Page 28 of The Murder of Thomas Cardwell
Stokes was the least familiar with ledger-keeping, so they installed him at the desk to, with a pencil, mark off each ledger as the others called out the clients’ names. Barnaby, Penelope, and Jordan divided the shelves into three sections and started working through them, pulling out the ledgers, checking the name inside the front cover, and calling it out to Stokes before reshelving that ledger and moving on to the next.
As Penelope was so short, she and Barnaby reorganized their allotted area so that Barnaby did the top two shelves over both sections, while she worked through the lower shelves.
As the minutes ticked by, the three worked their way steadily around the office.
Finally, after nearly half an hour, Jordan called out the name of the last set of three ledgers, and Stokes grunted. “That’s it.” He tossed down the pencil and slumped back in the chair. “It appears all the ledgers are still here.”
Penelope dropped into the chair facing the desk. “I suppose it would have been too easy to find that one set of accounts had gone missing.”
Stokes frowned at the list with its column of neat ticks. “Perhaps that means the revealing information Thomas found is not, in fact, in any ledger here.”
“Or”—Barnaby leaned on the back of Penelope’s chair—“that whoever killed Thomas didn’t realize it was something reflected in the business’s accounts that alerted Thomas to the nefarious activities.”
“I still think,” Jordan said, halting at one end of the desk and surveying the shelves, “that the financial ledgers remain the most likely source of information about nefarious activities that would have fallen into Thomas’s lap.”
Stokes pulled a face. “As much as I would like to point to some other source, I can’t.” He cast an uninspired glance at the shelves. “I believe that means we have to hunt through all the ledgers here until we happen upon whatever it was that signaled ‘nefarious activities’ to Thomas.”
Jordan looked at Stokes, then smiled commiseratingly. “I’ll show you a quick way of finding any anomaly in a set of financial accounts.”
Stokes sighed. “I suppose you can try.”
Penelope, Barnaby, and even Stokes listened as Jordan demonstrated which columns were critical and what to look for.
“We only need to look back over the past six months,” Jordan explained, “and if you see any strangely large payments beingmade or received, bring the ledger to me, and I’ll examine it in more detail.” He went to the shelves, pulled a ledger at random, and opened it. “For instance, this business is a bookshop. If we look down their income column, you can see the daily sums coming in are of a level that aligns with purchases of books. If you look at the expenses, you can see regular but much larger payments made to various publishers.” Jordan paused and looked at the others. “If you came across a large sum, either incoming or outgoing, for say, bakery goods or ironwork or leather work or something that doesn’t fit with running a bookshop, that’s worth further examination.”
He glanced at the ledger in his hands. “This ledger is boringly straightforward. Nothing nefarious going on at Coulter’s Books.”
“That’s easy enough.” Penelope bustled to the nearest shelf and started at the end of one row.
Jordan returned the Coulter ledger to the shelf and drew out the next.
Barnaby and Stokes shared a look. Neither was all that fond of scanning figures. Nevertheless, after they both grimaced, they walked to the shelves and took up the task.
Within fifteen minutes, it was apparent that Penelope and Jordan between them were checking and eliminating three times as many ledgers as Barnaby and Stokes.
Finally, Stokes put back the ledger he’d ploddingly checked, hesitated, then turned to the others. To Penelope and Jordan, he said, “You two are better suited to examining the ledgers than Barnaby and me.”
“Aside from all else,” Barnaby said, also replacing a ledger, “you’re both confident of what you’re looking for. We”—he met Stokes’s gaze—“aren’t.”
“Exactly,” Stokes said. “A better use of my and Barnaby’s time would be to hunt for further sightings of our unknown man.”
Barnaby nodded. “The likely murderer.” He looked at Penelope. “I’m going to find one of the lads and put out an alert through the network. It’s possible they might have some useful fact to share.”
“An excellent idea,” Penelope said.
Puzzled, Jordan asked, “Network?”
Barnaby smiled and described the web of boys and youths they’d started labeling the Lads’ Network. “All of them are out and about, virtually every day, and they cover most of the City and the surrounding areas, like Mayfair, Euston, the docks and warehouses, and so on.”
“And they’re remarkably observant,” Stokes put in.
Penelope nodded. “They notice everything that’s going on around them far more than adults do.”
“That’s…intriguing.” Jordan’s expression mirrored his words. “A novel idea and one I might well steal.”
Barnaby grinned. “Feel free. For now, however…” He stepped back and waved Stokes to the door. “We’ll leave you two to the ledgers while we search in wider fields.”
“We’ll return in an hour or so.” Stokes saluted Penelope and Jordan and made for the door.
