Two Hands

by Felix Aubrey Sharpley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The collection sheets came in four archive boxes, and when I took the lids off the room smelt of coin. If you have spent time near cash in quantity you know the smell: copper and nickel and the grease of a great many fingers. Someone had packed the sheets into the cardboard trays that bank coin bags are delivered in, and a fine grey dust had worked its way into the folds.

The covering letter was from Toby Feaver, of Feaver Lodge LLP in Colchester. His client was Gosnold's Amusements Limited, which has run an arcade on the seafront at Walton-on-the-Naze since 1971. The defendant was Mrs Pauline Threader. She had worked there for twenty-three years, latterly as cashier and office manager, until she was dismissed in February 2024. The company was suing her for £186,400. Her defence admitted that she had "on occasions taken sums from the takings" and put the claimant to proof of the amount. I was instructed to quantify the loss.

That is the usual shape. Once the money has been noticed, people seldom deny everything. They deny the size of it.

The figure of £186,400 came from the company's accountants, and Mr Feaver had attached their note. It was two pages long. They had taken the takings for 2017, the last full year before the period of the claim, and set each later year against it. The shortfall, year by year, was the loss.

I read the note twice and put it to one side. Then I opened the first box.

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An arcade is better documented than most people would suppose. Every machine on the floor has meters behind its cash door, small mechanical counters that click over for each coin in and each coin paid out. When a machine is emptied, someone writes down the readings, and the difference between this reading and the last one tells you what ought to be in the box. The cash is then counted and banked. If the count is honest, the two figures agree, give or take a jammed coin or a euro.

Gosnold's had forty-one machines: coin pushers, cranes, a row of fruit machines in the adult section behind a red rope, and two change machines by the door. They were emptied twice a week, first thing on Monday morning and last thing on Saturday night. The sheets were filled in by hand in blue biro, a row for each machine, and initialled at the foot by whoever had done the collection. Saturday's cash went into the safe and was banked with Monday's. The paying-in books were in the fourth box, held together with treasury tags.

I built the spreadsheet the slow way, which is the only way I trust: a row for each collection and, for each machine, the meter difference, the cash counted and the cash banked. Six years of it, twice a week. A junior could have done the typing. But the typing is where you notice things, and it took me the best part of three weeks.

The first thing the spreadsheet showed was that most of the claim was not a loss at all. The arcade had been shut for months at a time in 2020 and 2021, and in those months the meters hardly moved. Trade had not come back to its 2017 level afterwards. You cannot steal takings that were never taken. When I set what the meters said against what had been banked, the gap over the whole six years was £45,866. The remaining £140,534 was a fall in trade, and the accountants' method had counted it as theft.

The second thing the spreadsheet showed was Mrs Threader.

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She counted the Monday collections alone, in the back office, before the arcade opened at ten. On most Mondays the cash she recorded fell short of the meters by a small amount, almost always in pound coins from the fruit machines. Forty-seven pounds. Sixty-three. Eighty-one. Fifty-eight. Never a round figure and never more than £140. Over the period of the claim it came to £23,866.

I have looked at a good many people's thefts, and each has a shape. This one was steady and modest. It never grew, which is unusual; most thefts grow, because nothing happens to stop them. It skipped the weeks of the quarterly stock-check, when Mrs Gosnold came in and counted alongside her. It skipped the week before each annual review. And it stopped altogether for nine weeks in the spring of 2019.

I asked Mr Feaver about the nine weeks. It is no good finding a gap and making up the reason for it. The reason has to be asked for. He came back within the day: Mrs Threader had been on sick leave after an operation, and the Monday counts had been done by Mrs Gosnold. In those nine weeks the Monday counts balanced to the pound. When Mrs Threader came back, so did the shortfalls.

That was the strongest single thing in the file. It does not prove intent, and I would not say in a report that it did. What it shows is that the shortfalls followed one person's hand, and disappeared when someone else held the pen.

I was not asked why she did it. Why is not a number.

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The other £22,000 was on Saturdays.

For the first four years of the claim, the Saturday collections balanced as well as any I have seen. A coin here, two pounds there. The sheets were initialled R.G. in a large, upright hand. Mr Feaver's letter had mentioned, in a sentence about the company's history, that Mr Raymond Gosnold, the founder's son, had died in January 2022.

From April 2022 the initials were D.G., or there were none. And on forty of the ninety-five Saturdays between April 2022 and her dismissal, the cash counted on the Saturday sheet was short of the meters by exactly £500. On two more it was short by exactly £1,000. Nothing else. No odd pounds, no coins. The shortfalls were all in the note acceptors on the fruit machines and the change machines, which take ten- and twenty-pound notes, and most of them fell in summer and on bank holiday weekends, when the takings were large enough to hide them.

Genuine shortfalls are rarely round. A coin jams, a note is torn, a punter feeds in something foreign, and the gap comes out at £3.20 or £17. When a gap is £500 on forty separate occasions, someone has decided what it will be.

The claimant's case was that Mrs Threader had taken the Saturday money too. She had the keys to the safe and she banked the weekend's cash on Mondays, so she certainly had the opportunity. But the shortfalls were on the Saturday sheets themselves. The money was already missing when the Saturday count was written down, before it went into the safe, at an hour when, so far as anyone had told me, Mrs Threader was at home.

So far as anyone had told me. That was the weak point, and I did not like it. I had no record of who was in the building on a Saturday night. Without one, I could not exclude her. With what I had, I could not include her either.

There was one test that would settle which. The claim ran to her dismissal, but the arcade had gone on trading. If the Saturday shortfalls stopped when she went, that would be consistent with the claimant's case. If they did not stop, it would not.

I rang Mr Feaver.

"The period of the claim ends when she was dismissed," he said.

"The pattern doesn't know that."

"It isn't within your instructions, Mr Sharpley."

"I'm instructed to quantify the loss caused by the defendant. I can't tell you which of these shortfalls she caused unless I know whether they stopped when she left. If I don't ask that question, the defendant's expert will, and I would rather it was me."

"And if they didn't stop?"

"Then I shall say so."

There was a pause, of the kind that usually means someone is writing a note to file.

"You are instructed by the claimant."

"I'm paid by the claimant. My duty is to the court. It's on the form you'll be sending me to sign."

He said he would take instructions. Two days later his assistant emailed to say that the 2024 sheets were at the premises and that Mrs Gosnold would make them available. I asked whether I might also watch a Saturday collection, since I had watched neither. Nobody objected.

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Walton on a Saturday in February belongs to the dog-walkers. The wind comes straight off the North Sea, and the pier was closed beyond the first hundred yards. Gosnold's was lit and open, and nearly empty. A boy in a school coat was feeding two-pence pieces into a pusher while his grandfather watched from a stool. On the sliding shelf a fringe of coins hung over the edge, a third of each coin in the air, and none of them fell.

Dean Gosnold met me at the change kiosk. He was in his forties, in a fleece with the company name on the breast and a ring of keys on a retractable reel at his belt. He shook my hand and talked: about the season, about business rates, about the lads who tried to tip the crane machines, about his father, who had built the place up from twelve machines and a candyfloss stall. I said very little. People generally fill the silence for you.

At eight o'clock he locked the doors and did the collection, and I followed him round with my notebook. He read each set of meters aloud and wrote the readings down. He emptied the coin hoppers into plastic tubs and the note stackers into a canvas bag. Back in the office he weighed the coin on a set of bank scales, and then he counted the notes at the desk, fast, licking his thumb.

He counted the twenties into piles of twenty-five, squared each pile on the desk, and put a paper band round it. On each band he wrote 500 in felt-tip.

"Dad did hundreds, with an elastic band," he said. "I do them in five hundreds. You can see at a glance what you've got."

I wrote down what I had seen and nothing else.

Mrs Maureen Gosnold had been sitting in the corner of the office all this while, in her coat, with a flask of tea she did not drink. She was small and very upright, and she watched her son count. When he went out to take the bins round the back, she unlocked the safe, took out a box file and gave it to me.

"Everything from February," she said. "I've been doing the Mondays myself again."

"Thank you."

"Did Pauline take it all?"

"I don't know yet, Mrs Gosnold. I'll know when I've counted."

She looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable, then nodded and sat down again.

In the car I wrote up the visit before I drove off: the order of collection, the scales, the denominations, who wrote what on which sheet, the banding. Twenty-five notes of £20, banded, marked £500. I did not write down what it might mean. A note written in a car park has a way of ending up in the trial bundle.

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The box file held the sheets from February 2024 to the end of January this year. I entered them as I had entered the others.

The Monday counts, done by Mrs Gosnold, balanced to the pound, every one.

Of the fifty-one Saturdays since Mrs Threader's dismissal, eleven showed a shortfall in the note acceptors of exactly £500. The sheets for those eleven were initialled D.G. or not initialled. The first of them fell five weeks after she left.

I spent a day looking for an innocent explanation, because there usually is one and it is my job to look. A float taken out for the change kiosk and never written back? But the kiosk float was recorded on a separate sheet, and it balanced. A deposit made directly into another account? I asked, through Mr Feaver, for the company's other bank statements, and there was no other account. A charity collection, a cash payment to a contractor, wages? Nothing in the records matched the dates or the amounts. Each time I found no explanation, and the finding of no explanation is what I put in the report. Not the inference from it.

The report set out three figures. £140,534 of the claim represented a fall in trade, not a loss of takings, and I explained the method by which I had separated the two. £23,866 arose in Monday collections counted and initialled by the defendant and in no Monday collection counted by anyone else. And £22,000 arose in Saturday collections in round sums of £500 or £1,000, a pattern which continued on eleven occasions after the defendant's dismissal, totalling a further £5,500. On the documents I had seen, I was unable to attribute those shortfalls to the defendant. I had not been instructed to consider who else had access to the Saturday takings, and I expressed no opinion on it.

I signed the statement of truth and sent it on a Thursday.

Mr Feaver telephoned on the Friday. He said counsel would want a conference. He said it in the voice of a man reading from a card, and I said I would make myself available.

The conference was by video, the following Tuesday. Counsel was a Miss Pike, perhaps half my age, with a bookcase behind her that I suspected was a photograph. Mr Feaver was a smaller square at the bottom of the screen and kept his microphone off.

She did what good counsel do, which is to cross-examine her own expert before anyone else can.

"Your Monday figure rests on the initials. Could someone else have written P.T.?"

"Anyone can write two letters. But the Monday sheets are in the same hand throughout, and it matches her signature on her contract of employment. And the shortfalls stopped for the nine weeks she was on sick leave."

"Your Saturday figure. Could Mrs Threader have come in on a Saturday night?"

"I can't exclude it from the sheets. I asked whether there was CCTV. There is, and it overwrites itself every thirty-one days. Nothing from the period survives."

"Then the most you can say is that you don't know who took the Saturday money."

"The most I can say is that the Saturday shortfalls have a different pattern from the Monday shortfalls, and that one of them continued after she had gone. That is what I have said."

"Could the £500 sums have been taken out for some legitimate purpose that nobody wrote down?"

"I looked for one. If your client can produce a document, I'll look at it, and if it changes my opinion I'll say so in a supplementary report."

She made a note. Then she asked me what I thought was the weakest point in the report as a whole. I told her: that I had relied on the meters being accurate, and had tested that by sampling only six machines against their manufacturer's service records. She made another note and thanked me. Mr Feaver's square went dark before hers did.

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Mrs Gosnold came to see me the week after. She came on the train from Walton to Chelmsford, two changes, and climbed the stairs to my office over the optician's without holding the rail. Mr Feaver did not know she had come, and she did not say whether she would tell him.

She had a copy of the report in a plastic wallet. She had read it, and had marked it in places in pencil.

"I'd like to see the Saturdays," she said. "The dates."

They were in an appendix to the report, which she was entitled to see, so I printed the schedule and gave it to her: fifty-three dates, with the amount against each, the machines, and the initials on the sheet.

She put on her reading glasses and went down the column with her finger. She did not hurry. Now and then her finger stopped. The August bank holiday. The carnival weekend. The Saturday before Christmas, when the arcade stays open late for the lights on the front.

"Ray did Saturdays for thirty-one years," she said.

I said nothing.

"He never banded them. Elastic bands, in hundreds. I used to find them all over the house."

She read to the bottom of the page and turned it over to see whether there was anything on the back. There was not.

"Can this be changed?" she said. "This part."

"No, Mrs Gosnold."

"No," she said. "I didn't think it could."

She folded the schedule into four along its creases, put it in the plastic wallet behind the report, and put the wallet in her handbag. Then she fastened the clasp, and sat for a moment with both hands on it, the way people hold a bag on a train.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Fēlīce Sharpleiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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Felix Aubrey Sharpley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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