Front Runner

by Felix Francis

  “What’s the limit for?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s something to do with residency and tax, but I leave all that to Derrick. The British government has just changed the rules and I think it’s now better for us. We used to be able to stay in England for only ninety days per year, but in the future we can stay one hundred and twenty. Something like that.”

  I chose the chicken liver pâté, which was spectacular, and then the Jamaican curried shrimp, which was hot as hell but delicious.

  “I love their crab cakes,” Gay said. “They make them fresh from local crab caught right here in Morgan’s Harbour.”

  “Is it named for the pirate Captain Henry Morgan?” I asked. “As in the rum?”

  “Probably,” she said. “But I suspect it’s more for the American tourists than because he ever came here.”

  We laughed.

  I liked Gay Smith.

  —

  HENRI AND I were offered a lift back to the Coral Stone Club from the restaurant with the Governor and his wife in their official limousine.

  “Are you sure it’s allowed?” I asked.

  “Positive,” Peter said. “But one of you will have to sit in the front. Neither Annabel nor I are allowed to. Protocol. Strange, I know, but there you have it.”

  I sat up front with the driver, a Cayman Islands policeman in uniform, while Henri was between the Darwins in the back.

  “Do you fancy a nightcap, Jeff?” Peter asked during the journey. “I seem not to have spoken to you much all evening.”

  I turned my head, receiving a nod of agreement from Henri.

  “That would be lovely,” I said.

  “Take us to Government House, please, Christopher,” Peter said to the driver.

  The driver did as he was asked and he soon stopped the car under the canopy in front of the Governor’s residence. He was the first out of the car, opening the rear door for Peter and standing smartly at attention as the Governor stood up.

  “Christopher, here, will wait and take you home,” Peter said.

  “I’m sure we could get a taxi,” Henri said.

  “We could even walk,” I said. “It’s less than half a mile.”

  “I will wait for you, sir,” the driver said firmly, putting a stop to our shilly-shallying.

  “Thank you,” I said to him. “We won’t be long.”

  “Take your time, sir,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

  Peter and Annabel went into the house and Henri and I followed.

  “Seems like a nice chap,” I said to Peter, indicating the driver over my shoulder.

  “All the police here are,” he said. “They mostly have a good relationship with the community.”

  “I’m told there’s not much crime in the islands.”

  He sighed. “There’s a lot more than I’d like,” he said. “Opportunist burglary is the real menace, but we’ve also had a minor drug war going on recently between some rival gangs. We like to think we’re clear of that sort of thing, but we’re not.”

  How about attempted murder, I thought.

  Henri and Annabel had a brandy each, while Peter and I chatted amicably about racing over a couple of glasses of port.

  “I see that Duncan Johnson trained another King George winner,” Peter said. “He seems to have a knack of winning the big races.”

  “Yes, he does have a remarkable record.” I’d watched the race on my laptop. Bill McKenzie had finished a creditable fourth. “Dave Swinton would have probably ridden the winner if he’d still been with us. He rode the horse last time out, when it won at Haydock in November.”

  “His death is a huge loss to the sport,” Peter said. “Personally, I am extremely saddened by it. He was so exciting to watch, even when he rode a raw novice over hurdles. He seemed to have a sensitivity for the horses unlike any other jockey. He could easily have gone on to be the champion for many more years, to become one of the super-greats.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  But did I really?

  For me, Dave’s superhero reputation had been tarnished somewhat by his greed in demanding extra payments from the owners and trainers and then his nondisclosure of such payments to the tax man, while maintaining the pathetic excuse that the payments were merely gifts.

  Not that he deserved to be murdered for it.

  I wondered if his almost godlike standing with the racing public might take a hit when all the sordid details came out at his inquest, or at the trial of Leslie Morris and son, as they surely would. But I wasn’t about to burst Peter Darwin’s bubble of admiration just yet.

  Henri and I finished our drinks and departed, arriving back at our apartment in the back of the Governor’s official car, albeit without the Union Jack flying from its pole on the hood, as had been the case earlier.

  “Would Your Excellency like to come to bed with me for some rumpy-pumpy?” Henri said in an ultraposh voice as we went in.

  “I may not be that excellency tonight,” I said with a nervous laugh. “Not after all that booze.”

  “Let me be the judge of that,” she giggled.

  A little while later, she didn’t complain.

  —

  I WOKE AGAIN in the middle of the night, the bedside clock showing me it was three-thirty.

  It was unlike me to suffer so much from jet lag and I wondered if the hyperbaric treatment was somehow to blame.

  Or maybe it was just that my inquisitive mind was running on overdrive.

  Something that Gay Smith had said over dinner had struck a chord.

  I gently eased myself out of bed and went into one of the other bedrooms and closed the door.

  I used my cell to call Faye and Quentin.

  “I thought you’d call us on Christmas Day,” Faye said with a degree of reprimand in her voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was out all day and carelessly didn’t have my phone with me.” I had decided not to tell her of my diving adventures for fear of unduly worrying her. “Did you have a good day?”

  “Quiet,” she said. “In fact, it was just the two of us. Kenneth made a late decision to go to France with a new friend.”

  I don’t think she was actually trying to make me feel guilty, even though she had.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Are you having a nice time?” she asked.

  “Lovely, thank you,” I said. I told her all about the private jet and the fabulous apartment.

  “Don’t get ideas you can’t afford,” she said, ever concerned about my welfare.

  “Yes, Mother.” We laughed. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  Such a simple question with so many unspoken overtones attached.

  “Fine,” she said. “A little tired, as always.” She laughed again. “I’ve been using that as my excuse to get Quentin to do all the dishes.”

  We chatted a bit more about what we had both been doing.

  “How’s it all going with Henrietta?” she asked.

  “Great,” I said. “Very happy.”

  “Quentin was very taken with her.”

  I knew. I’d noticed.

  “Is he there? I’d like to have a word with him.”

  I waited while she found him.

  “What the hell time is it with you?” Quentin said as he came on the line.

  “Half past three,” I said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Got a guilty conscience?”

  “Slightly,” I said. “But that’s not why I called. Do you remember you told me about the man who sold his printing business and didn’t pay the capital gains tax?”

  “Of course. What about it?”

  “How did he claim to be a tax resident of the Channel Islands and why did you think he wasn’t?”

  “He bought a house in Guernsey and established res
idency there, but he spent too many days in London. He was a fool to think that no one would bother to count.”

  “What’s the limit on days?” I asked.

  “They’ve introduced a new system and I’m not sure of the latest rules, but it used to be if someone spent more than one hundred and eighty-three days in the UK during any one year, or more than an average of ninety days a year during the current and previous three years, then he or she was considered a resident for tax purposes. Those were the rules that applied in this case.”

  Unlike for American citizens, who are obliged to file an annual IRS tax return wherever they live in the world, the British are required to do so only for years when they are actually resident in the United Kingdom.

  “How can you find out how many days someone spends in the UK?”

  “It’s not as straightforward as you’d think. Passports are now scanned on the way into and out of the country, but that didn’t used to be the case. Until very recently, there was no record made when anyone left. Airline passenger lists could tell you, provided they went by air. But there were no passenger lists on the ferries or on the trains through the Channel Tunnel. Then, of course, there’s Ireland. There are no passport checks whatsoever for UK citizens going either way across the Irish Sea or when crossing the border on land between Northern Ireland and the Republic. That’s where my Guernsey man went—he used cash to buy a ferry ticket from Liverpool to Belfast, took a bus to Dublin, and then returned to London by air, later claiming he’d been in Ireland for two whole weeks. The tax people reckoned he’d gone there and back in a single day. He couldn’t produce any hotel receipts or even say where he’d stayed.”

  Sometimes, Quentin’s long answers could be quite useful.

  “How do I find the new rules?”

  “It’s sure to be on the web somewhere,” Quentin said.

  “If I was so inclined, to whom would I report if I discover that someone has been defrauding the tax man?”

  “Directly to Revenue and Customs.”

  “Not the police?”

  “No. The police wouldn’t really know what to do with it other than pass it on to the tax authorities. It is they who prosecute tax cheats. They even have a hotline especially for tip-offs from the public.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s very helpful.”

  “Glad to be of service.”

  We hung up.

  Quentin knew better than to ask me why I wanted the information or even who I was interested in. I would tell him if I needed to.

  I went through to the kitchen and opened my laptop.

  I googled the rules on determining UK tax residency and discovered that the new system was way more complicated than the one Quentin had described. It took into account far more factors than just the days a person was present in the UK. Available accommodation, family ties and days spent actually working in the country were also now important.

  Henri had told me that Martin had been working in the UK to restructure the British end of their organization. He also had a house and a minor child in the country. All of those things would have worked against him, reducing the number of days he was allowed to remain.

  From carefully reading the rules on the UK government’s website, it seemed to me that Martin would have been allowed to be in the country for a maximum of only ninety days without becoming a tax resident, maybe even less. Yet Henri had said he’d spent much of the summer there, and he’d also been in England for at least a week during the previous month.

  I’d seen him.

  So had he overstayed his permitted time?

  You’re a total fucking idiot! You absolutely shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t even be in the country. It’s far too risky.

  And what had Martin then replied to Bentley?

  No one will ever know.

  But I knew.

  34

  I went back to bed, but I still couldn’t sleep.

  I lay on my back in the dark, thinking and asking myself many questions, but I came up with very few definitive answers.

  Apart from the one in Dave Swinton’s sauna, were the other attempts on my life nothing to do with the blackmailing of jockeys to fix races?

  Were they all to do with the fact that I knew Martin Reynard had been at Newbury races on Hennessy Gold Cup day and I’d taken a photograph to prove it?

  It seemed rather extreme, as others would surely have also seen him there on that day.

  Was it Martin Reynard, not Leslie Morris, who’d sent a couple of London’s criminal fraternity to kill me with a carving knife?

  Indeed, when those attempts had failed, had he resolved to murder me here in Cayman with the contaminated dive tank?

  And perhaps the most important question of all—if I was right, how did I stop him from trying again?

  If it had been Martin who had taken the opportunity to delete the photo from my iPhone during the confusion on the boat, was that enough? Was that the end of it? Or did he still feel the need to bump me off?

  Could I take that chance?

  So far, I’d been very lucky to survive, the doctors kept telling me so.

  Could I trust that my luck would hold? I had to be lucky every time, whereas my would-be murderer had to be lucky only once.

  I could report my suspicions to Revenue and Customs, but it wouldn’t result in an arrest—not yet anyway. There would be weeks, months or even years of investigation.

  Maybe not even that.

  I suspected that no crime had yet taken place, as we must still be in the tax year in question. Any return for the current year would not be due to be filed until well into the year after next, more than twelve months away. A crime would be committed at that time only if a return was not submitted and the taxes due not paid.

  A year’s income tax didn’t seem worth murdering me over, not on the off chance that I might have spotted what was going on, especially as the attempts had done nothing more than make me increasingly determined to discover why.

  But Derrick Smith had been constantly telling people that I was some sort of superagent/supersleuth who could spot and then prevent wrongdoing from afar with almost mystical powers.

  Had Martin believed it and simply decided to act sooner rather than later?

  But murder?

  All he had to do was accept his responsibilities and pay his tax like everybody else. End of story.

  Other than the minor fact that he may have tried three times to cause my untimely death, I didn’t have any particular ax to grind with Martin—after all, I was an investigator for the BHA, not the tax authorities. But would it make it safer for me if I told him that I believed he had become a UK tax resident for the current year and that I had informed many others including the tax people? He could hardly murder everyone, so would he have anything to gain by killing me?

  No.

  Except, perhaps, revenge.

  —

  “TELL ME more about Martin,” I said to Henri over breakfast the following morning.

  “What about him?” she replied.

  “Who was he married to before Theresa?”

  “Some bimbo called Lorraine, who he met when he was a student.”

  “Were they at the same university?”

  “Good God, no,” she said with a laugh. “Lorraine didn’t go to university. She always used to say studying was a waste of time and that she went instead to the University of Life. More like the Reformatory of Life, if you ask me. I know for a fact that she’s been done for shoplifting several times even though Martin provides handsomely for both her and Joshua.”

  “How did they meet?”

  “In Spain, when he was twenty. She was nineteen. He was there on holiday and she worked in a bar on the Costa Brava. Absolute disaster, it was. Met, married and a mother all within nine months to the day. The divorce took a li
ttle longer, but not much. Uncle Richard was furious with him.”

  “Why on earth did Martin marry her?” I said. “She surely could have had an abortion.”

  “She didn’t tell him she was pregnant until it was too late for that, so Martin did the “honorable” thing without even telling his parents. She may not have gone to university, but our Lorraine is no mug. She’s far more clever than him, that’s for sure. He’s been her meal ticket for life.”

  “He can’t be that much of a mug if he’s the managing director of Reynard Shipping,” I said.

  “Uncle Richard has all the brains in the family. While Martin may be called the managing director, it’s Uncle Richard who really manages everything. He makes all the decisions. He worries, rightly, what will happen to the firm after he’s gone. That’s why we’ve sold the Hong Kong end of the business. I think Uncle Richard is afraid that Martin will lose it all.”

  How sad, I thought. Richard Reynard had two sons, one an artist who lived in the Scottish Highlands and had no interest in business, the other not quite up to running the family firm.

  “Would you say Martin and Theresa have a happy marriage?” I asked.

  “What is this?” she said sharply. “The Spanish Inquisition? You asked me that before. Do you know something I don’t?”

  “No,” I lied. “I just wondered. Theresa seems to be quite keen on Bentley.”

  “I can’t think why. He’s a horrid little man.”

  “Doesn’t he have any family of his own to spend Christmas with?”

  “I know that he has parents,” she said. “I’ve met them. But perhaps they’ve disowned him. This isn’t the first time he’s spent Christmas with us.”

  “If no one likes him, why is he still employed by your company?”

  She sighed. “It’s only me who can’t stand him. That’s because he and I have history.” She paused and I waited while she worked out in her mind if she was going to tell me about that history. She obviously decided not to. “Uncle Richard almost worships the ground he walks on. And, I have to admit, he’s very good at his job and fiercely loyal to the firm.”