A short story. Everything on this site so far has been true, or trying to be. This one isn’t, on purpose.

The job was to clean the movement, and Ines did that first, because it was what the parish had paid for.

It took most of a Tuesday. The clock sat in a timber cage halfway up the tower, a flatbed movement from the 1890s with a maker’s plate from a firm in Derby that no longer existed. It was dirty the way tower clocks are, with pigeon dust, old oil gone to varnish, and a dead wasp wedged in the count wheel of the strike. She took the going train apart, washed the wheels in a bucket of solvent on the belfry floor, pegged out the pivot holes and oiled them with the thin stuff, and put it all back. At four she started the pendulum and sat on an upturned crate with her phone in one hand and watched the seconds.

It kept good time. It had probably always kept good time. The escapement was sound and the pendulum rod was wood, which barely changes length between summer and winter. She let it run an hour against her phone and it lost less than a second.

It was also eleven minutes slow.

Not drifting. A clock that runs slow gets slower every day, loses a minute this week and two the next, until someone notices. This one had been exactly eleven minutes behind for so long that the error had stopped being an error and become a setting. The going train was fine. Somebody, some time, had set the hands wrong, and nobody had set them right.

There was a small setting dial on the movement for this. You loosened the collet, turned the arbor, watched the little hand on the setting dial come round, and the big hands on all four faces outside came round with it. She did it in about two minutes, waited for the phone to tick over to 17:10, and let go.

Then she packed up her solvent, locked the tower door behind her, dropped the key through the vicarage letterbox as arranged, and drove the forty minutes home.

The first call came on Thursday. It was the churchwarden, a man named Pryce who spoke as though he were reading out the minutes.

“There’s been some difficulty,” he said, “about the time.”

She said she’d set it to the correct time, which was part of the service.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the difficulty.”

He explained, carefully and without blame. The bus that went down to the station left from outside the church at what the timetable called 7:40, and the driver, who’d been driving it for nineteen years, went by the church clock because it was the thing he could see from the stop. So the bus had always left at 7:51, and the train it met left at 8:04, and there’d been a comfortable margin. On Wednesday the bus had left at 7:40, correctly, and six people who’d walked to the stop by the church clock had missed it.

The school, he said, had its own bell, but the bell was rung by a woman who set her watch by the tower every Monday on her way in. The baker opened at “church seven”, which was a thing people in the village said, it turned out, and meant 7:11. The pub’s quiz started at church eight. The Methodist chapel at the bottom of the hill had always started its Sunday service eleven minutes before the parish church did, and was proud of this, and had apparently not realised until Wednesday that it was, in fact, the parish church that had been starting late.

“Nobody’s cross with you,” Pryce said. “People are just a bit thrown.”

She asked whether they wanted her to set it back.

There was a long pause, the kind with a committee inside it.

“I’ll put it to the council,” he said.

The council met the following week and did not decide. Ines heard about it second-hand, from Pryce, in a second call that she suspected he’d volunteered to make because he found the whole thing quietly interesting.

The argument, as far as she could tell, went like this. One side said a church clock that told the wrong time was a broken church clock, and they’d just paid to have it fixed, and that was the end of it. The other side said nobody in the village had ever been late for anything because of that clock. The clock hadn’t been wrong. The village and the clock had agreed on a time, and the only thing that disagreed was the rest of the country, which didn’t live there.

Someone had gone looking in the parish records to find out when it had been set wrong, hoping there’d be a reason: a wartime order, a deliberate kindness to latecomers, some story. There wasn’t. The last recorded service before Ines was in 1981, a two-line invoice from a man in Shrewsbury. Either he’d set it eleven minutes slow, or it had slipped since, or someone had climbed the tower and nudged it in between and never mentioned it. Forty-odd years, and nobody could say.

“The bus driver’s the one I feel for,” Pryce said. “He’s taken it personally. Not at you. At time.”

She went back out a month later because the strike had started double-counting at noon, which happens after a clean when the oil settles, and it was a ten-minute fix she’d have done for free anyway.

The village had mostly moved on. The bus left at 7:40 now, and the driver had stopped looking at the tower, because he said he couldn’t trust it anymore, which Ines thought was the most reasonable thing anyone had said about the whole business. The baker had changed his sign to 7:00, and then, after complaints, to “7:00 (church 7)”, which meant nothing now but seemed to make people feel better. The quiz still started at church eight. Nobody knew what that meant anymore either, and they’d kept it anyway.

When she came down from the tower there was an old woman sitting on the bench by the lych gate, and a man of about fifty standing beside her holding two bags of shopping, looking like he’d rather be somewhere else.

“You’re the clock lady,” the woman said, in a tone Ines couldn’t read.

Ines said she was.

“Mum,” the man said. “Don’t.”

“I’m only going to ask her.” The woman kept her eyes on Ines. “My husband died on a Thursday, eleven years ago in March. I was at the kitchen window and he was in the front room, and I heard him go. I looked up and the tower said eight minutes to five, and I went straight to the phone. Straight to it.”

“The call was logged at four minutes past,” her son said to Ines, quietly, the way you’d explain something to a guest. “It’s on the paperwork. It’s fine. It’s just, she’s always said eight minutes to, and we’ve always said, well, you were in shock, Mum, it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me that you think I sat there,” the woman said. “Twelve minutes. With him on the floor.”

“Nobody thinks that.”

“You think I was muddled, then. That’s the kind version.”

Ines had set the hands herself. She’d watched the setting dial come round and knew the number exactly, and she could see the whole thing now, and it seemed wrong to let either of them go on another minute without it.

“It was eleven minutes slow,” she said. “The clock. It had been for forty years. When it said eight minutes to five, it was three minutes past.”

The son put the shopping down.

“So you rang a minute after,” Ines said to the woman. “Not twelve. One.”

For a while nobody said anything. The south face above them said 12:26, which was correct.

“I’m not asking you to put it back,” the woman said at last. “Everyone keeps asking what I want, as if I’d want the whole village on the wrong time for my sake. I just wanted someone who’d know to say it.”

“It really did say eight minutes to five,” Ines said. “And you really did go straight to the phone.”

The son sat down on the other end of the bench and didn’t say anything, and after a moment his mother put her hand on his arm, not to comfort him exactly, more as though a form had been signed. Ines left them there.

In her job book that night, under the parish name and the date, Ines wrote what she always wrote: the work done, the parts, the hours. Strike count wheel reset, noon double-strike cured. No charge. Then, because the book was hers and nobody else read it, she added a line underneath, in the same flat hand.

Mrs Hale, bench by lych gate. Tower read 4:52 on the day her husband died. True time 5:03. Error was 11 min in the setting, not the rate, so it would have read the same then as on my first visit. Told her and her son.

She thought about crossing it out, because it wasn’t the kind of thing the book was for. She left it in. It was the most accurate thing she’d written in there all year.

Forty minutes away, people would go on meeting at church eight for the quiz for years, long after anyone could say what it meant.