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Rain-slick lanes and stopped hands. Detective Anna Vasilyeva follows a clockmaker’s private ledger from a cramped workshop to a storage lot and into rooms where decisions about disappearance are made. When a returned brother complicates evidence, she must force a system to act.
The morning the phone woke Anna Vasilyeva, rain had left the city smelling of wet asphalt and hot iron. She dressed without thinking, fingers moving by habit through the pockets of a coat that had seen too many winters. The dispatcher’s voice had been flat, practiced: an elderly man, clockmaker, found at his bench. No signs of forced entry. No other witnesses. The words “accident” and “slip” were offered like small, safe maps for a body to disappear into. Anna had learned to treat them as traps.
The workshop sat on a narrow lane that had once been a corridor of craftsmen, each shop a small republic of hands and tools. Nowadays a few of the storefronts still stood with their windows filled with the things people collect for courage or memory. Leonid Haritonov’s door gave under her knock; inside, the world was measured in brass gears and glass. Hundreds of clocks occupied the walls, their faces frozen at different hours: some at quarter past; others at an exact, stubborn twelve. The room was a collage of stopped time.
Leonid lay slumped in the chair behind his bench, a shawl of metal filings and curled springs clinging to his lap. He looked smaller than Anna had imagined from the single portrait she’d seen months ago in the municipal brochure. Up close he was all angles and the pale, papery skin of a man who had spent his days bent over minute mechanisms. The coroner moved with methodical kindness and the constable at the door kept his distance like a gray shape.
On the workbench, instruments were arranged in meticulous disorder: files, tweezers, a magnifying glass with an old chip in the rim. A floor clock beside the bench had its long pendulum stopped at an exact angle. Beside it, on the bench, lay a torn sheet of paper. Anna’s fingers hovered because a detail can be a ripple that tells where a stone fell. The paper was jagged where it had been ripped free; scrawled names and dates crawled across the page like a list of customers. One name she recognized without needing to sound it out—Yuri Vasilyev. Her skull narrowed on the word as the room contracted into the space between that single name and the man on the chair.