The council signed the harbour lease on a Thursday afternoon, in a committee room with the public gallery empty and the minutes taken by a clerk who had been in the job eleven days.
Nobody on the committee had read the appendix. It ran to two hundred pages and it had arrived by email at ten past nine that morning, which is a fact that will matter a great deal in about four years.
What follows is a reconstruction of how the deal was made, drawn from twelve interviews, four freedom of information requests and the appendix nobody read.
Three of the eleven members had been briefed privately the week before. The fourth asked, twice, for the valuation the rent had been drawn from, and was told it would follow. It followed in March, after the signing, and it valued the site at four times what the council had accepted.
The clerk recorded the vote as unanimous. It was not — one member abstained and said so aloud — and the correction was made eleven months later, in a footnote to a set of minutes nobody was ever going to read twice.