Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Brindley Logistics ·
The Parcels of the Twelfth Shelf
A post-Christmas stocktake at the Brindley Logistics parcel store confirms a twelfth shelf in service, its parcels priced and posted for an October that has not begun.
- filed: "after the christmas traffic"
- reference: "BL/PD/31"
1. This record concerns the parcel store of Brindley Logistics on the northern face of the depot yard, Murrow. The store is a single hall of grey brick and wired glass, fitted with eleven shelving ranges to a plan approved in the depot's first year. All ranges are painted to one specification and all are numbered in the shelf register, one through eleven. No twelfth range appears on the plan, in the register, or in any alteration order held by this office.
2. On the fourteenth of January, in the course of the stocktake ordered after the christmas traffic, storekeeper Colin Berrow reported a twelfth range in service between range eleven and the loading doors. It is built to the same pattern as its neighbours, painted to the same specification, and stencilled 12 in the same lettering. The shelf register has grown a page for it, ruled in the office standard and headed in a hand the desk recognises as its own, and the desk denies writing it.
3. The range carried sixty-one parcels. Brown paper, string, sealed, labels complete and correctly formatted for the city's streets. Each label bears a delivery date falling between the first and the thirty-first of October next. No year is printed on any of them. So far as comparison allows, the addressing on all sixty-one is the work of a single hand.
4. Postage has been franked on every label. The frank marks agree with one another, and they agree line for line with the charge columns of a printed tariff schedule found filed among the depot's stationery. The schedule is issued for the year after this one. Its rates are not in force. The parcels have been charged at them correctly, to the penny, in every case.
5. The sender's boxes are complete throughout. Each carries the depot's own prefix, BL/PD, followed by an issue number from the series kept for the store's outgoing documentation. Every number in that series is accounted for on the dispatch book. None of them falls on these labels.
6. A removal test was carried out. One parcel, the lightest of the set, was signed out for inspection and weighed. At the next nightly count the range stood at sixty-one parcels. The recount confirms sixty-one. The signature book for the removal is properly kept, and on the page opposite, in pencil, a running note has been started for the inspected parcel: dated through the coming autumn, day by day, each entry adjusting the parcel's recorded weight downward by one small item, each adjusted figure agreeing with the last.
7. The parcel was returned to the range in order to restore the count. The register accepted it as a fresh arrival, logging it under its own label number with an arrival date in October, and now carries it twice. The shelf count and the register count cannot be brought to agree in either direction, however the arithmetic is worked, and three officers have attempted it independently.
8. No officer of the store admits to the range's construction, and none is suspected of it. The depot's standing practice for post-dated traffic is well known to this office: parcels held for collection, parcels held against a stated date, both entered and both priced. The twelfth range answers to neither practice. It holds parcels that are neither claimed nor yet due, and they are nevertheless entered, priced, and evidently served.
9. Filed without finding. The range remains in service for the present, on the grounds that its contents are correctly stored, that the charge accounts balance to the farthing, and that nothing on the shelf has asked to be delivered early. The question carried forward to the next inspection stands on the last ruled line of the shelf register: if the twelfth range is emptied before October comes, to which October will its parcels be delivered, and who will sign for them at the door?