The Borough

by Steve Dockray

CHAPTER THREE

  By late morning, after several cups of coffee and three soluble aspirin, Winner was beginning to feel more normal. The atmosphere in the general office was far from normal, the regular chatter and activity reduced to a fraction of their usual level. In the corridors, small groups of people stopped to find out if anyone else had any more information. A rumour went around that Stewart had been drinking, later that it was suicide, but hard facts were few and far between.

  At lunch time Winner walked out of the office and cut down through the back streets to the quayside. It was a brisk ten minute walk and few of the Council staff made it that far in their lunch breaks, preferring the closer town centre shops and cafes. He went into Burger King, figuring that the pappy burger and fries would be easy on the delicate tooth. There were only half a dozen people in the place, but Winner took his tray upstairs to get a decent view. In the summer you were lucky if you could get a seat at all, but today he was the only customer on the upper floor. He sat looking out over the estuary, with its neat rows of dinghies and cabin cruisers tied up alongside the marina walkways. He ate slowly and deliberately, trying to chew on the unrepaired side of his mouth. He supposed there must be worse places to be an accountant. The pleasant scenery and mild climate compensated in part for the dull tedium of the job.

  Across the water, the up-market houses of River Heights nestled among the trees that rose up from the riverside. Winner tried to pick out the one that belonged to Maurice Westerman, the Borough Treasurer, but it was hard to be certain as he'd only been to Westerman's house once, and that time he'd approached from the inland side of the property. A nice house, judging by the hallway and the glimpses of other rooms seen through the open doors. He had waited there for Westerman to come through from his study to receive his copy of the newly printed budget book. Winner had felt out of place, like a delivery boy. Hard to see now how he was ever going to afford a place in River Heights.

  Winner pulled the top off his hot chocolate and took a sip. It seemed indecent to be thinking it, but there was no way he could avoid doing something about the sudden vacancy in his office straight away. It would have been more dignified to leave it until after the funeral, whenever that might be, but the pressure of work was just too great.

  Only three or four years ago it would have been much easier to cope. There were more staff then and less pressure. All this separate accounting for the semi-privatised divisions caused extra work and a series of budget crises had meant staff cutbacks and intermittent bans on vacancy filling. That was bad enough, but now everything was needed in such detail. Once the costs of departments like the Treasury were allocated to services on a rough and ready guesswork basis. Now they had to be costed to the last pound to show that in-house bids for work were comparable to outside company tenders. Office staff had to spend time filling in time sheets at a time when they had a whole lot of other extra work. It was getting impossible to finish off any jobs with all the loose ends tied up. Discrepancies that were once investigated were just written off now. The place must be wide open to fraud. That was Barry Freeman's problem of course, but he only had half as many audit staff as three years ago.

  Winner glanced at his watch and drained the last of the hot chocolate from the plastic cup. Just as well to take a break now. It could be well into the evening before he could go home. Out on the quayside he buttoned up his coat against the cold damp breeze that was blowing in from the estuary and walked along by the river to the bottom of the High Street. On the way back to the Town Hall he went into a baker's shop and bought some filled rolls to see him through the evening.

  There were four of them in the Chief Accountant's office that afternoon, besides Winner. Mary Hatton, who dealt with loans, Planning Committee and capital finance. She had worked very closely with Nigel Stewart and probably knew more about his work than any of the others. Jack Evans, who looked after the Resources Committee. Pauline Tipper, the housing accountant and Peter Vaughan, Recreation and odds and ends. All in their thirties and all reasonably good at their jobs, which was as much as you could expect in a line of work that people took up because they couldn't think of anything better to do. Grey suits for the men, dark skirts and thin pullovers for the women. Dull and colourless like local government itself. They'd be extinct soon if government policies continued to their logical conclusion.

  Winner spoke first. "Awful business, this. I would have liked to have left talking about Nigel's work until....". He was about to say until the body had gone cold, but at the last moment it struck him that might be rather tasteless. ".....er, until a respectful amount of time had passed. It can't really wait, though."

  There were understanding nods from the others sat round the table.

  "Nigel finished his allocations off late yesterday afternoon," Mary Hatton said. "I found a print-out that he must have done after I went home. It seems to tie up with his department budget totals."

  Winner glanced across at her. "That's a relief. It might take a few days for anyone else to get the hang of his computer spreadsheets. They're full of complicated macros, from what I've seen."

  "Who is this anyone else?" Evans asked. "I haven't got time to take over any of Nigel's work at this time of year."

  "Neither have I," Pauline Tipper told him. "This Tenants' Choice business is blowing up into a full scale war."

  Suddenly irritated by the bickering, Winner turned to look out at the ash tree. A seagull was sitting incongruously on a lower branch. Wouldn't it be nice to be a seagull? "Look, I'm not too thrilled about all this, either. We'll just have to make the best of it. Westerman isn't back in the office until Monday and I'll need his backing to get Nigel's post filled. With Christmas coming up fast it would be impossible to get someone in post before the middle of February at the earliest."

  "To be honest," said Vaughan, "I'm not really sure what Nigel did. Don't misunderstand me. I'm sure he was very busy."

  "Actually, you're right, Peter," said Winner, swivelling back to face him. "I've got a list of his duties, but that's more theory than practice. I'll have to have a look at his time-sheets and try and work it out. I'll see if I can get round to looking through his in-tray and other stuff later today."

  "What about getting Sally Travis in from Audit?" Evans asked. "She's supposed to be good on the systems and she worked in here not too long ago."

  The ideal solution. She would probably only need a few days to take over Nigel's work. Not much chance of Barry Freeman letting her go, though. The audit office was already slimmed down beyond the bones.

  For a while they talked about the various routine tasks that Stewart had dealt with, but there was a marked reluctance on the part of any of the staff to volunteer for extra work.

  "How are the rest of the budgets coming on?" Winner asked, moving on to a more positive subject.

  "If Mary can give out Nigel's figures, we should be able to reach a total by Friday," Evans told him, "but it's going to be way too high."

  "There's not really a lot more we can do at the moment," said Winner. "You all make sure the draft budget's complete by Friday and I'll see what I can do about Nigel's work. Get someone to bring me in a cup of coffee, will you."

  Winner watched them going back to their desks, then started looking through the day's post. Not a great deal today. Just the usual selection of brokers' notes confirming loan transactions and a couple of grant applications for financial comment, some advertising bumph and details of the sale of a council house to the tenant. More Government regulations about transferring housing stock to the private sector. He'd better read that before passing it on to Pauline Tipper. The afternoon melted away as Winner dealt with the paperwork and then tapped away at his computer keyboard, reviewing the input from Stewart's time-sheets.

  Peter Vaughan joined Winner in his office just after four. The window had turned black, the daylight already gone. They spoke about the next day's Recreation Committee that Winner would have to attend in place of the vacati
oning Treasurer. Vaughan ran through the items on the agenda, trying to predict the questions that councillors might ask. By the time they were nearing the end of the list, some of the staff in the main office were packing up for the day. Winner noticed Vaughan glance at his watch.

  "There's not much more here. You can push off if you want to," Winner told him.

  "I shall if you don't mind. It's the first turkey dinner of the season tonight. Sailing club. Bit early if you ask me. I don't feel very festive yet."

  "No. Especially today. Don't overdo it - I can't have anyone going off sick."

  Vaughan left and Winner rummaged round in his top drawer for the bag of cheese and salad rolls. He wouldn't mind a turkey dinner himself. Perhaps he'd stop for something hot at the pub on the way home. Just as soon as he'd had a good look through Nigel Stewart's papers. There were only two people left in the main office now, Jack Evans and Christine Tucker, the costing clerk. It was a mystery why some people stayed on past the regular hours. Perhaps they just didn't have anything much to go home to. If they thought Winner would be impressed by their dedication, they were wrong. The best people were the ones who got the work done quickly, without any fuss.

  Winner took his time eating the rolls, then walked over and sat down at Stewart's desk. It wasn't as bad as some. It was even possible to see the surface in places. He moved the piles of documents down onto the floor and started reading through the contents of the in-tray.

  At six forty-five Evans and Tucker left and a cleaner came through emptying the waste bins. Winner got up for a stretch and switched off the all the lights apart from the one where he was working. This was the only time of year that he regularly stayed on into the evening and he liked the feeling of being alone in the semi-darkened office.

  By seven he had gone through all the papers and was ready to tackle the drawers. The right hand ones were full of the usual office junk. Stationery, dictionary, old print-outs. Winner stopped to look at the photograph. Stewart with his wife and two kids, presumably, probably taken last summer. He couldn't have been more than thirty five. The diary might be useful to see what appointments Stewart had booked. It was smaller than the regular office page-a-day, so he slipped it in his jacket pocket to avoid losing it among the papers.

  The left hand drawers were locked and Winner had to hunt through his own desk for the bunch of duplicate keys. The numbers stamped on the keys were from a different series that didn't correspond, but eventually he found one that worked the lock with a bit of force. There didn't seem to be much in the drawers to have justified locking them. The top one only contained a box of man-size tissues, a paperback novel - lunch-time reading, maybe - and an orange. No point in wasting that. Winner started peeling, but was brought to a halt as his thumb caught on something sticking out of the skin. Holding the orange over the waste paper bin to catch the juice, he broke it in half. Jammed in between the segments was a key. Not a door key, but long and flat and not like any that Winner had seen before. He dropped the orange halves into the bin, reached for the tissue box and pulled out a wad to wipe the juice off his hands and the key.

  He sat back in the chair and looked at the key, trying to think what it meant. Hard to imagine it having been already in the orange when it was bought in a shop, the result perhaps of a foul-up in the packing plant? No, that didn't seem likely. So it was either some sort of prank or threat towards Stewart, or deliberate concealment by Stewart himself. Very strange, but in a way an incentive to look more closely through the rest of Stewart's stuff. Winner walked across to the stationery cupboard and selected a tough manila envelope. He slipped the key in and added the diary from his pocket. Back at the desk he opened the lower left hand drawer. At the front was a box of micro computer diskettes. Winner flipped up the lid and pulled the diskettes towards him one by one. They were all neatly labelled as security copies of spreadsheet files for cashflow, balance sheets, reports, budgets and the like. Nothing unusual, but someone would have to check them all eventually.

  The rest of the drawer was filled with a stack of papers. He pulled them out as a complete bunch and perched them on his lap. It was a mixture of correspondence, old official reports and information leaflets. The dust from all this paper shifting and sorting was starting to get up Winner's nose. His hand shot out for the tissue box and his fingers scrabbled at the surface of the contents in an attempt to get one out before the sneeze arrived. He only just made it, but even in the rush his mind had registered something odd about the tissues. Dropping the pile of sundry papers back in the bottom drawer, he picked up the tissue box and started pulling out the tissues. Just a few layers down there was another computer diskette, wrapped neatly in a tissue of its own. No writing on the label, just a small red cross in the corner. Winner knew there must be hundreds of diskettes in the office as a whole, and people weren't as disciplined about labelling as they should be, but it still seemed an odd place to keep it. He slipped it in the envelope with the key and decided to call it a day.

  He tidied up the papers on the desk and leaned down to close the bottom drawer, but it jammed half way in. Down on his knees, he saw that he had been a bit too careless putting back the pile of papers, and some of them must have got caught up in the mechanism. He pulled out all the loose ones that he could reach and felt around underneath the upper drawer to find out what was causing the jam. There was something else there. Still half attached to the drawer above was some sort of package. Winner pulled away the remaining sticky tape and eased it out.

  It was an envelope of the same size and style that he'd taken from the cupboard for the diary and key, but the flap and seams were all firmly taped down. It was thickish, like a magazine or two. Probably pornographic, he thought, reaching for his Swiss army knife. The razor sharp blade sliced easily through the tape and flap, the contents sliding out onto the table. Taped onto an A4 sheet of card were five cling-film wrapped packages of twenty pound notes.

  Winner sat back, stunned. His mind raced over various possibilities, but it made no sense. One thing seemed certain. People just didn't keep large quantities of money hidden in an office for honest purposes. He would have to ring Freeman and tell him. The number was in his pocket book and he soon stabbed out the digits, but there was no reply. He let it ring a dozen times, then replaced the handset. Another five minutes passed before he picked up the money and peeled one of the packs off the card. Pulling away the cling-film, he licked his thumb and finger and started counting. A hundred notes. Two thousand pounds in one pack, and the other four packs looked the same. Ten thousand pounds in total and the notes looked genuine enough.

  It was a lot of money. Not in absolute terms, of course, since Winner was used to thinking in much larger sums for the Council accounts. But still a lot for someone who seemed to be lucky if there was fifty pounds left over at the end of a month. He began to wonder if he was glad that he hadn't managed to get through to Freeman. No, it wasn't his money, but on the other hand, whose was it? - and did anyone else know of its existence?

  The cash went into the envelope with the diary. He could think about it overnight, but in any event, there was no question of leaving the money lying around in the office. What on earth had Stewart been up to? There was nothing for it but to make another thorough sweep through all the papers in the desk, checking this time for anything that looked remotely out of place. By ten thirty, Winner was confident that there was nothing left in the desk other than regular Council business. He had found a few jottings that didn't make sense and a couple of receipts of some sort had fluttered out of the paperback when he riffled through the pages. He slipped them into the envelope, which he tucked into his briefcase, before turning out the lights and groping his way down a now dark corridor to the rear exit.

  Back at his flat, Winner extracted the heat sensitive diskette from the envelope and slipped it in the box where he kept his own computer stuff. The rest of the pickings from Stewart's desk found a cosy resting place tucked under the insulation jack
et at the back of the hot cylinder in the airing cupboard. He was too tired for any more thinking. Just time for some hot soup and Mozart before turning in.