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“Sorry, I don’t understand. We’ve already ordered our drinks.”

“Gemma?”

Across the cafe, Mr Jordan waved at Gemma, trying to get her attention.

“Sorry?” Gemma said.

She was utterly confused. She had been behind the counter the entire time and definitely hadn’t taken their orders. Sophie wasn’t due in for another half an hour. Unless Kent had come out of the kitchen to take their order, she didn’t see how that could be possible without her noticing. Then again, maybe she had had her head in a box looking for the menus.

“You’ve already ordered your drinks?” she said.

“Yes, and our food.”

“Gemma?” Mr Jordan’s voice came again. “Sorry, when you get two minutes, could you help me, please, love?”

“Yes, coffee, of course,” Gemma said automatically, with a slight wave at Mr Jordan while still focusing on the new customers.

“I’m sorry, who took your order?” she said.

The woman’s frown deepened.

“Well, no one,” she said.

“No one?” Gemma was lost. They were batty. They had to be. Nothing they were saying made any sense at all.

“No,” the man said before tapping the table and a black and white square that appeared to be stuck to it. “We ordered on the app. The way it says to do here.”

CHAPTER 39

Gemma turned in a circle. Every single table in the café had a thin piece of paper taped to the surface. A piece of paper she hadn’t noticed before. And yet, as she read it, she felt her jaw dropping open.

We are now using an online ordering platform,she read.Please scan the QR card and make your order and payment online. There is no need to leave your seat. Thank you. The Waterfront Café.

“Gemma?” Mr Jordan’s voice came again. “I’m not sure I’m doing this right. It keeps asking me to put a number in to pay. Can’t I just pay you the way I normally do?”

“Yes, you can,” Gemma said, although she was marching away from Mr Jordan and the other customers and heading straight towards the kitchen. Even as she pushed open the door, her stride didn’t break and her pace didn’t falter. This was not happening.

“What the hell have you done?” she said.

Kent was standing over the hob, cooking what appeared to be a full English, even though she hadn’t taken the order for one. There, next to him, was a new black machine she had never seen before.

“So, first order went without any issue,” he said. “That’s good to know. How’s the new till? Did you get your drinks orders through too?”

“What? What do you mean ‘new till’?”

“To work with the upgraded system? I assume you thought it was all self-explanatory.”

She hadn’t thought it was possible to be any more furious, and yet her pulse was pounding so hard she was sure something was going to burst.

“You bought a completely new till and implemented an entirely new system of ordering without even mentioning it to me?”

His face didn’t show so much as a flicker of remorse. If anything, he looked smug.

“It was in the email I sent around a week ago. I said the date that we were changing the system over and offered you the option of doing training on it last night. I assumed the fact that you hadn’t commented meant you didn’t have a problem.”

So that was where the smugness came from. Her back teeth ground together as she stepped towards him.

“I haven’t even seen the damn email, which you knew. There is no way I would have let you do this otherwise. Online ordering? Half our customers don’t even have smartphones.”