by Dick Francis
‘Not really, as long as they fight as well as the men. But they will have to be strong to carry all their kit. The Israeli army scrapped their mixed infantry battalions when they suspected the men were carrying the girls’ kit in return for sex. They were also worried that the men would stop and look after a wounded female colleague rather than carry on fighting.’
‘Human nature is human nature,’ Isabella said.
‘Certainly is,’ I replied. ‘Any chance of a bonus?’
5
Back at Kauri House Stables there was still tension in the air between my mother and her husband. I suspected that I’d interrupted an argument as I went through the back door into the kitchen with my bags at three o’clock on Monday afternoon.
‘Where has all that stuff come from?’ my mother asked with a degree of accusation.
‘It’s just my things that were in storage,’ I said, ‘while I was away.’
‘Well, I don’t know why you’ve brought it all here,’ she said rather crossly.
‘Where else would I take it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said with almost a sob. ‘I don’t know bloody anything.’ She stormed out clutching her face. I thought she was crying.
‘What’s all that about?’ I asked my stepfather, who had sat silently through the whole exchange.
‘Nothing,’ he said unhelpfully.
‘It must be something.’
‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ he said.
‘Let me be the judge of that,’ I said. ‘It’s to do with money, isn’t it?’
He looked up at me. ‘I told you, it’s nothing.’
‘Then why can’t you afford to buy her a new car?’
He was angry. Bloody furious, in fact. He stood up quickly.
‘Who told you that?’ He almost shouted at me.
‘You did,’ I said.
‘No, I bloody didn’t,’ he said, thrusting his face towards mine and bunching his fists.
‘Yes, you did. I overheard you talking to my mother.’
I thought for a moment he was going to hit me.
‘How dare you listen in to a private conversation.’
I thought of saying that I couldn’t have helped it, so loud had been their voices, but that wasn’t completely accurate. I could have chosen not to stay sitting in the kitchen, listening.
‘So why can’t you afford a new car?’ I asked him bluntly.
‘That’s none of your business,’ he replied sharply.
‘I think you’ll find it is,’ I said. ‘Anything to do with my mother is my business.’
‘No, it bloody isn’t!’ He now, in turn, stormed out of the kitchen leaving me alone.
And I thought I was meant to be the angry one.
I could hear my mother and stepfather arguing upstairs so I casually walked into their office off the hall.
My stepfather had said that they would have been able to afford a new car if it hadn’t been for the ‘ongoing fallout’ from my mother’s ‘disastrous little scheme’. What sort of scheme? And why was the fallout ongoing?
I looked down at the desk. There were two stacks of papers on each side of a standard keyboard and a computer monitor that had a moving screen-saver message, ‘KAURI HOUSE STABLES’, ran across it, over and over.
I tried to make a mental picture of the desk so that I could ensure that I left it as I found it. I suppose I had taken the decision to find out what the hell was going on as soon as I had walked into the office, but that didn’t mean I wanted my mother to know I knew.
The stacks of papers had some order to them.
The one on the far left contained bills and receipts to do with the house: electricity, bottled gas, council tax, etc. All paid by bank direct debit. I scanned through them but there was nothing out of the ordinary, although I was amazed to see how expensive it was to heat this grand old house with its ill-fitting windows. Of course, I’d never had to pay a heating bill in my life, and I hadn’t been concerned by the cost of leaving a window wide open for ventilation, not even if the outside temperature was below freezing. Perhaps the army should start installing meters in every soldier’s room and charge them for the energy used. That would teach them to keep the heat in.
The next stack was bills and receipts for the stables: power, heat, feed, maintenance, together with the salary and PAYE tax papers for the stable staff. There were also some training-fee accounts, one or two with cheques still attached and waiting to be banked. Nothing appeared out of place, certainly nothing to indicate the existence of any ‘scheme’.
The third pile was simply magazines and other publications including the blue-printed booklets of the racing calendar. Nothing unusual there.
But it was in the fourth pile that I found the smoking gun. In fact, there were two smoking guns that, together, gave the story.
The first was in a pile of bank statements. Clearly, my mother had two separate accounts, one for her training business and one for private use. The statements showed that, amongst other things, my mother was withdrawing two thousand pounds in cash every week from her private account. This, in itself, would not have been suspicious – many people in racing dealt in cash, especially if they like to gamble in ready money. But it was a second piece of paper that completed the story. It was a simple handwritten note in capital letters scribbled on a sheet torn from a wire-bound notebook. I found it folded inside a plain white envelope addressed to my mother. The message on it was bold and very much to the point:
THE PAYMENT WAS LATE. IF IT IS LATE ONE MORE TIME THEN IT WILL INCREASE TO THREE THOUSAND. IF YOU FAIL TO PAY, A CERTAIN PACKAGE WILL BE DELIVERED TO THE AUTHORITIES.
Plain and simple, it was a blackmail note.
The ‘ongoing fallout’ my stepfather had spoken about was having to pay two thousand pounds a week to a blackmailer. That worked out at over a hundred thousand pounds a year out of their post-tax income. No wonder they couldn’t afford a new BMW.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’
I jumped.
My mother was standing in the office doorway. I hadn’t heard her come downstairs. My mind must have been so engaged by what I’d been reading that I hadn’t registered that the shouting match above my head had ceased. And there was no way to hide the fact that I was holding the blackmail note.
I looked at her. She looked down at my hand and the paper it held.
‘Oh, my God!’ Her voice was little more than a whisper and her legs began to buckle.
I stepped quickly towards her but she went down so fast that I wouldn’t have been able to catch her if we had been standing right next to each other.
Fortunately she went down vertically on her collapsing legs, rather than falling straight forward or back, her head making a relatively soft landing on the carpeted floor. But she was still out cold in a dead faint.
I decided to leave her where she had fallen although I did straighten out her legs a bit. I would have been unable to lift her anyway. As it was I had a struggle to get down to my knees to place a small pillow under her head.
She started to come round, opening her eyes with a confused expression.
Then she remembered.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, trying to give her some comfort.
For the first time I could remember, my mother looked frightened. In fact, she looked scared out of her wits with wide staring eyes, and I wasn’t sure if the wetness on her brow was the result of fear or the fainting.
‘Stay there,’ I said to her. ‘I’ll get you something to drink.’
I went out into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. As I did so, I carefully folded the blackmail note back into its envelope and placed it in my pocket along with her private-account bank statement. When I went back, I found my stepfather kneeling down beside his wife, cradling her head in his hands.
‘What did you do to her?’ he shouted at me in accusation.
‘Nothing,’ I said calmly. ‘She just fainted.’
I thought about saying something flippant about lack of blood to the brain but decided against it.
‘Derek, he knows,’ my mother said from her prone position.
‘Knows what?’ he demanded, sounding alarmed.
‘Everything,’ she said.
‘He can’t!’
‘I don’t know everything,’ I said to him. ‘But I do know you’re being blackmailed.’
It was brandy, not water, that was needed to revive them both, and I had some too.
We were sitting in the drawing room, in deep chintz-covered armchairs with high sides. My mother’s face was as pale as the cream-painted walls behind her and her hands shook as she tried to drink from her glass without it chattering against her teeth.
Derek, my stepfather, sat tight-lipped on the edge of his chair knocking back Rémy Martin VSOP like it was going out of fashion.
‘So tell me,’ I said for the umpteenth time.
Again there was no reply from either of them.
‘If you won’t tell me,’ I said, ‘then I will have no choice but to report a case of blackmail to the police.’
I thought for a moment that my mother was going to faint again.
‘No,’ she did little more than mouth the word. ‘Please, no.’
‘Then tell me why not,’ I said. My voice had seemed loud and strong compared to my mother’s.
I remembered back to what my platoon colour sergeant had said at Sandhurst: ‘Command needs to be expressed in the correct tone. Half the struggle is won if your men believe you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t, and a strong decisive tone will give them that belief.’
I was now in command of the present situation whether my mother or stepfather believed it or not.
‘Because your mother would go to prison,’ Derek said slowly.
The brandy must be going to his head, I thought.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said.
‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘She would. And me too, probably, as an accessory.’
‘An accessory to what?’ I said. ‘Have you murdered someone?’
‘No.’ He almost smiled. ‘Not quite that bad.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘Tax,’ he said. ‘Evading tax.’
I looked at my mother.
The shaking had spread from her hands to much of her body, and she was crying as openly as I had never seen her. She certainly didn’t look like the woman the entire village was proud of. And she was a shadow of the person who must have collected the National Woman of the Year Award on television just a month before. She suddenly looked much older than her sixty-one years.
‘So what are we going to do about it?’ I said in my voice-of-command.
‘What do you mean?’ Derek asked.
‘Well, you can’t go on paying two thousand pounds a week, now can you?’
He looked up at me in surprise.
‘I saw the bank statements,’ I said.
He sighed. ‘It’s not just the money. We might cope if it was just the money.’
‘What else?’ I asked him.
His shoulders slumped. ‘The horses.’
‘What about the horses?’
‘No,’ my mother said but it was barely a whisper.
‘What about the horses?’ I asked again forcefully.
He said nothing.
‘Have the horses had to lose to order?’ I asked into the silence.
He gulped and looked down, but his head nodded.
‘Is that what happened to Pharmacist?’ I asked.
He nodded again. My mother, meanwhile, now had her eyes firmly closed as if no one could see her if she couldn’t see them. The shaking had abated but she rocked gently back and forth in the chair.
‘How do you get the orders?’ I asked Derek.
‘On the telephone,’ he said.
There were so many questions: how, what, when and, in particular, who?
My mother and stepfather knew the answers to most of them but, sadly, not the last, of that they were absolutely certain.
I refilled their brandy glasses and started the inquisition.
‘How did you get into this mess?’ I asked.
Neither of them said anything. My mother had shrunk down into her chair as if trying to make herself even more invisible while Derek just drank heavily from his glass, hiding behind the cut crystal.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you want me to help you then you will have to tell me what’s been going on.’
There was a long pause.
‘I don’t want your help,’ my mother said quietly. ‘I want you to go away and leave us alone.’
‘But I’m sure we can sort out the problem,’ I said in a more comforting manner.
‘I can sort it out myself,’ she said.
‘How?’ I asked.
There was another long pause.
‘I’ve decided to retire,’ she said.
My stepfather and I sat there looking at her.
‘But you can’t retire,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ she asked with more determination. She almost sounded like her old self.
‘How would we pay?’ he said in exasperation. I thought he was now about to cry.
My mother shrank back into her chair.
‘The only solution is to find out who is doing this and stop them,’ I said. ‘And for that I need you to answer my questions.’
‘No police,’ my mother said.
It was my turn to pause.
‘But we might need the police to find the blackmailer.’
‘No,’ she almost shouted. ‘No police.’
‘So tell me about this tax business,’ I said, trying to make light of it.
‘No,’ she shouted again. ‘No one must know.’
She was desperate.
‘I can’t help you if I don’t know,’ I said with a degree of frustration.
‘I don’t want your help,’ my mother said again.
‘Josephine, my dear,’ Derek said. ‘We do need help from someone.’
Another long pause.
‘I don’t want to go to prison.’ She was crying again.
I suddenly felt sorry for her.
It wasn’t an emotion with which I was very familiar. I had, in fact, spent most of my life wanting to get even with her; getting my own back for hurts done to me, whether real or imagined; resenting her lack of motherly love and comfort. Perhaps I was now older and more mature. Blood, they say, is always thicker than water. They must be right.
I went over to her chair and sat on the arm, stroking her shoulder and speaking kindly to her for almost the first time in my life.
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘they won’t send you to prison.’
‘Yes, they will,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘He says so.’
‘The blackmailer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t take his word for it,’ I said.
‘But …’ she tailed off.
‘Why don’t you allow me to give you a second opinion?’ I said to her calmly.
‘Because you’ll tell the police.’
‘No, I won’t,’ I said. But not doing so might make me an accessory as well.
‘Do you promise?’ she asked.
What could I say? ‘Of course, I promise.’
I hoped so much that it was a promise I would be able to keep.
Gradually, with plenty of cajoling and the rest of the bottle of Rémy Martin, I managed to piece together most of the sorry story. And it wasn’t good. My mother might indeed go to prison if the police found out. She would almost certainly be convicted of tax evasion. And she would undoubtedly lose her reputation, her home and her business, even if she did manage to retain her liberty.
My mother’s ‘disastrous little scheme’ had, it seemed, been the brainchild of a dodgy young accountant she had met at a party about five years previously. He ha
d convinced her that she should register her training business offshore, in particular, in Gibraltar. Then she would enjoy the tax-free status that such a registration would bring.
Somehow he had managed to assure her that, even though she could go on adding the Value Added Tax amount to the owners’ accounts, she was no longer under any obligation to pass on the money to the taxman.
Now, racehorse training fees are not cheap, about the same as sending a teenage child to boarding school, and my mother had seventy-two boxes that were always filled to overflowing. She was in demand, and those in demand could charge premium prices. The tax, between fifteen and twenty per cent of the fees, must have run into several hundred thousand pounds a year.
‘But didn’t you think it was a bit suspicious?’ I asked her in disbelief.
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Roderick told me it was all above board and legal. He even showed me documents that proved it was all right.’
Roderick, it transpired, had been the young accountant.
‘Do you still have these documents?’
‘No. Roderick kept them.’
I bet he did.
‘And Roderick said that the owners wouldn’t be out of pocket because all racehorse owners can claim back the VAT from the government.’
So it was the government she was stealing from. She wasn’t paying the tax in as she should, yet, at the same time, the owners were claiming it back. What a mess.
‘But didn’t you think it was too good to be true?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Roderick said that everyone would soon be doing it and I would lose out if I didn’t get started quickly.’
Roderick sounded like quite a smooth operator.
‘Which firm does Roderick work for?’ I asked.
‘He didn’t work for a firm, he was self-employed,’ my mother said. ‘He’d only recently qualified at university and hadn’t joined a firm. We were lucky to find someone who was so cheap.’
I could hardly believe my ears.
‘What happened to John Milton?’ I asked her. John Milton had been my mother’s accountant for as long as I could remember.
‘He retired,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t like the young woman who took over at his office. Far too brusque. That’s why I was so pleased to have met Roderick.’
I could imagine that any accountant who didn’t do exactly as my mother demanded would be thought of by her as brusque at the very least.