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He had not slept. The watch had kept him company through the small hours, its ticking a quiet insistence on the desk beside his chair, and somewhere around four he had given up on rest altogether. The word on the receipt had narrowed his world to a single destination. Pier. Leo had written it six years ago and handed it over last night as if it were a grenade with the pin already pulled.
The pier stretched out into the mist like a proposition. Its planks were slick with condensed moisture, the wood soft in places where salt and weather had done their work. James walked slowly, measuring each step, his shoes leaving dark prints that the damp air would erase within minutes. The Pavilion sat at the far end, its roofline just visible through the grey, a hulking silhouette that seemed to float above the water.
He stopped halfway along and listened. The sea slapped against the iron pilings below with a rhythm that was older than the town, older than any name on any map. Somewhere a halyard clinked against a mast. The mist muffled everything, turned the pier into a corridor with no visible exit.
The Pavilion's main doors were locked. He had expected that. He worked his way around the eastern side, where the decking dropped away into a service stairwell, the concrete steps slick with a green film of algae. A chain had once barred the way. It lay now in a coil beside the handrail, its padlock still engaged but the bracket it had secured rusted through.
He descended.
The air changed immediately. The mist gave way to a cold that was older and wetter, the kind that lived in stone and never left. The space beneath the Pavilion was a forest of iron girders and damp concrete, cross-braced with beams that had been painted red sometime in the last century and had been flaking ever since. The sea was louder here, channelled and amplified by the geometry of the pilings, each wave arriving as a hollow boom that reverberated through the structure.
James pulled a small torch from his coat and clicked it on. The beam picked out details in fragments: a rusted cleat, a coil of rope stiff with salt, a cluster of mussels clinging to the concrete above the waterline. The floor was a lattice of metal grating over black water. Through the gaps he could see the sea moving below, slow and thick as oil.
He moved deeper, ducking under a crossbeam, his free hand trailing along the cold iron for balance. The receipt had said nothing about what he was meant to find here. A locker, perhaps. A cache. Something Leo had stored six years ago and never retrieved. Or something someone else had stored, and Leo had only discovered.
A sound behind him. Not the sea. Not the pier settling.
He began to turn.
The blow caught him across the back of the skull, above the right ear, and the world went sideways. His torch spun away, its beam cartwheeling across the girders before it hit the grating and rolled into the water with a small, final splash. James landed hard on his shoulder, the metal grid punching through his coat, and then his head struck concrete and the darkness came in like a tide.
He did not lose consciousness entirely. He was aware, in a distant and academic way, of the cold water seeping through his trousers, of the iron taste in his mouth, of the fact that his hands were not moving when he told them to. The darkness was not absolute. There was a quality to it, a texture, and after a moment he understood that his eyes were open and he was staring at the underside of the decking above him.
Time passed. He could not have said how much.
Sound returned first. The waves, still at their work. The creak of the pier. His own breathing, which was too fast and too shallow. He closed his eyes and opened them again and the world had resolved into something like coherence. He was on his side. His head was a single, throbbing note of pain. The grating was wet beneath his cheek.
He pushed himself up. His right arm took the weight badly, the elbow buckling, and he had to try twice before he was sitting with his back against a girder. The movement sent a wave of nausea through him. He sat still and waited for it to pass.
The figure was gone. He had not expected otherwise. He had glimpsed nothing useful: a shape, a movement, the sense of something that had been waiting in the dark and was now elsewhere. The blow had been precise. Professional. Someone who knew how to put a man down without killing him, which meant the message was the point.
He touched the back of his head. His fingers came away wet. Not soaking. A slow ooze that suggested the skin had split but the skull had held. He pressed his handkerchief to the wound and held it there, the white cloth darkening.
Through the lattice of girders, through the mist that hung above the water, he saw the lights.
A small vessel sat offshore, perhaps two hundred yards out, its hull a low shadow against the grey sea. Its lights were blinking. Not the steady port-and-starboard navigation lights he knew from his flying days, but something deliberate. A sequence. Three short, two long, three short. Then a pause. Then the pattern repeated.
He watched it cycle through four times. Five. The rhythm was too regular to be accidental, too peculiar to be standard maritime signalling. Someone on that boat was talking to someone on shore. And someone on shore had just made sure James Watt was not in a position to see it.
Footsteps on the stairwell. Hurried, heavy. A man who did not care about being heard.
James tried to stand. His legs took the instruction badly, and he had to brace himself against the girder while the world tilted and then slowly righted itself. The torch beam that found him was not his own.
“Christ,” Leo said. “Christ, James.”
The big man came down the last steps two at a time, his apron still on, the strings trailing. He must have come straight from the Shack. He caught James under the arm and took his weight without apparent effort.
“I saw them,” James said. His voice sounded strange to him, thick and slow. “The boat. The lights.”
“We need to get you out of here.”
“Did you see it? The signal?”
Leo glanced towards the open water, but the mist had closed in again, and the vessel was only a smudge of darker grey against the grey of the sea. “I saw a boat. I didn't stop to count the bloody lights. You're bleeding.”
“I noticed.”
Leo guided him towards the stairs, one arm around his back, the other gripping his forearm. James moved like a man who had forgotten how his feet worked. Each step up the concrete risers sent a fresh pulse of pain through his skull, but the nausea was receding, and by the time they reached the decking he could stand without support.
The mist was thinning now, the dawn beginning to assert itself as a pale wash of light behind the Pavilion. The pier was still empty. Whoever had been in the shadows beneath it was long gone.
“How did you know I was here?” James asked.
“I didn't. I came down to open up and saw your footprints on the planks. The mist was still wet on them, so I knew you hadn't been here long.” Leo pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and folded it roughly, pressing it into James's hands. “Hold that against your head. You'll frighten the tourists.”
“There aren't any tourists.”
“There will be. There always are tourists.”
They walked back along the pier, Leo's hand hovering at James's elbow, ready to catch him if his legs gave out. The vessel was no longer visible. The coded signal had stopped. James filed the pattern away in the part of his mind that was still functioning: three short, two long, three short. He did not know what it meant, but he knew it meant something, and he knew that someone had been willing to crack his skull open to keep him from seeing it.
The smuggling operations Bartholomew Vane had built his fortune on had not ended in 1987. That was the thought that settled into James's mind as they reached the end of the pier and stepped back onto the solid ground of the promenade. The Northern Star had gone down, and Bartholomew with it, but the infrastructure had survived. The routes. The signals. The men who knew how to move cargo through the dark without leaving a paper trail. Someone had kept it all running. Someone was still keeping it running now.
“You need a doctor,” Leo said.
“I need to sit down.”
“Same thing. There's a bench.”
Leo lowered him onto the slatted wood and stood over him, his bulk blocking the wind. The big man's face was creased with something that looked more like anger than concern. His hands were opening and closing at his sides.
“I shouldn't have given you that receipt,” he said.
“You gave me a direction. Someone else gave me a warning.” James touched the back of his head again. The bleeding had slowed. “I'd say the two are connected.”
“You think?”
“I think Bartholomew Vane didn't build a shipping empire on honest cargo. I think the museum archives are full of half-truths and careful omissions. And I think someone in this town has been running those same operations right through the pier for decades, and they don't appreciate me asking questions about it.”
Leo said nothing. He looked out at the sea, his jaw working, and then he looked back at James with an expression that was harder than anything James had seen on him before.
“The Vane family didn't just smuggle goods,” Leo said. “They smuggled people. Information. Whatever paid. And when Bartholomew died, someone else took over. Someone who understood the value of a quiet town with a long coastline and a pier that nobody watches after dark.”
“Arthur Vane.”
Leo did not confirm it. He did not need to. The name hung between them, and the silence that followed was answer enough.
“I'm going to walk you back to your office,” Leo said. “And then I'm going to open the Shack and pretend I didn't see anything this morning. And you're going to decide whether forty pounds an hour is worth getting your head stoved in.”
James stood. The world swayed once and then held. He looked back at the pier, at the Pavilion sitting grey and silent above the water, at the mist still clinging to the ironwork beneath it. The vessel was gone. The signal was gone. But the pattern was still there, repeating in his mind, three short and two long and three short, a message he could not yet read but would not forget.
He turned away and let Leo guide him up the promenade towards the town, the folded receipt still in his pocket, the watch still ticking against his chest.
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