The Final Audit at Ferncastle Trust
The lifts at Ferncastle Trust smelled of carpet cleaner and stale coffee, and Priya Chandran had learned to hold her breath for the four floors between the lobby and the compliance department. She stepped out on Thursday morning with her satchel pressing a damp stripe across her shoulder and her thermos tucked under one arm, still warm against her wrist.
The open-plan office was already humming. Keyboards, a photocopier clicking through its warm-up cycle, Gerald Baines from fixed income laughing at something on his phone with his chair tilted at an angle that defied physics.
Priya sat down, opened the quarterly review files, and began.
She had been with Ferncastle eleven months. Long enough to know the accounts that behaved correctly, and to notice, as she did just before ten o’clock on that particular Thursday, one that did not.
Dormant account reference DCA-1147. Opened in 2009, no registered withdrawals since 2014, no active correspondence on file. It should have been gathering dust in the digital archive. Instead, it showed an interest credit posted every six weeks, regular as a heartbeat, drawn from an internal reconciliation fund that Priya had not been asked to review.
She printed the statement. It was warm from the machine and curled slightly at one corner.
“Hugh.” She crossed the office to where Hugh Seaton, senior compliance officer and maker of genuinely terrible tea, was sorting through a manila folder. “Can I ask you something about the dormant account procedure?”
Hugh looked up. He had the particular stillness of a man who has just heard a sound he hoped no one else noticed.
“What about it?”
“DCA-1147. It’s showing interest credits going back to 2019. Six-weekly cycle, consistent amounts. But there’s no authorisation trail.”
He set down the folder. “That one’s been flagged for closure. Old administrative error, probably.”
“The credits are recent. Last one was posted on the fourth.”
A pause. Hugh’s thumb moved back and forth across the edge of the folder. “I’ll look into it.”
Priya returned to her desk. She took a careful sip from her thermos and smoothed the printed statement flat on her keyboard.
She spent the next hour following the reconciliation fund backwards through three years of quarterly entries, copying nothing to the shared drive. By lunchtime she had found eight dormant accounts, all DCA-prefixed, all receiving credits from the same internal code. The total, across the period, was a fraction over one point two million pounds.
She ate her sandwich at her desk. Egg and cress. She barely tasted it.
At half past two, she walked down to the fourteenth floor and knocked on the door marked Suzanne Okafor, Head of Internal Audit.
Suzanne was a small woman with reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a reputation for remembering everything she had ever been told. She listened without interrupting, her hands still on the desk, while Priya set down her printed documents in a neat stack.
“You said Hugh’s response was that it would be looked into,” Suzanne said, when Priya had finished.
“Yes.”
“And you haven’t discussed it with anyone else.”
“No.”
Suzanne picked up the top sheet and read it once, slowly. Then she took off her glasses and placed them on the desk. “Hugh Seaton has been the authorising signatory on the reconciliation fund since 2020.”
Priya said nothing. She had already found that too, at around a quarter past twelve, somewhere between the egg sandwich and the third page of entries.
“You did the right thing,” Suzanne said.
By Friday afternoon, the matter had been referred to the Financial Conduct Authority and Hugh Seaton had been escorted from the building with his coat over his arm and his lanyard not quite in his hand. Priya had watched from the window, not deliberately, but she had been standing there when it happened and she had not looked away.
He had set up the dormant accounts himself in the early months of the pandemic, when transaction volumes were irregular enough to absorb the anomalies without attracting notice. The credits were small individually. Together they had funded, among other things, a barn conversion in the Cotswolds and a share portfolio registered in his wife’s maiden name.
The investigation would take months. The barn conversion would likely be sold.
On Monday, Priya arrived at work earlier than usual, before Gerald and his tilting chair, before the photocopier had finished its warm-up. She made herself a cup of tea in the small kitchen, using the good bags that someone had left in the cupboard above the sink, and she stood at the window with her hands around the mug.
The city moved below her. Buses, cyclists, a woman walking a small dog with determined speed. The light was flat and grey and the glass was cold where her knuckles rested against it.
She drank the tea. It was, unexpectedly, very good.
She rinsed the mug, walked to her desk, and opened the quarterly review files for the second time in six days. Then she took out a fresh pen, clicked it once, and began.
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