Dick Francis - Proof

‘We’re proceeding with our enquiries.’ He spoke without irony: the notebook jargon came naturally to his tongue. He wasn’t much older than myself; maybe four or five years. I wondered what he’d be like off duty, if such a structured and self-disciplined person were ever entirely off duty. Probably always as watchful, as careful, as ready to prickle into suspicion. I was probably seeing, I thought, the real man.

I looked at my watch. Nine-twenty. Mrs Palissey and Brian should be arriving in ten minutes.

I said, ‘I suppose it’s O.K. with you if I get all this mess cleared up? Replace the window, and so on?’

He nodded. ‘I’ll just take a look round outside, though, before I go. Come and tell me what’s different from before the break-in.’

I got slowly to my feet. We went out into the littered passage and without comment Ridger himself unbolted the heavy door and opened it.

‘My car was parked all day yesterday just about where it is now,’ I said. ‘Gerard McGregor’s car wasn’t there, of course.’

Ridger looked back through his notebook, found an entry, nodded, and flipped forward again. The door swung shut in its slow way. Ridger pushed it open and went out, looking over his shoulder for me to follow. I stepped after him into the raw cold air and watched him pacing about, measuring distances.

‘The thieves’ van was here?’ he asked, standing still.

‘A bit to your right.’

‘Where was the man with the shotgun standing when he fired at you?’

‘About where you are now.’

He nodded matter-of-factly, swung round towards Gerard’s car and raised his arm straight before him. ‘He fired at the car,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Then...’ he turned his body with the arm still outstretched until it was pointing at me. ‘He fired again.’

‘I wasn’t actually standing here by that time.’

Ridger permitted a smile. ‘Too close for comfort, I’d say.’ He walked the five steps separating us and ran his hand over the outside of the door. ‘Want to see what nearly hit you?’

The toughly-grained wood was dark with creosote, the preservative recently applied against the coming winter. I looked more closely to where he pointed, to an area just below the latch, a few inches in from the edge of the door. Wholly embedded in the wood as if they were part of it were dozens and dozens of little black pellets, most of them in a thick cluster, with others making marks like woodworm holes in a wider area all around.

‘There are three hundred of those in a normal cartridge,’ Ridger observed calmly. ‘The report we got from the hospital said they dug eleven of them out of your right arm.’

I looked at the deadly grouping of the little black shots and remembered the frenzied panic of my leap through the door. I’d left my elbow too far out for a split second too long.

The main cluster in the wood was roughly at the height of my heart.

Mrs Palissey and Brian arrived on time and fell into various attitudes of horror, which couldn’t be helped. I asked her to open the shop for business and asked Brian to start clearing up, and I stayed out in the yard myself knowing it was mostly to postpone answering their eagerly probing questions.

Ridger was still pacing about, estimating and making notes, fetching up finally at a dark red stain on the dirty concrete.

He said, frowning, ‘Is this blood?’

‘No. It’s red wine. The thieves dropped a case of bottles there. Some of them smashed in the case and seeped through onto the ground.’

He looked around. ‘Where’s the case now?’

‘In the sink in the washroom. Your policemen carried it there yesterday evening.’

He made a note.

‘Sergeant...?’

‘Yes?’ He looked up with his eyes only, his head still bent over the notebook.

‘Let me know, would you, how things are going?’

‘What things, for instance?’

‘Whether you find that van... Whether you find a lead to Paul Young.’

He looked up fully and soberly, not refusing at once. I could almost feel his hesitation and certainly see it; and his answer when it came was typically ambivalent.

‘We could perhaps warn you that you might be needed at some future date for identification purposes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Not promising, mind.’ He was retreating into the notebook.

‘No.’

He finished eventually and went away, and Mrs Palissey enjoyed her ooh/ahh sensations. Mrs Palissey wasn’t given to weeping and wailing and needing smelling salts. Mrs Palissey’s eyes were shining happily at the newsvalue of the break-in and at the good isn’t-it-awful gossip she’d have at lunchtime with the traffic warden.

Brian with little change to his normal anxious expression swept and tidied and asked me what to do about the case in the sink.

‘Take out the whole bottles and put them on the draining board,’ I said, and presently he came to tell me he’d done that. I went into the washroom to see, and there they were, eight bottles of St Emilion from under the tablecloth.

Brian was holding a piece of paper as if not knowing where to put it.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘Don’t know. It was down in the case.’ He held it out to me and I took it: a page from a notepad, folded across the centre, much handled, and damp and stained all down one side with wine from the broken bottles. I read it at first with puzzlement and then with rising amazement.

In a plain strong angular handwriting it read:

All opened bottles of wine.

All bottles with these names:

St Emilion.

St Estèphe.

Volnay.

Nuits St Georges.

Valpolicella.

Mâcon.

Spirits, etc. Anything to hand.

‘Shall I throw that away, Mr Beach?’ Brian asked helpfully.

‘You can have six Mars Bars,’ I said.

He produced his version of a large smile, a sort of sideways leer, and followed me into the shop for his reward.

Mrs Palissey, enjoyably worried, said she was sure she could cope if I wanted to step out for ten minutes, in spite of customers coming and almost nothing on the shelves, seeing as it was Monday. I assured her I valued her highly and went out along the road to the office of a solicitor of about my age who bought my wine pretty often in the evenings.

Certainly I could borrow his photocopier, he said. Any time.

I made three clear copies of the thieves’ shopping list and returned to my own small lair, wondering whether to call Sergeant Ridger immediately and in the end not doing so.

Brian humped cases of whisky, gin and various sherries from storeroom to shop, telling me each time as he passed what he was carrying, and each time getting it right. There was pride on his big face from the accomplishment; job satisfaction at its most pure. Mrs Palissey restocked the shelves, chattering away interminably, and five people telephoned with orders.

Holding a pen was unexpectedly painful, arm muscles stiffly protesting. I realised I’d been doing almost everything left-handedly, including eating Sung Li’s chicken, but writing that way was beyond me. I took down the orders right-handedly with many an inward curse, and when it came to the long list for the wholesalers, picked it out left-handed on the typewriter. No one had told me how long the punctures might take to heal. No time was fast enough.

We got through the morning somehow, and Mrs Palissey, pleasantly martyred, agreed to do the wholesalers run with Brian in the afternoon.

When they’d gone I wandered round my battered domain thinking that I should dredge up some energy to telephone for replacement wines, replacement window... replacement self-respect. It was my own silly fault I’d been shot. No getting away from it. It hadn’t seemed natural, all the same, to tiptoe off and let the robbery continue. Wiser, of course. Easy in retrospect to see it. But at the time...