A couple of weeks ago I was looking at our online bank statement and as usual I was wondering what we could cut back on. It would be nice not to be waiting desperately for the next pay cheque every month. I saw an outgoing that I didn’t recognise: £5.99 paid to DHC Ltd.
I looked up DHC on Google and it appeared to be a Japanese cosmetics company. “Have you been buying cosmetics online from Japan?” I demanded of Caroline. “What’s wrong with Boot’s?”
She said that she hadn’t and also that it was none of my business where she bought anything. Then, she pointed out that it was my card that had been used. We had a tense moment or two.
I rang the bank but the woman I spoke to was not much help, telling me that she would look into it for me. Eventually, I discovered that I had bought a large bottle of windscreen wash from a filling station near Cambridge. All that effort and nervous stress for less than six pounds! Times are hard.
A few days after that the postperson dropped five letters though my letterbox. I say “postperson” because our regular postman has been ill and off work for three months and most days someone different brings our post. Sometimes it’s a man and sometimes a woman.
I was opening the envelopes quickly and as soon as I opened the fourth one, I knew that it wasn’t for either of us. It was a deposit account statement from a bank that neither Caroline nor I have ever had any dealings with.
I looked at the address that it was meant to go to. It was for a “Mr Smith” at house number 6 in a road that I didn’t recognise. Our house number is also 6. I could see how the mistake had been made. I could also see the total amount that Mr Smith had in his account.
It was £2,654,168.89. Two million, six hundred and fifty-four thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight pounds, eighty-nine pence
That is a lot of money. In fact, that is an absurd amount of money to have in a bank deposit account. I thought about it for a time, wondering what to do. I seemed to have five options:
A Put the statement back into the envelope and then take it to the right address and put it through the letterbox and walk away without saying anything.
B Take it to the right address, knock on the door and apologise to the rightful recipient for opening his mail.
C Send it back to the bank with a note telling them that I had received it by mistake.
D Go and see the “Mr Smith” and give him the benefit of my knowledge of the best way to handle and invest large sums of money. It’s possible that he could then be so grateful that he might slip me a couple of hundred thousand quid.
E Destroy the statement and its envelope and do nothing.
I’ve been giving it some more thought. Yesterday, I drove to have a look at the house that the letter should have gone to. It is nothing special. It looks like an ordinary semi-detached house, probably with three bedrooms.
I looked it up on Zoopla and their estimated value of it is £349,000. If I had more than two million pounds, I wouldn’t be someone who lives in a house like that and I wouldn’t have the money sitting around in a deposit account earning less than 2% a year either.
But the big questions are,
1. What’s a man with so much money doing living in such a small, nondescript house?
2. How did a man with so much money, living in a small, nondescript house like that, get so much money? and that leads to the next question,
3. Is he a crook? A drug dealer possibly?
He’s probably not a drug dealer because I know from watching crime dramas on the telly, that drug dealers keep their loot in cash, hidden in the house. Crooks don’t use banks.
However, a much more interesting and intriguing question in my opinion is, “Would Mr Smith ring his bank and query an outgoing of £5.99?”
Seeing that he is gaining around £150 a day in interest alone, I doubt it. I wonder what sort of sum would make him spend and waste nearly an hour of his time and run the risk of an argument with his wife, checking on it. A lot more than six pounds I imagine.
By the way, I chose option E.
No comments:
Post a Comment