A mooring is paid annually by standing order. His has never missed, never bounced, and never been indexed. The bank says the account is closed. The money still comes.
I have been harbourmaster of a small tidal harbour on the west coast for twenty-two years, and my predecessor did thirty-one before me, and his predecessor did nineteen, and all three of us have signed off the same line in the ledger.
I should explain what a harbour ledger is, because people imagine something romantic and it is a spreadsheet.
There are ninety-four berths. Each one has a number, a holder, an annual fee and a payment method. Most pay by standing order in April. Some pay by card in the office. Two still pay me in cash, in an envelope, because they are eighty and that is what they have always done and I am not going to be the one who changes it.
At the end of the financial year I reconcile it. Ninety-four lines. Paid, paid, paid, chase, paid, chase.
Berth 14 has said paid for forty-three years.
The holder's name is on the record from 1974, when the current berthing arrangement was set up and everything was renumbered. He was a local man with a wooden boat, a twenty-eight footer, and I have seen a photograph of her in the harbour office because there is a board of photographs and she is on it.
He died in November 1979. That is not a rumour and it is not folklore. There is a stone in the churchyard four hundred yards from where I am sitting and there is a plaque on the harbour wall with his name on it along with two others, because of what happened, which was a bad night in November 1979 and three men off two boats.
The mooring fee was paid in April 1980. Which is not strange, because an estate takes time and a standing order runs until somebody stops it.
It was paid in April 1981. Also not strange, for the same reason.
It has been paid every April since.
Here is what makes it a problem rather than an oddity, and it took me eleven years to work out that this was the part that mattered.
The fee has gone up. Of course it has. In 1981 a berth was thirty-eight pounds a year. It is now four hundred and ninety.
A standing order does not go up. That is the entire nature of a standing order: it is an instruction from the payer to their bank to send a fixed amount on a fixed date until told otherwise. If the fee changes, the payer has to change the instruction. It is why every harbour, gym and golf club in the country spends February writing letters asking people to update their standing orders.
Berth 14 has never needed a letter.
The amount that arrives has changed nineteen times in forty-three years and it has changed in the same year as the fee, every single time, to the correct new figure, to the penny.
Somebody has been going into a bank, or onto a screen, nineteen times, and amending an instruction.
I did the obvious thing in about 2009, which is that I rang the bank.
They will not tell you anything, and quite right. But you can ask a bank to confirm whether a payment came from an account that is open, and they will tell you that much, because they have to for reconciliation.
The reference on the payment is a sort code and an account number and the account is closed.
Not dormant. Closed. Closed in 1980, which is exactly what you would expect for a man who died in 1979 and whose affairs were wound up by a solicitor in the town.
I asked the woman on the phone how a closed account can send money.
She said it cannot, and asked me to double-check the reference, and I read it to her twice, and she went away for a long time and came back and said she could not discuss it further and would I like to raise a formal query.
I raised a formal query. It came back four months later saying no irregularity identified.
The boat is the other half of it and it is the half I do not like.
Berth 14 is not empty.
It has a boat in it. She is a twenty-eight foot wooden boat, carvel, sound, a good bilge, and she is the boat in the photograph on my office wall.
I know what that sentence does. So I want to be careful.
Wooden boats last. There are boats in this harbour older than that one by thirty years. A well-kept wooden hull is a hundred-year proposition and there is nothing supernatural about a 1950s boat floating in 2024.
But a wooden boat lasts because somebody looks after it. Every year it comes out, it gets scrubbed, the seams get looked at, it gets antifouled and painted and put back. If nobody does that for three years you have a problem and if nobody does it for five you have firewood.
She comes out every March.
I have never seen her come out. She is in the water in February and she is on the hard in March, chocked and shored properly, and she is in the water again in April, and there is fresh antifoul on her, and the topsides have been done, and the brightwork has been oiled.
I have sat in my office window, which looks directly at that berth, and I have missed it every year for twenty-two years.
I have done the things. I want to list them so nobody has to suggest them.
I have watched. I have been down at four in the morning in March, more than once. Nothing happens on the night I choose.
I have asked. Every boatyard within thirty miles, and there are five. None of them lift her, none of them have an account in that name, and two of the five have owners who went pale and changed the subject, which is not evidence.
I have checked the register of shipping. She is registered. The registration has been renewed. The registered owner is the man on the plaque.
I have written to the address on the file, which is a cottage up the hill that has been a holiday let since 1993. The letters do not come back.
And once, in 2016, I did the thing I am least comfortable with, which is that I went aboard.
She was clean. Not preserved, not a museum. Used. There was a chart on the table folded to the sound north of here, and it was a current chart, that year's correction stamp on it, and there was a mug in the sink with a ring in it, and the stove was cold but the kettle had water in it.
I did not stay. I put my hand on the coaming to get back over the rail and it was warm, because it was July and it was an afternoon, and I have told myself that a hundred times.
I am going to stop soon because I have got to the part I actually wanted to write down.
Two years ago the harbour commissioners restructured the fees. Every berth went up and the increase was staged and there were letters, and there was a public meeting, and it was all very dull.
The new figure for a berth of that size was five hundred and twelve pounds.
In the April, four hundred and ninety arrived.
The old figure. For the first time in forty-three years, the wrong amount.
I sat and looked at it for a long time. And then I did the thing that my job actually requires, which is that I sent the standard letter to the address on the file, the one that has been a holiday let for thirty years, explaining the shortfall of twenty-two pounds and asking for the standing order to be amended.
Eleven days later a payment of twenty-two pounds arrived from a closed account.
And I understood something I would rather not have, which is that for forty-three years nobody had needed to write, because nothing had ever been owed, and the moment something was owed it was paid, and what that means is that the arrangement is not automatic.
It is being kept.
Somebody is reading the letters.