Why We Die (3 page)

She nodded.

‘And twenty-six pence.’

‘Where did they get that from?’

‘Well, they’re rather hoping to get it from you.’

This was what Zoë Boehm needed: a comedian. This was why she’d come through the door marked ‘Accountant’.

‘I fill in the forms. Every year. The self-assessment –?’

‘The SA100.’

Thanks.

‘I fill it in. I declare everything. So how come I suddenly owe four thousand, seven hundred and thirty-one pounds in unpaid tax?’

‘It’s a system. Like all of them, it has its flaws. You know what the problem with self-assessment is?’

She was about to find out.

‘
Self
. If you’d come to me in the first place, you wouldn’t be here now.’ He hesitated, as if aware of a paradox lurking in that. ‘An expert would have avoided the pitfalls.’

‘So you can make it go away?’

He said, ‘You realize we’re talking after the event.’

Four thousand, seven hundred and thirty-one pounds.

Zoë – forty-something, five foot nine, dark-eyed, curly black hair – had been leading one of those second-chance lives lately: air smelled fresh, coffee tasted great. When she walked down the street, attractive details jostled for attention. But there was a use-by date on second chances, and she’d reached hers. The floral displays hung on lampposts, autumn sunlight stroking sand-coloured stone – they’d revert to visual irritants on her way home. Everything would be back to normal.

‘I’ve never tried to cheat the revenue.’

This was about eighty per cent true. She’d never tried to cheat the revenue in a way she could be found out, and this was what was pissing her off now.

‘There’s a policy about ignorance being no defence? It turns out you’re not entitled to some of the set-offs you’ve claimed.’

‘Four grand’s worth?’

He looked down at the papers in front of him. ‘They’re going back a while. It adds up.’

‘They can do that?’

Short of walking through walls, his look said, they could do pretty much whatever they wanted. And don’t place bets against the walking through walls.

‘So what made them decide to look at me?’

‘Roughly twenty-eight per cent of all small businesses –’

‘What made them decide to look at me?’

‘I imagine somebody gave them your name.’

Autumn sunlight slanted through the window. On the ledge birds shuffled and cooed.

‘Nice.’

‘You’re a private detective. I assume you’ve made enemies.’

This was nice too.

Damien Faraday was mid-thirties, so hadn’t had as much practice as Zoë at making enemies. Zoë imagined he’d be a natural, though. She’d picked him out of the phone book, and there was always a sense, doing this, that you were conjuring somebody from yellow paper: an origami miracle. In which case, the product ought to conform more closely to what was needed. This one was a little too smooth, a little too self-satisfied.

She said, ‘I haven’t worked in a while.’

‘Such people have long memories.’

She assumed his experience was born of celluloid.

The desk between them was hi-tech, a polished black surface with chrome edging, on which sat a photocube, displaying pictures of Damien, and a sleek computer whose screen was angled away from her. She had a sudden vision of the numbers he poured into it: an endless stream the machine would chop and change, delivering them back again as fractions, percentages, roots and dividends. And he’d be shaving points all the time, of course. It wasn’t like he sat here for free.

‘Have you been away?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You’ve not been working, you said.’

She wasn’t about to give him her medical history. ‘Yes. Which has kind of hammered my savings.’

‘We can arrange a payment schedule. They won’t be expecting a lump sum.’

‘This is your advice?

‘Like I said, Miss Boehm.’
Ms
, she didn’t bother saying. ‘We’re a little after the event, here. We can make sure it doesn’t happen again. But there’s not a lot we can do about what’s already done.’

She wondered if this was what talking to a backstreet abortionist was like.

‘You no longer have an office.’

‘No. I run the business from my flat.’

He made a spreading gesture: what did she expect? The office had been her biggest business expense, a handy hole in the tax demand. Deciding it was also a luxury had been a bit hasty, judging by the man’s obvious disappointment in her: he might have been offering Zoë tax windows for years, on which she’d insisted on pulling the blinds.
So pay
the bill, woman. Forget about it
. Just one tinsy problem with that, Damien.

‘We could throw together a list of legitimate expenses. Expenses you unaccountably forgot to claim. I doubt they’d look at them at this stage, but if you wanted to make the effort . . .’

Did she want to make the effort? For a while, this past year, life had ganged up on Zoë Boehm. She supposed she’d let things slide. It was certain she didn’t have a trove of receipts she could wave in the taxman’s face . . . Zoë had been flying under the radar so long, she got a nosebleed signing official documents. Waking up to a demand like this might be just what she needed, if you went in for that tough love crap. Mostly, though, she wished the taxman’s spotlight had passed over her without registering the bump.

‘Are you working at the moment?’

It was on her tongue to tell him to mind his own business, but by entering his office she’d made it his business. ‘I had a call on my way here. A job, yes. I’m not sure what yet.’

‘It might be an idea to take it. Regardless.’

Regardless . . . That was a good word. It implied that consequences were things that happened to other people – though looking at Damien Faraday, it was possible that that was true. Events might slide off his basted surface. If she were a cruel woman, she’d be wondering what he looked like with a pair of those bird thermometers stuck into him; the kind that pop up when the turkey’s done.

‘Ms Boehm?’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘Filthy lucre, eh? Where would we be without it?’

‘I’ll keep you informed.’

With it, without it: she was on the street five minutes later. If she charged as much as Faraday did for doing bugger all, she’d not have required his advice in the first place. Another paradox there, but not as big a problem as remembering where she’d parked . . .

Except her memory wasn’t that bad. She’d parked exactly where she thought she had, and the space remained exactly as she’d found it: a nice vacant kerbside stretch barely halfway over the No Parking line. It was only the car that was missing, and no matter how many times she turned and stared along the row of vehicles behind her, it didn’t reappear when she turned back. Her car was gone.

Some crime scenes looked the part: broken glass and fractured furniture; the sense of something large having passed through, thrashing its tail and not giving a damn about the chaos. Others, eerily still, were often the ones where the most violence had taken place; violence carefully considered in advance, and focused entirely on its victim. Sometimes death was a private creature, and kept itself to itself. Zoë had seen a room once where a murder had taken place, and it simply looked recently vacated. She’d not have been surprised if the unspilled coffee cup on the table had been warm.

The jeweller’s shop she stood in now was more akin to the former than the latter, though it had not been laid waste, exactly. Two men had entered, and with threats and visible weaponry had taken what they’d come for. Harold Sweeney had been left shaken but unharmed. Little damage had happened indoors; the violence – the ripped bone and cartilege; the spilt blood – had taken place on the pavement outside, and pavements didn’t retain event-memory. Harold Sweeney’s, though, was working overtime:

‘I’m unlocking the door, and first thing I know they’re breathing down my neck, closer than my shadow. Looming up out of nowhere.’

The nowhere in question being a white BMW parked round the corner; stolen that same morning, and later found abandoned in the railway station car park.

‘And they were armed,’ Zoë said, to remind him she was there. He’d slipped into a fugue state; had travelled back in time three days, and was reliving it breath by breath.

‘The tall one.’

‘How tall’s tall?’

‘Taller than me.’

This wasn’t as helpful as he might have liked to imagine. Harold Sweeney wasn’t one of life’s giants; nor did he especially make up for this in other departments. Under the shop’s dim lighting – the mesh-inlaid windows blocked out the morning – his skin had a sallow sheen, as if he didn’t venture aboveground often, and his suit smelled like it had been rinsed then hung to dry in a smoke-filled room. Two smallish triangles of hair sprouted at his cheekbones. Presumably he thought this looked good, or that you weren’t allowed to shave there. Either way, a second opinion would have helped.

But it was a job, Zoë reminded herself. Whatever he wanted, he’d be paying for it. And money would be useful, any time soon.

Sweeney had called just before her appointment with Faraday. Of course, she hadn’t known then that she wouldn’t have a car come eleven o’clock. She’d had to wait twenty minutes for a bus up the hill, time she spent reporting the theft on her phone. More officialdom. Was she sure she’d left it where she thought she had? Only she’d be surprised how many wom – how many people reported their cars missing, only to remember later where they’d actually parked.

She said, ‘Is it true most policemen are failed traffic wardens?’

‘I think you’ve got that the wrong way round, ma’am.’

‘My mistake.’

Traffic wardens were a possibility, of course, but not a major one. In London, lorries with winches removed offending cars, but somebody had to examine the target for pre-existing damage first – she’d watched wardens with clipboards jotting down bumper scratches, to ward off later litigation. But that didn’t happen in Oxford yet, and besides, she’d only been with Faraday half an hour. Nowhere near long enough to catalogue her car’s damages. The policeman-shaped dent in the offside front panel was a page in itself.

And there was probably some law of modern life operating here: everybody gets a divorce, everybody gets their car stolen. Zoë had never been divorced, though that was largely a matter of timing. Now she’d had her car stolen, and while she couldn’t say she enjoyed the feeling, the timing wasn’t so bad here either. Like her marriage had been, her car was a wreck. But unlike her marriage, she was going to need to replace it.

Back to the present. ‘What about the other one?’

‘He was taller than me too.’ His vision was sharper suddenly; the eyes had a spark to them. ‘I’ve heard all the short jokes.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘The second one, he could give me an inch, tops. The first was about six foot.’

‘And they were wearing stocking masks.’

‘I doubt they walked up the street like that. Must’ve pulled them over their heads as they came up behind me.’

Zoë glanced through the dismal glass at what could be seen of the street. If their car had been round the corner, they’d had to cover fifty yards to get here: further than anyone would want to travel with a stocking mask on.

‘I doubt that too, Mr Sweeney. Did they speak at all?’

‘Bare minimum. They knew what they were after, and didn’t waste time discussing it.’

‘And what did they take?’

They both looked at the main counter display, whose glass was gone, though slivers remained in the crevices of the dusty velvet inlay. This was moulded to hold necklaces and bracelets. The wooden pegs were presumably mountings for rings.

‘Everything from there.’

‘Do you have –?’

But he was already giving her a typed list: one prepared for police and insurers.

‘Thanks.’

He said, ‘Do you know much about the jewellery trade, Ms Boehm?’

No: do you know much about the private detective business? But there was no sense antagonizing a potential client; besides,
yes
– everybody knew about the private detective business. ‘Just what everyone knows.’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘You sell expensive stuff. What’s on your mind, Mr Sweeney?’

‘Much of what passes through my hands is never actually offered for sale to the public.’

‘I see,’ said Zoë, who didn’t.

‘It’s a nice city to do business in, Oxford. There’s a lot of overseas visitors, a lot of tourists. People on holiday like spending money. Main reason they leave home in the first place. You can make a nice piece of change off the holiday trade . . .’

Zoë could see a
but
coming before it cleared the horizon. ‘Except this isn’t really Oxford, is it?’

‘This isn’t really Oxford.’

It was Oxford, of course, but it wasn’t. Oxford, for the tourist trade, was half a square mile – built largely of Cotswold stone – around which visitors could wander, asking where the university was. It was a stop en route to Stratford, around which they could also wander, asking where the Globe was. But Sweeney’s jeweller’s was well outside that zone: was up the big hill, past the house where a famous fat crook once lived, and nestled between a chemist’s and a charity shop on the road to London. Passing trade was exactly that: passing. Oxford was a nice address, but nicer the less you knew about it.

‘I do a lot of selling on. To bigger fish in the trade, you know?’ Whose shops, presumably, boasted loftier addresses and kerb flash.

‘Selling on of what?’

He shrugged. ‘People die. Their relatives sell their jewellery.’

‘Where are we heading here, Mr Sweeney?’

‘It’s what you might call a grey area.’

For a moment, she thought he meant Headington.

A shadow stopped outside the window, examined its contents for a moment, and moved on. Uncommitted interest. Sweeney got a lot of that, no doubt. Zoë had had a certain amount herself, when she ran an office: people dropping in to run hypotheticals past her; hoping she’d indicate an easy way they could find out what they wanted to know, and save them the expense of hiring her. Time-wasters were less of a problem since she’d quit the premises, though the species hadn’t been eradicated entirely. Cold calling had brought it to something approaching an art form.