‘Yes,’ said Scoffer after a pause. ‘That’s about it.’
‘Then why have you been chasing her for over twenty times that in actual tax?’
‘For various reasons.’
‘Such as?’
‘Now, don’t you take that tone with me, young lady…’ Scoffer was beginning as Willow stood up.
‘Mr Scoffer, don’t be so stupid. I don’t wish to have to pull rank.’
He looked as though he might burst into speech. Willow smiled provocatively, hoping that he would be angry enough to betray himself, if there was anything to betray. When he said nothing, she went on: ‘Look at it from my point of view. I have to be sure that you did not take a personal dislike to Doctor Fydgett for some reason and persecute her until she killed herself.’
‘That’s ridiculous and offensive. I did no such thing,’ said Scoffer, not moving from the chair. His whole posture suggested that what he wanted to say to Willow was: you forced me to sit down, I’m not going to get up now.
‘Very well. Then explain to me how you see your dealings with her.’ Willow thought that she had achieved a tone of polite enquiry but Scoffer looked even more obstructive, and so perhaps she had not.
‘I sent her a standard letter requesting confirmation that she had no other sources of income,’ he said through his teeth. ‘If she had answered honestly and clearly and in time, we would have raised an assessment based on the true figures, she would have paid the tax, and that would have been the end of that.’
Willow sat down again and pulled forward the pad on which she had been scribbling questions she wanted to ask.
‘What was the source of income you thought she had? I couldn’t find any notes in the file.’
‘Among other things, undeclared profits from the sale of paintings.’
‘Based on what? She’s declared capital gains on sales in two of the past three years. What makes you think that there were any more?’
Scoffer did not answer.
‘All right, we’ll take it from the beginning,’ said Willow with a sigh. ‘Why did you send her such a vague letter in the first place? If what you suspected was that she had been selling more paintings than she admitted, why didn’t you ask her about that specifically?’
‘Standard practice.’
Willow wrote herself a note, remembering Jason’s explanation, saying as she wrote: ‘What was the information that you told her you had received about her?’
‘What information?’
‘You wrote to Doctor Fydgett that you had received information that she was concealing sources of income. Here.’ Willow found the relevant letter and showed it to him. ‘Was that just because you guessed she was selling paintings? It doesn’t sound like it.’
Scoffer said nothing.
‘What did you mean?’ Willow went on. ‘I haven’t found anything on the file to justify a tax demand for £4786.00. Was that the capital gains tax on these phantom picture sales or income tax of some kind?’
Scoffer was beginning to look uncomfortable. Willow was glad to see that he had a conscience, even though it appeared to be the equivalent of a primitive single-cell organism rather than a fully developed animal.
‘Well?’
‘Since her death, we’ve discovered that the information we received may in fact have been mistaken. There’s no need to look like that. It was not our error.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘You’ll have to talk to Kate Moughette about that. If you’ve finished with me, I’ll get back to the work I’m paid to do.’
‘Just before you go, would you tell me whether it is true that it is a deliberate policy to try to frighten taxpayers of whom you’re suspicious?’
‘Who told you that? It’s ridiculous.’
Willow smiled. ‘I have in the past heard it said that inspectors sometimes send hugely exaggerated assessments in order to frighten taxpayers into producing accounts or documents of some sort. I wondered whether that was what you had been doing in the Fydgett case.’
Scoffer looked witheringly at her. ‘You clearly know nothing about the way we work. All assessments are calculated to the best of our judgment. Indeed we have to sign a certificate to that effect at the time the assessment is raised.’
‘And if your judgment turns out to have been flawed, what happens then?’
‘Unless there was reason to know that at the time of raising the assessment, it’s just too bad.’
‘I see,’ said Willow, thinking about it. After a moment, she added: ‘When you decide to send a taxpayer a large assessment based on something other than figures provided by that taxpayer, do you make any kind of enquiries first? I mean such as checking whether he or she, who may well be innocent in any case, is intelligent, healthy or strong enough to deal with the tactics that you use?’
‘Certainly not. We’re not social workers. We can’t be expected to mess ourselves up in other people’s feelings. If you do that you become like that fool Cara. She’s actually been known to cry in meetings with taxpayers when she’s supposed to be merely taking notes.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, causing maximum embarrassment to everyone concerned. She’s a real Belfast Post Room case. She appears unable to remember that it is the business of this office to assess the full tax owed and the collector’s to make certain that it is all paid. Taxpayers’feelings are not our responsibility.’
Scoffer’s contemptuous expression was so offensive that Willow let herself show a little of her own dislike. His face changed at once and he pointed one stubby finger at her and wagged it.
‘Do you know how much the black economy loses the ex-chequer?’
‘No, I’ve no idea.’
‘It’s been estimated to be the equivalent of something like five pence on the basic rate of tax, and no one can be sure it’s not more. That fact alone justifies everything that we do.’
Willow raised her eyebrows. ‘And what about the costs that are incurred by mistakes made in offices like this?’ she asked, quite politely.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I’m quite sure that you do.’ Willow tried not to let his aggression stoke up her own. ‘It must cost a great deal in time, paper and postage every time you send out incorrect assessments and have to put them right. Then there are the repayment cheques sent out just a week before you ask for precisely the same amount back again. And the assessments you raise for less than a pound. And what about the costs incurred by poor communication with the collector so that time is wasted badgering innocent taxpayers, and sending in bailiffs or even bankrupting people for money they don’t actually owe?’
‘If all taxpayers provided full and honest information on time, there would be no need for any of that, and communications with the collector would be much easier to keep up to date.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ asked Willow.
‘It’s obvious. Tax cheats cost this country a fortune it cannot afford.’
‘I’m not talking about them,’ said Willow, holding down her own anger with difficulty. ‘I’m on your side as far as loathing tax-dodgers goes. But I am here to look into the way you dealt with a woman who doesn’t appear to have been cheating at all. And I am becoming concerned that she may have been a victim of a deliberate policy. If that is so, something needs to be done to ensure that other people who may be equally unable to cope with it do not suffer as she did.’
‘If they are honest, they have nothing to fear,’ said Scoffer doggedly. ‘Unfortunately you have to face the fact that nearly everyone in any kind of cash-based business is on the fiddle. We have to remember that until they show themselves to be honest.’
‘Whatever happened,’ asked Willow more coldly than she had yet spoken to anyone in the tax office, ‘to the basic principle of English law, that you’re innocent until proven guilty?’
Scoffer got up, smiling. ‘Didn’t you know that the Revenue is different?’ he asked. ‘As far as tax assessments are concerne
d, the onus is on the taxpayer to prove that an assessment is incorrect. How strange that you’re ignorant of something so fundamental!’
Without waiting for a comment, he turned and stumped out of her office. Willow looked after him, wondering how innocent taxpayers could ever prove they had not received any cash payments if the Revenue were convinced that they had. She was deeply relieved that her own tax affairs were dealt with by a very different kind of inspector. Although she had had no direct contact with him, the letters and assessments he sent her had always been reasonable, even when they were wrong, and his responses to her accountant’s corrections had always been impeccable and quick.
By a quarter to six the building was almost completely empty. Willow, who had agreed to see the minister in the House of Commons at half-past six to report informally on her first day’s investigation, put her files away and walked out into the main office. The metal desks with their loads of files, loose papers, typewriters, computer screens and sad little heaps of mess looked infinitely depressing. The ferocious power that unhappy taxpayers like Fiona Fydgett seemed to feel issuing from such rooms seemed hard to take seriously.
Perhaps it was not surprising that Scoffer had no idea of the terror he might be visiting on his innocent suspects. And perhaps it was no wonder that anxious taxpayers appeared shifty to him as they tried to contain their fear and deal with demands that they did not always understand, even if they considered them justified.
Reaching the door of Kate’s office, Willow pushed it open and looked in.
‘Ah, yes, come in.’ Kate was frowning as though she had a headache or an intractable problem. She did not look at all pleased to see Willow.
‘Thank you. I thought it just as well to wait until the staff had gone before we had a chat,’ said Willow, taking a chair without being invited to sit down.
‘I can’t imagine what you might need me for.’
‘No? Well, very little really so far. Len Scoffer referred me to you when I asked him about the information this office received about Fiona Fydgett’s income.’
‘Did he? As you must know, all financial information we receive is confidential.’ Kate’s rapid voice had slowed, but her coldness had not thawed at all.
Willow looked at the rising star of the tax gatherers, widened her lips in an attempt at a smile, and said: ‘But I’ve been sent here by the minister expressly to look into everything that was said and done during the investigation into Fiona Fydgett’s affairs.’
‘That makes no difference to the confidentiality of information received by this office.’
Willow thought that Kate sounded as though she were reciting a training manual. Two can play at that game, she decided, filling her mind with civil service formality.
‘The minister needs to be fully briefed if he is to be able to defend you and your staff when questions are asked about your treatment of taxpayers. And they will be asked, you know, if not by Doctor Fydgett’s Member of Parliament in the House, then by the media. She had a lot of influential friends and relations. You won’t be able to cover up for much longer.’
‘We have not been covering anything up,’ said Kate Moughette, even more icily. ‘Make your point, and don’t try to threaten me. We’re fire-proof here.’
‘There was no threat, and I have made my only point: that I am here to report to the minister on everything that you or your staff said or wrote to and about Fiona Fydgett. Everything. Surely that’s clear enough?’
‘Perhaps. But I would need specific authority to give you any more information.’
‘In other words, the files I have been given to read so far are fakes.’
‘Certainly not’ Kate Moughette sounded genuinely outraged, which Willow felt was quite an achievement in the circumstances. ‘They have merely been edited in line with our duty of confidentiality.’
‘I see,’ said Willow, not certain of the interaction between the Data Protection Act and the Official Secrets Act, or how far her own powers of search extended. Had she realised how much obstruction she was likely to meet, she would have made the minister give her much clearer instructions in the first place.
‘Well, I’m due to see the minister this evening. I shall ask him for clearance.’
‘You can do whatever you like. It won’t change anything.’
Willow raised her eyebrows. Long accustomed to the odd ways of some eccentric civil service colleagues, she was still surprised by the strength of the resistance Kate and her staff were showing. ‘Fine. Well, I’d better go or I shall be late for him. I’ll see you in the morning. I should like to see the rest of the information by then.’
‘We’ll see. Good night.’ The dark head bent once again over the papers and calculator on the desk.
‘One more thing,’ said Willow, remembering Len’s demand for all his suspect’s records, whether or not they were relevant to his specific enquiry, and recognising the potential usefulness of such a tactic.
‘Yes?’ said Kate without looking up.
‘I shall also be explaining to the minister that I need to see the files—unfilleted—of all the other investigations you are carrying out at the moment.’
‘That’s impossible.’
“We’ll see,” Willow echoed with childish satisfaction as she left.
Chapter Four
Willow reached the House of Commons half an hour later, having walked slowly along the Embankment, enjoying the warm evening light over the Thames, stopping outside the Tate for a moment to check the posters for any new exhibitions she or Tom might want to see.
One of the bluebottles at the door of the Palace of Westminster took her name, matched it with some secret list and then directed her to the terrace. Willow, who had visited ministers at the House often before, was surprised. In the past she had always been received in their offices.
She knew her way and, having nodded her thanks to the policeman, walked off in the direction of the terrace. She could never be sure whether she was more amused or irritated by the building’s church-like gothickery. Considering the sleazy deals, the bullying of reluctant back-benchers, and the sometimes mind-numbing hypocrisy that were generally accepted there, the pretentions of its architecture seemed absurd.
Reaching the terrace, she breathed in the scent of the river, which came through the wafts of cigar smoke, aftershave, alcohol, sweat, and petrol from a passing motor launch, and thought how much had changed during her years in London. When she had first arrived in the capital nearly twenty years earlier, the Thames had been a disgusting mixture of animal, vegetable and mineral waste, and it had smelled of all of them.
Recently, she had heard, salmon had been seen not far from London, and otters were beginning to return to the upper reaches of the river. But the colour of the water was still the same shade of dull, thick café au lait it had been when she had stood beside it as a raw, aggressively self-sufficient mathematician from Newcastle.
There’s a moral in that somewhere, she told herself piously, and then added with more familiar self-mockery, but I can’t imagine what it might be.
‘Ah, Minister,’ she called, seeing George Profett waving to her from the edge of the terrace. She made her way to his side, adding, ‘How pleasant it is out here.’
‘Not at all. It’s good of you to make the time. By the way, do you know Malcolm Penholt?’ The minister turned to smile at the man beside him, adding, ‘Malcolm, this is Willow King. She’s a civil servant, loosely attached to my department at the moment.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the other man, who was much more like the politicians to whom Willow was accustomed. Despite his smoothness and his carefully chosen clothes, Penholt looked as though he might be very good company. He had round dark eyes that seemed full of light in his broad, tanned face, and his wry smile was attractive. His well-controlled dark curly hair was only just beginning to recede and grow grey at the temples. He looked as though he must have been in his later forties.
‘You did excellent work a year or tw
o ago on education in prisons for the Home Office,’ he said. When Willow did not react, he frowned, adding with a delightful hint of amused anxiety, ‘I’m not making a fool of myself, am I? That report was one of yours, wasn’t it?’
‘Actually it was John Misterton’s,’ said Willow, smiling at his technique as well as his knowledge of her past, ‘but in a way you’re right; I was Secretary to the Commission. How do you do?’
She assumed that the minister had introduced them because Penholt had been Fiona Fydgett’s MP, and waited for one of them to say something about her. No one said anything at all until the minister handed Willow a drink.
‘Thank you,’ she said, adding, in an attempt to get the conversation going, ‘It’s awful of me, but my memory’s much worse than yours, Mr Penholt. I’m not sure which constituency you represent.’
Both men laughed.
‘Fulham and Chelsea,’ said Penholt casually. ‘One of the few that remained staunchly Tory at last year’s débâcle.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Willow, remembering a little just in time. ‘You were the only Conservative MP to increase his majority. How could I have forgotten?’
‘Merely the civil servant’s obligatory blindness to politics, I suspect,’ Profett said wryly. ‘Well, it was good to talk, Malcolm. We’ll speak in due course. I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Good, George,’ said the Conservative obediently. ‘Good to see you. Thanks for the drink. Pleasure to meet you, Miss King.’
‘All mine, Mr Penholt.’
He raised a hand in an elegantly casual wave and disappeared into the throng.
‘So he was Doctor Fydgett’s MP?’ said Willow.
‘Yes, he was. Naturally he’s concerned about what happened to her, but he’s a good bloke taken all in all, and he’s given me a chance to find out what was going on before he starts to make capital out of it.’
‘That seems remarkably charitable in the circumstances,’ said Willow, wondering why the minister was refusing to look at her. She could not decide whether he or Penholt was behaving more oddly in the circumstances. As far as she could see there was nothing to stop an opposition MP making a huge and public fuss about the possible injustice done to his constituent ‘Did he know her well?’
Rotten Apples Page 4
