Mr. Jeong wore his good cardigan.

Seon-ho had never seen it. It was navy blue, with leather buttons, and had presumably spent the last decade in a drawer waiting for a day that justified it. He came out of the back room of the shop at a quarter to nine on Friday morning, in the cardigan, with his notary seal in a velvet pouch, and announced to Seon-ho and Priya, who were standing in the doorway with expressions of identical despair, "I am going to the police station."

"You don't have to," said Priya. "This is my problem."

"It is my stamp," said Mr. Jeong.

"It's my signature on the certification."

"On *my* form. On *my* paper. In *my* shop." He tucked the pouch under his arm like a man tucking in a bayonet. "For thirty years I have stamped anything put in front of me, Ms. Venkataraman, and nobody has ever said it was wrong. It would be a poor way to retire if the first time someone says it, I am not there."

Seon-ho opened his mouth. Mr. Jeong held up a finger.

"I do not want to know," he said, "how it happened. I want to know only that there is a reasonable argument. Is there one?"

"There is a very reasonable argument," said Seon-ho.

"Then we go."

The Maritime Police station on Dolsan was a low concrete building by the fish market, with a flag, a bicycle rack and a smell of salt and photocopier. They were shown into an interview room with a table and four plastic chairs, where a woman in a navy uniform sat with a folder and a paper cup of coffee and the air of someone who had been awake since a different decade. The badge on her chest said *Sgt. Baek Yu-ri.* She was in her mid-forties, short and compact, with hair going grey at the temples and a pair of reading glasses pushed up on her head like a second set of eyes.

Opposite her sat a man in an expensive suit, who stood when they entered and did not offer his hand.

"Moon Kyung-tae," he said. "Counsel to the Salvage Inquiry. I'd like to say at the outset that my client does not wish to be vindictive."

"That's reassuring," said Priya. "I'd hate to see what it looks like when it does."

"Ms. Venkataraman." Baek pointed with her coffee. "Sit. You're on the record, informally, which is a polite word for 'we have a recorder running but nobody's said it's a recorder.' Mr. Moon, what exactly is the complaint?"

Moon opened a folder and spread two sheets on the table. They were enlarged scans of the third page of the departure file: the pilot's note, with its crease and stain. He laid them side by side, one from the harbour authority's own archive, one from the copy Seon-ho had made. With a manicured finger he touched the margin of the first and drew it to the second, like a man performing a magic trick.

"Here," he said. "The archive page has a mark in the margin, adjacent to the water stain. A line, approximately three millimetres in length. The certified copy has no such mark. It has been *omitted.* The mark may be innocent. But it is the sort of detail on which a hearing turns, and it was removed by a person who certified it as a true copy."

Priya's hand moved under the table. Seon-ho, without looking at her, put his own knee against hers for exactly one second. It was the least subtle thing he had ever done. She stopped moving.

"Mr. Jeong," said Baek, "you are the certifying notary on the copy."

"I am." Mr. Jeong laid the velvet pouch on the table. He opened it with ceremony and set out the seal, the pad, and his licence, each on its own square of cloth. "I would like to say first that the marks you are discussing are not marks. They are scratches."

"That isn't established," said Moon.

"Mr. Moon, I have copied documents for thirty-one years." Mr. Jeong's voice, unexpectedly, had steadied. It had acquired a cadence that Seon-ho had heard only once or twice, in the first weeks of working for him, when Mr. Jeong had still believed he was a serious man. "Under the Notarial Practice Rules, Section Eleven, a certified copy is a reproduction of all *legible content.* Marks or abrasions on the original which are not legible are not content. They are damage. A notary is not required to copy damage."

"A three-millimetre line is a mark."

"A three-millimetre line with no character in it is a scratch. Section Eleven, paragraph four. The threshold is four millimetres and fewer than three discernible strokes." He looked at Baek. "I memorised it in 1994. Nobody has asked in thirty years, and I have been waiting."

Seon-ho kept his face carefully neutral, and underneath it was pure, undiluted gratitude. He had written fourteen strokes into the margin of an old man's life and the old man had memorised the one rule that made them invisible.

"Fewer than three *discernible* strokes," said Moon. "The mark in question has been enlarged. You can see that it contains a figure."

"You can see a figure," said Seon-ho, speaking for the first time. "Everyone sees a figure in a scratch, sir, if they're looking. It's called pareidolia. Faces in clouds." He leaned forward. "The question isn't whether *you* can see a figure after you've blown it up four hundred percent on a screen. It's whether a notary reading the page at normal size with a standard loupe would have seen three discernible strokes. And I'd like to add that the harbour authority's own archive copy is a *digital* scan of the page, made last Tuesday. Not the original. The original was in the care of Ms. Venkataraman for one night, and then in the care of this shop for another, and I assume you'd like to see the original."

Moon's eyes flickered. It was a tiny thing, and Seon-ho saw it, because he had been watching for it. "The original is not..."

"Is not in the file," said Seon-ho. "I know. It has been returned to the Harbour Authority, under receipt, by Ms. Venkataraman, on Wednesday at ten. The receipt's in my pocket." He placed it on the table. "Which means the 'original' you are comparing against is a scan from the Harbour Authority, scanned *after* Ms. Venkataraman handed it back. So there are two possibilities. One: the line was always on the page and the copy simply didn't reproduce it, as the rules allow. Two: someone made a mark on the page between Wednesday morning and Tuesday's scan. And I would like very much to know who has access to the Authority's archive."

The room was silent. It occurred to him that he had lied, fluently and for an extended period, to a lawyer, in front of a police officer, using the pronoun *I* seventeen times, and that none of it had been entirely untrue.

Baek took her glasses off her head, polished them on her sleeve and put them on her nose. "The receipt's genuine?"

"Authority stamp, time and date," said Seon-ho.

She checked it. She checked the Inquiry's complaint. She looked at Moon for what felt like a long time, and then she wrote something on the folder and closed it.

"Mr. Moon," she said pleasantly, "I'm going to recommend to the Inquiry that the allegation is not made out. I'm also going to ask a question that has nothing to do with Ms. Venkataraman. Your client filed this complaint at 18:52 last night. The scan of the archive page was made on Tuesday. How did you know, before Thursday, that there was a mark on the original which wasn't on the copy?"

Moon didn't answer. He picked up his folder. He had gone the colour of putty.

"Someone told you," Baek went on, in the mild voice of a woman reading the weather. "Someone told you there was something in the margin. Before the copy was even made." She opened the door. "I'd go and find out who. Quickly. Before I do."

He went. The door swung shut behind him with a squeak.

Priya let out a breath that went on for a very long time. Mr. Jeong sat down and began to put his seal back in its pouch, one piece at a time, with hands that trembled only a little.

"Thirty-one years," he said, to nobody. "Nobody ever asked me about Section Eleven."

Baek watched him from across the table, and a small, tired smile moved across her face. "Mr. Jeong, I'd like to offer you a job. Unpaid. Teaching the recruits."

"I'd be honoured."

"It was a joke."

"I know," said Mr. Jeong, "and I'd still be honoured."

They went out into the grey morning, the three of them, through the lobby with its fish-market smell and its rack of leaflets. Priya walked between them, her boots echoing. At the glass doors she stopped, turned to Mr. Jeong, and without a word bowed from the waist, deeply, in the way that is not taught to foreign visitors but that she had evidently learned by watching. Mr. Jeong looked appalled. Then he straightened his cardigan.

"Go and survey something," he said gruffly.

Outside, a car was waiting at the kerb. It was a long black hatchback with tinted windows and a small blue pennant on the aerial, a wave on a white field, and as they came down the steps, the back window slid down and a head popped out, followed by a hand holding a phone at selfie angle.

"Hey, Zero!" said Min Do-yoon. The ring light must have been a habit; his face seemed lit from within. "Dad says you're early. He says come now. He's *so* excited. He's never been this excited about a document before."

He waved. In the back seat, behind him, Seon-ho caught a glimpse of an older man's pale, patient eyes.

"It's not even ten," said Seon-ho.

"I know," said Do-yoon happily. "That's why he sent a car."