The owner's voice was older than she had expected, quiet and dry, with a slight wheeze in it, a man calling from a long way off. She told him what had happened on Friday night. All of it. She told him about the August emails and the nine crew and the rest-hour sheets and the hand to the face at 23:09, and he did not interrupt her once. When she was done, there was a long silence on the line, and then he said, "Is the young man going to walk?"
"The surgeons think so. It'll be a long road."
"I'd like his mother's phone number," Mr. Haverford said. "Please send it to Lorcan." Another pause. "Do what she says, Lorcan. Pay the agency. Whatever she needs." And then, to Octavia, in the same dry voice: "I'll make up my mind about the captain, and about your firm, Ms. Foster, when my boat is in Antigua. I want you to understand that clearly."
"I understand it clearly, sir."
"Good," he said, and hung up.
At five past two the surveyor from Narragansett Lifting had come aboard, a lean, unsmiling woman in a hard hat with a laptop under her arm and a load cell in a padded case, and by three o'clock the foredeck of the Coriolis looked like a construction site. Lachlan had rigged the new shackle and the new swivel and moused every pin with stainless seizing wire, and the surveyor had gone over his work with a flashlight and a gauge and grunted, which Lachlan took as the highest praise he had ever received. The proof load was four big orange water bags, each one a fat bulging teardrop of reinforced PVC, hung in a cluster from a spreader bar under the crane hook with the load cell in between, and they filled them from the hydrant on the pier with a fire hose, slowly, the whole crew standing back in a ring while the numbers on the surveyor's screen climbed. Three tonnes. Five. Seven. The tender's weight was a little over four. The surveyor wanted the crane to hold one and a quarter times its rated working load for ten minutes without creep, without a sound, without a weep of fluid from a single hydraulic fitting.
At eight tonnes the wind gusted across the pier at thirty knots and the bags swung, very slightly, and nine people on the foredeck held their breath at the same time. Octavia, standing at the base of the wheelhouse stairs with her phone in her hand and a pen behind her ear, realized that she was holding hers too. On the pier below, at the edge of the fuel dock, where he had no business being, Silvino Arruda stood with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker and his face turned up.
At 15:52 the surveyor said, "Holding," and started her clock.
At 16:02 she said, "Pass," and the foredeck erupted, nine tired people shouting and slapping one another on the back, and Lachlan Bairstow sat down on the forward bitts where he had fallen asleep on Friday night and put his face in his hands.