‘Logan's been saying the same thing. How fragile life is, how quickly everything can change.’
‘That it can.’
Cally swept her hand across in front of her. ‘The gardens look beautiful. The poppies are so pretty. Everything always looks lovely here.’
The gardener waved off the compliment and sighed. ‘It's the least we can do for the family. They've always been especially good to me. Alastair always had a kind word or a joke to share when he'd see me working, too. Well, I'd best get back to it.’
‘Yep. See you at the funeral, I guess, if not before.’
‘Will do. And, our Cally?’
She looked back. ‘Yes?’
‘You take care of yourself, too, you hear?’
‘I will. Thank you.’
As Cally waited for the gates to open, she could hear the scrape of the rake behind her. Strolling along the road in the direction of Lovely she thought about the gardener’s words and rolled her eyes. She didn’t need to take care of herself. She’d seen it all before.
30
Cally was back in Peaceton for the day. She stood with her hands on her hips in the doorway of the stockroom at the shop, and surveyed the very chaotic scene before her. Boxes were stacked haphazardly from floor to ceiling, shelves overflowed with a jumble of products, and layers of dust coated every surface that didn’t have a teetering pile of boxes on it. She let out a long exhale. She wasn’t in the least daunted by the task but it was going to be quite the undertaking.
‘Right then, best get cracking,’ she said to herself as she shook her head.
Rolling up her sleeves she put her experience with Nina to good use and did a quick first sweep of the room. The first thing would be to create some semblance of order out of the initial layer of mess. She'd need to group similar items together, take a proper inventory, and compare it all against what was listed in the system. Then she’d be able to make sense of stock levels and take it from there. She began methodically working her way through a towering stack of containers in one corner and tutted over and over again. As far as she was concerned, the mess and disorder were completely unnecessary. She frowned; it was so haphazard and jumbled, it was almost as if it had been done onpurpose. None of it made any sense. She knew from how things were ordered and how products came in from the delivery vans that the stacks and piles were so out of sync that it defied logic. That had been her first red flag.
Starting at the top of a tall disorganised stack of boxes, she sorted items into categories – medicines, toiletries, first aid supplies, and so on. As she worked, she compared the state of the room to the tidy, well-organised area she was in charge of back in Lovely Bay. It was a very startling contrast. No wonder Birdie had wanted her on board. She would certainly be earning her pay that day.
Wondering how on earth the place had got in such a state in the first place considering it had only been open for a while, she tutted as she worked. In amongst orders and stock, it looked as though years of clutter had accumulated resulting in what felt like a muddle of chaos. After a good few hours of sorting, she’d made a small dent in the clutter and perched on a rickety stool, she booted up her laptop and pulled up the inventory spreadsheets and delivery system to have a look and see if she could tell what was what. She shook her head in quick little movements and frowned as she went down the spreadsheet. Right away she didn’t need a calculator to tell her that it didn’t add up. The second red flag had appeared.
Delving further into the stock and boxes she cross-referenced the physical count against what was listed in the system to try and start to organise things. The simple cross-referencing was how she’d first started to work and organise things in the Lovely shop. As she tallied up an open carton of Cold & Flu sachets with the date on the accompanying order sheet, she noticed an error. Assuming that it was just a data entry mistake, she moved on with her head down and started to work her way through box after box.
By the end of the day, she wasn’t liking what she was finding at all. As she tidied, sorted and worked her way through more products, a distinct pattern began to emerge. Time and again, the physical count came up just short compared to what was listed in the system. It was cleverly done, too, and if you weren’t as fastidious as our Cally, it might possibly have been overlooked. It wasn't huge amounts either - a few items here, half a dozen there - but it was consistent.
It hadn’t taken much more for Cally to decide that things were wrong. What she’d found had gone beyond simple mistakes or possibly sloppy record-keeping. What she hadn’t realised before she’d got stuck in in the Peaceton shop was that her experience working in Lovely had given her a keen eye for inventory management. She knew how stock levels typically fluctuated and what constituted normal shrinkage and what was what at different times of the retail year. This felt different.
Moving back from the cardboard boxes to her laptop, she delved deeper into the spreadsheets, pulled up historical data, looked at stock levels and sales figures over the previous few months, and came up with more duds. The more she dug, the more alarmed she became. There were odd spikes in certain product sales and orders that didn't align with the seasonal patterns or promotional periods she’d come to know well. Items would show as fully stocked one week, then inexplicably depleted the next, with no corresponding spike in sales figures. It was as though bits of inventory here and there was vanishing into thin air.
‘Something's not right here,’ Cally muttered, shook her head and squeezed her eyes tightly together as if somehow that might help.
She was so engrossed in her analysis that she barely registered the time and it wasn’t until she realised she was starving that she saw she’d been looking at the figures for hours.
'Everything alright in here?' Estrella called from the corridor. 'You've been holed up for ages. I know it was a mess so I thought I would leave you to tidy up, then the next time you’re in, I will show you how I want things done.'
Cally hastily minimised the spreadsheets on her laptop screen. She’d let Estrella believe whatever she wanted for the time being. 'Fine, thanks. I just lost track of time getting stuck into the tidying.’
Estrella was still of the opinion that she was in charge. Cally let her continue to think that. 'No rush. Take as long as you need. I'm heading home now – don't forget to set the alarm when you leave and I’ll see you the next time you're in.'
'Will do. Have a good evening!'
Cally waited until she heard the jingle of the shop's front door and flipped her laptop open. The discrepancies she'd found went well beyond normal fluctuations and errors. What she’d not been aware of was that her experience in Lovely had made her a bit of a master at stocktaking and the corresponding figures on a screen. Everything was screaming at her that something was very wrong in Peaceton. It wouldn’t take her long to prove it, either. She would need more evidence which meant she had a lot more digging to do but she’d get there, of that she was sure. She looked around the cluttered stockroom, still largely in disarray despite her hours of work and couldn’t stop thinking about how cocky and sure of herself Estrella was. Also: the red shoes.
Shaking off her unease and time to call it a day, she stood, stretched and winced as her stiff muscles protested. She'd be back after the funeral to continue her investigation, keep schtum and head down, and put herself on a secret little mission to find out just what was going on. Estrella needn't be any the wiser.
Just as she was getting her bag from the other stockroom, she passed a jumbled pile of boxes behind the door she hadn’t even started on, and something caught her eye. Peering closer,she turned her head to the side and noticed a label with the day before’s date. Odd. Very odd. She shifted a few boxes aside to get a better look. As she dug deeper, she uncovered more recent postage labels. An entire stack of newly delivered stock had been buried beneath and in between a load of old promotional items behind the door. Cally more or less knew what was in the boxes because she knew the labels on the cartons. From what she could see, they were a mix of over-the-counter medications – painkillers, allergy tablets, heartburn remedies, and the like. All items that sold steadily and wouldn't raise suspicion if they went missing in small quantities. It would explain some of the discrepancies she'd been finding between the physical counts and the system records. She wondered why anyone would shove new deliveries behind the door in the back room. It went against all logical stock management practices to put new stock away unseen. The way Cally worked, new deliveries were properly logged and shelved, not hidden away. It was exactly what you would do if you wanted to deliberately conceal things. Red flags waved from everywhere.
Cally swallowed as she closed the door, walked to the back, punched in the code on the alarm and walked out; her new job wasn't going to be quite the walk in the park she’d assumed. She wasn’t wrong.
