Dick Francis - Proof

‘No special accent,’ I said. ‘Plain English. I doubt if he’d been deaf from birth... he didn’t sound toneless. He spoke ordinarily and heard everything anyone said. One wouldn’t have known he was deaf without seeing the hearing aid.’

‘And his manner, Mr Beach?’

‘A bull,’ I said without hesitation. ‘Used to having people jump when he said so.’ I thought back. ‘He didn’t seem like that at first sight, though. I mean, if he came in here now, he wouldn’t seem aggressive... but he developed aggression very fast. He didn’t like Sergeant Ridger’s authority... he wanted to diminish him somehow.’ I smiled faintly. ‘Sergeant Ridger was pretty much a match for him.’

Wilson lowered his eyes briefly as if to avoid showing whatever comment lay there and then with a few blinks raised them again. ‘Other impressions, Mr Beach?’

I pondered. ‘Paul Young was definitely shocked to find so many bottles containing the wrong liquids.’

‘Shocked that they did, or shocked that anyone had discovered it?’

‘Well... at the time I thought it was the first, but now... I don’t know. He was surprised and angry, that’s for sure.’

Wilson rubbed his nose absentmindedly. ‘Anything else, Mr Beach? Any insignificant little thing?’

‘I don’t know...’

A customer came in for several items at that point and wanted a detailed receipted bill, which I wrote for her: and the act of writing jogged a few dormant brain cells.

‘Paul Young,’ I said when she’d gone, ‘had a gold coloured ball point with two wide black bands inset near the top. He wrote with his right hand, but with the pen between his first and second fingers and with the fingers curled round so that the pen was above what he was writing, not below. It looked very awkward. It looked how left-handed people sometimes write... but I’m sure he was right-handed. He wrote with the hand the same side as his hearing aid, and I was wondering why he didn’t have the hearing aid incorporated into the frame of his glasses.’

Wilson incuriously studied the tissue wrapping his waiting bottle.

‘Did Paul Young seem genuine to you, Mr Beach?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘He behaved very definitely as if the Silver Moondance belonged to an organisation of which he was an executive of the highest rank. He seemed at first only to have come himself to deal with the crisis of Larry Trent’s death because the manager was away and the assistant manager had ‘flu. The third in line, the assistant to the assistant, was so hopeless that it seemed perfectly natural that head office should appear in person.’

‘Quite a long string of command, wouldn’t you say?’ murmured Wilson. ‘Trent himself, a manager, an assistant, an assistant to the assistant?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, moderately disagreeing. ‘A place like that, open long hours, half the night sometimes, they’d need that number. And the assistant assistant struck me as just a general dogsbody in togs above his station... poor chap.’

Wilson communed vaguely for a while with the South African sherries and then said, ‘Would you know Paul Young again, Mr Beach? Could you pick him out in a roomful of people?’

‘Yes,’ I said positively. ‘As long as I saw him again within a year. After that... I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘And in a photograph?’

‘Um... it would depend.’

He nodded noncommittally and shifted on his chair.

‘I’ve read Sergeant Ridger’s reports. You’ve been most helpful all along, Mr Beach.’

‘Sergeant Ridger did tell me,’ I said mildly, ‘who you are. I asked him if he knew of you, and he told me. And I’ve been surprised, you know, that you’ve come here yourself both times.’

He smiled patiently. ‘I like to keep my hand in, Mr Beach, now and again. When I’m passing, you might say, for a bottle of wine.’

He stood up slowly, preparing to go, and I asked him the thing that had been on my mind since Tuesday.

‘Was Zarac... the wine waiter... dead... before...?’

I stopped in mid-sentence and he finished it for me. ‘Dead before the plaster was applied? Since you ask, Mr Beach, no, he wasn’t. Zarac died of suffocation.’

‘Oh,’ I said numbly.

‘It is possible,’ Wilson said unemotionally, ‘that he had been knocked unconscious first. You may find that thought more bearable perhaps.’

‘Is it true?’

‘It’s not for me to say before the coroner has decided.’

There was a bleakness, I saw, behind his undemanding face. He had been out there for a long time in the undergrowth and found it easy to believe in all manner of horrors.

‘I don’t think,’ I said, ‘that I would like your job.’

‘Whereas yours, Mr Beach,’ he said, his gaze again roving the bottles, ‘yours I would like very much.’

He gave me the small smile and the unemphatic handshake and went on his way: and I thought of people bandaging all over a live man’s head and then soaking the bandage with water to turn it to rock.

Flora sent Gerard McGregor down to see me: or so he said, that Friday evening, when he came into the shop.

He looked just as he had on Sunday when tunneling away and hauling trestle tables through under the canvas for roofs. Tall, in his fifties, going grey. Ultra-civilised, with experienced eyes. Gerard with a soft J.

We shook hands again, smiling.

‘My wife and I took Flora home to dinner with us yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘We insisted. She said it was chiefly thanks to you that she was feeling better.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘She talked about you for hours.’

‘How utterly boring. She can’t have done.’

‘You know how Flora talks.’ His voice was affectionate. ‘We heard all about you and Larry Trent and the goings on at the Silver Moondance.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Whatever for? Fascinating stuff.’

Not for Zarac, I thought.

Gerard McGregor was looking around him with interest.

‘We don’t live so far from Flora,’ he said. ‘Five miles or so, but we shop in the opposite direction, not in this town. I’ve never been here before.’ He began to walk down the row of wine racks, looking at labels. ‘From what Flora said of the size of the trade you do, I somehow thought your shop would be bigger.’ His faintly Scottish voice was without offence, merely full of interest.

‘It doesn’t need to be bigger,’ I explained. ‘In fact large brightly-lit expanses tend to put real wine-lovers off, if anything. This is just right, to my mind. There’s room to show examples of everything I normally sell. I don’t keep more than a dozen of many things out here. The rest’s in the storeroom. And everything moves in and out pretty fast.’

The shop itself was about twenty-five feet by thirteen, or eight by four if one counted in metres. Down the whole of one long side there were wine racks in vertical columns, each column capable of holding twelve bottles (one case), the top bottle resting at a slant for display. Opposite the wine racks was the counter with, behind it, the shelves for spirits and liqueurs.

More wine racks took up the furthest wall except for the door through to the office and storeroom, and on every other inch of wall-space there were shelves for sherries, beers, mixers and coke and all the oddments that people asked for.

At the end of the counter, standing at a slight angle into the main floorspace, was a medium sized table covered to the ground with a pretty swagged tablecloth that Emma had made. A sheet of plate glass protected the top, and on it there stood a small forest of liqueur and aperitif and wine bottles, all opened, all available for customers to taste before buying. Coyly out of sight below the tablecloth stood open cartons of the same wines, ready to hand. We’d always sold a great deal because of the table: impulse buys leading to more and more repeat orders. Gerard fingered the bottles with interest, as so many did.