"It's on his wristband," she said. "I sat next to it for two hours yesterday morning. Twenty-three thirty-eight. Aled, I've been doing this a long time. Newport Fire is four minutes away. You called 911 at nineteen-fifty and the ambulance took three and a half hours?"
"Hospitals get things wrong."
"They do. So I asked. This morning, at the nurses' station. I'm listed as his employer's representative, they were very helpful. The EMS run sheet says Newport Fire was dispatched at twenty-three fifteen. On scene twenty-three nineteen. The 911 call was logged at twenty-three fourteen."
Aled put both hands flat on the chart table, on either side of the penciled course line to Bermuda.
"What time did the lift really start?" she said quietly.
He did not answer.
"Who was on the crane, Aled?"
He looked up at her, and in his face she saw not anger and not guilt exactly, but something she had seen in a great many faces across a great many tables, which was the look of a man watching a very large and very heavy thing begin to slide, slowly, toward the edge of something, and knowing that it was too late to put his hands on it.
"I'd like you to talk to my crew," he said finally. "Before we go on with this. I'd like you to hear it from them. Will you do that? Then you can ask me anything you want, and I'll answer it. You have my word."
She had known Aled Llewellyn for nineteen years, and she had never once known his word to be worth less than gold. She also knew that he had just bought himself forty minutes.