Turn 3 of 9

Ask the boy what else he saw

The boy watches you the way street children watch everything — with the practiced patience of someone who has learned that information is a currency. He takes another bite of the apple, chews slowly, and says nothing. You reach into your pocket and find a half-mark piece, which you hold up between two fingers. His eyes track it.

"The lady with the dispatch case," you say. "What else did you see?"

He shrugs with one shoulder, still chewing.

"She came up from the lower quays around the seventh bell. Went straight to Brennan's door, tried it, found it locked. Stood there a while, thinking. Then a runner came — boy about my age, Harbour Court livery — and handed her a folded note. She read it, put it in her case, and went up the stairs toward six." He takes another bite.

"Didn't look happy."

"What was in the note?"

"Folded, wasn't I? I don't read other people's mail." He says this with absolutely no irony.

"But the runner waited after. Watched her go up. Then he went back down toward the Court, running." The boy swings his feet against the crate.

"Brennan came out about ten minutes later. He was carrying a leather case, and he was moving fast for a man his age. Went the same direction — down toward the Court."

You turn this over. Ferran gets a note from the Court, then goes up to the sixth level instead of down. Brennan leaves his own office and heads to the Court, the same place the note came from. You wonder if Brennan is the one who filed the debt consolidation — notaries handle that kind of paperwork — and if so, why he's hurrying to the Court now, twenty minutes after Ferran already received whatever was in that note.

"Anything else?" you ask.

The boy holds out his hand. You drop the coin into it. He bites it — an old habit, universal — and pockets it.

"One more thing. The lady didn't go up to six alone. There was a man waiting at the top of the stairs. Tall, grey coat, didn't see his face. She seemed to know him, because she didn't slow down. They went together toward the east quay."

The east quay on the sixth level is where the brokerages are — the people who buy and sell cargo contracts, insurance, and debt. You feel the shape of something forming, though you can't see it clearly yet. Ferran knew about the debt. She left before the bell. She received a note from the Court, met a man, and went to the debt brokers. That is either the behaviour of someone trying to save the ship or someone trying to cut her losses.

From somewhere below, the ninth bell begins to toll. Three hours left.