Timeline

Question

What is the book’s chronology, and where does the text actually pin a date?

Evidence

When	Event	Chapter
A wet March evening	Dickie Bow follows the bald man from a Soho pub onto the Worcester express, then the Reading coach; he dies in his seat. The line was stopped by a fuse at Swindon.	C00
The following week (“last Tuesday evening”)	Lamb retraces the journey through Oxford and Reading, recovers the phone and the hat.	C01
Days later	River visits the O.B. in Tonbridge; Shirley traces the bald man to Moreton-in-Marsh; Lamb drinks with Katinsky; Min and Louisa meet Piotr and Kyril.	C03–C04
The same evening	Min Harper is knocked down and killed at a junction; Duffy takes charge of the scene.	C06
Three weeks later	Part Two opens. River has been in Upshott as “Jonathan Walker” for three weeks; the summit is set for the following day.	C07
The next evening	Louisa meets Pashkin at Marble Arch; River is caught in the artillery barrage on the range.	C09
The same night	Katinsky-as-Moult holds River; Lamb gets into Records; Ho finds the 1991 arrivals.	C11–C12
Summit morning	Pashkin collected and driven to the Needle through the underground garage; Kelly Tropper airborne.	C13
Summit afternoon — “the warmest day of the year”	Webb shot; Pashkin robs de Koenig and Rumble; the City evacuated; Katinsky dies at Upshott.	C14–C15
Immediately after	Barrowby resigns; the riot is policed; the Cessna intercepted; the mouse tours Slough House.	C16

Reading

The book runs on two clocks that never quite synchronise:

• The old clock. The Popov legend and ZT/53235 belong to 1951–55 and to 1989: the town burned in 1951 (C16) and was removed from the map in 1955 (C03), and Bow and Katinsky last met in Berlin in 1989. Everything in the present is a delayed action from those dates.
• The new clock. The action itself is roughly six weeks: a week of Lamb retracing the coach route, a few days of legwork, then a three-week elision and a single 48-hour climax.

Two dating claims need holding together rather than resolved:

1. The prologue is explicitly a wet March evening, and C14 calls the summit the warmest day of the year. Six weeks from March is late spring, so the line is either a mild exaggeration by the narrator or a deliberate local anomaly; the book never dates the summit.
2. ZT/53235 burned in 1951 and disappeared from the map in ‘55. These are not contradictory if the fire came first and the erasure took four years, but the text never says so — it gives the two dates in different chapters, in different conversations, with different characters doing the remembering.

Anachrony is used sparingly and always for character: C05 drops back to “the previous winter” for the canal-bench bargain between Lamb and Diana Taverner, which explains the operating fund the present-tense operation is already spending.

Confidence

High on sequence and on the three-week elision (stated twice in C07). Medium on the season: the March prologue and the “warmest day” line are both explicit, and nothing in the text reconciles them. Medium on the 1951/1955 relation — the two dates are explicit, the causal link between them is inference.