Rotten Apples (24 page)

‘Maybe not,' said Harness slowly. ‘But he's either a destructive little beggar or at the very least accident prone.'

‘I don't understand.' Willow felt surprisingly cold, considering the heavy sultriness of the weather.

‘Don't you? Look what you've just told me. How many houses do you know that are flooded by their cold water tanks exploding?'

‘None,' said Willow, annoyed with herself, ‘but the plumber had clearly seen it more than once before. You're not really suggesting that the boy engineered the flood are you?' As she spoke she remembered her surprise that he knew all about ballcocks and indeed that he was agile enough to get up into the roof space while water was still flooding down through the broken trap door.

‘It's a ludicrous proposition,' she added in an attempt to persuade herself.

‘Perhaps.'

‘What else has happened in buildings where he's been?'

‘Mrs Worth, I really am very busy. I have to go.'

‘Fine,' said Willow and banged down the receiver in a rage. It was short-lived and had been born, she knew perfectly well, from anxiety.

Trying to dismiss Harness's warnings, she concentrated on what else she needed to find out. The most comforting thing would be that Scoffer, and he alone, had been the target of whoever had set fire to the offices and that it had had nothing whatever to do with Fiona Fydgett, her tax affairs or her death. To establish that, Willow thought, she needed to confirm her picture of him and the way he had operated.

Having rung the temporary tax office, she asked to speak to Kate Moughette.

‘Yes, Willow, what is it?' asked Kate with her old briskness.

‘I'm almost there with my report, but there are some more things that I do need to ask you. Have you any time for me to come and talk today?'

‘Nope,' said Kate. ‘I'm hellishly pushed.' There was a pause and then in a reluctant voice, she added: ‘But if it would help you finish what you've got to do here and leave us to get on with our work, I could give you a lift to Croydon tomorrow afternoon. We could talk then.'

‘Croydon?'

‘Yes. Len's funeral. You said you wanted to come. Have you changed your mind?'

‘Ah,' said Willow, thinking of Mrs Scoffer's fury. Well, she would hardly recognise a woman she had never seen. ‘No, indeed. That would be fine. What time?'

‘Where d'you live?'

Willow gave her the address.

‘Why don't I pick you up at two? It'll be a slow crawl down the South Circular, but that can't be helped and I don't want to find myself stranded down there if there are no trains when I want to get back.'

‘I couldn't agree more,' said Willow. ‘I'll see you then. That's very good of you. Oh, before you go, could you transfer me to Cara Saks's phone? I need to talk to her, too.'

‘Must you? She's distracted enough from her work as it is and even more useless than normal.'

‘Honestly, I think I must,' said Willow.

‘Well, I can hardly stop you, but I should point out that she was petrified of Len. Please don't take her exaggerations too seriously, and don't keep her away from her desk during working hours.'

‘Very well,' said Willow.

There was a click and then a moment later she recognised Cars's voice at the other end of the line. ‘Is that you, Willow? Did you want me?'

‘Yes. I've nearly finished the first draft of my report to the minister but there are some things I need to ask you. Kate says you're frantically busy, but perhaps we could meet over a sandwich at lunchtime.'

‘Why not? Actually, I'm not all that busy at the moment. We're fairly stuck until the document conservators produce some more results. It does look as though some of the investigation files are going to come out all right, and it'll be all hands to the pump then, but there's not a lot I can do yet.'

‘That's great,' said Willow. ‘I'll loiter outside your office at one then, shall I?'

As she put down the telephone receiver, Willow suddenly remembered that there had been no payments to a dressmaker in the details of Kate's finances. She had spent plenty on couture fabrics, but nothing on fees to anyone to make them up. For a second it occurred to Willow that Kate might make her own clothes, and then she dismissed the idea. The suits looked far too professionally cut and sewn.

Remembering Scoffer's suspicions, Willow toyed with the idea that Kate could have been paying some dressmaker in cash, perhaps even cash from bribes she had been handed by anxious taxpayers like the architect, whose case had been settled without penalties.

‘It's not possible,' she said loudly. ‘An intelligent woman like that, dealing with tax investigations all the time? She'd have to be barmy to think she could get away with it.'

The Sandwich Bar Cara had chosen for their lunch had a few tables at the back, but the atmosphere inside was so stuffy that Willow suggested they should take their sandwiches and find somewhere to sit outside.

‘I don't think there is anywhere,' said Cara, ‘at least nothing very nice. It's quite rough until you get to the National Theatre, and that's miles.'

‘Dowting's has quite a nice garden with benches. That's only five minutes'walk from here. Come on.'

Cara followed her and they found several empty benches among the scented rose bushes.

‘I never thought of doing this,' she said, ‘but it is the nicest place for miles. Don't you think they might mind? It must be meant for patients.'

‘Not many of them are in a fit state to sit about in gardens,' said Willow, thinking of Tom lying silent and unknowing up in his dim room. ‘No one convalesces in hospital these days, even if they did when the garden was planned. I shouldn't have thought anyone would mind, but if they do, I'm on my way to visit my husband, so I count, and you can come on my ticket, as it were.'

‘Of course,' said Cara, flushing. ‘How is he?'

‘So so.'

‘I'm sure he'll be all right.' Cara laid a hand on Willow's arm. ‘I'm sure of it.'

All Willow's mental toughness told her that since Cara had no private line to the deity she could not possibly know what was going to happen to Tom, but she took the reassurance in the spirit in which it had been offered.

‘Thank you. Now, tell me about Len. I know he could be a bastard in the office, but what was he like with taxpayers?'

‘A bastard with them, too,' said Cara with a confiding smile. ‘I used to think that he actually enjoyed bullying them, particularly the ones he thought were cocky or even just extravagant He hated that and nearly always thought it was a sign of dishonesty. I sometimes wondered what there could be in him that made him want to make other people even more miserable than he must have been.' She paused and then added in a rush, ‘It wasn't unknown for them to burst into tears in meetings with him, even the men.'

‘Is that what upset you so much?'

‘How d'you mean?' Cara frowned. With her head on one side and her lips pursed she looked like a small, cross bird.

‘He told me on my first day that you tended to get upset in meetings and sometimes broke down.'

‘That's not fair.' Cara straightened her head and not only looked but also sounded tougher. ‘It only happened once. Len was really going at an electrician, a big, tough man with tattoos even, who looked as though he could take on the whole world. Len started needling him and he obviously got right under the man's skin because he broke down and started to cry. It was horrible, seeing someone broken like that. Okay, so he'd been fiddling his taxes in a small way and there was a significant payment still outstanding from last year. Len was right to challenge him—of course he was—and right to tell him that we'd pursue him for the last penny, but he didn't have to be such a bully.'

‘What was it he said?'

‘I can't remember. I was… It made me feel sick, you know. I couldn't bear it. I suppose it just reminded me of all the times he'd had a go at me. My knees went wobbly, I felt hollow, my head buzzed and I was terrified that…well, that I'd have to rush to the toilet.' Cam blushed.

‘It sounds most unpleasant.'

‘It was. Kate can do it to me too, sometimes. You know, one of the reasons why I chose the civil service was because I thought there'd be less pressure than in one of the big accountancy firms, even though they pay better. But perhaps Jason's right.'

‘I don't follow you,' said Willow, thinking that for a woman of twenty-eight, Cara was exceptionally thin skinned.

‘That's what Jason wants: a job in private practice. He often says it's the only kind of work that's worthy of our talents; that we're wasting ourselves harassing small businessmen for derisory salaries.'

‘There's always the index-linked pension. Would Jason be able to transfer, do you think?' asked Willow, realising that his ambitions probably explained why he spent so much on City suits and Jermyn-Street shirts.

‘Well, he might, but you see he's determined to get in at a high level.'

‘Don't you think that's possible?' asked Willow, watching a fat pigeon waddling among the flowers, pecking at juicy-looking aphids. ‘Isn't he clever enough?'

‘It's not that. He's got a mind like a razor, and he's got the confidence, too. I suppose he might just make it, even though no one I've ever heard of has gone in as high as he's planning. No, Jason's main problem is that his attention span is shorter than a baby's. He gets bored very quickly and then starts stirring up trouble in the office. That's bound to be on his references and it would have to count against him. I'd have thought, even in private practice.'

Willow looked at Cara, wondering whether she had deliberately planted that piece of information or whether her desire to please was such that it had merely slipped out. It was hard to assess exactly how naive she really was.

‘What kind of trouble?' Willow asked, trying to find out.

Cara wrinkled her pretty nose and pursed her lips again. ‘He knew how easy it was to get Len going about things and so he'd wind him up; you know, give him hints that someone was fiddling something, like poor Doctor Fydgett, and then watch laughing as Len floundered around trying to get proof of something that had never existed.'

‘I don't quite understand,' said Willow. ‘What things got Len going?'

‘Oh, dishonesty of any kind. He was a real stickler, you know. That's one reason why everyone hated him so much.' Seeing that Willow was still looking puzzled, cara explained. ‘If he caught one of the typists doing a letter of her own, say, or nicking an envelope, or someone taking too long at lunch, that sort of thing, he'd haul them into his office and give them a real dressing down. “We're government servants,” he used to say. “Paid by the taxpayer. We have to be more honest than anyone else.” The law was his god, really, and it amused Jason to wind him up, like on the Fydgett case. It was childish and destructive, but in a way it provided a safely valve for the rest of us. And it was bonding—you know, all of us together hating Len and laughing at him, sort of thing.'

While Cara folded her sandwich papers neatly and took them to the nearest litter bin, Willow thought of Len's alleged habit of threatening taxpayers and the suggestion that his file notes might not have accurately reflected the details of what had been said in meetings.

‘Was it the letter or the spirit of the law that meant so much to him?' she asked when Cara came back to the bench.

‘That's bright,' she said, sounding surprised enough to be rude. ‘I hadn't realised you'd seen enough of him to get on to that. I think he would always stick to the letter, but the spirit might get a bit bent sometimes, if you see what I mean.'

‘Hm, thank you, Cara. You've helped a lot.'

‘Great'She looked at her watch and then stood up in a hurry. ‘I must go or Kate will be furious. She's twitchy at the moment and needs to see us all working every minute of the day. I gather I'll be seeing you tomorrow at the funeral after all.'

‘What?' said Willow, forgetting the excuse she had used to get Cara to give her Mrs Scoffer's telephone number. ‘Oh, yes, probably. Kate's going to give me a lift.'

Cara smiled and turned away, muttering something that sounded like, ‘Well, lucky old you.'

‘Before you go,' said Willow. Cara looked back enquiringly.

‘You said that Jason wound Len up about the Fydgett case. What did he actually do?'

Cara smiled and shrugged and looked prettily reluctant.

Willow pressed her with a brisk ‘Come on, out with it.'

‘It was fairly simple, really. He overheard Len talking about Fydgett one day and he said: “Up to her old tricks again, is she? It wouldn't surprise me. I was at an auction the other day.” Len asked him what he meant, but Jason wouldn't tell him. “Only hearsay, old boy, but it sounds as though someone's been selling pictures secretly and pretty well this last year.”‘

‘Had he made that up?'

Cara shrugged. The points of her collarbone stuck up above the scooped neck of her T-shirt. Willow thought that there was a calculating look in her eyes, but it could merely have been the way the dazzling sun caught them.

‘I asked him that after we heard she was dead, and he said that he hadn't told any lies. He had actually been in an auction room recently, and people are always selling pictures secretly and well. And that in any case, Fydgett was bound to have been doing it because she always did sell one or two a year even if she did declare them for CGT. And then he added that “poor old Len hasn't had any fun for ages” and needed a nice rage to get him going properly.'

‘I see. Thank you, Cara.' Willow watched her go, wondering just exactly who had been stirring up trouble.