Rotten Apples

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Is that what upset you so much?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ Cara frowned. With her head on one side and her lips pursed she looked like a small, cross bird.

  ‘He told me on my first day that you tended to get upset in meetings and sometimes broke down.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’ Cara straightened her head and not only looked but also sounded tougher. ‘It only happened once. Len was really going at an electrician, a big, tough man with tattoos even, who looked as though he could take on the whole world. Len started needling him and he obviously got right under the man’s skin because he broke down and started to cry. It was horrible, seeing someone broken like that. Okay, so he’d been fiddling his taxes in a small way and there was a significant payment still outstanding from last year. Len was right to challenge him—of course he was—and right to tell him that we’d pursue him for the last penny, but he didn’t have to be such a bully.’

  ‘What was it he said?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I was… It made me feel sick, you know. I couldn’t bear it. I suppose it just reminded me of all the times he’d had a go at me. My knees went wobbly, I felt hollow, my head buzzed and I was terrified that…well, that I’d have to rush to the toilet.’ Cam blushed.

  ‘It sounds most unpleasant.’

  ‘It was. Kate can do it to me too, sometimes. You know, one of the reasons why I chose the civil service was because I thought there’d be less pressure than in one of the big accountancy firms, even though they pay better. But perhaps Jason’s right.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Willow, thinking that for a woman of twenty-eight, Cara was exceptionally thin skinned.

  ‘That’s what Jason wants: a job in private practice. He often says it’s the only kind of work that’s worthy of our talents; that we’re wasting ourselves harassing small businessmen for derisory salaries.’

  ‘There’s always the index-linked pension. Would Jason be able to transfer, do you think?’ asked Willow, realising that his ambitions probably explained why he spent so much on City suits and Jermyn-Street shirts.

  ‘Well, he might, but you see he’s determined to get in at a high level.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s possible?’ asked Willow, watching a fat pigeon waddling among the flowers, pecking at juicy-looking aphids. ‘Isn’t he clever enough?’

  ‘It’s not that. He’s got a mind like a razor, and he’s got the confidence, too. I suppose he might just make it, even though no one I’ve ever heard of has gone in as high as he’s planning. No, Jason’s main problem is that his attention span is shorter than a baby’s. He gets bored very quickly and then starts stirring up trouble in the office. That’s bound to be on his references and it would have to count against him. I’d have thought, even in private practice.’

  Willow looked at Cara, wondering whether she had deliberately planted that piece of information or whether her desire to please was such that it had merely slipped out. It was hard to assess exactly how naive she really was.

  ‘What kind of trouble?’ Willow asked, trying to find out.

  Cara wrinkled her pretty nose and pursed her lips again. ‘He knew how easy it was to get Len going about things and so he’d wind him up; you know, give him hints that someone was fiddling something, like poor Doctor Fydgett, and then watch laughing as Len floundered around trying to get proof of something that had never existed.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Willow. ‘What things got Len going?’

  ‘Oh, dishonesty of any kind. He was a real stickler, you know. That’s one reason why everyone hated him so much.’ Seeing that Willow was still looking puzzled, cara explained. ‘If he caught one of the typists doing a letter of her own, say, or nicking an envelope, or someone taking too long at lunch, that sort of thing, he’d haul them into his office and give them a real dressing down. “We’re government servants,” he used to say. “Paid by the taxpayer. We have to be more honest than anyone else.” The law was his god, really, and it amused Jason to wind him up, like on the Fydgett case. It was childish and destructive, but in a way it provided a safely valve for the rest of us. And it was bonding—you know, all of us together hating Len and laughing at him, sort of thing.’

  While Cara folded her sandwich papers neatly and took them to the nearest litter bin, Willow thought of Len’s alleged habit of threatening taxpayers and the suggestion that his file notes might not have accurately reflected the details of what had been said in meetings.

  ‘Was it the letter or the spirit of the law that meant so much to him?’ she asked when Cara came back to the bench.

  ‘That’s bright,’ she said, sounding surprised enough to be rude. ‘I hadn’t realised you’d seen enough of him to get on to that. I think he would always stick to the letter, but the spirit might get a bit bent sometimes, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Hm, thank you, Cara. You’ve helped a lot.’

  ‘Great’She looked at her watch and then stood up in a hurry. ‘I must go or Kate will be furious. She’s twitchy at the moment and needs to see us all working every minute of the day. I gather I’ll be seeing you tomorrow at the funeral after all.’

  ‘What?’ said Willow, forgetting the excuse she had used to get Cara to give her Mrs Scoffer’s telephone number. ‘Oh, yes, probably. Kate’s going to give me a lift.’

  Cara smiled and turned away, muttering something that sounded like, ‘Well, lucky old you.’

  ‘Before you go,’ said Willow. Cara looked back enquiringly.

  ‘You said that Jason wound Len up about the Fydgett case. What did he actually do?’

  Cara smiled and shrugged and looked prettily reluctant.

  Willow pressed her with a brisk ‘Come on, out with it.’

  ‘It was fairly simple, really. He overheard Len talking about Fydgett one day and he said: “Up to her old tricks again, is she? It wouldn’t surprise me. I was at an auction the other day.” Len asked him what he meant, but Jason wouldn’t tell him. “Only hearsay, old boy, but it sounds as though someone’s been selling pictures secretly and pretty well this last year.”‘

  ‘Had he made that up?’

  Cara shrugged. The points of her collarbone stuck up above the scooped neck of her T-shirt. Willow thought that there was a calculating look in her eyes, but it could merely have been the way the dazzling sun caught them.

  ‘I asked him that after we heard she was dead, and he said that he hadn’t told any lies. He had actually been in an auction room recently, and people are always selling pictures secretly and well. And that in any case, Fydgett was bound to have been doing it because she always did sell one or two a year even if she did declare them for CGT. And then he added that “poor old Len hasn’t had any fun for ages” and needed a nice rage to get him going properly.’

  ‘I see. Thank you, Cara.’ Willow watched her go, wondering just exactly who had been stirring up trouble.

  KATE ARRIVED at the mews the following day at noon. She looked unfamiliar in her black linen dress, the first dark thing that Willow had ever seen her wear. With its discreet buttons, square-cut neck, which only just revealed her collarbone, and roomy sleeves to just above the elbow, it could hardly have been more funereal and yet it must have been wonderfully cool to wear.

  Willow herself was feeling hot and uncomfortable in a black suit; her only dark dresses were either designed for winter or the evening. She took off the unbuttoned jacket before she got into Kate’s red Astra, wincing as the material rubbed through the bandages on her hands, and laid it on the back seat.

  ‘I wish I were Chinese.’

  ‘Why on earth?’ asked Kate, looking over her right shoulder as she eased her heavy car out of its parking space.

  ‘They wear white in mourning.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Yes, black is horribly stuffy on a day like this.’

  ‘Not yours. It’s great. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a dress quite like it. Where did you get it?’ Willow was genuinely admiring, but she was also glad
of the opportunity to flatter Kate.

  ‘I made it. I make all my clothes.’ Kate sounded defensive.

  ‘What, not the suits as well?’

  ‘Yes, the suits as well.’

  ‘Goodness, I am impressed,’ said Willow, glad to have one minor mystery cleared up. ‘D’you know, I’d never have suspected it?’

  ‘Why?’ Kate looked at her for a second. Willow was surprised to see hostility in her small dark eyes. ‘You surely can’t be like my step-sister, who thinks a career makes one unfeminine.’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Willow laughed. ‘Nor that dressmaking is a gender-specific skill.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ said Kate with considerable emphasis, as though Willow had unexpectedly produced the correct password. ‘Look, what is it that you want me to tell you? Let’s get that out of the way.’

  ‘I’ve got a list of questions in my bag,’ said Willow without even reaching for it. ‘But the first and most important one is what was the information that Len Scoffer told Fiona Fydgett he had about income that she’d concealed?’

  ‘Oh God!’ said Kate, putting the back of her hand against her forehead as though her persistent headache was still with her. She lifted her foot off the accelerator for a moment, causing the driver behind, whose car was only three inches from her back bumper, to hoot furiously. ‘Look, it’s just one of those hideously unfortunate things.’

  ‘Which hideously unfortunate things?’

  Kate shrugged and put her hand back on the steering wheel. ‘As you probably know, banks and building societies pass on to us information about the interest earned on all their customers’ accounts.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that.’

  ‘Fydgett’s bank gave us figures for the interest on her two accounts. The first coincided with the information on her tax return. The second did not. In fact, to have earned that amount of interest she would have had to have received a large injection of capital. We took it—Len took it—that she’d done another big picture deal and tried to keep it secret because it would have been the third that year.’

  She paused as she overtook a lorry parked on a double yellow line.

  ‘Why would that have mattered?’ asked Willow.

  ‘When the commissioners ruled that her picture profits were capital gains after all, she had had only two sales in the year. Len thought that she must have believed three deals would put the picture sales into the category of business profits after all, and that she’d concealed the biggest for that reason.’

  ‘That was all? Didn’t he have any evidence of a big deal? If she’d made a really crunchy amount, surely she would have had to have sold the painting through one of the big auction houses, and then there’d be a record. Did he check?’

  ‘In some ways a private sale would have been more likely,’ said Kate, as she braked at a set of traffic lights that was just turning amber. Once again there was a loud hooting from behind, combined with the sinister sliding shriek of rubber skidding on tarmac.

  The sound shocked Willow out of her musings about the possibly murderous fury someone might feel at seeing reports of a painting, for which they had earned only a hundred pounds, being sold on for ten or twenty times that amount by the woman to whom they had sold it. She turned to look out of the rear windscreen.

  The car behind was a big, navy-blue BMW and its brakes must have been recently serviced for the driver had just managed to stop without crashing into the back of the Astra. He was a thin-looking man in his forties with a dark, sneering face, and he was tapping at his steering wheel. Kate only glanced in her mirror and allowed herself a scornful smile.

  ‘Pillock!’

  As the lights changed she drove smoothly across the junction, checking her mirror more frequently than usual. As soon as the road widened at all, the BMW driver accelerated violently and whipped past them. The driver tapped his forehead as he passed, staring at Kate. She merely shook her head.

  ‘Well?’ said Willow after they had driven in silence for three crowded miles. ‘Did you ever discover whether there had been a private deal?’

  ‘No. In fact, the bank had made a mistake. I’m not sure how it happened. Presumably the computer malfunctioned or someone entered a wrong account number at some stage. The sum we were given for interest on the long-term account was in fact the total money she had in the account. It wasn’t our mistake at all, but it was most unfortunate.’

  ‘But didn’t you ever consider that the bank might have been wrong?’ Willow hoped that she did not sound as outraged as she felt

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Kate sounded unhappy but not apologetic. ‘We get that sort of information all the time. Have you any idea how many interest-bearing accounts there are in this country? We get details of them all. We can’t go checking every single one. Not only we, but also the banks would grind to a halt.’

  ‘But in a case where the taxpayer repeatedly denied any dishonesty,’ protested Willow, ‘surely any reasonable person would have thought there might have been a mistake.’

  ‘In an ideal world, yes. Len ought to have made some more enquiries. But, look at it his way: the picture dealing had been a thorn in his flesh for years. Fydgett not only denied having done any more deals to make the money he believed she had, but she also refused to supply any proof. If she had complied with Len’s request for her books and statements at the beginning, the whole problem would have been cleared up months ago. As it was, he was certain that she was lying. Seen from his point of view the whole thing is perfectly understandable.’

  Willow looked at Kate, for the first time seeing the strength of her chin, which was only noticeable in profile, and the sharpness of her small nose. ‘Well,’ she said drily after a while, ‘I can only say that it’s admirable that you defend your staff so forcibly. What did you really think of Len? Between us, off the record, going no further, and all the rest of it.’

  Kate sighed, slowed as, the car approached a roundabout and swung neatly round it. The impatient BMW was caught in the next traffic jam, still only one car ahead of them.

  ‘He was a tricky man to work with,’ Kate said, biting her lip. ‘I don’t know how much you’ve been told…?’

  ‘Not a vast amount, but I understand that he resented working for a woman so much younger than himself.’

  ‘I don’t think my age had much to do with it. He would have resented any woman, and probably most men, too. He hated being told what to do by anyone, and he despised a lot of my decisions.’

  Before Willow could ask for any details, Kate hurried on: ‘He didn’t believe in conciliation of any kind. Belligerent confrontation was more his style, and he could never accept that while it might make him feel tougher, it was unlikely to increase the tax take. I used sometimes to try to make him see that a considerable proportion of taxpayers are muddled and frightened rather than dishonest, and that if gently treated they will co-operate and our record of collection will improve.’

  ‘Belligerent confrontation is certainly the impression I’ve got from the files I’ve read,’ said Willow, surprised into admiration. Kate seemed to sense it for she flashed a glance at Willow and smiled. ‘It must have made him a difficult colleague.’

  ‘It did; that along with some of his other beliefs. The concept of de minimis, for instance, meant nothing to him at all. D’you know, he once raised an assessment for twenty-five pence?’

  ‘That’s loopy,’ said Willow. ‘I’ve heard of that sort of thing and assumed the stories were apocryphal. The postage alone would have cost that much, let alone the paper, the explanatory booklets, the computer time, his time… What a ridiculous waste!’

  ‘You’re telling me.’

  ‘Tell me something, Kate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you mean about Len’s despising your decisions? What kind of decisions?’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen the files,’ said Kate, apparently concentrating on the traffic ahead. ‘The architect whose accountant advised him so badly. L
en thought it iniquitous that I wasn’t pursuing him for every penalty in the book. Try as I might to explain my reasons, he would not accept them. I… Oh, what’s the use? The man’s dead. I can’t help feeling relieved and I wish that I didn’t. But one must be honest.’

  ‘Yes.’ Willow could hear the dryness of her own voice and hurried to disguise it. ‘Is that why you gave him a free ride on the Fydgett case?’

  ‘He was too senior to have me breathing down his neck all the time,’ said Kate, sounding resigned. ‘His files were his own to deal with as he chose unless there was a complaint. I had nothing whatever to do with the Fydgett case until the Chairman wrote to me, because she had never complained at all. I can’t think why not, if she was so upset about it all. That’s why I don’t believe her suicide was anything to do with the way Len behaved.’ Kate shrugged and then went on. ‘Anyway, as soon as I’d been brought in I instituted enquiries, discovered that the bank had made the error and satisfied myself that, even if Len had been a bit heavy-handed, at least he had followed the law. Then you appeared.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry that I added to your burdens. But do you really think that Len acted properly? I mean, even in his suggestion that if she didn’t agree to pay up, went to the commissioners and got away with it again, he would simply have investigated her every year until she died.’

  Kate groaned. Willow suddenly noticed the name of the street they were passing and recognised it as the one in which the Scoffers lived.

  ‘That’s a matter of perception,’ said Kate. ‘He wouldn’t have put it like that, whatever the woman thought she heard.’

  ‘But he was a bully, wasn’t he?’ Willow said quickly, making plans.

  ‘Yes, he was certainly that. And, oh, put it like this: in his private, internal narrative he was the only honest person around. Everyone else was careless at best, criminal at worst, and dishonest in any case. Look, here we are. That’s the church over there. I’ll park here. You don’t mind walking the last bit to avoid the one-way, do you?’