Manifest Loss

The fever has passed badly and unevenly.

Inland, cane fields have begun to move again in the trade wind. Along the waterfront, shutters open one by one. Clerks return to desks that belonged to other men a month ago. Ships take on water, salt beef, sailcloth, lamp oil and rumours. The harbour office wants every vessel cleared quickly. The warehouses want every account closed. The insurers want every loss numbered, signed and made ordinary.

Bridgetown has discovered the great commercial virtue of surviving: everybody is in a hurry to pretend nothing happened.

Then the brig Providence limps in from Cayenne.

She comes under shortened sail with a square of new planking high on her starboard quarter and a crew thin enough to make the rigging look crowded. Her master reports fever aboard, storm damage off Tobago and eight cases of roucou dye lost at sea. Roucou is good red, the colour merchants can sell to dyers, cooks, apothecaries and men who believe a bright cloth improves a dull sermon. Twenty-four cases left Cayenne. Sixteen, according to the clean papers, should remain.

The cargo is valuable enough that a notice of loss has already reached Vale & Crosse before the Providence has finished warping into berth. By noon the claim has acquired a number. By afternoon the number has begun to acquire authority.

Eight.

The trouble is simple.

The papers do not agree.

You are acting for the port's deputy examiner, who is still too weak from fever to leave his rooms and far too irritable to admit it. His instructions arrived folded around a spoonful of quinine bark and one sentence in a hand made worse by sweat.

Find out what happened to the red goods before the evening tide.

You have eight investigative visits. Each visit costs an hour, whether it gives you evidence, confusion or only a better class of liar. Some people will not become available until you discover where to find them. You may issue a finding at any time after five significant facts are recorded, but the strength of the finding will depend on what you actually know.

Your task is not to find a villain. It is to determine what happened to the cargo, which records can support that account, and where certainty ends.

The tide does not care whether you are ready.