by Dick Francis
‘She was pregnant,’ I said, and surprised myself. I normally didn’t say that. Normally I said the absolute minimum. But to Gerard, after months of silence, I found myself slowly telling it all, wanting to and not wanting to, trying to keep my voice steady and not cry… for God’s sake don’t cry.
‘She’d been having headaches on and off for ages. Then she had backaches. Nothing specific. Just aches in her spine. Everyone put it down to her being pregnant. And it passed off… until next time. Every week or so, for a day or two. One Sunday when she was nearly six months pregnant she woke up with one of those headaches, a fairly bad one. She took some aspirins but they never did much good. It got worse during the morning and when I went to do the midday stint in the shop she said she would go to bed and sleep it off. But when I got back she was crying… moaning… with pain. I tried to get a doctor… but it took ages… it was Sunday afternoon… Sunday… an ambulance finally came for her but by then she was begging me… begging me somehow to knock her out… but how could I? I couldn’t. We were both terrified… more than frightened… it was so implacable… she was in awful agony in the ambulance… hitting her head with her fists… nothing I could do… I couldn’t even hold her… she was yelling, rolling, jerking with pain. At the end of the journey she went slowly unconscious, and I was glad for her, even though by then I feared… well, I feared.’
‘My dear man.’
I sat for a while looking back to the past, and then swallowed and told him the rest of it coldly.
‘She was in a coma for four days, going deeper… I stayed with her. They let me stay. They said they couldn’t save the baby, it was too soon. In another month, perhaps… They told me the blood vessel must have been leaking for ages… it was the blood leaking into her brain and down her spinal nerves that had given her the headaches and backaches… but even if they’d diagnosed the trouble earlier they couldn’t have done much… it would have split open more one day, as it did… so perhaps it was better we didn’t know.’
I stopped. No tears. All I couldn’t have borne at that point was sympathy, and Gerard didn’t offer it.
‘Life’s most unfair,’ he said calmly.
‘Yes.’
He didn’t say I would get over it, or that time was a great healer. He didn’t say I would find another girl. Marry again… I approved of Gerard more and more.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ he said.
‘I don’t usually,’ I said apologetically.
‘No. Flora told me. You clam up, she said, if anyone asks.’
‘Flora chatters.’
‘Chattering does good, sometimes.’
I was silent. What I felt, having told him about Emma, was a sort of release. Chattering helped. Sometimes.
He finished his brandy and stood up to go. ‘If you have any more thoughts, telephone.’
‘O.K.’
He walked towards the door and stopped by a side table upon which stood three or four more photo frames among Emma’s collection of shells.
‘Your mother?’ he asked, picking up the lady on horseback with hounds. ‘Most handsome.’
‘Mother,’ I nodded.
He put her down. Picked up another. ‘Father?’
‘Father.’
He looked at the strong amused face above the colonel’s uniform with its double row of medal ribbons, at the light in the eyes and the tilt of the chin, at the firm half-smiling mouth.
‘You’re like him,’ Gerard said.
‘Only in looks.’ I turned away. ‘I loved him when I was small. Adored him. He died when I was eleven.’
He put the picture down and peered at the others. ‘No brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’ I grinned faintly. ‘My birth interfered with a whole season’s hunting. Once was enough, my mother said.’
Gerard glanced at me. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘No, I never did. I never minded being alone until I got used to something else.’ I shrugged abruptly. ‘I’m basically all right alone. I will be again, in the end.’
Gerard merely nodded and moved on out into the hall and from there to the kitchen and beyond to the rear door, where neither of us shook hands because of the slings.
‘A most productive and interesting evening,’ he said.
‘I enjoy your company.’
He seemed almost surprised. ‘Do you? Why?’
‘You don’t expect too much.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like… er… Chinese takeaway on your knees.’ It wasn’t what I truly meant, but it would do.
He made an untranslatable noise low in his throat, hearing the evasion and not agreeing with it. ‘I expect more than you think. You underestimate yourself.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
He drove away and I locked the doors and went back through the house to fetch the supper dishes, to stack them in the dishwasher. I thought of what I’d said to him about being all right alone, hearing in memory in the accumulated voices of years of customers the sighs and sadnesses of the bereaved. They talked of the common experience that was freshly awful for each individual. Two years, they said, was what it took. Two years before the sun shone. After two years the lost person became a memory, the loss itself bearable. I’d listened to them long before I thought of needing their wisdom, and I believed them still. Grief couldn’t be escaped, but it would pass.
I finished tidying downstairs and went up to bed, to the room where Emma and I had made love.
I still slept there. She often seemed extraordinarily near. I woke sometimes in the early hours and stretched out for her, forgetting. I heard the memory of her giggle in the dark.
We had been lucky in love; passionate and well matched, equal in satisfaction. I remembered chiefly her stomach flat, her breasts unswollen, remembered the years of utter fun, her gleeful orgasms, the sharp incredible ecstasy of ejaculation. It was better to remember that.
The room was quiet now. No unseen presence. No restless spirit hovering.
If I lived with ghosts, they were within me: Emma, my father and the titanic figure of my grandfather, impossibly brave. They lived in me not condemning but unconsoling. I struggled forever to come to terms with them, for if I didn’t I was sunk, but all three of their shadows fell long.
Pregnancy might recently have raised Emma’s blood pressure, they’d said. It was quite common. Higher blood pressure would have put too much strain on the slow leak, opening it wider… too wide.
Pregnancy itself, they’d said, had tipped the scales towards death. Although we had both wanted children, the seed that I’d planted had killed her.
FIFTEEN
I let myself into the shop the next morning wondering what I could trade with Sergeant Ridger for a sample of the Silver Moondance scotch, and he solved the problem himself by apearing almost immediately at my door as if transported by telekinesis.
‘Morning,’ he said, as I let him in. Raincoat belted, shoes polished, hair brushed. Hadn’t he heard, I wondered, that plain clothes policemen these days were supposed to dress in grubby jeans and look unemployed?
‘Good morning,’ I replied, shutting the door behind him. ‘Can I sell you something?’
‘Information.’ He was serious, as always, coming into the centre of the shop and standing solidly there with his feet apart.
‘Ah. Yes, well fire away.’
‘Is your arm worse? You didn’t have a sling last time I came.’
‘No worse.’ I shook my head. ‘More comfortable.’
He looked not exactly relieved but reassured. ‘Good. Then… I’m making an official request to you to aid us in our enquiries.’
‘What aid? What enquiries?’
‘This is a direct suggestion from Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson.’
‘Is it?’ I was interested. ‘To me personally?’
‘He suggested you himself, yes.’ Ridger cleared his throat. ‘It is in connection with our enquiries into complaints
received about goods supplied by licensed premises other than the Silver Moondance.’
‘Er…’ I said. ‘Sergeant, would you drop the jargon?’
Ridger looked surprised. What he’d said had been obviously of crystal clarity to his notebook mind. He said, ‘In the course of our investigations into the murder of Zarac it was suggested that we should follow up certain other complaints of malpractice throughout the whole area. There was a top level regional conference yesterday, part of which I attended as the officer first on the spot in the drinks fraud, and Chief Superintendent Wilson requested me directly to enlist your help as before. He said if we could find another place passing off one whisky as another, and if such whisky were similar or identical to that in the Silver Moondance, we might also find a lead to Zarac’s supplier and murderer. It was worth a try, he said, as there were so few other lines of enquiry. So, er, here I am.’
I gazed at him in awe. ‘You’re asking me to go on a pub crawl?’
‘Er… if you must put it like that, yes.’
Beautiful, I thought. Stunning. Fifty thousand bars between home and Watford… with the known bad apples offered on the platter of a police list.
‘Would you be driving me, like last time?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been assigned to that duty.’ He showed no feelings either for or against. ‘Can I take it you will be available?’
‘You can,’ I said. ‘When?’
He consulted his bristling wristwatch. ‘Ten-fifteen.’
‘This morning?’
‘Of course. I’ll go back now and report and return for you later.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘And Sergeant, when you return, would you bring with you the Bell’s whisky bottle from the Silver Moondance bar?’
Re looked concentratedly doubtful.
‘I’d like to taste its contents again,’ I explained. ‘It’s ten days since that morning in the Silver Moondance. If more of that scotch is what you’re looking for in these enquiries, I’ll have to learn it well enough to know it anywhere.’
He saw the logic. ‘I’ll request it.’
‘Mm… say it’s a requirement. I can’t do what you’re asking without it.’
‘Very well.’ He pulled out the notebook and wrote in it, rolling his wrist for another time check and adding nine-fourteen punctiliously.
‘How many places are we going to?’ I asked.
‘It’s quite a long list.’ He spoke matter-of-factly. ‘It’s a big area, of course. My Chief Inspector’s hoping we can complete the enquiry within two weeks.’
‘Two weeks!’
‘Working from ten-thirty to two o’clock daily in licensing hours.’
‘Is this an official appointment with pay?’
He checked internally before he answered. ‘It was being discussed.’
‘And?’
‘They used to have an available consultant expert, but he’s just retired to live in Spain. He was paid. Sure to have been.’
‘How often was he… consulted?’
‘Don’t rightly know. I only saw him once or twice. He could tell things by taste like you. The Customs and Excise people use instruments, same as the Weights and Measures. They’re concerned with alcohol content, not flavour.’
‘Did they check any of the places on your list?’
He said, ‘All of them,’ disapprovingly, and I remembered what he’d said before about someone in one of those two departments tipping off the Silver Moondance that investigators were on their way.
‘With no luck?’ I asked.
‘No prosecutions have resulted.’
Quite so. ‘All right, Sergeant. You drive, I’ll drink, and I’ve got ro be sober and back here by three to get my arm checked at the hospital.’
He went away looking smug and at nine-thirty to the half minute Mrs Palissey arrived with Brian. I explained that I would be away every mid-day for a while and said I would get her some help by tomorrow if she could possibly manage that morning on her own.
‘Help?’ She was affronted. ‘I don’t need help.’
‘But your lunch-hour…’
‘I’ll bring our lunch and we’ll eat in the back,’ she said, i don’t want strangers in here meddling. Brian and I will see to things. You go off and enjoy yourself, you’re still looking peaky.’
I was about to say that I wasn’t doing police work to enjoy myself but then it occurred to me that I probably was. I’d had no hesitation at all in accepting Ridger’s – or Wilson’s –invitation. I was flattered to be thought an expert. Deplorable vanity. Laugh at yourself, Tony. Stay human.
For an hour the three of us restocked the shop, made lists, took telephone orders, served customers, swept and dusted. I looked back when I left with Ridger: to a clean, cosy, welcoming place with Mrs Palissey smiling behind the counter and Brian arranging wine boxes with anxious care. I wasn’t an empire builder, I thought. I would never start a chain. That one prosperous place was enough.
Prosperous, I knew, against the odds. A great many small businesses like mine had died of trying to compete with chains and supermarkets, those giants engaged in such fierce undercutting price wars that they bled their own profits to death. I’d started that way and began losing money, and, against everything believed and advised in the trade, had restored my position by going back to fair, not suicidal prices. The losses had stopped, my customers had multiplied, not deserted, and I’d begun to enjoy life instead of waking up at night sweating.
Ridger had brought the Bell’s bottle with him in his car; it sat upright on the back seat in the same box in which it had left the Silver Moondance, two-thirds full, as before.
‘Before we go,’ I said, ‘I’ll take that whisky into the shop and taste it there.’
‘Why not here?’
‘The car smells of petrol.’ A gift, I thought.
‘I’ve just filled up. What does it matter?’
‘Petrol smells block out scotch.’
‘Oh. All right.’ He got out of his car, removed the box and methodically locked his doors although the car was right outside the shop and perfectly visible through the window: then he carried the box in and set it on the counter.
Casually I slipped my wrist out of the sling, picked up the Bell’s bottle, took it back to the office, and with a clink or two poured a good measure through a funnel into a clean small bottle I’d put ready, and then a very little into a goblet. The small bottle had a screw-on cap which I caught against the thread in my haste, but it was closed and hidden with the funnel behind box-files in an instant, and I walked unhurriedly back into the shop sipping thoughtfully at the glass, right wrist again supported.
Ridger was coming towards me. ‘I’m not supposed to let that bottle out of my sight,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’ I gestured with the glass. ‘It’s just on the desk in the office. Perfectly safe.’
He peered into the recess to make sure and turned back nodding. ‘How long will you be?’
‘Not long.’
The liquid in my mouth was definitely Rannoch, I thought. Straightforward Rannoch. Except that…
‘What’s the matter?’ Ridger demanded; and I realised I’d been frowning.
‘Nothing,’ I said, looking happier. ‘If you want to know if I’ll recognise it again, then yes, I will.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘Sergeant,’ I said with exasperation, ‘this is a collaboration not an inquisition. Let’s take the bottle and get the show on the road.’
I wondered if Sergeant Ridger ever achieved friendship; if his suspicious nature ever gave him a rest. Certainly after all our meetings I found his porcupine reflexes as sensitive as at the beginning, and I made no attempt to placate him, as any such attempt would in itself be seen as suspicious.
He drove away from the kerb saying that he would visit the nearest places first, with which I could find no quarrel, and I discovered that by nearest he meant ne
arest to the Silver Moondance. He turned off the main road about a mile before we reached it, and stopped in a village outside a country pub.
As an inn it had been old when Queen Anne died, when coaches had paused there to change horses. The building of the twentieth century highway had left the pub in a backwater, the old coaching road a dead end now, an artery reduced to an appendix. Emma and I had drunk a few times there, liking the old bulging building with the windows leaning sideways and the Stuart brickwork still in the fireplaces.
‘Not here!’ I said, surprised, as we stopped.
‘Do you know it?’
‘I’ve been here, but not for a year.’
Ridger consulted a clipboard. ‘Complaints of whisky being watered, gin ditto. Complaints investigated, found to be unfounded. Investigations dated August 23rd and September 18th last.’
‘The landlord’s a retired cricketer,’ I said. ‘Generous. Loves to talk. Lazy. The place needs a facelift.’
‘Landlord: Noel George Darnley.’
I turned my head, squinting down at the page. ‘Different man.’
‘Right.’ Ridger climbed out of the car and carefully locked it. ‘I’ll have a tomato juice.’
‘Who’s paying?’
Ridger looked blank. ‘I haven’t much money…’
‘No instructions?’ I asked. ‘No police float?’
He cleared his throat. ‘We must keep an account,’ he said.
‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay. We’ll write down at each place what I spend and you’ll initial it.’
He agreed to that. Whether the police would reimburse me or not I didn’t know, but Kenneth Charter very likely would, if not. If neither did, no great matter.
‘And what if we find a match?’ I asked.
He was on surer ground. ‘We impound the bottle, sealing it, labelling it, and giving a receipt.’
‘Right.’
We walked into the pub as customers, Ridger as relaxed as guitar strings.
The facelift, I saw at once, had occurred, but I found I preferred the old wrinkles. True, the worn Indian rugs wih threadbare patches had needed renewing, but not with orange and brown stripes. The underpolished knobbly oak benches had vanished in favour of smooth leather-look vinyl, and there were shiny modern brass ornaments on the mantel instead of antique pewter platters.