I knew he could be very persuasive and had seen and heard it before. I called it hispolite forcefulness, which usually brought results from whoever was on the other end of the conversation.
Admittedly there had been that same forcefulness in that conversation in Scotland when he had proposed to me. Of course, there were various methods of persuasion. I listened to that now, along with the look Brodie gave the manager. I would not have refused if I had been on the other end of it. But then…
“Perhaps there is someone else we might speak with in the matter,” Brodie continued. “The president of the bank, perhaps. And we are prepared to provide an official warrant for the information.”
That decided the matter, as the manager very quickly withdrew his concerns and objections.
“That will not be necessary,” he assured us. “I will have the information provided immediately, if you will wait in the private office we have for our customers.”
He promptly showed us to that office, then quickly excused himself to retrieve the information we had requested.
“Very persuasive,” I complimented Brodie. “You would have convinced me to cooperate.”
That dark gaze was still quite serious.
“I can be, when I want something.”
Were we still speaking of those account records?
The manager returned promptly with a bank clerk and two ledgers.
“These should provide the information you are looking for.” He had the clerk deposit the ledgers on the desk.
“If there should be anything else, you have only to let this young man know and he will provide it.” There was a stern look that passed between them.
I caught the frown on Brodie’s face. Volumes of records, entries in ledgers, a stack of papers, receipts, and letters, were usually met with that same reaction. I rounded the desk in the office that had been provided, sat in the chair and opened the first ledger for Harris Imports.
“How did you ever manage to file reports when you were with the MET?” I inquired as I started through the entries that went back more than twenty years.
“I usually persuaded someone to make them for me,” he confessed. “With me telling them the details, of course.”
“Of course,” I replied.
There were others who used dictation for their notes, particularly in the courts, where clerks recorded the details of a trial or hearing in official records.
My publisher, Mr. Warren, had recently explained a new invention used by another author, that recorded his voice onto a cylinder, which could be then be played back and transcribed by a clerk typist. It was very similar to the phonograph invented by Mr. Edison some years before.
I quickly scanned through the earlier entries. Harris Imports had been a very lucrative enterprise, with receipt of cargoes noted, bills received and paid with substantial profit. The entries notably changed at the time of the horrible tragedies for the Harris family.
There were entries for invoices paid and entered by a clerk for a funeral, then for a second funeral. There was a briefpause with only entries for payments received, which seemed reasonable, given Harris business.
The entries changed as I found those payments that were made to Carney. They were made regularly and in the same amount each time, no doubt for watching over the warehouse site, as he had explained to us. Then, there was a significant change in the dates and the amounts of transactions in the year following the tragedy.
“Ye found something?” Brodie asked.
He had been pacing the office, then took a seat in the other chair, but had begun to pace again.
“Just over a year after the death of his daughter and wife, and the fire at the warehouse, there were substantial withdrawals from the account.”
He rounded the desk to see what I had found. I had written down several entries on one page alone and quickly added them up.
“These alone come to almost four hundred pounds.” I showed him the list. “And there are more on the next several pages. There must be several thousand pounds that were withdrawn from the account just with the ones I’ve found, and there are more, including those made just the week past.”
“The question is, who made them?” Brodie commented on the obvious.
“This says they were made by Carney, but for what purpose?” I added.
“I don’t know anything about that,” the bank clerk who had brought the ledgers and stood guard as if we might steal something replied.
