第20章 The Counterfoil

They did not open the blotter. Iona Pratt opened the blotter, at ten past four on a Tuesday in the last week of November, with four other people in the room, and she said so out loud first so that nobody could ever afterwards say that a girl had done it. The envelope inside was brown and soft, and it had been sealed, and the seal had been broken and put back, and inside it was a single leaf of card with a hundred and ninety pages on it, printed, and folded, and in the state that paper is in when it has been somewhere damp for thirty years. It was a *Schedule of Coastal Passages*. Not the parish page. Not the line with a name cut out of it. A printed schedule, ruled in columns, one page to a year, listing every vessel that had passed the point on this coast in that year, with the date, the hour, the master, the tonnage and the number of persons aboard. One of them a year. The last leaf of the run. It ran from 1904 to the year it stopped being printed, and Tove had been in that basement thirty times since September and had never seen one, and neither had the man who swept the steps. "It is not the parish page," she said. "It is bound in behind the last page," Ole Ostrand said. "I have been putting my hand in behind the last page of those volumes since 1972. There is a leaf behind every one of them and it has always been there and I have never once taken it out, because in forty years of shelving and re-shelving and cleaning up after floods nobody has ever asked me for it, and because in 1972 I was told it was a duplicate and I accepted that." "Duplicate of what?" "Duplicate of what," said Silas Teal, "is the first sentence in this whole story that I have understood." It took him eleven minutes to work it out and it was the only thing in the entire month that he did without a document. They cut the 1996 leaf out of the middle of the volume. That was the mistake that undid them, or rather it was the decision, and it was probably both. A bound volume is a thing that is read by its numbers: you open it anywhere and you know where you are because page ninety-eight says ninety-eight on the top corner, and if you take a leaf out of the middle then page forty-one is followed by page forty-three and every hand that has ever opened that book has felt the wrongness in about a second and a half without being able to say what is wrong. So they took one leaf out of every volume in the run. Twenty-nine volumes. 1990 to 2018 in the run as it stood, plus the odd gaps where a year was thin or a volume had been replaced. Twenty-nine leaves, one from the back of each, so that no single volume had anything wrong with it at all, and so that the gap could not be found by anybody who did not know where to look. Which is why, Tove thought, standing in the window in the library at twenty to five on a Tuesday in November with a schedule of a 1996 year in her two hands, Hester Kowal had been able to walk into a basement in the dark with a torch in her teeth and find the same wound in books that had nothing to do with each other. It was not a wall. It was a repair. "They did not take the page to burn it," she said. "They took it out of the middle and then they had to make the whole run match, and the way you make a whole run match is to break it everywhere, and then the page sits in a hole behind a shelf in a bay that is painted over." "And that," said Ole Ostrand, from the doorway, with his cap in his hands, "is the first time in forty years that anybody in this town has explained something to me about my own basement that I did not already know." The 1996 schedule was printed down the left-hand side and had been written on down the right-hand side by a clerk with a good nib, and the eighth of October 1996 was the eleventh line of the second quarter. *Arawak. 8 Oct. 23.00. Master: Beaulieu Y., Norhaven. Persons: 3.* And underneath that, in the same ink, in the same hand, in the same week: *and a fourth struck through.* Not three and a fourth. Three, and a fourth that had been struck through hard enough to take the surface off the card with the nib. "Three," Hester said. "Three persons," Tove said. "He said three. And then the man who wrote the column struck the fourth one out of his own tally, in ink, on the day, because a fourth passenger on a fishing boat leaving at eleven at night is a question and three is not." "But the strike is through the surface," Silas Teal said. "It has taken the printing off. That is not a pencil line that somebody can lift with a lamp. That is a nib. There is nothing under there." "There is something under there," said Ole Ostrand. "There is the county copy and the harbourmaster's copy, because a schedule of passages is made out in three and one is posted to the county and one is kept at the harbour and one is kept in the town, and the town copy is the one that came out of the middle of the book." "The harbour authority was merged in 1997." "The harbour authority was merged in 1997 and the papers of the merged authority went into an archive in Norhaven in 1998 with everything else in it, in a room that is not public and has a reading card on it and takes eleven working days to get into." Ostrand put his cap back on. "I know the card. I have never applied for it. I have had a key to the basement of the town hall for forty years and I never once walked four hours up the road to ask a stranger for a reading card, because there was nothing in that basement that I wanted." Nobody said anything. "Right," Tove said. "Then that is what we do." "You are sixteen," said Silas Teal. "Hester Kowal is sixteen and she has been here since April and she was on a bus before that and she has been somebody's not-told for thirty years, and both of us wrote on the rota that a thing gets said in front of five people or it does not get said at all." She squared the schedule on the desk. "We are going to write to that archive. All of us, on the same letter, with all our names on it, because if I write to it alone I am a schoolgirl with a grudge and my grandmother is a woman who cut pages out of a book of births, and between the two of you there is not one name on this letter that any archive in that city can throw out without writing down why." Hester Kowal looked at her for a second and then said, "And the woman with the burn on her wrist." "She is next," Tove said. "And I want her found before she decides that the safe thing to do is a bus, because it is very clear now that safe is what she does. That is why she left the line in that form blank. She did not leave it blank for us. She left it blank because she has spent her whole life leaving things blank." She went down to the car park at five past five with the tide making and the light going, and the shelf in the split rock was clear, and the water was out over it, and she stood in the crack in the rock where the bags come over and counted for the old reason, out of habit, because it was what she did. There was a tenth bag in the crack. It had come in over the shelf on the top of the tide and grounded against the stone in the ordinary way, and there was no sand on the outside of it and no weed and no salt bloom, and inside there was a square of lined paper folded in four, gone soft at the folds, in a small careful hand that pressed hard on the first word of the third line and then got frightened and went light. She did not open it. She took out her phone and photographed it where it lay, twice, and once with her own hand next to it for scale, and she wrote the time and the height of the tide on the back of her hand in the same biro Hester used, and then she stood in the cold with her hands in her pockets and looked at the eleven minutes of wet shingle between her and the town. Then she went up to get Piet.