Mr Todd's Reckoning

by Iain Maitland

  (Sudden knock.)

  I think, at this moment, that might have been the end of it. Had I simply pulled back, she would have assumed that I had leaned forward to pick up my cup of coffee at the same instant and our heads had bumped together by accident.

  Unfortunately, she did not move for two or three seconds or longer – as a normal person would have done when heads collided – and I took more breaths, two, three, perhaps four even, as was stated later.

  It was then, as I moved to sit up, that I made an involuntary noise, somewhere between a sigh and a groan, at the back of my throat and she reared back – it is the only way to describe it – with a look of anger on her face.

  (Heavy crash.)

  Before I could speak, to calm her down over the obvious misunderstanding, she was gathering up her things in what might be described as a tizzy. She was, of course, only a young thing and I have found on occasions that they can be more emotional and hot-headed, especially at certain times of the month, shall we say. As she stood, I looked up at her blandly (so as not to encourage further over-reaction), and she stared back at me with a strange expression on her face. I could not tell if it was a kind or a nasty look. It was at this moment that I smiled nicely at her, as slight encouragement, and she spoke at last.

  “You sad little man,” is what she said. Those were her exact words.

  You.

  Sad.

  Little.

  Man.

  I really could not believe what I was hearing. It was a shocking thing to say.

  It would be fanciful to state that she spat out each word in turn while staring furiously at me. That would sound melodramatic over a matter that was, when all’s said and done, something and nothing. But I can say with certainty that she looked at me as she spoke and said it with some irrational vehemence.

  As any ordinary person would be, I was enraged by this, although, as per my training, I did not show it other than to stand up sharply to signal that our meeting was at an end. I have to state, here and now, that I thought her reaction was, and I use the word after very careful thought and consideration, unhinged. It revealed much about her.

  (Silence from the garage.)

  She then turned and left the room in a hurry, pulling the door to behind her. I could tell she was trying to slam it shut, to make a dramatic point, as the ladies are inclined to do, but it was a door that closed very slowly at its own pace – a fire-related safety device was fitted, I believe – and so the effect was somewhat lost.

  (Still no noise from Adrian.)

  I stood waiting for a few minutes, hearing her clackety-clack march down the corridor, hoping she would not see anyone while she was such in a state. I heard her opening another door and then one more some way off in the distance. It sounded as though she were exiting the building itself, going down the stairs rather than taking the lift. (I assume she did not want her colleagues to see her in such a state of agitation.)

  It was, strictly speaking, 45 minutes before she was due to finish work and she should not have done this. I moved over to the window as, from there, I could see the car park and, to my astonishment, she was walking across this towards her car. As she got to it, she turned and looked back up at me. I could not, from that distance, make out her expression, nor what she was mouthing at me, but her hand gesture left little room for doubt. Clearly, she was still in something of an irrational mood.

  I stepped back from the window and hoped that, by not responding to her silly anger, as I have been trained for so long not to do, it would quickly blow over. I went about my business, filing and such like – and humming and whistling to myself as I often do when I am cheerful – for the remainder of the day as if nothing had happened. I hoped that would be the last I would hear of the matter.

  (Scr-ee-ee-ch of garage door.)

  Sad to say, it was not. There were, over the next few days, accusing looks and stares, not only from the young woman but other feminist-lesbian types on the third floor with whom she’d obviously colluded. One strident woman, with a short-back-and sides haircut, with whom I’d never really got along, despite my early efforts, gave me a withering look and shook her head in a pitying manner when I walked by the next afternoon. (Not that I cared about her. Not one little bit!)

  There were then quiet words with line managers and notes on files and the stupid young woman was moved to the fifth floor. (It served her jolly well right.) This whole episode upset me greatly, and I wanted to put it behind me as quickly as possible. It was, however, and without wishing to be over-dramatic, the beginning of the end for me at the Revenue.

  It is quiet outside. Adrian has been in and out of the garage. Taken something. I don’t know what. He has not come back into the bungalow. He has gone out. I do not know where or why or for how long. I am worried more than I can say. It is bad enough that he keeps disappearing, but there are things in the garage, so many things, that can be used for wrong-doing. This is my fear. That he has taken something that will cause great harm to someone.

  MONDAY 24 JULY, 10.30AM

  I lie here, having put my diary to one side for the moment, thinking about what I should do next. I have a letter to write to the council that needs my attention. And a report that has to be filled in online, which I will do on a computer at the local library. I have a little bit of research to do online too. I have other mundane chores and tasks to complete as well; routine matters but nonetheless important for the smooth running of life.

  But these must all wait their turn.

  Adrian invades my thoughts.

  And what it is he is doing.

  Adrian is a creature of habit, trapped by his twitches and ever-repeating rounds of behaviour. Whatever’s going on must be something important, life-changing, for him to be able to break his relentless patterns.

  I think Adrian is doing something bad.

  It will not be the first time.

  He has ‘previous’, as we used to say at HMRC, and an offender always re-offends.

  I get up off my bed. Go to the door. Listen. Double-check he is not in the bungalow. All quiet. I slip into the hallway down to the kitchen and to the back door. Opening it, I move into the garden and go towards the side door of the garage that opens into the garden. To see what he has been doing in there. Moving things about. Taking something. Uncovering things that are none of his business.

  Not so long ago, maybe two or three years before he turned into what he is now, there was some trouble in the neighbourhood. Clothes were going missing from washing lines. Women’s things. A bright polka-dot bikini. Other items. It was reported in the local paper; something of a joke story really, an old cliché. Itsy bitsy teenie weenie. Who stole the polka-dot bikini? A bit of fun to fill the pages. Not so funny really.

  I open the garage door.

  Look around.

  Everything seems to be as it should be.

  Women’s clothes, though, never men’s or children’s. Not children’s, not intentionally anyway. Women’s things, that’s all. It started in the May and went on every day or two until the end of June. Then it ended for a while. What the locals called the ‘knicker nicker’, as if the whole business were amusing, something to chuckle over, a little bit of ‘Carry On’ smut, no more than that. Good old British saucy fun. A laugh, as they’d say around here.

  The back wall of the garage is full of shelving, pots of screws and nails, half-empty tins of paint. Tools and accessories for gardening and other work. It’s all as it should be. Neat and tidy. Just as I left it.

  Further down, against the bottom half of the back wall, is an old Formica kitchen table with boxes and tubs underneath, handyman items that might come in useful one day. A big spanner. Old rope. A container of acid. Rolls of black gaffer tape. A tub of screen wash. A pot of Polyfilla. A watering can.

  There are other items. A steel step-ladder. Lawnmower. A rake. A half-empty bag of cement. Two spades. A saw. A fork. A torch. A leaf blower. An axe. Adrian’s old bicycle. A pile of plant pots. Bri
cks. Spare roof tiles. All there? No, something is missing. I just don’t know what.

  Then he got caught. Adrian. He’d taken a handful of items from a line, a woman’s and a little girl’s too. Hard to tell the difference between them sometimes when these 20-something women wear tiny strips of this and frilly bits of that. Put those next to a little girl’s fuller cotton pants and they’d look much the same.

  I stand there thinking.

  My mind half on Adrian, half on what’s missing.

  Something dangerous in the wrong hands. Threatening.

  The father saw Adrian as he dipped inside the back gate. Watched and waited as Adrian unpegged and took the clothes off the line – leaving the tops and trousers and towels behind – and then chased Adrian down the road. He caught up with him and grabbed hold of his arm by the local parade of shops, spun him around. There was some pushing and shoving – Adrian angry and tearful – and the manager of the local Co-op called the police.

  I look along the shelves, pot by pot, tin by tin, one at a time, almost ticking them off in my head. Then see what’s what on the Formica table.

  I look over the lawnmower and other bits and pieces. Add them up. Do it again. They seem to be all present and correct.

  I count the boxes and tubs in front of me. Seven there. I think there have always been seven. I think he’s taken something from one of these. I have to look, one by one.

  There were visits from a policeman and woman and then social workers; nasty, grubby busybodies. And checks where they looked around Adrian’s room and on his computer. Adrian shouted and sobbed and claimed he was dared to do it by a friend, unnamed and then ever-changing, no more than that, and that the father has assaulted him, bruised his arm, cut his knee when he pushed him to the floor.

  I felt ashamed.

  Knew something was wrong with him.

  Some twisted thing.

  It was this ‘assault’ – little more than a mark and a scratch in truth – that saved Adrian. The police, most likely not wanting the hassle and the costs and the time spent on it all, persuaded the father to accept a warning, as did Adrian. The matter was put to one side. Left on file, though. For another time. The next time. There is always a next time.

  I step out from the garage side door. Close it. Walk back into the garden where I look around. It’s a longish garden, out of all proportion with the size of the bungalow. High-fenced to either side for privacy, it stretches down to the train line that runs across the bottom, taking passengers to and from the town to the coast. Containers too, back and forth to the port of Felixstowe, rumbling through at night, all night, every night, even on Sundays. Beyond that, fields and farms.

  He’s definitely taken something.

  Adrian.

  I’m not sure what, but I know it’s something significant I should have spotted.

  There is little between me and the wired-off train tracks except for the patio at this end, rougher and readier than I had hoped, that I built a while back. I did not do a good job, truth be told. It has sunk slightly to one side.

  And there is an old Second World War shelter halfway down and in the middle of the garden. Its dome protrudes up into the garden and is now covered with grass and moss. There are steps down to the door that leads to the underground shelter; no more than a small, cramped room really. I boarded the door up a while back. I don’t want anyone going in there. It would be dangerous.

  There are tree stumps at the far end of the garden, close to the railway line. Rotten apple trees. I cut them down with an axe and then a saw. Tried, unsuccessfully, to leverage out the main stump with rope. Burned it away instead, most of it anyway, with acid.

  And then it comes to me, all of a sudden. What Adrian has taken. From one of the shelves.

  An ornate, bejewelled paper knife from mother and father’s cruise to Madeira in 1967. Originally used for opening letters by mother. Now old and battered, I’d kept it in the garage to cut string and such like.

  He’s taken mother’s knife. What on Earth would he want with that?

  MONDAY 24 JULY, 1.25PM

  I have been busy. I have gone to the library to use the computer and then to the post office to send my letter to the council’s Chief Executive and the parcel to the neighbour. I then went on to the shops and picked up some groceries and a pre-packed sandwich and a banana for my lunch from the Co-op. I will have a hot meal at teatime.

  I have eaten my lunch with a cold glass of semi-skimmed milk and am now going to try to write in some detail about the second event – perhaps I should say events or series of events – that led to what I will call my dismissal.

  The first incident with that young woman – ‘incident’ being an exaggeration, really – was next to nothing; a moment, no more. A misunderstanding. Something that, although discussed and noted, should have been waved away as being of little or no real consequence to anyone. Not so the second, let us say, sequence, although even now I would stress, as I had to do through several meetings and reports, that I was the innocent party.

  The section of HMRC that I worked in had changed in recent months, if not years, looking back – and not for the better, I might add. There was a time when older members of staff retired and were not replaced, their workload being spread out among the rest of us. It soon reached an intolerable state of affairs and, eventually, when we were all feeling the strain and the section and indeed the department were at breaking point, some new employees were recruited.

  Although these were generally welcomed at first, they were, almost uniformly, young people with little know-how or training and, rather than easing the workload of us ‘senior folk’, just added to it because we had to explain everything to them as they went along and then had to check what they were doing was completed properly. Often it was not: ‘slapdash’ and ‘lacking in cross-references’ were two of my regular feedback comments.

  (It’s hell living here, this bungalow, this road. It’s killing me slowly, bit by bit. There is no peace no matter where I sit or lie down. Whether I have the windows open or closed. Endless and also sudden noises all the time. From either side. I can’t think to write.)

  At one point, after a particularly difficult day correcting the work of several ‘juniors’, I did put a note, anonymously and in a slightly different hand, in one of the feedback boxes to this effect and how it meant our workload had doubled and everyone had jolly well had enough of it! I wrote in quite a light-hearted, almost jovial, manner, wishing to put over the (slight) criticism in the nicest possible way.

  I had, not unreasonably, also mentioned as an aside that two of the new recruits, young men in their early 20s whom I shall refer to by their initials, FD and RP, were simply not up to scratch. I should say that most HMRC employees are, almost without exception, cut from the same cloth – quiet, measured, thoughtful and hard-working types like myself. ‘Good sorts.’ Not so these two, who seemed to have wandered into the office from a nearby building site. All they lacked were the helmets and high-vis jackets!

  They often arrived late, sometimes together, and seemed to do very little work that I could see as they effed and blinded their way through the day, talking about football and drinking and, as often as not, women in the basest manner. They had no respect for their elders and betters. I had never met anyone like them at work and felt obliged to alert HMRC that we had ‘two bad eggs’ among us. I think, being kind, I had used the phrase ‘rotten apples’ who are ‘upsetting the apple cart’, which seemed to be a rather clever way of making a valid point.

  (My mind is forever distracted by thoughts of Adrian. Going into town on the bus. With a knife inside his pocket. Why would he want a knife? And such an ornate one at that? He is a constant worry. One day, I know, there will be a knock at the door and the police will be standing there, one man, one woman, to break some terrible, shameful news to me.)

  Somehow or other, my ‘rotten apples’ comment came out and it worked its way back to FD and RP that I had made such observations. I kno
w not how. This became apparent a day or two later when they started to refer to me as ‘Doris’ between themselves and in front of me (but not when others were about).

  I recall the moment I first overheard their conversation, quiet but just loud enough for me to hear, about someone called Doris and they spoke of this “old woman” in derogatory tones “sticking her nose into other people’s business” and saying later, “Doris needs to be careful she’s not taught a lesson”.

  I should stress here that these were not the exact words but as close as I remember them, excluding, of course, the language that seemed to pepper every conversation. As a brief example, it was not “old woman” but “f___ing old b____”. I am not someone who swears – perhaps the odd “bloody!” – except under the most extreme provocation and so I will not use the full word here. Bad language is the preserve of the ill-educated and the uncouth sectors of society.

  (To the left of the bungalow, as you face it from the road, there is a single mother, 24 years old I have discovered, with two girls of six and eight years. You do not need to be an HMRC tax inspector – ex or not – to do the maths on that young madam. There is a man who visits now and then, a boyfriend, the most recent of several she’s had this past year. She lets the children play outdoors all the time. Throwing balls about. Being a nuisance. They are outside now. They have a paddling pool. And a hose. And a radio. I hear their screams, high-pitched and sudden. It goes quiet for a moment or two and there’s another bout of screaming. I have to wait until it’s all quiet again before I can continue my writing.)

  I felt, given that these sounded like offensive comments about an elderly lady who may perhaps have been part of an HMRC random enquiry, that I should speak up and ask FD and RP who they were talking about. There was, at this point, quite a lot of sniggering between themselves, rather like naughty schoolboys who had been caught out by a teacher when they were smoking behind the bike sheds, but neither of them would say that it was what they were now calling me.