Free Spirit. Penny Jordan

her back door. She ushered Hannah inside quickly and said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got the coffee on. I didn’t know whether you’d want a cup or…’

      ‘I’d love one,’ Hannah told her. ‘I can drink it while I go through your papers. What time exactly is the appointment?’

      Linda told her and Hannah checked her watch. That left her a good hour to run through the figures, which should be ample time. She found the error quickly enough, a simple mistake in adding up, which had resulted in Linda paying less than the amount of tax that she ought to have paid the previous year.

      ‘Oh, no,’ Linda said, sitting down, her face going pale. ‘Oh, Hannah, what on earth am I going to do?’

      ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Hannah assured her. ‘I’ve just checked back into your previous year’s figures, and you seem to have made a trading loss, but from what I can see, you actually paid tax.’

      ‘Well, yes,’ Linda agreed, frowning slightly as she scanned the figures Hannah was indicating. ‘You see, I got the demand and I…well, I just paid it.’

      Hannah had a tiny grimace. ‘Well, at the end of the day, I suspect you will probably find that you only owe the Inland Revenue a very small sum of money indeed,’ she said soothingly. ‘What we need to do now is to put all these figures in front of the inspector.’

      ‘Oh, Hannah, you must think me an absolute idiot,’ Linda said ruefully, as they finished their coffee and Hannah collected all the papers, folding them neatly and inserting them into a spare file she was carrying in her black leather briefcase. ‘I don’t know why it is, but the sight of a column of figures always throws me into an absolute panic. I always used to envy you. You were always top of the class in maths.’

      ‘And you were always top in domestic science,’ Hannah reminded her, ‘whereas I was still sewing the same grubby scrap of fabric in the fifth form as I was in the third.’

      Her comment lightened Linda’s tension, as she had intended it to do, and the other girl laughed.

      ‘Yes, I suppose we all have our weaknesses and our strong points,’ she agreed.

      The tax office was in the local county town, and when Hannah suggested that they both went in her car Linda agreed willingly.

      ‘I’m still driving Dad’s old Jag,’ she told her. ‘It’s on its last legs now, really, but I can’t afford to replace it, even though it guzzles petrol at an appalling rate. Mack at the garage somehow or other manages to keep it going for me, I don’t know how.’

      Without taking her eyes off the road, Hannah said sotto voce, ‘A labour of love, perhaps.’

      Linda flushed, and Hannah reflected on her mother’s comments that the village grapevine was reporting that Linda and Ian Macdonald were ‘getting involved’.

      ‘He’s been marvellous since Dad died,’ Linda said quietly. ‘I don’t really know what I’d have done without him. It was he who suggested that I bought the shop, and he gave me trade references when I first set up in business. He even offered to guarantee my loan with the bank, but I couldn’t let him do that. He’s away at the moment,’ she gave a slight sigh, ‘a family funeral in Edinburgh.’

      Hence the frantic call to her, Hannah recognised. The county town wasn’t busy. Hannah knew where the local Inland Revenue offices were and parked her car deftly in the nearest car park. Several people eyed her businesslike suit and crisp, authoritative manner as she and Linda waited to cross the road.

      She looked out of place here in the quiet mellowness of the old stone town. Young mothers in jeans and sweatshirts pushed prams or held the hands of toddlers. Older women in tweeds and sensible shoes, carrying shopping baskets, eyed her curiously. A group of youths stopped and stared, one of them whistling at her. Hannah ignored them. She was used to attracting attention.

      Long ago she had learned the necessity of playing down her looks. In the career she had chosen, to look feminine in the way she herself looked feminine was not an asset. The full softness of her mouth made men think thoughts that were not at all businesslike. The high curves of her breasts concealed by her silk shirt and the businesslike cut of her suit jacket caused male concentration to wander, and in the early days of her career she had encountered more than her fair share of sexual harassment, before a kindly and far more worldly colleague had taken her on one side and pointed out that in their line of business, a lushly feminine figure such as hers was definitely not an asset—not if she wished to be taken seriously, that was. And so Hannah had learned to disguise the narrowness of her waist and the fullness of her breasts.

      She had learned to adopt a severe, almost cold expression. She had learned to modulate her voice so that it never betrayed any emotion. She had had her hair cut and kept it straight and sleek in a businesslike bob, and most of all she had learned to control her terrible betraying temper, to distance herself from the slights and snubs she had endured in the early days of working her way up the career ladder.

      She had come a long way from the girl she had been when she had first left university, but there was still a long, long way to go. She thought about the new job she had applied for. She had heard about it on the grapevine, a prestige appointment as vice-president of a small but extremely highly geared financial services group. The post would involve working very closely with the chairman of the group, someone whom Hannah had never met, but whom she had heard much about. His name featured frequently in the pages of the Financial Times. It was spoken with awe over the lunch tables of their small, e´lite world.

      Silas Jeffreys was a man who guarded his privacy with the utmost stringency. She had never even seen a photograph of him, never read a word of gossip about his private life, never even met the man, but what she had heard of his reputation, what she knew of the way he ran his business, told her how much she wanted to work with him. It would be like sitting at the feet of a master.

      She had applied for the job a week ago. She had an interview on Monday, a good sign. She could feel cautiously hopeful. Her qualifications and work experience were good, but there were still intelligent and otherwise sane men who did not believe that women could work in finance, and she had no way of knowing if he was one of that number.

      No amount of discreet probing could elicit enough information for her to draw a composite picture of the man, which was aggravating to someone like Hannah who had trained herself to have a neat, orderly mind and to keep her mind empty of clutter but full of information.

      As they walked into the building, she and Linda were moving at the same pace, but by the time they had entered the reception area Hannah noticed that Linda was lagging slightly behind her. She hid a small smile. After all, her friend wasn’t the only person to be intimidated by the vast anonymity of the Revenue offices.

      The girl on reception was young and smiled warmly at them. Obviously she hadn’t been in her job very long yet, Hannah reflected cynically, as she turned enquiringly to Linda, asking her for the name of the tax officer they were due to see.

      Linda had it written down, and she handed the piece of paper over to the girl nervously.

      ‘Oh, yes, he’s on the fifth floor,’ the girl told her, giving them another warm smile.

      The lift was old and creaked as it moved slowly upwards. A symbol of the tax system itself, or simply symbolic of a careful husbanding of national resources? Hannah wondered, as she and Linda stood silently side by side. Her friend was very nervous. Hannah wanted to tell her not to be, but she knew that it wouldn’t do the slightest good. She wanted to tell her that tax officials were only human, after all, capable of standards that were good, bad and indifferent, just like anyone else, and merely trained to appear distant and sharply suspicious of the motives of the public. However, Linda was very vulnerable and emotional where her weakness over figures was concerned, and Hannah suspected that, like somebody with a phobia about visiting the dentist, no amount of reassurance from someone else would tend to lessen her apprehension.

      They found the office down a long corridor, a small boxlike room furnished with a basic desk, a chair behind it and then two other