The Eclipsed Life of Luna Mischa novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: The Cellar Office

"Who signed the letter?" I said.

The manager hesitated.

"The Luna of the Night Whispers. A Miss Bethany Mabbott."

I looked through the windscreen at the bank's front door. Thirty feet away.

"I'm parked outside," I said. "Give me ten minutes, face to face. If you still say no after that, I'll go and never bother you again."

A long pause.

"Ten minutes."

The bank in Helston was small and beige, with a carpet that crackled with static.

The manager met me at her office door. Grey bob, reading glasses on a chain, arms folded.

Her assistant manager came in behind me and stood by the filing cabinet. A witness. Fair enough.

The letter lay on her desk. Night Whispers letterhead. Our lake, our crest.

Mischa Thirlwell was removed from her post for the embezzlement of pack funds.

Bethany's signature underneath, with a little circle over the i.

"May I use your computer?" I said.

The manager looked at the assistant. Then she turned the screen round.

I logged into my archive.

"This is the archive of every account I ran for that pack," I said. "Every night for seventeen years."

I didn't make a speech. I just opened things.

The debt, four million and a hundred thousand pounds, the year I started. Paid down every month. The last payment eleven months before I left, to the penny.

Seventeen annual audits by an outside firm. Seventeen clean signatures.

"Every payment I ever made needed two signatures," I said. "Mine and the Alpha's. He signed all of them."

The manager leaned in.

"Now look at the dates."

I opened the record of the day I left. Then the pups' fund, twenty-eight days later.

One point two million pounds out, at one minute past nine.

Authorised by Duncan Thirlwell and Bethany Mabbott.

"I'd been four hundred miles away for four weeks," I said. "I had no codes and no ring. The money that left that pack, she signed for."

The assistant manager made a small noise.

"And the woman who wrote you this letter," I said, "started in my office eight weeks ago. On the bottom desk. She's never done a receipt."

The manager sat back.

She took her reading glasses off and let them drop on their chain.

She looked at the letter for a long time.

Then she picked it up, folded it in half, and dropped it in her bin.

"I'm sorry, Ms Thirlwell," she said. "We'll lend against the casks. A hundred and twenty thousand. The papers will be ready Friday."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me." She was already writing. "Send me a bottle when it's done."

Jago was on the quay when I came down the hill.

He took one look at my face as I got out of the car.

"Yes?"

"Yes."

He whooped. He picked me up off the cobbles and swung me round in front of the chippy, and his aunt banged on the hatch with her fish slice.

"Put her down, you'll drop her in the harbour!"

"I'll fish her out!"

By nine that night the quay was empty and the cellars were dark.

I was in the office, at my window desk, writing it all down.

Jago came in with a bottle and two glasses.

He set one glass on my desk and sat on the edge of the desk beside it.

I opened the drawer of the oak desk.

Inside, under the lid, was a yellow sticky note. A bit curled now.

One word in his handwriting: Later.

His eyes went to it. Then to me.

"You kept that."

"I'm a hoarder. You said so."

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