Cooking the Books (28 page)

I carried my bag back to Insula, with a brief detour to the supermarket. I knocked on the door of the Lone Gunmen’s shop. It was supposed to be open by now, but they had discovered a fine source of income in abolishing things and finding things on teh interwebs, and they only opened, now, when they felt like some conversation with fellow gamers. Their customer base had accepted this. They got away with their hacking because they had agreed to help the police with any little computer problems they might have. They may have been troglodytes, but they’re not stupid.

Gully opened the door, widened his eyes at the presence of a female, and then again at the presence of an armful of Tex-Mex dainties. He opened the door wide.

‘Come in,’ he said to the junk food. I came with it. I went into their kitchen and unloaded onto the table. I had bags of corn chips, guacamole, Molten Metal salsa, grated cheese, sour cream, a frightful chilli dip which dissolved fillings and a lot of bottles of their favourite drink, Arctic Death, a combination of lemon syrup, soda water, and antifreeze. Or that’s what it tasted like to me. I had once brought the Lone Gunmen a lovingly crafted guacamole made by a fervent Mexican cook, who had given it to me as a present. I can’t stand chilli, so I had regifted it, and watched the Lone Gunmen as they squaffed it. ‘Nice,’ they told me. ‘But not up to Junk Inc’s standard.’ After that I had surrendered. There was no way to improve their palate, assuming they still had one. Perhaps they really did like the tang of all those artificial colours and flavours. You never know with tastes in food.

‘Breakfast!’ said Taz gleefully. He began popping bags and loading corn chips onto microwave plates stained red with the blood of a thousand tomatoes.

‘Breakfast?’ said Rat, wandering in after what had to have been a late night playing the latest game: Bioshock or Heavy Rain. He is called Rat because he retains a little tail of hair at the nape of his neck, like a rat’s tail. Fashion has never been a preoccupation for the Lone Gunmen.

‘Love that dip,’ he said, seizing a handful of corn chips and wresting the lid off the container. ‘What’s the occasion, Corinna?’

‘You’ve got a new job,’ I told them, to the sound of crunching and snacking. ‘Daniel wants you to look up this Facebook site and read this blog. It’s urgent. The writer has disappeared and she’s a suicide risk. So get cracking,’ I added. Three heads nodded. Their mouths were too full to reply.

‘We’ll send it all through to Daniel’s phone,’ spluttered Gully, always the spokesman. I brushed off a few crumbs and took my leave. Chilli for breakfast. How the other half lived . . .

My place was clean and cool and chilli free. I took a shower and sat myself and cat down at the desk to examine those documents. And eat Uncle Solly’s salt beef sandwich. Which was, as always, excellent.

I had a balance sheet, and the workings which made up the company accounts. They made fascinating reading. I put on my accountant’s hat and examined them closely. What did this company do, what were its assets, its liabilities, its current account? Pockets had marked these sheets with his unmistakable prints. He had handled them. And he had stashed them in the recycling bin. Why? Because he was a fruitcake?

Wait a moment. Pockets had said something about ‘corrupt’ documents. This had a special meaning in computer science—the code was mixed up. Pockets might have known that. I examined them more closely, adding salt beef crumbs to the biological overload already present. Or did he mean corrupt as in debased? What did those Lemurians want with these papers, anyway?

Several hours later Daniel arrived. He looked hot and harassed, but had brought a bag of spare goodies, filched from Tommy’s kitchen before they were sent off to Feed My Lambs. Horatio rose to his paws to greet Daniel and that hopeful-looking canvas bag. Canvas bags contained cat food. He knew that.

Daniel stroked Horatio, gave him a whole cream bun for his very own, and slumped into a chair next to me. He rubbed his eyes.

‘Nothing,’ he replied to my look. Horatio licked enthusiastically at the cream, up on the table where he knew he was not supposed to be. I lifted him and his bun and placed them both on the floor. He gave me a severe look, but kept eating. Affront was affront, but a cream bun did not come his way very often.

‘I spoke to the Lone Gunmen, they’re on the case,’ I told my beloved. ‘I’ll just put on the kettle, you can feast on some leftovers, and I will tell you all about Mason and Co. Also, Uncle Solly is making enquiries. Nothing you can do at present; take a breath, poor darling.’

‘You’re wonderful,’ he said to me. ‘Tea, please. I’ve had my fill of coffee. TV studios run on coffee. Have one of these honey slices. Bernie made them. They’re very good. Eight million calories in every slice.’

‘And I bet she told Ms Atkins they were low-fat,’ I com- mented. ‘That must be real cream in the bun. Horatio can detect confectioner’s cream at fifty paces and wants nothing to do with it.’

‘He’s a dairy cat,’ said Daniel.

I made tea. Daniel ate a sausage roll. He raised an eyebrow at the pile of papers on the table.

‘Documents,’ I said. ‘Put in a recycling skip by Pockets. Not the bonds, sorry, they’re not there. But that company is in trouble.’

‘Bad trouble?’ he asked, biting into another sausage roll.

‘Very bad,’ I agreed. ‘Someone appears to be cooking the books.’

Daniel laughed. Crumbs showered. It seemed to be my day to be spattered with pastry. I laid my papers before him and pointed out the interesting bits.

‘See, here this expense is an expense. On this spreadsheet, it’s an asset. And this debt has been hived off to this sub-company so that it does not appear in the profit-and-loss. And I’m pretty sure that those capital expenditures are actually ordinary business expenses.’

‘What’s the advantage of that?’

‘Putting the coffee onto capital? Tax. Don’t giggle—that’s what Enron was doing. And look what happened to them.’

‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘And another thing . . .’ I put down the papers. ‘Why was Lena carrying bearer bonds around town? Hardly anyone uses them anymore. They never ought to come out of the safe.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they are unregistered and totally negotiable. Like money. Just like money, in fact. In a much more portable form. A bearer bond can be for a million dollars. All in one easily hidden one-page document. Not like carrying a suitcase full of heavy notes.’

‘Hmm,’ said Daniel, his mouth full of honey slice.

‘Admittedly, they are the negotiable instrument of choice for tax evaders and money launderers. They’re banned in the US for that reason. Most financial transactions of any size are done on computer now, anyway. You know, Daniel,’ I said, ‘reluctant as I am to admit it, there are some crooked accountants. Not many.’

‘There are also crooked police, ministers of religion and politicians,’ Daniel put in comfortingly. ‘There are even crooked rabbis, though I can’t think of one at the moment. So you think that Mason and Co is worthy of a little research?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I’ll see what’s on the public record about them.’

‘And I’ll check the private sources,’ he said. ‘I wonder what other interns thought of Mason and Co? Might be time to find a few. And, of course, find Lena, which means reading that huge email which the Lone Gunmen sent.’

‘Can I help?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ he told me. ‘You would understand a bullied young woman better than I.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ I said. ‘But I can try.’

We drank our tea and read through Lena’s Facebook entries. It was depressing. Lena had thrown all caution to the winds and exposed her bleeding heart to the cyberspace community, and only a few had been kind. Most replies urged her to stand up for herself and show some backbone and not be so despicably weak. And these were her friends. Two were sympathetic at first. Their names were FaeGirl and GerGer.

Not much longer to go before you finish
, encouraged FaeGirl.
Hang in there!

They’re being horrible to you
, said GerGer.
Don’t give them the satisfaction of seeing you cry.

But gradually even these people lost empathy. FaeGirl announced that she was unfriending Lena
because of her whining
.
Suck it up, girlfriend!
she urged in farewell.

And GerGer became positively sinister.
There’s a way out if you aren’t too weak
, he said.

This was repeated over the entries, recounting the small tyrannies and minor cruelties to which Lena had been continuously subject. Not asking her to sign a get-well card (because the recipient was already sick enough). Not inviting her to after-work drinks (because it was a small bar and they all had to fit in). Not including her in lunch orders (because she needed to go on a diet). Telling her that she was lazy (because she was fat). Leaving cosmetic surgery pamphlets on her desk (because she should consider having all that ugly fat sliced off). Excluding her from the photo of the staff for the annual report (because they were a healthy fit firm). Calling her Fatso, Blimp, Zeppelin, Meatloaf, Bloat, Greedhead. Insults and abuse, nibbling away at her sense of safety. Eroding her self-confidence.
You can escape
, insinuated GerGer.
They’ll never be able to get to you once you’re safe in heaven.

‘This is torture,’ I said to Daniel.

‘Torture it is,’ he agreed. ‘But not illegal. Unfortunately. It would be lovely to get my hands on GerGer,’ he added grimly. ‘I’ll ask the hackers to track him down.’

‘And when they do?’ I had a lot of faith in the skill of the Lone Gunmen, though none at all in their social abilities.

‘We shall have a conversation,’ said Daniel.

There was a silence in which Horatio indicated that a scratch under the chin—no, not there, just
there
—would be appreciated. I scratched. He purred. I tried to feel a gentle pity for GerGer and got nowhere. I am not a nice person, really.

Instructive as the entries had been, they gave us no clue as to where Lena might have gone.

‘Would she go to FaeGirl?’ I asked.

‘Not after she had been unfriended,’ said Daniel. ‘And I haven’t heard that she’s on the street. Not in the city, at least. We need to ask her mother. How I do not look forward to that interview.’ He shuddered slightly.

‘I’ll come too,’ I offered. ‘She might not shred you if there’s a third party present.’

‘I marvel at your confidence,’ he said gloomily. ‘That woman will see a third party as a valuable extra audience for her grievances.’

‘What about her father?’ I asked. ‘Lena’s father. Her mother said that he was always kind to her.’

‘A thought,’ said Daniel, and rattled keys. He looked up a moment later.

‘Her father is on the net,’ he said, delighted. ‘And he Twitters.’

‘What’s his profession?’ I asked.

‘Consultant engineer.’ He flourished his fingers. ‘Aha, lives in an apartment in Docklands! No wife or children mentioned. We can drop in during the day. We’re already at Harbour Studios tomorrow. Good. Very good. Now for some dinner—do you fancy maybe Thai?—and some research.’

I always fancy Thai food. We ate it as we followed the strange and twisting paths of corporate sub-creations which marked Mason and Co until it got late and Daniel prepared to join the Soup Run, the route of which ought to take him to anywhere Lena might be if she was still in the city. I put self and cat to bed, pleased with a good day’s work. Something was definitely rotten in that company. Otherwise why were they hiving off little companies whose sole purpose appeared to be possession of a woundy great debt which ought to belong to the parent company? Gotcha, I thought as I fell asleep.

* * *

I woke with the sense that I had missed something, but I had to go and make bread, so I descended to the bakery, put on the mixers and the coffee pot (those essential bakery tools) and let Bernie in. She looked irritatingly clean and neat and began right away to chat about her private life, in which I had no interest at that hour of the morning.

‘Ethan thinks I ought to call my shop the Magnolia Bakery,’ she informed me. ‘But that’s the name from
Sex and the City
. Do you think they’d let me use it?’