Elementary – Serial Week/Conan Doyle – Jenny 60

[For a quick guide go here: Quick guide.]

[Old back story is here: Story so far at 30 Nov 2020 and read more recent Jenny episodes especially this one.]

[Other back story through in-links.]

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Jenny and Anna Watson were in the supplies store, ferreting around some boxes which Anna had discovered and wanted to investigate further.

“You have discovered something a little out of the ordinary,” murmured Jenny. “These types of requisitions are usually only made at the start of the second quarter of our business year, and yet here they are now.”

“Yes,” said Watson. “And I believe they have been here since last December - or at least that’s what the sticky label on the front of two of the boxes say.”

“Curious,” admitted Jenny, impressed by Watson’s powers of observation. “And how have these packages gone unnoticed until today?”

“They were positioned behind several stacks of breeze blocks and three and a half tonnes of cement,” explained Watson.

“So whoever put them here was hoping they would not be discovered until…” trailed Jenny, “until when I wonder?”

Watson had raised the query with Jenny at the start of the day. It was true she was drawn to the new finance director for other reasons as well. They seemed to share many of the same characteristics, a sense of humour, a sharp intellect and the love of logical problems which could be solved through elementary thinking. That and Anna liked Jenny’s face a lot.

Being thrown together in this fashion was an added bonus of working for this construction company. Anna Watson definitely wanted to work more closely with Jenny if she could, and Jenny, while more tentative and always placing her work before anything else, was certainly not against the idea.

Their work was interrupted by a sharp clearing of a throat at the doorway and the sudden appearance on Linus Hudson, carrying a tray on which was place a splendid tea service. This consisted of a bone china teapot, cups and saucers for all and a plate – an entire plate – of very special biscuits.

“So,” said Hudson, “Are you two getting along alright? Finding things out together?”

Jenny and Anna passed a knowing look - perhaps a little too knowing, thought Jenny, but what the hell?

“Mr Hudson!” exclaimed Jenny, coming forward and relieving Linus of his burden. “You have intervened at the most fitting moment. My colleague here appears to have happened across some kind of discrepancies between our financial outgoing and procurement orders. We are attempting to deduce precisely what has gone on here - be it a simple case of misplaced goods and insufficiently filled out paperwork - or, as I suspect, an attempt to deprive certain parties of some sort of significant sum of money.”

“Great heavens,” cried Linus Hudson, and sat down on a wooden crate.

Jenny bit into her special biscuit with precision. “What we need now is corroborative evidence,” she said, spraying special biscuit crumbs across the floor for which Anna Watson forgave her, being so entranced by Jenny’s clear minded approach, and her face.

“The hunt is on!” Jenny hollered, suddenly dashing out of the supplies store, down a flight of stair two at a time, around three corridors and into her own office, hotly pursued by Anna and trailed by Hudson, still carrying the tea pot.

Jenny whipped open one of the drawers in her desk and shoved her hand to the back. Triumphantly she pulled her hand out and in it was a clutch of receipts. “A-ha!” she exclaimed.

“What does this mean?” asked Hudson is hushed tones. Anna gestured simply to make him shut the hell up.

“It is…” said Jenny. “The audit trail!”

“Does this mean what I think it means?” asked Watson.

“Yes,” said Jenny, “Provided you think it means we have discovered the true reason for the items stowed behind the bricks and cement.”

Anna smiled. That was precisely what she thought it meant and she was pleased to find they were so much on the same wavelength.

“But how did you know to look in the back of the drawer to find those receipts?” asked Linus Hudson, flabbergasted.

“Because,” said Jenny, “our perpetrator had a habit, initially a subconscious tick, if you will, which involved pushing old receipts to the back of drawers rather than filing them in their proper place. She did this partly because she was lazy and partly because there were things better left until a particular time in the accounting process.

“Now,” she continued, “I suspect on this occasion she intended to lose the receipts and and covered her act of receipt deceit with the fiction of this being her habitual unconscious act. This enabled her to hold back full disclosure of expenditure from the tax man, reduce the burden for end of year payments on account for the company and pocketing the difference for herself.”

“Sinking that difference instead into the expenditure of one bicycle,” said Watson, completing the circle in wonder.

“Watson?” said Jenny, “that is precisely correct.”

“Amazing!” said Watson in awe, partly at Jenny’s face.

“Amazing!” said Hudson.

“You’d better believe it,” said Jenny, breaking the third wall momentarily to wink at the reader.

"But who would think of such a scheme?” asked Mr Hudson, almost keeping up.

“I’ve already told you,” said Jenny. “My predecessor. My arch nemesis. None other than Izzy. Izzy Moriarty.”

“Izzy Moriarty!” whispered Watson.

“Come Anna!” cried Jenny, storming to her feet. “Cherchez la femme!”