# Chapter One: The Nature of Gerald Firth

Gerald Firth had not always been a man of the Inland Revenue, but he had been a man of the Inland Revenue long enough to have developed what he considered a professional relationship with the colour beige. His office on the fourth floor of the Crown Office on Sutherland Road, Croydon, was beige in every direction that the eye could travel. The walls were beige. The filing cabinets were a slightly different beige, which was, Gerald had once explained to a visiting colleague from the Valuation Office in Bromley, "the same beige, really, just one that's been in the sun a bit longer." The carpet was beige. The blinds were beige. The particular shade of fluorescent tube that lit the room was, if you squinted in a certain way, almost beige. And the teapot, which sat perpetually on the corner of his desk with a small saucer beneath it, was a sort of aggressive, unapologetic beige that Gerald had come to think of as "the beige that gives up."

It was the morning of the fourteenth of March, 1984, and Gerald was sitting at his desk in this beige landscape, reading a letter that had arrived that morning in a manila envelope with the words *URGENT – PERSONAL INCOME TAX – FY 1982/83* stamped on it in red ink, and he was thinking about cabbages.

This was not unusual. Gerald Firth, at the age of thirty-six, had developed what his wife, Doreen, described as "a cabbage problem" and what Gerald described as "a sustained intellectual interest in the botanical classification of Brassica oleracea." It had begun, he thought, in the autumn of 1981, when he had been working a particularly tedious case involving a self-employed window cleaner in Surbiton who had been deducting the cost of a secondhand Ford Anglia from his taxable income while simultaneously claiming the car was a "domestic asset" and therefore not business-related. Gerald had spent three weeks on that case. Three weeks of poring over receipts, cross-referencing garage invoices, and eventually driving out to Surbiton to inspect the said Ford Anglia, which turned out to be parked in a driveway that was also the driveway of a woman who kept eleven cats and a parrot named Reginald. The parrot had called Gerald a "fucking muppet" four times during the inspection. He had come home that evening, gone to the supermarket, and bought a head of cauliflower. Not a cabbage, exactly, but in the same family, and he had sat at his kitchen table with the cauliflower in front of him and a glass of Bristol Beer and had simply *looked* at it for a long time. Doreen had come in, seen him, and said, "Gerald, what are you doing to the cauliflower?" and he had said, "Just looking, Doreen. It's a cauliflower. I'm looking at it." And Doreen had said, "Well, look quickly, it's getting soft," and had taken it from him and thrown it in the bin, and Gerald had driven back to work the next morning with a strange, low hum in his chest that he could not name.

Now, three years on, the cabbage problem was well established. He had a small notebook, leather-bound, A5, in which he kept notes. Not about tax. Not about cases. About cabbages. The specific, particular, *individual* nature of each cabbage. How a Savoy was different from a Wexford, not just in the way of the crinkle, but in the *attitude* of the crinkle. How a red cabbage was not merely a cabbage that had decided to be red, but a cabbage that had *become* red, that had undergone a transformation, that was in a sense a different vegetable wearing a cabbage's skin. He had filled four notebooks. He had shown no one. He was not ashamed of it, exactly, but he was not *proud* of it, and there was a difference, and the difference was important to him.

The letter in front of him was not about cabbages. The letter was about a firm of accountants called Ashworth & Dale, of 14 Wellington Road, Croydon, who had filed a return for a client named Mrs. Patricia Underwood, of 63 High Street, Croydon, which Gerald, in the course of a routine review of Croydon self-employment declarations, had noticed was, to put it mildly, *unconventional*.

Mrs. Underwood was a retired head teacher. She had retired in 1979. She was seventy-one. She was, as far as Gerald could tell from the file, a pleasant woman who enjoyed tending her garden, watching *Crossroads* at six o'clock on a Thursday, and making a rather excellent apple crumble that she brought to the Croydon Women's Institute on the second Saturday of each month. And yet, in the tax year 1982/83, Mrs. Underwood had declared a taxable income of nil. Not a small income. Not an income of £12, which would have been the minimum threshold and would have been, if slightly unusual, entirely explicable. *Nil*. And yet, the file contained a reference to a property in Epsom, which Mrs. Underwood owned outright, and a pension of £487.50 per annum from the Teachers' Superannuation Scheme, and a small sum from a building society account that earned, by Gerald's calculation, approximately £34.12 in interest for the year. None of this should have been visible to the taxman. None of it, on its face, should have been a problem. But the *manner* of the return, the way it was structured, the particular architecture of the deductions and the small, almost invisible reclassifications of income, suggested to Gerald a hand other than Mrs. Underwood's own hand.

The hand, the letter suggested, belonged to Ashworth & Dale.

Gerald read the letter a second time. He read it a third time. He then picked up his telephone, dialled the number of his supervisor, Mr. R. C. Pemberton, who worked on the third floor and whose office was, Gerald noted with a small private satisfaction, *not* beige but a sort of institutional green that Gerald found deeply unpleasant, as though the building itself had developed a mild case of jaundice.

"Mr. Pemberton," said the woman who answered.

"Hello, Susan. It's Gerald Firth. Fourth floor. I've had a referral come in this morning regarding Ashworth & Dale, Wellington Road. Can I have ten minutes?"

There was a pause. Gerald could hear, faintly, the sound of a telex machine clicking in the background, a sound like small, metallic teeth chattering.

"Mr. Pemberton's in a meeting with the Valuation people, Gerald. He's not expecting to be free until at least two."

"Right. Of course. I'll come back to it this afternoon."

"Or you could just log it in the queue, Gerald. He'll get to it."

"Of course, Susan. Thank you."

He replaced the receiver. He picked up the letter again. He looked at the name *Ashworth & Dale* and felt a small, strange tightening in his chest that was not quite excitement and not quite apprehension but was some kind of alloy of the two, like a metal that had not yet been given a name.

He did not know why. He was a Senior Inspector in the Personal Income Tax Division. He had been one for six years. He had handled, in that time, approximately four hundred and thirty-seven cases, ranging from the mildly irritating (a man in Norbury who had been claiming his wife's hair extensions as a business expense on the grounds that she was a "companion to the self-employed") to the genuinely complex (a case involving a series of offshore trusts in the Channel Islands that had taken him eleven months and had made him lose approximately two pounds of weight and a considerable portion of his faith in the fundamental decency of the human species). He was, by his own assessment, competent. He was, by his wife's assessment, "all right, Gerald, in the way that a kettle is all right." He was not a man who felt a "tightening in the chest" at the sight of an accountant's name on a manila envelope.

And yet.

He put the letter in his desk drawer. He made a fresh pot of tea. He opened his leather notebook and, on a fresh page, wrote: *Wexford cabbage. The outer leaves are a sort of pale, almost angry green, as though the vegetable is holding a grudge against the sun. The inner leaves are tighter, more compact, more* serious. *The heart is almost white. There is a particular* quality *to the heart of a Wexford that I cannot quite name. It is the quality of a* promise.

He closed the notebook. He went back to his desk. He opened the file on Mrs. Patricia Underwood and began, methodically, to read.