The False Bike Mesenger

The False Bike Messenger

      I was auditing at Bernie Green’s Insurance Brokerage. This was my third year with this particular client. I was familiar with most of the staff. I was actually a senior auditor with Denny, Junior and Singh, Chartered Accountants. If I remembered right it was a Tuesday and I was just returning from lunch when I saw Westin, their bike messenger, coming out of a taxi.

          I wondered what had happened to his bike.  Later that afternoon, I was busy working on some audit schedules when Ditty Burke came into the room where I was. She was their Accountant.

          “They stole Westin’s bike.”

          “I was wondering what happened to him. I saw him come in a taxi.”

          I knew that about two years ago gunmen had held him up and stolen his bicycle and the lodgements.

          “Did he have any lodgements with him?”

          “He made the lodgements before they held him up.”

          I thought to myself, why would anybody steal a bike? Unless they wanted to use it to carry out some robbery.

          I knew that Westin had money problems. He had always complained to me that he wasn’t being paid the right amount of money. I’m sure he owed me money from the last time I was here. I had made up my mind that if he approached me this time around I would remind him that he owed me money. The fact that he hadn’t tried to borrow money from me this time didn’t mean that he was solvent.

            I thought that maybe he had one girlfriend too many. He wasn’t yet thirty, but had five children with four different women. He didn’t have any children with the woman he now lived with.

          I finished the job that week. Westin had reported the theft of the bike to the police but there were no further developments up to the time I left.

          About two weeks later I was back to clear some audit queries.

          I was surprised to see that they had a new bike messenger.

          “What happened to Westin?” I asked Bentley Murdock, the finance manager.

          “That guy’s a trickster. The police found a man riding the bike. When they questioned him about it, he said Westin had lent him the bike.”

          “So where is Westin now?”

          “We can’t find him, it seems as if he has run away. The police have looked everywhere for him.”

          “You remember that lodgement that he lost along with the bicycle. I felt that he made it up. I told Dave, but he didn’t believe me,” he told me.

          Dave Rodney was their General Manager.

          I too had my suspicions about that incident. I finished my queries and went back at the officer. A month later, they held Westin with a gun!

          I later heard that he had confessed to lending out the bike. I wondered if the police questioned him about that lost lodgement. I knew that staff had been properly vetted before they were employed. Westin had gone through the same process as all the other members of staff.  It was difficult to see why these bad traits had not been picked up soon after he was employed. If they had been, he would either have been fired or asked to get counseling. The End.