Dick Francis - Proof

Gerard and I sat in the offered chairs. Kenneth Charter took his place behind his desk in a swivelling chair which he tilted recklessly backward.

‘How much have you told this bonny expert?’ he said, and listened without visible anxiety to Gerard’s recapitulation.

‘Well, now,’ he said to me cheerfully at the end, ‘You’ll want to know what liquid you’re looking for. Or could you guess, laddie, could you guess?’ His very blue eyes were quizzically challenging, and I did a quick flip and a turnover through past occasional nips in customers’ houses and sought for a check against the memory from the bar of the Silver Moondance and said on an instinctive, unreasoned impulse, ‘Rannoch.’

Charter looked cynical and said to Gerard, ‘You told him, then.’

Gerard shook his head. ‘I didn’t.’ He himself was looking smug. His consultant, it seemed, had come up trumps at the first attempt.

‘I guessed,’ I said mildly. ‘I sell that make. I’ve tasted it quite a few times. There aren’t so many whiskies that would be shipped in bulk and bottled in England. Rannoch... just fitted.’

‘Very well, then.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and produced from it a full bottle of Rannoch whisky, the familiar label adorned with an imposing male kilted figure in red and yellow tartan. The seal, I noticed, was unbroken, and Charter showed no signs of altering that.

‘A Christmas gift from the bottling company,’ he said.

‘Last Christmas?’ I asked.

‘Of course last Christmas. We’ll not be getting one this year, now will we?’

‘I guess not,’ I said meekly. ‘I meant... it’s a long time for the bottle to be full.’

He chuckled. ‘I don’t drink alcohol, laddie. Addles your brains, rots your gut. What’s more, I can’t stand the taste. We need someone like you because I wouldn’t recognise that stolen load of firewater if it turned up in the pond in my garden.’

The goldfish would tell him, I thought. They’d die.

‘Did you have a profile of that load?’ I asked.

‘A what?’

‘Um... its composition. What it was blended from. You could get a detailed list from the distiller, I should think. The profile is a sort of chemical analysis in the form of a graph... it looks something like the skyline of New York. Each different blend shows a different skyline. The profile is important to some people... the Japanese import scotch by profile alone, though actually a perfect-looking profile can taste rotten. Anyway, profiles are minutely accurate. Sort of like human tissue typing... a lot more advanced than just a blood test.’

‘All I can tell you is it was fifty-eight per cent alcohol by volume,’ Charter said. ‘The same strength as always with Rannoch. It’s here on the manifest.’ He produced from a drawer a copy of the Customs and Excise declaration and pushed it across for me to see. ‘I don’t ask what’s in the stuff, I just ferry it.’

‘We’ll get on to the profile straight away,’ Gerard murmured.

‘The Customs people probably have already,’ I said. ‘They’ll have the equipment. A gas chromatograph.’

I had an uncomfortable feeling that Gerard was thinking I should have told him about profiles on the way, but it hadn’t crossed my mind.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘if they took a sample from the distillers and matched it with the sample the police took from the Silver Moondance, they would know for sure one way or another.’

There was a silence. Finally Gerard cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you might tell Tony how we were led to the Silver Moondance. Because at this moment,’ he looked straight at me, ‘there is no reason for the Customs to connect that place to the stolen tanker or to compare the samples. They aren’t aware of any link.’

I said ‘Oh’ fairly vaguely and Kenneth Charter consulted the ceiling, tipping his chair back to where it should surely have overbalanced. He finally let his weight fall forward with a thud and gave me the full blast from the blue eyes.

‘Promise of silence, laddie,’ he said.

I looked at Gerard, who nodded off-handedly as if such demands were an everyday business fact, which I supposed to him they were.

‘Promise of silence,’ I said.

Kenneth Charter nodded his long head sharply as if taking it for granted that promises would be kept; then he pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the centre drawer of his desk. The object within needed no searching for. He pulled out a small slim black notebook and laid it on the desk before him, the naturally humorous cast of his face straightening to something like grimness.

‘You can trust this laddie?’ he said to Gerard.

‘I’d believe so.’

Charter sighed, committed, turned to the page that fell open immediately in a way that spoke of constant usage.

‘Read that,’ he said, turning the notebook round for me to see but retaining it under the pressure of his thumb. ‘That’ was a long telephone number beginning 0735, which was the code for the Reading area, with underneath it two lines of writing.

‘Tell Z UNP 786 Y picks up B’s Gin Mon 10 a.m. approx.’

‘I’ve read it,’ I said, not knowing what exactly was expected.

‘Mean anything?’

‘I suppose it’s the Silver Moondance number, and Z is Zarac?’

‘Right. And UNP 786 Y is the registration number of my tanker.’ His voice was cold and unemotional.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Berger’s Gin is where it set out from at 10.15 a.m. a month ago tomorrow. It went to Scotland, discharged the gin, was sluiced through in Glasgow and picked up the bulk scotch at Fairley’s warehouse near Helensburgh, in Dunbartonshire. Wednesday morning it set off from there. Wednesday evening it didn’t arrive at the bottling plant. By Thursday morning we know it was parked outside a drivers’ café on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but it wasn’t identified until Friday as its registration plates had been changed. The Customs and Excise have impounded it, and we haven’t got it back.’

I looked at Gerard and then again at Kenneth Charter.

‘And you know,’ I said slowly. ‘You know who wrote the message.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘My son.’

Highly complicating, as Gerard had hinted.

‘Um...’ I said, trying to make my question as noncommittal as Charter’s own voice. ‘What does your son say? Does he know where the bulk in the tanker vanished to? Because... er... six thousand gallons of scotch can’t be hidden all that easily, and the Silver Moondance wouldn’t use three times that much in six years, let alone six months... if you see.’

The blue eyes if anything grew more intense. ‘I haven’t spoken to my son. He went to Australia two weeks ago for a holiday and I don’t expect him back for three months.’

There was an element of good riddance in that statement, I thought. He wasn’t so much grieving over his offspring’s treason as finding it thoroughly awkward. I smiled at him faintly without thinking and to my surprise he grinned suddenly and broadly back.

‘You’re right,’ he said. The little bugger can stay there, as far as I’m concerned. I’m certainly not trying to fetch him home. I don’t want him charged and tried and maybe flung in jail. I don’t, I definitely don’t want any son of mine behind bars embarrassing the whole family. Making his mother cry, spoiling his sister’s wedding next spring, messing up his brother’s chances of a degree in law. If I have to sell up here, well, I will. There’ll be enough left for me to start something else. And that’s the end of the damage that sod will do. I won’t have him casting a worse blight on the family.’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘When was it, did you say, that he went to Australia?’