Rotten Apples Page 8

  Serena’s face brightened with a tolerant smile that made Willow think young Robert might eventually be lucky in his guardian.

  ‘I think so, probably. He’s certainly got brains, although his results aren’t particularly good so far. I’m not sure what he’ll do in the end. As a small boy he used to say he’d like to be a burglar because he liked seeing the inside of other people’s homes.’

  ‘Presumably he’s got over that now,’ said Willow with a laugh. She sobered up as she thought about the loneliness that might make a child yearn to be inside other people’s houses.

  ‘Definitely. The last I heard was that he’s decided to go in for architecture or possibly town planning. Apparently he’s been working on a project about utilities and ways of improving their provision and maintenance in large cities.’

  ‘He’ll be blessed by all Londoners if he can think of ways to do that which don’t entail digging up newly surfaced roads and pavements every five minutes,’ Willow said with real fervour. ‘But back to your sister for a moment. I must just get one thing clear at least. Do you believe that Scoffer was responsible for her death or not?’

  Serena sighed again and looked down at the piles of paper on her desk. ‘Partly, but perhaps not entirely. That’s why I want to know what you find out. It would help to discover…’ She shook her head as though she could not bear to say any more.

  ‘Why not entirely?’

  There was a long pause, before Serena said abruptly: ‘She had tried to kill herself before.’

  Willow frowned. Once again she could not understand why the minister had kept such important information from her. Previous suicide attempts, at least, must have come up at the inquest.

  ‘You’re very frank,’ she said at last.

  ‘It’s no secret. She…well, she was often ill. Scoffer probably didn’t realise that and wouldn’t have known how to deal with it even if he had; I don’t believe that excuses the way he treated her.’

  ‘No,’ said Willow slowly as she absorbed the significance of what she had just heard, ‘no, I don’t suppose you do. Did she leave a letter?’

  ‘Not this time,’ said Serena, looking up. At the sight of her face Willow forgot enough of her own misery to feel sympathetic. ‘But on the two previous occasions when she was found unconscious with an overdose inside her there were letters.’

  Willow started as her suspicions returned.

  ‘Oh, you don’t need to look like that,’ said Serena at once. ‘There was not the remotest doubt that she’d done it herself or even that she’d meant to do it. She’d seen her doctor that morning and got a new prescription for anti-depressants. She picked up the pills from the chemist and went straight home to swallow the lot with a large whisky. The front door was bolted on the inside and the back door locked. There were no signs of a break-in. No one else had been there.’

  ‘But no one really knows why she did it this time.’ Willow looked across the desk at the self-controlled, intelligent woman on the other side, and told herself to stop being silly. Serena would hardly be talking so frankly if she had had a hand in her sister’s death. It frightened Willow to think how seriously her judgment had been affected by what had happened to Tom.

  ‘No, but several people knew that the tax investigation had been upsetting her, and her papers underline that.’

  ‘”Several people”? Who?’

  ‘Oh, old friends of ours, like her MP, and even one or two people she’d bought pictures from. I didn’t know at the time, but some of them have been in touch with me since she died. Apparently Scoffer was convinced she’d been understating the gains she’d made on her paintings and he’d approached some of her buyers and sellers to check up on the information she’d given him.’

  ‘What?’ Willow was outraged that there were no copies of such letters on the file she had read. She assumed that Scoffer had removed them until it struck her that Serena might be lying in an attempt to arouse extra sympathy for her dead sister, or even to press the blame for her death more firmly on to Scoffer than the evidence warranted. Willow reminded herself that hearsay, such as Serena had offered, was not proof of anything at all.

  ‘I know,’ said Serena, unaware of Willow’s wavering sympathy. ‘It’s no wonder Fiona was getting in such a state. Her reputation could have taken quite a beating from gossip generated by his activities. After all, it’s not as though all the picture buyers and sellers were friends of hers, who’d have known she’d never lie. Some were perfect strangers, who might have believed anything of her—even that she’d cheated them. It must have been utterly ghastly for her.’

  There was a long silence as Willow tried to absorb the implications of what she had learned.

  ‘Have you any photographs of her?’ she said eventually.

  ‘Yes,’ said Serena, looking as though she had been jolted by the change of subject ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s irrational,’ Willow said, ‘but I feel that if I knew what she looked like I might be able to understand a bit more about what went on between her and Scoffer, which would help me come to the sort of conclusions I’ve been asked to make.’

  ‘Okay. They’re all at home. I’ll bung one in the post for you.’

  Willow thanked her, talked for a few minutes more, and left for the hospital.

  There was no change in Tom’s condition. She sat with him in complete silence for four hours, sometimes certain that he would regain consciousness, at others coldly convinced that he would die. Eventually she gave in to common sense and took a taxi back to the mews, trying to deaden her own raw feelings without rebuilding the self-defensive walls that she had been working to dismantle ever since she and Tom had decided to marry.

  Finding that the insides of her cheeks were clamped between her teeth again as she unlocked her front door, she deliberately relaxed her jaw muscles and tried to turn her mind to more productive things. She wished that she had prepared better for her meeting with Serena and not been so easily and completely distracted. If only she had drawn up a proper list of questions as she would have done in the old days before the shooting, the interview would have been of much more use.

  Later, lying in a cool bath, with the skin of her fingers and toes slowly puckering in the scented water, she thought about Fiona Fydgett’s alleged suicide attempts and knew that the investigation was going to be much more complicated than she had ever thought it would be.

  Chapter Seven

  The Following Morning Willow went straight into Kate Moughette’s office to ask for a copy of Serena Fydgett’s letter of protest to the Chairman of the Inland Revenue. Kate’s neatly painted lips tightened in irritation, but she found a photocopy of the letter without difficulty. Willow smiled insincerely and took the piece of paper back to her temporary office.

  Dear Sir Roland, My sister, Doctor Fiona Fydgett of I Castlereagh Street, Chelsea, whose tax affairs have been under investigation by some of your officers, killed herself last week. While I do not suggest that their treatment of her was the sole cause of her suicide, I must protest about the way they have handled her case; and I would ask you, as a matter of urgency, to review the Inland Revenue’s policy on disputed tax assessments and to consider instituting some different form of training. Taxpayers are now called ‘customers’, and I would suggest that if the customer cannot always be considered to be right, there should at least be an acknowledgment that the people with whom the customers are dealing may sometimes be wrong as well. It is also essential that proof of wrongdoing is established before customers are treated as guilty. I know that the onus is on taxpayers to prove their innocence, but while your officers are waiting for that I suggest it would be more productive if they refrained from treating taxpayers as criminals. There is, I understand from my sister’s solicitor, a serious allegation in her papers to the effect that the inspector in charge of her case actually threatened that if she did not agree to pay the disputed assessment he would see that she was investigated every year until she died. He pointed out that
she had already protested that she could not afford to pay her accountant to deal with the first investigation and therefore would not be in a position to challenge any future assessments. It seems more than possible that, unable to face the prospect of such investigations, draining both her fragile emotional energy and her purse, she killed herself. In any case, such a threat seems to me not only to constitute abuse of process, but also to be tantamount to blackmail.

  Yours sincerely,

  Serena Fydgett

  Willow read the letter through several times, wishing that she had the minister in front of her so that she could cross-examine him. She would also have liked to talk to Malcolm Penholt to find out precisely what Serena had meant by describing him as ‘an old friend of ours’, and how much of her story about her sister he would be prepared to corroborate.

  Fiona Fydgett’s history was sad, but, as far as Willow could see, it was no real threat to the new government However appalling the investigation might have seemed to Fiona herself, any questions or criticisms that were raised about it could be countered by the fact that she had never tried to use the well-publicised system for complaints against the Revenue, and indeed that she had tried to kill herself at least twice before. The minister must have known both of those facts, even if he had not mentioned them to Willow. Could he really have been motivated only by a desire to collect enough ammunition to persuade his colleagues to beef up the Taxpayer’s Charter?

  Willow pushed aside the list of criticisms she had made for her report on Scoffer’s conduct and, as she did so, her concentration broke and the thoughts she had been holding at bay all morning flooded into her conscious mind.

  Tom will die, she said to herself. If he does, I’d rather be dead. It would have been better never to have loved him at all than to face this. All my life I’ve protected myself against this particular pain, and now I’ve lost my last defences against it; not even lost them, actually chosen to dismantle them. I must have been mad.

  With an audible growl, pushed out through gritted teeth, she ordered herself to get back to work and picked up the telephone to tell Len Scoffer that she needed to talk to him again. His line was engaged and so she started to plough through all the other files she had been given, doggedly refusing to let herself think of Tom.

  As the day wore on she felt as though she were getting to know many of the taxpayers who were, or recently had been, in dispute with Kate and Scoffer. Most of them seemed to her to be fundamentally honest, if sometimes rather silly, but every so often she would come across one like Joe Wraggeley, whose letters and tax returns would have aroused plenty of suspicions in her mind if she had been an inspector.

  It was not until late afternoon that she found any cases that had ended at all strangely, and then she came across one concerning an architect called Simon Creke. He had got into a mess over an unprecedentedly successful year, during which he had won a lucrative architectural prize, as well as earning far more in fees than ever before or since.

  When Kate had written to ask him whether he had had any sources of income other than those listed in his accounts, he had told her at once about the prize, claiming that his accountant (who was not chartered) had advised him that money from prizes was not taxable. Kate had disputed that, writing to explain that prizes from the competitions entered in the course of carrying out a trade or profession were indeed taxable. After an increasingly acrimonious exchange of letters, during which she had told the accountant that she would be imposing large penalties, she had effectively ordered both him and his client to come to her office for a meeting.

  Kate’s notes of that meeting made it clear that the accountant was sticking by his guns. Then there was an apparent gap in the files, after which there was a letter from a different accountant with plenty of initials after his name, dated seven weeks after the meeting, suggesting a protracted repayment schedule for the original tax demand, but making no mention of penalties that Kate had written about in one of her earliest letters. The file made it clear that Simon Creke was faithfully repaying the tax but it gave no dues as to why Kate should have let him off the penalty.

  Willow was still working when Kate walked past the open door of Mrs Patel’s office on her way out of the building at seven-thirty.

  ‘You’re very dedicated,’ Kate said, stopping in the doorway.

  Taking the comment at face value, Willow smiled noncommittally, still determined not to tell anyone in the tax office about Tom or explain why she did not want to go back to her empty house. ‘I haven’t very long in which to prepare this report for the Merk, and I want to make it as comprehensive as possible,’ she said, using Kate’s nickname for the minister partly out of amusement and partly to try to build some kind of bond between them. ‘I imagine the last thing you want is for me or anyone else to have to come back to ask more questions.’

  ‘You’re right there.’ Kate also seemed to be making an unusual effort to be pleasant. She produced a smile but it looked more like a grimace than an expression of pleasure or affection. ‘It’s considerate of you. But you ought to stop now. I have a settled policy here that the staff work no longer than their contractual hours except in seriously dire emergencies. It’s too easy for any group of people to sink into bad habits, egging each other on to stay later and later each day. All that happens is that they do less and less in each hour they spend, and ruin their private lives and mental health. I know you’re not staff, but all the same…’

  ‘I know what you mean, but I want to get this finished. Are you in a great hurry, or have you a moment to spare? There are one or two things I still don’t understand, and I’d rather not make a fool of myself in my report.’

  Kate looked at her watch, tightened her lips and then shrugged and came into the room, pulling her carefully looped scarf from around her neck. ‘Okay, I can spare about ten minutes.’

  ‘Well, it’s this plumber really,’ Willow said.

  Kate smiled with a synthetic kindliness that raised most of Willow’s hackles. ‘We have quite a lot of those,’ she said. ‘Which is the case?’

  Willow passed it across the shabby desk.

  Kate opened it and quickly read through the first few letters and memos. ‘All right. Wraggeley. Yes, I remember. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I just wondered why you went to the expense of having him under surveillance.’

  Kate frowned. ‘There’s nothing here about surveillance.’

  ‘No. But it’s perfectly clear that it happened. The list of jobs you sent him and the sums of money you quote for his cash receipts show that you’ve either suborned someone on his staff or been having him watched.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘If the latter,’ said Willow carefully, ‘it must have cost a great deal more than the extra tax you finally got him to pay. I wondered how much of that sort of thing goes on?’

  ‘That’s hardly within your brief.’ All attempts to be friendly had stopped. Kate looked as coldly obstructive as she had been on the first morning of Willow’s assignment.

  ‘I’m just interested,’ said Willow, adding in an attempt to retrieve Kate’s co-operation, ‘I ought perhaps to say unequivocally that I entirely agree with you that people who owe tax ought to pay it. I’m merely exercised about the budgeting and costing of an operation like this. I wonder if it can ever be cost-effective.’

  ‘So far, it looks as though it will be,’ said Kate, sounding a little less annoyed. ‘There’s been an element of pour encourager les autres about it. Almost as soon as he realised that we had collected hard information about the black-economy parts of his business, we had a trickle and then a flood of revised accounts from other people in his and related trades.’

  Willow could not help smiling at Kate’s apposite choice of words for the group of repentant plumbers. ‘I see. That makes sense. I was mildly concerned that you’d been going after him out of expensive rage. Now, turning to the architect…’

  Kate visibly twitched and covered the movement
by reaching across for the file Willow was holding out to her. ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t quite understand why you should have let him off the penalties you wrote about in this letter.’

  ‘Surely you’re looking for instances of Revenue brutality rather than solicitude,’ said Kate, her neat eyebrows meeting across the top of her small nose.

  ‘To be frank, I’m not absolutely certain exactly what I am looking for, except that it must lie in oddities.’ Willow paused in order to smile. ‘This definitely seems to me to be one of those.’

  Kate leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, the picture of ease and confidence. Willow thought the picture might be as untruthful as her own smile.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple, although several people in this office have been whispering about it. No doubt you’ve heard some of the tittle-tattle.’ Kate’s little nostrils flared in disdain. ‘The man was badly advised by his accountant—exceptionally badly advised—and since he himself was more than willing to provide every bit of information I asked for and pay everything he owed, it seemed inappropriate for me to impose penalties. He is paying the interest on the original sum without demur.’

  ‘Are you really allowed that much discretion over penalties?’ asked Willow almost involuntarily.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Kate coolly as she looked at her watch again. ‘Now, if there’s nothing else, I must be off.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Willow.

  Kate redraped the fine silk scarf around her neck, tucked the ends into the collarless neck of her pale sage-coloured suit, picked up her briefcase and left, shutting the office door behind her.

  Wondering how many more of the expensive-looking pastel summer suits Kate must have hanging in her wardrobes, Willow went back to her files. She had already called the hospital and heard that there was still no change in Tom’s condition, and the last thing she wanted was to spend an evening alone in the rooms she had furnished with him, trying to keep her thoughts under control. Work was more likely to do that than any book, piece of music or television programme. She did not even consider trying to see a friend; it would be impossible not to talk about Tom and anything that was said could only make her terror worse.