intently as Horace began describing the watch in more detail, and something cold began to creep up the back of her neck. Her fingers tightened around the arm of the sofa as she felt the colour drain from her face. Horace’s next words confirmed her growing suspicion.
‘It had no Vale stamp on it,’ he said. ‘Instead there were diamonds around the bezel. It looked like a pocket watch, but was designed so the strap could be fitted later. And there was a tiny dent in the back casing where I accidentally dropped it, though that piece was meant to be replaced.’
Pippa’s stomach flipped as her eyes locked on Theo’s.
Theo placed his hand on her arm. The shock on his face mirrored hers perfectly.
She swallowed. Hard. ‘That … that watch sounds like…’ she said slowly. ‘That description…’
Theo nodded.
Horace was still speaking, but Pippa barely heard him. Her heart thudded too loudly.
Theo cleared his throat, steadying himself. ‘Horace,’ he said carefully, gesturing towards Pippa, who reached down and pulled the watch from her bag. She slowly placed it on the table.
Everyone’s gaze fixed on the pocket watch, everyone asking a hundred questions in silence.
Finally, Horace spoke. ‘Where the hell did you get that from?’
‘My father,’ Pippa answered.