The Briefcase #64: Last Night I Dreamt of Spreadsheets

A Halloween accounting story, with apologies to Daphne du Maurier.

Last night, I dreamt of Manderley Savings & Loan again.

The iron gates stood open. Beyond them, the drive wound through the dark gardens towards the house, where a single light burned in the west wing. Through the window, I could see the printer. It was flashing amber.

Even in my dreams, it needed something.

We do not work there anymore. These days, we occupy temporary offices above an estate agent, where the windows open properly and nobody speaks reverently about the previous accountant. But sometimes, when I open an unfamiliar workbook, I feel her presence still. Becky.

The second accountant

I first met Max in Monte Carlo, where I was employed as bookkeeper and travelling companion to Mrs Van Hopper. This meant recording her expenditure and listening to her explain why it was business-related. She had recently bought a diamond bracelet to improve stakeholder engagement.

Max owned Manderley Savings & Loan, an old Cornish financial firm operating from his family’s coastal estate. He was handsome, reserved and troubled. I assumed he was having problems with payroll. We spoke over breakfast. He asked where I qualified, I said “ICAEW” and he said “I see”.

He asked whether I could prepare management accounts and whether I had any objection to living in Cornwall. His previous accountant had left, he explained. She had moved on to KPMG.

I did not ask why she would move. I was young, and the benefits package included parking and greater proximity to pasties than I was used to.

A fortnight later, I was appointed head of finance. I remember thinking how fortunate I was. I had not been required to complete a second interview, give a presentation or meet the person whose work I would inherit. At the time, this seemed wonderfully efficient.

Nobody at Manderley ever used my name. I was “the new accountant”, or occasionally “the other one”. Becky, however, was always Becky. Never once was she Becks, or B-dog, or Grandmaster Digits.

The west wing

Mrs Vanders met me in the entrance hall. She was the office manager, although this did not quite describe the extent of her authority. She controlled the keys, the stationery cupboard and the atmosphere – mostly via the thermostat.

“I expect you’ll want to see her room,” she said.

Becky’s office occupied the west wing, overlooking the sea. Everything remained as she had left it. A fountain pen lay beside an open ledger. Her cardigan hung over the chair. On the desk stood a Sports Direct mug.

Mrs Vanders heaved it into her arms. “She never put this in the dishwasher.” It wasn’t just the gigantic mug, there was also a weight to her words. I assured her I would follow Becky’s tradition.

The computer was still logged in. Across the screen stretched a workbook of extraordinary complexity, its coloured tabs disappearing beyond the edge of the window. Becky’s initials appeared in comments throughout, usually beside instructions such as “LEAVE THIS” and “DO NOT ADJUST”.

“What does this calculation do?” I asked.

Mrs Vanders looked at me for a long time.

“Becky knew.”

In the weeks that followed, I learned much about Becky’s abilities and almost nothing about her methods. She could close the month in a morning and she remembered every balance. She never needed anyone to explain a transaction.

When I asked where she had documented the process, Mrs Vanders smiled faintly, “She didn’t need to.”

I began to understand that asking questions was considered evidence of a personal failing. Soon, I stopped asking them.

At night, the sea beat against the cliffs below my window. Occasionally, I would wake to the sound of the printer starting downstairs. In the morning, another report would be waiting in the tray.

Nobody knew who had scheduled it. Nobody would let me cancel it.

The annual presentation

Manderley’s annual budget presentation was a great occasion. Directors came down from London, and lunch was ordered from somewhere expensive. Even the good biscuits appeared, Choco Leibniz, although Mrs Vanders counted them before setting them out.

Becky had always made the presentation. I spent days preparing mine, checking figures, rehearsing explanations and trying to decide how long a pause could last before it became a visible loss of confidence.

Mrs Vanders watched me struggle.

“There is a template,” she said eventually. “Something she used for special occasions. Max is very fond of it.”

She led me to an archive folder and opened a presentation in dark green and gold. It was beautiful. The charts were elegant and the headings were assured. Here, at last, was something I could use without having to invent everything myself. I adapted it carefully. For the first time since arriving, I began to feel that I might belong at Manderley.

On the day, I stood before the assembled directors and brought up the first slide.

Max went white. “Where did you get that?”

“Mrs Vanders thought–”

“Take it off. The presentation. Get it off the screen.”

A director lowered his biscuit. Beside the door, Mrs Vanders stood quite still. Only afterwards did I learn that Becky had used the same design for her final presentation. The one nobody discussed. The one after which she had left.

Mrs Vanders found me in the west wing, staring at my laptop.

“You could resign,” she whispered, “there’s no shame in recognising when something is beyond you.” She opened a blank email and addressed it to Max. My hands hovered above the keyboard. I had begun to type when a shout came from the courtyard.

They had found the boat.

Something comes to the surface

Manderley had once owned a small sailing boat, used for entertaining clients and occasionally described as a networking platform. It had sunk in the estuary shortly before Becky’s departure.

Now, during work on the harbour, it had been brought to the surface. Inside was a waterproof case containing an external hard drive. It was plugged into my laptop with haste. There were several years of financial records, which Max regarded with considerably more alarm.

The man from IT examined the drive. By late afternoon, he had recovered a folder called Actuals. Inside it was another folder called asdf.

I opened the workbooks.

The figures were not the ones I had inherited. Revenue was lower, costs were higher, and several adjustments had no supporting records at all. The immaculate reports everyone remembered had been carefully separated from the transactions they supposedly described.

For months, I had imagined Becky accomplishing feats of accounting beyond my abilities. It had not occurred to me that the numbers might simply be a fraud.

Max found me in the office after dark.

“She didn’t go to KPMG,” he said. “I sacked her.”

Apparently, he had discovered the discrepancies and confronted Becky. She had laughed at him. He had signed the accounts, she reminded him. He had presented her results to the board. If he wanted to explain that he had never properly understood them, he was welcome to try.

In a rage, he had dismissed her. Then, in a decision I struggled to reconcile with his position as managing director, he had put the records aboard the boat and sunk it. It didn’t make any sense to me, and I wondered if I read about this in a blog post, would it even be funny? There’s just way too much going on, and you need to have read Rebecca, which obviously most people haven’t. And is Rebecca really that Halloweeny? Surely something like Frankenstein would make more sense. You could have a workbook that resists its creator and runs amok? That probably wouldn’t be funny, either, now that I think of it.

“I thought we could start again,” he said.

There was a long silence. I had spent months believing he regretted employing me because I could never match Becky, but actually, Becky was actually worse than me. That said, I was also a very bad accountant.

The final adjustment

Once the recovered records were safely copied and passed to the investigation team, everyone remembered having concerns about Becky. The people who had described her as infallible now explained that they’d always had their doubts. Mrs Vanders disappeared that afternoon, and the Sports Direct mug with her and all the good biscuits.

We work above the estate agent in town now. Max eventually decided it was weird running a business from a creepy mansion. We have written procedures and a month-end process more than one person understands. My name is on the door. But still I can see her, in her cardigan, doing the accounts or whatever, and it haunts me.