Litany of Winter

The next morning, Hans called Severin into the records room.

A Blackhaven packet waited on the table. The first name Severin recognized was Danny Wells.

His name sat halfway down an Aethermerian police sheet in block letters, squeezed between a body number and a line marked POSSIBLE IDENTIFICATION. Hans had spread the rest of the packet across a records-room table before Severin arrived: copied yard ledgers, two thin police files, witness statements and a brown envelope with BLACKHAVEN POLICE stamped across the front.

Severin stopped beside the chair as Hans pushed the packet toward him. ”Sit.”

”What’s this?”

”You knew the yard.”

That answered enough. The room was narrow and warmer than the corridor. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling behind Hans, each loaded with tied files and gray document boxes. A records clerk had left an ink bottle beside a stack of blank slips, with blotting paper tucked underneath, before disappearing through the side door.

On the covering page, the review began after the Order sent Blackhaven the names it had from the freight yard and the fortnight in which the men disappeared. The police had gone back through recent body and missing-person records, then compared them with the yard material. Each case had been recorded separately, with nothing linking one file to the next.

Severin sat and pulled Danny’s sheet closer.

The photograph had been fixed to the page with two small corners of black paper. Danny looked worse than Severin remembered, mostly because Severin barely remembered him at all. His face was narrow beneath dark hair flattened back from his forehead. A bruise high on the neck showed as a gray stain.

He read the identification line twice. Recovered from a towpath below the eastern canal locks. The property line recorded no money or papers; death was attributed to strangulation.

The first patrol had logged him as an unidentified laborer.

For three weeks, the body remained unidentified. After the Order request, Blackhaven police compared the sheet against recent missing-person statements. Danny’s sister had supplied enough personal and employment details, including the clothing he wore, for the identification to be accepted.

Severin turned to the copied pay ledger.

WELLS, D. NIGHT SHUNTER.

Beside the final entry, a short note read: PAY UNCOLLECTED: 8c.

He rested one finger on the figure, and Eddie’s voice came back easily enough. Church sure doesn’t owe him eight copper.

Hans was sorting a second set of papers. ”Did you know him?”

”No.”

Severin kept looking at the eight.

”I mean, I knew who he was. That’s different.”

Hans nodded and left it there.

The shift sheet beneath Danny’s pay record was harder to read. Yard hands had written over one another in two inks, with jobs changed in the margins and names moved between crews. Severin understood that part better than the police summary.

He drew the page closer. ”Here.”

Hans looked over. Danny’s ordinary work kept him around the shunting lines at night, coupling wagons into the order the yard needed and helping move them between sidings. Men still got borrowed for other jobs. If a wagon arrived late and somebody needed another pair of hands, nobody held a meeting about whose job it was.

Two entries near the end were different. Someone had crossed out Danny’s normal siding assignment and written SECURED TRANSFER beside his name.

Hans asked, ”What does that mean?”

”Could mean anything. Getting moved isn’t strange.” Severin tapped the added words. ”But writing secured on the work sheet is.”

Hans leaned closer.

”Most of the time they just moved your name,” Severin continued. ”Nobody cared enough to explain why.”

He put Danny’s pay sheet beside the police record.

The secured assignment appeared two nights before Danny stopped reporting. The surviving copy gave no wagon number or cargo description and did not name a warehouse.

Severin reached for the second police file. Miller’s photograph was smaller, and the face gave him nothing useful. He knew the name because Spud had said it in the yard; the file would have to do the rest.

The identification had come from a boarding-house keeper and the yard employment register. Miller had been found in an alley behind a row of workshops on the west side of Blackhaven. The physician recorded a fractured skull from a heavy blow. His pockets still held three copper and a meal token.

Miller’s file held the physician’s injury notes and the district homicide number. Blackhaven had treated it as an ordinary murder in another part of the city.

Severin read the date, then took Miller’s yard sheet from the pile.

Another altered assignment: GUARDED UNLOAD.

He looked up. ”There.”

Hans did not answer.

Severin put Miller’s sheet beside Danny’s and thought back to the locked wagon. The unknown men had stood beside it while Pike watched the marked crates instead of the workers carrying them. He remembered Warehouse Three too, along with the guard knocking a loader’s hand away from a chain.

”Bloody hell. They had them on the same kind of work.”

Hans asked, ”Same kind?”

”Yeah. The freight I handled.”

He pulled Danny’s sheet closer, then Miller’s. The certainty lasted about five seconds.

Miller’s guarded unload had taken place well before Danny’s secured transfer, under a different shift supervisor and in another section of the yard. Danny’s assignment sat against the north lines; Miller’s had been entered against a warehouse crew. Neither sheet listed Warehouse Three or gave a wagon number.

Severin leaned back. ”No. I’m filling in the missing bits.”

He tapped Miller’s entry. ”This says guarded unload, and Danny’s says secured transfer. That’s all the papers give us.”

Hans turned a blank slip around and wrote two lines on it while Severin watched the pencil move.

”Seems like both of them got pulled into work that wasn’t ordinary,” Severin said. ”That much I’d keep.”

Hans wrote again.

”And both disappeared after,” Severin said.

Hans looked up. ”After how long?”

Severin checked the sheets. Danny had missed his next recorded shift; Miller had worked one ordinary day after the guarded unload, then vanished.

”Different timing,” Severin said. ”Still close enough to notice, but I wouldn’t make much of that yet.”

Hans set the slip between the two files. The brown envelope still held one more photograph.

Severin pulled it free. A dark work coat lay flat on a police table with a number card beside one sleeve.

”That’s Hobbs’s.”

His hand stopped. Severin read the property note before saying anything else.

Dark wool work coat, recovered from freight-yard changing room after report of missing laborer. Yard workers stated property belonged to Hobbs. Ownership not independently established.

He put the photograph down. ”No. Men said it was Hobbs’s. I heard Spud say Hobbs left his coat, but I never saw him wearing this one.”

Hans took the blank slip back, crossed out one word and replaced it.

Severin turned the property sheet over. There was no body record behind it.

”What’ve they got on Hobbs?”

”Nothing that confirms where he went.”

”Pike said he walked off sick.”

Hans passed him a copied statement.

The foreman’s account was there in flat police handwriting: Hobbs complained of stomach pain and left before the end of shift. Several workers disputed that account because a coat believed to be his remained in the changing room, and no witness had actually watched Hobbs leave.

Severin placed the statement beside the coat photograph. ”Pike says Hobbs left sick. The others say the coat was his, but nobody actually saw him leave.”

Hans pulled another page from the packet. ”One more.”

The copied statements had even less on the fourth worker. Yard men had spoken of four disappearances in the same fortnight, but only three names had been fixed. The police review had not established who the fourth man was well enough to match him against any body file.

Severin stared at the gap where a name should have been. At the yard, four men had been enough to make Spud stop laughing. In the paperwork, one of them barely existed.

He sorted the pages into two groups.

Danny and Miller went to the left with their identification and employment records. Severin put the physicians’ findings with them. Hobbs went to the right with the coat photograph and conflicting statements. The fourth report went to the right as well, thinner than everything else on the table.

Hans reached for Danny’s file. ”Both murdered. Connected?”

Severin looked over the two dead men’s shift sheets again. He almost said yes, but the dates stopped him.

”Can’t prove that.”

Hans waited for the rest.

”Both got put on unusual secured freight work before they disappeared. Miller worked another day after his. Danny didn’t. The jobs weren’t written down the same way, and I still can’t tie either one to the wagon I unloaded.”

”What does that leave?”

Severin rubbed a smear of old copying ink from the edge of Danny’s pay sheet. ”Maybe somebody decided they knew too much.”

He looked at the uncollected eight copper again. ”That’s the part I’d chase.”

Hans copied the wording onto the case slip: Possible connection between homicides and prior irregular freight assignments. Nature of connection unconfirmed.

He sanded the line and returned the excess to the tray before moving to the status boxes on the transfer summary.

Beside DANNY WELLS he wrote CONFIRMED DEAD and gave MILLER the same entry. HOBBS remained MISSING.

The last line had no name, only FOURTH REPORTED YARD DISAPPEARANCE. Hans left its status open, folded the summary over the unresolved sheets and tied those papers separately from the two homicide files.

Severin helped square the edges before Hans pulled the cord tight.

Two files went into the closed stack while the other two stayed on the table.