Papers were strewn across an executive-size walnut desk. A photograph of the Lucella as she lay fractured in the Poe Lock covered a table at one side, and a cutaway picture of a freighter hull was taped to the wood-paneled west wall.

I stopped to look at the photograph, enlarged to about three feet by two feet, and shuddered with remembered shock. Several more hatch covers had popped loose since I last saw the ship and the surfaces pointing steeply into the lock were covered with a thick smear of wet barley.

As I studied it, a very tall man got to his feet and strolled over to stand next to me. I hadn’t seen him when I first walked into the room—he’d been sitting in a corner behind the door.

“Shocking, isn’t it?” he said with a pronounced English accent.

“Very. It was even more shocking when it occurred.”

“Oh, you were there, were you?”

“Yes,” I answered shortly. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, a private investigator. And you’re—?”

He was Roger Ferrant from the London firm of Scupperfield, Plouder, the lead underwriters on the Lucella’s hull and cargo insurance.

“Roger is probably the most knowledgeable man in the world about Great Lakes shipping, even though he operates out of London,” Hogarth told me. He added to Ferrant, “Miss Warshawski may know something about our ultimate liability on the Lucella.”

I sat down in an armchair by the window where I could see the setting sun paint Buckingham Fountain a faint pink-gold. “I’m looking into the accident to the Lucella as part of a murder investigation. At the moment I have two separate crimes—the murder of a young man connected with the Eudora Grain Company, and the destruction of the Lucella. It’s not clear to me that they intersect. However, I was on board the Lucella pursuing my murder investigation when she blew up, and that’s given me something of a personal interest in the explosion.”

“Who’s your client?” Hogarth demanded.

“It’s a private individual—not someone you’d know.… How long does it take to clear up a claim like this?”

“Years.” Ferrant and Hogarth spoke in chorus. The Englishman added, “Honestly, Miss Warshawski, it takes a very long time.” He stumbled a bit pronouncing my name, unlike Hogarth, who got it right the first time.

“Well, who pays Bledsoe’s expenses while he reassembles the Lucella?”

“We do,” Hogarth said. “Ferrant here handles the hull damage. We pay for the destroyed cargo and the business interruption—the loads that Bledsoe is forgoing by having his ship lying in the bottom of the lock.”

“Do you ante up a check to cover the cost of repairing the ship?”

“No,” Ferrant said. “We pay the bills as the shipyard submits them.”