Making Money

Most people agree that after half a minute or so she picked up the paper, pulled a pencil from the tight bun on the back of her head, ordered the young man out of his seat, sat down and spent some time staring at the numbers. She got up. She went to the desk of another senior clerk. Together they pored over the piece of paper. A third clerk was summoned. He copied out the offending columns, worked on them for a while and looked up, his face grey. No one needed to say it aloud. By now all work had stopped, but Mr Bent, up on the high stool, was still engrossed in the numbers before him and, significantly, he was muttering under his breath.

People sensed it in the air.

Mr Bent had Made a Mistake.

The most senior clerks conferred hastily in a corner. There was no higher authority that they could appeal to. Mr Bent was the higher authority, second only to the inexorable Lord of Mathematics. In the end it was left to the luckless Miss Drapes, who so recently had been the agent of Mr Bent’s displeasure, to write on the document, ‘I am sorry, Mr Bent, I believe the young man is right.’ She placed this at the bottom of a number of working slips that she was delivering to the in-tray, dropped it in as the tray rumbled past, and then the sound of her little boots echoed as she rushed, weeping, the length of the hall to the ladies’ restroom, where she had hysterics.

The remaining members of the staff looked around, warily, like ancient monsters who can see a second sun getting bigger in the sky but have absolutely no idea what they should do about it. Mr Bent was a fast man with an in-tray and by the look of it there was about two minutes or less before he was confronted with the message. Suddenly and all at once, they fled for the exits.

‘And how was that for you?’ said Moist, stepping out into the sunlight.

‘Do I detect a note of peevishness?’ said Adora Belle.

‘Well, my plans for today did not include dropping in to chat with a three-hundred-year-old letch.’

‘I think you mean lych, and anyway he was a ghost, not a corpse.’

‘He was letching!’

‘All in his mind,’ said Adora Belle. ‘Your mind, too.’

‘Normally you go crazy if people try to patronize you!’

‘True. But most people aren’t able to translate a language so old that even golems can hardly understand a tenth of it. Get a talent like that and it could be you getting the girls when you are three centuries dead.’

‘You were just flirting to get what you wanted?’

Adora Belle stopped dead in the middle of the square to confront him. ‘And? You flirt with people all the time. You flirt with the whole world! That’s what makes you interesting, because you’re more like a musician than a thief. You want to play the world, especially the fiddly bits. And now I’m going home for a bath. I got off the coach this morning, remember?’

‘This morning,’ said Moist, ‘I found that one of my staff had swapped the mind of another of my staff with that of a turnip.’

‘Was that good?’ said Adora Belle.

‘I’m not sure. In fact I’d better go and check. Look, we’ve both had a busy day. I’ll send a cab at half past seven, all right?’

Cribbins was enjoying himself. He’d never gone in much for reading, up until now. Oh, he could read, and write too, in a nice cursive script that people thought was quite distinguished. And he’d always liked the Times for its clear, readable font, and had, with the aid of some scissors and a pot of paste, often accepted its assistance in producing those missives that attract attention not by fine writing but by having the messages created in cut-out words and letters and even whole phrases if you were lucky. Reading for pleasure had passed him by, however. But he was reading now, oh yes, and it was extremely pleasurable, goodness yes! It was amazing what you could find if you knew what you were looking for! And now, all his Hogswatches were about to come at once—

‘A cup of tea, reverend?’ said a voice by his side. It was the plump lady in charge of the Times’s back numbers department, who had taken to him as soon as he doffed his hat to her. She had the slightly wistful, slightly hungry look that so many women of a certain age wore when they’d decided to trust in gods because of the absolute impossibility of continuing to trust in men.

‘Why, thank you, shister,’ he said, beaming. ‘And is it not written: “The eleemosynary cup is more worthy than the thrown hen”?’