Thus Was Adonis Murdered

by Sarah Caudwell

she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in income tax. It was a subject which she had studied for examinations and on which she had thereafter advised a number of clients: she naturally did not suppose, in these circumstances, that it had anything to do with real life.

‘It is still not clear to me,’ I said, ‘why she now feels able to afford a holiday.’ ‘It is true,’ said Selena, ‘that if she takes a holiday, she can’t afford to pay the Revenue. But if she doesn’t take a holiday she still can’t afford to pay the Revenue. On the sheep and lamb principle, she has decided to go to Venice. I think it’s very sensible. She will return to London spiritually refreshed and able to cope with life.’

‘You do not seem to appreciate the intensity of Julia’s feelings towards the Department of Inland Revenue. She is under the impression that it is a vast conspiracy having as its sole objective her physical, mental and financial ruin.

Selena began carefully cutting her escalope into very small pieces, looking like a Persian cat which had unexpectedly found itself in low company.

Our conversation turned to the subject on which we are most in sympathy—that is to say, the wickedness of income tax. Such phrases as ‘penalizing achievement,’ and ‘petty-minded persecution,’ soon filled the air of the Piazza.

if people are going to let sentiment interfere with their tax planning, there is no helping them.

The funeral rites of the rich are a signal for vultures to gather: among whom one may class, with all respect, antique dealers and the Chancery Bar.

“Hilary [Tamar’s] voice was in my head before any of the plots,” Caudwell told writer Martin Edwards in an interview for Mystery Scene. “I knew from the outset Hilary must be an Oxford don—but of equivocal sex and even equivocal age, resembling that precise, donnish kind of individual who starts being elderly at the age of 22.”