"Have you nothing to say, man?" Thorpe demanded impatiently.

"Not without thinking about it carefully," Phillips replied. "Sir," he added, "if there’s medicine really missing, rather than just wastage or a miscount, or somebody’s error in writing what they took, then it’s a serious matter."

"Of course, it’s a serious matter! "Thorpe snapped. "There’s blackmail and murder involved."

"Murder?" Phillips said with a slight lift of surprise in his voice, but only slight. "Over our medicines? There’s been no theft that size. I know that for sure."

"Over a period of time," Thorpe corrected him. "Or so the sergeant thinks."

Phillips fished for his keys and brought out a large collection on a ring. First he opened one of the drawers and pulled out a ledger. "How far back, sir?" he asked Robb politely.

"I don’t know," Robb replied. "Try a year or so. That should be sufficient: ’

"Don’t rightly know how I can tell." Phillips obligingly opened the ledger to the same month the previous year. He scanned the page and the following one. "Everything tallies here, an’ there’s no way we can know if it was what we had then in the cupboards. Doesn’t look like anyone’s altered it. Anyway, I’d know if they had, and I’d have told Mr. Thorpe."

Thorpe stepped closer and turned the pages of the ledger himself, examining from that date to the present. There were quite obviously no alterations made to the entries. It told them nothing. The checking in of medicines was all made in the one hand, the withdrawals in several different hands of varying degrees of elegance and literacy. There were a few misspellings.

Robb looked at them. "Are these all doctors?" he asked.

"Of course," Thorpe replied tartly. "You don’t imagine we give the keys to the nurses, do you? If the wretched woman has really stolen medicines from this hospital, then it will be sleight of hand while the doctor’s back was turned, perhaps attending to a patient taken suddenly ill, or while he was otherwise distracted. It is a perfectly dastardly thing to do. I trust she will be punished to the fullest extent of the law as a deterrent to any other person tempted to enrich herself at the expense of those in her care!"

"Could just be wastage," Phillips observed, his eyes wide, looking from Thorpe to Robb. "Not easy to measure powders exact. Close enough, o’ course, but over a couple o’ dozen doses yer could be out a bit. Ever considered that, sir?"

"You couldn’t blackmail anybody over that," Robb replied, but his expression indicated that he said it with reluctance. "There must be more. If there is nothing in the past that is provable now, would you check your present stocks exactly against what is in your books?"

"Of course." Phillips had very little choice, nor for that matter, had Robb.

They stood silently while Phillips went through his cupboards, weighing, measuring and counting, watched impatiently by Thorpe, anxiously by Callandra, and with unease by Robb.