The superintendent had been growing restive during Smith's account and could contain himself no longer.
"Will you please explain your familiarity with this device," he said formidably. "Did the gardener use this sort of thing for blowing up the tree trunk?"
"No, I don't think so. This device wasn't meant for setting off bombs. It was a toy."
"What sort of toy?"
"Well… it was for switching things on. Torch bulbs, mostly. Like the lights we had on a station in a train set. A buzzer, sometimes. It was incredibly simple."
"Explain," Yale commanded.
I glanced at Smith. He was nodding resignedly.
"You get an old or cheap clock," I said. "We had wind-up clocks, not a battery clock. You fix a length of wire to one of the hands, like this, so that a bare bit of wire sticks out and makes the hand much longer."
"The hands are still on the clock, I take it?"
"Oh yes. Though sometimes we'd pull the minute hand off and just use the hour hand, because it's stronger, even though it's shorter. All you need is for the bare wire to reach out beyond the edge of the clock face. We used glue to stick the wire to the hand. Then you have a long bit of wire coming out from the centre of the front of the clock, and you fasten the free end of that to a battery. One of those nine-volt batteries with things like press-studs at the end."
Smith was still nodding. Yale looked very much as if I shouldn't know such things.
"We made quite a lot of other gadgets," I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. "Buzzers for morse codes. Rudimentary telephones. Not just time-switches. I made a lock once which could only be operated with a straight piece of wire." And it still worked fine, although I wasn't going to show him.
Yale sighed. "So in this case, we've got the wire fixed to the clock's hand at one end and to a battery at the other, right? Go on from there."
"You need two more lengths of wire. One goes from the battery to whatever you want to activate. In our case, it was usually a torch bulb screwed into a metal holder. We fastened a bare end of wire to the metal holder. Then the third wire went back from the metal holder to the clock. We fixed this wire with glue to the clock case itself, not to the hands, in such a way that the bare end of wire was pointing out forwards, towards you if you were facing the clock like this." I demonstrated with the clock face. "We usually stuck it on over the number twelve, at the top, but you could fix it anywhere you liked. Then you wind up the clock and set the hand with the wire where you want it, and just wait. The wired hand travels round towards the jutting out wire and eventually hits against it at right angles. The circuit is thus complete from the clock wires to the battery to the light and back to the clock, so the light goes on. The clock hand keeps on trying to go round and the jutting wire keeps stopping it, so the light stays on. Well…" I finished lamely, "that's what happened when we made them."
"Them?" Yale said with apprehension.
"They were easy to make. They were interesting. I don't know how many we had, but quite a few."
"my God."
"There might be one still in the playroom," I said. "The old train sets are there."
Yale looked at me balefully. "How many of your family saw these devices?" he asked.
"Everyone."
"Who made them?"
"I did, Gervase did, and Ferdinand. Thomas did. I don't remember who else."
"But your whole family knows how to make a simple time-switch?"
"Yes, I should think so."
"And why," he said, "haven't you mentioned this before?"
I sighed and twisted the wired clock hand round in my fingers. "Because," I said, "for starters I didn't think of it until after I'd left here the other day. After we'd been digging out the black powder and so on, and I'd been looking back to the past. I didn't want you to find this. I wanted you to find something sophisticated, that no one in the family could have thought up."
"Hm," he said, seeming to accept it. "How many people outside your family knew about these clocks?"
"Several did, I suppose, but it was such a long time ago. No one would remember, would they?"
"They might." Yale turned to Smith. "This toy, is this really what set off the bomb?"
Smith nodded. "It sounds just right. Wire in a detonator where the Pembroke children had a torch bulb…" He spread his hands. "it wouldn't need more current than that."
Not surprisingly, they decided to take a look in the playroom. They picked their way cautiously across the ankle-twisting rubble and headed for the passage which was comparatively clear by this time. The playroom, when we reached it, was shadowy inside, with the windows boarded up. Light of sorts seeped in through the door, but it took a few minutes for eyes to acclimatise, during which Yale bumped into the bicycles, knocking them over. I helped him pick them up. He wanted to know whose they were, and I told him about Peter and Robin.
He made no especial comment but watched while I went over to the shelves and began peering into boxes. I hadn't been in the room at all since the twins had gone, and their own playthings had overlaid those outgrown and abandoned by their elder brothers and sisters so that most of what I was looking at was unfamiliar and seemed to belong to strangers. It took several minutes to locate the box I thought I wanted, and to pick it off the shelves and put it on the table.
Someone, Coochie I dared say, had packed the trains away for good after Gervase and Ferdinand had left and I'd been busy with school and horses. At one time, the tracks had run permanently round half the room, but Peter and Robin had been television-watchers more than the rest of us, and hadn't dragged them out again. I opened the box and found the old treasures undisturbed, looking more battered than I'd thought, with rust on the much-used wheels.
I lifted out a couple of engines and some coaches, then followed them with a tunnel, a signal box with green and red bulbs and a brown plastic railway station adorned with empty bulb-holders among the advertisement stickers. I suppose to any adult, his childhood's rediscovered toys look smaller, deader, less appealing than he remembers. The trains were dusty and sad, relics ready for the skip outside, melancholic. The little lights had long gone out. I took everything out of the box, but there were no clocks.
"Sorry," I said. "They could be in anything, really. If they're here."
Smith began looking into any box whose contents weren't easily identifiable by the picture on top. Yale, with a no-hope expression, followed suit. I packed the trains back into oblivion with regret.
"Well, just look here," Smith said suddenly. "Gold mine."
He had produced from a jumble of Lego constructions a bright new- looking clock with a Mickey Mouse face in unfaded technicolour. Mickey's hands in fat white gloves were the hands of the clock. To the minute hand was fixed a coil of white plastic-covered wire. A second white coil was stuck to the scarlet clock casing, its bared end jutting out over noon. When Smith held it all up, the white coils stretched out and down like curling streamers.
I looked at it blankly.
"I've never seen that one before," I said. "We didn't make them decorative. Ours were…" I sought for the word "… utilitarian."
Smith picked away among the Lego. "Can't find a battery," he reported. "Nor a torch bulb, for that matter." A pause. "Wait a minute…" He rattled around and, finally, triumphantly produced a red and white Lego tower with a bulb-holder lodged inside near the top. "A lighthouse, wouldn't you say?" he asked, standing it upright. "Neat."
"Someone made this for your twin brothers," Yale said. "Are you sure you never saw it?"
I shook my head. "I didn't live here then, only visited. The twins had a short attention span, anyway. They tired of new toys pretty quickly. Always wanted to get on with the next thing."
"I'll find out who made it," Yale said. "Can you sort out a box to put it in? I'll give you a receipt, of course."
Smith found him an empty Lego box and into it they packed the bright co-star of an act that had brought half the house down. There was room in the box for the lighthouse, so they took that, too. Yale solemnly wrote a receipt on a page of his notebook and gave it to me, and with him carrying the box we went out into the daylight, blinking as our eyes adjusted after the gloom.