the police that night either. She would do what she had always done when a stone did not test clean: she would gather more evidence, carefully, and she would check every figure before she spoke, because an accusation made without proof was worse than no accusation at all, and because the people who would be hurt by a false step were not only Hugh.
The next morning she went back to the shop's records with fresh eyes. She pulled the appraisal files, which she had not yet examined closely, and she went through them one by one. Aster and Grey offered insurance appraisals, a service for which customers paid between one hundred and fifty and four hundred dollars, depending on the piece. The procedure, as written in the operations manual, was clear: the appraisal was to be prepared by a qualified appraiser, filed with the shop's records, and a copy given to the customer, with the filing recorded in a separate log. Octavia found the forms, dozens of them, each with a customer's name, a description of a piece, and a fee marked as paid. What she did not find, for a large number of them, was any corresponding filing. She checked the filing log, and she checked the filing cabinet, and she checked the digital folder where the Carrows had told her the appraisals were stored. For twenty-nine appraisals over two years, there was a form and a fee and nothing else: no filed document, no copy on record, no entry in the log. The fees on those forms added to twelve thousand six hundred dollars. The customers had paid for a service they had not received, and the money, so far as she could tell from the shop's accounts, had not gone into the shop's revenue at all. It had gone, like the payments marked W, somewhere it should not have gone. She copied the figures into her own notebook, in her own hand, and she noted the names and dates, and she did not yet allow herself to name what she was looking at, because naming it too early would make her careless, and carelessness was the one thing she could not afford.
She also noticed something else in the records that morning, something smaller and quieter, and it stayed with her. The schedule for the coming week, which Hugh had posted on the office wall, showed Tamsin Kirkland's hours cut nearly in half. Tamsin had been working five days a week. The new schedule gave her two, and both were the slowest shifts, the ones when the shop was quietest and the commission was thinnest. There was no note explaining the change, and no complaint in Tamsin's file that would justify it. Octavia looked at the schedule for a long time, and she thought about the Tuesday visit again, about the young woman who had shown her a pendant with care, and she understood, without needing anyone to tell her, that the cut was a punishment for kindness, or at least for disobedience, for serving a customer Hugh had decided was not worth serving. It was a small cruelty, as cruelties in workplaces often are, done with a schedule instead of a word, and it told Octavia something important about the man she was about to confront: that he did not only steal, he also made sure that anyone who did not steal with him, or who did not obey his judgments about people, paid for it in hours.
On Wednesday morning Octavia arrived at the shop an hour before it opened. She let herself in with her key, and she waited in the back office, with the notebook and her own figures in a folder on the desk, until she heard the front door open and Tamsin Kirkland's footsteps on the carpet. Tamsin came in through the back, carrying a tote bag and a paper cup of coffee, and she stopped when she saw Octavia standing in the office doorway, because Octavia was not supposed to be there, and because the office was Hugh's territory in the mornings, and because a stranger standing in it was a thing that required an explanation.