The inquiry began without announcement.
No notices were posted. No sessions scheduled publicly. Questions were asked in offices, corridors, and storage rooms, one at a time, by men who carried neither ledgers nor seals.
They did not take notes openly.
The first to be questioned were clerks.
Not the senior ones.Those whose handwriting appeared most often in the margins.
They were asked about process.
"How did you determine deviation?""What reference did you use?""Why was this adjustment accepted?"
The answers were consistent.
"I followed the record.""It matched prior handling.""There was precedent."
None of that satisfied the men asking.
By midweek, guards were included.
They were asked similar questions.
"When did you allow passage?""Who instructed you?""What did you observe?"
The guards answered carefully.
"I checked the notice.""I followed procedure.""It was recorded."
The men asking wrote nothing down.
He was not questioned.
Not yet.
A pattern formed anyway.
Not in the answers.In what was ignored.
No one asked why the markers had been placed where they were.No one asked who had approved the first exception.No one asked why failures continued outside restricted routes.
Those questions did not appear on the prepared sheets.
At the records hall, a summary was drafted.
It avoided dates.It avoided names.
It described errors of handling rather than decisions.
The language was careful.
Reassuring.
A recommendation followed.
Clarify guidance.Centralize authorization.Reduce discretionary judgment.
The measures were framed as support.
He felt the inquiry in the way his work changed.
Requests returned unsigned.Decisions deferred upward.Instructions rewritten to remove choice.
Nothing moved faster.
At the infirmary, linen shortages worsened.
Cloth that should have been discarded was washed and reused again. The practice was noted, flagged, then allowed to continue under supervision.
A patient developed infection.
Then another.
The cases were recorded separately.
No link was made.
On the fifth day, a porter was dismissed.
No charge was listed.
The note read only: failure to adhere to clarified guidance.
The porter did not argue.
He collected his things and left through the eastern gate, passing beneath markers that no longer required explanation.
That evening, the inspector from the Crown reviewed the inquiry's progress.
"The problem is interpretation," he said.
No one disagreed.
"We must remove ambiguity," he continued.
Heads inclined.
The inquiry concluded the next morning.
Not with findings.
With alignment.
A directive was issued shortly after.
All deviations required confirmation.All confirmations required review.All reviews required documentation.
The process was clean.
Orderly.
Impossible to question.
He read the directive once and placed it with the others.
The ground beneath his feet remained still.
There was no warning.
No correction.
Only the quiet certainty that the system had found its answer.
And it was not him.