Chapter 4 The Off-Book Shift

The tally-clerk at Awn Quay was a man of perhaps fifty named Orry Peploe, who had worked the tide tables at the same counter for twenty-two years and who, when Nyle asked about the shift book, told him the shift book was kept upstairs in the crane house. Upstairs in the crane house was a ledger with four thousand entries a year in Peploe's own square hand, which was not the ledger the Hourhouse paid for. "The printed one says forty-two hours a week on the ebb tide," Peploe said. "This one says the same plus whatever the tide actually did. We had a bad year in the ninth of my time. Crates coming off the lighters before dawn, because the packet times were posted in Marnhull and nobody in Marnhull has ever seen the Awn at six." "Extra hours worked." "Extra hours kept." "And not credited." "Credited to whom?" Peploe had the manner of a man who has asked a question aloud before and been told to stop. "The band takes hours for the shift. The shift is the shift. If I put sixty-one hours in a band that was sold for forty-two, I am handing a man a week he did not work, and the Reckoner at the Hourhouse would have my marks off inside a month." "So the extra hours are simply not in anyone's account." "They are in this one." He put his hand flat on the ledger without opening it. "I have the best record of the working of that quay in this city and it is worth precisely nothing, because there is no column for it and no clerk above me who will sign a column that does not exist." Nyle understood the position completely, and it was worse than the arithmetic had suggested. The civic debit column measured civic works in hours. A quay crew's shift was a civic work. It should appear in the debit column at its true length. If Peploe's crew worked sixty-one hours and the debit column showed forty-two, then nineteen hours of real labour had vanished from the civic account every week of every year, and the account had closed the gap the only way an account can: by putting a nine-hour unattested deduction at the bottom of the Return and letting the rest go unreported. "Nineteen hours a week," Nyle said. "Four wards. Fifty-two weeks." "Lighter in winter. Heavier in the autumn packet." Peploe shrugged. "Call it an average." "I am not going to call it anything. I am going to put a bracket round it and leave the bracket empty until I can fill it." He wrote the figure down and did not write the multiplication, because the multiplication was a conclusion and he did not make conclusions in front of witnesses. "I am going to ask you for a statement." "I know what a statement is." "You are the only person in this city who can sign one that means anything." "And if I sign it, what happens to me?" Peploe looked out of the window at the water, which was doing what the water did. "The Reckoner at the Hourhouse keeps the marks. Cray keeps the warden. Cray's band has two rows of digits on it. Mine has one and a half." He turned back. "I have a daughter at the Grain Court who wants to be a journeyman. A journeyman advance costs twenty-four hours." Twenty-four hours. Nyle had the schedule with him. Prenticeship cost nothing to hold and nothing to leave. Journeyman cost twenty-four. Master cost one hundred and twenty. Warden cost three hundred, and there were four wardens in the city and one of them sat at the end of the long table in the Hourhouse with a pen in her hand. "Then you know why I cannot sign," Peploe said. "Not because I do not know the hours. Because I know what they cost and you do not, and I am not going to help you learn." "You should not have to pay for my finding." "No." Peploe pulled the printed ledger toward him and squared it. "That is the part nobody puts in the leaflets. Every hour you find is an hour somebody already paid for." Nyle left the crane house with nothing signed and one problem that had moved. He walked back down the bank through the middle terrace and stopped at the tally-clerk's house, where Ferrick had left a message that the Band Register cellar was unlocked and the lamp oil had been replenished, with no name on the note and no need of one. The cellar was three steps down and cold in a way the river cold was not. The Band Register was a rack of wooden cases, one per year, and Nyle went along the rack counting. Forty returns, forty cases, and the case labels went back exactly as far as the returns did. But the plates inside the cases did not. Each band in Brackmoor was cut by hand on a small press, and every cut left a plate: a strip of soft brass with the figure struck into it, kept so that a citizen who claimed their band had been miscut could bring the plate to a Hourhouse and have the record read. Plates were kept twenty years. After twenty years they were returned to the metal drawer and the brass went back into stock. The cases for the first twenty years of his Returns held brass. The next nineteen held wood shavings, a sorting tray, and nothing at all. "Twenty years," Nyle said, to the dark. Eight of the forty years he needed were gone. He had eleven months to find out what had happened in them, and then no way at all to prove a word of it. He sat down on the bottom step with the lamp between his boots and made a list of what he could still touch: the band itself on any living citizen, the plate behind any cut made inside twenty years, the civic Returns, the county dockets, the Reckoner's working papers, and the word of people who had been in the room. Five things. It was enough for a start and not enough for a finding, which is the ordinary condition of an inspector, and Nyle had made his peace with the arithmetic of it years ago. A finding is a thing you can be made to say out loud. The evidence is the thing that has to survive without him. He went up the three steps, shut the cellar door, and hung the key back on its nail where Ferrick had left it, because a man who leaves a door as he found it has not yet decided what kind of man he is going to be on Thursday. ---