Held to Account

Three men were waiting for her on the fourth floor, and Laura Pennick had been hired to be independent of every one of them.

The 7.10 out of Piccadilly had been full of men in navy coats reading the same three emails, and she had stood the whole way to Leeds with her laptop bag against her shins and her engagement letter folded in her inside pocket, where she could feel the edge of it each time the train leaned.

Forty-eight thousand pounds. Fixed fee, four weeks, one report. It was a quarter of what Weston Bramall billed in a year, and Ian Weston had read the letter twice at his desk on Friday with his glasses pushed up on his forehead before he signed it, because the work had come to them by recommendation and he had wanted to know whose. A partner at the client, he had said. Mallin. I don't know him. He seems to know us. Laura had said that was the problem with recommendations, and Ian had said that it was also the point of them, and signed.

Park Square was bare trees and wet railings and solicitors' brass plates on the far side. The building took up most of one edge of it: six storeys of dark red brick, an old cloth warehouse with its windows set in rows so even they looked ruled, and a stone doorway wide enough to have taken a cart. Somebody had spent a great deal of money on the inside and had made sure it did not show from the pavement. She went in through the glass doors with her camel coat buttoned to the throat and her one pair of heels in the bag with the laptop, and stood for a moment on the limestone, which was honed rather than polished and did not give back her reflection.

The man at the oak desk was round and grey and in his sixties, with a radio turned low somewhere under the counter and a log book open in front of him. He looked at her pass letter and not at her.

"Miss Pennick. Fourth floor. They're expecting you at nine." He wrote her into the log in a slow, square hand and slid a card across. "That opens the barrier and the floor. After seven the front's locked and you come and go by East Parade, round the side. That door logs every pass. Anyone leaving after ten, the desk calls them a car. It's firm policy, it's not optional, and it goes on the account."

"Whose account?"

"The firm's." He did not seem to find the question interesting. "Colin," he said. "I'm on mornings and evenings."

"Thank you, Colin."

She put the card in her jacket pocket and the information somewhere at the back of her mind, under the things she would not need, and went through the glass barrier when it opened for her.

The fourth floor had been made out of one long room by somebody who disliked walls. Oak floor, white plaster, the old iron columns painted the colour of slate, and at the square end a row of small glass-fronted offices like boxes at a theatre. A woman with a lanyard showed her to the second one. It had a long oak table, a desk lamp with a green shade, a blind she could pull, and a window that looked straight down into the trees. There was a laptop docking station, a locked steel cabinet with the key in it, and a sheet of paper in the middle of the table with three log-ins printed on it and the data room address underneath.

She did not sit down. She took her coat off and hung it on the back of the door and stood at the table and read the sheet, then turned it face down. Then she went to the glass and looked out along the floor to the east end, where a set of double doors stood open onto a conference room and three men were already inside it, standing, not talking, as though they had been there for some time and had nowhere else they would rather be.

At five to nine she picked up her notebook and walked down.

The conference room had a table that could have seated twenty and windows on two sides, and the three of them took up more of it than they should have. She had known they would be partners. She had not expected the scale of them.

The one who stood up first and came round the table was broad and heavy, six foot two at least, with thick black hair cut short and curled tight against his skull and a close black beard along a heavy jaw. Navy suit with a faint chalk stripe, white shirt, a good watch worn loose. He held out a hand and hers vanished into it.

"Richard Fenby. You found us. Sit, please. Coffee's coming." When he smiled his teeth were very slightly crooked, which on another man would have made him look friendly. "This is James Kershaw, our finance partner. And Edward Mallin, who runs the group."

James Kershaw did not get up. He did not need to for her to see the size of him: he was sitting at the far end of the table with his chair pushed back and he was enormous, deep through the chest and wide across the back, a man who would have to turn sideways in any normal doorway. Fair skin, high colour across the cheekbones, a wide mouth that did not move. Mid-brown hair, thick and straight, short at the sides, the front of it falling heavy over his forehead. He pushed it back with one hand and nodded to her and that was all.

Edward Mallin was by the window, and he did stand, though he did not come over.

He was the lightest of the three. Six foot one, she thought, and lean to the point of being spare, long in the leg and narrow through the hips, in a dark grey suit and a white shirt and a dark tie knotted all the way up. His hair was ash-blond and cut so short all over that it showed the shape of his head. A long pale face, high cheekbones, a narrow mouth, light hazel eyes. He looked at her the way she looked at a bank statement she had not yet opened, and then he sat down, and somehow the window behind him was his.

She took the chair Richard pulled out for her. It put her with her back to the door and all three of them in front of her, and she noticed that, and noticed that she was five foot two in flat loafers and that every one of them would have to look down to meet her eye even sitting. It was not a comfortable arithmetic. It was not meant to be. She opened her notebook and uncapped her pen.

Richard did the talking. He did it well, without notes. Royle Haulage, Bradford road freight, two hundred and ten vehicles, acquired by the group in April of the year before last on a valuation he described as "full but defensible". A recovery plan that had not recovered. Administration in May of last year. The group's investment written down in this year's accounts, and the external auditors, who were thorough and who had been burned elsewhere, unwilling to sign until an independent forensic review had gone through the impairment line by line.

"Which is you," Richard said. "The audit committee engaged you; the committee chair will take your report. We are simply the people who know where everything is. Anything you need, you ask. Anyone you need to see, they'll see you."

"I'll need the acquisition model, the completion accounts, the group's management accounts from completion to the administration, the administrators' reports, and the ledger detail behind every component of the impairment." She did not look up while she wrote. "Not summaries. The postings."

"All in the data room." That was James, from the end of the table. His voice was low and unhurried and it was the first thing he had said. "Your log-ins are on your desk. If anything's missing, it's my fault and you tell me."

"And the filing date is fixed."

"The fifteenth of December," Richard said. "The auditors want your review by the first. Which gives you a fortnight's margin, if you need it." He had a copy of the impairment memorandum open in front of him, and she saw him turn to the summary schedule and then stop, his thumb resting on the corner of the page, as if he had lost the line. A second passed. Across the table Edward turned his own copy to the same page without looking up, and Richard went on. "The components are the goodwill, the loan to the operating company, the deferred consideration we wrote back, and the acquisition costs we'd capitalised. Twenty-three point six in all."

She wrote it down. She thought, distantly, that a man who did that much talking probably liked a pause before a number for the effect of it, and she thought less of him for it, and moved on.

"Your firm has made itself very available," she said. "I'd rather it didn't."

The room was quiet.

"I'm independent of the group," she went on. "I'm paid by the committee. If I come to you for information I'll put the request in writing and I'll want the answer in writing. I won't have lunch with you, I won't be taken for a drink at the end of the day, and I'd be grateful if nobody tells me what they think I'll find. Not because I think anyone here would try to influence me. Because if this goes badly for you, somebody will ask whether I was influenced, and I want to be able to say no without having to think about it."

Richard opened his mouth. Edward Mallin spoke instead, and Richard closed it.

"How will you do it?"

It was the only thing he asked. His voice was level and quite quiet, and he had not moved in his chair.

She told him. She was used to clients who asked about method in order to sound engaged and then looked at their phones for the answer, and she gave him the short version first: that she would not start from the impairment memorandum, which was the group's account of its own losses, but from the ledger, and rebuild the write-down upwards from the postings; that every difference between her figure and theirs would be a variance, and every variance would be cleared to source documents or reported; that she would sample the cash payments out of the group to the operating company and its connected parties for the whole period from completion to administration, not the year-end alone. He did not look at a phone. He did not look anywhere but at her, and when she paused he waited, and so she gave him the long version too: the materiality threshold she would use and why, the population she would test in full rather than sample, what she would do if a source document did not exist. It took nearly four minutes. Nobody else in the room said a word while she talked.

When she had finished, he nodded once.

"Good," he said. "That's how I'd do it."

It was not said as praise. It was said the way a man reads a figure back to confirm that he has heard it, and she found that she disliked it more than she would have disliked praise. She capped her pen.

"Then I'll start," she said, and stood, and found that standing did not help her as much as she wanted it to. Richard stood with her, out of manners, and the size of him came up between her and the door. James did not stand. Edward did not either, and she was halfway back along the floor before she understood that she had felt him not standing more than she had felt the other man's courtesy.

The coffee arrived at eleven, black, on a tray, without her having asked for it. She drank it because it was there and the alternative was making a point of a cup of coffee.

The data room was good. That irritated her too. Everything she had asked for was in it, filed by date and by entity, the postings exported in full with the journal numbers intact, nothing missing, nothing summarised. She built the ledger side of the impairment from the bottom up through the afternoon, with the blind half down against the low sun on the square and the lamp on, her hair tucked behind her left ear and her jacket over the back of the chair. The building was very quiet. Once or twice she heard a door at the east end, and men's voices that did not carry, and once James Kershaw passed the front of her glass office with a file under his arm, turning a little sideways out of habit though the corridor was wide, and did not look in.

At ten to six she sat back.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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