The ferry captain had been interviewed thirty-four years before he was born.
That was the sentence on the top of the file, written in a clerk's careful hand. Catrin read it twice, then turned the page to find out what it meant.
Three witnesses had signed statements saying that Bellwether Island had stood across the harbour until Tuesday morning. Sixty-eight residents had come ashore ahead of Monday night's gale; when they tried to return, there was only water. The statements had different dates, different pens and different accounts of the weather. One described a school concert. One mentioned a black dog that came over on the ferry each afternoon. The third gave the name of a woman who had sold hot bread at the landing.
Each statement bore the city's blue INDEPENDENT WITNESS stamp. Beyond Catrin's door, sixty-eight people waited for the stamps to become beds and supper.
The first quoted a newspaper interview with the ferry captain. The interview printed his street name with the same misspelling and comma as his dictation slip for the second statement. He had also signed the third.
The man was fifty-six. The interview was ninety years old.
Catrin put the pages in date order. She had worked in the Office of Continuity for eleven years and had learnt that impossible dates usually meant a bad date. She checked the paper stock, the ink registration and the newspaper's accession number. All passed.
Through the window she could see the empty water between the breakwater and the north cranes. It was an unhelpful view. An island ought to leave a mark on the eye, even in its absence. The water gave her no such service.
Her supervisor came in carrying two cups of tea. He set one beside the file without asking.
‘There are sixty-eight people in the hall,’ Doran said. ‘Housing wants a ruling by four.’
‘The witnesses share an ancestor.’
‘They have mothers?’
‘The records.’ She turned the pages towards him and drew three lines with her finger. All ended at the captain's name.
Doran examined the dates. ‘You can prove that?’
Catrin pushed the dictation slip across the desk. Doran's thumb covered the captain's signature until she moved it aside. Then she tapped the newspaper date.
‘Then certify the copying. Leave the age to someone with a better imagination.’
He took his tea and went out. He had been kind to her when her father died. He was kind now, too, in the way that meant he had already chosen where to place the damage.
At noon, a woman from the hall asked to see her. She was carrying a blue enamel bread tin with a dent in its lid. Catrin recognised it from the third statement.
‘My name is Hester,’ the woman said. ‘I sold bread at the landing. Downstairs they wouldn't take my statement. They said I'd be signing for my own bed.’
Hester opened the tin. It held a folded cloth and two rolls, hardening at the edges.
‘May I ask where the flour came from?’
‘The mill.’
‘Which mill?’
‘The one on the island.’
‘Did the mill give you an invoice?’
Hester closed the lid. ‘I didn't bring it to establish anything. My son is hungry.’
Catrin looked towards the hall. A small boy sat on the floor, lining up the metal legs of the chairs with his eyes as if he might make them into a road.
‘There is a relief kitchen,’ she said. ‘It opens at five.’
‘For registered residents. I gave them my address.’ Hester took a rejected meal slip from her pocket and laid it on the desk. The district field was blank, circled twice in red. Ivo was still making a road out of chair legs.
‘I'll look for another record,’ Catrin said.
‘Look quickly.’ Hester picked up the tin. ‘His name is Ivo. He doesn't need to know which century the paper came from.’
Catrin went down to the harbour after lunch. The ferry office was bolted, but the mechanic in the yard let her through when she showed him her seal. A ferry stood in dry dock, its hull stippled with old salt. Its name, Bellwether, had been painted over with grey. The grey was dry.
‘When was it renamed?’ Catrin asked.
‘Tuesday,’ said the mechanic.
‘Why?’
‘Order came through.’
He found the order on his terminal. It was dated Tuesday, issued by Harbour Maintenance. Catrin photographed the screen, then noticed the revision number matched the one at the foot of her file.
At the end of the yard stood a brass tide gauge that predated the city's record network. A narrow paper strip came out of a locked housing and wound itself onto a reel. The mechanic said no one had collected a reel for years. The gauge was too old to be useful for flood warnings, so it had been allowed to keep running.
Its needle traced water height, not land. Catrin knew that. She also knew the morning ferry used to pass close enough to displace water against this wall.
‘Can you open it?’ she asked.
‘The lock's city property.’
‘I'm the city.’
He gave her a look and fetched the key.
On the reel, a shallow rise crossed the line every weekday morning at 07:12. It appeared on Monday and Wednesday. On Tuesday it was absent.
‘The boat didn't run Tuesday,’ the mechanic said. ‘That's in the log.’
‘Why didn't it run?’
‘There was nowhere to go.’
She carried the reel to the office and laid it beside the harbour log. Hester had followed her to the yard and now touched Wednesday's rise. ‘That's the ferry.’ Catrin thought of the maintenance launch, which used the same wall, and reached for the tide book. Hester watched her hand stop.
‘If you were on the boat,’ Catrin said, ‘what could we find that hasn't passed through the city map?’
Hester held the bread tin on her knees. ‘Ask the captain.’
‘His statement is one of the three.’
‘Ask what he took across.’
The cargo ledger carried the same revision number as the map. Catrin pictured the ferry sitting low under sacks of flour. She pulled the tide book towards her; half its pages were missing. Four o'clock was two hours away.
Housing's form offered eligible and unverified. Catrin held her pen above the second box. In the hall, a chair scraped across the floor; someone was making room for Ivo.
Catrin went to Doran. He had a visitor in his office: the deputy mayor, in a coat whose cuffs were still wet from a morning outdoors. The deputy mayor had once been photographed opening the emergency kitchens. She watched Catrin place the tide reel on the desk.
‘This came from the old gauge,’ Catrin said, unrolling the strip.
‘There is no Bellwether,’ the deputy mayor said.
‘That's what the current map shows.’
‘And the old map?’
‘It carries the same revision number as the statements.’ Catrin put the two pages side by side.
Doran turned his cup in its saucer. ‘Tell her the practical part.’
‘There are sixty-eight people in the hall. The kitchen opens at five.’
‘You want me to declare an island on the strength of a line on paper?’ the deputy mayor asked.
‘Section nine,’ Catrin said. ‘Three nights while we look.’
‘Section nine requires a named officer to stand surety for the cost.’
Catrin had calculated three nights of beds, three days of food and one bus to the school district. She had not calculated what would happen to her rent after that.
‘I'll stand for three days,’ she said. ‘After that, you will need another arrangement.’
Doran looked up. ‘You don't have to.’
‘I know.’
The deputy mayor pushed a declaration of residence across the desk. Catrin left it where it was and reached for the section-nine form. For several seconds no one spoke. Then the deputy mayor uncapped her pen.
By six the hall was empty. Catrin found Hester and Ivo at the relief kitchen, where Ivo was eating soup with a seriousness that made her turn away for a moment. Hester had opened the bread tin and was giving the last roll to someone else's child.
‘How long have we got?’ Hester asked.
‘Three nights.’
Hester wiped soup from Ivo's chin with her thumb and asked the kitchen worker for more bread.
‘I'm going back to the harbour tomorrow,’ Catrin said. ‘I need the captain and the old tide books.’
‘The captain will help. He knows the boat.’
Outside, the harbour lights came on. From the kitchen window Catrin could see the cranes and, beyond them, a dark width of water. Tomorrow at 07:12, she would be at the gauge when the needle made its next mark.
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