The kettle was at the boil when the bell rang.
Elio set the kettle down without hurrying. He counted. The harbour mouth lay quiet. No wind shift. No trawler in from the crossing. He had not climbed the tower, had not touched the rope. He was sixty-two and his knees told him so, and he had not touched the rope.
The brass note hung in the air longer than it should. He shut the gas off and stood at the cottage window with his tea forgotten in his hand.
Greyhook had a particular dusk. The gulls dropped first, then the light, then the smell of low tide — rotting weed, diesel, and the iron smell of weed-cut rope. Across the harbour the fish sheds stood shuttered. Someone on the quay was winding a hose. No one looked up at the tower. That was wrong too. The bell at slack tide pulled faces from the pub. It had always done so, even when he had been a boy.
He set the cup down and went out into the salt.
The path up to the bell tower was three stones wide, slick with lichen. He climbed it slow, the way he had climbed it every evening for eleven years. He did not run. The door of the tower stood as he had left it, latch on the latch. Inside, the rope hung in its own coil. The clapper was still. He put his hand against the bronze and felt no tremor, no after-vibration.
She must have come up the lane while he was on the path, because he had not heard her knock. She had a notebook under her arm and a folded letter in her hand, and she was looking up at the tower the way a person looks at a struck clock.
Elio came down the path and stopped a few feet from her. He did not say anything. Mira Sol was good at filling silence and bad at taking instructions on a disputed matter. He had known her since the spring she had arrived with her laminated permits and her shoes too clean for the cobbles. He did not dislike her. He disliked what she had come back for.
"Elio." She held the letter out, not offering it, just showing it. "I need to look at the old passenger lists. The ones from seventy-eight to eighty-one. Before the routes changed."
He looked at the letter. Then at her face.
Why seventy-eight, he thought. Why that stretch of water.
He looked at the letter. Then at her face.
"You already have what the council gave you."
"Copies. With names redacted. I want the ledger."
"There is no ledger."
She tucked the letter under the notebook. "Elio."
"You have what there is." He said it evenly. He was the custodian of the bell tower and the small museum beneath it, and there were cupboards in that museum he did not open. Not for her. Not for anyone. "Ask the harbour office. Ask the vicar's records. I have nothing to hand you."
"The harbour office says ask you."