第13章 The Case

The case was under the barometer bench and it had been under the barometer bench since before I came to this station, and I will say that first because I know what it sounds like. I did not find it. I looked under the bench for a wedge I wanted for the door, which has been sticking since November because the station takes in damp and gives it out again all winter, and my hand went back past it and stopped, because it was a case and I had never in three years seen a case. It was about two feet long, canvas-covered, with a brass catch, and the brass had gone green. There was no maker's plate and no stencilling. I got the wedge, and then I stood in the middle of the wire room with the door still shut and did not open it, and I want that in the account, because I have been asked since whether I opened it at once and the answer is that I stood there for some time and then I did, and it makes no difference whatever to anybody reading this except that it tells you what I was. I opened it at ten past four in the afternoon of the seventeenth, in daylight, with Halvard in the room, because after the sixteenth night a man does not open a case in the dark in this station on his own. There were five in it. Five small radios, grey, the size of my hand, laid in a row in a bed of grey felt, with a space at one end of the bed the shape of a sixth. Not fifth. There is a space at the end, and the felt is pressed down in the shape of a thing that has been lying in it for a long time and is not lying in it now, and the shape is the shape of the small grey object from the shelf. I did not touch them. That is the second thing. I stood in front of an open case on a bench and I did not put my hands on any of them, and I have not been able to explain it since, and I am not going to try. "Six," said Halvard. "Five and a space." "There are five and a space and one on the shelf, and I have not touched it since the sixteenth, and neither have you, and neither has anybody, and it has been sitting on that shelf in the dark for four months with nothing." He had his notebook out. He had it out before he had finished the sentence. "Erik, on the third I told you it is not transmitted. I have been sitting with that for fourteen nights and I have written down the four explanations and crossed them out, and the fifth one is that it is not a signal. It is a *counter*. And a counter has to be counted with, and you do not need a receiver for a counter, you need a number, and there is one of those on your shelf and there are five in a box and the felt has a space in it." I let that stand for about four seconds. "Then say the fifth one properly." "No." He shut the notebook. "Not in this room, and not with the log book eleven feet away, and not before Torsten and Karin are in it. I am not being dramatic. I am being an operator. There is a difference and the difference is that a dramatic man says things to be looked at and an operator says things when the circuit is closed." So I left the case open on the bench and went and knocked on Torsten's door, and then Karin's, and the four of us stood in the wire room and looked at five grey objects in a bed of felt. Karin said, "They are the same. Exactly the same. Same grille, same dial, same socket. Somebody made six of these in one workshop and sold them separately, or did not sell them at all." "Or somebody made six and put five away." Torsten had his spectacles down and was very close to them and did not touch them either, which I noticed. "Erik, this case is under a bench in a radio room. It is a dry room, it is a warm room, it is the only warm dry room on this island. And these have no dust on them, and there is dust on the case, and there is dust on the bench, and there is dust on the case and none on them, and that means they were put in after the last time anybody wiped this room, and the last time anybody wiped this room was the eighth of November by Sven's own count, because Sven counts everything twice a month and writes it down." "Then somebody put them in after the eighth of November," I said. "Somebody put them in after the eighth of November," said Torsten, "in this room, at the shelf, in the dark, at three in the morning, while six people were asleep thirty-one metres away." He straightened up. "Or somebody took them out and put them back." Nobody spoke. "Which of those do you believe," Karin said. "I believe the one that does not require a man to walk through a locked door in a building with a stove in it," Torsten said, "and I would like to be told that I am being unreasonable, because I have found in eleven years at sea that the unreasonable explanation is usually the one where you have not looked hard enough yet." Sven put his head in at about half past five. He came in the way Sven comes in, which is to say he stood in the doorway and looked at the bench for a while. "That is not ours," he said. "You have seen it before," said Halvard. "I have not seen it before. I have been looking at that bench every day for nine years and I have never seen that case, and I would have seen it, because I move the stool." He came in and stood over it. "That is the canvas they use on a boat. That is not station canvas. That is a tarpaulin, and it has been in a boat, and the green on the brass is the green you get in a bilge." "Ingrid's boat," I said, and heard myself say it, and the four of them looked at me. I did not know why I said it. I have turned that over a great many times. It may be that I knew, and had known since the fourteenth, and had been carrying it about in the part of a man that carries things. Anyway. I wrote it up that night and I wrote it honestly, and the entry is the longest in the book. *17th. 16:10. Case found under barometer bench, canvas, brass catch, no plate. Contents: five small grey objects, same type as shelf object. Felt bed shows a sixth space, empty, dustless. Object on shelf not touched since 3rd. S., on inspection, states the canvas is marine tarpaulin and the brass is bilge-green and that the case has been in a boat. Present: E.D., H.K., T.O., K.V. 03:00: no ringing, seventh night.* I put *cause unknown* at the end, because I have put *cause unknown* at the end of every line in that book for eleven years, and because on the seventeenth I began to understand what an officer in an office in Trondheim is actually going to make of a station that has spent a month writing that phrase. At three that night nothing rang. That was the first night of the six that nothing rang, and I lay in the bed by the door and listened for it, and it did not come, and after a while I got up and went and looked at the shelf, and the small grey object was where it had been for four months, with the short line and the long line and the mark that might have been a stop, and the empty socket at the back, and no warmth in it at all. And on the eighteenth night, at three o'clock, five of them rang at once, in the wire room, in a case on a bench, and the sixth of them rang on the shelf, and the six notes were not the same pitch.