by Crossfire
I hadn’t been counting, but she obviously had.
“So what happens now?” Alex asked into the silence.
“Well,” I said, “for a start, you return all the blackmail money to my mother. I reckon that’s about sixty thousand pounds.”
“I can’t,” he said. “We’ve spent it. And anyway, why would I?”
“Because you obtained it illegally,” I pointed out.
“But your mother should have paid it to the tax man.”
“And so she will when you give it back.”
“Dream on,” he said again, with a laugh.
“OK,” I said. “If that’s your attitude, I will have to go to Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway and ask them for it.”
“You’ll be lucky,” he said, still laughing. “They’re the most tightfisted pair of bastards I’ve ever met.”
“I’ll tell them you said that.”
The laughter died in his throat.
“Now, don’t you go telling them anything of the sort, or I’ll be straight on the blower to the Revenue.”
Mutually assured destruction—it was what nuclear deterrence was all about.
“And what about my pictures?” Julie demanded, gaining some confidence from Alex.
“They prove nothing,”Alex said. “All they show is that you were in the mailbox shop. That doesn’t mean you were blackmailing anyone.”
“Not those pictures,” Julie said, irritated. “The other pictures he took of me yesterday.”
“What other pictures?” Alex demanded, turning to me.
Oh dear, I thought. This could get really nasty. How might Alex react to my taking explicit images of his naked girlfriend? I sensed that Julie had also worked it out that if Alex hadn’t already seen them, it might be much better for her if he didn’t do so now.
“Er,” she said, backtracking fast. “They’re not that important.”
“But pictures of what?” Alex persisted, still looking at me.
Should I tell him? Should I show him just the sort of girl she was? Or could the pictures still be useful to me as a lever to apply to Julie?
“Just some photos I took outside the Yorkes’ house yesterday afternoon.”
“Show me,” he said belligerently.
I thought of my camera, still safely out of sight in my little rucksack.
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have the camera with me.”
“But why were you taking photos of Julie outside her house?” he demanded.
I thought quickly. “To record her reaction when I showed her the prints of her in the mailbox shop. That’s when I told her not to contact you for thirty-six hours.”
Julie seemed relieved, and Alex appeared satisfied by the answer, even if he was a tad confused.
“So what happens now?” he asked again.
It was a good question.
I thought about asking Julie if she knew anything of Warren and Garraway’s other little fiddle, the tax one, but I decided I might get more from her without Alex being there, especially if I were to use my photo lever on her.
“Well, I don’t know about you two,” I said, standing up, “but I’m going home to bed.” And, I thought, to read Alex’s e-mails.
I collected my “insulin” bag from the stairs, slung my rucksack onto my back and left the two lovebirds in the kitchen as I left the house by the front door. But I didn’t walk off down the road. I removed the camera from my rucksack and went quickly down the side of the house to the rear garden and the kitchen window.
I had purposely left a small space at the bottom when I’d closed the blind, and I now put my eyes up close to the glass and looked in.
Alex and Julie really weren’t very discreet. Making sure the flash was switched off, I took twenty or more photos through the window of them kissing, him sliding his hands inside her coat and pulling up her nightdress. Even though Julie’s back was mostly towards the window, there was little doubt where Alex was placing his fingers, and my eighteen-times optical zoom Leica lens captured everything.
Presently, Julie cut the plastic ties from around Alex’s ankles and they went, hand-in-hand, out of the kitchen and, I presumed, up the stairs to bed. Short of shinning up a drainpipe, I would see nothing more, and in spite of being called Tom, my artificial leg didn’t lend itself readily to climbing up to peep through bedroom windows.
Even then I didn’t return to Ian’s car and go home. Instead, I went back down the side of the house and out into Bush Close, to where Julie had parked the white BMW. It was some way down the road, well beyond the glow from the streetlight outside number twelve. I tried the doors, but she had locked them, so I sat down on the pavement, leaned up against the passenger door and waited.
I was getting quite used to waiting, and thinking.
Alex Reece clearly received more than an average bonus after being away for five days in Gibraltar, and I was just beginning to think that Julie was staying for the whole night when, about an hour after I left, I saw her coming towards me through the pool of light produced by the solitary streetlamp.
I pulled myself to my feet using the car’s door handle but I remained crouched down below the window level so Julie couldn’t see me as she walked along the road. When she was about ten yards away, she pushed the remote unlock button on her key and the indicator lights flashed once in response. As she opened the driver’s door to get in, I opened the passenger one to do likewise, so we ended up sitting down side by side with both doors slamming shut in unison.
Startled, she immediately tried to open the door again, but I grabbed her arm on the steering wheel.
“Don’t,” I said in my voice-of-command. “Just drive.”
“Where to?” she said.
“Anywhere,” I said with authority. “Now. Drive out of this road.”
Julie started the car and reversed it into one of the driveways to turn around. In truth, it was not the best-performed driving-test maneuver, and there would probably be BMW tire marks on the front lawn of number eight in the morning, but at least she didn’t hit anything, and I wasn’t an examiner.
She pulled out into Water Lane and turned right towards Newbury, towards home. We went a few hundred yards in silence.
“OK,” I said. “Pull over here.”
She stopped the car at the side of the road.
“What do you want?” she said, rather forlornly.
“Just a little more help,” I said.
“Can’t you just leave us alone?”
“But why should I?” I exclaimed. “My mother has paid you more than sixty thousand pounds over the past seven months, and I think that entitles me to demand something from you.”
“But Alex told you,” she said. “You can’t have it back. We’ve spent it.”
“On what?” I asked.
She looked across at me. “What do you mean ‘on what’?”
“What have you spent my mother’s money on?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“No. How could I?”
She laughed. “Coke, of course. Lots of lovely coke.”
I didn’t think she meant Coca-Cola.
“And bottles of bubbly. Only the best, you know. Cases and cases of lovely Dom.” She laughed again.
I realized that she must have been sampling one or the other during the past hour with Alex. It was not only fear that had caused her to drive on the grass. I couldn’t smell alcohol on her breath, so it had to have been the coke.
“Does Ewen know you take cocaine?” I asked.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” she said. “Ewen wouldn’t know a line of coke if it ran up his nose. If it hasn’t got four legs and a mane, Ewen couldn’t care less. I think he’d much rather screw the bloody horses than me.”
“So what is Jackson Warren and Peter Garraway’s little tax fiddle?”
“Eh?”
“What is Jackson and Peter’s tax fiddle?” I asked again.
“You mean their VAT fiddle?” she ask
ed.
“Yes,” I said excitedly. I waited in silence.
She paused for a bit, but eventually she started. “Did you know that racehorse owners can recover the VAT on training fees?”
“My mother said something about it,” I said.
“And on their other costs as well, those they attribute to their racing business, like transport and telephone charges and vet’s fees. They can even recover the VAT they have to pay when they buy the horses in the first place.”
The VAT rate was at nearly twenty percent. That was a lot of tax to recover on expensive horseflesh.
“So what’s the fiddle?” I asked.
“What makes you think I’d ever tell you?” she said, turning in the car towards me.
“So you do know, then?” I asked.
“I might,” she said arrogantly.
“I’ll delete the pictures if you tell me.”
Even in her cocaine-induced state, she knew that the pictures were the key.
“How can I trust you?”
“I’m an officer in the British Army,” I said, rather pompously. “My word is my bond.”
“Do you promise?” she said.
“I promise,” I said formally, holding up my right hand. Yet another of those promises I might keep.
She paused a while longer before starting again.
“Garraway lives in Gibraltar, and he’s not registered for VAT in the UK. He actually could be, but he’s obsessive about not having anything to do with the tax people here because he’s a tax exile. He only lives in Gibraltar to avoid paying tax. Hates the place, really.” She paused.
“So?” I said, prompting her to continue.
“So all Peter Garraway’s horses are officially owned by Jackson Warren. Jackson pays the training fees and all the other bills, and then he claims back the VAT. He even buys the horses for Garraway in the first place and gets the VAT back on that too. He uses a company called Budsam Ltd.”
“So why is that a fiddle?” I asked. “If Jackson buys them and pays the fees, then he is the owner, not Garraway.”
“Yes,” she said, “but Peter Garraway pays Jackson back for all the costs.”
“Doesn’t that show up in Jackson’s accounts or those of the company?”
“No.” She smiled. “That’s the clever bit. Peter pays Jackson into an offshore account in Gibraltar that Jackson doesn’t declare to the Revenue. Alex says it’s very clever because Jackson gets his money offshore without ever having to transfer anything from a UK bank, which would be required by law to tell the tax people about it.”
“How many horses does Peter Garraway own in this way?” I asked.
“Masses. He has ten or twelve with us and loads more with other trainers.”
“But don’t they pay for themselves with the prize money?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “Most horses don’t make in prize money anything like what they cost to keep, especially not jumpers. Far from it. Not unless you count the betting winnings, and Garraway gets to keep those himself.”
“So why doesn’t Peter Garraway register himself as an owner in the UK for the VAT scheme?”
“I told you,” she said. “He’s paranoid about the British tax people. They’ve been trying forever to get him for tax evasion. He’s obsessive about the number of days he stays here, and he and his wife even travel on separate planes so they won’t both be killed in a crash and his family get done here for inheritance tax. There’s no way he’ll register. Alex thinks it’s stupid. He told them it would solve the problem of the VAT without any risk, but Garraway won’t listen.”
I listened, all right.
Wasn’t it Archimedes who claimed that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could lift the world?
I listened to Julie with mounting glee. Perhaps now I had a lever long enough to pry my mother’s money back from under the Rock of Gibraltar.
All I had to do was work out on whom to apply it, and when.
17
I spent much of the night downloading Alex’s files and e-mails onto my laptop using the Internet connection in my mother’s office.
I had let myself into the kitchen silently using Ian’s key. The dogs had been unperturbed by their nocturnal visitor, sniffing my hand as I’d passed them and then going back to sleep, happy that I was friend, not foe.
I worked solely by the light of the computer screen and left everything exactly as I’d found it. I didn’t know why I still thought it was necessary for my presence to be a secret from my mother, but I wasn’t yet ready to try to explain to her what had been going on.
It might also have been safer for me if she didn’t know where I was.
After I had left Julie to drive herself home in the white BMW, I’d taken Ian’s car slowly up the driveway of Greystone Stables. My two telltale sticks on their stones were broken. Someone had been up to the stable yard, someone who would now know I wasn’t dead, someone who might try to kill me again. But they would have to find me first.
I slept fitfully on Ian’s sofa, and he left me there snoozing when he went out to morning stables at half past six on Monday morning.
By the time he returned at about noon, I had read through all of Alex’s downloaded information on my laptop. Most of it was boring, but amongst the dross, there were some real gems, and three standout sparkling diamonds.
Maybe I wouldn’t need to use my lever after all.
One of the diamonds was that Alex, it transpired, was not only the accountant for Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd but also one of the signatories of the company’s bank account, and best of all, I had downloaded all the passwords and user names that he needed to access the account online.
I would try to log in to the account tonight, I thought, when I had access to the Internet from my mother’s office.
The other diamonds were the e-mails sent by Jackson Warren to Alex Reece concerning me, the first a message sent on the night of Isabella’s kitchen supper, and the second after the races at Newbury on the day Scientific had won. The first had been sent in a fit of anger, and the second as a warning, but nevertheless, it amazed me how lax people could be with e-mail security.
In the army, all messages were encrypted before sending so that they were not readable by the enemy. Even cell phones were not permitted to be used in Afghanistan in case the Taliban were listening to the transmissions and gaining information that could be useful either in a tactical way or simply to undermine the morale of the troops.
No parents, having been called by their soldier offspring one evening from a cell telephone in Helmand province, would welcome then receiving a second call, this time from an English-speaking member of the Taliban, who would inform them that their son was going to be targeted in the morning, and that he would be returning home to them in a wooden box.
It had happened.
Yet here was a supposedly sensible person, Jackson Warren, sending clear text messages by e-mail for all to read. Well, for me to read anyway.
“What the bloody hell do you think you were doing talking so openly in front of Thomas Forsyth?” Jackson had written soon after storming out of the supper. “His mother was one of those who invested heavily in our little scheme. KEEP YOUR BLOODY LIPS SEALED—DO YOU HEAR?”
Capital letters in an e-mail were equivalent to shouting, and I could vividly recall the way Jackson had stormed out of the room that night. He would certainly have been shouting.
The second e-mail was calmer but no less direct, and had been sent by Jackson to Alex at five o’clock on the afternoon of the races. He must have written it as soon as he arrived home from Newbury.
“Thomas Forsyth told me this afternoon that he wants to contact you. I am making arrangements to ensure that he cannot. However, if he manages to be in contact with you before my arrangements are in position, you are hereby warned NOT to speak with him or communicate with him in any way. This is extremely important, especially in the light of the company business this coming week.”
So how are the horses?” I asked Ian, as he slumped down onto the brown sofa and switched on the television.
“They’re all right,” he said with a mighty sigh.
“What’s wrong, then?” I asked. “Would you like me to leave?”
“As you like,” he said, seemingly uninterested in the conversation as he flicked through the channels with the remote control.
“Bad day at the office?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “You could say that.”
I said nothing. He’d tell me if he wanted to.
He did.
“When I took this job I thought it would be more as an assistant trainer rather than just as ‘head lad.’ That’s what Mrs. Kauri implied. She told me she doesn’t have an assistant, as such, so I thought the role of head lad would be more important to her than to other trainers.”
He paused, perhaps remembering that I was Mrs. Kauri’s son.
“And?” I prompted.
“And nothing,” he said. He turned off the TV and swiveled around on the sofa to face me. “I was wrong, that’s all. It turns out she doesn’t have an assistant because she can’t delegate anything to anybody. She even treats me the same as one of the young boys straight out from school. She tells the staff to do things that I should be telling them to do, and often it is directly opposite to what I’ve already said. I feel worthless and undermined.”
Story of my life, I thought.
At least, it had been the story of my life until I’d left home to join the army. It seemed to me that Ian was already on the road to somewhere else. It was a shame. I’d seen him working with the horses, and even I could see that he was good, calming the younger ones and standing no nonsense from the old hands. He also had a passion for them, and he longed for them to win. Losing Ian Norland would be a sad day for Kauri House Stables.
“Have you been looking?” I asked.