Page 55 of Murder on Cold Street
Alice felt drained, but at least she no longer needed to hide anything from those she wished to trust. But what they would think of her, now that—
“Remember, Mrs. Treadles, that you did nothing wrong,” said Mrs. Watson firmly.
It was exactly what she’d hoped she would hear, yet words of objection left her lips on their own. “But I—”
“Stop blaming yourself for not having done everything perfectly. You did nothing wrong. Now you say it.”
Alice had no idea the extraordinarily kind Mrs. Watson could speak with such authority. In her bright blue cape, her gaze level, her back ramrod straight, she was no less queenly a figure than Miss Holmes had been.
“I—I did nothing wrong.”
“Precisely. And Miss Holmes would have been the first to tell you so, had you trusted her sooner.”
Alice’s face burned. “I’m sorry.”
“On this, you do owe her an apology. It hampers our ability to help you when you withhold important information. But that’s behind us now. We need to turn our attention to the matter at hand. Miss Holmes has entrusted me to look into Cousins Manufacturing. I should very much like to hear what you can tell me.”
Alice exhaled. “I wish I could tell you exactly what the matter is, but all I have are insufficient documentation and indirect evidence.”
“That is often how an investigation begins.” Mrs. Watson gave her an encouraging smile. “Please, go ahead.”
Alice needed a moment to pull her thoughts together, to turn her mind from Robert’s peril to a subject that had receded to a place of secondary importance since his arrest. “My brother helmed Cousins for four years. He began when our father was still alive. He’d never been terribly interested in the day-to-day operations of the company, and Father wanted to ease him in over time, rather than thrust the entire responsibility on him all at once.
“I tried to distance myself from concerns about Cousins—my father didn’t want me to be involved and my brother Barnaby certainly wouldn’t have appreciated unsolicited advice. But sometimes an uneasiness gnawed at me: Barnaby didn’t like to learn; he resented being corrected; and he despised any insinuation that he wasn’t quite the man his father had been. And he loved flattery—he needed to be told that he possessed all the cleverness and discernment in the world.”
“In other words,” mused Mrs. Watson, “it wouldn’t have taken much to pull the wool over his eyes.”
“Unfortunately so. It also didn’t reassure me that he didn’t boast about his successes. Barnaby loved feeling superior. If the firm had been doing as well under him as it had under my father, we’d have known. That he never said anything to that effect could only mean that such wasn’t the case.”
“So you were prepared for problems,” said Mrs. Watson, with approval in her voice.
Alice wallowed in her approval. She felt like a child who’d been given a much-longed-for bonbon, luxuriating in that glorious sweetness.
But she was also a grown woman who knew that confections, however delightful, could not sustain her.
Yes, she’d had enough foresight to anticipate problems. But what had she done once she’d run into those problems?
“I wanted to see the accounts. I wanted to visit the factories. I wanted to speak to suppliers and customers. I wanted a full audit of the firm conducted at the earliest opportunity. Instead I got a roomful of men who, when they didn’t treat me like an infant who’d somehow escaped her bassinet, took great offense that I dared to imply that they hadn’t done brilliantly and perfectly at their positions. They even tried to persuade my solicitors that it would be intheirinterest to get me to leave things alone, because that would givemy solicitors more work and therefore more money—and I’m not sure they hadn’t succeeded, at least halfway, in their attempt.”
She could no longer quite look Mrs. Watson in the eye. Or maybe it was her younger self she couldn’t bear to face, the girl whose only dream was to be part of this great enterprise that made train engines—train engines! How disappointed that girl would have been to know that her grown-up self had allowed that dream to turn into a nightmare.
“The only things I could get my hands on were some abbreviated reports I’d found in my brother’s study. And bank statements that showed the movement of funds—though in aggregate, which does not give me a detailed picture of what is happening inside the company. Still it seems to me that the company suffers from a shortage of cash.”
As she spoke those words aloud, she again felt the same sinking sensation that had assailed her the day she’d come to that realization. Cash was the vital blood of a going concern. A company chronically strapped for cash was as sick as a man suffering from severe cardiac disease.
Mrs. Watson’s expression, too, turned somber.
“My brother purchased a number of older factories to be modernized and refitted to our specifications. I concluded that too much money was spent on the endeavor and the returns have not been impressive. Needless to say, the men who oversaw the acquisition and renovation of those factories vehemently objected to that conclusion. They spouted all kinds of accounting reasons, amortization costs, and whatnot to justify why incomes have stagnated.
“I know what amortization costs are. I am familiar with the practice of writing off costs over time. I also understand the advantages of having amortization costs so that we may pay less to Inland Revenue. But cash flow affects operations in the here and now, and cash flow is a problem that no amount of accounting wizardry can explain away.
“The funny thing is, I’d been tentative about my conclusion, since I had so little data. I would have been perfectly happy to be shown otherwise. But instead of concrete evidence, I was given only obstruction, complaints, and temper tantrums. I am now convinced that something is wrong. Very wrong. Had that not been the case, my managers would still have been condescending and patronizing, I don’t doubt that, but not to this appalling extent.”
She realized, only after she’d finished speaking, that she had crushed Mrs. Watson’s delicate handkerchief in her grip.
Mrs. Watson, however, did not seem to mind at all. “Shall we put an end to all that appalling condescension?”
Miss Holmes had said the same, that it was time to take matters into her own hands. And Alice wanted to. How she wanted to. But...
