The Inspector Walter Darriteau Murder Mysteries - Books 1-4 David Carter (autobiographies to read txt) 📖

the complete lack of a career structure, no, the thing that had annoyed him the most was the arrogant and cold way so many of the Great British public treated shop assistants.

Boy, can we try the size nines? Boy?

These are awful, get something else!

I said tens, for God’s sake! Are you stupid?

Haven’t you anything better than this?

Pay attention when I’m speaking to you!

Wilsons up the road are much cheaper than you.

Go to bloody Wilsons then!

It wasn’t as if the customers were anything special. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been seen dead in Mawdsley’s. They were jumped up middle class pricks, most of them, who imagined that was the way to speak to servants like him.

When he left the store for the last time he vowed he would never look down on shop assistants, never treat them like dog dirt, and the next time he bought a pair of shoes, he would tip the assistant.

He did too. The young hard faced woman into whose hand he slipped the fiver; looked at him in disgust, imagining and wondering what he was offering her money for.

‘Bugger off!’ she yelled, thrusting the fiver back in his direction, a scruffy old note that fell to the maroon carpeted floor.

Armitage didn’t wait to retrieve it, but turned and left after noticing the heavy brigade coming to the girl’s assistance. Though it didn’t put him off being polite to shop staff.

IN THE BEGINNING HE enjoyed working for the taxman. After a while he was doing what everyone else did, what they were told not to do. When no one was looking he would log on to the central computer and inspect the tax returns of all the people he knew, and illuminating they were.

How much money they earned; how much tax they paid, how much money they didn’t declare, though you had to know them personally and be able to read between the lines to calculate that.

Mrs Greenaway in the flower shop, under declared by forty percent, he estimated. Armitage felt guilty at prying into Dennis’s financial affairs, but it had to be done, and it was only in fun. It turned out he didn’t earn anywhere near as much as he said. Jillian the mouse; she was doing well, typing away in a big insurance company, running round and round and round the corporate wheel. She was earning more than Dennis, though he would swear blind that was not the case. No wonder they were planning to buy a house and get married, with all that money plopping into the communal pot.

As for Reverend Blair McGowan, Army had no idea vicars were paid so well, or were so wealthy. Look at the share dividends for God’s sake; are you listening and watching, dear God? And income from property too, let out in Scotland. The parishioners would be surprised to learn about that. Even Hancock at Saint Edmond’s, and his manager at Mawdsley’s, just about everyone he had ever known who was still alive and employed, all fascinating stuff, and contrary to his current terms and conditions of employment.

The Inland Revenue management were becoming extra keen on team bonding. It built a more efficient office and added to the happiness and contentment of staff, so the mantra said. There had been an alarming increase in people becoming bored and jumping ship, though Armitage did not mind that, because he landed two promotions through it, and two pay increases too, enabling him to take over Dennis’s flat, when the happy couple bought a dinky house down at Saltney, at not too many feet above sea level.

It took him a long time to get used to living alone.

No matter what hour he arrived back at Bellingfield there would always be someone there to share a pot of tea and a chat. Returning to his deathly quiet flat stuck high in the gods was a depressing experience.

Dennis and his mousy spouse took what little furniture they possessed to dinky town, and after paying rent and deposit and insurance on the flat, there was precious little left for Armitage to spend on luxuries... like furniture.

He visited the Salvation Army centre for wayward boys and girls, who supplied him with a clean single bed, he was single, so single was all he qualified for, one small stained settee, one tiny yellow plastic topped dining table with two rickety chairs, and a filthy set of pans he tossed in the dustbin.

It was a start.

It was home.

It was his home.

But it was damned depressing.

THE LATEST WHEEZE OF team bonding was bound to terrify all but the boldest of staff. Parachute jumping, or skydiving, as they preferred to call it.

When it was first announced many of the team mouthed ‘Oh yeah? Not me, pal,’ but over the days that followed it became a test of one’s bravery or lily-liveredness, indeed one’s cowardice.

Who was up for it, and who was not?

Armitage was not the boldest young man there, but neither was he the weakest. But when Alan Steadman, the guy who’d always been considered the office wet, said he was looking forward to it and would jump, and declared that anyone who didn’t was a “fucking weed”, it became harder to refuse.

The date was set, engraved into the diary, logged up on the brand new office notice board as: Who’s a Yellow Bastard Day?

It was a Saturday morning.

The scruffy hired coach set off from outside the tax office at nine o’clock sharp. Anyone not there would be nominated an “utter weed” by none other than Alan Steadman.

Somehow, Armitage dragged himself from his single bed, threw on a jumper and jeans, staggered down the stairs, and set off for the office, determined to hide his shaking legs.

The coach was packed with nervous sweaty-palmed tax collectors, as it headed west toward Hawarden airport, and the Glendower Aero Club. The rattled tax team would be taken up in groups of six and hurled from the Skyvan plane, yelling some ancient Indian war cry