Smoke and Sundry Expenses
The coffee machine in the audit suite at Calloway Meridian had been broken since Tuesday. Priya Mehta had stopped expecting anyone to fix it. She sat at her desk on the fourteenth floor with a lukewarm tea from the vending machine, the paper cup leaving a faint damp ring on her notepad, and stared at a spreadsheet that had been bothering her since half past eight.
Outside, the City skyline was the colour of old pewter. Rain moved in slow diagonal streaks across the glass. Somewhere along the corridor, a printer juddered into life and then stopped.
The spreadsheet belonged to a mid-sized commodity trading firm called Brentham Voss. Calloway Meridian had been engaged to conduct a routine review of their operating expenses for the last eighteen months. It was, everyone agreed, an unremarkable brief. Priya was three weeks into the work.
She clicked her pen open. Clicked it shut again. Then she reached for her notepad and underlined a single column heading: Sundry Client Hospitality.
“You’ve got that look,” said Marcus from the desk opposite. He was eating a sandwich, the cellophane wrapper crackling with each fold.
“What look?”
“The one where you stop blinking.”
Priya turned her screen towards him. “Look at these hospitality figures. January through to June. What do you notice?”
Marcus chewed thoughtfully. “They’re even.”
“Exactly. Almost exactly two thousand pounds per month. Every month. To the penny in three of those six months.”
“Some firms budget tightly.”
“But hospitality isn’t that kind of expense. It’s dinners, client gifts, event tickets. It varies. It has to vary.” She tapped the screen. “This doesn’t vary. It performs the appearance of varying while never actually doing so by more than forty pounds either way.”
Marcus put his sandwich down.
She had requested the underlying receipts on Thursday. They arrived on Friday afternoon as a compressed file containing forty-seven scanned documents. Priya had printed them all. She spread them across the desk now, held flat with her mug and a stapler, and began sorting them into months.
The receipts were convincing. Restaurant names, dates, amounts, partial signatures. But Priya had spent four years in forensic support before moving into audit, and she knew what genuine receipt scans looked like. These were too clean. No creases. No variation in paper tone. The printed fonts were consistent in a way that handpressed thermal receipts never were.
She picked one up between two fingers. The paper was smooth. Standard eighty-gramme copy paper. Not the thinner, slightly waxy stock of a restaurant receipt.
Reprints. Or fabrications.
She telephoned three of the restaurants named on the documents. The first had no record of any booking under the client names cited. The second had closed in March of the previous year, four months before a receipt bearing its name and logo had supposedly been issued. The third did exist and did serve dinner, but the manager confirmed that they did not issue receipts in the format shown.
Priya sat for a moment with the phone still in her hand.
She rang the engagement partner, a man called Gerald Forsythe, who had an office with a view of the Thames and a habit of calling everyone by a shortened version of their name whether they preferred it or not.
“Pri,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
She walked him through it methodically. The even figures. The implausible consistency. The paper stock. The closed restaurant.
There was a pause on the line. She could hear him breathing.
“That’s a serious allegation,” he said.
“It’s a serious set of findings. I haven’t made an allegation.”
“Brentham Voss are a significant client.”
“I’m aware of that.”
Another pause. Longer this time. Outside her window, a pigeon landed on the ledge and regarded the rain with indifference.
“Write it up properly,” Gerald said finally. “Full documentation. I want every piece of supporting evidence referenced.” A brief silence. “You’ve done good work here, Pri.”
She wrote it up over the weekend, sitting at her kitchen table with proper coffee and the radiator ticking beside her. The report ran to nineteen pages. She cited each receipt by reference number, noted the discrepancies, attached the transcript of her conversation with the restaurant manager, and included a brief technical note on paper stock and print consistency. She did not speculate about who had produced the false documents or where the money had actually gone. That was not her remit. She simply described, clearly and completely, what she had found.
The report went to Gerald on Monday morning. By Wednesday, it had gone to Calloway Meridian’s financial crime liaison team, and from there, at Gerald’s direction, to the relevant regulatory body. Brentham Voss’s finance director, a man named Clive Asquith, was suspended pending investigation the following week.
Priya did not hear the details. She was not expected to. She returned to her desk, requested the next tranche of documents from a different client file, and found that someone had finally fixed the coffee machine.
She poured herself a cup. The coffee was strong and slightly bitter, the steam curling up past the window where the rain had stopped and a weak winter sun was doing its modest best against the pewter sky.
She sat down, opened her laptop, and began again from column one.
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, Cozy Nook Tales may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the site and allows us to continue publishing free stories every day.
Enjoyed this story? See our top 10 Financial Crime picks.
