Rotten Apples by Natasha Cooper Page A

attempts and knew that the investigation was going to be much more complicated than she had ever thought it would be.

Chapter Seven
    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