The Books He Kept

Nobody had told Kate Meacher that the man whose books she was being sent to straighten would decide, before she had so much as taken her coat off, which side of the desk she was going to sit on.

Graham Tolley gave her five minutes, which was four more than he gave most things on a Monday.

He did it standing up, at the window of his office on the first floor of Tolley & Hext, with the market square grey and empty below him and the cross wet from the night. He had the Selwood's file under one arm, and he held it out to her without letting go of it for a moment, the way a man holds out something he would rather someone else had inherited.

"Dennis's," he said. "One of the old ones. Filleted accounts, balance sheet only, filed on time every year for as long as anyone can remember. Dennis did them himself and never let anybody else near them."

"And now Dennis is in Tenby."

"And now Dennis is in Tenby." He let go of the file. "I don't like the balance sheet, Kate. I can't tell you why in a way I'd put in a letter. It's too tidy at the top and it's doing something at the bottom I can't follow without the books, and the books are on Sheep Street."

She opened it where she stood. Four pages of figures in Dennis Hext's careful old layout, the font a size too large, the totals ruled off twice. She did not read it properly. She read the shape of it, the way she read the shape of any set of accounts before she let herself look at a single number, and Graham was right. It was too tidy at the top.

"How long?"

"Three months. He's agreed to three months, and he's paying for three months, so it's three months." Graham took his glasses off and looked at them as if they might have an opinion. "Be tactful. He's a Selwood."

"What does that mean?"

"It means his grandfather put the name over that door in 1931 and half this town has bought a padlock from one of them. It means don't make him feel audited."

"He's being audited."

"He's having his books straightened," Graham said, "by a bright young woman from his accountants, who will be very polite." He put his glasses back on. "Off you go."

She was thirty-five, and nobody had called her a bright young woman in about nine years. She let it go. It was Monday, and she had a file.

Sheep Street climbed off the far corner of the square, narrow and steep enough that the pavement went in shallow steps outside the older houses. Half of it was flats over shops that had stopped being shops. Selwood's was a third of the way up on the left and it was the only frontage on the street that looked as though somebody painted it every spring. Three storeys of Georgian brick, sash windows in their proper proportions, and over the door, in gilt on black, the name. Galvanised buckets hung on hooks either side of the doorway, and a stand of yard brooms leaned against the window where a less careful shop would have stood a sandwich board.

She stood across the road for a minute with her bag on her shoulder and looked at it, because she liked to see a place before it saw her.

The door had a bell on a spring. Inside, the shop smelled of paraffin and oiled steel and, faintly, of whatever polish had gone onto the long mahogany counter for the last ninety years. The wall behind it was drawers from floor to ceiling, small square mahogany drawers with brass label-holders, each label handwritten. Coach bolts M8. Brass cup hooks. Panel pins 20mm. There was a set of scales on the counter, the old kind with a pan, and a scoop beside it. At the back of the shop, under a strip light, stood an old electric paraffin pump with a brass nozzle, and beside it a key-cutting machine with a woman in a brown shop coat bent over it, cropped white hair and half-moon glasses, three pens in her top pocket, cutting a Yale with the absolute concentration of somebody who had done it forty thousand times and still did not trust it.

Beyond her an arch opened through to a second counter and, past that, a yard. The trade counter, Kate thought. Where the money was, if there was any.

A man was standing in the arch with his back to her, talking to a boy.

"Take the long ladder, not the short one," he said. "The short one's split at the fourth rung and I've not had it out yet. If Stuart's had the van in front of the gate, ask him to move it. Don't climb round it."

"Right," the boy said, and went, without a word of argument, through the back and out into the yard. He could not have been more than nineteen. He went quickly and without looking put-upon, which in Kate's experience was not what nineteen-year-olds did when a man in a tie told them which ladder to carry.

She thought about that while the man turned round.

He was not tall. Five foot nine, she guessed, and broad with it, heavy through the chest and shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with a gym, the brown shop coat buttoned over a white shirt and a dark tie. His hair had gone grey-white all over and he kept it cropped close. A pair of reading glasses hung on his chest on what looked like a length of bootlace. He saw her, and his face did nothing very much, and then he came forward with his hand already out.

"Miss Meacher. Graham rang." He had a low voice, Marlcaster in its vowels. "Raymond Selwood."

"Kate."

"Kate." His hand was dry and hard, and on the back of it, as he took it away, she saw an old white scar about the size of a thumbprint. "You'll want a coffee before you want anything else. Pauline, is the kettle on upstairs?"

"It's always on upstairs," the woman at the key machine said, without looking up.

"Then it's on." He held his arm out towards a door at the side of the shop. "This way. Mind the second step, it's lower than the others and it catches everyone the first week."

It did catch her. She had been told and it caught her anyway, a quarter-inch drop that her foot did not believe in, and she put her hand to the wall. He was two steps above and he did not turn round or say anything. She liked him for that.

The staircase went up between panelled walls to a half-landing with a small window over the yard. On the half-landing, set into the panelling, was a cupboard door, painted the same cream as the walls, with a brass escutcheon and no key in it. She noticed it because she noticed doors. He went past it without a glance.

"Front office," he said, at the top, and opened the door.

It was the best room in the building. She knew that before she was through the doorway. Two tall sash windows faced out over Sheep Street, their shutters folded back into the reveals, and the February light came in flat and clean across a partners' desk the size of a dining table — dark wood, a green leather top worn pale at the edges, drawers on both sides. A green-shaded brass lamp stood at one end of it. The fireplace had been boarded and a radiator put in front of it, and the radiator was on. Someone had dusted that morning. Someone had squared the blotter.

On the desk, stacked and edged as neatly as a deck of cards, were the ledgers.

"Last year and the year before," Raymond said. "Nominal, sales ledger, purchase ledger. The bank statements are in the box files on the shelf. Day books go back as far as you like — they're on the bottom shelf, by year, and Pauline knows where any you can't find have got to." He went to the lamp and switched it on, though it was barely nine and not yet needed. "Keep that on. This side of the street loses the sun by three, and you'll not notice till your eyes ache."

"Thank you."

"Sit on the left of the desk, not the right. The right-hand drawers stick when the heating's on. I've been meaning to have them planed." He looked at the chair on the left side as though to make sure it was still there. "The kettle's on the landing, back of the stairs. Lavatory's on the second floor. My office is behind this one, through that door, and I'm in it before ten and after four. In between I'm on the floor. If you need anything, send up for it or come down and ask. If you want a key cut for the front, Pauline will do it, and you're to let her."

She found she had put her bag on the left side of the desk. She had not decided to; she had done it while he was explaining about the drawers. She noted that, the way she would have noted a figure that sat oddly in a column, and set it aside for later.

"That's very generous, Mr Selwood."

"Raymond. It's a good room. There's no point a good room standing empty." He paused at the door. "Dennis used to work in here twice a year. He said it was the only office in Marlcaster where you could think."

"Did he do the books here?"

"He did the accounts here. I do the books." He said it pleasantly, and it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, and it closed something. "I'll have Pauline bring the coffee up."

He went, and shut the door behind him, and she heard him go down the stairs, missing out the second step.

She worked the way she always worked, which was from the outside in.

She took off her coat and hung it on the back of the door, pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up her forearms, turned her watch round so the face lay against the inside of her wrist where it would not knock on the leather, and put her glasses on. She did not open a single ledger for the first hour. She took them off the stack one at a time and looked at their spines and their condition and who had written in them. She lined up the bank statements against the bank account in the nominal ledger, month by month, without reading anything in between. She made a list of what was there.

It was handwritten. All of it. In an age when every builders' merchant in the county had a till that talked to a server in Leeds, Selwood's kept its books in ink, in ledgers bought from a stationer's that had possibly closed, and kept them well. Two hands for the most part: a small upright one in the sales ledger that she guessed was Pauline's, and in the nominal a larger, rounder, heavier hand that pressed hard enough on the down-strokes to emboss the page behind. His. It was a good hand. It made sevens with a bar through them.

Pauline brought up the coffee at half past nine, in a mug with a hardware wholesaler's name worn half off it, and put it down on a coaster on the right side of the desk, and looked at Kate sitting on the left, and said nothing about it at all.

"Thank you."

"There's sugar on the landing if you take it." Pauline looked at the stack, and at the bank statements laid out in their twelve neat columns across the leather. Something moved in her face and was put away. "He's left you the good lamp."

"Is there a bad one?"

"There's his," Pauline said, and went.

By eleven Kate had the last two years in her head. They were in order. They were, in fact, very good: the sales ledger agreed with the control account, the bank reconciled to the penny every month, the VAT was right. She drank the coffee cold and was annoyed with it, and went to the bottom shelf.

The day books ran back in fat buckram volumes, one a year, labelled on the spine in the same heavy hand. Purchases and sales, year on year, all the way back to well before she had qualified. She took down a few at random and they were the same as the others. Somebody had looked after them.

Then she went along the shelf for the cash books, which were not on the desk, and found them on the end, the same buckram, the same hand on the spines.

She read the dates on them, and then stood with one hand on the shelf and read them again. Purchase day books: back as far as she liked, right up to last year. Sales day books: the same. Cash books: back as far as she liked, and then, six years ago, they stopped. Nothing after. Not on the shelf and not on the desk. At the end of the row the dust had not settled the same way, a hand's width of plain painted wood with a slightly cleaner edge to it, as if something had stood there until not very long ago.

Six years. Six years of cash books, the record of every pound that had gone in and out of the business, and nobody — not Graham, not Dennis's file, not the man downstairs with his good room and his good lamp and his instructions about the drawers — had mentioned it.

She sat back down.

Down on Sheep Street a van went past in second gear. Somewhere below her the bell on the shop door went, and went again, and she heard his voice, not the words, steady and unhurried, telling somebody something and, she was quite sure, telling them why. Through the floor she could feel the shop going about its business, the drawers opening, the scales settling, the long, careful, ninety-year working of it.

He had given her everything she could possibly need. He had given it to her before she asked, with the reasons attached, and he had been so entirely courteous about it that it had taken her until twenty past one to see that he had also decided, without saying a word, exactly what she was going to be allowed to look at.

It was not, she thought, that he had lied to her. He had not told her anything at all.

She did not feel angry. She felt the thing she felt perhaps twice a year, on a job that was going to be worth doing, which was very much like the first length in cold water: a shock, and then her whole body coming awake to it.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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