The investigator did not give Bram the comfort of saying the shift log was wrong.
She had compared it with a support worker’s record, the timing at the outer post, and a dispatch acknowledgment that had been filed under the reused code series. The passage had not remained wholly open. It had not become wholly inaccessible at the moment Bram first described either.
There had been an interval.
Long enough that the abandoned hunter might still have been reachable. Not proof a rescue would have succeeded. Proof that Bram’s first account had made the chance appear smaller than the records supported.
He kept his eyes on the diagram while she spoke.
The sister sat in the same place beneath the window. Today she had brought another relative, a younger man who looked at Bram with a fixed, exhausted attention. Bram did not try to identify what judgment the look contained. He had enough to answer without inventing the private thoughts of people he had hurt.
“Do you accept the correction?” the tribunal member asked.
“Yes.”
