Seven clocks

Seven clocks turn a mantelpiece arrangement into both a test for a murderer and a lingering source of dread. First recalling Gerald Wade’s death, the image later acquires a precise meaning: Ronald Devereux used the clocks to signal that the death would be avenged and to watch for anyone who betrayed knowledge of the crime.

A Sound That Recalls the Dead

While waiting in the stillness, Jimmy Thesiger hears a distant clock ticking. It brings back Gerald Wade and the seven ticking clocks on the mantelpiece; Jimmy wonders who placed them there and why, and shivers. At the time, the arrangement remains an unanswered question rather than an explanation. Its force lies partly in that delay: an ordinary sound becomes charged with the deaths of two young men, Gerald and Ronald Devereux, before Jimmy understands what the clocks meant.

The moment is sharpened by its circumstances. It is twenty minutes to one, an hour after the household has gone to rest, and Jimmy waits in the gloom with Leopold across his knee. The remote ticking breaks the silence just enough to revive the memory. The clocks therefore operate not only as an object in the earlier mystery but as a sound that carries that mystery into a later scene.

Devereux’s Warning and Test

The arrangement was Ronald Devereux’s deliberate act after Gerald’s death. He set seven clocks on the mantelpiece and discarded the eighth. The seven represented the promise that the Seven Dials would avenge the death of one of their members. Devereux also watched to see whether anyone showed signs of perturbation or otherwise gave themselves away. The clocks were thus both a symbolic warning and a practical test: their presence made a threat visible while turning the reactions of people in the house into possible evidence.

That purpose connects the image to Devereux’s own investigation. He had rejected the apparent explanation that Gerald died from an overdose of a sleeping draught and suspected that someone in the house had killed him. He pursued the same line of inquiry Gerald had been following and came to identify Jimmy as the culprit. Devereux’s use of the clocks marks his effort to make the hidden crime provoke a visible response.

Jimmy’s Guilt and the Clocks’ Afterlife

The later explanation establishes how much Jimmy had reason to fear Devereux’s scrutiny. Jimmy had poisoned Gerald by slipping the fatal substance into a whisky and soda before Gerald went to bed. Afterward, he placed a bottle, glass, and empty chloral bottle beside Gerald’s bed, and probably pressed the unconscious man’s fingers around them to support the appearance of an overdose. Devereux’s clocks did not expose him outright, but the account suggests that Jimmy had uneasy moments thinking about them and kept a wary eye on Devereux.

The image’s recurrence gives the earlier scene a double meaning. When Jimmy hears ticking, he recalls the clocks without knowing, in that moment, the full purpose behind their arrangement. The reader can later understand the mantelpiece not as an arbitrary oddity but as a message sent by a man testing a suspected killer. Seven clocks hold together the murder’s staged appearance, Devereux’s search for the truth, and Jimmy’s fear that the crime may yet be answered.