My name is Dunstan Vale.
I am seventy-two years old.
Before I retired, I spent forty years as a corporate auditor.
Four decades of tracing money that had gone somewhere it was not supposed to go.
Four decades of sitting in rooms with boxes of statements, spreadsheets, bank confirmations, invoices, contracts, payroll records, and occasionally very nervous people, and finding the one line that did not sit right.
I was good at it.
Not famous.
Nobody has ever stopped me in a supermarket and said, “Aren’t you Dunstan Vale, the auditor?”
But within about four firms, people knew my name.
I had a reputation for being patient.
That was the word they used.
Patient.
I could sit with the same set of accounts for six hours without getting bored. I could read the same page twenty times if there was something on it that bothered me.
And there usually was.
I used to say, mostly as a joke, at dinners and retirement parties and the occasional Christmas gathering:
“Show me the account nobody opens and I’ll show you the problem.”
Two colleagues had that sentence printed on a card for me when I retired.
It is still in a drawer in this flat.
