Rotten Apples (3 page)

Yes, thought Willow, following her down the long room and ignoring the curious stares of the junior tax staff, I bet she would. She looks quite powerful in spite of being so short.

Like many people who had been teased for their height in childhood, Willow had an instinctive contempt for those who did not share her inches. The habit was so ingrained that sometimes she did not even notice what she was thinking. On that occasion she did and set about making amends. For some time she had been conducting a private campaign to control her tendency to mockery and disdain.

She decided that Kate Moughette's suit was admirably designed for her height and well tailored, too. It was made of wool, but so light and fine that it must have been cool enough even for that hot June day. The colour was a particularly appealing shade of pale greyish lavender, which set off her glossy black hair to advantage.

Noticing the dust in the corners of the big room and the indelibly grimed paintwork, Willow thought that Kate must spend a fortune on dry cleaning and wondered how she could afford it on the salary most principals earned. There was a premium paid to those who served in the Inland Revenue rather than the ordinary civil service, but Willow did not think it could be much.

Kate stopped in the doorway of an office, effectively blocking Willow's view into it. ‘Len, this is Willow King. I told you about her last week. She's here for the merk.'

‘”Merk”?' said Willow instinctively. Kate turned, looking impatiently at the newcomer.

‘MRC. It's what we call the Minister for Rights and Charters here.'

‘Oh, I see. I thought it must be a contraction of “merkin”, and I couldn't imagine what the context might be.'

Kate's lips tightened and her little eyes narrowed, which told Willow both that she was aware of some of the odder parts of the English language and that her sense of humour was slight Anyone who did not automatically smile, or at least grimace, at the idea of a pubic wig would have to be treated with caution.

‘This is Len Scoffer,' she said coldly. ‘I'll leave him to tell you anything you need to know.'

Kate darted off without waiting for either of them to say anything. Willow smiled politely at the owner of the office and took stock of him.

He was in his early sixties, broad but at the same time stringy looking. He had a crumpled face and very short, stiff, grey hair that stuck up all over his head. The jacket of his greeny-brown suit was hanging over the back of his chair and he had things like steel springs clasped around his biceps, bunching up the overlong sleeves of his sharply ironed white poly-cotton shirt. His string vest was clearly visible through it. He made no move to smile or stand up to greet the new-comer.

Willow could not prevent a sinking feeling, having come across plenty of men like him before. They were intelligent, sometimes chippy, often pigheaded, nearly always completely honest and usually intolerant of anyone who did not share their own bleak outlook on life.

‘Is she always as rushed as that or is there a crisis on?' Willow asked, smiling in an attempt to enlist his sympathy.

‘She doesn't believe in wasting taxpayers' money. Nor do I.' Scoffer had a rasping voice that made it clear his sympathy was not on offer. ‘Politicians do that much too easily. I can't think what they want you to look into the Fydgett case for. It was all perfectly simple.'

‘Nevertheless, that's what I've been sent to do,' said Willow with another uncharacteristically ingratiating smile. ‘And I'll need your help if I'm to do the job properly.'

‘The woman's suicide had nothing to do with us. But if you must have the files, those for the last three years are on the press there.'

‘On that what?' asked Willow, flummoxed.

Scoffer's thin lips twisted into a sneer. He pointed to a battered dark-green filing cabinet opposite his desk on which were balanced a pile of cardboard folders.

‘Thank you,' said Willow, feeling the full blast of his antagonism. She assumed that Scoffer, like most people she had ever dealt with, used aggression as his first means of defence. The prospect of being blamed for someone's death was enough to make anyone feel defensive.

‘Do you think that there's somewhere I could sit and read the files?' she asked, politely enough. Watching his unyielding expression, she gave in to temptation: ‘Or would that be a waste of taxpayers'money?'

‘Cara!' yelled Scoffer. Willow took an involuntary step backwards. ‘Cara! Come in here, will you?'

A moment later a scared-looking, brown-haired young woman dressed in a full blue skirt and well-washed black T-shirt looked around the door.

‘Yes, Len? What have I done?'

‘Nothing for once, unless it hasn't come to my attention yet. This is Willow King, sent by the Merk to investigate the Fydgett case. Those are the files. Take them and her to Mrs Patel's old office and tell her anything she needs to know.' He looked down again at the file on his desk, making it quite clear that in his opinion he had done all he needed to satisfy the minister.

‘Would you like to come this way, Ms King?' said Cara politely.

Relieved to be treated as a human being, Willow smiled at her and followed her out into the big general office. There was amusement and mockery on the faces of several of the people sitting there, who must have heard everything that Len Scoffer had said. Once Willow would have felt humiliated by their amusement and therefore angry, but she had grown out of all that—or most of it.

Cara opened the door to an office about half the size of Scoffer's. It looked out over the busy main road.

‘Will this be all right for you, Ms King?' she asked doubtfully.

‘Yes, I think so,' said Willow, noticing that the metal desk itself was clean enough and that there was a telephone and a relatively stable-looking chair. It was covered in a surprising flowered nylon material that looked positively revolting above the orange carpet, but she thought that she could probably suppress her aesthetic faculties for a week or so. She opened the window to clear the air and recoiled from the noise and the smell of car exhaust from the road outside.

‘And do please call me Willow,' she said when she had shut the window again. ‘What's your name?'

‘Caroline Saks, but I'm always called Cara.'

‘And what are you?'

‘A TO(HG), that is—'

‘I know: a Tax Officer (Higher Grade),' said Willow, calculating that Cara's rank was the equivalent of an Executive Officer in the ordinary civil service. ‘Did you have anything to do with Fiona Fydgett's case?'

‘I do most of my work for Len, so yes, I did do some things. Would you like a cup of coffee?'

‘Perhaps later when you're having one anyway. I'm perfectly certain that it's not your job to be making coffee for stray visitors.'

‘Oh, no. We've got a machine out there. You know, a slot machine thing. Do call me if you need anything, and please don't take Len's…um, too seriously. His bark really is worse than his bite.'

‘I see,' said Willow, thinking that Cara looked too frightened to reassure anyone about anything. ‘Thank you.'

Cara backed out of the door and Willow sat down to read her way through the case of Fiona Fydgett, art historian, suicide, and possible tax dodger.

By the end of the morning Willow thought that she had come to understand a lot about Fiona Fydgett's career and income, but nothing at all about her character. The files gave a confusing impression of that. From some of the letters she had written in her flamboyant black script, she seemed to be both casual and arrogant, but there were other letters, too, occasionally written in the same hand but more often typed, which read as though they had been composed by a woman as fearfull as Cara Saks.

Fydgett's income had been made up of publishers'advances and royalties, fees from an elitist travel agent, whose art tours to Italian cities she sometimes escorted, fees for advising several art galleries on the attribution of paintings, a salary from a famous institute of art history, and once or twice profits from the sale of paintings she had picked up cheap and sold very well.

It must have been a pleasant existence, Willow thought until Len Scoffer's increasingly aggressive letters had started to spoil it Fiona Fydgett had clearly spent her life in the company of like-minded people, moving between the scholarly and commercial art worlds in London, Paris, Geneva and New York, and being paid to travel to some of the most beautiful places in Italy. To have earned the sums neatly typed at the bottom of her annual accounts, she must have been successful; she had obviously worked hard.

Her salary from the academic job was taxed under the PAYE rules, and the profits from the sale of paintings were treated as Capital Gains, but all the rest formed the profits of self-employment and were taxed under Schedule D.

From the file, it appeared that Len Scoffer believed that she owed just under five thousand pounds of extra tax. Willow had not managed to work out how he had arrived at that figure, but she could not help wondering why a woman like Fiona Fydgett would have felt she had to kill herself over it. It did not seem to be enough for anyone to die for, and Doctor Fydgett's net income for the preceding year had been well over fifty thousand pounds. Surely if Scoffer's investigation had been upsetting her, she could just have paid the tax and disputed the amount later.

Rereading the file in search of clues, Willow was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was immediately followed by a light, sarcastic, male voice, saying: ‘You must be the important Willow King. How delightful to meet you! Jason Tillter.'

Willow looked up and saw a tall, thin, brown-haired man, who looked a little younger than Kate, standing by the door. Although he was smiling, there was a sneer in his expression; and, although he was holding out his hand with all the patronising graciousness of a visiting dignitary, he was standing too far away for Willow to take it without getting up and crossing the office. She had always disliked people who played the sort of games Jason seemed to be attempting and so she ignored his hand and merely said: ‘How do you do?'

‘Oh, aren't we superior?' he said, raising his eyebrows. ‘Who rattled your cage this morning?'

Astonished by his quite unprovoked impudence, Willow looked at him with her jaw dropping until she realised that she must be looking gormless and shut her mouth with a snap.

‘I'm sorry I wasn't here when you came,' said Jason with a return to his earlier regal manner.

‘There's no reason why you should have been,' said Willow. ‘I understand that you had an urgent meeting.'

Jason swung into the dingy office, rearranging the knotted silk cufflinks in his striped shirt, and sat down opposite her. He crossed his legs and leaned back. ‘Now, what can I tell you?'

‘I don't know that I need you to tell me anything just yet,' said Willow, examining him carefully. He and Len had been so gratuitously unpleasant that she was beginning to feel sorry not only for Fiona Fydgett but also for any other taxpayer who had had dealings with either of them. ‘And I'm sure you have plenty of urgent work waiting for you.'

His self-satisfied expression tightened in irritation. A moment later he was smiling again. ‘Whatever you say. I just thought you might need some help with the natives here. They're not like ordinary people, you know. I'd have thought a stranger might need a little assistance, in translation if nothing else.'

‘Well, I'm doing fine at the moment, thank you,' said Willow, thinking of Len's description of his filing cabinet as a ‘press', but determined not to allow Jason to feel any sort of control over her investigation. ‘I expect that there will be something you can help me with before I'm done, but just at the moment I am acquainting myself with the Fydgett files. There'll be plenty of time for questions later.'

‘You'll discover pretty quickly that poor old Scoffer loathes answering them. He's like Little Miss Muffet in that, if in nothing else. I suspect that you're in for quite a rough time, Ms King.'

‘Is that so?' said Willow, resisting the strong temptation to flatten Jason with some unanswerable piece of verbal brutality. She compromised with a smile as patronising as his own. ‘I won't keep you from your work any longer. It was good of you to make yourself known to me.'

When Jason eventually left her alone, she shook her head and turned back to one of Doctor Fydgett's letters, which read:

Dear Sirs, With reference to our recent meeting, I wish to make several things entirely clear: 1. I have never concealed any income from your department and I will not be blackmailed into paying tax on money I have never received. 2. The only irregularity you have managed to establish since the commissioners decided-four years ago that my gains from the sale of paintings were Capital Gains and not business profits was a genuine error on my part of mistaking some dollar invoices for bills in pounds sterling. I have apologised for that and frequently expressed my readiness to pay the tax owing. 3. The maximum tax I could possibly owe is less than two hundred pounds. Your assessment for £4786.00 plus interest is iniquitous. 4. Your suggestion that I should pay that assessment since it would be cheaper for me to do so than to continue to fight you is outrageous. Your further suggestion that, unless I settle with you now, you will investigate me every year so that I shall never be free of you, is an unconscionable threat

There was a piece of paper pinned to the letter. On it someone,

perhaps Len Scoffer, had written:

Unwarrantably misleading impression of meeting. No threats, no blackmail, merely an explanation of the risks she faces in refusing to pay the assessment. Both sides of any future action carefully presented, including likely costs of going to court. LS also pointed out, after FF had complained of having to pay accountants so much, that if she had complied with first requirements for documents her tax would have been paid by now and she would have saved accountant's fees.