When J.J. looked in at the office door, Mr Dyce was standing by the window, gazing down at the yard and the wet streets beyond and so absorbed by his thoughts that the room lay in slumber behind him.

J.J. rapped, triple-time, on the door jamb. "We’re logging off, now, Chief. It’s all yours."

Mr Dyce gave no acknowledgement. He had his quirks and foibles, which his two young assistants laughed at but never questioned. J.J. sauntered through to the desk with the ledger and cash tray, still talking: "I’m heading north, Boss Man, out on the road." He twirled the ledger on the polished desk top. "We got that gig up in Lindsay I was telling you about. Hallowe’en bash in an aircraft hangar. Eight until three, nonstop – should be wild!"

He turned and leaned back on the desk. "So think of me, Wise One, out there losing my religion, breaking hearts, tearing the stars down because yes, yes, we only come out at night and the night is long." His words spilling out for their own glad sake, hands conjuring the strings of a mighty guitar. He snapped upright again.

"Anyway, Maestro, I brought you a toy. This old girl came in to see if we could fix it; I thought you should check it out. It’s really a neat device."

He launched himself back towards the door. "I’ll see you Monday, Sensei, early if not bright. Carla will open up in the morning." He turned in the doorway and clicked his heels. "Ciao, Father Time."

"Thank you, Justin. Enjoy your weekend." The murmur scarcely reached the boy’s ears, for Mr Dyce was still fixed on the world beyond the glass.

Instead of comprising the usual drab screen upon which his thoughts, with their private images, moved, the street below had come into focus: the shops and the trees and the rooftops. People walked and hurried through the rain, cars turned, lights shed their colours on the wet pavement and sidewalks. Only the sounds remained vague, unreal. He had watched a long time, without moving his eyes, as you’d enter the general world of a Flemish painting, till at last he had fixed on one detail, in the foreground, close to his face through the rain-mottled panes.

Two telephone lines slanted down, from the eaves just above his window, towards the low embankment beside the park, and along each wire raindrops were on the move, coalescing and falling.

The simple, mesmeric play of those winking beads held him rapt as a child. They shuttled, as though on a ghost-handled abacus, and as he searched for some law or pattern in their motions he understood, with sudden and quiet certainty, that his own death would come, like this, in the aftermath of rain and in just this season of the year.

He felt no dread, or disappointment. He knew, simply. As he had known one April day long ago, walking back through the college grounds in the green light of spring, with exams behind him and summer to dream of: looking up at the pink and white candles of the chestnut blossoms, the great billows and flounces of greenery arching above him, and understanding, absolutely, that his father would die, some year in the future, when the chestnuts were in bloom.

When the call had come from his sister, five time zones away and thirty years later, that had been his first question. It was Easter week, and he could not be sure if the trees in old England were further along than the one that he passed each evening; for the glossy, recurving buds above the park gates were still straining upwards, with here and there, in the last day or so, a limp and miniature cluster of five-fingered leaves.

There had been a moment’s silence on the line before she put down the phone. He could visualize the room in the old house exactly; he could smell the shadows beside the oak bureau and hear the dull rote of the Dutch clock on the mantel. His sister, he knew, was leaning upon the window seat, craning her neck to look out down the garden. She’d come back to the phone to say yes, that the candle blossoms were out on the trees across the lane.

Yes, a day such as this, with raindrops slipping down the wires. He looked out, as a ghost might look in, knowing all, with a fond, detached sadness.

In the yard below, young J.J. had wheeled his motorcycle out from the shelter of the fire escape. He stood astride it, fastening the strap of his helmet. The black leather "gear," the jacket and jackboots and pants, did little to bulk out his lanky frame, yet no one watching him thrust down now with his heel, till the engine snarled into life and savaged the quiet enclosure, would guess at the sensitive hands, the intuitive patience, the anachronistic instinct for train and escapement which governed his days.

The boy’s wrist jerked at the throttle, and Mr Dyce winced. With braggart crescendos, the machine steered its way through the yard gates and into the lane, the wake of its treadmarks fading on the wet asphalt. A moment later it roared out into the street and J.J. stormed off, visible for a moment past the lights, hair whipping below his helmet.

Mr Dyce winced again, and turned from the window.

There was dusk in the room, by contrast, and when he switched on the standard lamp by the desk, the outdoors receded in turn.

Mr Dyce pursed his lips in a silent prayer against wet roads, blind lights and hurtling machines, and turned his attention to the ledger which J.J. had set, upright and ajar, upon the cash tray: a precarious sculpture, capped by the small wooden box.

It was English without a doubt, but there was something too unsevere, too workaday, in its Regency style. A Victorian copy, perhaps, from some sleepy borough where time crept along country roads and yesterday’s fashions might linger for 50 years.

The veneer was fine burlwood – a cloudy tortoiseshell grain that seemed to be walnut but was, he suspected, elm. There came to him, then, in a low breath of sawdust and gluepot and damp country air, an image of the maker. A village joiner, the day’s work over at coffins and wainscottings, intent by the evening light at his window on this more frivolous challenge. A pattern book from his far-off apprentice days outspread on his bench. The doubt and desire in those blunt hands; a journeyman daring refinement.

Was it a whim of the local squire, or his guest? A gift for a lady? A "toy?" Mr Dyce reached for the box and felt at once the weight of the sleeping machinery within. There was a nub of brass for a catch; he turned back the lid and brought the box up to his face. It was his habit to put his nose to things, as a booklover sniffs at the life of a new acquisition.

It was a music box. Within was a shelf of clear glass, with a foliate key lying on it; the brass cylinder and rust-speckled comb in clear view beneath. Framed by a narrow rim over which the lid fitted, the glass was recessed enough to have held cigarettes, cigars even, but no ghost of tobacco lingered there.

Mr Dyce held the box in both hands, at his fingertips. He noted two base-metal studs on the face, flanking the brass catch, and a round key-socket in the mattwood base; but beyond them, as though from a window bay, were a terrace and steps in warm sandstone, and parkland going down to a river, with scattered chestnuts and lindens round-trodden and browsed by the roan-spotted cattle.

Mr Dyce had diviner’s hands, though he was scarcely aware of them. In the mind’s light and air of the 1840’s he watched the shadows lengthening in that park, heard a woman’s voice, laughing, as though in the room behind him, and caught the brief fragrance of orris and dried roses, before he came back to his own hands, in lamplight, turning the little box.

The village craftsman had done wonderfully well. The bevels and joining of the beechwood interior were faultless, almost invisible, with a chaste thumbnail lunette just under the rim the single clue that all was not solid and finished. Mr Dyce set the box down on his desk, and turned on the small, brighter lamp. He was sure now that the box was a copy, or a replacement at least, for the botched or damaged case which had first held this tiny clockwork spinet.

He weighed the ornate, not too ornate, key on his palm: its fluted gunmetal shank had been filed at some point; it was not the original. Someone, at the century’s turn, had borrowed it from an American travel-clock. For a moment, he was on a stairway, below decks, with the millstone thud of paddlewheels shivering through him, and the reek of molasses; but he shook those ghosts off, as distractions, and peered down through the glass again at the waiting mechanism.