by Dick Francis
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I can’t involve the police.’
‘Why on earth not?’ she asked, rather self-righteously.
‘I just can’t,’ I said. ‘I promised my young soldier I wouldn’t talk to the police.’
‘But why not?’ she asked again, imploring me to answer.
I looked at her. ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘But I can’t tell you why.’ Even to my ears, I sounded melodramatic.
‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’ She was clearly annoyed. ‘I think I’d better take you home now.’
‘Maybe that would be best,’ I said.
My chances of any future bonuses had obviously diminished somewhat.
I passed the afternoon using my mother’s computer in her office and its internet connection. She probably wouldn’t have liked it but, as she was out when Isabella had dropped me back, I hadn’t asked.
I did have my own computer, a laptop. It had been in one of the blue holdalls I’d retrieved from Aldershot, but my mother hadn’t moved into the wireless age yet, so it was easier to use her old desktop model and with its internet cable plugged straight into the telephone point in the wall.
I looked up reports of inquests using the online service of the Oxford Mail. There were masses of them, hundreds and hundreds, even thousands.
I searched for an inquest with the name Roderick Ward and there it was, reported briefly on by the paper on Wednesday 15 July. But it had been only the opening and adjournment of the inquest immediately after the accident.
It would appear that the full inquest was yet to be heard. However, the short report did contain one interesting piece of information that the Newbury Weekly News had omitted. According to the Oxford Mail website, Roderick Ward’s body had been formally identified at the short hearing by his sister, a Mrs Stella Beecher, also from Oxford.
Perhaps Mr Roderick Ward really was dead, after all.
7
At nine o’clock sharp on Tuesday evening my mother received another demand from the blackmailer.
The three residents of Kauri House were suffering through another unhappy dinner round the kitchen table when the telephone rang. Both my mother and stepfather jumped, and then they looked at each other.
‘Nine o’clock,’ my stepfather said. ‘He always calls at exactly nine o’clock.’
The phone continued to ring. Neither of them seemed very keen to answer it so I stood up and started to move towards it.
‘No,’ my mother screamed, leaping to her feet. ‘I’ll get it.’
She pushed past me and grabbed the receiver.
‘Hello,’ she said tentatively into the phone. ‘Yes, this is Mrs Kauri.’
I was standing right next to her and I tried to hear what the person at the other end was saying, but he or she was speaking too softly.
My mother listened for less than a minute.
‘Yes. I understand,’ my mother said finally. She placed the phone back in its cradle. ‘Scientific at Newbury, on Saturday.’
‘To lose?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘In the Game Spirit Steeplechase.’
She walked like a zombie back to her chair and sat down heavily.
I picked up the phone and dialled 1471, the code to find the number of the last caller.
‘Sorry,’ said a computerized female voice, ‘the caller withheld their number.’
I hadn’t expected anything else but it had been worth a try. I wondered if the phone company might be able to give me the number but that, I was sure, would involve explaining why I needed it. I also thought it highly unlikely that the blackmailer had been using his own phone or a number that was traceable back to him.
‘What chance would you expect Scientific to have anyway?’ I asked.
‘Fairly good,’ she said. ‘He’s really only a novice and this race is a considerable step up in class, but I think he’s ready for it.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘But it’s not bloody fair on the horse. If I make him ill again it may ruin him for ever. He’ll always associate racing with being ill.’
‘Would he really remember?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Lots of my good chasers over the years have been hopeless at home only to run like the wind on a racecourse because they liked it there. One I had years ago, a chestnut called Butterfield, he only ran well at Sandown.’ She smiled remembering. ‘Old boy loved Sandown. I thought it was to do with right-handed tracks but he wouldn’t go at Kempton. It had to be Sandown. He definitely remembered.’
I could see a glimpse of why my mother was such a good trainer. She adored her horses and she spoke of Butterfield as an individual, and with real affection.
‘But Scientific is not the odds-on sure thing that Pharmacist was meant to be at Cheltenham last week?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s another very good chaser in the race, Sovereign Owner. He’ll probably start favourite, although I really think we could beat him, especially if it rains a bit more before Saturday. And Newark Hall may run in the race as well. He’s one of Ewen’s and he should have a reasonable chance.’
‘Ewen?’ I asked.
‘Ewen Yorke,’ she said. ‘Trains in the village. Has some really good horses this year. The “up and coming” young opposition.’
From her tone, I concluded that Ewen Yorke was more of a threat to her position as ‘top dog’ in Lambourn than she was happy with.
‘So Scientific is far from a dead cert?’ I said.
‘He should win,’ she stressed again. ‘Unless he crossfires.’
‘Crossfires?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s when a horse canters and leads with a different leg in front than he does at the rear,’ she explained.
‘OK,’ I said slowly, none the wiser. ‘And does Scientific do that?’
‘Sometimes. Unusually, he tends to canter between his walk and gallop,’ she said. ‘And, if he crossfires, he can cut into himself, hitting his front leg with his hind hoof. But he hasn’t done it recently. Not for ages.’
‘OK,’ I said again. ‘So, even supposing that Scientific doesn’t crossfire, no one would be vastly surprised if he didn’t win.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It would be disappointing, but no surprise.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘after that call from our friend just now, all we have to do is ensure he doesn’t win on Saturday without making him so ill he gives up on the idea of racing altogether.’
She stared at me. ‘But how?’
‘I can think of a number of ways,’ I said. ‘How about if he doesn’t run in the first place? You could simply not declare him and tell everyone he was lame or something.’
‘He said the horse had to run,’ she replied gloomily.
Time to move on to plan B.
‘Well how about a bit of over-training on Thursday or Friday? Give him too much of a gallop so he’s worn out on Saturday.’
‘But everyone would know,’ she said.
‘Would they really?’ I thought she was being overly worried.
‘Oh, yes, they would,’ she said. ‘There are always people watching the horses work. Some of them are from the media, but most are spotters for the bookmaking firms. They know every horse in Lambourn by sight and they would see all too easily if I gave Scientific anything more than a gentle pipe-opener on Thursday or Friday.’
Was there a plan C?
‘Can’t you make his saddle slip or something?’ I asked.
‘The girths will be tightened by the assistant starter just before the race starts.’
‘But can’t you go down to the start and do it yourself and just leave them loose?’ Was I clutching at straws?
‘But the jockey would fall off,’ she said.
‘At least that would stop him winning,’ I said with a smile.
‘But he might be injured.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t do that.’
Plan D?
‘How about if you cut through the reins just enough so that they break during the race
? If the jockey can’t steer then he surely can’t win.’
‘Tell that to Fred Winter,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Fred Winter,’ she repeated. ‘He won the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris on Mandarin with no steering, way back in the early sixties. The bit broke, which meant he had no brakes either. He used his legs, pressing on the sides of the horse to keep it on the figure-of-eight course. It was an absolutely amazing piece of riding.’
‘And will this Fred Winter be the jockey on Scientific on Saturday?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘He died years ago.’
‘Well, in that case, don’t you think it’s a good idea?’
‘What?’
‘To make the reins break.’ God, this was hard work.
‘But …’
‘But, what?’ I asked.
‘I’d be the laughing stock,’ she said miserably. ‘Horses from Kauri House Stables don’t go to the races with substandard tack.’
‘Would you rather be laughed at or arrested for tax evasion?’
It was a cruel thing to say but it did bring the problems she faced into relative order.
‘Thomas is right, dear,’ my stepfather said, somewhat belatedly entering the conversation.
‘So, it’s agreed, then,’ I said. ‘We won’t subject Scientific to the green-potato-peel treatment but we will try to arrange for his reins to break during the race. And we take our chances.’
‘I suppose so,’ my mother said reluctantly.
‘Right,’ I said positively. ‘That’s the first decision made.’
My mother looked up at me. ‘And what other decisions do you have in mind?’
‘Nothing specific as yet,’ I said. ‘But I do have some questions.’
She looked back at me with doleful eyes. Why did I think she knew the questions wouldn’t be welcome?
‘Firstly,’ I said, ‘when is your next Value Added Tax return due?’
‘I told you, I don’t pay VAT,’ my mother said.
‘But the stables must have a VAT registration for the other bills like the horses’ feed, the purchase of tack, and all sorts of other stuff. Don’t the race entries attract VAT?’
‘Roderick cancelled our registration,’ she said.
If Roderick hadn’t already been dead, I’d have wrung his bloody neck.
‘How about the other tax returns?’ I said. ‘Your personal one and the training business return. When are they due?’
‘Roderick dealt with all that.’
‘But who has been doing it since Roderick died?’ I asked in desperation.
‘No one,’ she said. ‘But I did manage to do the PAYE return last month on my own.’
At least that was something. PAYE, or pay as you earn, was the way most UK workers paid their income tax. The tax amount was deducted from their salaries by their employer and paid directly to the Treasury. The non-arrival of the PAYE money was usually the first indication to the taxman that a company was in deep financial trouble. It would have rung serious alarm bells at the tax office, and representatives of HM Revenue and Customs would have been hammering on the kitchen door long before now.
‘Where do you keep your tax papers?’ I asked.
‘Roderick had them.’
‘But you must have copies of your tax returns,’ I implored.
‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘They might be in one of the filing cabinets in the office.’
I was amazed that anyone who was so brilliant at the organization and training of seventy-two racehorses, with all the decisions and red tape that must be involved to satisfy the Rules of Racing, could be so completely hopeless when it came to anything financial.
‘Don’t you have a secretary?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Derek and I do all the paperwork between us.’
Or not, I thought, as the case may be.
I was pretty certain that my mother’s individual self-assessment tax return, as for every other self-employed person in the United Kingdom, should have been filed with the tax office by midnight on 31 January at the very latest, along with the payment of any income tax due.
I looked up at the calendar on the wall above her desk. It was already 9 February. There were no exceptions to the deadline so she would have already incurred a penalty for late filing, to say nothing of the interest for late payment.
I’d checked the HMRC website on the internet. It confirmed that she would have notched up an automatic £100 late-filing penalty plus interest on the overdue tax. It also said that she had until the end of February before a five per cent surcharge of the tax due was added, on top of the interest.
Very soon now, the Revenue was probably going to start asking difficult questions about my mother’s accounts. The time left to sort out the mess was unknown, but it had to be short. Maybe it was already too late and the Revenue would be at her door in the morning.
I wondered about my own tax affairs.
As an employee, I paid my tax as I earned it, which meant I didn’t need to complete an annual tax return. The army deducted my tax and National Insurance before it paid the remainder of my salary into my bank account. Mostly they took off my board and lodging costs too, but there hadn’t been any of those for a while. Even the army couldn’t charge me to stay in a National Health hospital.
Sometime soon I should be receiving a tax-free lump sum of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme, although how they could put a value on the loss of a lower leg and foot is anyone’s guess. The major from the MOD had taken away my completed AFCS form with a promise that it would be dealt with promptly. That had been nearly three weeks ago now but I had long ago learned that anything less than six months was ‘promptly’ as far as army finances were concerned.
Perhaps it might help to keep the taxman’s handcuffs from my mother’s wrists. But would it be enough? And would it arrive in time?
*
I searched through my mother’s filing cabinets and, eventually, I found her previous year’s tax return filed under R, for Roderick. Where else?
The tax return was a piece of art. It clearly showed that my mother had only minimal personal income, well below that which would have incurred any tax to be paid. It stated that her monthly income was just two hundred pounds from her business, mere pocket money.
Perhaps the Revenue might not be knocking at her door in the morning after all, even if they could find it.
Possibly designed to confuse them, the return was not in the name of Mrs Josephine Kauri and her address was not recorded as Kauri House Stables. It wasn’t even in Lambourn but at 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford. However, I did recognize the signature as being that of my mother, in her familiar curly handwriting.
Only the name was unfamiliar. She had signed the form Jane Philips, her real, legal, married name.
In the same filing cabinet, I also found a Kauri House Stables corporate tax return for the previous year. It was dated May, so at least we had some breathing space before the next one was due.
I looked through it. Roderick had worked his magic here as well.
How, I wondered, did my mother afford to pay two thousand pounds a week in blackmail demands if, as according to the tax returns, her personal income was less than two and a half thousand a year, and her business made such a small profit that it paid tax only in three figures, in spite of all the extras paid by the horse owners in non-existent VAT.
But, of course, I could find no records of the profits made by the company called Kauri House Stables (Gibraltar). In fact, there was no reference to any such entity anywhere in the R for Roderick drawer of the filing cabinet, or anywhere else for that matter. However, I did find one interesting sheet of paper nestling amongst the tax returns. It was a letter from an investment fund manager welcoming my mother and stepfather into the select group of individuals invited to invest in his fund. The letter was dated three years previously and had been signed by a Mr Anthony Cigar of Rock
Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd.
Mr Cigar hadn’t actually used the term ‘hedge fund’ but it was quite clear from his letter, and from the attached fee schedule, that a hedge fund was what he’d managed.
I sat at my mother’s desk and looked up Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd on the internet. I typed the name into Google and then clicked on the bank’s own web address. The computer came back with the answer that the website was under construction and was unavailable to be displayed.
I went back to the Google page and clicked on the site for the Gibraltar Chronicle, one of the references that had mentioned the Rock Bank. It reported that, back in September, Parkin & Cleeve Ltd, a UK-based firm of liquidators, had unsuccessfully filed a suit in the High Court in London against the individual directors of Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd in an attempt to recover money on behalf of several of their clients. The directors were not named by the report and the Chronicle had been unable to obtain a response from any representative of the bank.
It didn’t bode well for the recovery of my mother’s million dollars.
I yawned and looked at my watch. It was ten to midnight and my mother and Derek had long before gone up to bed, and it was also well past my bedtime.
I flicked off the light in the office and went up the stairs.
My first day as ‘sleuth-in-residence’ at Kauri House Stables hadn’t gone all my own way. I hoped for better news in the morning.
*
When I came down to breakfast at eight o’clock I found my stepfather sitting silently staring at a single brown envelope, which was lying on the bleached-pine kitchen table with ON HER MAJESTY’S SERVICE in bold type along the top.
‘Have you opened it?’ I asked him.
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘It’s addressed to your mother.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked.