Sweets from Strangers (1994)

Simon Corrigan's second novel follows Daniel Marriner, who abandoned family and university to disappear in Paris for three years and now comes home to lodge with his sister Rachel in Oxfordshire, until Luc, an associate from the Paris days, turns up. The watch Daniel is handed on the morning he leaves France measures how far he has really got away. (Open Library)

Watches

Raymond Weil watch: In the brasserie of the Gare du Nord a hungover woman in furs, later remembered as Saskia, gives Daniel a wrapped black box holding a gold Raymond Weil; he asks whether it is the pay-off, drops his old watch in a litter bin and boards the train with "a new watch for an old time zone". In England Luc and Daniel's nephew Guy both remark on it, the boy asking whether he should not have given it back. It then vanishes from his wrist: Guy, a compulsive thief, was talked into taking it by a stranger. When Daniel returns to Paris a bellboy delivers the same watch with a card from Carlos telling him not to lose it a second time, and he puts it on knowing that one wrist is already shackled. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He removed the expensive shiny wrapping. Inside the black box was a gold watch made by Raymond Weil of Geneva. He asked: 'Is this the pay-off?' (Simon Corrigan, Sweets from Strangers, scan cataloged as Andre Deutsch, 1994, p. 4; the watch is remarked on at pp. 59, 72 and 88, missed on pp. 104 and 116, accounted for on p. 147 and returned on pp. 170 to 171, where its Roman numerals are mentioned; Internet Archive scan OCR)