"I did," Alfred answered. He was still a bit annoyed to be recounting details he'd already given to someone else (because surely he must have said at least that when he was explaining the situation, or else why would they even have taken it in the first place?) but was relieved to at least see that they were putting the whole two-minutes-of-silence-before-a-question thing behind them. He could handle repeating the same thing, he supposed, as long as he wasn't waiting around to deliver the story in one-sentence-per-three-minute fragments.

"That's my knife that's in it — or was in it when I brought it in," he said with a shrug, not sure if the current state of the chest had changed in the last month. Presumably they'd done something with it. "I'd just started to get the lid off when it started — doing that thing," he said vaguely, not sure how to describe exactly what had happened on the ship. "So I stopped and we turned around and headed back to London. We tried to open it as soon as we found it," he explained. He paused, considering himself done with his story, but then had an inkling that maybe the Ministry folks would think that he had done something wrong in opening it when (or how) he had, even if he hadn't managed to get the lid entirely off. To that end, he added a tad defensively, "A captain needs to know what's onboard his ship."