“A draft,” Gideon said. “Circulated for comment.”
“You weren’t employed on the twelfth of March.”
“Consultants are engaged before appointments are announced.”
The transfer note next: two pallets of oak flooring and a cage of cordless tools signed out of Ashfield at twenty to seven on the Wednesday morning, consigned to Wrexham, authorised in his hand.
“Transfers happen every week.”
The visitor book last, the photograph passed down the table. “You told this board you had never set foot in Ashfield.”
He looked at it. “I toured the estate in March. As a candidate. That’s diligence, not fraud.”
“Then who took the count?” I said. “Because the count is dated the Monday, the pallets left on the Wednesday, and the variance was run on the Friday from the Monday sheet. There was no second count. There was no loss. There was a hole in a stockroom that somebody made with a docket and a pen.”
Rosalind said, “Lena.”
Lena opened her ledger, and I understood that she had been waiting to be asked in a room with minutes in it.
“The schedule came to me on the twelfth of March at 6.52 in the evening,” she said. “From him. With a note asking me to hold it until the appointment was announced. I held it.” She looked at Marek’s empty chair, which someone had left at the table. “I told myself I was protecting my package. I’ve been protecting it since March and it’s cost a man his job. There was no variance. I rolled one count forward and typed what the sheet gave me, and I did it because I was told the Ashfield count was wrong.”
Gideon started to say something about instructions from the trust, and Rosalind cut across him. “Don’t.”
“You wanted six branches closed.”
“I wanted six branches closed. I did not want a theft, a suspension and a page with your initial on it written before you had a contract to sign.”
They asked us to wait in the corridor. At ten past four the solicitor called me back in and read the resolution standing up, which is how you know it is serious. Gideon Marsh was dismissed for gross misconduct that afternoon. His consultancy fee and his completion bonus were withheld. The inventory report was going to the auditors and to the police. No reference. His professional body notified. Rosalind vacated the chair and lost her vote on the trust, and kept her shares, because shares are not a moral instrument.
Gideon came back in to collect his folder while I was still standing there. He stopped at my chair.
“You’d have signed it,” he said.
“I know,” I said. Which was the truest thing I said all day.
“I picked you off an org chart,” he said. “Eleven years, no complaints, no appetite for a fight. I was wrong about the last part.” He put his folder under his arm the way he had on the train, and he didn’t look back.
They offered me the interim post before I left the room. I took it on two conditions, and I made the trustees repeat them so they’d be in the minutes. Marek reinstated on the Monday with his pension intact and the suspension letter removed from his file. And every closure through a full staff consultation, sixty days, figures given to the staff before the press got them.
Then I signed four of the six myself. Barrow and Ashfield I kept, because Barrow’s lease could be renegotiated and Ashfield was making money, and because I had walked both of them.
Marek was back behind the trade counter on the Monday morning with his keys and his kettle. Lena took her redundancy in July with a card and no leaving do and a handshake in the car park that lasted slightly too long. The auditors closed the inventory report in September. Ashfield’s shutters went up at eight every morning through all of it.
On the 7:40 last Thursday I had one coffee in my hand and no tray. Somewhere under the tunnel I opened my banking app and sent forty pounds to the Ashfield staff hardship fund, the same forty I once offered a stranger for a coat, and I put the phone away before the light came back.
The stained page is in the bottom drawer of my new desk, under the leases. It still smells faintly of coffee when the radiator is on. I turn the key the way Marek taught me, a quarter turn and a push.
