Everything in Its Place

Crane’s Cannery squatted at the end of the quay like a long brick animal that had given up on the sea. The strike had turned its chimney cold, and without the smell of cooking brine the whole district seemed to be holding its breath. A single constable kept the gate. He lifted the tape without being asked, with the air of a man who’d been told to look as if nothing had happened.

The iron back stair climbed the wall in three flights, every step slick with salt rain. At the bottom, a chalk outline would have been dramatic; instead there was only a darker patch on the cobbles that the morning’s hose had failed to remove. Jonah looked up the stair, then down, then at his shoes.

“Forty-one steps,” he said. “You don’t slip on a sherry. You’d have to mean it.”

The office at the top was a glass-fronted box above the packing floor, where a man could watch his own factory. A sherry glass sat on the desk, half full. Two chairs had been drawn close, as if a quarrel had pulled them together. And on the cork board, pinned dead centre in the owner’s brisk hand, was the pay notice: wages reduced by twelve per cent, “in the interests of the whole community”. Beneath it, in pencil, small and level, somebody had written one word and a question mark. WHOSE?

“Everyone’s got a theory by nine in the morning,” said Jonah. “Nobody’s got a fact.”

“Then we collect the facts,” you said, “and we note carefully whose theory each one happens to suit.”