What The Moon Owes Me

CHAPTER 1: THE SIGNATURE The signature was wrong in a way that only I would have noticed, that was the first issue. It was at the bottom of a transfer authorisation on page 212 of a binder that Northland Timber & Milling had handed over as a form of punishment. E. Hale. Blue ink, a very tall looping E and an H with the crossbar so low it was almost an A. I just stared at it until the fluorescent above my desk was buzzing in my back teeth. My Dad wrote his H that way. I couldn't prove it. I was three when he died and all that I had of him would fit in a shoebox which I'd never opened since university. I knew it the way you know the smell of a house you've no longer lived in (which was utterly ridiculous). I was a forensic accountant. I worked in the realm of the provable and a feeling about handwriting wasn't evidence. So I did what I always do when a feeling tries to pass itself off as evidence. I opened a spreadsheet. By 9.40 the fourth floor of the Alworth Building was just me and the cleaning staff (who vacuumed around my feet in silence). Outside the window Duluth was grey and wet down the hill, the lake a flat dark expanse beyond the roofs, an ore boat glowing like a floating apartment block. I pulled all the payments that Northland had made to the Lakeshore Land Trust over the six year period and sorted them by date. 41 transfers. Every one authorised by an E. Hale. Every one routed through a different holding account which was closed within a week of use. Forty-one. No-one forgets all those signatures. No-one forgets all those dead men. I leaned back and rubbed my eyes. The thing I never tell people at parties (or indeed at any time) is that I'd known something was amiss with Northland as soon as Monday. Martin Pruitt (their CFO) came and met me in the lobby with a coffee I hadn't asked for and told me the books were absolutely fine. He said it in the most normal, friendly way, with a good handshake. The sentence just landed in my ear like a coin dropped on the wrong side of the counter. It was a flat, dead wrongness and it's a wrongness I've learned to trust well before I ever learned to articulate it. It's been going on since I was a kid. Someone would say something and I'd just know it wasn't true. My foster mother Diane actually called it my 'party trick' and then stopped inviting me to parties. No-one ever could work out why it worked so I used it quietly on contracts and invoices and on the odd boyfriend. I always kept the paper trail separate so that my conclusions were always based on something real. I had the paper trail now. I had forty one of them. I first checked the obvious. Elias Hale, deceased, was in the county records with a date and a cause of death (logging accident on the Iron Range, the year I was three). A dead man can't sign 41 cheques. A dead man's name can be used, of course, and the cheapest way to hide money is to have it behind someone you'll never get round to calling to verify it. I was copying the transfer records onto a flash drive when the elevator chimed down the hall. Gerald came round the corner with his coat on and his tie pulled down (not his usual manner at all). In nine years he'd never once come in after seven. He was a very neat man with a very neat grey beard and he just stood in my doorway looking at my monitor as if he was looking at a dog that had got into the bin. "You're still here," he said. "The Northland binder." I rotated the screen a bit so he could see the columns sorted. "Gerald, look at this. All the authorisations come from the same signer and all the accounts they go through are shells. Six years of it. I think the money's getting out of the company as land purchases and I don't think the land actually exists at all." "Lyra." "There's a signature I'd like to run past a document examiner. It could be a forgery or it could be genuine and someone's just using a dead man's name. Either way we have an obligation to—" 'The client are happy with the initial findings,' he said, in his standard 'firing the temps' tone. 'We're wrapping the engagement tonight. I'll send you the invoice summary in the morning.' I waited as that sentence had also landed wrong in a different way. It wasn't a lie per se. It was something he'd been told to say and was saying very carefully, like a man carrying a full glass of water across a room. "Who called you?" I asked. "No one called me." There it was, the coin on the wrong side of the counter. I nearly did admire the stillness of his face. "You came in at ten in the evening with your coat on to tell me something you could have put in an email. Somebody called you." "Pack up your things." He looked at the flash drive in my hand (not at my face, at the drive). "Leave the binder. Leave the working files. Anything you've copied stays here. I'd like that drive on my desk before you go." I closed my fingers around it. A tiny, idiotic thing to do and I felt it all the way up my arm. The metal edge was digging into my palm and I just let it, the pain being something tangible to grip. "Is that the bit about the signatures?" Gerald was silent for what was clearly a very long time. A cart rattled somewhere down the corridor. When he spoke again his voice was much lower and for the first time that night there was nothing in it at all to suggest he was being careful. 'Hale has been dead for twenty three years,' he said. 'I'd have him stay that way.' I'd never said the name. I'd said the signer. I'd said the signature. I'd never in that office once said 'Hale' and I'd never told Gerald Whitcomb a single thing about my father. My mouth was absolutely dry. "How do you know that name?" He didn't answer. He held out his hand for the drive. I put it in my pocket instead, picked up my bag and walked past him into the hall and he didn't stop me. That actually frightened me more than if he had.