The Vault at Four

The cash centre never got fully dark. Even at four in the morning the fluorescents hummed at half strength over the counting floor, and the machines ticked and whirred in their cages, and Priya sat at station six with a deposit bag from a supermarket in Slough and a discrepancy of forty pounds. Forty pounds short. The bag said 3,240. The machine said 3,200. She'd run it twice. "Run it again," said Dennis from the supervisor's desk, without looking up. "I've run it twice." "Then run it a third time, and if it's still short, do the paperwork." Priya had worked nights at the centre for six years. She'd taken the job because it paid a shift premium and because her son was small then and her mother could have him while he slept. Now he was twelve and slept through anything, and she'd stayed because she liked it. She liked the quiet. She liked that money, in here, stopped being money. It was just paper you counted. Nobody wanted it from you. Nobody was sad about it. It came in bags and went out in bricks and the only feeling anyone had about it was whether the count matched. She ran it a third time. 3,200. The paperwork was a form. Bag number, declared amount, counted amount, difference, initials. She filled it in and she was about to sign it when she noticed the slip. The deposit slip, handwritten, tucked in the bag. The declared amount was 3,240, but there was a line through the 4. Not a correction. A hesitation. Someone had written 3,200 first, then added the 4, then thought better of it, then left it. "Dennis." "What." "Someone's had a go at this slip." He came over. He looked at it for a long time, holding it up to the light like it was a banknote. "That's not our problem," he said finally. "We count what's in the bag. The bag's got 3,200. The store can argue with their own staff." "But someone's going to get blamed for forty quid." "Someone's going to get blamed for forty quid," he agreed. "And it might be the person who took it. And it might be a nineteen-year-old on the till who added it up wrong at the end of a double shift. And we don't know which, and it's not our job to know which."

She signed the form. At half five the bricks went out to the vans and the floor went quiet in the way it did before the day shift, a different quiet, more like a held breath. Priya made tea in the little kitchen and stood at the one window, which looked onto a car park and a fence and beyond it a bit of motorway just starting to fill up. Dennis came in for his own tea. "You'll drive yourself mad," he said, not unkindly. "Thinking about the other end of the bags." "I know." "Six years and you still think about it." "I know." He stirred his tea. "That's probably why you're good at it," he said, and went back to his desk.