The Proxy Vote at Pellucid House
The rain had been falling since Tuesday. Miriam Scaife stood at the tall window of Pellucid House’s reception and watched it silver the pavement below, the puddles trembling with each drop. Behind her, the lobby smelled of damp wool and the particular brand of floor polish the building’s management had used since 1987 — a waxy, almost floral scent she associated with quarterly reviews and the quiet dread of columns that did not balance.
She had not been an auditor for six years. She had not missed it. She had, however, accepted a voluntary consultancy with the Inland Investment Protection Panel because the alternative had been another winter spent cataloguing her late husband’s record collection by genre. The records were in the spare room. The consultancy file was in her leather briefcase, and the briefcase was under her arm.
“Miss Scaife?” The receptionist, a young man with a very straight parting, extended a lanyard. “Mr. Ashworth is ready.”
Gerald Ashworth ran Pellucid Balanced Growth, a modest fund managing the pension contributions of just under four thousand teachers, ambulance staff, and local authority workers across the East Midlands. He was fifty-three, tan for November, and wore a tie that was too bright for someone under investigation.
“The Panel’s request was very clear,” Miriam said, settling opposite him at a glass table that reflected both their faces back at them. “Proxy voting records for the past four years. I have the originals here.” She laid out a sheaf of papers. “I have questions about the Hartfield Property Holdings votes in particular.”
Ashworth smoothed his tie. “Those were routine. The fund voted in favour of the board restructuring.”
“Yes.” Miriam uncapped her pen. It was a green-barrelled thing she had used since her first audit in 1991. “All twelve votes. Identical.”
“The fund holds twelve sub-accounts. The trustees instructed unanimously.”
“Indeed they did.” She turned three pages across the table so they faced him. “What I find interesting, Mr. Ashworth, is that one of those trustees, a Mrs. Dorinda Cale of Sheffield, died eighteen months before these votes were cast. And yet her signature appears on all twelve proxy forms. Very neatly.”
Ashworth’s jaw moved. No sound came out.
“The signatures are excellent,” Miriam continued. “The letter formation is consistent. But Mrs. Cale, I notice, always crossed her lower-case t with a slight backward lean. A habit. It shows in her earlier documents.” She tapped the original specimen signatures she had obtained from the Probate Registry. “These cross their t’s perfectly horizontally. Someone practised, but not quite enough.”
The room was so quiet she could hear the rain on the glass two floors above.
“I’d like,” Ashworth said, “to call my solicitor.”
“I thought you might.” Miriam began to stack the papers. They made a small, firm sound against the glass table.
The investigation that followed took four months. Miriam sat in on three interviews with the Panel’s legal counsel and submitted two written analyses she typed herself on a desktop computer her daughter had spent an afternoon setting up. She drank a great deal of tea and ate biscuits that were never quite the right kind, but she did not complain.
What emerged was systematic and rather simple in its mechanics. Ashworth had been casting proxy votes on behalf of deceased and lapsed account holders, all of them in favour of a series of property investment resolutions that returned handsome advisory fees to a consultancy registered in the name of his brother-in-law. Pellucid Growth had not suffered substantially. The teachers and ambulance workers would lose nothing. But Ashworth had drawn out just over three hundred and forty thousand pounds over four years in fees that should never have been authorised.
He admitted to it on a grey Tuesday in February, in a room with carpet tiles that had started to lift at one corner. His solicitor did the talking. Ashworth looked at his hands.
Miriam drove back to Nottingham that afternoon. The roads were clear for once, the sky the particular pale blue that appears only briefly in winter, and the bare hedgerows had a clean, pencil-sketch quality against it. She stopped at a petrol station and bought a packet of shortbread biscuits, the proper kind, thick and slightly sandy between the teeth.
At home, she made tea and sat at the kitchen table. Mrs. Dorinda Cale of Sheffield had been seventy-one years old and had worked as a primary school teaching assistant for thirty years. Her probate records listed a daughter in Harrogate and a cocker spaniel named Phillip. Miriam knew this because she had read the records carefully, as she read everything carefully.
She finished her tea. She ate two biscuits. Then she opened her briefcase and took out the next consultancy file, which concerned a charitable endowment in Bristol and a series of donations that did not correspond to any donor’s records.
Outside, the first proper dark of winter came down over the street. The lamp post opposite flickered once, then held. Miriam uncapped her green pen, and began.
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