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After he parked his car, we headed straight to the office. Stuart called Caroline, who accepted his generous offer, saying she would be ten minutes.
I paced the office, waiting for Caroline to join us. Stuart stood up and caught me by the waist.
“Hen, what’s on ye mind? Other than the reports.”
“I’m sure I can prove theft, based on my theory, but it’s finding who’s the thief that may elude me. All I know is you buy more barley and raw ingredients for what you make.”
“Ye just show that we have a thieving scunner and we’ll figure out who it was from there.”
I nodded and Stuart pulled me in for a hug, his heartbeat strong and steady against my ear.
“Stuart, after this audit is done…”
A beep sounded behind us and doors opened as we parted.
“Righto, then.” Caroline strode in, sat in front of her computer, turning on the power and cracking her knuckles. “Data is my bitch. What do ye need?”
We worked fast, performing different queries on each of our laptops. After two hours scrutinising reports, line by line, I began to see anomalies.
Stuart left for food and drinks and I let him back into the office.
“Fuck, I need to find my keys and swipe card.”
“Do ye want me to order ye a new one?” Caroline asked him, highlighter poised in mid-air. “Oh, shit. Look at this.”
We rushed over to see her print-out.
“Ye’ve got bottle orders from the wholesaler,” Stuart said, putting down our food.
“Yes, this is perfect!” I scanned over it. “You see, you ordered so many bottles but when we look at how much whisky was bottled versus the stocktake of the warehouse, you should have lots of empties in storage. But you don’t.”
“Ye saying someone is nicking empty whisky bottles?” Caroline asked.
I nodded.
“Missing bottles aren’t worth tens of thousands of pounds,” Stuart added.
“But adding up the barley over the years, it could. That’s my theory so far.” My mind whirred with our next steps. “We need to map out barley purchases, when they were delivered, bottle orders, label printing -”
“Labels?” Stuart interjected, his face ashen. “Fuck.”
“Stuart, what are you -”
Caroline’s face had also turned pale. “Ye think someone is making counterfeit whisky with Gallanach’s own labels?”
“Aye, I do.” Stuart nodded. “Thirty labels are missing from the locked safe where we keep them. I thought it was a counting error or someone just hadn’t put back the leftover ones. But now I can’t help but think that it’s not a coincidence.”
“I’ll get the staff member in London to help us double check what we find.”
“Counterfeit whisky could undermine the value of our product on the market and ruin us,” Stuart murmured.
“I’m happy to stay tonight and find this fucker who’s stealing from us,” Caroline piped up, cracking her knuckles again.
I looked at Stuart. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”
“It’s but one night, hen. I’ll do anything I can right now to help solve this.”
I looked from the files in my hand and back to Caroline and Stuart. I wanted to figure out who was doing this, more than ever. This is what I loved about my job.
