Dick Francis - Proof

‘It’s so seldom,’ he said to my protestations, ‘that I have anyone here with whom I can truly share my enthusiasm. My dear wife puts up with me, you know, but even after all these years she would as soon drink ordinary everyday Beaujolais or an undemanding Mosel. Tonight, and please don’t argue, my dear chap, tonight is a treat.’

It was for me also. I drank my share of the Château Palmer and of the Clos St Jacques, which I had originally tasted when I sold it to him a year earlier; and I greatly enjoyed discovering how that particular wine was satisfactorily changing colour from purplish youth to a smooth deep burgundy red as it matured in excellence and power. It might well improve, I thought, and he said he would put it away for maybe a year. ‘But I’m getting old, my dear chap. I want to drink all my treasures, you know, before it’s too late.’

What with one thing and another it was nearly midnight before I left. Alcohol decays in the blood at a rate of one glass of wine an hour, I thought driving home, so with luck, after six glasses in five hours, I should be legitimately sober. It wasn’t that I was unduly moral; just that to survive in business I needed a driving licence.

Perhaps because of the wine, perhaps because of the tossing and turning I’d done the previous night, I slept long and soundly without bad dreams, and in the morning rose feeling better than usual about facing a new day. The mornings were in any case always better than the nights. Setting out wasn’t so bad; it was going home that was hell.

My mother had advised me on the telephone to sell and live somewhere else.

‘You’ll never be happy there,’ she said. ‘It never works.’

‘You didn’t move when Dad died,’ I protested.

‘But this house was mine to begin with,’ she said, surprised. ‘Inherited from my family. Quite different, Tony darling.’

I wasn’t quite sure where the difference lay, but I didn’t argue. I thought she might possibly be right that I should move, but I didn’t. All my memories of Emma were alive there in the old renovated cottage overlooking the Thames, and to leave it seemed to be an abandonment of her: an ultimate unfaithfulness. I thought that if I sold the place I would feel guilty, not released, so I stayed there and sweated for her at nights and paid the mortgage and could find no ease.

The morning deliveries were widely scattered which meant a fair amount of zig-zagging, but free home delivering brought me so much extra business that I never minded.

Bad news travels as fast as the thud of jungle drums, and it was at only ten-fifteen, at my last port of call, that I heard about the Silver Moondance.

‘Frightful, isn’t it?’ said a cheerful woman opening her back door to me on the outskirts of Reading. ‘Someone broke in there last night and stole every bottle in the place.’

‘Did they?’ I said.

She nodded happily, enjoying the bad news. ‘The milkman just told me, five minutes ago. The Silver Moondance is just along the road from here, you know. He went in there as usual with the milk and found the police standing around scratching their heads. Well, that’s what the milkman said. He’s not overkeen on the police, I don’t think.’

I carried her boxes into the kitchen and waited while she wrote a cheque.

‘Did you know the owner of the Silver Moondance was killed in that accident on Sunday, the one with the horsebox?’ she asked.

I said that I’d heard.

‘Frightful, isn’t it, people going in and looting his place as soon as he’s dead?’

‘Frightful,’ I agreed.

‘Goodbye, Mr Beach,’ she said blithely. ‘Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone was good?’

The plundered Silver Moondance, so close to her house, lay on my own direct route back to the shop, and I slowed as I approached it, unashamedly curious. There was indeed a police car standing much where Ridger had parked the day before, and on impulse I turned straight into the driveway and pulled up alongside.

There was no one about outside, nor, when I went in, in the entrance hall. There were fewer lights on than before and even less air of anything happening. I pushed through the swinging western doors to the saloon, but the black and scarlet expanse lay dark and empty, gathering dust.

I tried the restaurant on the opposite side of the entrance hall, but that too was deserted. That left the cellars, and I made my way as on the previous day along a passage to a door marked ‘Private’ and into the staff area beyond. The cellars were not actually in a basement but consisted of two cool interconnecting windowless storerooms off a lobby between the dining room and what had been Larry Trent’s office. The lobby opened onto a back yard through a door laden with locks and bolts which now stood wide open, shedding a good deal of physical light onto the hovering figure of Sergeant Ridger, if no enlightenment.

The belted raincoat had been exchanged for an overcoat buttoned with equal military precision, and every hair was still rigidly in place. His brusque manner, too, was unchanged. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, stiffly, as soon as he saw me.

‘Just passing.’

He gave me a dour look but didn’t tell me to leave, so I stayed.

‘What was in here yesterday?’ he asked, pointing to the open doors of the cellars. ‘The assistant manager is useless. But you saw what was here. You came here for that wine, didn’t you, so what do you remember of the contents?’ No ‘sir’, I noticed, today. I’d progressed in his mind to ‘police expert’, perhaps.

‘Quite a lot,’ I said reflectively. ‘But what about the wine list? Everything was itemised on that.’

‘We can’t find any wine lists. They seem to have gone with the wine.’

I was astonished. ‘Are you sure?’

‘We can’t find any,’ he said again. ‘So I’m asking you to make a list.’

I agreed that I would try. He took me into Larry Trent’s office, which was plushly comfortable rather than functional with a busily patterned carpet, several armchairs and many framed photographs on the walls. The photographs, I saw, were nearly all of the finishes of races, the winning post figuring prominently. Larry Trent had been a good picker, Flora had said, and a good gambler... whose luck had finally run out.

I sat in his own chair behind his mahogany desk and wrote on a piece of paper from Ridger’s official notebook. Ridger himself remained standing as if the original occupant were still there to disturb him, and I thought fleetingly that I too felt like a trespasser on Larry Trent’s privacy.

His desk was almost too neat to be believable as the hub of a business the size of the Silver Moondance. Not an invoice, not a letter, not a billhead showing. No government forms, no cash book, no filing cabinets, no typewriter and no readily available calculator. Not a working room, I thought: more a sanctuary.

I wrote what I could remember of bins and quantities of wines and then said I could perhaps add to the list if I went into the cellars and visualised what I’d seen before. We transferred therefore into the first of the rooms, where the bulk of the wines had been kept, and I looked at the empty racks and partitioned shelving and added a couple more names to my list.

From there we went through the sliding inner door into the second cellar, which had contained stocks of spirits, liqueurs, canned beer and mixers. The beer and mixers remained: brandy, gin, vodka, whisky, rum and liqueurs were absent.

‘They did a thorough job,’ I remarked, writing.

Ridger grunted. ‘They cleared the trolley in the dining room besides.’

‘And the bar?’

‘That too.’

‘Highly methodical,’ I said. ‘Head office must be fuming. What did your friend Paul Young have to say?’