Rotten Apples (25 page)

KATE ARRIVED at the mews the following day at noon. She looked unfamiliar in her black linen dress, the first dark thing that Willow had ever seen her wear. With its discreet buttons, square-cut neck, which only just revealed her collarbone, and roomy sleeves to just above the elbow, it could hardly have been more funereal and yet it must have been wonderfully cool to wear.

Willow herself was feeling hot and uncomfortable in a black suit; her only dark dresses were either designed for winter or the evening. She took off the unbuttoned jacket before she got into Kate's red Astra, wincing as the material rubbed through the bandages on her hands, and laid it on the back seat.

‘I wish I were Chinese.'

‘Why on earth?' asked Kate, looking over her right shoulder as she eased her heavy car out of its parking space.

‘They wear white in mourning.'

‘Ah, I see. Yes, black is horribly stuffy on a day like this.'

‘Not yours. It's great. I'm not sure I've ever seen a dress quite like it. Where did you get it?' Willow was genuinely admiring, but she was also glad of the opportunity to flatter Kate.

‘I made it. I make all my clothes.' Kate sounded defensive.

‘What, not the suits as well?'

‘Yes, the suits as well.'

‘Goodness, I am impressed,' said Willow, glad to have one minor mystery cleared up. ‘D'you know, I'd never have suspected it?'

‘Why?' Kate looked at her for a second. Willow was surprised to see hostility in her small dark eyes. ‘You surely can't be like my step-sister, who thinks a career makes one unfeminine.'

‘Certainly not.' Willow laughed. ‘Nor that dressmaking is a gender-specific skill.'

‘That's all right then,' said Kate with considerable emphasis, as though Willow had unexpectedly produced the correct password. ‘Look, what is it that you want me to tell you? Let's get that out of the way.'

‘I've got a list of questions in my bag,' said Willow without even reaching for it. ‘But the first and most important one is what was the information that Len Scoffer told Fiona Fydgett he had about income that she'd concealed?'

‘Oh God!' said Kate, putting the back of her hand against her forehead as though her persistent headache was still with her. She lifted her foot off the accelerator for a moment, causing the driver behind, whose car was only three inches from her back bumper, to hoot furiously. ‘Look, it's just one of those hideously unfortunate things.'

‘Which hideously unfortunate things?'

Kate shrugged and put her hand back on the steering wheel. ‘As you probably know, banks and building societies pass on to us information about the interest earned on all their customers' accounts.'

‘Yes, I knew that.'

‘Fydgett's bank gave us figures for the interest on her two accounts. The first coincided with the information on her tax return. The second did not. In fact, to have earned that amount of interest she would have had to have received a large injection of capital. We took it—Len took it—that she'd done another big picture deal and tried to keep it secret because it would have been the third that year.'

She paused as she overtook a lorry parked on a double yellow line.

‘Why would that have mattered?' asked Willow.

‘When the commissioners ruled that her picture profits were capital gains after all, she had had only two sales in the year. Len thought that she must have believed three deals would put the picture sales into the category of business profits after all, and that she'd concealed the biggest for that reason.'

‘That was all? Didn't he have any evidence of a big deal? If she'd made a really crunchy amount, surely she would have had to have sold the painting through one of the big auction houses, and then there'd be a record. Did he check?'

‘In some ways a private sale would have been more likely,' said Kate, as she braked at a set of traffic lights that was just turning amber. Once again there was a loud hooting from behind, combined with the sinister sliding shriek of rubber skidding on tarmac.

The sound shocked Willow out of her musings about the possibly murderous fury someone might feel at seeing reports of a painting, for which they had earned only a hundred pounds, being sold on for ten or twenty times that amount by the woman to whom they had sold it. She turned to look out of the rear windscreen.

The car behind was a big, navy-blue BMW and its brakes must have been recently serviced for the driver had just managed to stop without crashing into the back of the Astra. He was a thin-looking man in his forties with a dark, sneering face, and he was tapping at his steering wheel. Kate only glanced in her mirror and allowed herself a scornful smile.

‘Pillock!'

As the lights changed she drove smoothly across the junction, checking her mirror more frequently than usual. As soon as the road widened at all, the BMW driver accelerated violently and whipped past them. The driver tapped his forehead as he passed, staring at Kate. She merely shook her head.

‘Well?' said Willow after they had driven in silence for three crowded miles. ‘Did you ever discover whether there had been a private deal?'

‘No. In fact, the bank had made a mistake. I'm not sure how it happened. Presumably the computer malfunctioned or someone entered a wrong account number at some stage. The sum we were given for interest on the long-term account was in fact the total money she had in the account. It wasn't our mistake at all, but it was most unfortunate.'

‘But didn't you ever consider that the bank might have been wrong?' Willow hoped that she did not sound as outraged as she felt

‘You don't understand.' Kate sounded unhappy but not apologetic. ‘We get that sort of information all the time. Have you any idea how many interest-bearing accounts there are in this country? We get details of them all. We can't go checking every single one. Not only we, but also the banks would grind to a halt.'

‘But in a case where the taxpayer repeatedly denied any dishonesty,' protested Willow, ‘surely any reasonable person would have thought there might have been a mistake.'

‘In an ideal world, yes. Len ought to have made some more enquiries. But, look at it his way: the picture dealing had been a thorn in his flesh for years. Fydgett not only denied having done any more deals to make the money he believed she had, but she also refused to supply any proof. If she had complied with Len's request for her books and statements at the beginning, the whole problem would have been cleared up months ago. As it was, he was certain that she was lying. Seen from his point of view the whole thing is perfectly understandable.'

Willow looked at Kate, for the first time seeing the strength of her chin, which was only noticeable in profile, and the sharpness of her small nose. ‘Well,' she said drily after a while, ‘I can only say that it's admirable that you defend your staff so forcibly. What did you really think of Len? Between us, off the record, going no further, and all the rest of it.'

Kate sighed, slowed as, the car approached a roundabout and swung neatly round it. The impatient BMW was caught in the next traffic jam, still only one car ahead of them.

‘He was a tricky man to work with,' Kate said, biting her lip. ‘I don't know how much you've been told…?'

‘Not a vast amount, but I understand that he resented working for a woman so much younger than himself.'

‘I don't think my age had much to do with it. He would have resented any woman, and probably most men, too. He hated being told what to do by anyone, and he despised a lot of my decisions.'

Before Willow could ask for any details, Kate hurried on: ‘He didn't believe in conciliation of any kind. Belligerent confrontation was more his style, and he could never accept that while it might make him feel tougher, it was unlikely to increase the tax take. I used sometimes to try to make him see that a considerable proportion of taxpayers are muddled and frightened rather than dishonest, and that if gently treated they will co-operate and our record of collection will improve.'

‘Belligerent confrontation is certainly the impression I've got from the files I've read,' said Willow, surprised into admiration. Kate seemed to sense it for she flashed a glance at Willow and smiled. ‘It must have made him a difficult colleague.'

‘It did; that along with some of his other beliefs. The concept of
de minimis
, for instance, meant nothing to him at all. D'you know, he once raised an assessment for twenty-five pence?'

‘That's loopy,' said Willow. ‘I've heard of that sort of thing and assumed the stories were apocryphal. The postage alone would have cost that much, let alone the paper, the explanatory booklets, the computer time, his time… What a ridiculous waste!'

‘You're telling me.'

‘Tell me something, Kate.'

‘What?'

‘What did you mean about Len's despising your decisions? What kind of decisions?'

‘Well, you've seen the files,' said Kate, apparently concentrating on the traffic ahead. ‘The architect whose accountant advised him so badly. Len thought it iniquitous that I wasn't pursuing him for every penalty in the book. Try as I might to explain my reasons, he would not accept them. I… Oh, what's the use? The man's dead. I can't help feeling relieved and I wish that I didn't. But one must be honest.'

‘Yes.' Willow could hear the dryness of her own voice and hurried to disguise it. ‘Is that why you gave him a free ride on the Fydgett case?'

‘He was too senior to have me breathing down his neck all the time,' said Kate, sounding resigned. ‘His files were his own to deal with as he chose unless there was a complaint. I had nothing whatever to do with the Fydgett case until the Chairman wrote to me, because she had never complained at all. I can't think why not, if she was so upset about it all. That's why I don't believe her suicide was anything to do with the way Len behaved.' Kate shrugged and then went on. ‘Anyway, as soon as I'd been brought in I instituted enquiries, discovered that the bank had made the error and satisfied myself that, even if Len had been a bit heavy-handed, at least he had followed the law. Then you appeared.'

‘Yes, I'm sorry that I added to your burdens. But do you really think that Len acted properly? I mean, even in his suggestion that if she didn't agree to pay up, went to the commissioners and got away with it again, he would simply have investigated her every year until she died.'

Kate groaned. Willow suddenly noticed the name of the street they were passing and recognised it as the one in which the Scoffers lived.

‘That's a matter of perception,' said Kate. ‘He wouldn't have put it like that, whatever the woman thought she heard.'

‘But he was a bully, wasn't he?' Willow said quickly, making plans.

‘Yes, he was certainly that. And, oh, put it like this: in his private, internal narrative he was the only honest person around. Everyone else was careless at best, criminal at worst, and dishonest in any case. Look, here we are. That's the church over there. I'll park here. You don't mind walking the last bit to avoid the one-way, do you?'

‘Not at all,' said Willow, half-amused by Kate's reference to Len's private narrative. She was tempted to ask whether Len had ever found his inner child. ‘Look here, Kate, I think I'm going to have to bottle out of this after all.'

‘What on earth do you mean?'

‘I had a bit of a run-in with Mrs Scoffer on the telephone.

I know she's no reason to know what I look like, but if someone told her who I am, she might feel that I'm rubbing her nose in it a bit You know—that I survived and Len didn't. I… It may be sentimental of me, but I'd rather not do that. I'Il hang about for a while and perhaps go back by train.'

‘Are you sure? You could always have a coffee or something and then come back to the car. I'm not planning to eat the funeral baked meats, you know, and I don't suppose the service will take more than an hour, if as much.'

‘Okay. But if I'm not here, don't wait for me.'

‘Right.' Kate turned away and crossed the road towards the forbidding grey church.

Willow waited until she had gone in before turning back the way they had come. Five minutes'fast walking brought her to the end of the street of matching semi-detached houses where the Scoffers lived.

A funeral, as all burglars know, is one of the few times when a family home is certain to be empty. Willow made her way along the row of houses until she came to the Scoffers'.

It had been carefully, if insensitively, maintained. The original sash windows had been replaced with modem double-glazing and the slate roof had been renewed with red tiles, which clashed with the pinker colour of the bricks. The windows gleamed with recent washing and even the doorstep looked as though it had been scrubbed that morning.

Two black plastic dustbins stood neatly aligned on the bare concrete in the centre of the small front garden. Willow was amused to see that both had their lids firmly attached with wire clips. From her years in the Clapham flat, she knew how difficult it was to persuade the refuse collectors to return the lids with the emptied bins.

A row of regimented petunias edged the narrow flower beds. They were arranged by colour, one white, then a red, then two whites and then a pink, another white, another red and so on. Inside the row were neat, humpy green plants speckled with small yellow flowers, which Willow could not identify. There was no ease or generosity or spontaneity in the garden, and it seemed typical of Len's obsession with rules, obedience, and symmetry.

Shuddering despite the damp heat, she rang the front door bell. No one came and so, checking that none of the neighbouring net curtains had been twitched aside, Willow walked down the dark passage between the Scoffers'house and their neighbours', hoping to find an easy way in.