The wide oak desk was in chaos, heaped with scratch pads and graph paper and accounts books. It looked as if Shearson and Peter had finished their day’s work and then left everything exactly where it was, without bothering to clear up. There was even a half-smoked cigar in Shearson’s ashtray, and a congealing cup of coffee beside Peter’s chair. Ed picked up a yellow legal pad that Shearson had carelessly dropped on to the floor. On the top page, he had doodled an animated dollar-sign, with a broad smile, a big nose, and two little legs.

‘It seems like even dollars can walk,’ said Ed, throwing the pad down again.

‘Sure they can,’ said Della, who was busily leafing through the papers that Peter Kaiser had been working on. ‘They walk right out of the Blight Crisis Appeal fund, around the block a few times, double back around the next block, and then dodge in to Shearson Jones’s hank when nobody’s looking.’

‘I call that smart,’ said Ed.

‘I don’t,’ said Della. ‘I call it embezzlement.’

Ed looked around the office. The walls were clad with knotted pine, sanded and varnished. There were five or six photographs of Shearson making presentations to smiling wheat farmers in Kansas, and a misty early-American landscape by George Catlin. On the oak bookshelf beside the desk reclined a Victorian alabaster sculpture of an idealised Indian maiden, Pocahontas out of Wonder Woman, with feathers in her hair and bare breasts.

Della threw Ed a heavy pile of loose papers. ‘You can start on those. You’re looking for any financial movement out of the Blight Crisis Appeal fund. You’re looking for where it goes, who handles it, which banks are involved, account numbers, possible pseudonyms, that kind of thing. You’re looking for double entries and obvious laundering jobs. You think you can manage?’

‘Sure I can manage,’ said Ed, taking the papers across the room and spreading them out over a small side-table. ‘I mean, pinning down two expert embezzlers out of a whole mess of memos, that can’t be difficult.’

‘You don’t have to find anything specifically criminal. All we need is names, or account numbers. Anything that looks remotely unorthodox.’

‘Okay,’ said Ed. ‘This is your party.’

They worked their way through the papers for forty minutes. Most of the notes and jottings were indecipherable, crowded with notes about tax law – such as ‘Arizona acct exempt under Code Sec 501(c)3??’ and ‘trnsfr to cemetery company poss?’ – and then there were columns and columns of figures, hardly any of them annotated or explained.

But after a while, Ed began to detect a distinct flow of correlated figures from one page of all these scribbled accounts to another. He pulled the desk lamp nearer, and switched on Peter Kaiser’s print-out calculator, and after five minutes of intensive button-punching, he said, ‘That’s it. I think I’m on to something.’