The north pier at midnight is a mile of wet concrete, two crane rails and a row of lamps that Haldor Vik has lit one at a time since he took the watch. He walks on the outside of you, the sea side, and he has not said anything for four hundred metres.
He was the largest man on the Row at ten and he still is: grey-white hair he did not have as a boy, shoulders that make the yard coat look borrowed, and one grey ear standing out of his hair, the one that did not go back.
At the end of the pier he stops, turns, and looks down at you the way he looks at a thing he is about to lift.
"You are going to ask,"
he says. Slow, low, every word set down like a crate.
"Everybody asks. I am going to answer it before you do, because you deserve it first."
He pulls the yard coat off, drops it over a bollard, and stands in the wind with his chest bare and old rope scars across it, and a set along the left side that are not rope.
"That night I went into the water after the tin. I got it out and I handed it to Aristide. That is the part they know."
He looks at the water, not at you.
"The rest of it I have not said out loud, and I am going to say it to you in the watch room, where it is warm. So come down the ladder."