After Hours
The tower door isn’t locked — nothing in Blackwater Cove locks its doors, you’ve noticed. Past midnight, by torchlight, the clock mechanism is easier to read than it was in daylight: the whole gear train is built around a single loose brass disc, wedged deliberately between two teeth so the hour hand drags backward instead of forward.
It’s the same token-shape you saw on the hands themselves, but this one isn’t fixed to the mechanism — it’s been forced in, recently, and it comes free in your palm with a little effort. It’s warm, though the tower is cold, and it’s stamped on the reverse with a single word in a shipping-line hand you recognise from the harbourmaster’s tide tables: Nightjar.
Whatever this token buys the town, someone jammed the clock to stop it being spent. You suspect you know who, and you suspect you know why he stopped answering his own logbook.
What do you do?