I waited in silence.
She paused for a bit but eventually began to explain. ‘Did you know that racehorse owners can recover the VAT on training fees?’
‘My mother said something about it,’ I said.
‘And on their other costs as well, those they attribute to their racing “business”, like transport and telephone charges and vet’s fees. They can even recover the VAT they have to pay when they buy the horses in the first place.’
The VAT rate was at nearly twenty per cent. That was a lot of tax to recover on expensive horseflesh.
‘So what’s the fiddle?’ I asked.
‘What makes you think I’d ever tell you?’ she said, turning in the car towards me.
‘So you do know, then?’ I asked.
‘I might,’ she said arrogantly.
‘I’ll delete the pictures if you tell me.’
Even in her cocaine-induced state, she knew that the pictures were the key.
‘How can I trust you?’
‘I’m an officer in the British Army,’ I said rather pompously. ‘My word is my bond.’
‘Do you promise?’ she said.
‘I promise,’ I said formally, holding up my right hand. Yet another of those promises I might keep.
She paused a while longer before starting again.
‘Garraway lives in Gibraltar and he’s not registered for VAT in the UK. He actually could be but he’s obsessive about not having anything to do with the tax people here because he’s a tax exile. He only lives in Gibraltar to avoid paying tax. Hates the place really.’ She paused.
‘So?’ I said, prompting her to continue.
‘So all Peter Garraway’s horses are officially owned by Jackson Warren. Jackson pays the training fees and all the other bills and then he claims back the VAT. He even buys the horses for Garraway in the first place and gets the VAT back on that too. He uses a company called Budsam Ltd.’
‘So why is that a fiddle?’ I asked. ‘If Jackson buys them and pays the fees then he is the owner, not Garraway.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but Peter Garraway pays Jackson back for all the costs.’
‘Doesn’t that show up in Jackson’s accounts or those of the company?’
‘No.’ She smiled. ‘That’s the clever bit. Peter pays Jackson into an offshore account in Gibraltar that Jackson doesn’t declare to the Revenue. Alex says it’s very clever because Jackson gets his money offshore without ever having to transfer anything from a UK bank, which would be required by law to tell the tax people about it.’
‘How many horses does Peter Garraway own in this way?’ I asked.
‘Masses. He has ten or twelve with us and loads more with other trainers.’
‘But don’t they pay for themselves with the prize money?’
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘Most horses don’t make in prize money anything like what they cost to keep, especially not jumpers. Far from it. Not unless you count the betting winnings, and Garraway gets to keep those himself.’
‘So why doesn’t Peter Garraway register himself as an owner in the UK for the VAT scheme?’
‘I told you,’ she said. ‘He’s paranoid about the British tax people. They’ve been trying for ever to get him for tax evasion. He’s obsessive about the number of days he stays here, and he and his wife even travel on separate planes so they won’t both be killed in a crash and his family get done here for inheritance tax. There’s no way he’ll register. Alex thinks it’s stupid. He told them it would solve the problem of the VAT without any risk, but Garraway won’t listen.’
I listened all right.
Wasn’t it Archimedes who claimed that, if you gave him a lever long enough, he could lift the world?
I listened to Julie with mounting glee. Perhaps now I had a lever long enough to prise my mother’s money back from under the Rock of Gibraltar.
All I had to do was to work out on whom to apply it, and when.
17
I spent much of the night downloading Alex’s files and e-mails onto my laptop using the internet connection in my mother’s office.
I had let myself into the kitchen silently using Ian’s key. The dogs had been unperturbed by their nocturnal visitor, sniffing my hand as I’d passed them and then going back to sleep, happy that I was friend, not foe.
I worked solely by the light of the computer screen and left everything exactly as I found it. I didn’t know why I still thought it was necessary for my presence to be a secret from my mother, but I wasn’t yet ready to try to explain to her what had been going on.
It might also