Dick Francis - Crossfire

"Don't you have a secretary?" I asked.

"No," she said. "Derek and I do all the paperwork between us."

Or not, I thought, as the case may be.

I was pretty certain that my mother's individual self-assessment tax return, as for every other self-employed person in the United Kingdom, should have been filed with the tax office by midnight on January 31 at the very latest, along with the payment of any income tax due. Unlike in the United States, where the filing date is April 15 and one is able to file for an extension, in the UK January 31 is the deadline, period.

I looked up at the calendar on the wall above her desk. It was already February 9. There were no exceptions to the deadline, so she would have already incurred a penalty for late filing, to say nothing of the interest for late payment.

I'd checked the tax office website on the Internet. It confirmed that she would have notched up an automatic one-hundred-pound late-filing penalty plus interest on the overdue tax. It also said that she had until the end of February before a five percent surcharge of the tax due was added, on top of the interest.

Very soon now, the Revenue was probably going to start asking difficult questions about my mother's accounts. The time left to sort out the mess was unknown, but it had to be short. Maybe it was already too late and the Revenue would be at her door in the morning.

I wondered about my own tax affairs.

As an employee, I paid my tax as I earned through the PAYE system, which meant I didn't need to complete an annual tax return. The army deducted my tax and National Insurance before it paid the remainder of my salary into my bank account. Mostly they took off my board and lodging costs too, but there hadn't been any of those for a while. Even the army couldn't charge me to stay in a National Health Service hospital.

Sometime soon I should be receiving a tax-free lump sum of nearly a hundred thousand pounds from the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme, although how they could put a value on the loss of a lower leg and foot is anyone's guess. The major from the MOD had taken away my completed AFCS form with a promise that it would be dealt with promptly. That had been nearly three weeks ago now, but I had long learned that anything less than six months was "promptly" as far as army finances were concerned.

Perhaps it might help to keep the tax man's handcuffs from my mother's wrists. But would it be enough? And would it arrive in time?

I searched through my mother's filing cabinets, and eventually I found her previous year's tax return filed under R for Roderick. Where else?

The tax return was a piece of art. It clearly showed that my mother had only minimal personal income, well below that which would have incurred any tax to be paid. It stated that her monthly income was just two hundred pounds from her business, mere pocket money.

Perhaps the Revenue might not be knocking at her door in the morning after all, even if they could find it.

Possibly designed to confuse them, the return was not in the name of Mrs. Josephine Kauri, and her address was not recorded as Kauri House Stables. It wasn't even in Lambourn but at 26 Banbury Drive, Oxford. However, I did recognize the signature as being that of my mother, in her familiar curly handwriting.

Only the name was unfamiliar. She had signed the form Jane Philips, her real, legal, married name.

In the same filing cabinet, I also found a Kauri House Stables Ltd corporate tax return for the previous year. It was dated May and they were annual so at least we had some breathing space before the next one was due.

I looked through it. Roderick had worked his magic here as well.

How, I wondered, did my mother afford to pay two thousand pounds a week in blackmail demands if, as according to the tax returns, her personal income was less than two and a half thousand a year, and her business made such a small profit that it paid tax only in three figures, in spite of all the extras paid by the horse owners in nonexistent VAT.

But, of course, I could find no records of the profits made by the company called Kauri House Stables (Gibraltar) Ltd. In fact, there was no reference to any such entity anywhere in the R for Roderick drawer of the filing cabinet, or anywhere else, for that matter. However, I did find one interesting sheet of paper nestling amongst the tax returns. It was a letter from an investment fund manager welcoming my mother and stepfather into the select group of individuals invited to invest in his fund. The letter was dated three years previously and had been signed by a Mr. Anthony Cigar of Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd.

Mr. Cigar hadn't actually used the term "hedge fund," but it was quite clear from his letter, and from the attached fee schedule, that a hedge fund was what he'd managed.

I sat at my mother's desk and looked up Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd on the Internet. I typed the name into Google and then clicked on the bank's own Web address. The computer came back with the answer that the website was under construction and was unavailable to be displayed.

I went back to the Google page and clicked on the site for the Gibraltar Chronicle, one of the references that had mentioned the Rock Bank. It reported that back in September, Parkin amp; Cleeve Ltd, a UK-based firm of liquidators, had unsuccessfully filed a suit in the High Court in London against the individual directors of Rock Bank (Gibraltar) Ltd in an attempt to recover money on behalf of several of their clients. The directors were not named by the report, and the Chronicle had been unable to obtain a response from any representative of the bank.

It didn't bode well for the recovery of my mother's million dollars.

I yawned and looked at my watch. It was ten to midnight, and my mother and Derek had long before gone up to bed, and it was also well past my bedtime.

I flicked off the light in the office and went up the stairs.

My first day as sleuth-in-residence at Kauri House Stables hadn't gone all my own way. I hoped for better news in the morning.

When I came down to breakfast at eight o'clock I found my stepfather sitting silently, staring at a single brown envelope lying on the bleached-pine kitchen table, with "On Her Majesty's Service" printed in bold type along the top.

"Have you opened it?" I asked him.

"Of course not," he said. "It's addressed to your mother."

"Where is she?" I asked.

"Still out with the first lot," he said.

I picked up the envelope and looked at the back. "In case of non-delivery, please return to HMRC" was printed across the flap, so there was no mistake-it was definitely from the tax man.

I slid my finger under the flap and ripped open the envelope.

"You can't do that," my stepfather said indignantly.

"I just did," I said, taking out the contents. I unfolded the letter. It was simply a reminder for her Pay-As-You-Earn payments for the stable staff.

"It's OK," I said. "This is just a routine monthly reminder notice. It was generated by a computer. No one is going to come here. Not yet anyway."

"Are you sure?" he asked, still looking worried.

"Yes," I said."But they will come in the end if we don't do something about this mess."

"But what can we do?" he said.

It was a good question.

"I don't know yet," I said, "but I do know that we will be in even more trouble if we do nothing and then the tax man comes calling. We simply have to go to them with answers before they come to us with questions."

My mother swept into the kitchen and placed her hands on the Aga.

"God, it's cold out there," she said. Neither my stepfather nor I said anything. She turned around. "What's wrong with you two? Quiet all of a sudden?"

"A letter has arrived from the tax office," my stepfather said.