The Strange Death

of Fiona Griffiths

 

 

1.

September 2011

I like the police force. I like its rules, its structures. I like the fact that, most of the time, we are on the side of ordinary people. Sorting out their road accidents and petty thefts. Preventing violence, keeping order. In the words of our bland but truthful corporate slogan, we’re Keeping South Wales Safe. That’s a task worth doing and one I enjoy. Only, Gott im Himmel, the job can be tedious.

Right now, I’m sitting in a cramped little office above the stockroom at a furniture superstore on the Newport Road. I’m here with a Detective Sergeant, Huw Bowen, recently transferred from Swansea. A finance guy from Swindon is shoving spreadsheets at me and looking at me with pained, watery eyes. We have been here forty minutes.

Bowen takes the topmost spreadsheet and runs a thick finger across it. It comprises a column of names, a row of months, a block of numbers.

‘So these are the payments?’ says Bowen.

‘Correct.’

The finance guy from Swindon wears a plastic security pass clipped to his jacket pocket. Kevin Tildesley.

‘So all these people have been paid all these amounts?’

‘Correct.’

Tax deducted, national insurance, everything?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

The only window in the office looks out over the shop floor itself. We’re up on the top story, so we’re on a level with the fluorescent lighting and what seems like miles of silver ducting. The superstore version of heaven.

Bowen still hasn’t got it. He’s a nice guy, but he’s as good with numbers as I am at singing opera.

I bite down onto my thumb, hard enough to give myself a little blue ledge of pain. I let my mind rest on that ledge, while the scenario in front of me plays itself out. I’m theoretically here to take notes, but my pad is mostly blank.

‘And these are all employees? Contracts in place? Bank accounts in order? Anything else, I don’t know … pension plans and all that?’

‘Yes. They are all contracted employees. We have their contracts. Their bank details. Their addresses. Everything. But two of the people – these two,’ he says, circling two names on the spreadsheet, ‘these two don’t actually exist.’

Bowen stares at him.

His mouth says nothing. His eyes say, ‘So why. The fuck. Were you paying them?’

Kevin starts to get into the detail. Again.

He tries to puff his chest out to take control of this interview, but he doesn’t have much chest to puff. The room smells of body odor.

Anyway. We go round again. The Kevin and Huw show.

Payroll is handled centrally but data is entered locally. Head office routinely ‘audits’ local payroll data, but what Kevin means by that is simply that the entire company’s data is fed into a computer program that looks for implausible or impossible results. The two phantom names – Adele Gibson and Hayley Morgan – didn’t ring any alarm bells.

‘So, for example,’ Kevin tells us, ‘if we find multiple payroll entries that share the same address or the same bank account, we’d be very suspicious. Ditto, if there are no deductions being made for tax or if overtime claims seem unnaturally high. So basically, we’ve done an audit-quality data check.’

His voice is high and pressured. I realize that he’s worried about his own job. He’s the Head Office guy who was meant to make sure this kind of thing didn’t happen. And here it is: having happened. The fraud only came to light when the superstore got an enquiry from the bank of one of the recipients.

I ask how much money has been lost.

Kevin starts to answer. His voice catches. He drinks water from a bottle. Then, ‘Thirty-eight thousand pounds. Over two financial years.’

Bowen and I look at each other. Steal £38,000 and you’re looking at a two-year prison sentence, give or take. It’s too big a fraud for us to ignore, but I can already see Bowen wondering how he can dodge this one. Give him a good bit of Grievous Bodily Harm or a nice little Assault With Intent, and Bowen is your man. Give him an investigation full of spreadsheets and people with plastic badges called Kevin from Swindon and Bowen, big man that he is, looks pale with fear. This shouldn’t really even be our case. Huw and I are both attached to Major Crimes, and this case is strictly Fraud Squad. Only there’s a sad lack of violent death in South Wales at the moment, while our colleagues in Fraud keep on getting sick or taking jobs in the private sector.

So we’re here, with Kevin. A stack of manila folders sits on the desk in front of him. The personnel files for this branch. All of them. Current employees, past employees, temporary and part-time staff. Everyone.

Bowen looks at them. He looks at me.

Kevin looks at us both and says, ‘These are copies. For you.’