I look at him, shaking my head in disbelief at this nonsense. Yet I find myself saying, “Yes, okay, she can come for tea.” I do not want her here. No, not at all. For so many reasons. But I cannot say no. I dare not. It would seem wrong somehow. And Adrian would not let it be; he would worry at it, keep coming back to it until, eventually giving in, it would be more of an ordeal that it needs to be.
So I agree. Let’s have her in. Feed her. Get her out. See her gone. She’ll soon be out of his life anyway, once she finds out what he’s like. The twitching and the fiddling. The endless repetition. The dreary conversation about something and nothing. Round and round. Never-bloody-ending nonsense and drivel.
He smiles at last. I have not seen him smile properly for ever such a long time. “I’ll text her,” he says, getting his phone out of his back pocket as he turns towards his bedroom. He seems to stand upright, tall for a moment, instead of walking in his usual bent-over crouch. Because he is so tall, he stoops, so that he does not stand out.
“Oh,” he adds, as if it has just occurred to him. As if it is an afterthought. “She’s got a little daughter, Lily, she’s coming up to four.”
I watch him as he opens his bedroom door, picks up his bag, and gives me an awkward half-smile as he goes into the room.
So there we are. What it’s all about. The daughter. Lily. Aged almost four.
It takes all of my power of self-control not to go into his room and sort this matter out for once and for all. But Josie and Lily will be at the door at four o’clock. And what would they do if they expected someone to answer and nobody did?
WEDNESDAY 26 JULY, 12.01PM
I am lying down again in my room. Before I leave to go to the shops to buy some fancy foods for our afternoon tea. Really, afternoon tea. I am still hot and sticky but it is slightly cooler, if that is the right word, in here than it is in other parts of the bungalow.
Adrian has already gone back to “fetch them” as he put it, to bring them back for four o’clock. I do not want to dwell on this matter now. I will meet them, make a judgement, and decide what to do from there. I have other matters on my mind at present. Her. Him. A letter. The letter that triggered the unfolding of everything.
Letters have always been an integral part of my working life, at least in recent years. People are always writing in, or used to do so, to tell us taxmen (and lovely ladies, of course) about rogues and ne’er-do-wells in the community. Some are more accurate than others, but all offer a line of enquiry. Many lead to full investigations. I would not have expected that I would find out about her and him in just the same way: via an anonymous letter.
I would not like to estimate exactly how many tax investigations I carried out nor how much extra tax I uncovered for Her Majesty. Over time, I prepared an amusing ‘ad-lib’ for those members of the public who asked such inane questions. “Lots and pots,” I would say and, for those simple sorts who looked confused, would add, with a chuckle, “Lots of investigations and pots of money!”
I was a careful and thorough investigator.
The best.
Truly, the best of all. I am not being immodest.
From cheats and liars to the mentally ill and half-witted, I had a 100 per cent strike rate. I always found something, somewhere. Always.
Most people knew what they were doing. Under-declaring income. Missing it out altogether. Pretending they did not think it was taxable. Simple ‘errors’ (but always in their favour, of course). Pocketing cash was a favourite for many. That is easy to identify. You simply trawl bank and card statements for outgoings and cash withdrawals to see what their average spend is in a week, a month, a quarter, a year. If they are pocketing cash now and then, that average spend can suddenly dip by hundreds a week, thousands a month.
“So, Mr Plumber (or whatever),” I would ask nicely with a warm smile and emphasis on the long, drawn-out, ever-so-polite mister, “I see from your bank statements that, over the past year, you withdrew an average of £2,000 a month in cash for personal spending… (pause)… except in June and September where the figures were, let me see now… (another agonising – for him! – pause)… £100 and £250. Would you tell me about these drawings please?” Of course, he would bumble about with his ers and ums, not wanting to tell me that he’d obviously had some cash-in-hand jobs in those months that went straight into his back pocket.
A better question to be asked by members of the public would be how many crooked taxpayers did you expose?
How many prosecutions?
How many businesses closed?
How many marriages broke up?
How many cheating scum, once discovered and shamed, took their own miserable lives?
I know the answers to those questions. Yes I do!
Investigations begin for many reasons. There are various HMRC systems, balances and checks that flag up possible lines of enquiry. There is also the random enquiry that covers a multitude of reasons, everything from a tax investigator noticing neighbours running businesses on the quiet (something I have seen myself no fewer than five times) to a trainee picking cases genuinely at random as part of their training.
Then there are the letters. I say letters because, in the old days, that is how people would notify Her Majesty’s, at that time, Inland Revenue; a plethora of indignation and anger about ex-partners, family, former friends and neighbours who were, one way or the other, cheating the state.
There would always be letters coming in to local offices. Ex-partners, wives mostly, can be very bitter and revealing. They would always ‘spill the beans’, their little acts of revenge. I always made a joke to any husbands I was investigating that if they split up from the wives and had some tax money hidden away they had better either pay up ASAP or shut the ex up ASAP! These days most of it comes via online forms, of course, to be sorted and sifted and weighed centrally; not so effective, some might say.
People don’t write letters so much these days.
One woman did, though. To me. She spilt the beans alright.
About her and what she was doing. With him.
I remember seeing the letter for the first time. Placed upright, in the middle of two or three other letters, junk mail really, on the little shelf above the shoe rack in the porch. Either she or maybe Adrian put it there without realising what it was, its significance. I picked it up as I came in from work. It was a Thursday evening and she was out at a night class and Adrian was in his room. It was a slim brown envelope with my initial and surname printed carefully on it by hand followed by the address. Second-class stamp. Smudged but definitely a local postmark.
I was intrigued as I do not usually receive post that looks like that. For some reason, despite the capitals, I thought it was a woman’s hand. As I walked down the hallway to the kitchen, I unpeeled the envelope. Inside was a blank A4 sheet of paper folded precisely in three. Opening it, in black ink and in the same careful hand, I read the words, ‘Dawn is having an affair with Philip Rennie at work. They have sex in the dinner hour. We thought you should know.’
I sat down on a kitchen chair and struggled to regain my composure.
I felt a sense of shock initially. Disbelief that this was happening.
Angry too, that I had been cheated on, cuckolded, made a fool of. A laughing stock.
I looked over the letter for hidden clues. I checked the spellings, although there were no mistakes. I examined the hand – the block capitals were quite small and written carefully. I even lifted the paper up to my nose to smell it. Nothing.
I thought – although it was no more than an educated guess – that it was more likely to be a woman who had written this rather than a man. A man would not have written so carefully. And they would not have used the coy phrase ‘have sex’. They would have used the f word. Despite the ‘we’, she had probably acted alone. It would not have been this man’s wife; too dispassionate. A co-worker most likely. Someone who did not like him. Or her. Both, possibly.
Easy to check, though. Out and
about, investigating, I could take my lunch hour at the same time as hers.
Park up a little way from the school, tucked in at the top of a side road, unnoticed among a row of cars.
Watch and wait and follow them. See for myself.
There is a sudden clatter of the letter box being opened and something being pushed through and falling to the floor. A letter or two maybe.
I go and check what it is. A colour pamphlet for a new supermarket opening soon, with some vouchers inside. A leaflet about gardening services. Something to do with satellite TV. Another about stair-lifts for the elderly and infirm. All junk. I put it to one side. I have other matters to think about right now.
I did follow them. Him and her. The next day. A minute or two past 12.30, I saw her come out of the school building first, walking through the gates and turning right, away from me. She strolled along as if she were making her way to the nearby convenience store.
I stayed put.
I’d been there five, ten minutes.
Knew he had not yet left.
A few minutes later, no more than two or three, I saw a car pulling out of the school car park. A blue car, a Honda Civic. I was too far away to read the plate. The car turned right, as if following her.
Stop. She gets in. I know what happens next.
They drive off together. To a quiet lane, a field, somewhere over by the marshes. Where they do it.
Come back. She gets out up the road and walks the last ten yards, no one any the wiser.
I drove after them, keeping my distance, suppressing the urge to drive up hard, ramming them, forcing them off the road. I had a wheel brace in the boot and I would gladly have beaten him with it. And then her. But I knew I had to be careful. Not give into instinct, that I had to plan and plot and work out how I was going to get my revenge.
They did not go to a field as I expected. Instead, they just went to a pub, turning into the car park as I drove by quickly before they got out and might see me. I looked straight ahead just in case she spotted me – so she’d think I was just out and about ‘on duty’, visiting a taxpayer.
I parked further up, pulled into a side road, watched and waited.
An agony of time passed as I sat, waiting to see them come out again.
They did, some 40 minutes later. They walked back to his car, to return to school.
As they approached the car, she was slightly out of sight to me. But I saw him stop and put his arms around her, pulling her towards him. I could just see her head resting on his shoulder. They stood like that for what must have been two or three minutes and then he seemed to start rocking her gently from side to side. As if cradling a baby!
As he released her, he went to kiss her.
She moved her head and was slightly obscured from my view and I could not tell if he kissed her cheek or her lips.
But their heads were together, close and touching, for a further minute or more until they turned to get inside the car.
Before the car could reverse out and pull away, I started my car and drove off at speed back towards the office in Ipswich. I had seen all that I needed to see. Love. Affection. Physical closeness. I knew our marriage, such as it was, was in its final days.
WEDNESDAY 26 JULY, 3.43PM
I do not think anyone has ever come for afternoon tea at my little bungalow. Not with me anyway. And not for many years with anyone else. I have never encouraged visitors. They are more trouble than they are worth. I cannot say that this is something I really want to do now, what with one thing and another.
While Adrian went into town on the bus to fetch her and bring her back, and after my diary and trip to the shops, I have been preparing an afternoon tea as best I can in the living room. I should perhaps say here that Adrian does not drive. He is not allowed to. He has this thing where, now and then, he ‘freezes’ for a moment or two; what’s known as an absence seizure, where he just stares into space. He ‘wakes up’ a second or two later and carries on with what he was doing, almost as if he is not aware he has temporarily ‘switched off’. He is therefore not permitted to drive a car.
This switching off is not an issue in itself.
Unless, of course, he was doing something potentially dangerous at the time. Like standing on top of a ladder to clear the gutters. Or crossing the railway track to retrieve a blown-away scarf.
Then he could, quite possibly, be killed.
“What happened?” someone might say.
“He must have had one of his absence seizures,” I would reply, ever so sadly.
I tidy the living room as best I can, jabbing at the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling with a rolled-up old newspaper. Dusting and polishing the surfaces with some lemon polish spray, which leaves a nice scent. Vacuuming the carpet and dabbing at the stain on the arm of the sofa, before plumping and rearranging the cushions to cover it. It is an unsightly dark stain, almost black, but it does not smell of anything.
It is a dated room dominated by a rather bulky television. It is an old one and I do not have satellite television nor a DVD player. The VHS recorder sits there, largely unused now, although I have a small number of tapes in the sideboard; a few Agatha Christie Poirots mostly that I taped and watch occasionally when there is nothing else on ‘live’.
I have seen some of them so many times that I remember not only what happens but sometimes the words spoken by Poirot in his denouement. On one or two occasions, I have spoken along in a cod Belgian accent (for my own amusement).
I also have a few tapes of The Two Ronnies, who were rather funny fellows. I remember, at one Inland Revenue Christmas event, doing a skit from one of the shows and everyone found it most amusing. One colleague, who I have never really liked, laughed so hard that he had to leave the room.
There is a knock at the door.
I stop what I am doing, hold my breath. Wait a minute. Two. Three. It is not Adrian, he has a key.
I will not answer it. Hope they – whoever they are – will go away.
After a few minutes have passed, I slip along the hallway into the front room, peering out through the blinds. No one about. That blue car is still parked there, though. I ignore it, go back to what I was doing.
The coffee table has seen better days but I cover it as best I can with a folded-over wipe-clean tablecloth from the local Co-op. On this, I arrange various plates of differing sizes with assorted sandwiches, again from the Co-op. These save me the time and trouble of making them myself, a chore I have never enjoyed and, truth be told, I have never advanced much beyond cheese or ham with pickle.
I have tried tomatoes on occasions, but I do not like to use the ends, which seems wasteful, and what I call ‘a bulging tomato’ can create a soggy sandwich. I do not use eggs either. I do not like the smell. When I was at school, I was bullied rather badly and the big boys would hold me down while Chatfield would sit on my face and break wind. Boiled eggs remind me of that and I do not wish to recall it.
But I digress. One of the Co-op sandwiches has salmon in it. It was 20 per cent off and a little stale but warming it through for ten seconds in the microwave has revived it. Two packets of Mr Kipling cakes, Viennese Whirls and some angel slices, and a jug of orange squash with some slightly faded but perfectly serviceable beakers from the back of the cupboard, complete my display. And very nice it is too. If I do say so myself. A lovely spread for our guests, not too fancy, not too plain.
I hear noises at the front door again, rustling sounds.
I put the knife in my hand down, then pick it up again.
Sounds of movement. Someone coming in. Adrian’s voice.
I am not happy about this, to be caught ‘on the hop’. They are here a little sooner than expected. I had hoped to watch them arriving from the bedroom window. To see how they were together, acting naturally rather than as they will be; presenting themselves as they want me to see them, a happy and perfect couple. As a tax inspector – yes, former tax inspector – I know there can be a huge difference between the
two.
They stand there, the three of them, waiting for me as I get up and walk to meet them. She is tall and lean, her dark hair tied back. She wears a white T-shirt, quite loose over her slight breasts, and dark-blue jeans cut off below the knee with a simple pair of white sandals. She has an oversized denim handbag over her shoulder. Despite the heat, she is clean and tidy and she has a pretty face and smiles warmly at me and makes eye contact. What this strong, fit beauty sees in big, gawky Adrian, I do not know.
She looks down as if to introduce her daughter, the girl of Adrian’s drawing. She has a mass of dark brown, fluffy-looking hair and a wide, smiley face, which she half-hides, peeking out from behind her mother. I think she is playing a game with me already but cannot be sure. I smile at her. And then chuckle to show I am a friendly sort of fellow. A kindly uncle bouncing a little girl on his knee. She does not respond though, ducking her head behind her mother’s back.
Adrian stands there quietly, almost proudly, as if he has been abroad for years, is visiting and is now introducing me to his never-met-before wife and daughter. “There,” he seems to be saying, “see what I’ve gone out and got for myself, I’ve won first prize and you thought I was a big useless loser.”
I can see what he sees in them – the woman’s strength and beauty and the girl’s sweet mischievousness. But I don’t know what they want from him. This awkward-looking, self-conscious man-child. I simply say a neutral hello as I have been trained to do when meeting people for the first time and they say the same back and I beckon them through into the living room.
I reflect, just for a moment, whether I should have shaken hands, maybe ruffled the child’s hair.
These days, people hug when they meet each other. I cannot bear to hug people, let alone strangers.
The touch of breasts and stomachs, the close proximity of genitalia. The smell of people’s bodies and their hot breath on my cheek.
There is a moment’s hesitation in the living room as to who will go where and then the little girl struts across to the sofa, sits in the middle of it and lifts her feet and puts them on the edge of the coffee table. She folds her arms, cocks her head to one side and smiles at us. I think this is a child who knows how to play cute. I also think her Little Orphan Annie act will become wearing rather quickly.
Mr Todd's Reckoning Page 9