Free The Final Curtain by Priscilla Masters

hadn’t it was indeed a nasty prank. But if someone else was involved it meant that the person who planted this watch must have known of her late husband’s wish.
    Responding to her unspoken thought without comment Diana Tong passed across a yellowing newspaper cutting. Joanna read it and passed it to Korpanski, who also read it wordlessly then handed it back to her. The headline screamed:
Child Star’s Late-Husband’s Request
.
    Underneath it detailed the whole damned lot, that Gerald Portmann, the late husband of ‘child star’ Timony Shore, had asked to have his beloved Rolex Oyster (Perpetual
Air-King
) to be strapped to his right wrist and buried with him. It went on to describe the clothes he should also be wearing, and underneath that a perfectly tasteless picture of the dead man in his coffin wearing the (also prescribed) dark pinstriped suit, white shirt and tie, the right sleeves of both jacket and shirt pushed up just enough to expose the shining face and dark strap of the watch in question.
    Joanna looked down at the item in Timony’s shaking hand. She and Mike exchanged looks and messages. His head gave an almost imperceptible jerk towards the newspaper. She could interpret his comment only too well.
So the whole bloody world knew about it.
    Even so, Joanna tried to put the point over to Timony. ‘You can’t be sure that this is
his
watch.’
    â€˜Oh, but I can. The scratch across the glass.’ Staring ahead of her, as though she was a blind person, Timony’s fingernail followed a line, a scratch on the watch glass which reached from the top of the one to the bottom of the line which represented four. ‘That happened when he had the car accident in which he died,’ she explained. ‘He was wearing it then too.’ Her eyes flicked upwards to meet Joanna’s with a mute appeal to be believed. ‘He
always
wore it, Inspector. He hardly ever took it off. He just loved it. To him it was the ultimate star status symbol.’ Her fingers stroked it and her face looked far away, pillow-deep in memory. Joanna glanced across at Korpanski and could barely resist rolling her eyes. Korpanski, for his part, gave her an innocently bland smile, as though to say,
Well you’re the boss, Boss. And I’m just the lackey
. She scowled at him.
    â€˜The watch isn’t proof of anything,’ Joanna said calmly. She wanted to take the item from her but even
she
was a little spooked by the thought of touching a watch which had lain around the wrist of a dead person for …?
    â€˜How long ago did your first husband die?’
    â€˜Gerald died forty years ago, Inspector,’ she said calmly, ‘in nineteen seventy-two.’
    Joanna’s eyes locked on the item. Common sense told her that this could not be the watch that had been strapped to Gerald Portmann’s dead wrist. But superstition argued with common sense. Common sense won. She slipped on a pair of gloves and reached out for it.
    â€˜May I?’
    Timony Weeks handed it over with a tiny shiver of revulsion.
    Joanna looked at it. She’d never really seen what all the fuss was about Rolexes but there was something about the feel of it, the elegance and stark cleanness of its dial. Then, using her much-mocked magnifying glass, she peered closer. Embedded around the dial was what looked like soil.
    Grave soil?
    And the watch itself was ticking, as though it had an unstoppable, malevolent life of its own. A mechanical heart. Had it ticked away in the grave, Edgar Allan Poe like? For a fraction of a second in the room they were all silent, listening to the quiet but insistent tick of the watch. Joanna passed it to Mike, who’d put a glove on his right hand and stretched it out.
    Joanna looked back at Timony Weeks. ‘Why are you so afraid, Mrs Weeks? What exactly are you afraid of? And if you are that afraid why continue to live out here in this lonely spot?’
    Timony Weeks