Risk

10

She followed me in her pale blue Midget to the pub on the south side of Oxford, and chose a long cold drink with fruit on the top and a kick in the tail.

‘Dad has schooled Notebook until he’s blue in the face,’ she said, pursing her lips to the straw which stuck up like a mast from the log-jam of fruit.

‘Some of them never learn,’ I said.

She nodded. Polite transaction achieved, I thought: she had obliquely apologised for the horse’s frightful behaviour, and I had accepted that her father had done his best to teach him to jump. Some trainers, but not those of William Finch’s standing, seemed to think that the best place for a green novice to learn to jump was actually in a race: rather like urging a child up the Eiger without showing him how to climb.

‘What made you become an accountant?’ she said. ‘It’s such a dull sort of job.’

‘Do you think so?’

She gave me the full benefit of the big eyes. ‘You obviously don’t,’ she said. She tilted her head a little, considering. ‘You don’t look boring and stuffy, and you don’t act boring and stuffy, so give.’

‘Judges are sober, nurses are dedicated, miners are heroes, writers drink.’

‘Or in other words, don’t expect people to fit the image?’

‘As you say,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘I’ve known Trevor since I was six.’

A nasty one. Trevor, without any stretch of imagination, could fairly be classed as stuffy and boring.

‘Carry on,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Security. Steady employment. Good pay. The usual inducements.’

She looked at me levelly. ‘You’re lying.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘People who risk their necks for nothing in jump races are not hell-bent on security, steady employment, and money.’

‘Because of me Mum, then,’ I said flippantly.

‘She bossed you into it?’

‘No.’ I hesitated, because in fact I never had told anyone why I’d grown up with a fiery zeal as powerful as a vocation. Jossie waited with quizzical expectation.

‘She had a rotten accountant,’ I said. ‘I promised her that when I grew up I would take over. As corny as that.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. She died.’

‘Sob story.’

‘Yes, I told you. Pure corn.’

She stirred the fruit with her straw, looking less mocking. ‘You’re afraid I’ll laugh at you.’

‘Sure of it,’ I said.

‘Try me, then.’

‘Well... she was a rotten businesswoman, my Mum. My father got killed in a pointless sort of accident, and she was left having to bring me up alone. She was about thirty. I was nine.’ I paused. Jossie was not actually laughing, so I struggled on. ‘She rented a house just off the sea-front at Ryde and ran it as a holiday hotel, half a step up from a boarding house. Comfortable, but no drinks licence; that sort of thing. So she could be there when I got home from school, and in the holidays.’

‘Brave of her,’ Jossie said. ‘Go on.’

‘You can guess.’

She sucked down to the dregs of her glass and made a bubbling noise through the straw. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘She was good at cooking and welcoming people and lousy at working out how much to charge.’

‘She was also paying tax on money she should have claimed as expenses.’

‘And that’s bad?’

‘Crazy.’

‘Well, go on,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Digging a story out of you is worse than looking for mushrooms.’

‘I found her crying sometimes, mostly in the winter when there weren’t any guests. It’s pretty upsetting for a kid of ten or so to find his mother crying, so you can say I was upset. Protective also, probably. Anyway, at first I thought it was still because of losing Dad. Then I realised she always cried when she’d been seeing Mr Jones, who was her accountant. I tried to get her to open up on her troubles, but she said I was too young.’

I stopped again. Jossie sighed with exasperation and said, ‘Do get on with it.’

‘I told her to ditch Mr Jones and get someone else. She said I didn’t understand, I was too young. I promised her that when I got older I would be an accountant, and I’d put her affairs to rights.’ I smiled lopsidedly. ‘When I was thirteen she went down to Boots one morning and bought two hundred aspirins. She stirred them into a glass of water, and drank them. I found her lying on her bed when I came home from school. She left me a note.’

‘What did it say?’

‘It said “Dear Ro, Sorry, Love, Mum.” ’

‘Poor girl.’ Jossie blinked. Not laughing.

‘She’d made a will,’ I said. ‘One of those simple things on a form from the stationers. She left me everything, which was actually nothing much except her own personal things. I kept all the account books and bank statements. I got shuttled around uncles and aunts for a few years, but I kept those account books safe, and then I got another accountant to look at them. He told me Mr Jones seemed to have thought he was working for the Inland Revenue, not his client. I told him I wanted to be an accountant, and I got him to show me exactly what Mr Jones had done wrong. So there you are. That’s all.’

‘Are you still killing Mr Jones to dry your mother’s tears?’ The teasing note was back, but gentler.

I smiled, ‘I enjoy accountancy. I might never have thought of it if it hadn’t been for Mr Jones.’

‘So God bless villains.’

‘He was ultra-righteous. A smug pompous ass. There are still a lot of Mr Joneses around, not pointing out to their clients all the legitimate ways of avoiding tax.’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s silly to pay tax when you don’t have to.’

‘That’s obvious.’

‘A lot of people do, though, from ignorance or bad advice.’

I ordered refill drinks and told Jossie it was her turn to unbutton with the family skeletons.

‘My Ma?’ she said in surprise. ‘I thought the whole world knew about my Ma. She canoes up and down the Amazon like a yo-yo, digging up ancient tribes. Sends back despatches in the shape of earnest papers to obscure magazines. Dad and I haven’t seen her for years. We get telegrams in January saying Happy Christmas.’

Revelation dawned. ‘Christabel Saffray Finch! Intrepid female explorer, storming about in rain forests?’

‘Ma,’ Jossie nodded.

‘Good heavens.’

‘Good grief, more like.’

‘Trevor never told me,’ I said. ‘But then he wouldn’t, I suppose.’

Jossie grinned. ‘Trevor disapproves. Trevor also always disapproves of Dad’s little consolations. Aunts, I used to call them. Now I call them Lida and Sandy.’

‘He’s very discreet.’ Even on the racecourse, where gossip was a second occupation, I hadn’t heard of Lida and Sandy. Or that Christobel Saffray Finch, darling of anthropological documentaries, was William’s wife.

‘Sandy is his ever-sick secretary,’ Jossie said, ‘perpetually shuttling between bronchitis, backache and abortion.’

I laughed. ‘And Lida?’

Jossie made a face, suddenly vulnerable under all the bright froth.

‘Lida’s got her hooks into him like a tapeworm. I can’t stand her. Let’s talk about food; I’m starving.’

We read the menu and ordered, and finished our drinks, and went in to dinner in the centuries-old dining-room: stone walls, uncovered oak beams, red velvet and soft lights.

Jossie ate as if waistlines never expanded, which was refreshing after the finicky picker I’d taken out last.

‘Luck of the draw,’ she said complacently, smothering a baked-in-the-skin potato with a butter mountain. I reflected that she’d drawn lucky in more ways than metabolism. A quick mind, fascinating face, tall slender body: there was nothing egalitarian about nature.

Most of the tables around us were filled with softly chattering groups of twos and fours, but over by a far wall a larger party were making the lion’s share of the noise.

‘They keep looking over here,’ Jossie said. ‘Do you know them?’

‘It looks like Sticks Elroy with his back to us.’

‘Is it? Celebrating his winner?’

Sticks Elroy, named for the extreme thinness of his legs, had studiously avoided me in the Towcester changing room, and must have been thoroughly disconcerted to find me having dinner in his local pub. He was one of my jockey clients, but for how much longer was problematical. I was not currently his favourite person.

The noise, however, was coming not from him but from the host of the party, a stubborn-looking man with a naturally loud voice.

‘Avert your gaze,’ I said to Jossie.

The large eyes regarded me over salad and steak.

‘An ostrich act?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘If we bury our heads, maybe the storm won’t notice us.’

The storm, however, seemed to be gathering force. Words like ‘bastard’ rose easily above the prevailing clatter and the uninvolved majority began to look interested.

‘Trouble,’ Jossie said without visible regret, ‘is on its feet and heading this way.’

‘Damn.’

She grinned. ‘Faint heart.’

Trouble arrived with the deliberate movements of the slightly drunk. Late forties, I judged. About five feet eight, short dark hair, flushed cheeks and aggressive eyes. He stood four-square and ignored Jossie altogether.

‘My son tells me you’re that bastard Roland Britten.’ His voice, apart from fortissimo, was faintly slurred.

To ignore him was to invite a punch-up. I laid down my knife and fork. Leaned back in my chair. Behaved as if the enquiry was polite.

‘Is Sticks Elroy your son?’

‘Too right, he bloody is,’ he said.

‘He had a nice winner today,’ I said. ‘Well done.’

It stopped him for barely two seconds.

‘He doesn’t need your bloody “well done”.’

I waited mildly, without answering. Elroy senior bent down, breathed alcohol heavily, and pointed an accusing finger under my nose.

‘You leave my son alone, see? He isn’t doing anyone any harm. He doesn’t want any bastard like you snitching on him to the bloody tax man. Judas, that’s what you are. Going behind his back. Bloody informer, that’s what you are.’

‘I haven’t informed on him.’

‘What’s that?’ He wagged the finger to and fro, belligerently. ‘Costing him hundreds, aren’t you, with the bloody tax man. Bastard like you ought to be locked up. Serve you bloody well right.’

The head waiter arrived smoothly at Elroy’s shoulder.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ he began.

Elroy turned on him like a bull. ‘You trot off. You, major-domo, or whatever you are. You trot off. I’ll have my say, and when I’ve had my say I’ll sit down, see? Not before.’

The head waiter cravenly retired, and Elroy returned to his prime target. Jossie’s eyes stared at him with disfavour, which deflected him not at all.

‘I hear someone locked you up for ten days or so just now, and you got out. Bloody shame. You deserve to be locked up, you do. Bastard like you. Whoever it was locked you up had the right idea.’

I said nothing. Elroy half turned away, but he had by no means finished. Merely addressing a wider audience.

‘You know what this bastard did to my son?’ The audience removed its eyes in thoroughly British embarrassment, but they got told the answer whether they liked it or not.

‘This boot-licking creeping bastard went crawling to the tax- man and told him my son had some cash he hadn’t paid taxes on.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said to Jossie.

He swung round to me again and poked the finger rigidly under my nose. ‘Bloody liar. Locking up’s too bloody, good for bastards like you.’

The manager arrived, with the head waiter hovering behind.

‘Mr Elroy,’ the manager said courteously. ‘A bottle of wine for your party, compliments of the management.’ He beckoned a finger to the head waiter, who deftly proffered a bottle of claret.

The manager was young and well-dressed, and reminded me of Vivian Iverson. His unexpected oil worked marvels on the storm, which abated amid a few extra ‘bastards’ and went back to its table muttering under its breath.

The people at the other tables watched from the cover of animated conversation, while the head waiter drew the cork for Elroy and poured the free wine. The manager drifted casually back to Jossie and me.

‘There will be no charge for your dinner, sir.’ He paused delicately. ‘Mr Elroy is a valued customer.’ He bowed very slightly and drifted on without waiting for an answer.

‘How cool of him,’ Jossie said, near explosion.

‘How professional.’

She stared at me. ‘Do you often sit still and let people call you a bastard?’

‘Once a week and twice on Sundays.’

‘Spineless.’

‘If I’d stood up and slogged him, our steaks would have gone cold.’

‘Mine has, anyway.’

‘Have another,’ I said. I started to eat again where I had left off, and so, after a moment or two, did Jossie.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m all agog. Just what was that all about?’ She looked round the restaurant. ‘You are now the target of whispers, and the consensus looks unfavourable.’

‘In general,’ I said, spearing lettuce, ‘people shouldn’t expect their accountants to help them break the law.’

‘Sticks?’

‘And accountants unfortunately cannot discuss their clients.’

‘Are you being serious?’

I sighed. ‘A client who wants his accountant to connive at a massive piece of tax-dodging is not going to be madly pleased when the accountant refuses to do it.’

‘Mm.’ She chewed cheerfully. ‘I do see that.’

‘And,’ I went on, ‘an accountant who advises such a client to declare the loot and pay the tax, because otherwise the nasty Revenue men will undoubtedly find out, and the client will have to pay fines on top of tax and will end up very poorly all round, because not only will he get it in the neck for that one offence, but every tax return he makes in the future will be inspected with magnifying glasses and he’ll be hounded for evermore over every penny and have inspectors ransacking every cranny of his house at two in the morning...’ I took a breath. ‘...such an accountant may be unpopular.’

‘Unreasonable.’

‘And an accountant who refuses to break the law, and says that if his client insists on doing so he will have to take his custom somewhere else, such an accountant may possibly be called a bastard.’

She finished her steak and laid down her knife and fork. ‘Does this hypothetical accountant snitch to the tax man?’

I smiled. ‘If the client is no longer his client, he doesn’t know whether his ex-client is tax-dodging or not. So no, he doesn’t snitch.’

‘Elroy had it all wrong, then.’

‘Er,’ I said, ‘it was he who set up the scheme from which Sticks drew the cash. That’s why he is so furious. And I shouldn’t be telling you that.’

‘You’ll be struck off, or strung up, or whatever.’

‘Sky high.’ I drank some wine. ‘It’s quite extraordinary how many people try to get their accountants to help them with tax fiddles. I reckon if someone wants to fiddle, the last person he should tell should be his accountant.’

‘Just get on with it, and keep quiet?’

‘If they want to take the risk.’

She half laughed. ‘What risk? Tax-dodging is a national sport.’

People never understood about taxation, I thought. The ruthlessness with which tax could be collected put Victorian landlords in the shade, and the Revenue people now had frightening extra powers of entry and search.

‘It’s much safer to steal from your employer than the tax man,’ I said.

‘You must be joking.’

‘Have some profiteroles,’ I said.

Jossie eyed the approaching trolley of super-puds and agreed on four small cream-filled buns smothered in chocolate sauce.

‘Aren’t you having any?’ she demanded.

‘Think of Tapestry on Wednesday.’

‘No wonder jockeys get fat when they finally let themselves eat.’ She spooned up the dark brown goo with satisfaction. ‘Why is it safer to steal from your employer?’

‘He can’t sell your belongings to get his money back.’

The big eyes widened.

‘Golly!’ she said.

‘If you run up debts, the courts can send bailiffs to take your furniture. If you steal instead, they can’t.’

She paused blankly in mid-mouthful, then went on chewing, and swallowed. ‘Carry right on,’ she said. ‘I’m riveted.’

‘Well... it’s theft which is the national sport, not tax-dodging. Petty theft. Knocking off. Nicking. Most shop-lifting is done by the staff, not the customers. No one really blames a girl who sells tights all day if she tucks a pair into her handbag when she goes home. Pinching from employers is almost regarded as a rightful perk, and if ever a manufacturing firm puts an efficient checker on the staff exits there’s practically a riot until he’s removed.’

‘Because he stops the outward march of spanners and fork-lift trucks?’

I grinned. ‘You could feed an army on what disappears from the fridges of hotels.’

‘Accountants,’ she said, ‘shouldn’t find it amusing.’

‘Especially as they spend their lives looking for fraud.’

‘Do you?’ she said, surprised. ‘Do you really? I thought accountants just did sums.’

‘The main purpose of an audit is to turn up fiddles.’

‘I thought it was... well... to add up the profit or loss.’

‘Not really.’

She thought. ‘But when Trevor comes to count the hay and saddles and stuff, that’s stocktaking.’

I shook my head. ‘More like checking on behalf of your father that he hasn’t got a stable lad selling the odd bale or bridle on the quiet.’

‘Good heavens.’ She was truly astounded. ‘I’ll have to stop thinking of auditors as fuddy-duddies. Change their image to fraud squad policemen.’

‘Not that, either.’

‘Why not?’

‘If an auditor finds that a firm is being swindled by its cashier, for instance, he simply tells the firm. He doesn’t arrest the cashier. He leaves it to the firm to decide whether to call in the handcuffs.’

‘But surely they always do.’

‘Absolutely not. Firms get red faces and tend to lose business if everyone knows their cashier took them for a ride. They sack the cashier and keep quiet, mostly.’

‘Are you bored with telling me all this?’

‘No,’ I said truthfully.

‘Then tell me a good fraud.’

I laughed. ‘Heard any good frauds lately?’

‘Get on with it.’

‘Um...’ I thought. ‘A lot of the best frauds are complicated juggling with figures. It’s the paperwork which deceives the eye, like a three card trick. I paused, then smiled. ‘I know a good one, though they weren’t my clients, thank God. There was a manager of a broiler-chicken factory farm which sold thousands of chickens every week to a freezing firm. The manager was also quietly selling a hundred a week to a butcher who didn’t know the chickens had fallen off the back of a lorry, so to speak. No one could ever tell how many chickens there actually were on the farm, because the turnover was so huge and fast, and baby chicks tend to die. The manager pocketed a neat little untaxed regular income, and like most good frauds it was discovered by accident.’

‘What accident?’

‘The butcher used to pay the manager by cheque, made out in the manager’s name. One day he happened to meet one of the directors of the firm which owned the chicken farm, and to save postage he got out his chequebook, wrote a cheque in the manager’s name, and asked the director to give it to him, to pay for that month’s delivery of chickens.’

‘And the lid blew off.’

‘With a bang. They sacked the manager.’

‘No prosecution?’

‘No. The last I heard, he was selling rose bushes by mail order.’

‘And you wondered for whose nursery he was working?’

I grinned and nodded. She was quick and funny, and it seemed incredible that I’d met her only the day before.

We drank coffee and talked about horses. She said she had been trying her hand at three-day-eventing, but would be giving it up soon.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Lack of talent.’

‘What will you do instead?’

‘Marry.’

‘Oh.’ I felt obscurely disappointed. ‘Who?’

‘I’ve no idea. Someone will turn up.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Of course just like that. One finds husbands in the oddest places.’

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ I said.

Her eyes gleamed with light and life. ‘Visiting a girl friend. What will you do instead?’

‘Sums, I expect.’

‘But tomorrow’s Sunday.’

‘And I can have the office to myself all day, without any interruptions. I often work on Sundays. Nearly always.’

‘Good grief.’

We went out to where the Midget and the Dolomite stood side by side in the car park.

‘Thanks for the grub,’ Jossie said.

‘And for your company.’

‘Do you feel all right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Just checking,’ she said. ‘Dad’ll ask. It looked such a crunching fall.’

I shook my head. ‘A bruise or two.’

‘Good. Well, goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’ I kissed her cheek.

Her eyes glinted in the dim light from the pub’s windows. I kissed her mouth, rather briefly, with closed lips. She gave me the same sort of kiss in return.

‘Hm,’ she said, standing back. ‘That wasn’t bad. I do hate wet slobbers.’

She slid expertly into the Midget and started the engine.

‘See you in the hay,’ she said. ‘Counting it.’

She was smiling as she drove away, probably with a mirror expression of my own. I unlocked my car door, and, feeling slightly silly, I looked into the dark area behind the front seats.

No one there.

I sat in the car and started it, debating whether or not to risk going home to the cottage. Friday and Saturday had passed safely enough; but maybe the cats were still watching the mousehole. I decided that another night away would be prudent, and from the pub drove northwards around Oxford again, to the anonymity of the large motel and service station built beside a busy route-connecting roundabout.

The place as usual was bright with lights and bustle: flags flying on tall poles and petrol pumps rattling. I booked in at the reception office, took the key, and drove round to the slightly quieter wing of bedrooms at the rear.

Sleep would be no problem, I thought. The constant rumble of traffic would be soporific. A lullaby.

I yawned, took out my suitcase, locked the car, and fitted the key into the bedroom door.

Something hit me very hard between the shoulders. I fell against the still closed door, and something immediately hit me very hard on the head.

This time, it was brutal. This time, no ether.

I slid in a daze down the door and saw only dark unrecognisable figures bending over to punch and kick. The thuds shuddered through my bones, and another bang on the head slid me deep into peaceful release.