I went straight to Crawford's from school and worked in the filing team for three years before being promoted to Alistair Smether's assistant. We got on well and he was very kind about giving me a month off work when I married Sean about 18 months after I started working with him. He normally seemed very formal, but very occasionally he would tell me rude jokes that made me blush, or touch my arm as we talked.
Sean and I bought a house when we got married, and got in trouble soon after when he lost his job and had to take another one at a lower salary. The redundancy money helped for a few months, but soon ran out.
I would do Alistair's expenses when he travelled, and found that I could have them paid to me and transfer the money to him. When we had run out of money at home towards the end of one month I claimed an extra $50 for taxis and kept that in my account. I was terrified for weeks that I would be found out and meant to pay it back, but never did. I did similar two months later, then it became a habit at the end of every month to get an extra $50 or $100. I reasoned that I worked late a few nights a month, and this was the overtime pay the company didn't pay me.
'Susanna, can you come into my office for a minute please?' Alistair asked as I cam back from lunch one Friday.
'Of course.' I went in and stood in front of his desk.
'I don't understand my expenses' he told me.
'Which month?'
'Well, I thought this month's were strange, so I looked at last's to compare, then I went back a bit. I always seem to be claiming more than I get. I'm going to phone Finance and ask them to pay me the difference, but want to be sure first.'
I got a very cold feeling inside.
'I'm sure there is a reason,' I told him. 'I'll look carefully, talk to Finance, and explain.'
I told to him the next day that Finance had sorted it out; that a code in their system was wrong, and that somehow Jim's expenses were sometimes appearing on Alistair's account. He seemed to accept this.
A week later he called me into his office again and told me to close the door.
'It's you, isn't it?'
I got that horrid cold feeling again, but remained calm.
'What's me?'
'The expenses. You've been claiming extra and keeping it.'
He told me he had phoned Finance to make sure that Jim's expenses weren't coming out of our department's budget and they had no idea what he was talking about. He told them he must have made a mistake, and hung up.