Rotten Apples (10 page)

Unable to hold out any longer, Willow blew her nose hard, and explained about the shooting. Serena put a few skilful questions and Willow did not stop talking again until she heard herself explaining about the permafrost in which her emotions had been encased for her first thirty-eight years, and the way that Tom had thawed them out. Horrified to be opening her private life to a stranger, whom she had no reason to trust—or to bore—she finally put a mental gag on herself and managed to stop talking.

Serena, who had been listening in silence, said, ‘I heard about the shooting on the news last night, of course, but I hadn't made the connection between him and you. I am so sorry. It must be appalling for you not knowing whether he's going to survive.'

Taken aback by the other woman's bluntness, and yet at the same time relieved that she had not commented on any of the emotional outpourings, Willow just nodded.

‘Where is he?'

‘Dowting's. I've every respect for them there. If anyone can help him, they can.' Willow shook her head. ‘But that's not what we're here to discuss.' She tried to think of something relevant to ask and, failing, added: ‘Tell me more about the boy, your nephew.'

‘He's at St Peter's in Chelsea; a boarder,' said Serena readily, not pointing out that Robert was not germane to the enquiry either. She seemed as relieved as Willow to be able to talk about something else.

‘A London boarding school? Isn't that a bit odd given that your sister lived so close?'

‘Not really. Fiona was—often preoccupied, and she had to travel so much that it seemed best for him to board, even though her house is only about ten minutes'walk from the school. From what I picked up from them both, it always sounded as though he'd been reasonably happy there.'

‘Been?'

‘Yes. As you can imagine he's quite different now.'

‘Deeply unhappy, I'd have thought.'

‘I'd have thought so, too, but he's gone cold on me. I don't know that I expected him to cry in my arms exactly, but he won't let any feelings out at all… He actually quite frightens me at the moment.' She frowned.

‘Why frightens?' asked Willow.

‘There must be so much going on under the surface,' said Serena quickly, ‘and not knowing what he's thinking at all worries me. He seems hostile, and yet he doesn't appear to think it's my fault that she's dead, and so I don't understand it. I suppose the hostility might just be a mask, but for what? He's a big lad, too, for his age,' she added with apparent irrelevance.

Willow was about to ask a question when Serena shook her head so violently that she loosened one of the hairpins that skewered her dark hair into a bun at the nape of her neck.

‘I've had him out of school each weekend since it happened, so that he knows he's still got a home and…well, some kind of support. But so far it seems as though I'm doing no more than driving him even further into himself.' Serena coughed. ‘I can't think why I'm telling you all this.'

Willow smiled at that, feeling for the first time that day as though she did not have to pretend about anything. ‘Perhaps because I let go and told you far too much about myself. It's a weird feeling, isn't it?'

Serena only nodded.

‘It's going to be difficult for you, though, isn't it: altering your life to fit a schoolboy into it, particularly a hostile one?' Willow went on, only too glad to be distracted from her own troubles and forgetting all the questions she ought to have been asking. ‘Is he likely to do well academically? That might help.'

Serena's face brightened with a tolerant smile that made Willow think young Robert might eventually be lucky in his guardian.

‘I think so, probably. He's certainly got brains, although his results aren't particularly good so far. I'm not sure what he'll do in the end. As a small boy he used to say he'd like to be a burglar because he liked seeing the inside of other people's homes.'

‘Presumably he's got over that now,' said Willow with a laugh. She sobered up as she thought about the loneliness that might make a child yearn to be inside other people's houses.

‘Definitely. The last I heard was that he's decided to go in for architecture or possibly town planning. Apparently he's been working on a project about utilities and ways of improving their provision and maintenance in large cities.'

‘He'll be blessed by all Londoners if he can think of ways to do that which don't entail digging up newly surfaced roads and pavements every five minutes,' Willow said with real fervour. ‘But back to your sister for a moment. I must just get one thing clear at least. Do you believe that Scoffer was responsible for her death or not?'

Serena sighed again and looked down at the piles of paper on her desk. ‘Partly, but perhaps not entirely. That's why I want to know what you find out. It would help to discover…' She shook her head as though she could not bear to say any more.

‘Why not entirely?'

There was a long pause, before Serena said abruptly: ‘She had tried to kill herself before.'

Willow frowned. Once again she could not understand why the minister had kept such important information from her. Previous suicide attempts, at least, must have come up at the inquest.

‘You're very frank,' she said at last.

‘It's no secret. She…well, she was often ill. Scoffer probably didn't realise that and wouldn't have known how to deal with it even if he had; I don't believe that excuses the way he treated her.'

‘No,' said Willow slowly as she absorbed the significance of what she had just heard, ‘no, I don't suppose you do. Did she leave a letter?'

‘Not this time,' said Serena, looking up. At the sight of her face Willow forgot enough of her own misery to feel sympathetic. ‘But on the two previous occasions when she was found unconscious with an overdose inside her there were letters.'

Willow started as her suspicions returned.

‘Oh, you don't need to look like that,' said Serena at once. ‘There was not the remotest doubt that she'd done it herself or even that she'd meant to do it. She'd seen her doctor that morning and got a new prescription for anti-depressants. She picked up the pills from the chemist and went straight home to swallow the lot with a large whisky. The front door was bolted on the inside and the back door locked. There were no signs of a break-in. No one else had been there.'

‘But no one really knows why she did it this time.' Willow looked across the desk at the self-controlled, intelligent woman on the other side, and told herself to stop being silly. Serena would hardly be talking so frankly if she had had a hand in her sister's death. It frightened Willow to think how seriously her judgment had been affected by what had happened to Tom.

‘No, but several people knew that the tax investigation had been upsetting her, and her papers underline that.'

‘”Several people”? Who?'

‘Oh, old friends of ours, like her MP, and even one or two people she'd bought pictures from. I didn't know at the time, but some of them have been in touch with me since she died. Apparently Scoffer was convinced she'd been understating the gains she'd made on her paintings and he'd approached some of her buyers and sellers to check up on the information she'd given him.'

‘What?' Willow was outraged that there were no copies of such letters on the file she had read. She assumed that Scoffer had removed them until it struck her that Serena might be lying in an attempt to arouse extra sympathy for her dead sister, or even to press the blame for her death more firmly on to Scoffer than the evidence warranted. Willow reminded herself that hearsay, such as Serena had offered, was not proof of anything at all.

‘I know,' said Serena, unaware of Willow's wavering sympathy. ‘It's no wonder Fiona was getting in such a state. Her reputation could have taken quite a beating from gossip generated by his activities. After all, it's not as though all the picture buyers and sellers were friends of hers, who'd have known she'd never lie. Some were perfect strangers, who might have believed anything of her—even that she'd cheated them. It must have been utterly ghastly for her.'

There was a long silence as Willow tried to absorb the implications of what she had learned.

‘Have you any photographs of her?' she said eventually.

‘Yes,' said Serena, looking as though she had been jolted by the change of subject ‘Why?'

‘It's irrational,' Willow said, ‘but I feel that if I knew what she looked like I might be able to understand a bit more about what went on between her and Scoffer, which would help me come to the sort of conclusions I've been asked to make.'

‘Okay. They're all at home. I'll bung one in the post for you.'

Willow thanked her, talked for a few minutes more, and left for the hospital.

There was no change in Tom's condition. She sat with him in complete silence for four hours, sometimes certain that he would regain consciousness, at others coldly convinced that he would die. Eventually she gave in to common sense and took a taxi back to the mews, trying to deaden her own raw feelings without rebuilding the self-defensive walls that she had been working to dismantle ever since she and Tom had decided to marry.

Finding that the insides of her cheeks were clamped between her teeth again as she unlocked her front door, she deliberately relaxed her jaw muscles and tried to turn her mind to more productive things. She wished that she had prepared better for her meeting with Serena and not been so easily and completely distracted. If only she had drawn up a proper list of questions as she would have done in the old days before the shooting, the interview would have been of much more use.

Later, lying in a cool bath, with the skin of her fingers and toes slowly puckering in the scented water, she thought about Fiona Fydgett's alleged suicide attempts and knew that the investigation was going to be much more complicated than she had ever thought it would be.

The Following Morning Willow went straight into Kate Moughette's office to ask for a copy of Serena Fydgett's letter of protest to the Chairman of the Inland Revenue. Kate's neatly painted lips tightened in irritation, but she found a photocopy of the letter without difficulty. Willow smiled insincerely and took the piece of paper back to her temporary office.

Dear Sir Roland, My sister, Doctor Fiona Fydgett of I Castlereagh Street, Chelsea, whose tax affairs have been under investigation by some of your officers, killed herself last week. While I do not suggest that their treatment of her was the sole cause of her suicide, I must protest about the way they have handled her case; and I would ask you, as a matter of urgency, to review the Inland Revenue's policy on disputed tax assessments and to consider instituting some different form of training. Taxpayers are now called ‘customers', and I would suggest that if the customer cannot always be considered to be right, there should at least be an acknowledgment that the people with whom the customers are dealing may sometimes be wrong as well. It is also essential that proof of wrongdoing is established before customers are treated as guilty. I know that the onus is on taxpayers to prove their innocence, but while your officers are waiting for that I suggest it would be more productive if they refrained from treating taxpayers as criminals. There is, I understand from my sister's solicitor, a serious allegation in her papers to the effect that the inspector in charge of her case actually threatened that if she did not agree to pay the disputed assessment he would see that she was investigated every year until she died. He pointed out that she had already protested that she could not afford to pay her accountant to deal with the first investigation and therefore would not be in a position to challenge any future assessments. It seems more than possible that, unable to face the prospect of such investigations, draining both her fragile emotional energy and her purse, she killed herself. In any case, such a threat seems to me not only to constitute abuse of process, but also to be tantamount to blackmail.

Yours sincerely,
Serena Fydgett

Willow read the letter through several times, wishing that she had the minister in front of her so that she could cross-examine him. She would also have liked to talk to Malcolm Penholt to find out precisely what Serena had meant by describing him as ‘an old friend of ours', and how much of her story about her sister he would be prepared to corroborate.

Fiona Fydgett's history was sad, but, as far as Willow could see, it was no real threat to the new government However appalling the investigation might have seemed to Fiona herself, any questions or criticisms that were raised about it could be countered by the fact that she had never tried to use the well-publicised system for complaints against the Revenue, and indeed that she had tried to kill herself at least twice before. The minister must have known both of those facts, even if he had not mentioned them to Willow. Could he really have been motivated only by a desire to collect enough ammunition to persuade his colleagues to beef up the Taxpayer's Charter?

Willow pushed aside the list of criticisms she had made for her report on Scoffer's conduct and, as she did so, her concentration broke and the thoughts she had been holding at bay all morning flooded into her conscious mind.

Tom will die, she said to herself. If he does, I'd rather be dead. It would have been better never to have loved him at all than to face this. All my life I've protected myself against this particular pain, and now I've lost my last defences against it; not even lost them, actually chosen to dismantle them. I must have been mad.

With an audible growl, pushed out through gritted teeth, she ordered herself to get back to work and picked up the telephone to tell Len Scoffer that she needed to talk to him again. His line was engaged and so she started to plough through all the other files she had been given, doggedly refusing to let herself think of Tom.