I wrapped the logbook in its linen cloth again and put it back in the canvas bag, and I held the bag against my chest on the drive back, the way a mother holds a child. Forty years in ink. Every real repair. Every honest penny. It was heavier than it looked, and it was the lightest thing I had carried in weeks, because for the first time since the night on the river, I knew I could win.
Chapter 13
— The Logbook Against the Ledger
Wesley brought the company's books to the small room at the back of the offices on a wet Thursday morning, in two cardboard boxes, and he laid them out on the table beside my logbook as carefully as a surgeon laying out instruments. The books were the official record: bound volumes and printed statements, stamped and filed, the kind of record a board of directors trusts without reading. My logbook was a cloth-bound volume with a worn cover, written by hand. Between them, on that table, lay the whole truth of the Haversham Danube Line, and the whole lie.
"We do it properly," Wesley said. "Page by page. Year by year. Every invoice for a repair, checked against your book. If it is in both, it is real. If it is only in the books, it is a phantom."
We began with the most recent year, and we worked backwards. It was slow work, and it was grim work, and by the end of the first hour my hands were shaking, not with age but with anger. The pattern was not subtle. It did not need a detective to see it. It needed only a woman who had written down every repair for forty years and a grandson who knew what a boat was worth.
In the most recent year, the books showed forty-one maintenance invoices paid to Alpen Trade. My logbook showed fourteen real repairs. The other twenty-seven had never happened. There was an invoice for a full hull overhaul on the Wachau Queen in March, for a sum that would have bought a small house, yet my logbook showed that in March she had been in service every day and had needed nothing more than a new coat of paint on her wheelhouse. There was an invoice for a boiler replacement on the Vienna Star in July, though her boiler had been replaced three years earlier and had run perfectly ever since. There was an invoice for a propeller shaft on the Danube Empress in September, a month in which she had not left her mooring at all.
Wesley made a list, in a fresh notebook, in his own neat hand. The list grew longer as the morning went on, and by midday it ran to three pages, and by late afternoon it ran to six. We went back three years, and the pattern held in every year we checked. The phantom repairs had started small, five or six a year, amounts a busy chairwoman might not notice, and they had grown bolder as Landon and Xavier realised no one was checking. In the last year alone, the phantom invoices added up to more than the company had spent on real repairs in the previous five years combined.
"Look at this," Wesley said, and he pushed a page toward me. It was an invoice for emergency hull plating on the Danube Empress, dated in the middle of the winter, when the boat had been in dry dock with her hull already inspected and passed. The work described on the invoice had never been done, because the boat had been out of the water and the yard had been closed for the holiday. "They did not even bother to make the lies possible," he said. "They thought no one would ever look."
I thought of all the years I had trusted my son with the day-to-day running of the company, while I kept the chair and the relationships with the yards and the towns along the river. I thought of the meetings where Xavier had presented the maintenance figures and I had nodded, because the numbers had seemed plausible and because I had believed that a son does not steal from his mother. I had been wrong about both things. The numbers had been impossible, and I had not seen it, because I had stopped looking at the details and started trusting the people who showed them to me.
By evening we had finished three years, and the list was nine pages long, and Wesley sat back and rubbed his eyes and said what we both knew. "Grandmother, this is enough. This alone is enough. The logbook against the books. Forty years of ink against three years of lies. No one can explain this away."
I looked at the two records lying side by side on the table: my logbook, open at a page from forty years ago, where Nelson had written about a propeller shaft in his careful hand, and the company's books, open at a page from last year, where a phantom hull overhaul had been stamped and paid. One was the truth. One was the theft.
"We keep going," I said. "We check every year they were in charge. We make the list complete, so that when we lay it before the hearing, there is no gap for Landon to hide in. He will say it was a mistake. He will say it was a misunderstanding. He will say the logbook is old and the books are new. But a mistake does not happen twenty-seven times in one year, and a misunderstanding does not always point in the same direction, toward the same company, toward the same pocket."