They were small numbers, twenty pounds one day, ten pounds on another but not two days in a row. He continued to look back at the sheets. Each monthly tally showed a set of figures that matched, and the monthly profit and loss statement hid the missing money, but the daily tallies, where the goods sold ought to match the money taken for them, had holes in. One could put them down to the person on the till accidentally handing over the wrong change, but there were too many instances for that, and it was all exact numbers.
Now that he’d identified what looked like petty theft - someone taking notes from the till - Albert had to consider what it meant and if it had anything to do with Joel Clement’s murder.
‘Dad!’
Snapped back to reality, Albert realised Selina had been talking and probably asking him questions, but he hadn’t spoken in over a minute. ‘Sorry, sweetheart, I zoned out there for a moment, didn’t I? I should probably get an early night. All the excitement recently has left me feeling tired.’ He faked a yawn, making it audible as part of his act.
Selina sounded a little worried when she replied, ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Dad? You can come home any time you want. I will come and get you. Or one of the boys will. It’s no bother.’
They were still trying to get him to cancel or cut short his trip. They all worried for no good reason. It made him want to fast forward their lives so they could be nearly eighty too. Maybe then they would see that scoring a few years didn’t make a person decrepit.
‘I’m fine, sweetheart,’ he assured her, believing wholeheartedly that it was true. ‘I’m having fun and so is Rex. You’ve nothing to worry about.’
‘Dad, you keep getting mixed up in murder cases. Randall got hurt in Bakewell and I had to come there with Gary to help you out.’
Albert chuckled, ‘Yeah. That was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?’
‘No, Dad. It was dangerous. You could have been hurt. Randall was hurt.’
‘It all ended well enough,’ Albert grumbled, beginning to feel a little put upon.
Relenting, Selina said, ‘Okay, Dad. Look I’ve got to go. I can hear one of the kids moving about upstairs which probably means they are about to throw up again. Just take care of yourself, okay?’
‘Of course, love.’ The call ended, but he’d been looking at the lines of numbers the whole time and there was no doubt someone had been taking money.
He pulled open the drawer in the desk to see if there was anything in it of interest. A notebook with some annotations would be nice, he thought as he leafed through the clutter. Perhaps he needed to speak with April. She didn’t portray herself as someone a person might wish to interview, but she clearly thought she knew something, and he needed to know what it was.
Victor reappeared in the doorway. He was perspiring slightly from the effort of getting the café cleaned to an acceptable standard as swiftly as possible. ‘Find anything?’ he asked.
Albert took a few moments to point out the small discrepancies, indicating each line and figure with a finger and then hypothesising about the notes being taken from the till as one way in which the money might have gone missing.
Victor skewed his face to the side in thought. ‘Kate would have noticed that, wouldn’t she?’ he asked it as a question, but Albert thought the man already knew the answer.
‘They would have stood out,’ he replied quietly. ‘Any accountant would have seen them.’
Victor was shaking his head, accepting what he could see but refusing to believe it anyway. ‘There’s no way Kate was stealing from the business. No way. Just like there’s no way she killed Joel.’
‘Well then. I guess we should ask her about it.’
‘We can do that?’ asked Victor. ‘I didn’t think they would let me near her.’
Albert tipped his chair back. ‘At the station? No, they won’t. Not without very good reason. They will let her make a phone call though. We just have to get a message to her, so she calls us.’ In his head, Albert was thinking about his two sons and wondering which he could use to get a message to Kate Harris. He had a short list of questions he wanted answers to and the only way to get them, unless DS Craig felt like sharing, which he highly doubted, was to have Randall or Gary go through a back door.
‘Can we do that now?’ asked Victor.
Albert glanced at the clock on the computer and shook his head. ‘Unlikely, I will need to set that up.’ In truth, Victor could go to the station and have a message to call him passed on. They would probably do it, but Albert wanted to be involved and this way was more likely to yield a result.
Hanging his head, Victor released a breath as if he’d been holding it. ‘Poor Kate.’ At the sound of his human’s name, Hans looked up, making eye contact with Victor.
