Chapter 12: Vasken's Dossiers — A Case File for Every Passenger

The knock came at seven forty-one in the morning — three beats, precise and unhurried, the knock of someone who has decided something.

Blackwell delivered it himself. He did not ask Marek to come with him, though the conductor was technically the relevant authority on this train in the absence of any other. He simply walked to berth fourteen, checked the number against what he had noted in his first hour aboard, and knocked.

Silence. Then the sound of something being set down deliberately on a hard surface.