No Comebacks (33 page)

Two days later Mr Pound informed the Inland Revenue of the full facts of the case. They checked the facts and, albeit with an ill grace, declined to pursue.

Barney Smee walked happily and with a brisk pace towards his bank, confident he would just get there before they closed for the Christmas holiday. The reason for his pleasure was tucked inside his breast pocket: a cheque for a quite substantial sum, but only the last of a series of such cheques that over the past few months had ensured him a much higher income than he had ever managed to earn in twenty years in the risky business of dealing in scrap metals for the jewellery industry.

He had been right, he congratulated himself, to take the risk, and it had undeniably been a high one. Still, everyone was in the tax-dodging business nowadays and who was he to condemn the source of good fortune simply because the man had wished to deal only in cash? Barney Smee had no difficulty in understanding the silver-haired investor who called himself Richards and had a driving licence to prove it. The man evidently had bought his 50-ounce ingots years before, when they were cheap. To have sold them on the open market through Johnson Matthey would beyond doubt have secured him a higher price, but at what cost in capital gains tax? Only he could have known and Barney Smee was not one to probe.

In any case, the whole trade was rife with cash deals. The ingots had been genuine; they even bore the original assay mark of Johnson Matthey, from whom they had once come. Only the serial number had been blazed out. That had cost the old man a lot, because without the serial number Smee could not offer him anything near fair market price. He could only offer scrap price, or producer's price, about 440 US dollars an ounce. But then, the serial numbers would have identified the owner to the Inland Revenue, so maybe the old man knew his onions after all.

Barney Smee had got rid of all fifty eventually, through the trade, and had made a cool ten dollars an ounce for himself. The cheque in his pocket was for the sale of the last of the deal, the ultimate two ingots. He was blissfully unaware that in other parts of Britain another four like himself had also spent the autumn filtering fifty 50-ounce ingots each back into the market through the second-hand trade, and had bought them for cash from a silver-haired seller. He swung out of the side street and into the Old Kent Road. As he did so he collided with a man descending from a taxi. Both men apologized to each other and wished each other a merry Christmas. Barney Smee passed on his contented way.

The other man, a solicitor from Guernsey, peered up at the building where he had been dropped, adjusted his hat and made for the entrance. Ten minutes later he was closeted with a somewhat mystified Mother Superior.

'May I ask, Mother Superior, whether Saint Benedict's Orphanage qualifies as a registered charity under the Charities Act?'

'Yes,' said the Mother Superior. 'It does.'

'Good,' said the lawyer. 'Then no infringement has taken place and there will be no application in your case of the capital transfer tax.'

'The what?' she asked.

'Better known as the "gift tax",' said the lawyer with a smile. 'I am happy to tell you that a donor whose identity I cannot reveal, under the rules of confidentiality governing business between client and lawyer, has seen fit to donate a substantial sum to your establishment.'

He waited for a reaction, but the grey-haired old nun was staring at him in bewilderment.

'My client, whose name you will never know, instructed me quite specifically to present myself to you here on this day, Christmas Eve, and present you with this envelope.'

He took an envelope of thick cartridge paper from his briefcase and held it out to the Mother Superior. She took it but made no move to open it.

'I understand it contains a certified bank cheque, purchased from a reputable merchant bank incorporated in Guernsey, drawn on that bank and made out in favour of Saint Benedict's Orphanage. I have not seen the contents, but those were my instructions.'

'No gift tax?' she queried, holding the envelope, irresolute. Charitable donations were few and far between, and usually hard fought for.

'In the, Channel Islands we have a different fiscal system to that of the United Kingdom mainland,' said the lawyer patiently. 'We have no capital transfer tax. We also practise bank confidentiality. A donation within Guernsey or the Islands attracts no tax. If the recipient is domiciled or resident within the UK mainland, then he or she would be liable under mainland tax law. Unless already exempted. Such as by the Charities Act. And now, if you will sign a receipt for one envelope, contents unknown, I will have discharged my duty. My fee is already settled and I would like to get home to my family.'

Two minutes later the Mother Superior was alone. Slowly she ran a letter knife along the envelope and extracted the contents. It was a single certified cheque. When she saw the figure on it she scrabbled for her rosary and began telling it rapidly. When she had regained some of her composure she went to the prie-dieu against the wall and knelt for half an hour in prayer.

Back at her desk, still feeling weak, she stared again at the cheque for two and a half million pounds. Who in the world ever had such money? She tried to think what she should do with so much. An endowment, she thought. A trust fund, perhaps. There was enough to endow the orphanage forever. Certainly enough to fulfill the ambition of her lifetime: to get the orphanage out of the slums of London and establish it in the fresh air of the open countryside. She could double the number of children. She could ...

Too many thoughts flooding in, and one trying to get to the front. What was it? Yes, the Sunday newspaper the week before last. Something had caught her eye, caused a pang of longing. That was it, that was where they would go. And enough money in her hands to buy it and endow it for always. A dream come true. An advert in the property columns. For sale, a manor house in Kent with twenty acres of parkland...

SHARP PRACTICE

JUDGE COMYN SETTLED HIMSELF comfortably into the corner seat of his first-class compartment, unfolded his day's copy of the
Irish Times,
glanced at the headlines, and laid it on his lap.

There would be plenty of time for the newspaper during the slow four-hour trundle down to Tralee. He gazed idly out of the window at the bustle of Kingsbridge station in the last minutes before the departure of the Dublin— Tralee locomotive which would haul him sedately to his duties in the principal township of County Kerry. He hoped vaguely he would have the compartment to himself so that he could deal with his paperwork.

It was not to be. Hardly had the thought crossed his mind when the compartment door opened and someone stepped in. He forbore to look. The door rolled shut and the newcomer tossed a handgrip onto the luggage rack. Then the man sat down opposite him, across the gleaming walnut table.

Judge Comyn gave him a glance. His companion was a small, wispy man, with a puckish quiff of sandy hair standing up from his forehead and a pair of the saddest, most apologetic brown eyes. His suit was of a whiskery thornproof with a matching weskit and knitted tie. The judge assessed him as someone associated with horses, or a clerk perhaps, and resumed his gaze out of the window.

He heard the call of the guard outside to the driver of the old steam engine puffing away somewhere down the line, and then the shrill blast of the guard's whistle. Even as the engine emitted its first great chuff and the carriage began to lurch forward, a large running figure dressed entirely in black scurried past the window. The judge heard the crash of the carriage door opening a few feet away and the thud of a body landing in the corridor. Seconds later, to the accompaniment of a wheezing and puffing, the black figure appeared in the compartment's doorway and subsided with relief into the far corner.

Judge Comyn glanced again. The newcomer was a florid-faced priest. The judge looked again out of the window; he did not wish to start a conversation, having been schooled in England.

'By the saints, ye nearly didn't make it, Father,' he heard the wispy one say.

There was more puffing from the man of the cloth. 'It was a sight too close for comfort, my son,' the priest replied.

After that they mercifully lapsed into silence. Judge Comyn observed Kingsbridge station slide out of sight, to be replaced by the unedifying rows of smoke-grimed houses that in those days made up the western suburbs of Dublin. The loco of the Great Southern Railway Company took the strain and the clickety-clack tempo of the wheels over the rails increased. Judge Comyn picked up his paper.

The headline and leading news item concerned the premier, Eamon de Valera, who the previous day in the Dail had given his full support to his agriculture minister in the matter of the price of potatoes. Far down at the bottom was a two-inch mention that a certain Mr Hitler had taken over Austria. The editor was a man who had his priorities right, thought Judge Comyn. There was little more to interest him in the paper, and after five minutes he folded it, took a batch of legal papers from his briefcase and began to peruse them. The green fields of Kildare slid by the windows soon after they cleared the city of Dublin.

'Sir,' said a timid voice from opposite him. Oh dear, he thought, he wants to talk. He raised his gaze to the pleading spaniel eyes of the man opposite.

'Would you mind if I used a part of the table?' asked the man.

'Not at all,' said the judge.

'Thank you sir,' said the man, with a detectable brogue from the southwest of the country.

The judge resumed his study of the papers relating to the settlement of a complex civil issue he would have to adjudicate on his return to Dublin from Tralee. The visit to Kerry as circuit court judge to preside over the quarterly hearings there would, he trusted, offer no such complexities. These rural circuit courts, in his experience, offered only the simplest of issues to be decided by local juries who as often as not produced verdicts of bewildering illogicality.

He did not bother to look up when the wispy man produced a pack of none-too-clean playing cards from his pockets and proceeded to set some of them out in columns to play patience. His attention was only drawn some seconds later to a clucking sound. He looked up again.

The wispy man had his tongue between his teeth in an effort of great concentration — this was producing the ducking sound — and was staring at the exposed cards at the foot of each column. Judge Comyn observed at a glance that a red nine had not been placed upon a black ten, even though both cards were clearly visible. The wispy man, failing to see the match, began to deal three more cards. Judge Comyn choked back his irritation and returned to his papers. Nothing to do with me, he told himself.

But there is something mesmeric about a man playing patience, and never more so than when he is playing it badly. Within five minutes the judge's concentration had been completely broken in the matter of the civil lawsuit, and he was staring at the exposed cards. Finally he could bear it no longer. There was an empty column on the right, yet an exposed king on column three that ought to go into the vacant space. He coughed. The wispy one looked up in alarm.

'The king,' said the judge gently, 'it should go up into the space.'

The card player looked down, spotted the opportunity and moved the king. The card now able to be turned over proved to be a queen, and she went to the king. Before he had finished he had legitimately made seven moves. The column that began with the king now ended with a ten.

'And the red nine,' said the judge. 'It can go across now.'

The red nine and its dependent six cards moved over to the nine. Another card could be exposed; an ace, which went up above the game.

'I do believe you will get it out,' said the judge.

'Ah, not me, sir,' said the wispy man, shaking his head with its sad spaniel eyes. 'Sure I've never got one out yet in all me life.'

'Play on, play on,' said Judge Comyn with rising interest. With his help the game did indeed come out. The wispy man gazed at the resolved puzzle in wonderment.

'There you are, you see; you've done it,' said the judge.

'Ah, but not without your honour's help,' said the sad-eyed one. 'It's a fine mind ye have for the cards, sir.'

Judge Comyn wondered if the cardplayer could possibly know he was a judge, but concluded the man was simply using a common form of address in Ireland in those days towards one worthy of some respect.

Even the priest had laid down his collection of the sermons of the late, great Cardinal Newman and was looking at the cards.

'Oh,' said the judge, who played a little bridge and poker with his cronies at the Kildare Street Club, 'not really.'

Privately he was rather proud of his theory that a good legal mind, with its trained observation, practised powers of deduction and keen memory, could always play a good game of cards.

The wispy man ceased playing and began idly dealing five-card hands, which he then examined before returning the cards to the pack. Finally he put the deck down. He sighed.

'It's a long way to Tralee,' he said wistfully.

With hindsight Judge Comyn never could recall who exactly had mentioned the word poker, but he suspected it might have been himself. Anyway, he took over the pack and dealt a few hands for himself. One of them, he was pleased to notice, was a full house, jacks on tens.