Crossfire

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 screensaver message "Kauri House Stables" that 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 made 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 having to do with the house: electricity, 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 charging them for the energy used. That would teach the soldiers to keep the heat in.

The next stack was bills and receipts for the stables: power, heat, feed, maintenance, together with the salary and tax papers for the stable staff. There were also some training-fee accounts, one or two with checks 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 to more than 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 vertically down on her collapsing legs rather than falling straight forwards 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 to struggle to get down to my knees to place a small pillow under her head.

She started to come around, 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 that 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 of 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."

"Why?" he asked, concerned.

I thought about saying something flippant about lack of blood to the brain but decided against it.

"Derek, he knows," my mother said.

"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 Remy 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 seemed loud and strong compared to my mother's.

I remembered back to what my platoon color 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 openly as I had never seen her before. She certainly didn't look like the woman that 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 the 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.

"Then how would we pay?" he said in exasperation. I thought that 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. "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 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 trailed 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 Remy 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 had 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.

Value Added Tax, or VAT as it was known, was a tax levied on goods and services in the UK that was collected by the seller of the goods or the provider of the services and then paid over to the government, similar to sales tax except that it applied to services as well as sales, services such as training racehorses. Somehow the dodgy young accountant had managed to assure my mother that even though she could go on adding the VAT amount to the owners' accounts, she was no longer under any obligation to pass on the money to the tax man.

Now, racehorse training fees are not cheap, about the same as sending a teenage child to boarding school, and my mother had seventy-two stables that were always filled to overflowing. She was in demand, and those in demand could charge premium prices. The VAT, somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent of the training 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 that she was stealing from. She wasn't paying the tax 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.

"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 tax man?"

"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 to the tax man 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 be only a matter of time before she was investigated. Four years of nonpayment 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 from being sent to prison."

My mother began to cry again.

"We haven't got the money to pay the tax man," 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 tax man 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 tax man 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. But I certainly didn't share my mother's confidence that her retirement would guarantee that the tax man 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 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 buildup, and then I lay back 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 tax man, 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 naivete. And it was of no comfort to know that hedge funds had been so named because 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 U.S. 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.

Ironically, an ISA, an individual savings account, was designed for tax-free saving, but there was a limit on investment, and each ISA 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 pounds to my name.

I wondered if the Revenue would take installments 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 friendly forces-self only, no reinforcements available WEAPONS: as required and/or as available EXECUTION: Initially find and interrogate Roderick Ward or, if in fact 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