by Dick Francis
‘I don’t think he minded,’ I said soothingly. ‘Um… what does he do, do you know?
‘Some sort of business consultant, I believe. All those jobs are so frightfully vague, don’t you think? He’s always travelling all over the place, anyway, and Tina… that’s his wife… never seems to know when he’ll be home.’
‘Have you known them long?’ I asked.
‘We met them at other people’s parties several times before we really got to know them, which would be about a year ago.’
‘I mean… has he always lived near here?’
‘Only about five years, I think. They were saying the other evening how much they preferred it to London even though Gerard has to travel more. He’s such a clever man, Tony dear, it just oozes out of his pores. I told him he should buy some wine from you, so perhaps he will.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Er… do you have his telephone number?’
‘Of course,’ Flora said happily, and found it for me. I wrote it down and we disconnected, and I was still looking at it indeterminately at nine o’clock when I closed the shop.
‘I half expected you to cry off,’ he said, when he picked me up at two the next day.
‘I half did.’
‘But?’
‘Curiosity, I suppose.’
He smiled. Neither of us pointed out that it was curiosity that got the Elephant’s Child into deep trouble with the crocodiles in the Limpopo River, though it was quite definitely in my mind, and Gerard, as he had told me to call him, was of the generation that would have had the Just So Stories fed to him as a matter of course.
He was dressed that afternoon in a wool checked shirt, knitted tie and tweed jacket, much like myself, and he told me we were going to Watford.
I sensed a change in him immediately I’d committed myself and was too far literally along the road to ask him to turn back. A good deal of surface social manner disappeared and in its place came a tough professional attitude which I felt would shrivel irrelevant comment in the utterer’s throat. I listened therefore in silence, and he spoke throughout with his eyes straight ahead, not glancing to my face for reactions.
‘Our client is a man called Kenneth Charter,’ he said.‘Managing Director and Founder of Charter Carriers, a company whose business is transporting bulk liquids by road in tankers. The company will transport any liquid within reason, the sole limiting factor being that it must be possible to clean the tanker thoroughly afterwards, ready for a change of contents. Today’s hydrochloric acid, for instance, must not contaminate next week’s crop-sprayer.’
He drove steadily, not fast, but with easy judgement of available space. A Mercedes, fairly new, with velvety upholstery and a walnut dash, automatic gears changing on a purr.
‘More than half of their business,’ he went on, ‘is the transport of various types of inflammable spirit, and in this category they include whisky.’ He paused. ‘It’s of course in their interest if they can arrange to pick up one load near to where they deliver another, the limiting factor again being the cleaning. They have steam cleaning facilities and chemical scrubbing agents at their Watford headquarters, but these are not readily available everywhere. In any case, one of their regular runs has been to take bulk gin to Scotland, wash out the tanker with water, and bring scotch back.’
He stopped talking to navigate throught a town of small streets, and then said, ‘While the scotch is in the tanker it is considered to be still in a warehouse. That is to say, it is still in bond. Duty has not been paid.’
I nodded. I knew that.
‘As Charter’s tankers carry six thousand imperial gallons,’ Gerard said neutrally, ‘the amount of duty involved in each load is a good deal more than a hundred thousand pounds. The whisky itself, as you know, is of relatively minor worth.’
I nodded slightly again. Customs and Excise duty, value added tax and income tax paid by the shopkeeper meant that three-quarters of the selling price of every standard bottle of whisky went in one way or another to the inland revenue. One quarter paid for manufacture, bottles, shipping, advertising, and all the labour force needed between the sowing of the barley and the wrapping in a shop. The liquid itself, in that context, cost practically nothing.
‘Three times this year,’ Gerard said, ‘a tanker of Charter’s hasn’t reached its destination. It wouldn’t be accurate to say the tanker was stolen, because on each occasion it turned up.
But the contents of course had vanished. The contents each time were bulk scotch. The Customs and Excise immediately demanded duty since the scotch was no longer in the tanker. Charter Carriers have twice had to pay up.’
He paused as if to let me catch up with what he was saying.
‘Charter Carriers are of course insured, or have been, and that’s where they’ve run into serious trouble. The insurers, notwithstanding that they rocketed their premiums on each past occasion, now say that enough is enough, they are not satisfied and are withholding payment. They also say no further cover will be extended. Charter’s face having to raise the cash themselves, which would be crippling, but more seriously they can’t operate without insurance. On top of that the Customs and Excise are threatening to take away their licence to carry goods in bond, which would in itself destroy a large part of their business.’ He paused again for appreciable seconds. ‘The Excise people are investigating the latest theft, but chiefly because they want the duty, and the police also, but routinely. Charter’s feel that this isn’t enough because it in no way guarantees the continuation of their licence or the reinstatement of their insurance. They’re extremely worried indeed, and they applied to us for help.’
We were speeding by this time along the M40. Another silence lengthened until Gerard eventually said, ‘Any questions?’
‘Well… dozens, I suppose.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as why was it always the scotch that was stolen and not the gin? Such as was it always the same driver and was it always the same tanker? Such as what happened to the driver, did he say? Such as where did the tankers turn up? Such as how did you connect it all with Zarac?’
He positively grinned, his teeth showing in what looked like delight.
‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘Such as where did the scotch start from and where was it supposed to be going and how many crooks have you turned up at each place, and such as does Kenneth Charter trust his own office staff and why wasn’t his security invincible third time around?’ .
I stopped and he said without sarcasm, ‘Those’ll do to be going on with. The answers I can give you are that no it wasn’t always the same driver but yes it was always the same tanker. The tanker turned up every time abandoned in Scotland in transport cafe carparks, but always with so many extra miles on the clock that it could have been driven as far as London or Cardiff and back.’
Another pause, then he said, ‘The drivers don’t remember what happened to them.’
I blinked. ‘Don’t remember?’
‘No. They remember setting off. They remember driving as far as the English border, where they all stopped at a motorway service station for a pee. They stopped at two different service stations. None of them remembers anything else except waking up in a ditch. Never the same ditch.’ He smiled. ‘After the second theft Kenneth Charter made it a rule that on that run no one was to eat or drink in cafes. The drivers had to take what they wanted with them in the cab. All the same they still had to stop for nature. The police say the thieves must have been following the tanker each time, waiting for that. Then when the driver was out of the cab, they put in an open canister of gas… perhaps nitrous oxide, which has no smell and acts fast… it’s what dentists use… and when the driver climbed back in he’d be unconscious before he could drive off.’
‘How regular was that run?’ I asked.
‘Normally twice a week.’
‘Always the same tanker?’
‘No,’ he said contentedly. ‘Charter’s keep four tankers excl
usively for drinkable liquids. One of those. The other three made the run just as often, but weren’t touched. It may be coincidence, maybe not.’
‘How long ago was the last load stolen?’ I asked.
‘Three weeks last Wednesday.’
‘And before that?’
‘One in April, one in June.’
‘That’s three in six months,’ I said, surprised.
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘No wonder the insurers are kicking up a fuss.’
‘Mm.’ He drove quietly for a while and then said, ‘Every time the scotch was destined for the same place, a bottling plant at Watford, north of London. The scotch didn’t however always come from the same distillery, or the same warehouse. The stolen loads came from three different places. The last lot came from a warehouse near Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire, but it set off from there in the normal way and we don’t think that’s where the trouble is.’
‘In the bottling plant?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know, for sure, but we don’t think so. The lead to the Silver Moondance looked so conclusive that it was decided we should start from there.’
‘What was the lead?’ I said.
He didn’t answer immediately but in the end said, ‘I think Kenneth Charter had better tell you himself.’
‘O.K.’
‘I should explain,’ he said presently, ‘that when firms call us in it’s often because there are things they don’t necessarily want to tell the police. Companies very often like to deal privately, for instance, with frauds. By no means do they always want to prosecute, they just want the fraud stopped. Public admission that a fraud was going on under their noses can be embarrassing.’
‘I see,’ I said.
‘Kenneth Charter told me certain things in confidence which he didn’t tell the police or the Customs and Excise. He wants his transport firm to survive, but not at any price. Not if the price in personal terms is too high. He agreed I should bring you in as a consultant, but I’ll leave it to him to decide how much he wants you to know.’
‘All right,’ I said peacefully.
We left the motorway and Gerard began threading his way across the semi-suburban sprawl to the north of London where one town ran into another without noticeable difference.
‘You’re an undemanding sort of man,’ Gerard observed after a while.
‘What should I demand?’
‘How much a consultancy fee is, perhaps. Conditions, maybe. Assurances.’
‘Life’s like the weather,’ I said wryly. ‘What comes, comes. Even with a sunny forecast you can get wet.’
‘A fatalist.’
‘It rains. You can’t stop it.’
He glanced at my face for almost the first time on the journey, but I doubt if he read much there. I’d spoken not bitterly but with a sort of tiredness, result of failing to come to terms with my own private deluge. I was in truth quite interested in the stolen scotch and the tankers, but it was on an upper and minor level, not down where it mattered.
As if sensing it he said, ‘You’ll do your best for me?’
‘Such as it is,’ I assured him. ‘Yes.’
He nodded as if a doubt had been temporarily stilled and turned off the road into an industrial area where small factories had sprung like recent mushrooms in a concrete field. The fourth on the right bore the words ‘Charter Carriers Ltd’ in large red letters on a white board attached to the front, while down the side, like piglets to a sow, stretched a long row of silver tankers side by side, engines inwards, sterns out.
NINE
Kenneth Charter wasn’t in the least what I expected, which was, I suppose, a burly North Londoner with a truculent manner. The man who came into the entrance hall to greet us as we pushed through the glass front door was tall, thin, reddish-haired and humorous with an accent distinctly more Scottish than Gerard’s faint Highland.
‘Is this the consultant?’ he said with a lilt. He found my youth more a matter of laughter than concern, it seemed. ‘No greybeard, are you?’ He shook my hand firmly. ‘Come away in, then. And how are you today, Mr McGregor?’
He led the way into a square uninspiring cream-walled office and waved us to two upright armless chairs facing a large unfussy modern desk. There was a brown floor-covering of utilitarian matting, a row of grey filing cabinets, a large framed map of the British Isles and a settled chill in the air which might or might not have been because it was Sunday. Kenneth Charter seemed not to notice it and offered no comment. He had the Scots habit, I suspected, of finding sin in comfort and virtue in thrift and believing morality grew exclusively in a cold climate.
Gerard and I sat in the offered chairs. Kenneth Charter took his place behind his desk in a swivelling chair which he tilted recklessly backward.
‘How much have you told this bonny expert?’ he said, and listened without visible anxiety to Gerard’s recapitulation.
‘Well, now,’ he said to me cheerfully at the end, ‘You’ll want to know what liquid you’re looking for. Or could you guess, laddie, could you guess?’ His very blue eyes were quizzically challenging, and I did a quick flip and a turnover through past occasional nips in customers’ houses and sought for a check against the memory from the bar of the Silver Moondance and said on an instinctive, unreasoned impulse, ‘Rannoch.’
Charter looked cynical and said to Gerard, ‘You told him, then.’
Gerard shook his head. ‘I didn’t.’ He himself was looking smug. His consultant, it seemed, had come up trumps at the first attempt.
‘I guessed,’ I said mildly. ‘I sell that make. I’ve tasted it quite a few times. There aren’t so many whiskies that would be shipped in bulk and bottled in England. Rannoch… just fitted.’
‘Very well, then.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and produced from it a full bottle of Rannoch whisky, the familiar label adorned with an imposing male kilted figure in red and yellow tartan. The seal, I noticed, was unbroken, and Charter showed no signs of altering that.
‘A Christmas gift from the bottling company,’ he said.
‘Last Christmas?’ I asked.
‘Of course last Christmas. We’ll not be getting one this year, now will we?’
‘I guess not,’ I said meekly. ‘I meant… it’s a long time for the bottle to be full.’
He chuckled. ‘I don’t drink alcohol, laddie. Addles your brains, rots your gut. What’s more, I can’t stand the taste. We need someone like you because I wouldn’t recognise that stolen load of firewater if it turned up in the pond in my garden.’
The goldfish would tell him, I thought. They’d die.
‘Did you have a profile of that load?’ I asked.
‘A what?’
‘Um… its composition. What it was blended from. You could get a detailed list from the distiller, I should think. The profile is a sort of chemical analysis in the form of a graph… it looks something like the skyline of New York. Each different blend shows a different skyline. The profile is important to some people… the Japanese import scotch by profile alone, though actually a perfect-looking profile can taste rotten. Anyway, profiles are minutely accurate. Sort of like human tissue typing… a lot more advanced than just a blood test.’
‘All I can tell you is it was fifty-eight per cent alcohol by volume,’ Charter said. ‘The same strength as always with Rannoch. It’s here on the manifest.’ He produced from a drawer a copy of the Customs and Excise declaration and pushed it across for me to see. ‘I don’t ask what’s in the stuff, I just ferry it.’
‘We’ll get on to the profile straight away,’ Gerard murmured.
‘The Customs people probably have already,’ I said. ‘They’ll have the equipment. A gas chromatograph.’
I had an uncomfortable feeling that Gerard was thinking I should have told him about profiles on the way, but it hadn’t crossed my mind.
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘if they took a sample from the distillers and matched it with the sample the police took from the Silver Moondan
ce, they would know for sure one way or another.’
There was a silence. Finally Gerard cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you might tell Tony how we were led to the Silver Moondance. Because at this moment,’ he looked straight at me, ‘there is no reason for the Customs to connect that place to the stolen tanker or to compare the samples. They aren’t aware of any link.’
I said ‘Oh’ fairly vaguely and Kenneth Charter consulted the ceiling, tipping his chair back to where it should surely have overbalanced. He finally let his weight fall forward with a thud and gave me the full blast from the blue eyes.
‘Promise of silence, laddie,’ he said.
I looked at Gerard, who nodded off-handedly as if such demands were an everyday business fact, which I supposed to him they were.
‘Promise of silence,’ I said.
Kenneth Charter nodded his long head sharply as if taking it for granted that promises would be kept; then he pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the centre drawer of his desk. The object within needed no searching for. He pulled out a small slim black notebook and laid it on the desk before him, the naturally humorous cast of his face straightening to something like grimness.
‘You can trust this laddie?’ he said to Gerard.
‘I’d believe so.’
Charter sighed, committed, turned to the page that fell open immediately in a way that spoke of constant usage.
‘Read that,’ he said, turning the notebook round for me to see but retaining it under the pressure of his thumb. ‘That’ was a long telephone number beginning 0735, which was the code for the Reading area, with underneath it two lines of writing.
‘Tell Z UNP 786 Ypicks up B’s Gin Mon 10 a.m. approx.’
‘I’ve read it,’ I said, not knowing what exactly was expected.
‘Mean anything?’
‘I suppose it’s the Silver Moondance number, and Z is Zarac?’
‘Right. And UNP 786 Y is the registration number of my tanker.’ His voice was cold and unemotional.
‘I see,’ I said.
‘Berger’s Gin is where it set out from at 10.15 a.m. a month ago tomorrow. It went to Scotland, discharged the gin, was sluiced through in Glasgow and picked up the bulk scotch at Fairley’s warehouse near Helensburgh, in Dunbartonshire. Wednesday morning it set off from there. Wednesday evening it didn’t arrive at the bottling plant. By Thursday morning we know it was parked outside a drivers’ cafe on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but it wasn’t identified until Friday as its registration plates had been changed. The Customs and Excise have impounded it, and we haven’t got it back.’