28 July 2010 Greg W. ©
Task: You are called from a party and someone hands you an unlabeled CD
The noise from the party muted as soon as the front door closed behind me. My eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the darkness but I was quick to recognise the side-lights of the old Jag parked up in the drive. Matt was leaning nervously on the driver’s door, usual cigarette in hand and with the stupid scarf and flat cap he wore whenever he drove the old girl.
‘Why didn’t you come in, why call me out here ?’ I went to the front of the car, ‘Its freezing out here.’
“Nobody inside I want to spend my time with”. Matt replied. I resisted the urge to dispute, Matt’s attitude to the company had not been great recently, he didn’t do recession very well.
‘Yeah, okay. So what do you want with me then?’
‘You and me, we have a problem, a big one.' He was talking rapidly, like a panic. 'I’ve brought you all the month-end spreadsheets. One or two of your party mates in there have been sucking cash from our sales and our inventory accounts’
‘Bullshit!’ I sputtered. I didn't believe it, I might not be that good with admin but Matt is married to our accounting, so much so that I mostly leave him to it. ‘Who it is?’ I asked ‘And how much?’
‘No way that I can figure out who it is but it’s been happening for a long time and we are about 2 million down this year alone.' he raced on 'I've got no idea how many of the staff are involved but it’s not a one man act I can tell you that.’ Matt was really seething. He pleaded to me ‘You need to look at all these end-of-year summaries and let me know which items you approved and which ones you didn't. Even then, we’ll still have a huge job to figure it all out,,, took a long drag and continued ‘I’m going to call in the law and get the bastards, who ever they are.’ He smashed his hardly smoked cigarette out with his foot.
‘Whoa, hold on Matt. Couldn't it be a mistake or something?’ My mind was racing, I had personally recruited every one of our team and I couldn't believe any one of them would be ripping us off. ‘I mean, the guys are all on profit share, have been for years, we've been reporting accruals monthly, how could everyone have missed this?’
“It’s a systematic, bloody clever, well hidden rip-off. Matt spat out ‘While you have been schmoozing, and splashing payouts to all and sundry I have been slugging away trying to figure out why the end of year was out of whack’
His hands were shaking as he struggled to light another smoke. He was wearing his stupid driving gloves which made his whole smoking exercise clumsy as he fumbled with the pocket, smokes and lighter. He took a suck and went on, ‘I stumbled on it while I was matching receipts from our Munich exhibition last May. Its good, real good, You need to go through everything you approved back at least a couple of years to see how long this has been going on.”
With that he fumbled again in his jacket and handed me a flash drive. ‘Here take this, have a look at the things I've highlighted. Call me if you agreed to any of those draw-downs, I didn't, and I'm betting you haven’t.’
I looked at the drive. One bit of plastic, 8 gig of memory, untold agony. I turned the drive over and over in my fingers, I hate detail at the best of times and this was going to be hell. Worse, I knew Matt would be right and the fallout was going to be devastating.
I looked up to see Matt was getting back into his car.
‘Hey, where the fuck are you going? Come in and go through it with me, we need to sort this together!’
‘No way. I’m not walking through that bunch of bastards knowing any one of them is ripping me off. Call me when you've gone through it’. The big old engine roared into life and the tyres chirped as he shot backwards and took off up the street.
Shit! was all I could think as I watched his tail lights disappear.
I went back in, headed past the noise and into my study, shut the door and slipped the flash drive into my laptop.
The drive opened but there were no files. Shit! I re-booted and the drive opened again but no folders, no files, it was clean. I didn't understand. Matt was too sharp to have handed me a blank drive. I speed dialed Matt off my mobile and got a number unavailable message. For the next hour I tried every way I knew to reach him, he hadn't returned to the office, he wasn't at home, not at the gym, nowhere.
From then my actions are a blur, I closed down the party to huge protests. Said I had super urgent business to attend to, locked up the house and went out to see if I couldn't find Matt at any of his mates, I even scoured the local pubs. Not having any luck I went to our office, I turned the place over looking to see if he had left a copy of his files out. There was nothing. His desk was bare, he’d obviously taken his laptop with him, but he usually did that. I pulled open some client files but they were all in order and hadn't been recently searched through. There was no evidence anyone had been checking any hard copy records. Most strange, how could Matt be so sure of his facts if he hadn't cross-checked the files? It was making no sense. I kept trying to call Matt with no luck and eventually I drove back home.
Then things got even weirder, my front door was unlocked, I tentatively called out and walked into my foyer, all quiet, no one here, turning on lights room by room, nothing had been disturbed until I looked in my office. My laptop was on but the flash drive wasn't in the USB port. My brain went into overdrive, what is going on? Who would break in and only steal a blank flash drive? I dropped into my chair and sat, numb, trying to think.
I don’t know how long I had been sitting there when there was a thumping on the front door and a voice yelled out ‘Open up, police!’ I hadn't even reported the break in yet. That’s not what they wanted.
Detective Inspector Fielding presented me with a warrant for my arrest, cautioned me, and a uniformed sergeant bundled me into the back seat of a blacked out Volvo estate.
I didn't understand anything, I was sat in a bare room behind a table. I was accused of fraud, theft and a list of corporate violations longer than a phone book.
What I was slowly able to piece together during my interrogation is that the cops got a tip-off that I had been siphoning off shareholder profits and was about to leave the country. They slapped down on the table a first class ticket to Geneva made out in my name dated tomorrow morning. I was told a flash drive had been found with only my fingerprints on it which contained complete and damning records of bogus transactions going back three years, cash deposits made into a numbered off-shore bank account, falsified sales records and phony inventory orders.
I still didn't understand.
Then, suddenly it all clicked. 2007, the partnership had nearly collapsed. Matt and I were in fundamental disagreement on offering our employees profit share. There was nothing ever formally documented on Matt’s defeat, just the reduction in our joint share and despite our company thriving, I knew he had always sort of begrudged my victory over him. The bastard had copies of my house keys.
Shit. You think you know someone.
Well, he’d taken his time but he’s done one hell of a stitch up job on me.
I'm thinking he is on a flight to Geneva. First Class. How the hell am I going to get out of this?
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