Last Reminder by Stuart Pawson Page A

shuffled the sheaf of papers she was holding and addressed the room. There were four women in it, and the only other non-white was Shaheed, an Asian PC. ‘First of all, I’ll tell you about Luke’s success.’ Because he was a civilian he wasn’t at the meeting to speak for himself. ‘He found Goodrich’s data-base in about thirty seconds. “What do you want to know?” he asked, before we’d turned round, so we told him to bring up the client list. Hetapped two keys and there it was. All I ever get is “Message error, bring me someone who knows what they’re doing”.’ She said the last bit in a tinny robot voice.
    I glanced at her audience. Most of them were smiling, but one or two weren’t impressed. I suspected that she was nearly as good as Luke on the computer, but was deliberately demeaning herself. To survive in the job she needed the full cooperation of her colleagues, and that meant not being a smart arse or a threat to their promotion prospects. It shouldn’t be necessary, and it made me angry.
    Maud continued. ‘So, I told him to print us a list and left him to it. He ran one off and realised that all the entries were in chronological order, by the dates that they signed on as clients. That’s OK on a computer – you just tap in a name and it finds it for you. Luke thought that perhaps we’d prefer alphabetical hard copies, so he asked the machine to sort the names and print another list. While he was browsing through he noticed that it contained a disproportionate number of people called Jones. He did some quick calculations with the phone book and reckoned that Goodrich should have had about four Joneses among his seventeen hundred clients. In fact, he had eleven. Then Luke noticed that seven of them were called A. Jones, B. Jones, C. Jones, right through to G. Jones.’
    People shuffled in their seats, wondering if this was relevant. If there was a fraud, they just wanted to know the basic details.
    I said, ‘So he had files for seven people called A., B., C., D., E., F. and G. Jones.’
    ‘Not files as such, Mr Priest. They were on his list of clients, but the information was incomplete. There are no addresses and no amounts of money against them. It rather looks as if someone entered the names but didn’t know how to set up a file. Like as if he did it himself, without his secretary’s knowledge. Instead, he started using…this.’ Maud held aloft a plastic bag. Inside it we could see what looked like an exercise book.
    ‘This is a cash book; available at any good stationer’s or newsagent’s. We found it in the back of the file – the filing cabinet file – for a Mr and Mrs W. F. Jones, who appear to be a perfectly respectable retired greengrocer and his wife. Goodrich evidently just put it there for safe-keeping. It was his secret account book. Inside are pages for each of our seven Mr Joneses, with long lists of amounts of money against them. Two to three thousand pounds at a time, once a week, for the seven of them. In other words, about twenty thousand pounds a week, for over two years, ceasing just before last Christmas.’
    ‘So if these were some sort of payment,’ someone asked, ‘which way were they going? In or out?’
    ‘It’s not clear,’ Maud told him. ‘There are other figures and dates, but we haven’t cracked what they mean, yet.’
    ‘Was he being blackmailed?’ a voice at the back wondered.
    ‘We don’t know. But we’ve found something else. As you already know from the handouts, we were investigating him for possible fraud, at the request of his clients’ solicitors. However, we have another piece of information about him which has just come to light. Two years ago, just about when he set up the file for A. Jones, we were notified by N-CIS about an SCT against him.’
    I sat up. ‘Money laundering?’ I wondered aloud.
    Maud nodded in my direction. ‘Possibly.’
    ‘Er, explain SCTs to us,’ I suggested.
    ‘OK,’ she said. ‘An SCT is a