A Courtesy Copy to No One
The coffee in Priya Mehta’s mug had gone cold again. She hadn’t noticed. The reconciliation spreadsheet in front of her was forty-seven pages long, printed on both sides, and she was on page thirty-one.
The open-plan office at Carrington Settle Asset Management smelled of printer toner and the bacon rolls someone had brought in three hours ago. It was a Tuesday in February, the sky beyond the tall windows the colour of old pewter. Priya had been seconded here from her firm, Hawthorn & Associates, for a routine internal audit. Routine, her manager had said. Three weeks, maximum.
She was on day eleven.
She turned to page thirty-two. The payments column was dense with familiar reference numbers, each one tied to a vendor in the master register. Property management. IT support. Legal retainer. She ran her finger down the page, a habit she’d picked up from her father, who had balanced the household accounts in exactly the same way every Sunday.
Her finger stopped.
VERDANT SOLUTIONS LTD. Twelve payments over fourteen months. Each one for £9,800. The total sat just beneath the £10,000 threshold that would trigger automatic secondary approval.
She looked at the vendor code. It wasn’t in the master register.
Priya set the page down and picked up her pen. She drew a small neat circle around the name. Then she went to make fresh coffee, because that was something to do with her hands.
—
The compliance officer at Carrington Settle was a man named Douglas Farr. He was sixty-one, recently promoted, and wore a signet ring on his right hand that he turned continuously while he talked. He had the manner of someone who had spent decades making awkward conversations feel smooth, which made Priya trust him slightly less than she might otherwise have done.
She showed him the page at half past two.
“Verdant Solutions,” he said, not as a question. He turned the ring.
“It’s not in the register,” Priya said. “No company number, no contact details, no signed contract on file. But the payments are regular and they’ve cleared without issue for over a year.”
“Vendor master can have gaps,” Farr said. “Especially for smaller suppliers. Sometimes these things are managed informally.”
“Twelve payments totalling £117,600 is not especially informal.”
He looked at her over the page. “I’ll look into it.”
“I’d like to trace the account the payments are going to,” Priya said. “Could you get me the banking details from the payment authorisations?”
There was a pause. Brief, but present, like a single missed beat in a piece of music.
“I’ll have to go through the finance director for those,” he said.
“Of course,” Priya said. “I’ll wait.”
—
She didn’t wait. She went back to her desk and searched Companies House for Verdant Solutions Ltd. There were several. She worked through them systematically, cross-referencing incorporation dates and registered addresses until she found one that had been registered fourteen months ago. The registered address was a serviced office in Bristol. The sole director was listed as one G. R. Pelston.
She searched the internal staff directory.
Graham R. Pelston. Head of Property and Facilities. Carrington Settle Asset Management.
Priya sat back in her chair. Around her, colleagues typed and talked and ate biscuits from a communal tin. The photocopier whirred. Someone laughed at something on their phone. She looked at her cold coffee and then looked back at her screen.
She called her manager at Hawthorn & Associates. His name was Sanjiv and he had the particular quality, rare in her experience, of listening completely before he spoke.
She told him what she’d found.
“Don’t touch anything else,” he said. “Don’t speak to Farr again today. I’m ringing their board’s audit committee chair directly. Do you have the file reference number for the reconciliation?”
“AR-2024-09.”
“Good girl.” He paused. “Good work, Priya.”
She printed three copies of page thirty-two. She put one in her bag, one in her personal audit file, and one in a sealed envelope addressed to Sanjiv. Then she walked to the post box at the end of the street.
The air outside was sharp and damp, carrying the faint smell of exhaust and wet stone. She posted the envelope, stood for a moment on the pavement, and watched a pigeon investigate a dropped chip near the kerb. The chip was frozen stiff.
—
Sanjiv spoke to the audit committee chair that evening. By Thursday morning, an external forensic accountant had been brought in. Graham Pelston was placed on immediate leave while the company was referred to the National Crime Agency. Douglas Farr faced a separate internal review.
Priya returned to the office on Thursday afternoon to collect her files. Her temporary desk had already been cleared by someone else. Her mug, the one with the chip in the handle that she’d been using all fortnight, had been washed and placed in the general cupboard.
She retrieved it. She put it in her bag.
On her way out, she passed the photocopier, still whirring steadily, and the biscuit tin, now empty, and the tall windows overlooking the street, the sky still that same flat pewter grey.
She had a new instruction from Sanjiv waiting on her phone. A corporate client in Leeds. Quarterly returns.
She called him back from the pavement.
“How long?” she asked.
“Three weeks,” he said. “Maximum.”
Priya looked down at her bag, the printed page still folded inside it, the small neat circle in blue ink around a name that should never have been there.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll drive up Sunday.”
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