Chapter 23: The Ledger

I didn't open the gate.

I reached over it and took the box.

It was heavier than it looked. Inside, under a folded tea towel, was a book bound in red leather, as thick as a family Bible.

"Why?" I said.

Duncan looked past me, down the hill, at the lit windows of the chapel hall.

"The elders gave me a month to bring the pups' fund back. So I drove to Harrow Fell and asked him for it."

"And he laughed."

"He poured me a whisky. He called me son. He said the money was working hard in Cornwall and I should be proud of it."

His hand pressed harder on his ribs.

"Then his phone rang, and he went out to take it. The book was open on his desk. I saw the lake on the first page I looked at."

"So you took it."

"I put it under my coat and walked out to the car. I've not stopped since, except to charge my phone."

Behind me the hall door opened, and the gravel crunched.

Jago came up the hill and stood at my shoulder. Paul stood at the other.

Duncan looked at Jago for a long moment. Jago looked back and said nothing.

"You'd better come in," I said. "Not for long."

We read it at my counting table, under the strip lights, with the bottles stacked to the ceiling round us.

Paul made Duncan a tea with three sugars in it, without asking.

Duncan didn't seem to notice.

The ledger was in Clive's own handwriting. Small and neat, in brown ink.

Every pack had its own section, with a little drawing at the top.

A pack on the Solway, and a sheep pack in the Dales.

A pack on the cliffs outside Whitby, and a river pack in Shropshire.

A pack in the Peak with a slate quarry.

Five packs.

Every one of them the same.

A loan at six percent, after a funeral, or a flood, or a bad winter.

The fees were in the back pages, at thirty-five percent, forty, forty-one.

Then a balloon clause on a date that mattered: a harvest, a wedding, Midwinter.

Then a line ruled under it, and one word in capitals.

TAKEN.

The quarry, the farm, the river meadows, the cliff houses.

I turned the pages slowly. Jago read over one shoulder, Paul over the other.

Nobody said anything.

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