Contrary to the private murmurs exchanged within the halls of Trinity House, Cotter was not a desperate man. He was not some fragile vessel hastily assigned to an inconvenient vacancy and left to endure its toll. Once admired among his Jesuit peers — not for any natural charisma, which he lacked entirely — Cotter had built his reputation upon the discipline with which he approached questions of the divine. He was a meticulous teacher of ecclesiastical Latin, a modest if earnest amateur astronomer, and the author of several obscure theological essays that suggested, controversially, that time itself was a covenant: a grace-imparted structure, vulnerable to rupture should that grace be withdrawn.

[…]Vice-Admiral Harrow, for his part, did not settle for a tidy letter and an unsigned report. He launched a private inquiry, and when courtesy was no longer enough, he hired counsel. The solicitor he engaged - one William Rothbridge of Lincoln’s Inn - possessed both a seasoned grasp of maritime law and a sharp eye for procedural fissures. What he unearthed, slowly and with no small resistance, was not a single clerical omission but a pattern - deliberate, buried, and troubling. There had indeed been a keeper stationed before Harrow: a man named Finnegan Gray, whose service record had been sealed without explanation. The final volume of his log was missing from the archives, and in its place, pencilled faintly beside his name in a quarterly ledger, appeared just two words - post suspended.

Somewhere beyond the mist, the ship continued on, sails full, course steady. If they had seen the signal - and they must have seen it - they did not respond. The blink pattern from Grimleigh had been deliberate: long-short-short, a textbook salute. But what reached the vessel’s deck may not have matched what left the lens.

Later, when Admiralty logs were reviewed, that same ship - the Freja, registry Copenhagen - recorded a different pattern entirely. Four short flashes, followed by a long pause. A code not used since the days of semaphore. Translated, it meant only one thing:

Do not approach.

But Harrow had written no such warning.

The Board at Trinity House received the report with due concern, though not, perhaps, with due haste. A formal inquiry was drafted, then postponed. A replacement was suggested, then declined. The Admiralty, already uneasy about growing merchant traffic along the Danish corridor, applied pressure: the route was too important to leave unwatched, even for a fortnight. But volunteers were not forthcoming. The story of Gray’s disappearance, cloaked in rumour, embroidered by sailors with each retelling, did not lend itself to eager successors. Men at sea are a superstitious breed, and the idea of a station lit but uninhabited, burning through storms with no hand at the helm, unsettled more than it intrigued.

It was through informal correspondence, perhaps passed along a naval quartermaster’s desk or mentioned in one of Portsmouth’s quieter drawing rooms, that the vacancy came to the attention of one Mr Nathaniel Harrow. He had not been looking for employment, but for something altogether rarer: an opportunity to observe, uninterrupted and unrestrained.

Grimleigh Rock was scarcely more than a splinter jutting from the North Sea - one hundred and twelve yards at its widest, covered in lichen and sea-battered stone. The lighthouse stood at its highest point, squat and wind-scoured, surrounded by little more than iron grating, gull droppings, and the perpetual hum of waves gnawing at the base.

[…]

The following entries are transcribed from a lighthouse logbook recovered during a routine inspection in June 1852. The final dated entry is from mid-May. The lantern was still lit. No keeper came to meet the boat.