Dick Francis - Proof

‘No.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘Yes. No one that I could see.’

‘You’ve consulted your memory... before this moment?’

I half smiled. ‘Yes. You might say so.’

He sighed. ‘Did you see anyone at all anywhere near any of the cars?’

‘No. Except... only a child with a dog.’

‘Child?’

‘They weren’t near the horsebox. Nearer the Sheik’s Mercedes, really.’

‘Can you describe the child?’

‘Well...’ I frowned. ‘A boy.’

‘Clothes?’

I looked away from him, gazing vacantly at the racks of wine, thinking back. ‘Dark trousers... perhaps jeans... and a dark blue sweater.’

‘Hair?’

‘Um... light brown, I suppose. Not blond, not black.’

‘Age?’

I pondered, looking again at the patient questioner. ‘Young. Small. Four, I should think.’

‘Why are you so definite?’

‘I’m not... his head was still big in proportion to his body.’

Wilson’s eyes glimmered deeply. ‘What sort of dog?’ he said.

I stared vaguely once more into the distance, seeing the child on the hill. ‘A whippet,’ I said.

‘On a leash?’

‘No... running and turning back towards the boy.’

‘What sort of shoes did the boy have?’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I only saw him for a couple of seconds.’

His mouth twitched. He looked down at his hands and then up again. ‘No one else?’

‘No.’

‘How about the Sheik’s chauffeur?’

I shook my head. ‘He might have been sitting in the car, but one couldn’t tell. It had tinted windows, as you saw.’

He stirred and said thank you and began to get to his feet.

‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘someone stole three cases of champagne and some other bottles out of my van sometime after the accident. I need to report the theft to the police before I claim insurance... May I report it to you?’

He gave me a smile. ‘I will note that you have reported it.’

‘Thanks.’

He held his hand out to me over the counter and I shook it. ‘It’s I who thank you, Mr Beach,’ he said.

‘I haven’t been much help.’

He smiled his small uncommunicative smile, nodded benignly, and went away.

Good grief, I thought inconsequentially, watching his hunched departing back, one hundred and fifty goblets were lying in splinters in the Hawthorns’ back garden, and it was all very well talking of insurance, I was due to supply those very glasses to the Thames Ladies Christmas Charities fund-raising wine and cheese party on the following day, Tuesday, which I had forgotten clean about.

Tentatively I rang the Hawthorns’ number, not wanting to overload Flora but to ask all the same how many glasses if any remained intact, and I got not Flora but an answering machine with Jimmy’s voice, loud, healthy and languid, inviting me to leave my name, number, and message.

I complied, wondering how Jimmy was doing in intensive care, and when Mrs Palissey came back I took Brian with me to the wholesalers, where he helped me shift umpteen cases from the stores onto trolleys, and from those trolleys to other trolleys at the pay desk, for rolling out to the van, and from the second trolleys into the van, and, back at the shop, from the van into the storeroom. My own muscles, after roughly twelve years of such exercise, would have rivalled a fork-lift truck, and Brian’s, too, were coming along nicely. He grinned while he worked. He enjoyed lifting the cases. Two-at-a-time he had begun to scorn; he liked me to pile him with three.

Brian never talked much, which I appreciated. He sat placidly beside me in the van on the way back, lips apart as usual, and I wondered what went on in that big vacant head, and how much one could teach him if one tried. He’d learned quite a lot in the three or so months he’d been with me, I reflected. He was brilliantly useful compared with day one.

He unloaded the van by himself when we returned and put everything in the right places in the storeroom, which I had arranged with much more method since his arrival. Mrs Palissey had taken two more orders on the telephone, and I spent some time making up those and the ones from earlier in the day, collecting all the various items together into boxes for Brian to carry out to the van. Being a wine merchant, I often thought, was not a gentle artistic occupation, but thoroughly backbreakingly physical.

The telephone rang yet again while I was sitting in the office writing the bills to go out with the orders and I stretched out one hand for the receiver with my eyes on my work.

‘Tony?’ a woman’s voice said tentatively. ‘It’s Flora.’

‘Dear Flora,’ I said. ‘How are you? How’s Jack? How’s everything?’

‘Oh...’ She seemed tired beyond bearing. ‘Everything’s so awful. I know I shouldn’t say that... but... oh, dear.’

‘I’ll come and fetch the glasses,’ I said, hearing the appeal she hadn’t uttered. ‘I’ll come practically at once.’

‘There... there aren’t many left whole... but yes, do come.’

‘Half an hour,’ I said.

She said, ‘Thank you,’ faintly and disconnected.

I looked at my watch. Four-thirty. Most often at about that time on Mondays Mrs Palissey and Brian set off in the van to do any deliveries which lay roughly on their way home, finishing the round the following morning. Mrs Palissey’s ability to drive had been the chief reason I’d originally hired her, and she on her part had been pleased to be given the use of the shop’s second string, an elderly capacious Rover estate. We swopped the two vehicles around as required, so I said I would do the deliveries that day, if she would stay until five to close the shop, and go home again in the car.

‘By all means, Mr Beach.’ She was graciously obliging. ‘And I’ll be here at nine-thirty, then, in the morning.’

I nodded my thanks and took the bills, the orders, van and myself off up the hill to Jack Hawthorn’s stables, where not a great deal had changed since the day before.

I saw, as I came over the hill, that the great green horsebox still stood on the lawn, with, beyond it, the heaped canvas remains of the marquee. The Sheik had gone, and his bodyguards. The mute bloodstained expanse of fawn matting was scattered with trestle tables and sections of tent pole, and glittering here and there in the rays of late afternoon sunshine lay a million pieces of glass.

I parked as before outside the kitchen entrance and locked the van with a sigh. Flora came slowly out of the house to greet me, dressed in a grey skirt and a green cardigan, dark smudges under exhausted eyes.

I gave her a small hug and a kiss on the cheek. We had never before been on those sort of terms, but disasters could work wonders in that area.

‘How’s Jack? ‘I said.

‘They’ve just now set his leg... pinned it, they say. He’s still unconscious... but I saw him this morning... before.’ Her voice was quavery, as it had been on the telephone. ‘He was very down. So depressed. It made me so miserable.’ The last word came out in a gasp as her face crumpled into tears. ‘Oh, dear... Oh, dear...’

I put my arm round her shaking shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He’ll be all right. Truly.’

She nodded mutely, sniffing and fumbling in a pocket for a handkerchief, and after a while, through gulps, said, ‘He’s alive, and I should be grateful for that, and they say he’ll be home quite soon. It’s just... everything... everything...’

I nodded. ‘Just too much.’

She nodded also and dried her eyes with a re-emergence of spirit, and I asked whether any of her children might not come to help her through this patch.

‘They’re all so busy... I told them not to. And Jack, you know, he’s jealous of them really, he wouldn’t want them here when he’s away, though I shouldn’t say that, only I do seem to tell you things, Tony dear, and I don’t know why.’