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last twenty years, which isn’t saying much for our surveillance system.”
    “He’s an old crackpot!” Lambert burst out as he stood up. “He used to sneak about like a rat, and he always made his way onto the Valkyrie . He’d spend hours on the bridge, spinning around, muttering strange things.”
    “Do you know where I can find him?” asked Kate.
    “Carroll? He lives maybe ten minutes from here,” answered Collins with a glimmer of interest in his eyes. “How did you know I was going to suggest you talk to him?”
    “I didn’t.” Kate shrugged and stood up. “It seems like he would be a good source for the article I’m writing. That’s all.”
    The two men exchanged a look.
    “It’s OK,” said Kate, smiling. “Why were you going to suggest him?”
    “Because old man Carroll,” Collins replied, “claims to be the same man who discovered the Valkyrie in the Atlantic.”

VIII
    Half an hour later a taxi dropped off Kate in a blue-collar neighborhood of Denborough. The quiet little houses were swallowed up by the pitch-black night and torrential rain. She wondered for the thousandth time if it had been a good idea to come. She was tired and wanted badly to find a hotel. Instead, she found herself standing in front of an old house that looked haunted.
    She shivered as a particularly strong gust of wind blew past. Her return train was scheduled to leave early the next morning. If she didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, she might not have another chance to talk with the old man. Most likely, he was just senile and had confused the Valkyrie with some obscure merchant ship from his time as a cabin boy fifty years earlier. But she had to try. Something in her stomach—the fluttering of fruit bats, Robert used to say—told her that this was a good lead.
    “Wait for me here, please,” she told the cabdriver. He was a sallow-skinned Pakistani with a bushy beard who was looking around nervously.
    “This is very bad neighborhood, ma’am. Very bad. Drugs, whores, and bad people. You shouldn’t be here. Me neither,” he said with urgency.
    “I’ll just be ten minutes. Maybe less,” she said, trying to appear confident as she handed the driver two fifty-pound notes.
    The driver took the money and muttered something under his breath. Still, he appeared more at ease. Kate couldn’t help but notice the man had a club within arm’s reach underneath the dashboard.
    Approaching Mr. Carroll’s house, Kate noticed that it had seen better days. The paint was peeling and parts of the eaves were missing. Graffiti covered an entire side of the house, and plywood shuttered one of the first-floor windows. Empty beer cans and cigarette butts littered the front steps.
    Kate hesitated before ringing the doorbell. Nothing happened. After a moment’s wait, she tried again. Finally, she gingerly knocked on the door a few times with little hope. Disappointed, she turned back around to the taxi. But then, she heard several deadbolts unlock. A wrinkled, hunched man with suspicious eyes opened the door slightly and peered at her.
    “You can’t work here,” he grumbled. “Go find another corner to show your tits, but don’t come to my door! Go away or I’ll call the police!”
    “It’s not what you think,” she said, rifling through her bag for her press badge. She looked up to see the man closing the door.
    “A gun,” he howled. “She’s got a gun.”
    “It’s just my badge,” Kate yelled, trying to show it to him through the gap in the door. “I’m a reporter. I just want to talk.”
    “Reporter? I don’t want to talk to you. I’ve been blowing the whistle on all those junkies from Compton Road for years now. I’ve called the papers dozens of times and for what? They never listen to me. Never!”
    “I’m not here to talk about Compton Road.” Kate could tell the man excelled in holding a grudge. “I’m here to talk about the Valkyrie .”
    The change in the old man’s expression was so