False Pretences Read Free

properties, and the ones at head office – are paid at slightly below the going rate, because they’ve been sold on the idea that it’s a privilege to work for a Trust. The Trust owns the Kensington HQ; the rates and utility bills are reasonable. True, if that building were sold and the Trust moved to a smaller place in the suburbs they’d save a mint, but the directors can’t imagine locating to a less prestigious venue.
    â€˜The biggest outgoing – and it’s huge – is on maintenance, but the Director responsible was always saying that they need to do more, because elderly buildings need money spent on them to keep up with today’s Health & Safety regulations. Fire doors. Lifts. Heating. Rewiring, and so on.
    â€˜I started to look at the cost of maintaining the buildings. For years the Trust had put all its maintenance work out to a building contractor called Corcoran & Sons. Recently Great Granddaddy – Lord Murchison – had suggested diversifying by splitting the work between Corcorans and another firm, in which he had shares. Naturally,’ his voice flattened, ‘they wouldn’t consider using a firm whose directors they didn’t know personally.’
    â€˜As usual the directors had been divided in their opinion about using a firm new to the Trust, but he’d overridden them to arrange for this second firm to rewire one building while Corcorans rewired another. Both contracts had just been completed and the invoices received. As part of my job I opened the post and took the bills through to the Maintenance Director for checking and payment, and I happened to notice that one bill was for twice the amount of the other. For the same work.
    â€˜We are not talking peanuts. The Maintenance Director saw that I’d spotted the discrepancy and remarked that it was always better to use good workmen, even if they were more expensive, rather than those who bodged the job. He sold that idea to the board, who agreed to continue with Corcorans, though they did murmur that perhaps they ought to ask one or two other firms to quote for jobs as well. The figures burned into my brain. I started to go through invoices from Corcorans for the past few months. They’d been charging astronomical sums for changing a couple of light bulbs. The repair of a door hinge would pay a family’s gas bill for a quarter.
    â€˜There were a number of small maintenance jobs on hand waiting for attention. I arranged for half of these jobs to go to Corcorans as usual, but I asked the firm recommended by Lord Murchison to attend to the rest. Corcorans came in at roughly double what the others would have charged.
    â€˜I didn’t know what to do. I’d overstepped the mark, I’d gone behind the director’s back, and I told myself that if there really had been anything wrong, someone else would have spotted it, and that if they continued to ask for quotes, the scam – if there was a scam – would die a natural death.’
    Bea nodded. She could see how tempting it must have been to do nothing.
    â€˜Only, the more I played around with the figures, added up a possible overspend here and there, the more I realized that, if someone had been fiddling the books, they might have got away with half a million, maybe more. I assume that Corcorans had either been greedy and been taking the Trust for a ride or, perhaps, that someone in the Trust had been taking a kickback for throwing work their way.’
    He braced himself. ‘The only person who could have swung such a scam was the director in charge of maintenance, who was on excellent terms with the managing director of Corcorans, even had him in to lunch once a month. This particular director bullied the staff and fawned on the other directors. He referred to me by names that, well, if I’d wanted to make trouble, meant I could have taken him to a race tribunal. I told myself it was a cultural thing, that