The False Bike Messenger

                                                                             The False Bike Messenger

by

Austin Mitchell

     
 My name is Audley Dickson and I’m a
professional accountant. 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 them 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 wasn’t in money worries
again.

           
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. The man they
caught riding it was fingered in at least three robberies using our 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 to the office.

         
I later heard that Westin had confessed to lending out the bike after he was
picked up by the police. I wondered if they had questioned him about that lost
lodgement. I knew that the 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.

            However,
Westin soon got bail and probably the first person he came to check was me.

            “Mr.
Dickson, I only lent Errol and Jimmy the bike to go somewhere, sir. They never
told me that they were going to rob anybody.”

            “The
bike wasn’t yours. So you shouldn’t have lent it out. It was used to do several
robberies.”

            “You
know that you won’t be able to get back your job, plus you’re in trouble with
the law.”

            “Why
did you report the bike as stolen when you had actually lent it out?”

            His
shoulders dropped, and then he shrugged.

            “When
I didn’t see them return with it and then all I was getting from them was voice
mail, I just panicked.”

            He
begged me to get a lawyer for him. My old friend, Carl Pryce, decided to take
the case. Actually Carl was both an accountant and a lawyer. We had studied
accounting together, but he finished long before me and then did the law.

            Carl
said that if Westin was really a robber he would have stolen the days
lodgements. I told him about the stolen bicycle and those lodgements. He told
me that Westin had told him about it.