Chapter 120: Twenty-Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty
The missing royalties had a number, and exactly half of it was not mine.
On Wednesday, the independent accountant placed the German audio reconciliation on the review table.
The report covered the three quarters that had appeared blank in North Quay's old-book statements. The accountant had matched each omitted period separately, preventing one corrected total from hiding which statements and remittances had failed.
Its first schedule linked foreign sub-licence reports to bank receipts and publisher entries.
The source documents had arrived through the jointly authorised audit route.
Neither Saltmere nor Larkspur appeared anywhere in the scope.
Household accounts and the closed six-line payment remained excluded.
The reconciliation identified £27,480 in previously unreported net receipts. The audit trail showed how foreign currency amounts reached sterling and preserved the rate date used for each remittance.
That number was not gross consumer sales.
It was not a penalty, damages award or calculation of my personal loss.
It was the old catalogue's contract-defined net receipt total for the omitted period.
The accountant displayed every expressly permitted deduction beneath the source line.
Each deduction had a contract reference, currency record and supporting invoice or statement. A second reviewer recalculated the schedule from the source copies without seeing the first accountant's working total.
No invented administration charge or new reserve entered the calculation.
The audit fee appeared separately under our shared audit authorisation.
Oliver and I each bore one half of that fee.
The distributable remainder followed the six existing title schedules.
Every relevant schedule still required a fifty-fifty division.
My majority of first drafts did not increase my percentage.
Oliver's performances and Chapter Eleven draft did not increase his.
The public contribution matrix changed no payment term.
The publisher's finance representative accepted the omitted reporting in writing.
She did not claim that the blank quarters meant the foreign receipts had never existed.
She also did not describe the error as a transfer of copyright.
North Quay issued payment of £27,480 plus the agreed interest adjustment into the controlled route. The publisher's transfer reference identified old German audio receipts only and could never be reused for any other settlement purpose.
The funds went to solicitors acting as stakeholder under a client account arrangement.
The client-account ledger recorded the principal, interest and authorised deductions separately.
Neither solicitor could release the other party's share on one signature.
The distribution instruction divided the permitted remainder equally under the old schedules.
It allocated the corresponding agreed interest through the same fifty-fifty rule.
I approved my side of the arithmetic after tracing each row to its source.
Oliver's solicitor approved his side through an independent confirmation.
The accountant compared both approvals without giving either party the other's private legal advice.
No amount was offset against the returned final-volume advance.
No amount reduced Oliver's £8,000 six-line obligation.
No amount entered the house-equity calculation.
The audit corrected one old-income stream and nothing else.
My share was real money I had been owed.
It was not a windfall entitling me to Oliver's half.
Accepting that limit cost me the easiest public version of recovery.
I also retained my half of the accountant's fee despite the publisher's reporting failure.
The audit agreement had allocated that cost before the result was known.
At 15:54, the accountant locked the reconciliation workbook and source index.
North Quay finance, both solicitors and the accountant retained role-specific certified copies.
I received the calculation and my authorised source extracts, not Oliver's private account file.
The corrected payment changed our available cash but not our authorship history.
It changed no copyright, licence, contribution fact or future pen-name restriction.
At 16:20, the accountant issued a draft corrected quarterly statement.
Its control line required confirmation of receipt allocation and future reporting treatment.
I had until 10:00 the next morning to verify both before the corrected statement became final.