Rotten Apples (2 page)

‘I think you're probably right,' she said.

‘About what?' He grinned, and added quickly: ‘Not that I'm ever wrong, of course.'

Willow made a face. ‘I only meant that you're right about the irresistibility of spying on the Revenue, but I probably shouldn't have admitted it. You've been right about too many things recently and I don't want you getting delusions of infallibility.'

‘That could never happen in this house.'

‘What do you mean?' said Willow, sounding less amused than she had been a moment before.

‘Mrs Rusham makes it perfectly clear that she can only just tolerate my presence. That keeps me nice and humble,' he said drily.

Willow's relief that Tom had not been nursing a secret sorrow emerged as a burst of laughter, and she swiped at him with her napkin, forgetting that it was full of croissant crumbs. ‘You're not unique in that. Disapproval comes naturally to her. I've been paying her wages for years and she still hasn't started to approve of me.'

‘Maybe not,' said Tom as he put his hand up to feel his hair. He examined the crumbs sticking to his hand and wiped it on his napkin. ‘But she's a lot cosier with you than she is with me. There are times when she looks at me as though she's about to sentence me to bread and water for a week.'

‘Idiot,' said Willow, laughing again just as the door opened to reveal Mrs Rusham, looking as forbidding as usual in the white linen lab coat she wore instead of an apron.

‘I thought you might like some more coffee,' she said as she laid two clear cups of foaming cappuccino on the table and removed the empty ones.

Willow was amused to see that Tom was flushing slightly as he started to pick the rest of the crumbs out of his hair. As soon as the housekeeper had left the room, Willow drank her coffee and then walked round the table to pat her husband's crunchy head.

‘You needn't be afraid of bread and water while I'm alive,' she said, giving the announcement its maximum drama.

‘Ah, Will,' said Tom, reaching up to hold her face next to his own, ‘my champion!'

‘Take care today, Tom,' she said as she pulled herself away from him.

‘I always do,' he said, raising one hand to wave her off while he picked up the newspaper with the other.

Willow collected her handbag and the jacket of her bright-green linen suit, made up her face and put a pair of small but richly dark emerald earrings into her earlobes. She grimaced at herself in the mirror, enjoying the lavishness of her jewels and yet amused by her own pleasure. Once, things like the emeralds had provided her with a hedge against reality, but those days were gone. Now, she just enjoyed the way they looked.

Pleasurably satisfied with herself and her life, she went to the kitchen to say goodbye to Mrs Rusham, for whom she had considerable if unexpressed affection. They had always respected each other's privacy, and, never trying to become friends, had achieved a relationship that succeeded in spite of its apparent lack of warmth.

‘It was a good breakfast. Thank you.'

‘I'm glad you liked it,' said Mrs Rusham, smiling tightly. ‘Will the chief inspector be in to dinner tonight?'

‘Yes, I think so. Pretty late. If you could leave us both something in the fridge, that would be splendid.'

Willow knew that she was smiling in memory of Tom's bread-and-water fantasy, but she could not help it. Mrs Rusham's housekeeping had always been as lavish as her show of feelings had been meagre.

‘I must go or I'll be late. See you tomorrow.'

The other woman nodded, and Willow left the house. As always, she turned at the corner of the street to look back.

She and Tom had sold their flats before the wedding and pooled their resources to buy the long, low house, which had been built across the front of a mews on the edges of Belgravia at the beginning of the last century. By the time they found it, the fabric had become dilapidated, the stucco had been falling off the three small Dutch gables in chunks, the paint had been peeling everywhere, and the glass in two of the circular windows in the gables had been badly cracked. But with money, care and an excellent builder, they had transformed it. Restuccoed and painted cream, with a new roof, new drains, wires and pipes, it had become a comfortable house with a kind of eccentric charm that suited them both.

Leaving it all behind her, Willow walked through the hot, white, tidy streets of Belgravia to the messier environs of Victoria Station, through the tatty edges of Pimlico and so to the broad, thunderous artery of the Vauxhall Bridge Road. It took her nearly twenty minutes, but after eating two of Mrs Rusham's croissants, even without the quantities of butter Tom liked to spread on his, she thought that the exercise was no bad thing. As she walked she considered the job she had been asked to do.

A week earlier, only a little more than a month after the General Election had ushered in a completely new government, she had been summoned to Whitehall to see George Profett, who had been made Minister for Rights and Charters. Never having encountered him before, either in the flesh or in any of the media, she had gone to his office full of curiosity.

He had surprised her. With his worn clothes, thin, lined face and very straight, untidy, blond hair, Profett looked quite unlike the archetypal politician, and Willow could not imagine what had attracted him to the life in the first place. But there was no doubt that he had been a clever choice for the job of being seen to protect citizens'rights.

Having been brought to believe that they had been manipulated by a bunch of arrogant muddlers and amoral chancers for the past few years, a large part of the electorate had given voice to a longing for government by figures of undeniable probity and firm principles. George Profett's very lack of suavity made him look as though he had plenty of those.

As Willow watched him, wondering whether he would be able to stand up to the rough and tumble of ministerial life, he recited a hesitant little speech about the new cabinet's concern that the rights of individuals might have been eroded during the long stint of the previous government.

It had been decided, he told her in conclusion, that he should collect a team of civil servants to look into certain specific cases of suspected abuse. From their reports decisions could be taken on what needed to be done to beef up the various citizen's charters.

‘And you seemed just the type of person I have been looking for to investigate a case at the Inland Revenue,' he said, watching her through his thick spectacles.

‘Really?'

‘Yes. I gather that you've been part-time for some years now, are considering early retirement and have an income that does not depend on your civil service pay, all of which suggest that you will be wholly independent. Your experience as the Assistant Secretary (Finance) at the Department of Pensions helped put you at the top of my shortlist, as indeed did your investigative experience.'

Willow asked herself uneasily how the minister had come to know of her detective skills. The few investigations she had tackled over the past few years had been made on a strictly amateur basis, and she had hoped that no one connected with her professional life had heard anything about them.

She saw that her silence was making Profett uncomfortable, but that did not worry her. Like most civil servants, she believed that a certain degree of mental discomfort was necessary for any minister. Without a reasonable amount of fear of their officials, elected politicians tended to make all sorts of precipitate decisions that could take their departments months to unravel.

‘Are you at all interested?' he asked when the silence became unbearable.

‘Could you give me a bit more information about the job before I decide?'

‘The case is that of a woman called Fiona Fydgett—Doctor Fydgett in fact, the art historian. You've probably heard of her.'

‘No, I don't think I have,' said Willow, adding, in an attempt to console him for her ignorance, ‘but then I don't move in that world.'

‘Ah. Well, she took an overdose a short while ago. The Inland Revenue had been investigating her financial affairs, and there's been a suggestion that it was their activities that drove her to suicide.'

He paused, obviously waiting for Willow to comment. She raised her darkened eyebrows. The minister took off his tortoiseshell spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He looked very tired. Willow thought that he was probably worn out with the effort of switching from opposition to government. It must have been a huge shock for all the members of the party to find themselves in charge after an election that no one had ever expected them to win.

‘If the Revenue investigation was the cause of Doctor Fydgett's death,' Profett said, screwing up his myopic eyes so that he could still see her, ‘it is crucial for us to establish whether or not it was carried out properly.'

‘I can see that, but didn't the inquest establish the reason why she killed herself?' asked Willow.

‘No,' he said with a determined smile that she thought was supposed to express complete frankness and which in itself made her suspicious. ‘That surprised me, too. Never having had anything to do with either sudden death or the law, I hadn't realised that coroners are there only to decide the immediate cause of death, not to investigate motives or impute blame to anyone. If a crime has been committed, so I'm told, then it's up to the police to investigate and the courts to apportion guilt.'

‘And no crime was suspected in this case?' said Willow, wanting to be absolutely clear about what she was supposed to be investigating.

‘None. Which means that Fiona Fydgett's death is of no more official interest.'

‘Except to you.'

‘Except to my department. In the circumstances we can't just let it go. I have to be certain that no members of the Inland Revenue exceeded their brief or misused their powers.'

‘I see,' said Willow. ‘I don't want to raise unnecessary objections—it sounds like an intriguing assignment—but I thought taxpayers' complaints were ultimately the responsibility of the Treasury. Besides, haven't the Revenue themselves got some kind of investigative machinery? I'd have thought they'd be far more suitable than me, and they'd know at once what they were looking for, which no outsider could.'

‘They have, of course. There's the Board Investigation Office. And there's the Revenue Adjudicator, who's been doing such a good job for aggrieved taxpayers, but this is a rather different enquiry. As it has to do with citizens'rights, I'm handling it rather than one of the Chancellor's team. And in some ways it's your very lack of experience that makes you what I want.'

‘Oh?'
‘Yes. I want to know all about the way they think and work and
deal with people. I want an assessment of the feel of the office and
what the staff think about what they're doing. The ideal would be
for me to see it all for myself, and, since I can't do that, I think
I'm more likely to get the kind of whole picture I want from an
observer like you than from an insider. It's possible… Look here,
are you going to take the job on?' He smiled suddenly, displaying
an unexpected charm.

Willow, her interest tickled as much by the man himself as by the job he had described, nodded. ‘Yes, I think I am.'

‘In that case, to be absolutely frank, what I want is to be certain that this death isn't the result of some kind of canteen culture within the Inland Revenue. Will you find out for me?'

‘I'll do my best,' she said, succumbing to the charm.

The Inland Revenue building was a large, ugly, flat-fronted, red-brick edifice with grimy windows and a generally unwelcoming air. Giving her name to the man in the glass-fronted cubicle by the door, Willow was admitted. Apparently scowling, he told her to go to the third floor, waved her towards a door marked ‘Private' and reached for the telephone on his desk.

Wondering whether the taxpayer's charter would ever manage to change such surliness, and whether that kind of thing should figure in her report, Willow took a creaky lift up to the third floor and stepped out into a semi-open-plan office furnished with grey-metal desks and an astonishing assortment of chairs. Looking from side to side as she tried to decide which way to go, she saw a short, dark-haired woman rushing towards her from an open door at the far end of the room.

‘Willow King?'

‘Yes. Are you Kate Moughette?'

‘That's right. Come along and meet Len Scoffer. He handled the Fydgett case and can give you everything you need.' Kate's speech was so fast that Willow found it hard to sort the hurried syllables into comprehensible words. ‘One of the other FT Inspectors, Jason Tillter, used to work on Fydgett's affairs a few years ago, before—'

‘I'm sorry,' said Willow, breaking into the torrent of sounds, ‘but could you just stop for a moment and explain FT?'

Kate turned her head briefly, looking astonished. ‘It merely stands for “fully trained”,' she said, no more slowly than before. ‘If you need to talk to Jason, he'll be back in the office later this morning. I can't give you much time myself, I'm afraid. I'm very pushed at the moment. But then I had little to do with the Fydgett files and so that ought not to present any problems.'

Walking behind her, trying to adjust to Kate's speed of talking, Willow remembered the few things that the minister had said about her. ‘She's shaping up to be a bit of a heroine in the Revenue, apparently. She's still not particularly senior—only the equivalent of a principal—but she's increased the tax take enormously in her local office, and in a year or two they'll promote her and give her a bigger district. If she manages that as well as the current one, they'll push her on towards the very top at Somerset House. They call her “Little Miss Muffett”, but from what I've heard she'd see off a tarantula any day, let alone any British spider.'