Malcolm Reeve

Malcolm Reeve was born in Sheffield, in a family that worked to a wage and counted it, in the years the steel was going. He trained as an accountant because it was steady, and found he had a talent nobody warns you about: reading a set of accounts the way other people read a face, and knowing when it was lying.

He drifted into the forensic side by accident, seconded onto an investigation no one senior wanted, and stayed for thirty-one years. His work was the aftermath — the failed bank, the vanished grant, the division that had hit every quarterly number for six years and turned out to have been moving the same loss forward one quarter at a time. He came with a laptop and a box of files and reconstructed, from the paper, who had decided what, and when, and who had paid for it.

Two findings came back so often he stopped being surprised. The first was that the money and the blame in a failing organisation travel in opposite directions, and if you follow both you arrive at the same person: the one who kept the upside and signed for none of the downside. The second was that fraud was the rare case. The ordinary case — the man who games the number promoted over the woman who does the work — broke no law at all. It was not a bug in the system. It was the system, working as built.

He is retired now, in the Peak District, and writes. He is not interested in outrage. He is interested in the mechanism, and in whether you can see it once it has been named.