‘They all must have perished, then,’ I said finally, at something of a loss. ‘I am sorry. But these are common risks, are they not?’

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he said, with something of the manner in which I would speak to the Coopers’ younger child. ‘But there are aspects to this, aspects that disturb me. This was a good vessel, in capable hands. There was no talk of storms. You eliminate the common causes—the weather, incompetence, an unseaworthy boat—and then you must look more widely. An isolated society of lawless men: yes, you would consider that. Men who live off the sea, who might not be above committing a deception, an outrage. False lights, or…’

‘This is wild talk,’ I replied. ‘There are patrols through those islands, everyone knows it. You need only ask them to carry out a specific search.’

He responded in a way I had not expected: he waved an irritated hand at his own face and told me no one would conduct a search at the behest of a Bengali. I hadn’t considered this, but I knew immediately he was right.

‘I have private means,’ he said then, ‘and I am long accustomed to achieving private ends.’

I had diverted him, and soon enough he returned to the thread of his story, to the other aspects of it that he believed to be nefarious. A striking choice of word: the sea took its share of vessels and lives every year; it was blind and indiscriminate. To hear talk of deliberate malice was something new.

A handful of sealers had turned up in port, said Srinivas, making splendid men of themselves, loaded with money. One such man, an islander named Drew, strode into a Launceston rooming house looking—and here Srinivas suddenly became awkward—for the services of a good woman. I nearly laughed: from all I’d heard, no one would seek a good woman in Launceston. But the point was that the man carried a fortune in cheques and heavy coin, and had no good reason for the possession of either.

This, I told him, was circumstantial. He was undeterred. ‘Circumstances are strands in a rope,’ he told me: it was their combination that mattered. When I asked him for another such strand, he told me that a cooked leg of mutton had floated ashore on Preservation Island. This time I did laugh, and Srinivas conceded a smile. ‘They don’t tend to sail the seven seas, mutton roasts.’

But his face quickly turned serious again, and he talked of rumours he’d heard: the use of lights to lure ships to their destruction. It had been put directly to him—he would not say where—that the crew and passengers had been murdered, the vessel plundered.

‘The islands are wild places,’ he said finally. ‘A closed society. I cannot rely on anecdotes alone, because they tend to the outlandish.’

He meant no irony by this, I firmly believe.

~