Beautiful Damage
You're the forensic accountant hired to audit Niko Ravell's company. You have the power to end him — and you both know it. The question is whether you're willing to use it.
The access request you submitted on Monday is granted in full by Tuesday morning, which is not what happens with difficult audits. You've done fourteen of these. You know how the first week works: restricted access, strategic delays, documentation that's technically complete and substantively useless, lawyers who arrive at every meeting with the particular smile of people being paid to waste your time. You know the choreography of a company that has something to hide and the resources to hide it slowly. Ravell Group gives you everything you asked for. The servers, the subsidiary ledgers, the operational accounts going back five years. The assistant who meets you in the lobby — efficient, professionally friendly — escorts you to a conference room on the seventh floor with floor-to-ceiling glass and a view of the docklands and informs you that anything you need will be arranged. She hands you the WiFi password on a printed card. You've been in the room for forty minutes when the door opens without a knock. He doesn't look like a man who has something to hide. He looks like a man who has thought carefully about what to show you and made a strategic decision to show you most of it. There's a difference, and you note it the way you note everything — without expression, categorised, filed. "Cass Devereaux." He says it as a statement, not a greeting. He crosses to the other side of the conference table and sits down with the unhurried ease of someone who considers this room as much his as yours. Dark-haired, lean, with the specific stillness of a man who has trained himself not to betray things through movement. "I'm told you're the best they have." "Who told you that?" "The institutional investors." A slight pause. "Before they sent you in to see whether I'm worth keeping." You look at him across the table. He is looking at you in a way you have only been looked at in this context by guilty people — but most guilty people don't meet your eyes like this, like they've decided to make a point of it. "Are you?" you ask. Something shifts in his expression. Not a smile — closer to the decision to allow one, deferred. "That's what you're here to find out." He opens the file in front of him — your access request, annotated in his handwriting. "Let's start," he says, "with the construction subsidiary." You take out your pen. You are aware, with the forensic precision that makes you good at this job, that this conversation has not gone the way any audit conversation has ever gone before. You are also aware, in a register you are carefully not examining, that this is going to be a problem.