But once Acts 3’s original founders had moved on or retired, there was no one to hold on to the original motives that had inspired its founding. Its religious narrative came to be seen as an unnecessary complication – after all, as long as you were doing good, did it really matter what was going on in your heart? And so it became plain old Three Acts Housing Association to emphasise the three different things that the association did – provide social housing; deliver information, advice and guidance to the unemployed; and offer care services to the elderly and the infirm.
It seemed a subtle change at first; after all, they were still focused on providing “More than just a home” as their strapline proudly declared. But somehow, something more fundamental had changed without anyone actively deciding that it should. A hundred little plates had been piled on top of one another until they reached so high that everyone was scared to start removing them. It had been the same trajectory that Monument had travelled – one that had ultimately led to Neville’s unceremonious defenestration.
“I know that many of you might be worried about what this might mean for your job,” Andrew went on, “and I’m also aware that some of you have been worried about what’s going to happen after the recent round of voluntary redundancies. Well, the good news is that – because we’ve both recently undertaken VR trawls focused on our central services, and we don’t currently have any geographical overlap in service areas – we believe we can achieve this merger without any compulsory redundancies below director level.”
The room – except for the directors sitting obediently behind Andrew – breathed a collective sigh of relief. So that had been his plan all along: clear out the dead wood now to make way for the merger. Once the two finance and HR teams were merged, there would no doubt be more than enough capacity to cope with the workload.
With that concern out of the way, there was only one question left.
“Of course,” Andrew continued as if anticipating everyone’s thought, “there is the vexed question of the name. Well, we’ve agreed that we will engage an agency to look at creating a new name for the merged association. We hope to be able to go live with that at the launch in April. But, for the moment, whilst we’re still awaiting formal approval for the merger from our regulator, we’ve decided to use a composite name. So, in the short term, we’ll be referring to the new entity as Acts & Monument Housing Group.”
The explanations went on, the business-plan objectives were restated and the strength of the ‘customer offer’ was spelt out. It was all going to be wonderful, everyone was assured. And Barry was sure that some people would believe it. For those employees who had been around long enough to hear these merger announcements before, however, there was a certain world-weary cynicism.
Inevitably, the announcement became a topic of discussion around the office that afternoon. There were those who (despite Andrew’s assurances) were worried about their jobs. And there were those who were worried about their boss’ job – not because they cared about their boss, but because they cared who their boss was, and the idea that their boss might no longer be the clueless buffoon they had grown used to, but instead might be a different clueless buffoon, perhaps one based miles away, filled them with a certain dread.
And then there was the name.
“Actually, I quite like it,” was Jean’s view.
Barry was surprised. Acts & Monument seemed such an ungainly name – such an obvious compromise just to get the deal agreed – that Barry couldn’t believe that anyone could possibly warm to it. And he had such high regard for Jean’s opinion of things that he’d rather hoped that she would be able to articulate better than he could why the whole thing was a terrible idea, so that he could carry on feeling bitter and resentful whilst, at the same time, still claiming the moral high ground. Barry’s face obviously couldn’t quite mask his disappointment.
“Oh, I know it probably seems a bit silly,” she said. “But actually, it says something rather profound – if you look for it.”
“Acts & Monument – really?”
“Well, it’s what we’re all about isn’t it?” she replied, matter-of-factly. “Acts and monuments.”
“Are we?”
“Yes, of course we are. What was it Napoleon said?”
Barry didn’t know. The only quote of Napoleon’s that he knew was, “Not tonight, Josephine”, but, in the context of their conversation, he was fairly confident this wasn’t the one Jean was referring to. Thankfully, as if anticipating Barry’s ignorance of France’s Napoleonic-era history, she answered her own question.
“‘Man is made great by the monuments he leaves behind.’”
“Oh, I see,” said Barry, despite not seeing at all.
“Well, we create monuments, don’t we? We build homes for people, and they’re left long after we’ve all gone.”
“Yeah, I suppose so, but they’re not really monuments, are they? They’re just buildings.”
“Oh, but they are, Barry! They’re monuments to our age – to the things we value; our priorities. We’ve made a point of building housing for people who can’t afford to pay for it to be built themselves. That tells you something about us. Other generations haven’t done that. And people in other places don’t do that now. So that act creates a little monument to our age, doesn’t it? Just as each of our acts as individuals creates a little monument to our lives.”
Barry thought about it for a moment. It was an idea that made him uncomfortable, but he could feel the logic of Jean’s position.
“Small stones make big ripples, I suppose,” Barry said, by way of trying to agree with Jean. But he hoped it wasn’t true.
Forty-Two
That evening, Barry pulled up on his drive and tooted his horn. He hoped this would be enough to bring his wife to the front door. He hadn’t told her about his new car because he hadn’t ever quite got round to telling her that he was losing his old car – it just seemed like one more indignity he didn’t want to have to explain. By showing her his flashy, new car first, he reasoned, she would be so taken with it that he could draw a discreet veil over what had happened to his comparatively dull old car. Sadly, however, his vigorous tooting failed to stir any response from inside the house, so Barry switched off the engine, shoe-horned his way out of the car and stood on the drive calling into the house as the dampness of the cold December evening enveloped him.
“Hiya, love. Come out here a minute; I’ve got something to show you.”
“What?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“A surprise? What is it?”
“Well, if I tell you that, it won’t be a surprise! Just come here and have a look.”
“I’ve got some lamb chops on the go and there’s still the vegetables to prepare. Can’t you just tell me? And you’re letting a draught in.”
She was in her slippers and it had been raining, so Barry could see that she was determined not to come out. Eventually, they agreed that the compromise position would be for her to stand at the front door and peer out into the inky blackness. Barry reached inside the house and turned the porch light on to illuminate the drive, then stepped back to stand proudly by his new car.
“Ta-dah!” Barry exclaimed.
“What’s that?”
“My new car!”
She stood for a moment, her cardigan pulled tight against the first bite of the evening frost. At first she said nothing, she didn’t even move, so that it felt as though everything was frozen, even the weather. But then a look of confusion slowly formed on her face. “What happened to the old one?”
This was not an issue that Barry particularly wanted to discuss, and particularly not as he could feel his bones rattling with the winter cold, which swirled through the fabric of his suit. But it was clear that his ingenious plan of introducing the new car first had failed to divert attention away from the obvious prior question.
“It’s gone back. It was the end of the lease,” Barry explained, which was indeed the truth (although not the whole truth). “I’ve got this now. What do you think?”
His wife stared at him as though he was a cat that had just dropped a dead mouse at her feet. And he knew in that instant that there was nothing he could say that would make her see the car in the way that he’d hoped she would.
“But where’s Lauren going to sit?”
“There’s two seats in the back,” he answered lamely.
“With no legroom! And never mind the back – what about the front? How am I ever going to fit in there?”
It was, as Barry himself had discovered, a good point, and one to which he could devise no good response. Fortunately, before his inability to come up with an appropriate answer was exposed, his wife continued her observations.
“It’s hardly a family car, is it?”
This was, Barry was forced to concede, also true. “Yeah, but we don’t need a family car anymore,” he said. “Not now there’s just the two of us again.”
At which point, his wife burst into tears and returned to her vegetables.
*
For her part, Lindsey Norton was feeling a sense of accomplishment. She was no expert in economic crime, but she’d managed to secure a production order from the court in double-quick time. This would compel the banks involved to divulge the destination of the missing money after it had left Chris Malford’s account. But she had also sought production orders against Adam Furst and Shana Backley. This would reveal whether either of them had had any suspicious activity on their bank accounts around the time of, and subsequent to, Chris Malford’s death. The banks had twenty-eight days to respond; the question was, what could Lindsey do whilst she was waiting?
She could see that there was a clear picture emerging that suggested that Adam Furst’s disappearance at the same time as the money was more than just coincidence. It seemed obvious that this was where her investigations should focus. But she wasn’t a fraud expert, so, in order to try to figure out the link, she contacted Rob Worrall from the economic crime unit to see if he could give her a steer on how best to proceed. Apart from being Gemma’s boyfriend, Rob was also known as a good copper, although perhaps one who loved himself just a bit too much. He entered Lindsey’s office with the confident demeanour of an opening batsman returning to the pavilion after knocking a quick-fire century. Lindsey couldn’t see what Gemma saw in him, to be honest.
Sitting in the cramped office, Rob nonchalantly slapped the file back down on her desk and took a swig from his coffee. “The thing you’ve got to think about is, what kind of crime is this?”
“It’s a fraud,” Lindsey replied, somewhat nonplussed that Rob felt the need to ask the question.
“Yes, but what kind of crime is a fraud?”
This was everything that frustrated Lindsey about Rob, so she just decided to cut to the chase. “I dunno. What?”
“Well, it’s a deception isn’t it? A sleight of hand. And how do magicians get away with a sleight of hand?”
Lindsey thought about it for a moment. “They divert your attention.”
“Exactly! They try and get you to focus all your attention on the place where nothing is going on, so that you don’t notice what they’re up to,” Rob announced triumphantly, reaching over and pilfering a couple of Lindsey’s Bourbon creams. “Fraudsters are the same. They’ll create a complete mess in one place to get your attention there, then they’ll get the money out somewhere else without you noticing.”
“So you don’t think it’s all about Furst?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it might be that’s what someone wants you to think, but actually it’s nothing to do with him. It might be someone else entirely.”
“Yeah, but the money went through Malford’s account. Furst was there at the time Malford died. There’s the missing paperwork and the gap on the dresser.”
“Could be nothing.”
“Honestly? You really think that, Rob?”
“Even if there was a gap in the dust – so what? It may be that nothing was removed at all. It could have just been that someone put a clipboard or a folder on the dressing table when they came in later – the funeral director or one of the housing guys – and that moved the dust. But, even if something was removed, it doesn’t mean it was removed by Furst. Surely, if it had been, there’d have been at least some of the dust replaced in the two weeks since Furst had been there. It wouldn’t be a totally clean gap,” Rob said, gently swinging back and forth in his chair.
A look of growing disappointment spread across Lindsey’s face. He was right, of course, although she hated to admit it. Everyone had been so keen to pin everything on Adam Furst, they’d forgotten the first rule of policing – follow the facts, not your prejudices.
“So you don’t think any of this is anything to do with him?”
“I didn’t say that. He’s clearly linked to the two deaths, so you need to find him. It’s just that I’m not sure you can assume he’s linked to the fraud. But, ultimately, the only way to find out if he is involved is to see where the money’s gone. Follow the money; whoever’s account the money’s ended up in is definitely involved in the fraud. You just need to find out then if they’ve got any links to Furst.”
“So what do you suggest we do now?”
“If it was me – and obviously, this one hasn’t come out to us from Action Fraud yet – but if it did, the first place I’d want to be looking is at all the people who had a hand in the whole invoicing shambles. I’d be asking for production orders against all of them.”
“All of them?”
“If it was me. The thing is, you can see that the two women at The SHYPP could have made a couple of genuine errors. But it’s not impossible that one or other of them has deliberately screwed up and tried to make it look like an innocent mistake.”
“So the two from The SHYPP – I get that. What about Monument? There’s Bhatti, obviously. What about Burrell?”
“Yeah, I’d want to have a look at him. He seems to have been very keen to get the invoice out and the payment in as quickly as possible. And it’s all happened on his watch. Same for the finance director woman – she’s the one who created the chaos in the first place by mucking about with the bank accounts. Again, might be nothing, but might be a handy excuse for her to slip the money out while everyone’s looking the other way. And she took the decision to let Bhatti go. She could easily have implicated her, knowing that she wouldn’t be around to answer questions when the balloon went up.”
“Right. Five of them,” said Lindsey, making a note of all the names.
“Six, actually.”
“Six?” Lindsey said, her forehead creasing, anxiously.
“Yeah. Think about it. Who’s the one person who connects them all? Knows all the Monument staff and all the staff at The SHYPP? And had direct connections to all the tenants at Monument and The SHYPP?”
Lindsey thought about it for a moment whilst Rob gave her a patronising stare.
“Barry Todd!”
“Bingo!” he said, snaffling a couple more biscuits. “You’re getting the hang of this.”
And, for the first time, Lindsey thought that perhaps she just might be.
Forty-Three
Barry hadn’t expected DS Norton’s phone call, and, when it came, he felt his chest tighten and a small ball of pressure push against the back of his throat. He loosened his tie and undid his top button, as she assured him that seeking a production order was standard procedure. It was being done for everyone connected to the case, she went on, and would simply allow the police to eliminate him from their enquiries. This last point felt rather moot to Barry, but DS Norton insisted that, as long as there was no connection financially between him and Adam Furst, there would be no reason for the police to take th
eir interest in him any further. When put like that, Barry felt it would be unreasonable to object.
But the secret that had once seemed as light as a feather now felt like a Sisyphean burden, heavy and unrelenting. And, despite Alun’s reassurances, there seemed no escape from its shadow. It wasn’t always visible, but it was always there, prowling the liminal space at the threshold of his consciousness. Its constant presence felt wearying. Slowly, remorselessly, it was beating Barry down, reshaping him like the unremitting drip of water on a stone.
None of the six people identified by Rob Worrall objected to production orders being granted, and so they all were in short order. The banks, for their part, were given twenty-eight days to produce all the necessary information, so it would not be until the new year that Lindsey Norton would be able to sift through the documents.
Meanwhile, in the run up to Christmas, Barry noticed the frantic phone conversations between Lauren and her mum becoming increasingly short-tempered. Then there was a week or so of texts between them long into the night. But in the week leading up to Christmas there appeared to be nothing at all. By Christmas Eve, Barry had still heard nothing and so decided he needed to phone Lauren himself. After several unreturned calls, he finally managed to get through to her. She was with her boyfriend’s family. They were, apparently, lovely – far lovelier it seemed than her own – and they were delighted to have her with them for the holidays (Barry was tempted to ask Lauren to pass the phone over to her putative mother-in-law just so he could check that fact, but ultimately thought better of it).
“What about coming over here for a bit? Your mum wants to see you… Obviously, I want to see you too, but your mum’s really upset about it.”
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