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Etcetera.’
    â€˜It was the man’s own haste that did it,’ I said.
    â€˜Hmm?’
    â€˜The accident. The hurt man (somehow ‘dead’ would not come out of my mouth) hitched the load to the crane. Hastily. In case you were wondering if anyone else was to blame. Not the crane driver, or another hand, just the man himself. Though perhaps if he’d been allowed to work at a more measured pace …’
    Addison regarded me a while, a yellow incisor working to still his lower lip. ‘Perhaps,’ he said eventually, but could not stop himself from going on. ‘Perhaps pondering, ruminating and whatnot are of use in lawyering. But I can’t see that dallying would have helped here. No, Sir. On board a ship, sloth does everything but sharpen a man’s instincts.’

Thirteen
    Amidst the rush of the quay, I sat on a bollard to eat a minced beef pasty I had bought from Cousins, the baker. Today more than usual, the warm and wholesome smell of the place, in contrasting so vividly with the docks, had been irresistible. I flicked my foot at a gull. It cocked its head and swaggered just out of reach.
    It wasn’t the Captain’s apparent callousness in the aftermath of the accident which troubled me, but the truth in what Addison had said. Sloth, or drudgery, or thoroughness – call it what you will – did indeed blunt a man’s instincts. Poring over documents in search of accounting discrepancies had dulled my own eye. If the Captain had not pricked me with his jibe about lawyering, I might not have noticed. But now, on the quay, I could see every detail, the boy’s bare feet, the depression in the deck (like the flattened skin of a bruised apple) where the barrel had hit it, the shard of wood the boy was about to sweep up, branded with a letter: W. And there, beyond the broom, the rest of the barrel’s lid, with the remainder of the stamp. I took a bite of pasty and blinked back the initials: TC.
    There was nothing untoward about the Belsize , owned by the Western Trading Company, unloading a cargo of barrels stamped with the Company’s logo. Nothing untoward at all, not when considered rationally. But to have seen a man killedby such a barrel cut through rational thought. It was an omen. My instinct told me that although the documents in the satchel across my knees were no doubt all present and correct, Captain Addison was covering something up.
    The seagull had tacked up to within kicking distance again. You’ve got to admire these birds: nothing short of a blow will warn them off. I stood up and tore the remains of my pasty in two – I was less hungry than I had thought, anyway – and tossed it at the gull’s webbed feet.

Fourteen
    Kitty didn’t want to go in the first place but her brother Edmund said it would be worth their while if she did. He needed somebody to help carry the buckets. Full, they’d be heavy. The track from Leigh Woods to the river’s edge was steep. Going down wasn’t a problem; you could hop, skip and slide down empty-handed , but the gorge was a trial coming back up, never mind lugging a load.
    Edmund was convinced they could make some money out of worms. He always said ‘We’ when he wanted her help. Kitty didn’t care about money anyway; she was more interested in colours. It was autumn so the woods were full of golden trees, but she still preferred the yellow a buttercup made if you held it against your forearm. Edmund said he liked gold, too, so long as it was real. He didn’t have any of his own yet, but he would, because he was a businessman. Their father laughed when he called himself that. ‘You mean busybody,’ he said.
    Anyway, Edmund knew you could pull worms out of the mudflats when the river was low. They could sell them to fishermen. It wasn’t the money Kitty was interested in, but the walk through the woods at sunset. That was when low tide was today, so