第3章 The Beam at the Grain Court

The Grain Court stood at the top of the Quay Ward, a long stone building with a copper vent along the ridge and a single door wide enough for a cart. Nyle arrived at seven in the morning with a test weight from the Office and a request for the storekeeper, and he was made to wait forty minutes in the weighing room with four farm carts and a boy eating bread. At half past seven a woman named Halla Cray came through the door, read the docket Nyle had left with the boy, and stood looking at the great scale. She was fifty-four and had been warden of the Brackmoor Hourhouse for nineteen years, which meant she had held the post through every Return in Ferrick's service. She had a face that had been organised rather than lived in, and she wore a band cut to five digits in two rows. "Inspector Threshwick," she said. "You've come about the weighbridge." "I've come about the scale." "It's the same thing to the men who bring grain." She took the docket from him without looking at it and handed it to the boy. "You'll want the storekeeper. He's at the far end. He's been at the far end since six. He is a careful man and he will tell you the scale is honest." "It is honest," Nyle said. "It's just not accurate, and I'd like to show you the difference before you decide whether those are the same word." He showed her the difference. The Grain Court's scale was a beam balance on a stone plinth, the kind that had not been built since the last century. Two pans, a copper beam with graduated notches down its edge, a sliding poise, and a set of cast weights in a locked case. Nyle put the Office's test weight on the near pan and read the beam at five grains, then four, then four and a quarter, and then again from the far side to check his own reading. It came out short by a little under one part in two hundred and forty. "One part in two hundred and forty," Cray said. "On a hundred quarters of barley that is under a quarter of a bushel." "On a hundred quarters of barley delivered to this court it is two hours and a quarter of a cartman's paid time, which the Ministry does not pay and the farmer does." Nyle wrote the figure in his notebook. "Every load that has come across this beam since the counterweight was last trimmed has been short by that. How long since it was trimmed?" "Three years. The trim is a yearly item." "Who trims it?" "The storekeeper and a scale-fitter from the county, on the docket, in the second week of the month." She said it in the voice of a woman reciting a duty that had never failed to be performed. "It is in the Return as an outlay. Twelve hours, every year, for the trim." "Twelve hours against a loss of four hundred and six a year in farmer's cartage." "You have a figure for that?" "I have a ratio and a quantity. The rest is arithmetic anyone can do." He closed the notebook. "I want the county docket. The fitting docket. And I want to know whether the same man fitted the dock scales at Awn Quay." "You are asking whether the county has a bad fitter." "I'm asking whether the county has one fitter, one docket, and eleven courts." He looked at the beam. "Nine of those courts would be balancing short in the same direction, for the same reason, on the same week of the year. That stops being a fault and becomes a practice." Cray did not answer immediately. She walked to the far pan, put two fingers on the copper, and pushed it the way a person touches a horse they have decided about. "You will find nothing at the county," she said. "You have not looked." "I have had the county's returns for nineteen years." "And in nineteen years of county returns, how many times did anyone reconcile a scale against a test weight?" She looked at him then, properly, for about as long as it takes to read a figure twice. "Twice," she said. "The Office has done it twice." "Thank you." "Do not thank me yet." She turned back to the door. "You have found a fault at the Grain Court. A fault is a small thing, and a small thing is a good thing for a man in your position, because a small thing can be given to a senior desk without anybody having to be embarrassed." Her hand found the doorframe. "The variance is not a small thing. If you spend the spring on my scale, the spring will be gone and you will have found a beam that leans, and the nine will be exactly where you left it." "Then I will find it," Nyle said. "I know you will." She held the door. "That is why I am telling you now that the Hourhouse will cooperate with everything you ask, and that the wards will not, and that the wards are the part you cannot prove." He wrote that down afterwards, in the notebook, under a heading he made for the purpose: *cooperation offered, reasons not stated*. He had learned that phrase from a man who had spent forty years reading other people's Returns, and it was the single most useful thing anybody had ever handed him, and the man had said it exactly once, in a doorway, for no reason at all. He walked the length of the weighing room with the boy holding the test weight ahead of him. The carts went out through the wide door and the light came off the river in flat white bars across the floor. Forty minutes of waiting had been an instruction, and he had taken it, and now he had an hour of the morning left and a storekeeper at the far end who had been conveniently occupied since six. He had learned three things by nine o'clock, and he wrote them in order, because Nyle Threshwick was a man who believed that a list of facts kept in the order they arrived was worth more than an opinion formed after the fact. One: the shortfall was manufactured, and the manufacture was a ceiling with nine hours standing unused at the top of it. Two: the citizenry had never been charged the shortfall directly. Whatever had been charged had been done through the bands, and the bands were the Hourhouse's, and the Hourhouse had been Cray's for nineteen years and her predecessor's before that. Three: the grain scale was crooked, and it had been crooked for years, and nobody had wanted it found. He put the pencil behind his ear and went to find the storekeeper. ---