The last lamp on the quay

By Andrew Pickett. Fiction for this site. It is not a slip from the app.

An ink drawing of a lamp, a closed ticket hut, a coil of rope, and a tide clock on a quiet quay. — Saltwick quay, after the rain. The lamp was still burning.

Saltwick is a made-up harbour, and the people in it are made up too. The outer quay keeps one lamp. On the night Idris Pell died, that lamp was the only light past the rope posts.

Idris ran the ticket hut. He leaned out of the window at closing, trimmed the wick, and pulled the shutter down. In the morning the shutter was still down, the lamp was still lit, and Idris was on the floor of the hut. One blow. Nothing else in the hut was broken except the lamp glass, cracked from the inside.

Three people had been on the quay after ten. Mara Voss, who skips the evening ferry. Cal Drury, who mends rope. Tomos Wren, a boy paid to wind the tide clock. Each of them said the same thing: they had gone home when the clock on the post read half past ten.

The clock is not a wall clock. It follows the water. A full wind lasts a tide. Someone had wound it backward one turn, so half past ten on the face was closer to midnight by a kitchen clock. The three alibis were honest and useless.

The rope coil told the rest. Rain had started at eleven. The outside of the coil was wet and the inside was dry, so it had been dropped after the rain began, not before. Cal's hands were tar to the wrist, and his coat was soaked, and he had been mending that coil in the rain. He had no reason to touch the shutter, and the shutter latch takes a small brass key, not a rope knife.

Tomos had the clock key, a long one, and he is too short to reach the shutter latch without the stool. The stool was inside the hut, dry. He had wound the clock from the post, in the open, and gone home muddy to the ankles and no higher.

Mara's coat was dry. Her ferry timetable, folded in the pocket, was marked in civil time: "ashore 11:40." She had the hut key because Idris left it on the ferry rail at nine, and she had not given it back. The latch turns from the outside. She pulled the shutter on him while he leaned out to the lamp, and the glass cracked when the frame hit the chimney. Then she wound the tide clock back, so the quay would swear to the wrong hour.

The lamp kept burning because she never put it out. She only needed the dark on the path behind her.

That is the whole of it. Saltwick is not a place you can visit, and this sentence is not one that prints when a Daily grid is finished.