Proof

by Dick Francis

  There was a police car already outside my door when I walked round to the front. Inside it, Detective Sergeant Ridger. He emerged from the driver’s side at my approach, every button and hair regimentally aligned as before. He stood waiting for me and I stopped when I reached him.

  ‘How are you?’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m… er… sorry.’

  I smiled at least a fraction. Sergeant Ridger was becoming quite human. I unlocked the door, let us in and locked it again; then I sat in the tiny office slowly opening the mail while he walked round the place with a notebook, writing painstakingly.

  He came to a halt finally and said,’You weren’t trying to be funny, were you, with the list of missing property you dictated to the constable yesterday evening before you went off to the hospital?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do realise it was almost identical with the red wines stolen from the Silver Moondance.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ I said. ‘And I hope you’ve got my Silver Moondance bottles tucked away safely in your police station. Twelve bottles of wine, all opened. My own property.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ he said with a touch of starch. ‘You’ll get them back in due course.’

  ‘I’d like one of them now,’ I said reflectively.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The St Estèphe.’

  ‘Why that one particularly?’ He wasn’t exactly suspicious; just naturally vigilant.

  ‘Not that one particularly. It was the first that came to mind. Any would do.’

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘Just to look at it again. Smell it… taste it again. You never know… it might just be helpful. To you, I mean.’

  He shrugged, slightly puzzled but not antagonistic. ‘All right. I’ll get you one if I can, but I might not be able to. They’re evidence.’ He looked around the tiny office. ‘Did they touch anything in here?’

  I shook my head, grateful for that at least. ‘They were definitely looking for the wine from the Silver Moondance. The bottles they loaded first and succeeded in taking away with them in the van were all opened and re-corked.’ I explained about the bottles missing from on and beneath the tasting table, and he went to have a further look.

  ‘Anything you can add to the description you gave of the thieves?’ he asked, coming back.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Could one of them have been the barman from the Silver Moondance?’

  ‘No,’ I said definitely. ‘Not his sort at all.’

  ‘You said they wore wigs,’ Ridger said. ‘So how can you be sure?’

  ‘The barman has acne. The robbers didn’t.’

  Ridger wrote it down in his notebook.

  ‘The barman knew exactly what you bought,’ he observed. ‘He spelled them out item by item on your receipt.’

  ‘Have you asked him about it?’ I said neutrally.

  Ridger gave me another of the uncertain looks which showed him undecided still about my status: member of the not-to-be-informed public or helpful-consultant-expert.

  ‘We haven’t been able to find him,’ he said eventually.

  I refrained from impolite surprise. I said, ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since…’ he cleared his throat. ‘Not actually since you yourself last saw him leaving the bar last Monday after he’d locked the grille. Apparently he drove off immediately in his car, packed his clothes, and left the district entirely.’

  ‘Where did he live?’

  ‘With… um… a friend.’

  ‘Male friend?’

  Ridger nodded. ‘Temporary arrangement. No roots. At the first sign of trouble, he was off. We’ll look out for him, of course, but he’d gone by early afternoon that Monday.’

  ‘Not suspected of killing Zarac,’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘The assistant assistant and the waitress both knew what I bought,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But…’

  ‘Too wet,’ Ridger said.

  ‘Mm. Which leaves Paul Young.’

  ‘I suppose he wasn’t one of the thieves.’ Hardly a question, more a statement.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They were both younger and taller, for a start.’

  ‘You would obviously have said.’

  ‘Yes. Have you… er… found him? Paul Young?’

  ‘We’re proceeding with our enquiries.’ He spoke without irony: the notebook jargon came naturally to his tongue. He wasn’t much older than myself; maybe four or five years. I wondered what he’d be like off duty, if such a structured and self-disciplined person were ever entirely off duty. Probably always as watchful, as careful, as ready to prickle into suspicion. I was probably seeing, I thought, the real man.

  I looked at my watch. Nine-twenty. Mrs Palissey and Brian should be arriving in ten minutes.

  I said, ‘I suppose it’s O.K. with you if I get all this mess cleared up? Replace the window, and so on?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll just take a look round outside, though, before I go. Come and tell me what’s different from before the break-in.’

  I got slowly to my feet. We went out into the littered passage and without comment Ridger himself unbolted the heavy door and opened it.

  ‘My car was parked all day yesterday just about where it is now,’ I said. ‘Gerard McGregor’s car wasn’t there, of course.’

  Ridger looked back through his notebook, found an entry, nodded, and flipped forward again. The door swung shut in its slow way. Ridger pushed it open and went out, looking over his shoulder for me to follow. I stepped after him into the raw cold air and watched him pacing about, measuring distances.

  ‘The thieves’ van was here?’ he asked, standing still.

  ‘A bit to your right.’

  ‘Where was the man with the shotgun standing when he fired at you?’

  ‘About where you are now.’

  He nodded matter-of-factly, swung round towards Gerard’s car and raised his arm straight before him. ‘He fired at the car,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then…’ he turned his body with the arm still outstretched until it was pointing at me. ‘He fired again.’

  ‘I wasn’t actually standing here by that time.’

  Ridger permitted a smile. ‘Too close for comfort, I’d say.’ He walked the five steps separating us and ran his hand over the outside of the door. ‘Want to see what nearly hit you?’

  The toughly-grained wood was dark with creosote, the preservative recently applied against the coming winter. I looked more closely to where he pointed, to an area just below the latch, a few inches in from the edge of the door. Wholly embedded in the wood as if they were part of it were dozens and dozens of little black pellets, most of them in a thick cluster, with others making marks like woodworm holes in a wider area all around.

  ‘There are three hundred of those in a normal cartridge,’ Ridger observed calmly. ‘The report we got from the hospital said they dug eleven of them out of your right arm.’

  I looked at the deadly grouping of the little black shots and remembered the frenzied panic of my leap through the door. I’d left my elbow too far out for a split second too long.

  The main cluster in the wood was roughly at the height of my heart.

  ELEVEN

  Mrs Palissey and Brian arrived on time and fell into various attitudes of horror, which couldn’t be helped. I asked her to open the shop for business and asked Brian to start clearing up, and I stayed out in the yard myself knowing it was mostly to postpone answering their eagerly probing questions.

  Ridger was still pacing about, estimating and making notes, fetching up finally at a dark red stain on the dirty concrete.

  He said, frowning, ‘Is this blood?’

  ‘No. It’s red wine. The thieves dropped a case of bottles there. Some of them smashed in the case and seeped through onto the ground.’

  He looked around. ‘Where’s the case now?’

  ‘In the sink in the washroom. Your policemen carri
ed it there yesterday evening.’

  He made a note.

  ‘Sergeant…?’

  ‘Yes?’ He looked up with his eyes only, his head still bent over the notebook.

  ‘Let me know, would you, how things are going?’

  ‘What things, for instance?’

  ‘Whether you find that van… Whether you find a lead to Paul Young.’

  He looked up fully and soberly, not refusing at once. I could almost feel his hesitation and certainly see it; and his answer when it came was typically ambivalent.

  ‘We could perhaps warn you that you might be needed at some future date for identification purposes.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Not promising, mind.’ He was retreating into the notebook.

  ‘No.’

  He finished eventually and went away, and Mrs Palissey enjoyed her ooh/ahh sensations. Mrs Palissey wasn’t given to weeping and wailing and needing smelling salts. Mrs Palissey’s eyes were shining happily at the newsvalue of the break-in and at the good isn’t-it-awful gossip she’d have at lunchtime with the traffic warden.

  Brian with little change to his normal anxious expression swept and tidied and asked me what to do about the case in the sink.

  ‘Take out the whole bottles and put them on the draining board,’ I said, and presently he came to tell me he’d done that. I went into the washroom to see, and there they were, eight bottles of St Emilion from under the tablecloth.

  Brian was holding a piece of paper as if not knowing where to put it.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t know. It was down in the case.’ He held it out to me and I took it: a page from a notepad, folded across the centre, much handled, and damp and stained all down one side with wine from the broken bottles. I read it at first with puzzlement and then with rising amazement.

  In a plain strong angular handwriting it read:

  FIRST

  All opened bottles of wine.

  SECOND

  All bottles with these names:

  St Emilion.

  St Estèphe.

  Volnay.

  Nuits St Georges.

  Valpolicella.

  Mâcon.

  IF TIME

  Spirits, etc. Anything to hand.

  DARKNESS 6.30. DO NOT USE LIGHTS

  ‘Shall I throw that away, Mr Beach?’ Brian asked helpfully.

  ‘You can have six Mars Bars,’ I said.

  He produced his version of a large smile, a sort of sideways leer, and followed me into the shop for his reward.

  Mrs Palissey, enjoyably worried, said she was sure she could cope if I wanted to step out for ten minutes, in spite of customers coming and almost nothing on the shelves, seeing as it was Monday. I assured her I valued her highly and went out along the road to the office of a solicitor of about my age who bought my wine pretty often in the evenings.

  Certainly I could borrow his photocopier, he said. Any time.

  I made three clear copies of the thieves’ shopping list and returned to my own small lair, wondering whether to call Sergeant Ridger immediately and in the end not doing so.

  Brian humped cases of whisky, gin and various sherries from storeroom to shop, telling me each time as he passed what he was carrying, and each time getting it right. There was pride on his big face from the accomplishment; job satisfaction at its most pure. Mrs Palissey restocked the shelves, chattering away interminably, and five people telephoned with orders.

  Holding a pen was unexpectedly painful, arm muscles stiffly protesting. I realised I’d been doing almost everything left-handedly, including eating Sung Li’s chicken, but writing that way was beyond me. I took down the orders right-handedly with many an inward curse, and when it came to the long list for the wholesalers, picked it out left-handed on the typewriter. No one had told me how long the punctures might take to heal. No time was fast enough.

  We got through the morning somehow, and Mrs Palissey, pleasantly martyred, agreed to do the wholesalers run with Brian in the afternoon.

  When they’d gone I wandered round my battered domain thinking that I should dredge up some energy to telephone for replacement wines, replacement window… replacement self-respect. It was my own silly fault I’d been shot. No getting away from it. It hadn’t seemed natural, all the same, to tiptoe off and let the robbery continue. Wiser, of course. Easy in retrospect to see it. But at the time…

  I thought about it in a jumbled way, without clarity, not understanding the compulsive and utterly irrational urge that had sent me running towards danger when every scared and skin-preserving instinct in my life had been to shy away from it.

  Not that I’d been proud of that, either. Nor ashamed of it. I’d accepted that that was the way I was: not brave in the least. Disappointing.

  I supposed I had better make a list of the missing wines for the insurance company, who would be getting as fed up with my repeated claims as Kenneth Charter’s insurers were with his. I supposed I should, but I didn’t do it. Appetite for chores, one might have said, was at an extremely low ebb.

  I took some aspirin.

  A customer came in for six bottles of port and relentlessly brought me up to date on the family’s inexhaustible and usually disgusting woes. (Father-in-law had something wrong with his bladder.)

  Sung Li appeared, bowing, with a gift of spring rolls. He wouldn’t be paid for my previous evening’s dinner, he said. I was an honoured and frequent customer. When I was in need, he was my friend. I would honour him by not offering payment for yesterday. We bowed to each other, and I accepted.

  He had never seen China, but his parents had been born there and had taught him their ways. He was a most punctilious neighbour and because of his roaringly successful but unlicensed take-away I sold much wine in the evenings. Whenever I could without offending him I gave him cigars, which he smoked on sunny afternoons sitting on a wooden chair outside his kitchen door.

  At three Sergeant Ridger returned carrying a paper bag from which he produced a bottle, setting it on the counter.

  St Estèphe: just as I’d asked. Uncorked and sealed with sticky tape, untouched since its departure from the Silver Moondance.

  ‘Can I keep it?’ I said.

  He gave one brief sharp nod. ‘For now. I said you’d been helpful, that it would be helpful for you to have this. I obtained permission from the Chief Inspector in charge of the Silver Moondance murder investigations.’ He dug into a pocket and produced a piece of paper, holding it out. ‘Please sign this chit. It makes it official.’

  I signed the paper and returned it to him.

  ‘I’ve something for you, as well,’ I said, and fetched for him the thieves’ shopping list. The original.

  His body seemed to swell physically when he understood what it was, and he looked up from it with sharply bright eyes.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  I explained about Brian clearing up.

  ‘This is of great significance,’ he said with satisfaction.

  I agreed. I said, ‘It would be particularly interesting if this is Paul Young’s handwriting.’

  His staring gaze intensified, if anything.

  ‘When he wrote his name and address,’ I said, ‘do you remember, he held his pen so awkwardly? He wrote in short sharp downward strokes. It just seemed to me that this list looked similar… though I only saw his name and address very briefly, of course.’

  Sergeant Ridger, who had looked at them long and carefully, stared now at the thieves’ list, making the comparison in his mind. Almost breathlessly he said, ‘I think you’re right. I think they’re the same. The Chief Inspector will be very pleased.’

  ‘A blank wall, otherwise?’ I suggested. ‘You can’t find him?’

  His hesitation was small. ‘There are difficulties, certainly,’ he said.

  No trace at all, I diagnosed.

  ‘How about his car?’ I suggested.

  ‘What car?’

  ‘Yes… we
ll… he didn’t come to the Silver Moondance that day on foot, would you think? It’s miles from anywhere. But when we went out with the boxes of drinks, there wasn’t an extra car in the car park. So… urn… he must have parked round at the back where the cars of the staff were. Round by that door into the lobby where Larry Trent’s office is, and the wine cellars. So Paul Young must have been to the Silver Moondance some other time… or he would have parked out front. If you see what I mean.’

  Detective Sergeant Ridger looked at me long and slowly. ‘How do you know the staff parked round at the back?’

  ‘I saw cars through the lobby window when I went to fetch the bottles of wine. It seemed commonsense to assume those were the staff’s cars… barman, assistant assistant, waitress, kitchen staff and so on. They all had to get to work somehow, and the front car park was empty.’

  He nodded, remembering.

  ‘Paul Young stayed there after we left,’ I said. ‘So maybe the assistant or the waitress… or somebody… remembers what car he drove away in. Pretty long shot, I suppose.’

  Ridger carefully put the folded shopping list into the back of his notebook and then wrote a sentence or two on a fresh page. ‘I’m not of course in charge of that investigation,’ he said eventually, ‘and I would expect this line of questioning has already been thoroughly explored, but… I’ll find out.’

  I didn’t ask again if he would tell me the results, nor did he even hint that he might. When he left, however, it was without finality: not so much goodbye as see you later. He would be interested, he said, in anything further I could think of in connection with the bottle of wine he had brought. If I came to any new conclusions, no doubt I would pass them on.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  He nodded, shut the notebook, tucked it into his pocket and collectedly departed, and I took the bottle of St Estèphe carefully into the office, putting it back into the bag in which Ridger had brought it so that it should be out of plain sight.

  I sat down at the desk, lethargy deepening. Still a load of orders to make up to go out on the van; couldn’t be bothered even to start on them. Everyone would get their delivery a day late. Goblets and champagne needed for a coming-of-age on Thursday… by Thursday I mightn’t feel so bone weary and comprehensively sore.