After some twenty minutes a middle-aged woman in a severely tailored suit came into the office pushing a large wire cart full of files. “These are the Grafalk Steamship files Mr. Hogarth asked for,” she said, leaving the cart in the middle of the room.

Ferrant was enthusiastic. “Now we’ll see what shape the business is in. You can’t tell that just from the hull insurance, which is all I do for Grafalk.”

Five years of Grafalk history was a substantial amount of paper. We had workers’ compensation policies, which went on for about a hundred pages a year, showing classes of employees, states covered, Longshoremen’s Act exclusions, and premium audits. There was a business interruption policy for each year, cargo coverage, which was written on a per-shipment basis, and inland marine, to cover Grafalk’s liability for cargo once it was unloaded from his ships.

Ferrant sorted through the mass with an experienced eye. “You know, the cargo and the compensation are going to tell us the most. We’ll just see the value of the freight he’s carrying and how many people he’s employing to do it. You tot up those workers’ compensation policies—look at the final audited statements and that’ll tell you how many people he’s got sailing for him every year. I’ll go through these cargo policies.”

I sat down at a round wooden table and joined him in stacking the papers covering it down on the floor. “But I thought the whole shipping business was depressed. If he’s not carrying much, how will that tell us anything besides the fact that the industry’s depressed?”

“Good point, good point.” Ferrand placed a stack of workers’ compensation policies in front of me. “We have some industry statistics—the average load carriers are hauling as a percentage of their available tonnage, that sort of thing. We’ll just compare them. I’m afraid it’s a rough approximation. The other thing, though, is that we know about what it costs a day to own one of those old clunkers. Now if it’s not carrying cargo, there’s still overhead—it has to be docked someplace. Unless the ship is in mothballs—which also costs something per diem—you have to have a skeleton crew on board. You need to be able to turn the beast on in a hurry and get to the place where you have a cargo waiting. So we can make a good guess at his costs and then look at these cargoes, here, and see how much he’s earning.”

That seemed like a reasonable approach. I started on my part of the assignment, secretly entertained by Ferrant’s enthusiasm for the project. He didn’t have Hogarth’s personal feeling for the insured.