Crossfire by Dick;Felix Francis Francis Page B

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.
     
     
    G radually, with plenty of cajoling and the rest of the bottle of Rémy 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.
    “Do you still have these documents?”
    “No. Roderick kept them.”
    I bet he did.
    “And Roderick said that the owners wouldn’t be out of pocket because all racehorse owners can claim back the VAT from the government.”
    So it was the government that she was stealing from. She wasn’t paying the tax as she should, yet at the same time, the owners were claiming it back. What a mess.
    “But didn’t you think it was