Lindsay ran her finger along the list of those present. Then she checked two of her dockets. She compared them to the list again, then let out a long, slow sigh of satisfaction. “I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, and I’d bet a month’s salary that it’s not an oncoming train.”

“Care to enlighten me? Or do I get treated like the typical Watson, kept in the dark till the very end?” Sophie asked.

“Sorry. I think that someone has been fiddling expenses on a scale to make your eyes water. It works like this. When you’re a lay official of the union, and you come to head office for meetings, you’re entitled to claim travelling and meal expenses, and sometimes overnight allowances too. If you’re a freelance, you can also claim a sum of money that’s supposed to go some way towards covering loss of potential earnings while you’re attending meetings. What usually happens is, you get to the meeting and the full-time officer who’s responsible for that sector of the union dishes out expenses forms. You fill in your form, the officer authorizes them with a signature, takes them up to the accounts department and goes back in an hour or so to pick up the cash and hand it out.”

“Cash? In 1993?” Sophie said incredulously.

“The theory is that it’s cheaper to the union than issuing dozens of checks for relatively small amounts. Anyway, not everyone gets round to filling their form in on the day. For example, if you’re actually chairing the meeting, it can be difficult to make the time. So in those cases, you send the form in later, an officer authorizes it retrospectively, and the accounts department hang on to the dosh till the next time you’re in head office for a meeting. If you specifically ask for it, they’ll send you a check, but they don’t like doing that. So what I have here is a bundle of expense dockets that have apparently gone through the system and been paid out. Only problem is, according to at least one set of minutes, people appear to have been paid money for attending meetings they weren’t at. And in the vast majority of these cases, Laura Craig was the officer responsible for signing the dockets.” Suddenly, Lindsay leapt to her feet with the look of a woman whose brain has just made a racing change from second to third gear.