Free Web NovelChapter 47: Chapter 47 Something fishy
_Rowena’s POV_
The Ashthorne Wine Company occupied a converted warehouse in the city’s southern quarter, three stories of dark brick and wide windows, the kind of building that had been industrial once and had been adapted into something that was trying to look purposeful without quite committing to elegance.
I arrived unannounced that morning.
That had been deliberate because the account irregularities Celeste’s lawyers had found in the wine company’s subsidiary ledgers were specific enough to warrant a visit, and a visit that was announced in advance was a visit that gave someone time to prepare the version of things they wanted me to see. I preferred the unrehearsed version.
The receptionist looked up when I came through the door and her expression did something small and controlled, a micro-adjustment. She covered it quickly and smiled, “Ms Asthorne, Mr. Corby, would be right with you.” She said, already knowing who i was thanks to Celeste.
I looked around the reception while I waited.
The space was tidy on the surface, the kind of tidy that came from things having been moved recently rather than from things being kept orderly. A slight misalignment in the filing stacks along the east wall.
A desk that had been cleared too thoroughly, leaving rectangular outlines in the dust where items had been removed.
Mr. Corby appeared four minutes later.
He was sixty, broad-shouldered, with the energy of a man who had been in charge of something for a long time and had developed his authority through repetition rather than natural confidence. He smiled when he saw me and without being told, I knew that wasn’t a genuine smile.
“Marchioness Ashthorne,” he greeted. “What a pleasure. We weren’t expecting....”
“I know,” I said pleasantly. “I was passing. I thought I’d look in.”
His assistant appeared two steps behind him, I’m guessing she was. She looked younger, probably in her mid-thirties, with a face that was doing considerably less work to hide its feelings than Corby’s. She looked at me the way people look at someone they resent and are trying not to show they resent, which is to say with eyes that were not as neutral as she believed them to be.
Corby showed me around with the thoroughness of a man who wanted to control the tour and the energy of someone hoping I wouldn’t ask to see anything specific. He showed me the barrel room, the bottling line, the tasting facility on the second floor that had been recently refreshed.
I asked to see the office.
He paused. “Of course,” he said.
The office was on the third floor, large, with the account ledgers arranged on shelves along the east wall and a desk that had a computer and several folders arranged on it in the careful way of someone who had decided in advance which folders should be visible.
I sat down across from his desk and asked for the past three years of operational accounts.
He brought them. I worked through them with the focused attention I had developed over weeks of reading documents that were designed to obscure rather than illuminate, and I found what I was looking for inside forty minutes.
Three workers. Two years ago, eighteen months ago, and eight months ago respectively.
The first had been listed as an industrial accident — equipment failure in the barrel room. The second as illness, cause unspecified. The third as an accident during delivery operations.
What they had in common, beyond the category of accident or illness, was that all three had been employed in the same section of the company, the fermentation processing unit on the lower floor, the area of the building that sat furthest from the main entrance and that Corby had moved past quickly on the tour without stopping.
I looked up from the ledger.
Corby was watching me with the careful expression of someone monitoring a situation.
“The fermentation unit,” I said. “We didn’t stop there on the tour.”
“It’s operational,” he said. “Nothing particularly interesting....”
“I’d like to see it.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Of course,” he said.
The fermentation unit was on the lower ground floor, reached through a heavy fire door that opened onto a dim corridor smelling of oak and something chemical underneath the wine smell. It was faint, not immediately identifiable, but present.
I walked through it slowly.
The equipment was older than the rest of the facility, it was not maintained to the same standard, running in a way that produced results without being examined too closely. Along the north wall, three of the large fermentation vats had been taken out of rotation. Tagged as undergoing service.
They had been tagged as undergoing service for, according to the maintenance log I pulled from the wall bracket, eight months.
“Something is wrong here,” Kyra noted.
I ran my hand along the side of the nearest vat.
The metal was cold and there was condensation on the surface that didn’t match the temperature of the room, which meant something was still inside it and that something was cooler than the ambient environment.
“Mr. Corby,” I said. “What exactly is in these vats?”
His expression was very still. “Residual stock,” he said. “Being processed for disposal.”
“Eight months of disposal processing,” I said.
“It’s a slow process,” he said.
“For wine?”
He said nothing.
I looked at the vats. At the maintenance tags.
The three dead workers. The resentful assistant. The too-tidy office. The vats that had been out of rotation for eight months.
Someone was stealing from this company. I had seen that in the accounts clearly, product quantities that didn’t reconcile with sales figures, a gap that had been papered over with creative categorization. But the theft was the surface. Underneath it was something else, something that had cost three people their lives and was being kept in the dark in the most literal way available.
I closed the maintenance log.
“Thank you for the tour, Mr. Corby,” I said. “I’ll be reviewing the accounts in detail and I’ll have questions for you in writing by the end of the week.”
He nodded. “Of course, Marchioness.”
I walked out. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
In the car, I sat for a moment before telling the driver to go.
