Compound Interest
The flyer was printed on paper so thin that the ink had bled slightly at the edges, turning the letters soft and uncertain. Cecily Oakes smoothed it flat on the kitchen table beside her toast, angling it towards the grey morning light from the window. The Hartwell Community Foundation. Annual Fundraising Gala. A Decade of Giving Back. She pressed one finger to the chairman’s name at the bottom of the page and held it there for a moment before reaching for her reading glasses.
She had last seen that name on a compliance report in 2009.
Cecily had spent thirty-one years as a bank examiner, most of them at the Financial Conduct Authority’s regional office in Bristol. She had retired in June with a good watch and a potted orchid. Neither had required much maintenance since. The orchid sat on the windowsill now, dropping leaves onto the sill in small brown crescents, and the watch was accurate to within four seconds a day, which was more precision than her current schedule demanded.
She pinned the flyer to the corkboard above the kettle and went to find her reading notebooks.
The name was Gerald Pritt. In 2009 he had been assistant treasurer for a credit union in Worcestershire that had collapsed amid suggestions of irregular loan arrangements. No charges had followed. The investigation had stalled for reasons Cecily had always found inadequate, and Gerald Pritt had subsequently vanished from her professional horizon entirely.
Apparently he had reappeared in Hartwell, running a registered charity.
She looked up the Hartwell Community Foundation on the Charity Commission website that evening, sitting at the small desk in the back bedroom that had once been her office and still smelled faintly of photocopy toner and the dried lavender she kept in a ceramic bowl by the lamp. The charity’s accounts were filed and publicly accessible. She printed them off, all forty-seven pages, and began at the beginning.
By midnight she had filled six pages of her own notebook with observations. By one in the morning she had found the first thread.
The foundation listed a catering firm called Sunningdale Services as a regular supplier. Quarterly invoices, always just below the threshold requiring trustee sign-off. Across three years that amounted to just under eighty thousand pounds paid to a company whose registered address was a flat in Swindon. Cecily cross-referenced the company filing at Companies House. Sunningdale Services had been incorporated in 2019. Its sole director was listed as a G. M. Pritt.
She set down her pen and looked at the lavender bowl.
The following Wednesday she attended the foundation’s volunteer information morning, held in the back room of the Hartwell library. The room smelled of radiator dust and old carpet, and someone had arranged a plate of bourbon biscuits beside an urn of tea. Six other people had come. Cecily took a seat near the window and accepted a cup.
Gerald Pritt was shorter than she had expected from his photograph. He wore a good suit with a small enamel pin on the lapel, and he spoke with the relaxed authority of a man accustomed to being trusted. His handshake, when he worked his way around the room, was dry and firm.
“I understand you’ve been involved with charitable finance before,” he said when he reached her. His eyes were the colour of overcast sky and gave nothing away.
“In a manner of speaking,” Cecily said. “I spent a good many years in banking regulation.”
Something in his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Marvellous. We can always use people who understand figures.”
“I imagine you can,” Cecily said.
She had already forwarded her notes to a former colleague at the FCA the night before. A woman named Bridget Farrow who had taken over financial crime referrals for the South West region and who responded to Cecily’s email at seven forty in the morning with the words: “This is not the first time his name has crossed my desk this year. Call me.”
They spoke for forty minutes. Cecily read out the supplier names, the invoice amounts, the dates. Bridget made sounds of quiet, methodical interest at intervals. Sunningdale Services was already known to her team, she said eventually. It had appeared in connection with another charitable entity in Gloucestershire the previous spring. They had not been able to establish the link clearly enough until now.
“The threshold-splitting is the thing,” Cecily said. “Always just below the level requiring oversight. Whoever structured it understood internal controls.”
“He would,” Bridget said. “He used to write them.”
The gala took place on a Saturday evening in the function suite of the Hartwell Park Hotel. Cecily did not attend. She spent the evening repotting the orchid into a larger container with fresh bark medium, pressing it gently down with her thumbs and tapping the sides of the pot to settle the roots. Outside, rain moved in from the west and tapped quietly at the kitchen window.
On the Monday morning following, she received a brief text from Bridget: “Warrant executed Friday evening. Pritt and two others. Accounts frozen. Thank you, Cecily.”
She read it twice, then set her phone face-down on the table beside the flyer, which was still pinned to the corkboard. She considered it for a moment. The ink at the edges of the letters still bled slightly, turning the words soft and uncertain.
She unclipped it, folded it in half, and placed it in the recycling.
Then she put the kettle on.
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