Acts & Monuments Read online

  “But obviously, I’m upset too, and I don’t think she gets that. I need to talk. I need to feel that someone understands. But I just feel lonely at the moment. Very lonely. My daughter’s gone off to university now too, which doesn’t help. There’s no one to talk to. And then I missed out on a job I really should have got—”

  “You have job. Good job. With good company.”

  “I don’t know about that. The pay’s not what it should be – I’ve not had a pay rise for three years. And Monument’s not like it was when I joined. They’d chuck you out on the street now – if it wasn’t for what I’m doing. All this, it shouldn’t be necessary. If it was down to me, it wouldn’t be. But it’s them. They’ve forced us both into this situation, really.”

  A punch of smoke hit the air as Iulia choked, incredulous. “You give me your money because of them? You expect me to believe this?”

  Barry finally turned to face her. “It’s true, honestly. I want to help you – because of Neville. Because of what it used to be like. He’d never have let you be evicted… Besides, I can afford it.”

  “How you afford it? If they pay you so bad?”

  “It’s all rather complicated, really,” Barry said, sensing a shift in her demeanour. “Technically, I’m using their money to pay you. But you’re paying it straight on to them anyway, so it’s not really theft. It still gets to them in the end. It felt like the right thing to do.”

  She coughed a hollow laugh, which gave way to an accusing silence. Eventually, Iulia turned her gaze from the window and fixed Barry with a look that was so piercing, so wounded, that he immediately fell silent.

  “You go now,” she said, tossing Barry’s trousers toward him. “I take shower.”

  It was as if there were a hole at the heart of their encounter. Barry wondered if a muffin could fill it. He knew there was a service station on his route back to the office, so he decided to find out.

  *

  The service station was an uncomfortable mix of bright lights and aching loneliness. Barry had the misfortune of making his stop at the same time as a coach-load of schoolchildren. He bought himself a coffee and the largest muffin he could find, and looked for a seat as far away from the ebullient ten year-olds as possible. There didn’t seem to be many options, but then he noticed a single seat free next to a youngish woman who appeared to be wholly entertained by writing something. Barry apologised for having to ask if the seat was free, and then apologised again for sitting in it when she said that it was.

  He didn’t mean to pry, but he couldn’t help noticing what she was writing. It was a simple thank-you note, but it looked for all the world like a touching act of kindness by a person whose thoughtfulness in feeling it necessary to write one set her apart as good.

  Dear Harry and Liz,

  Thank you so much for a great few days. Everything’s been so horrible, but it was wonderful to get away – and very much appreciated. I didn’t realise how much I needed it until I was with you, but driving back now I’m missing you both already, so I just wanted to say thanks for all you’ve done. It was very thoughtful of you.

  I hope the kids didn’t mind having me around. (They’re great by the way – a real credit to both of you.)

  You really are the most wonderful friends. Thank you so much – I promise I’ll return the favour one day if either of you ever need it!

  Love and best wishes to you both,

  She looked up and smiled awkwardly as she noticed Barry staring at her, and he was suddenly filled with a sense of unbearable longing. What he hungered after, he realised, was not her beauty, but the innate goodness that seemed to make her beautiful.

  And what Barry also realised was that maybe the opposite was true for him. Maybe he wasn’t ugly because of his physical and aesthetic deficiencies, but because of an innate moral deficiency that somehow soaked into his skin and disfigured him.

  It made perfect sense; if people were hungry for goodness, the opposite was also true – malevolence invariably made them want to throw up. And Barry knew from the look Iulia had given him as he’d removed his clothing that lunchtime that he made women want to throw up.

  He’d thought he wanted sex because of what happened at the end, but now he realised that he actually wanted it because of what happened at the beginning. And that, it transpired, was something that money couldn’t buy.

  Barry pushed his half-eaten muffin to one side. A horrible thought occurred to him: maybe the money wasn’t going to change anything, not fundamentally. Maybe it wasn’t enough – or, rather, maybe it was too much, but too much of the wrong thing. Maybe it wouldn’t make things better after all. Maybe it might even make them worse.

  Thirty-Six

  “Ruth, you wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, Barry, please come in.”

  “Sorry,” Barry replied, entering the room. It was neat and tidy, but seemed to strain ever-so-slightly at the seams trying to contain all of Ruth’s various accoutrements – which, Barry thought, was not unlike the trouser suit she was wearing.

  “Take a seat,” she said. “Obviously, you know Langley…”

  “Morning, Barry.”

  A bolus of unease sat, firm and immovable, in the pit of Barry’s stomach. He had arrived at work that morning to find an email and a phone message from Ruth calling him to an urgent meeting at 9.30am. Ruth never called him into a meeting – there was no need for her to; she was, after all, the director of finance, not housing. If Ruth was calling him into a meeting, then it could only mean one thing.

  “And this is one of our auditors, Hope Mansell.”

  Hope was an intimidatingly young Anglo-Jamaican woman with a commanding demeanour and jet-black hair swept back into a bun. “Pleased to meet you, Barry,” she said unsmilingly, whilst proffering her hand.

  “Auditors? I hope there’s nothing wrong,” Barry said, as innocently as he could manage. But his unease quickly spread from the pit of his stomach to every part of his being.

  “It’s OK. There’s nothing for you to worry about,” Ruth said.

  But Barry knew that there was everything for him to worry about, so he concentrated his efforts into twisting and untwisting his tie around his fingers like thread around a bobbin.

  “It appears that Monument may have been the victim of a fraud,” Hope said. “The quarterly payment from The SHYPP has been… misdirected.”

  “Misdirected?”

  “Yes. The quarterly invoice has been paid, but not into our account,” Ruth explained.

  “Which means that we don’t have the money!” Langley said.

  “But how can that have happened?” Barry asked.

  “Well, that’s why we wanted to talk to you,” Hope replied, the effect of her caramelly voice somewhat undercut by the coldness of her eyes. “We were hoping that you would answer a few questions that might help us find all that out.”

  Despite the December chill outside, Barry felt heat burning through his face and sweat patches beginning to form in the palms of his hands, which began to soak into the fabric of his tie.

  “Errr… OK… Is it me or is it awfully hot in here?”

  Ruth obligingly adjusted the temperature of the comfort cooling system on the control panel.

  Hope peered at Barry authoritatively over the reading glasses perched on her nose. “Me and my team have been investigating this since your internal people discovered the problem yesterday and it looks to us like a fairly traditional mandate fraud.”

  “Mandate fraud?”

  “Someone has amended the payment details on your invoice.”

  “So the money’s gone to them instead of us?” Barry asked.

  “It would appear so,” replied Hope, looking even more sombre than the occasion required, in Barry’s opinion.

  “But the good news is we think we know who did it!” Langley said.

&n
bsp; The colour slowly leaked from Barry’s face until all that was left was a sallow, variegated white. He felt as if he were about to be sick and then as if he might suddenly defecate. How had they worked it out so quickly? He had been so sure that nothing could be traced back to him, but they’d obviously been watching him all this time. And as for Alun’s reassurances that such crimes were almost never investigated, how could he have been so stupid as to take at face value the inebriated rantings of someone who had such an obvious axe to grind?

  “To be fair,” said Ruth, glaring at Langley through the solid frames of her glasses, “we can’t say with any degree of confidence yet that we know who was involved. But there are a couple things that seem to be pointing us in a certain direction. Which is why we wanted to speak to you.”

  Barry was torn. Should he just fold and confess all now in the hope of a lesser sentence? Or could he try to bluff his way out of it? Twin emotions rose up in him, vying for supremacy. He suddenly found that he had no idea how to hold himself together anymore, how to sit or even how to breathe. And certainly not what to say. In view of this, he decided to play for time while he found out how much they knew.

  “And how do you think I can help?” he asked, clenching his buttocks determinedly as if trying to stop the truth leaking out.

  “Well, there are obviously a couple of people who could have been involved here and at The SHYPP,” said Hope.

  “And we need to work out if any of them have been lying,” said Langley.

  “We need to try to eliminate as many people as we can,” Hope clarified, shooting Langley a glance as she did so. “May I just ask, Barry, have you had any problems with The SHYPP’s payments before?”

  “Oh, no. Never. The SHYPP’s been open fifteen years and I’ve been involved right from the beginning. They’ve been a bit slow to pay sometimes, but I’m positive we’ve never had a payment go missing before. Absolutely positive.”

  “OK. So tell me Barry, what was your understanding of the process for producing the invoice?” Hope asked.

  “Well, it was down to Saleema really. She was supposed to get the figure for the rent that was due from the rent accounting system and then get the figure for repairs from Bob.”

  Hope looked up from her tablet and lifted an eyebrow in gentle enquiry. “Supposed to?”

  “Well, Saleema hadn’t been doing it long, and I think it’s fair to say the first invoice she’d done hadn’t been a hundred per cent accurate. So she liked to run them past me first. Of course, I just told her what to do with the rent due figure. I didn’t check anything else.”

  “Obviously. And did she check this invoice with you too?”

  “Well, yes. I talked her through the calculation she needed to do. She did it and then sent me through a PDF of the draft invoice.”

  “And did you notice anything about the draft invoice?”

  “Not really. Just that, as far as I could tell, it was correct. So I told her to issue it – Langley was chasing payment and wanted to get the money in, so I didn’t want it delayed anymore.”

  “And did she issue it by email at all?”

  “No. Definitely by post. Sally’s a bit old school about things like that. I think she gets loads of fake ones via email – like the rest of us. Anyway, she insists on getting a letter in an envelope through the post before she pays anything. I made a point of telling Saleema that.”

  “I see,” said Hope flicking an eyebrow up at Barry, then typing some notes into her tablet. “Now I want to move on, if I can. I understand that you had a phone conversation with Marilyn from The SHYPP about the invoice before she paid it.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” If Marilyn had told them about the call, it seemed pointless to deny that it had happened.

  “And what did she ask you?”

  “Well, she said they’d had an invoice, but it had different payment details to usual. They just wanted to check whether ours had changed.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “Well, I said that, as far as I’d been told, they had. There’d been a letter about it.”

  “And did you actually confirm what the new details were?”

  “Well, no, I couldn’t. I don’t know our bank account details,” Barry replied, entirely truthfully. “But I knew that they were changing because Saleema had told me.”

  Langley’s eyes narrowed. “So Saleema knew Sally would only pay against a paper invoice, and she was aware that the bank details were changing before she sent the invoice out?”

  “Oh yes,” Barry said.

  Meaningful looks were exchanged between the other three.

  “And can I ask, did anyone else at Monument know that the invoice was being issued to The SHYPP that week?” Ruth asked.

  “Well, no. Not as far as I’m aware. It was quite unusual for us to issue the invoice that early, to be honest. We were only issuing it when we did because Langley was pressing for payment. Normally, it would have gone out later.”

  Hope looked up sharply from her tablet. “It would normally have gone out later? What do you mean?”

  “Well, normally, we’d wait until Bob had sent through the list of repairs and their costs. That could take weeks from quarter end. But Langley said he wanted the invoice out sooner, so we chased Bob up.”

  “Only so we’d get our money sooner!” Langley said. “Actually, only so we’d get our money when it was due, rather than seven weeks late!”

  Hope noted all this down. “That’s fine. Did anyone phone you up at all, before the invoice was sent out, asking about it?”

  “Errr… No. I’m sure I’d have remembered that. But, no, no one phoned me about the invoice – not before Marilyn did. Sorry.”

  “So only Saleema was aware the invoice had been issued?” asked Langley.

  “Well, only Saleema and me. And you of course, Langley.”

  “Yes, well I hope you can discount me from your enquiries, Hope!” Langley said, laughing blithely.

  Hope remained impassive and didn’t respond. She tapped a few more thoughts into her tablet. “Barry, does the name Christian Malford mean anything to you?”

  “Chris Malford? Yeah. He was one of our tenants.”

  “One of our tenants?” Langley said, suddenly sitting up.

  “He was. Died a few weeks ago. Very sad.”

  “He’s dead?” asked Hope, her look of grim-faced professionalism slipping for a moment.

  “Yes. Drug overdose. The police are investigating though. They seem to think it may not be as simple as that. They came round asking for CCTV footage. They think someone else might have been involved – that it was deliberate – after what happened with poor Shana Backley at The SHYPP. I sent them the CCTV, but I’ve not heard anything more since.”

  Hope’s face betrayed her mounting concern. “And did Mr Malford die before or after the invoice was issued? This really is very important.”

  “Oh, just before,” Barry replied. “Lee discovered his body on the Thursday, and I remember coming into work the next morning and having a conversation with Langley and Saleema about the invoice then. But he’d been dead for a couple of weeks before that, according to the CCTV.”

  “And did Saleema know?” asked Ruth.

  Barry paused. He wanted to get his answer right, and the right answer was “almost certainly not”. Monument had over 7,000 tenants and no one in the finance team was likely to know the names of any of them. Of course, the people in area housing team B would have heard Barry and Lee talking about Chris Malford. But such news was unlikely ever to reach the dizzy heights of the central services floor. Barry had certainly never mentioned anything to anyone.

  But the cogs in Barry’s mind were beginning to whir and tick their way into new positions. He now realised that, having investigated this as any good auditor would, Hope would have discovered that the apparent b
eneficiary of the fraud was not Barry Todd, but Saleema Bhatti. There was, therefore, a potential advantage to Barry in ensuring that the suspicions she was floating before him were not dismissed too easily. So what he actually said was, “Well, I guess it’s possible.” Which it was. Theoretically.

  A silence descended on the room. There were more looks exchanged between Ruth, Langley and Hope.

  “May I just check, Barry,” Hope asked, “did Saleema ever suggest to you that she had any money troubles?”

  “Money troubles? Well…”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Langley said impatiently. “Blessing says she heard Saleema having several phone conversations with her husband that seemed to be about money, and she saw you speaking to Saleema after one of those. She says when she came in the other day, she saw Saleema and her husband in conversation with you. Were they talking to you about money?”

  “Well, yes, I did chat with Saleema. Her father was very ill, y’know. I guess I wanted to be supportive…” Barry petered out whilst three sombre faces looked at him expectantly.

  “They told you not to say anything, didn’t they?” Ruth said.

  “I’d rather not answer that question,” Barry said. Which was, of course, an answer in itself.

  “I know you got on with Saleema, Barry,” Ruth continued, “but you’ve got to realise that nearly £50,000 of our money has been misdirected, and we need to find out where it’s gone.”

  Barry felt bad. He didn’t want to lie – that would be wrong – but surely it couldn’t be wrong if he just told the truth?

  “Her father was ill. In Pakistan. Obviously, they don’t have an NHS over there so she’d had to pay for his operation herself.”

  “Did she ever ask you for money?” asked Hope. “To pay for his operation, perhaps?”

  “Oh no. She had her redundancy money to pay for that. But there was other stuff – chemotherapy and stuff – that he needed going forward, and she still had to pay for that.”