Dick Francis - Crossfire

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.