by Dick Francis
‘And what is Roderick’s surname?’
‘His name was Ward,’ she said.
‘Was?’
‘He’s dead,’ my mother said with a sigh. ‘He was in a car accident. About six months ago.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean, am I sure?’
‘Are you sure that he’s dead and hasn’t just run away?’ I said. ‘Are you certain he’s not the blackmailer?’
‘Thomas,’ she said, ‘don’t be ridiculous. The car crash was reported in the local paper. Of course I’m sure he’s dead.’
I felt like asking her if she had actually seen Roderick Ward’s lifeless body. In Afghanistan there were no confirmed Taliban ‘kills’ without the corpse, or at least a human head, to prove it.
‘So how long did the little scheme of yours run? When did you stop paying the taxman?’
‘Nearly four years ago,’ my mother said in a whimper.
‘And when did you start paying again?’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘Are you paying the VAT now?’ I asked, dreading the answer.
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘How could I start paying again without them asking questions?’
How, I wondered, had she stopped paying without them asking? Surely it could only be a matter of time before she was investigated. Four years of non-payment of VAT must add up to nearly a million pounds in unpaid tax. She should indeed be worried about going to prison.
‘Who is doing your accounts now?’ I asked. ‘Since this Roderick Ward was killed.’
‘No one,’ she said. ‘I was frightened of getting anyone.’
With good reason, I thought.
‘Can’t you pay the tax now?’ I said. ‘If you pay everything you owe and explain that you were misled by your accountant, I’m sure that it would prevent you being sent to prison.’
My mother began to cry again.
‘We haven’t got the money to pay the taxman,’ Derek said gloomily.
‘But what happened to all of the extra you collected?’ I asked.
‘It’s all gone,’ he said.
‘It can’t have all gone,’ I said. ‘It must be close to a million pounds.’
‘More,’ he said.
‘So where did it all go?’
‘We spent a lot of it,’ he said. ‘In the beginning, mostly on holidays. And Roderick had some of it, of course.’
Of course.
‘And the rest?’
‘Some has gone to the blackmailer.’ He sounded tired, and resigned. ‘I don’t honestly know where it went. We’ve only got about fifty thousand left in the bank.’
That was a start.
‘So how much are the house and stables worth?’ I asked.
My mother looked horrified.
‘Mother, dear,’ I said, trying to be kind but firm. ‘If I’m going to keep you out of prison then we have to find a way to pay the tax.’
‘But you promised me you wouldn’t tell the police,’ she whined.
‘I won’t,’ I replied. ‘But if you really think the taxman won’t find out eventually, then you’re wrong. The tax office is bound to do a check sometime. And it will be much better for you if we go and tell them before they uncover it for themselves.’
‘Oh, God.’
I said nothing, allowing the awful truth to sink in. She must have known, as I did, that the tax inspectors at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had little compassion for those they discovered were defrauding the system. The only way to win any friends amongst them was to make a clean breast of things and pay back the money, and before they demanded it.
‘Not if I retire,’ she said suddenly. ‘The taxman won’t ever know if I simply retire.’
‘But Josephine,’ my stepfather said, ‘we’ve already discussed that. How would we pay him if you retired?’
I, meanwhile, wasn’t so sure that her retirement wouldn’t in fact be the best course of action. At least, then she wouldn’t be perpetuating the fraud, as she was now, and selling the property might raise the necessary sum. I certainly didn’t share my mother’s confidence that her retirement would guarantee the taxman wouldn’t find out. It might even attract the very attention she was trying to avoid.
Overall, it was quite a mess, and I couldn’t readily see a way out of it.
My mother and stepfather went off to bed at nine o’clock, tired and emotional from too much brandy and with the awful realization that their secret was out, and their way of life was in for radical change – and probably for the worse.
I, too, went up to my bedroom, but I didn’t go to sleep.
I carefully eased my stump out of the prosthetic leg. It was not a very easy task as I had been overdoing the walking and my leg was sore, the flesh below my knee being swollen by excess fluid. If I wasn’t more careful I wouldn’t be able to get the damn thing back on again in the morning.
I raised the stump by placing it on a pillow to allow gravity to assist in bringing down the fluid build-up, and then I lay back flat to think.
There was little doubt that my mother and stepfather were up to their necks in real trouble, and they were sinking deeper into the mire with every day that passed.
The solution for them was simple, at least in theory: raise the money, pay it to the taxman, submit a retrospective tax return, report the blackmail to the police, and then pray for forgiveness.
The blackmailer would no longer have a hold over them and maybe the police might even find him and recover some of their money, but I wouldn’t bet my shirt on it.
So the first thing to be done was to raise more than a million pounds to hand over to the Revenue.
It was easier said than done. Perhaps I could rob a bank.
Reluctantly, my mother and stepfather had agreed that the house and stables, even in the recent depressed property market, could fetch about two and a half million pounds, if they were lucky. But there was a catch. The house was heavily mortgaged, and the stables had been used as collateral for a bank loan to the training business.
I thought back to the brief conversation I’d had with my stepfather after my mother had gone upstairs.
‘So how much free capital is there altogether?’ I’d asked him.
‘About five hundred thousand.’
I was surprised that it was so little. ‘But surely the training business has been earning good money for years.’
‘It’s not as lucrative as you might think, and your mother has always used any profits to build more stables.’
‘So why is there so little free capital value in the property?’
‘Roderick advised us to increase our borrowing,’ he’d said. ‘He believed that capital tied up in property wasn’t doing anything useful. He told us that, as it was, our capital wasn’t working properly for us.’
‘So what did Roderick want you to do with it instead?’
‘Buy into an investment fund he was very keen on.’
I again hadn’t really wanted to believe my ears.
‘And did you?’ I’d asked him.
‘Oh, yes,’ he’d said. ‘We took out another mortgage and invested it in the fund.’
‘So that money is still safe?’ I had asked with renewed hope.
‘Unfortunately, that particular investment fund didn’t do too well in the recession.’
Why was I not surprised?
‘How not too well?’ I’d asked him.
‘Not well at all, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘In fact the fund went into bankruptcy last year.’
‘But surely you were covered by some kind of government bailout protection insurance?’
‘Sadly not,’ he’d said. ‘It was some sort of offshore fund.’
‘A hedge fund?’
‘Yes, that’s it. I knew it sounded like something to do with gardens.’
I simply couldn’t believe it. I’d been stunned by his naïvety. And it was of no comfort to know that hedge funds had been so named beca
use they had initially been designed to ‘hedge’ against fluctuations in overall stock prices. The original intention of reducing risks had transformed, over time, into high-risk strategies, capable of returning huge profits when things went well, but also huge losses if they didn’t. Recent unexpected declines in the world’s equity markets, coupled with banks suddenly calling in their loans, had left offshore tax shelters awash with hedge-fund managers in search of new jobs.
‘But didn’t you take any advice? From an independent financial adviser or something?’
‘Roderick said it wasn’t necessary.’
Roderick would. Mr Roderick Ward had obviously spotted my complacent mother and her careless husband coming from a long way off.
‘But didn’t you ever think that Roderick might have been wrong?’
‘No,’ he’d said, almost surprised by the question. ‘Roderick showed us a brochure about how well the fund had done. It was all very exciting.’
‘And is there any money left?’
‘I had a letter that said they were trying to recover some of the funds and they would let investors know if they succeeded.’
I took that to mean ‘no’, there was nothing left.
‘How much did you invest in this hedge fund?’ I’d asked him, dreading his reply.
‘There was a minimum amount we had to invest to be able to join.’ He had sounded almost proud of the fact that they had been allowed into the club. Like being pleased to have won tickets for the maiden voyage of the Titanic.
I had stood silently in front of him, blocking his route away, waiting for the answer. He hadn’t wanted to tell me but he could see that I wasn’t going to move until he did.
‘It was a million US dollars.’
More than six hundred thousand pounds at the prevailing rate. I suppose it could have been worse, but not much. At least there was some capital left in the real estate, although not enough.
‘What about other investments?’
‘I’ve got a few ISAs,’ he’d said.
Individual Savings Accounts. Ironically, they were designed for tax-free saving but there was a limit on investment and they could amount to only a few thousand pounds per year. They would help, but alone they were not the solution.
I wondered if the training business itself had any value. It would have if my mother was still the trainer but I doubted that anyone buying the stables would pay much for ‘the business’. I had spent my childhood, at my mother’s knee, being amazed how contrary racehorse owners could be.
Some of them behaved just like the owners of football clubs, firing the team manager because their team of no-hopers wasn’t winning, when the solution would have been to buy better, and more expensive, players in the first place. A cheap, slow horse is just like a cheap two-left-footed footballer – neither will be any good however well they’re trained.
There is no telling if the owners would stay or take their horses elsewhere. The latter would be the more likely, unless the person who took over the training was of the same standing as Josephine Kauri, and who could that be who didn’t already have a stable full of their own charges?
I had to assume that the business had no intrinsic value other than the real estate in which it operated, plus a bit extra for the tack and the rest of the stable kit.
I lay on my bed and did some mental adding-up: the house and stables might raise half a million; the business might just fetch fifty thousand; and there was another fifty thousand in the bank. Add the ISAs and a few pieces of antique furniture and we were probably still short by more than four hundred thousand.
And my mother and Derek had to live somewhere. Where would they go and what could they earn if Kauri House Stables was sold? My mother was hardly going to find work as a cleaner, especially in Lambourn. She would have rather gone to prison.
But going to prison wasn’t an ‘either/or’ solution anyway. If she was sent down she would still have to pay the tax, and the penalties.
Over the years I had saved regularly from my army pay and had accumulated quite a reasonable nest egg that I had planned to use sometime as a down-payment on a house. And I had invested it in a far more secure manner than my parent so I could be pretty sure of still having about sixty thousand to my name.
I wondered if the Revenue would take instalments on the never-never.
The only other solution I came up with was to approach the circumstances as if I had been in command of my platoon in the middle of Afghanistan, planning a Combat Estimate for an operation against the Taliban:
Problem: Enemy in control of objective (tax papers and money).
Mission: Neutralize enemy and retake objective.
Situation: Enemy forces – number, identity and location all unknown. Own forces – self only, no reinforcements available.
Weapons: As required and/or as available.
Execution: Initially find and interrogate Roderick Ward or, if really dead, his known associates. Follow up on blackmail notes and telephone messages to determine source.
Tactics: Absolute stealth, no local authorities to be alerted, enemy to be kept unaware of operation until final strike
Timings: Task to be completed asap, and before exposure by local authorities – their timescale unknown.
H-hour: Operation start time: right now.
6
All I could see of him were his eyes, his cold, black eyes that stared at me from beneath his turban. He showed no emotion but simply raised a rusty Kalashnikov to his shoulder. I fired at him but he continued to lift the gun. I fired at him again, over and over, but without any visible effects. I was desperate. I emptied my complete magazine into him but still he swung the barrel of the AK-47 round towards me, lining up the sights with my head. A smile showed in his eyes and I began to scream.
I woke with a start, my heart pumping madly and with sweat all over my body.
‘Thomas! Thomas!’ someone was shouting, and there was banging on my bedroom door.
‘Yes,’ I called back into the darkness. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You were screaming.’ It was my mother. She was outside my room on the landing.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It was just a bad dream.’
‘Goodnight, then,’ she called suddenly, and I could hear her footfalls as she moved away.
‘Goodnight,’ I called back, too quietly and too late.
I suppose it was too much to expect my mother to change the habits of a lifetime but it would have been nice if she had asked me how I was, or if I needed anything, or at least if she could come in to my room to cool my sweating brow, or anything.
I laid my head back onto the pillow.
I could still remember the dream so clearly. In the last couple of months, I had started to have them fairly regularly about the war. They were always a jumble of memories of real incidents coupled with the imagination of my subconscious brain, unalike in so far as they were of different events but all with a common thread – they all ended with me in panic and utter terror. I was always more terrified by the dreams than I remember ever having been in reality.
Except, of course, at the roadside after the IED.
I could remember all too vividly the terrible fear and the awful dread of dying I had experienced as Sergeant O’Leary and I had waited for the casevac helicopter. If I closed my eyes and concentrated I could, even now, see the faces of my platoon as we had passed those ten or fifteen minutes – minutes that had felt like endless hours. I could still remember the look of shock in the face of the platoon’s newest arrival, a young eighteen-year-old replacement for a previously wounded comrade. It had been his first sight of real war, and the horror it can do to the frail human body. And I could also recall the mixture of anxiety and relief in the faces of those with more experience: their anxiety for me, and their almost overwhelming relief that it wasn’t them lying there with no right foot, their lifeblood draining away into the sand.
I reached over and turned on the light. My bedside clock show
ed me that it was two thirty in the morning.
I must have been making quite a lot of noise for it to have woken my mother at the other end of the house. That was assuming that she had actually been sleeping and not lying awake contemplating her own troubles.
I sat up on the side of the bed. I needed to pee, but it was not as simple as it sounded. The bathroom was three doors away and that was too far to ‘heel-and-toe’, or to hop.
I now wished I’d accepted the hospital’s offer of crutches.
Instead, I went through the whole wretched rigmarole of attaching my false foot and ankle just in order to go to the loo. How I longed for the days of springing out of bed ready and able to complete a five-mile run before breakfast, or to fight off a Taliban early-morning attack.
Once or twice I had done just that, half asleep and forgetting that I was ‘sans foot’. But I had soon been reminded when I’d crashed to the floor. On one occasion I’d done myself a real mischief, opening up the surgical wound on my stump as well as splitting the back of my head on a hospital bedside locker. My surgeon had not been amused.
I made it without upset to the bathroom along the landing and gratefully relieved myself. I caught a glimpse of my face in the shaving mirror as I clumsily turned round in the enclosed space.
‘What do you want from life?’ I asked my image.
‘I don’t know,’ it answered.
What I really wanted I knew, in my heart, I couldn’t have. Flying an aeroplane with tin legs, even a Spitfire, was a completely different ball game to commanding an infantry platoon. The very word ‘infantry’ implied a foot soldier. I suppose I could ask for a transfer to a tank regiment but, even then, the ‘tankies’ became foot soldiers if and when their carriage lost a track. I could hardly say, ‘Sorry, chaps, you’ll have to carry on fighting without me,’ as I sat there with my false leg waiting for a lift, now could I?
So what were the reasons I had so enjoyed being an infantry platoon commander? And could I find the same things elsewhere?
I went back to my room, and back to bed, leaving my prosthesis standing alone by the bedroom wall as if on sentry duty.