Mr Todd's Reckoning

by Iain Maitland

  I slip the pieces back into the pocket and then lift up the sleeve to smell it. I am not sure what I am expecting; the scent of a young girl, I fear. Sugar and spice and all things nice. But I smell nothing except the fabric. I take the jacket out and put my nose to it properly as if examining the evidence; I smell sweat and dirt, or maybe that’s my imagination. I turn the jacket to look inside and I see what looks like grass and mud marks on it; as if the jacket has been on the ground and been pushed into it back and forth.

  I catch my breath, terrible thoughts running through my mind.

  Look around the room searching for something, I’m still not sure what; it’s all too neat, too careful, even by Adrian’s obsessive-compulsive standards.

  As if the truth has been disguised, hidden away, put somewhere else.

  Adrian does not now have a computer. He did have. But there was another incident, following the one in the sauna. This time in a lavatory in a department store in town. The toilets, male and female, shared the same entrance, the closets back to back, a thin wall between them. The men’s, so Adrian said, were, filthy: they’d not been cleaned. Or flooded, he sometimes said. As if he’d forgotten his original story. He’d popped into the ladies, no one there he said, sat down and realised there was no paper. Looked over into the next cubicle; a young girl was sitting there. Younger, pre-teens.

  The police came again. Several of them.

  Took away his computer.

  Found nothing. At least, nothing that would convict him in a court of law.

  Adrian did not want it back. The computer. Said he felt invaded. Dirty. An innocent boy – man really – and an honest-to-goodness mistake. I don’t think anyone believed it. I didn’t. But he was adamant. And the mother of the girl – a widowed young mother, wanting to protect her child’s sweet innocence – did not wish to take things further. Again, the matter was left to lie.

  And now Adrian has nothing in his bedroom to be uncovered, no magazines beneath the mattress, no letters or notes or reminders of loves, real or imagined, at the bottom of drawers. It is an empty room, stripped bare of personality. Devoid of life. Of heart and soul.

  But he has a mobile phone. In his back pocket. He carries it with him all of the time; to the bathroom, to the toilet, to bed. I hear it beep at night as he receives messages, glimpse the light beneath the door and imagine him sitting there quietly watching the movements of bodies on the small, illuminated screen.

  Adrian has everything on his phone. His messages, his searches, his pictures, his downloaded videos, his secrets, his life, whatever it is he wants to hide. It is the phone that I need to see to discover what is going on. But I have no idea how I am going to get it without him knowing. But I must. No matter what.

  MONDAY 24 JULY, 7.55PM

  Adrian came home, empty-handed, in the late afternoon. I greeted him in the hallway. Then waited, to see if he might talk, volunteer what was going on.

  He answered my greeting with a brisk hello without making eye contact, moving into his room and shutting the door carefully behind him. Silence, as if he were lying down.

  I had my tea at 6.00 and retired to my room while he went through his snip-snip-snip routine again. He has now, at long last, finished and I can write more of my diary.

  I will now write about the final incident – another series of events, really – that was totally misconstrued by everyone both inside and outside HMRC. Indeed, it was what happened outside of HMRC that led to my demise. Again, this was wholly unfair – the whole matter should have been dismissed as something and nothing. HMRC should have dealt with it and made a note on file, no more than that.

  A young lady joined HMRC on what was called a fast-track apprenticeship; this is, or at least was, an alternative to university and a way of learning on the job. I did not work one-on-one with her at the beginning; I think that the previous incident I wrote about was something of a ‘black mark’ against me, although nothing was put in writing to that effect, of course, nor said out loud. It was my investigator’s sixth sense – my antennae, if you like – that told me I was being kept away from young women when on my own, ‘just in case’. Outrageous really. Disgraceful. But I said nothing despite my understandable anger.

  (Adrian is at the garage again. I hear the scr-ee-ee-ee-ch of the up-and-over door being raised.)

  The young lady was assigned to the same team of investigators as me, sharing files and workloads, visits and interviews. She was, as part of her training, shadowing random enquiries and investigations with a handful of extra returns being chosen for her to work on as part of her training. Over a few weeks, a month or two, our arms-length relationship, nods and smiles, business conversations, chit-chats over coffees, turned into something more than just being good work colleagues.

  As an aside, I should say that random enquiries – where a number of taxpayers’ returns are chosen at random to be checked in more detail – can be most fruitful in the hands of an experienced investigator. What starts as an enquiry – a relatively gentle checking of one aspect of a return (typically, something that doesn’t quite ‘add up’) – can often widen into a full-blown investigation that generates significant unpaid taxes for the Crown.

  I can say now that, over the last two and a half years of my time at HMRC, I saw three of my random enquiries turn into investigations and on to, in turn, a bankruptcy, a company in receivership and one male suicide leaving behind a wife and two small children. I state this without any particular satisfaction, simply to illustrate that I have, on several occasions, turned a random enquiry into something else, the discovery of substantial unpaid taxes, through my expertise and diligence. But I am not a boastful type so I will leave the matter there.

  (I stop and listen for a minute, to hear more bangs and clonks from the garage but there are none. It is all quiet.)

  Our platonic relationship – friendly colleagues working together as part of a team – turned into something more one day. We had worked late one Friday evening, some three or four of us, sharing out some of my files on various taxpayers whom I had earmarked for visits the following week.

  I have to say I was in good cheer that evening. Three or four of the taxpayers had funny surnames when put together; something I have watched out for over the years to amuse myself. Wanamaker was one, Love was another – and I made the off-the-cuff remark that I hoped for their children’s sake that they didn’t marry and have a double-barrelled surname! She found this most amusing once I repeated it more slowly and her tinkling laughter rather spurred me on to further tomfoolery.

  The two female colleagues with us, both dreary lesbian sorts with hatchet faces, were not ‘in on the joke’. We, however, the two of us, had a very jovial time as I was, shall we say, ‘on form’ and made lots of spontaneous jokes one after the other that she found very amusing. Her laughter drove me on to more and more harmless silliness. We finished the evening quite exhausted with merriment.

  Early the next morning, when I have to be honest and say I had been thinking about her all night, I received a text from her on my work mobile phone. I should say that I am not a fan of the ‘modern world’ and have always resisted a mobile phone and other paraphernalia in my private life but was obliged to keep up-to-date and ‘in touch’ at work. The text, and I shall ‘translate’ it from teenage to proper English, read, and I will never forget it: ‘Loved last night. Good to see you again over the weekend if you’re free.’ I could barely believe it. This lovely young girl and a middle-aged chap like myself.

  I thought long and hard about this text and how I should respond to it (if at all, as personal messages on work phones are frowned upon). I drafted several replies, from the formal to the funny to that of a lovestruck teenager (I soon deleted that one – she may have been just out of her teens but I was 30 years older!).

  Eventually, and it took me a good hour, I decided what to do. As an investigator, I am a man who finds things out and is aware of what is going on ‘behind the scenes’ without people rea
lising it. I know things that most people don’t know. I knew, for example, from overhearing a conversation in a booth close to me, that the young lady helped out in her family’s delicatessen in town on Saturdays. So I decided to ‘bump’ into her as she came out for her lunch break. We could have a chat and see how things went from there.

  (I hear the sudden scr-ee-ee-ee-ch of the up-and-over garage door closing and the clanging of metal on metal as Adrian walks away, carrying something; I’m not sure what.)

  The delicatessen was easy enough to find, being on a side road leading towards the main shopping area. By good fortune, just along the other side of the road there was, a little way along, a bench on which I could sit and wait. I had, on my way in, walked by the delicatessen – very busy, it was – and saw that she was working in there. It was simply a matter of taking my place on the bench at 12.00, the earliest I thought she might have her lunch, and waiting patiently. I did not mind sitting there for I was in high spirits; more than I had been for as long as I could remember.

  It was a fine day, and a good job too, as it was close to 1.20 before she appeared at the shop entrance and headed into town. She rather caught me dozing and I had to almost break into a run to catch her up to see where she was going. As I got closer, I saw she had some wrapped food in one hand, a bottle of water in the other, and her handbag over her shoulder. From the direction she was heading I assumed she was going to sit by the town hall and watch the world go by. And so, four or five minutes on, with me walking some yards behind, I was proven correct. She arrived in the town hall square and sat down on the first bench there.

  It was at this point that I hesitated. Like many a lovelorn chap before me – yes, I was smitten – I wasn’t sure how best to approach the young lady. I decided to stroll by as if I were a regular visitor out for a walk, and then do a rather amusing ‘double-take’ as I saw her – as if she were the last person I’d expect to be sitting there. She seemed surprised to see me – she clearly had no idea I had been walking behind her for the past five to ten minutes – but then smiled quite brightly while looking around, as if to check whether any other HMRC colleagues were with me!

  We had a very pleasant chat about all sorts of things – the sunny weather, the frisky pigeons trying to ‘do it’ in the square and so on – rather than work-related matters. It was the weekend, after all. I said I often took a walk to the square at lunchtimes when I was in town on Saturdays (a little white lie) and she said the same and I said “snap” when she said that and this made her laugh and I did too. We sat there for a moment or two in comfortable silence. I thought that she might rest her head on my shoulder but she was shy and I did not want to force the issue (although I did edge a little closer to her just in case).

  As she finished her vegetable wrap – her mother, who owned the delicatessen with her stepfather, had made it for her – she got up to head back. I gently admonished her at this point for not taking her full 60 minutes but she said they were very busy, which I had seen, and had to be back by 2 o’clock. I insisted on walking her to the shop despite her polite protestations. When we got there, I did think of kissing her goodbye on the cheek but the shop was full and the man behind the counter was watching us, so I hesitated and she hurried in to serve the next customer. I went home and laid on my bed in a state of some excitement. Suffice to say, I felt like a young boy of 16 again. But I have nothing to add to that!

  (I can hear Adrian in the hallway. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. He drives me to the edge, he really does. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. I’ve worked out what it is, though. The only thing it can be).

  Adrian has got the step-ladder from the garage.

  He has bought it into the bungalow. To go into the loft. I wait a while and listen. I am correct. That is what he is doing.

  I wonder what it is he is going to get down from the loft. Something dangerous in the wrong hands. Adrian’s hands.

  MONDAY 24 JULY, 8.26PM

  I wish I had left the matter of the young lady there with that silly lunchtime get-together and my dreamy imaginings on my bed.

  Had I done, my life would have been very different. I would not now be living in a constant state of suppressed fear.

  But I did not. I went on. I am not ashamed to say it was a mistake.

  The next week passed in something of a blur, partly because I was in and out of the office on so many investigation-related visits but mostly because I could not stop thinking about the young lady. I was very careful, when at work, not to show that there was anything between us. Personal relationships, in terms of intimacy, shall we say, were discouraged at HMRC. And I would not have wanted her to feel I was rushing things too quickly.

  Our paths crossed only a few times face-to-face, when I would give her a little smile and say some nice words of encouragement about her work; on the third occasion, when I had a moment or two alone with her as we waited for a lift, I patted her on her arm (fighting the natural instinct to put my arm around her) and said “chin up” as she looked a little down and worried.

  I also texted her, on the work phone, with one or two news snippets relating to enquiries and investigations of mutual interest. I made one or two friendly comments too, little jokes between the two of us, so she would know that my ‘distance’ from her at work was only a front for others.

  (Adrian is unfolding the metal step-ladder that he has taken from the garage. I hear it clang. Again. Clang. As he puts it up. Once more, clang. He is definitely going into the loft. Clang. What does he want there, for Christ’s sake?)

  The next Saturday, a day I had been looking forward to all week, could not come fast enough. I again waited on the same bench as the week before. I was fortunate that I was a little earlier this time, arriving before noon, as the young lady came out just after that and stood at the entrance looking around as though she was not sure where to go to eat her lunch.

  I stood up and waved and hurried across to her in my delight. This time, I had prepared a little packed lunch of my own so that we could sit and eat them together in the square. It was a lovely sunny day and I was looking forward to spending what I hoped would be a full hour with her. I was thinking perhaps that I might suggest our relationship moved on a little at this time and ask whether she might like to join me for an out-of-town meal that evening.

  Sadly, however, as I approached the young lady, I saw an older woman, her mother, bang on the window and gesture emphatically at her to come back into the shop. The young girl, before we could speak, turned and went inside. I hesitated outside for a moment or two, watching through the window as the mother and daughter disappeared into a room at the back of the shop. The shop itself was empty and I could only assume that the mother wanted her daughter’s assistance to unload a fresh delivery of goods from out the back.

  As I waited, three young women – giggling among themselves – brushed by me and went into the delicatessen. I watched for a moment or two more as the mother came back out followed by the young lady, who had put her work overall back on and started serving the stupid young women. So much for a long and leisurely lunch! I sat on my bench until 2.30, feeling more and more frustrated with that thoughtless, selfish mother. I came close to going in and giving her a piece of my mind, but I knew that would embarrass my young lady. Instead, I went home and had a vigorous tidy round of the garden before doing anything else.

  (I hear Adrian above my head, walking slowly about, moving each foot carefully from joist to joist. It is dark in the loft. There is no light. It must be unbearably hot. I do not like him rummaging about, digging into corners, finding things. It makes me uneasy.)

  The next week was an agony for me as I was away on a course and had no opportunity to see my young lady at all. This was a residential course in Wales to do with online fraud and money laundering and such like – one of many I have attended over the years with gritted teeth as I loathe the endless lectures and need for small-talk with people I don’t know and will never meet again.

  Invariably, s
ome of the younger men, down from Liverpool or Manchester, go off to a bar to drink and watch a football match and start chanting for one side or the other while some sad old spinster type stays at the hotel bar drinking too much and making a spectacle of herself with the nearest, half-interested man. I, overwhelmed at times with loneliness, spent my evenings, and eventually nights and mornings, texting my young lady about what was happening and then, as the time passed and I became increasingly maudlin, my thoughts and feelings for her.

  (I am thinking about what he is looking for. There is little there. I rack my brains. Papers and notes from years gone by? A few items from his childhood he did not want to let go? Yes. That’s it. I cannot help but sigh. Toys, games. He is looking for something to entice a young child. The thought sickens me.)

  The next – the final – Saturday could not come soon enough for me. I left Wales early Friday evening and well recall my almost bubbling-over excitement as I drove the long five to six hours home along the M4, around the top of the M25 and up the A12. I went straight to bed, slept fitfully and woke early, pacing about the little bungalow by 6.00am. The agony of waiting until noon had me almost beside myself as I cleaned and tidied the bungalow, putting things straight and so on, keeping busy, distracting myself.

  At last, I went into town and sat down on the bench close to where my young lady worked. I arrived again at noon, give or take a minute, and sat back to watch the comings and goings in the shop. Within a moment or two, I could see there was something of a commotion behind the counter where, from what I could make out, the mother and the young lady – my lovely cuddly girl – seemed to be having an argument with a big, I have to say fat, middle-aged man. I got to my feet, thinking for a minute that he was an angry customer but I soon realised that this was my young girl’s stepfather and she and her mother were trying to calm him down.

  What happened next was this. Fatso stormed out of the delicatessen, looked left and right as he crossed the road and started running towards me. As I stated later to the police – and I was advised to use the exact words he said and so feel I should repeat them here – he shouted, “You fucking old pervert” as he reached my side of the pavement and “Leave my fucking daughter alone” as he punched me on the side of the head.