Devil Take The Hindmost

Chapter Twenty-Three

The red brick edifice of Wolverhampton Central Library stands apart from the structures around it, being, as it is, one of the few islands of culture and aspirational endeavour in a bleak sea of gaudy bars and Balti houses in the south-eastern corner of the city centre.

I had fond memories of the building from my childhood.

I would sometimes undertake a weekend pilgrimage to the reference section, membership card clutched in a sweaty pre-teen fist, seeking dust-jacketed tomes of alien knowledge I imagined ingesting. Treaties on philosophy, psychology, social anthropology, and more were removed from shelves, stared at, largely misunderstood and abandoned in search for the next one.

Safe to say the trip I made with Ty on this particular morning was very different.

The place was deserted.

It seemed that since young Satchmo stalked these aisles twenty years before, the fine people of Wolverhampton had moved past the pursuit of enlightenment as an indivisible good.

They were now more content to hoover up the latest pap shovelled onto the page by celebrities whose talents did not extend to writing, but whose names shifted copies. Where once stood great works and classics, now there were rotating wire-framed-standees groaning under the weight of pop star cookbooks, ghost-written self-help shite and gameshow host thrillers.

Ty and I found Widdershinz easily enough among the otherwise abandoned floor plate.

He occupied a table in the furthest crevice of the reference section, all-but entombed by teetering towers of dusty volumes. When we asked the librarian at the front desk, in reverentially hushed tones, if she knew where someone matching his description might be, her response was to sigh and gesture for us to follow as she wheeled a creaking trolley of leather-bound books to the Scotsman's lair.

"Grand!" the rotund Scotsman stood upon our arrival and clasped the terrified woman by the shoulders.

She recoiled in horror at this moment of unaccustomed and unwelcome physical intimacy in the encyclopaedia aisle and scurried away, the squeaking of her trolley materially diminished now that Widdershinz had feverishly unloaded it and added to his dragon's hoard of published paper.

"I've been here for forty-eight hours," he breathed like a bibliophilic Smaug, puffy bags beneath his eyes giving truth to the assertion. "I hid in the bogs at closing time and slept on the bench over there."

Ty nodded sagely as if in appreciation of this small act of rebellion against the council's oppressive public library opening hours policy.

"But I've cracked it, ye'll not believe it!"

"The clock?" I said.

Widdershinz did not reply but looked furtively over our shoulders to see whether we might be observed or overheard. When he saw the library was deader than Tutankhamun's cat, he reached beneath the table and placed the timepiece, augury, whatever, on the surface, making space among his sheets of scribbled notes with a slow sweep of a podgy arm.

"Aye," he nodded, winking for some unnecessarily clandestine emphasis.

"This..." he paused to gather his thoughts. "This is quite remarkable. Unbelievable craftsmanship."

"Go on," Ty said, pulling two wooden chairs from another desk to allow us all to sit.

"We know it isnae a clock, right?" Widdershinz pointed to the dial with its single ornate hand and subtly positioned thirteen demarcations.

"Not a very good one, anyway," I muttered.

"But it does tell the time," Widdershinz continued with a sly smile. He spun the object around and using his least-chewed fingernail, prised open a metal door on the rear side to reveal a movement comprising a whirring maelstrom of spinning cogs, flashing springs and little brass bit-bobs that were, collectively, all a-jiggle.