Chapter Two: A Reasonable Explanation

She found four more reasonable explanations before lunch and discarded all of them by two o’clock.

The first was transposition: perhaps the slip was dated correctly and she had misread it, tired eyes turning a nine into a six. She held it to the window. It was a nine. The second was that some earlier clerk, decades ago, had made a game of predicting tides in advance and filed the results as a private joke, the way sailors sometimes bet on weather. This was plausible until she checked the ink against the volume’s binding date and found the slip’s paper stock hadn’t been manufactured until eleven years after the ledger it was tucked inside had been retired from active use and moved to storage. Nobody had opened volume forty-one in the interval. She checked the sign-out log, which — this being a harbour office that treated its own history as evidence — went back to 1962.

The third explanation was that she was being tested, that this was some initiation ritual for junior clerks that everyone else in the building was in on. She raised it, carefully, over lunch with Denholm, who had held the senior clerk’s post for nineteen years and possessed, as far as she could tell, no sense of humour whatsoever that would have permitted a prank of this elaborateness. He looked at her the way he looked at a column that didn’t sum correctly, which was to say, with mild, professional concern, and asked her to show him.

He read the slip twice. He checked the volume’s storage record. Then he did something that told her more than any answer could have: he asked her not to log the discovery in the day’s incident book, which was the first time in six weeks she had heard him suggest that any piece of paper crossing his desk should not be logged.

“There are others,” he said, eventually. “Not many. I’ve found three in nineteen years. I was starting to think I’d stop finding them before anyone else did.”

“Found them where?”

“That,” he said, “is the part I don’t have an answer for yet. Sit down. This will take a while to explain badly.”