[originaltext]Keith: I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you, Mr Bristow. Cou

Keith: I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you, Mr Bristow. Could you possibly spare me a few minutes?
Bristow: Can’t it wait till this afternoon, Keith?
Keith: Well, it is rather urgent ...
Bristow: I see. It may be better to deal with it now, then. I may not have time after lunch. I’m going out with a customer and I might have to go on to his factory and not be back till late. Let’s have it, then. What’s the problem?
Keith: I’ve not been here very long, Mr Bristow, so I may be making a fool of myself. Accountants can make mistakes, I know, like anyone else, but ...
Bristow: All right, Keith. Get to the point.
Keith: It’s this, Mr Bristow. I’ve been checking through the accounts over the past two years and I’ve reason to believe that someone may have been embezzling the firm’s money. I can’t prove the case yet in detail but I think there’s enough evidence for you to look into it.
Bristow: That’s a very serious charge. But go on.
Keith: What drew my attention to it was that Mr Hammond, the Works Manager, was complaining the other day that he could never get hold of enough spare parts. As you know, Mr Cross, the Purchasing Manager, has been off sick all this week, so Mr Hammond asked me to check on the stocks on what had been ordered.
Bristow: Quite right. Yes.
Keith: I found we’ve been ordering far more spare parts than we need for a long time. When I showed Mr Hammond the figure, he couldn’t believe his eyes. He said we couldn’t have been using such large quantities, and what’s more, we’d been paying well over the market price for them. I checked over the last eighteen months and was able to discover what had been going on. The extra orders and higher prices were only for items we’d ordered from Holder
and Bragg. But of course they’re our main suppliers. I thought I might have made a mistake, but Mr Hammond couldn’t understand it. He said you might be able to throw light on it.
Bristow: Can I see the figures? Hmm. Yes, there’s no doubt the orders seem excessive. Let’s take gear wheels as an example. We can’t have been paying that much for them. Of course Cross may have over-ordered when he first came here two years ago, just to be on the safe side, but he can’t have gone on doing that every month ...
Keith: And even then it doesn’t explain the shortage, does it, Mr Bristow? There are very few of these items in the store.  Perhaps there is a logical explanation, but...
Bristow: There maybe, but I can’t think of one. I can hardly believe it of Cross. But can there be any other explanation, apart from the obvious one? And now that I think of it, someone said Cross was doing some part-time work as a consultant to a spare Parts firm. If it was Holder and Bragg ...
Keith: It may sound a bit presumptuous of me, Mr Bristow, but what I still can’t understand is how my predecessor, Mr Lawton, didn’t spot it. If he had been any good as an accountant, surely he would have realized that the figures were strange?
Bristow: That’s the piece I needed to fit the puzzle together. Lawton is Cross’s brother-in-law. In fact he recommended Cross to us. He must have been part of the swindle. Cross couldn’t have got away with it, otherwise.
Keith: I know Mr Cross. has been in poor health recently.
Bristow: He may be ill, but that doesn’t justify any of this. How long’s he been off sick?
Keith: Since the beginning of the week. His secretary said he might be back tomorrow.
Bristow: Hm. Well, if you’re right, as I think you are, he’ll feel a lot sicker when we get to the bottom of this affair. Well done, anyway. Cross may be back tomorrow. That’ll be all for the moment. I’ll have a call through to Hemming and Wood, the Company lawyers.