The Last Quarter at Linden & Pryce
The lift at Linden & Pryce smelled of carpet cleaner and warm photocopier toner, the same on every floor. Nell Bassett had worked here for three years and could tell which floor she’d arrived at with her eyes closed, simply from the particular quality of the silence. The twelfth floor, where the senior partners kept their offices, had a hush like a church between services. Heavy. Expectant.
She was not supposed to be on the twelfth floor.
The spreadsheet printout in her hand was warm from the printer and slightly damp at one corner where she’d gripped it too tightly on the journey up. It showed eighteen months of invoices from a company called Veridan Procurement Solutions. Forty-three payments. Each one just under ten thousand pounds.
Nell stood outside the office of Marcus Hollett, Head of Internal Finance, and straightened the printout. Then she knocked.
“Come.”
His office was panelled in pale oak that had gone slightly orange with age. A rubber plant in the corner had leaves the size of dinner plates, each one polished to a shine. Marcus was at his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, reading something on his screen. He did not look up immediately. When he did, he smiled, and the smile went nowhere near his eyes.
“Nell. What brings you up here?”
“The Veridan account.” She placed the printout on the desk, though he didn’t reach for it. “I’ve been working through the Q3 supplier reconciliation and I can’t find any corresponding purchase orders. No deliveries. No goods receipts. No contact details in the system beyond a single email address.”
“Veridan handle consultancy services,” Marcus said. “There’s rarely a paper trail for that sort of engagement.”
“I searched the Companies House register.” She folded her hands to stop fidgeting. “There’s no business registered under that name. Not in England, not in Wales. I also rang the telephone number listed in our vendor file. It’s a residential line. The woman who answered didn’t know what Linden and Pryce was.”
The rubber plant rustled faintly from the ventilation above, its polished leaves catching the strip lighting.
Marcus picked up a pen and set it down again. “You should have brought this to me before going to outside sources.”
“I’m bringing it to you now.”
There was a pause that lasted perhaps four seconds. Nell counted them.
“These things sometimes get set up in unusual ways,” he said. “Interim arrangements. I’ll look into it.”
“There are forty-three payments,” she said. “Four hundred and twenty-two thousand pounds in total, going to an account at a private bank in the Channel Islands.”
He looked at the printout then. He read for a moment with his jaw set, then placed the sheet face down on the desk as though turning off a light.
“Leave this with me,” he said, in a tone that was meant to close the conversation.
Nell picked the printout back up. “I’ve kept the working file.”
She took the stairs back down to the seventh floor, where the internal audit team had three shared desks and a kettle that took eight minutes to boil. Her colleague Priya was eating a tangerine, the sharp citrus smell cutting through the stale office air.
“Well?” Priya said.
“He told me he’d look into it.”
“And?”
Nell opened her laptop and navigated to the encrypted folder she had set up two days earlier. She had already sent a copy to the external whistleblowing service. She had sent a second copy to the Financial Conduct Authority’s online portal at eleven forty-seven the previous night, sitting at her kitchen table in her dressing gown with a mug of cold tea beside her. She had pressed submit, then sat for a long time listening to the central heating tick.
“I reported it externally yesterday,” she said. “Before I went to see him.”
Priya set the tangerine down. “Nell.”
“Someone set up a ghost supplier and ran nearly half a million pounds through it over eighteen months. The payments were structured to stay below the single-authorisation threshold. That’s not a mistake. That’s deliberate.” She kept her voice flat. “I wasn’t going to give anyone the chance to make the file disappear.”
The FCA called at three twenty-seven. They were precise and courteous and asked her to send the working file through a secure portal, which she did while still on the telephone. They told her to preserve all documentation and to contact them again if anyone within the organisation attempted to speak to her about the matter.
Marcus Hollett was placed on administrative leave the following Thursday. The firm’s external auditors arrived on the Monday after that, carrying matching wheelie cases and wearing the expressions of people who expected to be there for some time.
Nell found out later that Marcus had been diverting the payments to an account held in his wife’s maiden name. He had set up the Veridan email address on a free webmail service, using a library computer in Cheltenham. He had been doing it since shortly after a bonus dispute in the second quarter of the year before last.
On the Friday evening after the external auditors arrived, Nell took the lift down to the lobby. It smelled of carpet cleaner and toner, same as always. She stepped out into a November evening that tasted of cold air and distant bonfires, and she walked to the bus stop with the printout still folded in her coat pocket, its edge worn soft from the week’s handling. She left it there. She didn’t need it any more.
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