Proof

by Dick Francis

  I left Gerard reading invoices with concentration and went through into the next room which was furnished with an expensive leather-topped desk, green leather armchairs, carpet, brass pot with six foot high evergreen, cocktail cabinet, framed drawings of Bernard Naylor and his bottling plant fifty years earlier and a door into a luxurious washroom.

  On the far side of the plushy office another door led into what had probably been designed as a boardroom, but in there, with daylight pouring through the skylights, the whole centre space was taken up by a table larger than a billiard table upon which someone appeared to have been modelling a miniature terrain of hills, valleys, plains and plateaux, all of it green and brown like the earth, with a winding ribbon of pale blue stuck on in a valley as a river.

  I looked at it in awe. Gerard poked his head round the door, glanced at the table, frowned and said ‘What’s that?’

  ‘War games,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ He came closer for a look. ‘A battlefield. So it is. Where are the soldiers?’

  We found the soldiers in a cupboard against one wall, tidily stacked in trays, hundreds of them in different uniforms, many hand-painted. There were also ranks of miniature tanks and gun carriages of all historical ages and fierce looking missiles in pits. There were troop-carrying helicopters and First-World-War biplanes, baby rolls of barbed wire, ambulances and small buildings of all sorts, some of them bombed-looking, some.painted red as if on fire.

  ‘Incredible,’ Gerard said. ‘Just as well wars aren’t fought on the throw of dice. I’ve thrown a six, I’ll wipe out your bridgehead.’

  We closed the cupboard and in giving the table a last interested look I brushed my hand lightly over the contours of the nearest range of mountains.

  They moved.

  Slightly horrified I picked them up to put them back into place and stood looking at the hollowed out interior in absolute surprise. I picked up another hill or two. Same thing.

  ‘What is it?’ Gerard said.

  ‘The mountains are white inside.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘See what they’re made of?’

  I held the mountains hollow side up so that he could see the hard white interior. ‘Its plaster of Paris,’ I said. ‘Look at the edges… like bandage. I should think he’s modelled that whole countryside in it.’

  ‘Good grief.’

  ‘Not an ear nose and throat surgeon. A war games fanatic. Simple material… easily moulded, easily coloured, sets hard as rock.’

  I put the hills and the mountains carefully back in position. ‘There must be a fair few rolls of the stuff on this table. And if you don’t mind… let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gerard agreed. ‘I suppose he’d just bought some more, the day he went to the Silver Moondance. Just happened to have it in his Rolls.’

  People didn’t just happen to wrap people’s heads in it. To do that, people had to have seriously vengeful thoughts and psychotic malice. Paul Young had gone a long way from where Stewart Naylor set out.

  We closed the war games room door, crossed the green leather office, returned to the business sector.

  ‘There’s just enough legitimate trade going on to give an appearance of tottering a fraction this side of bankruptcy,’ Gerard said. ‘I can’t find anything out of place. There were deliveries via Charter Carriers up to a month ago. Nothing since. No invoices as from Vintners Incorporated, no delivery notes, nothing. This office is for accountants and inspectors. Depressingly clean except for many samples of the Young-Naylor handwriting. Let’s try the plant itself.’

  He locked our way out of the office block and raised his eyebrows for a decision from me.

  ‘Let’s try over there,’ I said, pointing to the building by the Bedford van. ‘See what’s in there first.’

  ‘Right.’

  There were two sets of double doors set into the long blank wall, and having tried ‘bottle store’ and ‘vats’ I found the key marked ‘dispatch’ opened one of them.

  The hinges creaked as I pulled the door open. My body had almost given up on separate nervous reactions: how could one sweat in some places while one’s mouth was in drought? We went into the building and found it was the store for goods already bottled and boxed ready for sending out.

  There was a great deal more space than merchandise. There were three lonely pallets laden with cases marked ‘House Wine – Red’, addressed to a restaurant in Surrey and four other pallets for the same place marked ‘House Wine-White’: and that was all.

  ‘The paperwork for that lot is in the office,’ Gerard said. ‘The restaurant bought and shipped the wine, Naylor bottled it. Regular consignments, it looked like.’

  We went back into the yard and locked the dispatch doors.

  ‘Main plant,’ I said, looking at the high building opposite. ‘Well… let’s see what it’s like.’

  The key duly let us in. The building was old, it was clear at once, built by grandfather Naylor sturdily to last for generations. Internal walls were extensively tiled in white to shoulder height, cream-painted (long ago) above. From the central entrance some stairs on the left wound upwards, and Gerard chose to go that way first as his paper-oriented mind looked instinctively for most enlightenment aloft: so we went upstairs and to a great extent he was right.

  Upstairs, among much unused and dusty space, we found a locked door to further reaches, a door that opened like Sesame to the ‘label room’ key.

  ‘Great heavens,’ Gerard said. ‘Is all this usual?’

  We stood looking at an expanse of floor covered with heaps of bundles of labels, thousand upon thousand of them altogether, in an apparent muddle but no doubt in some sort of order.

  ‘Quite usual,’ I said. ‘No one ever tries to order exactly the right number of labels needed for any particular job. You always have to have more, for contingencies. The unused ones just tend to be dumped, and they pile up.’

  ‘So they do.’

  ‘Labels in constant use are probably in those small drawers over there. The ones looking like safe deposit boxes. Some of those drawers have labels on the front… they’ll have those labels in the drawers.’

  ‘What we want are St Estèphe and all the rest, and Bell’s.’

  ‘Mm.’

  We both set to, but none of the fake labels turned up, very much to our dismay.

  ‘We need something,’ Gerard said. ‘We need proof.’

  We didn’t find it in the label room.

  At the back of the label room a closed door led presumably to another room beyond, and I suggested taking a look through there, on the off chance.

  ‘All right,’ Gerard said, shrugging.

  The door was locked and the ‘label room’ key didn’t fit. Gerard diagnosed another mortice job and took what seemed to be an age with his probe turning the mechanism, but eventually that door too yielded to him, and we went through.

  Inside that room there was a printing press. A clean, oiled, sleek modern machine capable of turning out impeccable labels.

  Some of the press’s recent work was still in uncut sheets: rows and rows of Bell’s upon Bell’s, brilliant in colour, indistinguishable from the real thing.

  Neither Gerard nor I said a word. We turned instead to the cupboards and boxes stacked around the walls, and we found them all, the neatly printed oblongs saying St Estèphe, St Emilion, Valpolicella, Mâcon, Volnay and Nuits St Georges.

  ‘It’s the Château de Chenonceaux,’ I said suddenly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘On this St Estèphe label. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. It’s the Château de Chenonceaux on the Loire, without its bridge.’

  ‘I’m glad you know what you’re talking about.’

  He was taking one each of all the fake labels and stowing them tenderly in his wallet, tucking them away in his jacket. We left everything else as it was but on the way out to my relief he didn’t stop to relock the door. We went down again to the hall and from there to a door on the l
eft which unlocked to ‘vats’.

  One could immediately smell the wine; a warm rosy air-filling aroma like a lungful of earthy fruit. Gerard lifted his head in surprise and to me it felt like coming home.

  ‘I’d no idea,’ he said.

  A small lobby opened into two long halls, the larger, on the left, containing a row of ten huge round vats down each side. Each vat, painted dark red, was eight feet high, six feet in diameter, and sat eighteen inches above ground level on thick brick pillars. Each vat, on its front, had large valves for loading and unloading, a small valve for testing, a quantity gauge, and a holder into which one could slot a card identifying the present contents.

  ‘They’re vast,’ Gerard said.

  ‘Kenneth Charter’s tanker would fill four of these. That size vat holds fifteen hundred gallons. You can get them bigger.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I smiled. ‘Let’s see what’s in them.’

  We read the contents cards. Most of them said ‘empty’, the quantity gauges reading zero. The three nearest the entrance on the left side bore ‘Keely house wine, shipped October 1st’, and another further along, ‘Dinzag private cuve, shipped Sept 24th’. Two together on the opposite side said ‘Linakket, shipped Sept. 10th’; and all of the occupied vats were only three-quarters full.

  ‘They’re all in the office paperwork,’ Gerard said regretfully.

  ‘Let’s try the empties, then,’ I said. ‘Quantity gauges can be disconnected.’

  I started at the far end under the premise that if Paul Young stacked his loot as far from the entrance as possible at Martineau Park then he might have done so on his own territory: and he had. The very first trickle which came out onto my fingers as I turned the small testing valve bore the raw volatile smell of scotch.

  ‘Bloody bingo,’ I said. ‘I’ll find a bottle and we’ll take a sample, if you like.’

  ‘Later. Try the others.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I loosed the small valves on all the ‘empty’ monsters, and we found scotch in five of them and wine in three. There was no way of telling how many gallons were in each, but to neither of us did that seem to matter. The wine, as far as I could tell from sucking it from my palm, was similar to our old friend ‘St Estèphe’, and the scotch was Rannoch already mixed with tap. Gerard looked like a cat in cream as I straightened from testing the last ‘empty’ (which was in fact empty) and said we’d seen everything now except the actual bottling department, and where would that be?

  ‘Follow the hoses,’ I said.

  He looked at the three or four hoses which were lying on the ground, fat lightweight grey ridged plastic hoses like giant earthworms as thick as a wrist, some in coils, some straightened out and running the length of the room between the vats.

  I said, ‘Those connectors at the end of the hoses lock into the valves on the vats. One of them is connected to one of the so called “empty” vats we found the wine in, see? The wine is pumped from the vats to the bottling plant… so to find the plant, follow the hoses.’

  The hoses snaked round a corner into another wide hall which this time contained only two vats, both painted a silvery white, taller, slimmer, and with several upright pipes attached from top to bottom of their sides.

  ‘White wine?’ Gerard said flippantly.

  ‘Not really. They’re refrigeration vats.’

  ‘Go on then, what are they for?’

  I went over to the nearest, but it was switched off, and so was the other, as far as I could see. ‘They use them to clear cloudy particles out of spirits and white wine. If you drop the temperature, the bits and pieces fall to the bottom, and you run off the cleared liquid from higher up.’

  The hoses ran straight past the refrigeration vats and through another wide doorway, and through there were found what Gerard was looking for, the long light and airy hall, two storeys high, where the liquids were fed into the bottles and stoppered by corks, where the caps and the labels were applied and the bottles packed into cases.

  There were four separate lines of filling, corking, labelling and capping machines, a capacity way beyond the jobs in hand. The machines themselves, like the vats and hoses, were new compared with the buildings. It all looked bright, clean, orderly, spacious and well run.

  ‘I somehow expected something dark and Dickensian,’ Gerard said. ‘Where do we look?’

  ‘Those big wooden slatted crates standing around probably contain empty bottles,’ I said, ‘but some might have full ones ready for labelling. Look in those.’

  ‘What are those glass booth things?’

  ‘The actual bottling machines and corking machines and automatic labellers are enclosed with glass for safety and they don’t work unless the glass doors are shut. One set of the machines looks ready to go. See the corks in that transparent hopper up there? And up there,’ I pointed, ‘on that bridge, see those four vats? The wine or whatever is pumped along from those huge storage vats in the long hall through the hoses up into these vats on the bridge, then it feeds down again by gravity into the bottles. The pumps for those vats look as if they’re up on the bridge. I’ll go up and see if there’s anything in those feeder vats, if you like.’

  Gerard nodded and I went up the stairs. The bridge, stretching from side to side of the bottling hall, was about twelve feet wide, railed at the sides, with four feeder vats on it standing taller than my head, each with a ladder bolted to its side so that one could go up to the entry valves on top.

  There were four electric pumps on the bridge, one for each feeder vat, but only one was connected to hoses. In that one case a hose came up from the floor below and a second hose ran from the pump to the top of one of the feeder vats. In that vat I thought I might find more of the ‘St Estèphe’, and I squatted at the base of it and released a few drops through the small valve there.

  Gerard was rattling bottles in the slatted wooden crates, looking for full ones. The crates were about five feet square, four feet high, very heavy, constructed of rows of timber rather like five barred gates. One could see the bottles inside glinting between the slats, hundreds in each crate.

  I had become so at home in my more or less natural surroundings that I’d forgotten to be frightened for the past ten minutes: and that was a fundamental mistake because a voice suddenly spoke from directly beneath me, harsh, fortissimo and threatening.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Back off, put your hands up and turn round.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  He was speaking not to me but to Gerard.

  He advanced from below the bridge into my vision, young, bullish, dressed in jeans and padded jacket, carrying a short-barrelled shotgun. He had his back to me and he hadn’t seen me, and I crouched on the bridge in a frozen state, incapable of movement, muscles locked, with the old clammy chill of abject fear sweeping over my skin and setting in my gut.

  He was the one, I was intuitively certain, who had shot us before.

  He was probably Denny. I called him Denny in my mind.

  Gerard turned slowly towards him and raised one hand, the other being still in its sling. He didn’t look up to the bridge. He could have seen me perhaps if he had’t even though I was down behind the railings and between two vats. He did nothing, said nothing, then or later, to let Denny suspect I was there.

  ‘Stand still,’ Danny said, ‘or I’ll blast you.’

  Another voice said,’Who is it? Is it Beach?’; and that was worse. I knew the voice too well.

  Paul Young’s voice. Stewart Naylor.

  ‘That’s not Beach,’ he said.

  He appeared from below me and stood beside Denny.

  I could see the black hair, the heavy shoulders, the glint of glasses, the hearing aid behind his ear.

  ‘Who is it, then?’ Denny said.

  ‘The one who was with him. Older, greyer, wearing a sling. That’s him. Some name like Gregg, Lew said.’

  Who was Lew…

  �
�What’s the sling for?’ Stewart Naylor demanded.

  Gerard didn’t answer. After a silence Naylor said, ‘You said you hit someone in a car at Beach’s shop. Was this him?’

  Denny said, i couldn’t see who it was.’

  ‘I don’t want him shot in here,’ Naylor said forcefully. ‘Too much sodding mess. You just keep your sodding finger off the trigger. And you, Gregg, take your arm out of that sling and turn your back to me and put both your hands on the top rail of that bottle-container crate, and you do just what I tell you or you’ll get shot again, mess or not.’

  Gerard did as he was told. I’ve got to do something, I thought, and couldn’t think what. Couldn’t think. Listened in hopeless horror.

  Stewart Naylor walked to Gerard and patted him all over, looking for weapons. Gerard didn’t move. Naylor reached round into Gerard’s jacket and pulled out his wallet, stepping back a few paces to look at the contents.

  ‘Gerard McGregor,’ Naylor said, reading. ‘Where’s your friend Beach?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Gerard said, shrugging.

  ‘How the hell did he turn up here?’ Denny said. ‘I don’t like it.’

  With suddenly spurting alarm and anger Naylor viciously said, ‘He’ll sodding wish he hadn’t!’

  I watched in despair. He had found in the wallet the fake labels from upstairs. He was holding them out as if in disbelief.

  ‘He’s seen the press,’ he said furiously. ‘He knows too bloody much. We’ll kill him and dump him. He’ll have had no chance yet to tell what he’s seen. We’ll be all right.’ He sounded convinced of it.

  Gerard’s apparently untroubled voice rose as if in courteous discussion. ‘I did of course leave word of where I was going. If I don’t return safely you’ll find the police at your door.’

  ‘They always say that in movies,’ Denny said. ‘It’s never bloody true.’