“Then read the margin.”
“I’m not going to sit here and read biro.” She got up and closed the door, and when she turned round her face had stopped performing. “I’ll say this once. If you take that page round this building and tell people the new chief executive wrote a closure schedule before we had even interviewed him, you will be finished here. Not because it’s a lie. Because nobody in this building will thank you for it, and I won’t be able to help you.”
“You could help me by looking at the date.”
She had the handset at her ear before I reached the corridor. When I turned at the lifts, she put it down.
That was the second thing I got wrong.
The board review was still set for Friday. I went back to my desk and told myself that sloppy is not the same as wicked, that finance reuses templates, that a woman who has run figures for twenty years can still be careless with a footer. I told myself that four or five times that week, and each time it got less convincing.
The managers were called in again that week, in the small boardroom with the blinds down. Gideon had one sheet in front of him and a cup of the machine coffee going cold at his elbow. He said he wanted to deal with a housekeeping matter, and then he read out the numbers.
Thirty-eight thousand pounds of stock unaccounted for at Ashfield in the week ending the twenty-second. Two pallets of oak flooring. A cage of cordless tools. Copper fittings, a lot of them. He read it like a shopping list, without any heat in it.
“The count for that week was signed off at branch level,” he said. “By the manager.”
Marek was on speakerphone. I could hear his chair, and a kettle going in the background, and I knew that kettle. It’s the one in the Ashfield stock office, and it only boils if you hold the switch down.
“I was away that week,” Marek said. The little grey speaker made him smaller than he is. “First week I’ve taken since my sister’s operation. You signed the leave yourself.”
“I did. Which is why this is a suspension and not a dismissal.” Gideon looked round the table at the managers, who were all looking at their hands. “Marek Dvorsky is suspended pending investigation. The branch’s stock files come to head office today. Friday’s review waits until the numbers are clean.”
“Whose numbers?” I said.
“Ours, Priya. The company’s.”
“The count sheet would have been signed by whoever covered his shifts. I want to see it.”
“Internal audit has it.”
“I’d like it today.”
“You’ll see it when I’ve seen it.” He straightened his sheet against the table. “Nobody in this region discusses Ashfield’s figures outside this room. That includes the branch.”
The files left in a grey crate at four o’clock. I watched it go down in the lift from the window at the end of the corridor, and it occurred to me that a stock count is a piece of paper, and a piece of paper in a crate is a thing somebody has decided you should not read.
Marek was in the car park when I came down, standing by the bins with his hands in his pockets, because reception had been told not to sign him in.
“They took the stock sheets,” he said.
“I know.”
“Did they take the drawer?”
“What drawer?”
He looked at me then, properly, and I understood that he had been waiting since that first night for me to ask him something, and I had not called. He took his keys out and put them in my hand. The fob was worn smooth.
“Stock office. Behind the trade counter, bottom drawer, the transfers. If they’ve taken the counts, the transfers will still be there. Nobody thinks a transfer is interesting.”
I let myself into Ashfield at ten past nine that night. The shutters were down, the aisles were dark, and my footsteps went to the back of the store and came back to me off the racking.
The stock office is the size of a cupboard. One strip light, one tube flickering, a kettle, and a filing cabinet with a dent in the top where somebody once dropped a box of tiles.
The bottom drawer was transfers, filed by branch, two years of them. Wrexham was near the back.
