The Clocks (novel) - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

It is while visiting Wilbraham Crescent one afternoon on his own business that Special Branch agent Colin “Lamb” takes the terrified Sheila into his arms. He is investigating areas connected with crescents or the moon while following up a clue to the route by which classified information is leaving the country. The clue is a note found in a dead agent's pocket; letter M, number 61, and a sketch of a crescent moon are all that is written on a bit of hotel stationery (sketched in the book).

At 19 Wilbraham Crescent, home of the blind Miss Pebmarsh, a police investigation begins into the murder. The dead man has a business card in his pocket indicating that the bearer is an insurance salesman called R. H. Curry. Neither the company nor the salesman are real, police learn soon. The clothing reveal nothing else, as all labels have been removed. He was killed by a knife, an ordinary kitchen knife.

A colourful group of neighbours is interviewed by Inspector Hardcastle with his friend Lamb in attendance as his note-taking sergeant. The neighbouring homes adjoin the murder site on the street or from the back gardens in this unusually arranged Victorian housing development. The most interesting of the neighbours to Colin is the Ramsey family: the husband popped off for business travel days after his boys came home for the school vacation, as he does frequently for his 'constructional' profession. He is clearly taken with Sheila, an extra motive to aid his friend, the inspector.

Things look bleak for Sheila when the aunt who raised her, Mrs. Lawton, is questioned by Hardcastle. Her niece's full name is Rosemary Sheila, but the girl preferred Sheila from age 6. Rosemary is the name on a leather travel clock found at the scene of the murder, but lost before the police gathered up the clocks set to the incorrect time. Frustrated, Colin approaches Hercule Poirot, an old friend of his father, to investigate the case. He challenges Poirot to do so from his armchair as he had always claimed was possible. He leaves the celebrated detective with detailed notes on the investigation thus far. The celebrated detective accepts the challenge, then instructs Colin to talk with the neighbors beyond the initial interviews with Inspector Hardcastle.

At the inquest in Crowdean, the medical examiner reveals that the victim had been given a "Micky Finn" (chloral hydrate in alcohol) before he was murdered. After the inquest, Edna Brent, one of Sheila’s fellow secretaries, expresses her confusion at something said in evidence. What she said couldn't be true, she tells the young officer she first encounters. She attempts to draw it to Hardcastle’s attention, but that lower level officer deflects her. Within hours, she is found dead in a telephone box on Wilbraham Crescent, strangled with her own scarf.

The dead man's identity proves hard to discover, further frustrating Hardcastle. A letter from a woman called Mrs. Merlina Rival (original name Flossie Gapp) seems the first solid lead. She appears, identifies the dead man as her one-time husband, Harry Castleton, after careful questioning by the Inpsector. In that week, Colin has left Britain on his own case, travelling behind the Iron Curtain to Romania. He returns with the information he needed, but not the person he hoped to find.

Following Poirot's advice, Colin seeks to talk with the neighbors. He makes an important discovery in a ten-year-old girl, Geraldine Brown, who lives in the apartment block on the other side of the street. She has been observing the events at Wilbraham Crescent with a pair of opera glasses while confined to her room with a broken leg. She records events of interest. She reveals that a new laundry service delivered a heavy basket of laundry on the morning of the murder. Colin shares his discovery with Hardcastle.

Mrs. Rival wrote to the police to state that her late husband had a scar behind his left ear. Meeting her in London, Hardcastle tells her the scar is only a few years old, per medical examination, long after she had last seen him. Upset at this news, she calls the person who involved her in this case. Despite a police "tail" on her to find this link, she is found dead at Victoria tube station, stabbed in the back. Three murders now, the bodies are piling up, and the police are no closer to resolving their case. Hardcastle has one firm fact: Mrs. Rival was hired by the murderer to make the identification she did, and then killed for it.

Poirot’s initial view of this case is that the appearance of complexity must conceal quite a simple murder. The clocks are therefore a red herring, as is the presence of Sheila, and the removal of the dead man's wallet, tailor marks in the clothing. Colin updates Poirot on succeeding visits, teasing him for not yet finding the solution.

Poirot took a room in a Crowdean hotel to tell Inspector Hardcastle and Colin Lamb what he has deduced. From a careful chronology of events, he deduces what Edna realised. She returned early to the secretarial bureau from lunch the day of the murder because of damage to her shoe, unnoticed by her boss, Miss Martindale. Edna knows that Miss Martindale took no telephone call at the time she testified that she had. Thus only one person had motive to murder poor Edna. From that fictitious call, the boss sent Sheila to Miss Pebmarsh’s house for steno/typing service. Miss Pebmarsh steadfastly denied ever requesting this service. Mrs. Bland, one of the neighbors of 19 Wilbraham Crescent, mentioned she had a sister in the initial interview with Insp. Hardcastle. Poirot deduced the identity of this sister. Miss Martindale, owner of Cavendish Secretarial and Typewriting Bureau, is the sister of Mrs. Bland. Her typing service specialized in readying author's texts for publication, mystery authors and a few writers of seamy romances.

The present Mrs. Bland is the second Mrs. Bland, also deduced by Poirot. Mr. Bland said his wife was the sole living relative for her family inheritance — how could she be sole heir and have a sister, at the same time? Mr. Bland married in the war, but his wife was killed overseas in that same war; he remarried soon after, another Canadian woman. The Canadian family of his first wife had disapproved of him, cut off communication with their daughter so thoroughly that they did not know she was dead. Some 16 years later, the first wife was heiress to an overseas fortune, thought to be the last living relative. When news of it reached the Blands, they decided that the second Mrs. Bland must pose as the heiress in order to obtain the money, rather than admit the death. The couple succeeded in fooling the British law firm that sought the heir on behalf of the Canadian firm handling the will. When Quentin Duguesclin, who knew the first wife and her family, decided to look her up in England more than a year later, a plan was laid to murder him. The plan was simple, with additions like the clocks taken from an unpublished mystery story whose author had been a close client of Miss Martindale. She was avaricious and brutal but not imaginative.

Mrs. Rival was murdered before she could tell the police who asked her to make the false identification, just as Edna had been killed before she revealed what she inadvertently knew. Mr. Bland and his sister-in-law thought their plan would baffle the police, while Mrs. Bland felt she was a pawn in their schemes, rather than the full partner she was. Mr. Bland took care to dispose of Mr. Duguesclin's passport on a quick trip to Boulogne, which trip he was bold enough to mention to Colin in casual conversation. Again proving Poirot's point that people reveal much in simple conversation. Poirot has assumed this trip, so the man's passport would be found in a country different than where he was murdered, and long after friends and family in Canada had missed him on his vacation in Europe.

The missing clock, the one with Rosemary written in faded letters, was traced as well. Colin realized that Sheila had taken it that afternoon, seeing it was her very own clock, mislaid on the way to a repair shop. She tossed it in the neighbor's trash. But she had not mislaid it initially; her boss, Miss Martindale, had taken it as part of her murder plot.

Following Poirot's resolution of the motives for these murders, Colin sees his error in reading the note he carries. Turned upside down, it points him to 19 Wilbraham Crescent. Miss Pebmarsh is the center of the ring passing information to the other side in the Cold War, using Braille system to encode their messages. He has decided to marry Sheila and realizes that Miss Pebmarsh is the real mother of his love. A true gentleman, he gives Miss Pebmarsh two hours warning of the net about to close around her, soon to be his mother-in-law. She chose her cause over her child once, and does so again, finding a knife to defend herself. Colin disarms her, and the two wait for the arrest, each secure that their convictions are the true ones.

The novel closes with two letters from Inspector Hardcastle to Poirot, telling him police have found all the hard evidence to close the case. Mrs. Bland "cracked" under questioning, and admitted all.

The two plots are tied in several points, but one is clever. Colin initially seeks, but did not find, 61 Wilbraham Crescent. That is home to the Blands, who committed the murder that Hardcastle and Poirot want to solve. Initially, the Blands are not suspected in the murder at all, and of no interest to Colin. The murdered body was found in 19 Wilbraham Crescent, a murder in which the owner had no involvement. Instead, it was the home of the person whom Colin sought, centre of the spy ring, Miss Pebmarsh. It is important to have human curiosity, to turn the paper every direction.

Viewed from the 21st century, well past the Cold War, its flavour and feeling are well captured in this novel.