A Taxing Affair Read online

  A TAXING AFFAIR

  by

  VICTORIA GORDON

  © Victoria Gordon 1993

  CHAPTER ONE

  Vashti stretched her throat as if for the sacrificial knife as she tipped her head back and stared upwards to an unseen heaven.

  ‘But why me?’ she asked, directing the question not at her immediate superior, who had provoked it, but past him, above him, to the nameless, invisible deity she half expected to reply in a barrage of thunderbolts.

  ‘Because it was you that he asked for,’ was the reply, but it came, of course, from Ross Chandler, whose rotund figure was all too visible, its Buddha-like attitude of benignity offset by eyes that never smiled, perhaps never had.

  ‘And,’ he continued with an attitude to match, ‘since he apparently has friends in high places, it would be best to…’

  His gesture upwards had vastly different overtones than had Vashti’s. To Chandler, the only deity that existed was the Australian Taxation Office for which they both worked; the Commissioner for Taxation was the ultimate authority.

  ‘But it doesn’t make any sense,’ Vashti argued. ‘I don’t know the first thing about writing, and certainly I’m no authority on the ways in which this office works. I’m just a field auditor. Surely there are people far better qualified for ... for whatever this person wants.’

  ‘He wants you. He is apparently writing a book in which the workings of the taxation office — and particularly the field audit side — play some significant role, and he wants someone he can consult regularly to ensure accuracy.’ Her boss was unmoved by her concern. The request had been ratified from above, therefore she would follow through to the best of her ability. Or he would know the reason why.

  ‘But that’s just the point,’ Vashti insisted. ‘Why me? Surely there are much better people in this office to help Mr ...?’

  ‘Keene,’ her boss supplied the name, through hardly moving lips. Vashti added his first name, but her own lips trembled noticeably, at least to herself.

  ‘Phelan. Phelan Keene,’ she whispered, shaking her mane of ash-blonde hair and clenching her teeth around the name as if to somehow subdue the memory it carried. ‘Of course ... of course it would be.’

  And just knowing the name answered, at least in part, the manifold question of why. Vashti had spent the months just prior to his father’s death working on a terribly convoluted — and still not complete — field audit on the family’s wide-ranging Tasmanian business dealings. Phelan Keene hadn’t been involved, except as a remote and distant partner in the overall scheme of things; he was a writer who spent virtually none of his time involved with the family’s rural affairs. He’d only come home, she thought, for the funeral.

  She narrowed her usually wide pale grey eyes and pushed time back a fortnight, back to a grave site...

  The funeral for old Bede Keene had been held on a bleak Tuesday morning, the setting a tiny church that crouched on a high and windy ridge back in the hills behind Ouse. Once there’d been a settlement there, now there were a few isolated homesteads and a sign at the gravel-road junction. The aged church, refurbished in a dress of cream-coloured galvanised iron with a fresh-painted green roof, hunched in one comer of a small cemetery, as lonely as its setting. Many of the graves dated back to before 1900; some delineated entire family histories, and several were no more than humps in the ground, unmarked, with nothing to speak for those beneath.

  Vashti had attended purely for personal reasons. Purely because during her months of dealing with the old man she had come to like and respect him greatly, and she’d been genuinely saddened by his death.

  Emerging from her car after a horrendous drive through drizzle and fog all the way from Hobart, she had almost got right back in again and left, thinking how out of place she felt, and probably looked, to all those gathered round the tiny church, which was literally propped up by timbers on each side and seemed almost to cower beneath the huge old pine trees surrounding the cemetery.

  She was only twenty kilometres from Ouse, barely a hundred from Hobart, but it seemed as if she’d gone back just as far in time.

  These were country people. Work-roughened hands tugged at unfamiliar and strangling ties and collars beneath out-of-fashion pin-striped suits. Those who were hatless had pale foreheads above tanned and weathered faces. Most of the women, too, seemed from a different time, their clothing somehow dated, their very attitudes different. Given the unique setting of the place, Vashti wouldn’t have been surprised to see Model-T Fords parked around the yard, but what she did see still held a country flavour of battered utilities and four-wheel-drives parked along the narrow dirt track to the churchyard with luxury vehicles that had seen better days.

  Around her as she hesitantly sought out a glimpse of the family were the voices of rural Tasmania; the talk was of cattle and rain and sheep and drought and crops. And the very cadence of those voices was audibly different, so reminiscent of old Bade Keene’s way of speaking that it brought a lump to her throat.

  And as more people gathered — surely the little church couldn’t hold them all? — she noticed that she wasn’t totally alone in not fitting in. There were a few people in city gear, a few men who stood out from the crowd because of their noticeable veneer of sophistication.

  Two, she noticed, were politicians, one of them a cabinet minister for the state of Tasmania. And of course Janice Gentry, the family’s accountant, was there, classically clothed, classically beautiful, but, to Vashti’s eye, with an expression that said this was a duty appearance, even if the accountant seemed comfortable enough in the rural setting.

  Her expression had changed as the two women met, nodded, and then Ms Gentry was past and Vashti found herself face to face with Bevan Keene, the elder of the sons, and Alana, the surprisingly young twenty- two-year-old daughter of the patriarch, who’d died in his seventy-ninth year.

  Their welcome was evident; Bevan smiled at her, murmuring her name as he nodded. Alana went so far as to reach out and take Vashti’s hands in a warm greeting.

  Vashti had to blink back tears and force a smile of her own that froze as Alana moved aside to introduce ‘my brother Phelan’ and Vashti looked up to meet grey-green eyes that fairly blazed with hostility.

  No words. She, transfixed by his attitude, simply couldn’t speak; he clearly wasn’t about to.

  Instead, he stared down at her, eyes fierce, mouth fixed in a bitter, angry slash. His pale eyes seemed to bum from a darkly suntanned face the colour of his crisply curled hair. It was a wolf’s face; merciless and bleak.

  Vashti was stunned. Never in her life had she seen such blatant bitterness. And for what? She’d never met him before — and certainly wouldn’t have forgotten if she had.

  Far from handsome, at least in any conventional way, he was the most intensely alive man she’d ever seen. Although he was standing still, it seemed as if he was poised, totally ready for action. His immobility shouted its own lie. And, she noticed quite irrelevantly, he too was in the country yet not quite of it. His dark suit was of European styling, his gleaming shoes a world apart from the dress boots worn by most other men present.

  His haircut was of the city, his hands work-muscled, but more the hands of an artist than a farmer. Which, of course, he wasn’t. Phelan Keene was a writer and a famous one, a man who’d kept his rural background in his fitness and carriage, but whose life now was centred round the international scene, travelling in Europe and especially in south-east Asia.

  And he did not like her, to say the very least. But why?

  She tried to match his stare, but found it almost impossible. Had it been a frank sexual appraisal she could have managed; she’d faced enough of them in her adult years to recognise such. But this was a
predator’s appraisal, so savage that she half expected to see him snarl, to see gleaming teeth slashing down at her trembling throat.

  For what seemed like hours she felt as if there were only the two of them there, as if they were trapped in stillness within the quiet, sober bustle of the funeral crowd. Then he shouldered past her and it was as if she’d been suddenly returned to a strangely menacing present.

  Moments later, the crowd began to take on a semblance of order as everyone moved to first fill, then overfill, the tiny church. Vashti, still shaken by Phelan Keene’s silent assault, hung back, and stayed with the overflow outside.

  The funeral, quietly dignified and somehow fitted to the setting, finally over, she found herself in the muddle of departing vehicles without seeing Phelan Keene again, and wasn’t sorry. Finally, she managed to trail other vehicles southwards to Ouse, but didn’t pause for the ‘wake’ at the Lachlan Hotel, despite overhearing compliments about the food and drink that would be on offer.

  Instead, she had continued on to Hobart, wondering as she drove why Phelan Keene had seemed so angry, so hostile. It was, she had thought with no sense of understanding, as if he somehow blamed Vashti herself for his father’s death.

  All of which, she now thought, made his request all the more surprising, not to mention suspicious. Fair enough for him to write a book which might involve taxation office procedures, but why specifically seek her involvement?

  ‘I’ll do what I can, then,’ Vashti assured her boss, but she kept her fingers crossed behind her back as she did so; there was something going on here that she somehow knew she wasn’t going to like.

  On her way home from work, Vashti bought a paperback copy of Phelan Keene’s latest suspense thriller.

  The reading of it occupied the next three evenings, but did nothing to reveal the logic of the remembered antipathy towards her. Even Keene’s picture on the back cover held more mystery than information; it was unsatisfyingly flat and lifeless compared to her memory of the man himself.

  The picture simply couldn’t do justice to those eyes, she found herself thinking. Those icy grey-green eyes, so bleak in their hostility towards her, now seemed to mock her with their blandness in the picture.

  Worse, the image of Phelan Keene revealed a surprising resemblance to the man’s father; Vashti might have been looking at Bede Keene in his mid-thirties, she thought.

  There was the same high-bridged nose, the same generous mouth and solid, determined jaw line. It was easy to picture the old man’s shock of still curly grey hair as auburn and even curlier. The photograph held none of the anger she remembered from her brief meeting with the man; indeed he looked almost friendly, with one quirked eyebrow and a hint of a wry smile for his readers.

  A face with character, she found herself thinking. A lived-in face. A face too much like his father’s for Vashti’s taste. She had liked and greatly admired the father, a man of black and white principles, a man with little compromise, and no deviousness, no great subtleties except in the droll, dry sense of humour she’d come to relish.

  Throughout their involvement, he’d established a joking pattern of trying to marry her off to one or the other of his sons, insisting she was getting ‘long in the tooth’ and overdue for marriage. The subject had first arisen when he’d spoken of the original family home north of Ouse. Now it was of only marginal significance to the family’s vast empire, but it had been the beginning, and held great emotional significance to the old man.

  He’d grown up there, married there, buried his wife there, and was far from joking when he told Vashti he’d ‘get a measure of satisfaction out of dying in the same house I was born in. Not that it’s really the same house — probably more new than old about it now — but still...’

  ‘I can’t imagine much satisfaction in dying anywhere,’ she’d replied, adding, ‘but then I’ve only got my poky little flat, and it’s rented in any case.’

  ‘And you’re far too young to be thinking of dying anyway,’ he’d said. ‘You should be thinking of children and a home of your own. I should be thinking about grandchildren, by rights, but the way my mob’s going I suspect I’ll not see grandchildren in the house where I was born.’

  He’d chuckled, eyes bright with inner laughter. ‘Unless I could interest you in a fine, strapping lad like Bevan, of course. Might be handy having a tax expert in the family. Phelan,’ he grunted, ‘wouldn’t be much use to you; he’s never here at the best of times.’

  Vashti had missed most of a muttered remark about the second son, but the look in the old man’s eyes fairly shouted that although Phelan Keene might be wild and unruly, with little of the old man’s steadiness, he was none the less a favourite.

  ‘You’ll outlive all of us,’ she’d retorted, and now recalled the comment with sadness as she thought of him on that lonely ridge with generations of Bannisters and various members of the Harrex and Barry families, the many children from so long ago that were buried there with him, yet no grandchild of his own left to mourn.

  A grand old man, a man worth the knowing.

  But this son? She didn’t know — couldn’t know; could only speculate at the man behind the confusing dichotomy of picture and meeting. Phelan Keene clearly hadn’t liked her, but his father had, of that she was certain.

  When she’d finished the first novel, she searched out two others in a second-hand bookshop, and had read one of them as well by the time she finally heard from the man himself. Neither book did anything to ease her apprehensions; even less did they prepare her for the sheer seductiveness of his voice over the telephone.

  ‘Phelan Keene,’ he announced in tones that were pure chocolate fudge. ‘I understand you’ve been designated to assist with this book I’m trying to work up.’

  ‘I’ve agreed to help where I can,’ Vashti replied, not exactly being evasive, but hoping at the same time to avoid sounding too eager.

  It was difficult; Phelan Keene’s voice fairly rippled with sex appeal, touching her as surely as if he had been there in the room, stroking, caressing, exploring.

  ‘We’ll have to get together in person, soon,’ he was suggesting, and that voice did more than simply suggest. ‘I was hoping to at least have lunch together before we got into the details of my research, but I seem to have got ahead of my own schedule for once, and already I have questions that are slowing me up.’

  ‘We couldn’t have that, could we?’ Vashti replied without thinking, then could have bitten her tongue. What a thing to say!

  Phelan Keene seemed not to notice. He began, instead, to work through what was obviously a list of questions he had already prepared. Most of them, Vashti was comforted to find, seemed direct enough and easy to answer.

  But then she began to detect a pattern, or at least the beginnings of a pattern. And it was a pattern that did nothing at all for her peace of mind, harking back, as it now clearly did, to her work with Phelan Keene’s father and family, to the field audit and the philosophy behind it.

  Vashti shook her head, both alarmed and worried by the direction the conversation was taking. There was, she now knew, absolutely nothing drastic hidden among the myriad accounts administered, in theory, by Janice Gentry; indeed, the family business was almost certain to emerge from the field audit with flying colours. But something about the way Phelan Keene now approached the subject was a red danger signal to Vashti.

  ‘Really, Mr Keene,’ she finally had to say, ‘I think this is getting far off the track of being just research. It seems you’re getting on to fairly specific ground here, and I’m not sure we ought to be discussing such details.’

  ‘Why not? Have you got something to hide?’

  ‘Certainly not, but policy prohibits me from discussing specific cases, which it seems to me you’re leading up to.’

  ‘It’s a case in which I’m personally involved. It isn’t as if I were asking you to discuss somebody else’s business.’ His voice was still so smooth, so persuasive.

  ‘I realise t
hat,’ Vashti replied, ‘but again, Mr Keene, I have to say that I’m not comfortable about discussing this specific case outside a formal situation with your family’s accountant in attendance. I don’t ... don’t think we should go on with this at this time.’

  ‘Too right you don’t ... Ms Sinclair.’ Despite the rich, mellow sound of his voice, he managed to make the honorific ‘Ms’ sound somehow tawdry, or at the very least pretentious.

  Vashti’s temper flared, then was as quickly brought under control before she could snap a reply into the telephone. She suddenly guessed — and just in time — what he was on about and why the entire conversation had suddenly taken on a tinge of deja vu.

  Gotcha! she thought, and almost laughed aloud. The very nerve of the illustrious Mr Keene! He was playing games with her, had been all along.

  ‘Could you hold for just a tick?’ she asked, and, without waiting for an answer, she put down the telephone and turned to quickly rush across the room and grab her handbag.

  Returning to her desk, it was the work of a moment to grab up the copy of the book she’d only just started reading and find the passage she wanted.

  Forcing the book down hard in front of her, Vashti skimmed through the pages and fought to steady her breathing and still summon the courage for what she was about to try.

  ‘You seem to have something against the use of the word “Ms”, Mr Keene.’ Vashti deliberately kept her voice rigidly calm, undramatic. It wouldn’t do to give the game away by her tone of voice alone. ‘I wouldn’t have expected a man in your position to be such a blatant chauvinist.’

  ‘Chauvinism has nothing to do with it. I just don’t like having to refer to any woman by a word that’s at best wishy-washy and at worst nothing more than an abbreviation for manuscript,’ he snapped in reply, and Vashti could have cried out with delight.

  He was following the script! Just as if he, also, had the book there in front of him; as if he, too, could read the hero’s lines that he had written.