I sat with my elbows on the kitchen table, and while she chopped onions and potatoes and green peppers I told her a good deal more, most of it highly unethical, as an accountant should never disclose the affairs of a client. She listened with increasing dismay, her cooking actions growing slower. Finally she laid down the knife and simply stood.
‘Your partner,’ she said.
‘I don’t know how much he’s condoned,’ I said, ‘but on Monday... I have to find out.’
‘Tell the police,’ she said. ‘Let them find out.’
‘No. I’ve worked with Trevor for six years. We’ve always got on well together, and he seems fond of me, in his distant way. I can’t shop him, just like that.’
‘You’ll warn him.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell him of the existence of... the rock.’
She started cooking again, automatically, her thoughts busy behind her eyes.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that your partner knew about the other embezzlers, and tried to hush them up?’
I shook my head. ‘Not Glitberg and Ownslow. Positively not. Not the last two, either. The firms they worked for were both my clients, and Trevor had no contact with them. But Connaught Powys...’ I sighed. ‘I really don’t know. Trevor always used to spend about a week at that firm, doing the audit on the spot, as one nearly always does for big concerns, and I went one year only because he had an ulcer. It was Connaught Powys’s bad luck that I cottoned on to what he was doing. Trevor might genuinely have missed the warning signs, because he doesn’t always work the way I do.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, a lot of an accountant’s work is fairly mechanical. Vouching, for instance. That’s checking that cheques written down in the cash book really were issued for the amount stated or, in other words, if the cashier writes down that cheque number 1234 was issued to Joe Bloggs in the sum of eighty pounds to pay for a load of sand, the auditor checks that the bank actually paid eighty pounds to Joe Bloggs on cheque no. 1234. It’s routine work and takes a fairly long time on a big account, and it’s often, or even usually, done, not by the accountant or auditor himself, but by an assistant. Assistants in our firm tend to come and go, and don’t necessarily develop a sense of probability. The present ones wouldn’t be likely to query, for instance, whether Joe Bloggs really existed, or sold sand, or sold eighty quids worth, or delivered only fifty quids worth, with Joe Bloggs and the cashier conspiring to pocket the thirty pounds profit.’
‘Roland!’
I grinned. ‘Small fiddles abound. It’s the first violins that threaten to cut your throat.’
She broke four eggs into a bowl. ‘Do you do all your own... er... vouching, then?’
‘No, not all. It would take too long. But I do all of it for some accounts, and some of it for all accounts. To get the feel of things. To know where I am.’
‘To fit into the landscape,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘And Trevor doesn’t?’
‘He does a few himself, but on the whole not. Don’t get me wrong. More accountants do as Trevor does, it’s absolutely normal practice.’
‘You want my advice?’ she said.
‘Yes, please.’
‘Go straight to the police.’
‘Thank you. Get on with the omelette.’
She sizzled it in the pan and divided it, succulent and soft in the centre, onto the plates. It tasted like a testimonial to her own efficiency, the best I’d ever had. Over coffee, afterwards, I told her a great deal about Jossie.
She looked into her cup. ‘Do you love her?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. It’s too soon to say.’
‘You sound,’ she said dryly, ‘bewitched.’
‘There have been other girls. But not the same.’ I looked at her downturned face. My mouth twitched. ‘In case you’re wondering about Jossie,’ I said, ‘no, I haven’t.’
She looked up, the spectacles flashing, her eyes suddenly laughing, and a blush starting on her neck. She uttered an unheadmistressly opinion.
‘You’re a sod,’ she said.
It was an hour’s drive home from Hilary’s house. No one followed me, or took the slightest interest, that I could see.
I rolled quietly down the lane towards the cottage with the car lights switched off, and made a silent reconnoitre on foot for the last hundred yards.
Everything about my home was dark and peaceful. The lights of Mrs Morris’s sitting-room, next door, shone dimly through the pattern of her curtains. The night sky was powdered with stars, and the air was cool.
I waited for a while, listening, and was slowly reassured. No horrors in the shadows. No shattering black prisons yawning like mantraps before my feet. No cut-throats with ready steel.
To be afraid, I thought, was no way to live; yet I couldn’t help it.
I unlocked the cottage and switched on all the lights; and it was empty, welcoming and sane. I fetched the car from the lane, locked myself into the cottage, pulled shut the curtains, switched on the heaters, and hugged round myself the comforting illusion of being safe in the burrow.
After that I made a pot of coffee, fished out some brandy, and sprawled into an armchair with the ancient records of the misdeeds of Powys, Glitberg and Ownslow.
At one time I’d known every detail in those files with blinding clarity, but the years had blurred my memory. I found notes in my own handwriting about inferences I couldn’t remember drawing, and conclusions as startling as acid. I was amazed, actually, at the quality of work I’d done, and it was weird to see it from an objective distance, as with a totally fresh eye. I supposed I could understand the comment there had been then, though at the time what I was doing had seemed a perfectly natural piece of work, done merely as best I could. I smiled to myself in pleased surprise. In that far-off time, I must have been hell to embezzlers. Not like nowadays, when it took me six shots to see Denby Crest.
I came across pages of notes about the workings of computers, details of which I had forgotten as fast as I’d learned them on a crash course in an electronics firm much like Powys’s. It had pleased me at the time to be able to dissect and explain just what he’d done, and nothing had made him more furious. It had been vanity on my part, I thought: and I was still vain. Admiring your own work was one of the deadlier intellectual sins.
I sighed. I was never going to be perfect, so why worry.
There was no record anywhere in the Glitberg/ Ownslow file of the buying of the warehouse, but it did seem possible, as I dug deeper in the search for clues, that it actually had been built by Glitberg and Ownslow, and was the sole concrete fabrication of National Construction (Wessex). Anyone who could invent whole streets of dwellings could put up a real warehouse without much trouble.
I wondered why they’d needed it, when everything else had been achieved on paper.
A tangible asset, uncashed, gone to seed, in which I had been dumped. The police had been told I was there, and the estate-agent trail had led without difficulty straight to Ownslow and Glitberg.
Why?
I sat and thought about it for a good long time, and then I finished the coffee and brandy and went to bed.
I picked Jossie up at ten in the grey morning, and drove to Portsmouth for the hovercraft ferry to the Isle of Wight.
‘The nostalgia kick?’ Jossie said. ‘Back to the boarding house?’
I nodded. ‘The sunny isle of childhood.’
‘Oh yeah?’ She took me literally and looked up meaningfully at the cloudy sky.
‘It heads the British sunshine league,’ I said.
‘Tell that to Torquay.’
A ten-minute zip in the hovercraft took us across the sea at Spithead, and when we stepped ashore at Ryde, the clouds were behind us, hovering like a grey sheet over the mainland.