Dick Francis - Proof

‘Great God,’ he said, reading it. ‘He might as well have signed a confession.’

‘Mm.’

‘But you can see why the robbers needed a written list,’ he said. ‘All those French names. They needed a visible check actually in their hand. They’d never have been sure to take the right things without.’

‘Not unless they knew the right labels intimately.’

Gerard looked up from the list. ‘You mean, the men who broke in are therefore not the designers of the swindle.’

‘If they were they wouldn’t have needed the list.’

‘Right.’ He smiled slightly. ‘How would they grab you as the murderers of Zarac?’

I opened my mouth and shut it again: then when the small shock had passed, I slowly and undecidedly shook my head.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They were rough.. but there was a moment, when the bigger one picked the gun out of the van, that he pointed it at me and visibly hesitated. If he’d already helped to kill Zarac... wouldn’t he have killed me then?’

Gerard considered it. ‘We can’t tell. Zarac died out of earshot of a Chinese takeaway. The hesitation may have been because of the more public nature of the yard. But people who take shotguns to robberies have at least thought of killing, never forget.’

I wouldn’t forget, I thought.

‘What made you become a detective?’ I asked curiously.

‘Don’t say detective. Tina doesn’t like it.’

‘Investigating consultant, then.’

‘I was baby-snatched from college while detection still seemed a glamorous idea to my immature mind.’ Again the lop-sided self-mocking smile. ‘I’d done an accountancy course and was at business school but not much looking forward to living what it taught. Rather dismayed, actually, by my prospects. I mentioned to an uncle of mine one day that I thought I’d like to join the police only the family would have mass heart attacks, and a friend of his who was there said why didn’t I join the business police... I didn’t know what he meant, of course, but he steered me to an agency and I think spoke in their ear. They offered me a trial year and started to teach me how to search... It was a different agency, not Deglet’s. Deglet’s took us over, and I was part of the furniture and fittings.’

‘And you’ve never regretted it?’

He said thoughtfully, ‘It’s fashionable to explain away all crime as the result of environment and upbringing, always putting the blame on someone else, never the actual culprit. No one’s born bad, all that sort of thing. If it weren’t for poor housing, violent father, unemployment, capitalism, et cetera, et cetera... You’ll have heard it all, over and over. Then you get a villain from a good home with normal parents who’s in a job and can’t keep his fingers out of the till. I’ve seen far far more of those. They’re the ones I investigate. Sometimes there’s a particular set of circumstances you can point to as the instigation of their thieving or spying or betraying of confidence, but so many of them, I find, simply have an urge to be dishonest. Often not out of dire need, but because that’s how they get their kicks. And whichever way you look at them, as poor little victims of society or as marauding invaders, they damage everyone in their path.’ He shifted against his pillows. ‘I was brought up to respect that most old-fashioned concept, fair play. Even the present weary world tends not to think all’s fair in war... I seek to restore fair play. I only achieve a bit here and there and the next trickster with a computer is being born every minute... What did you ask me?’

‘You’ve answered it,’ I said.

He ran his tongue round his lips as if they were dry. ‘Pass me that water, will you?’ he said.

I gave him the glass and put it down when he’d drunk.

Be grateful for villany, I thought. The jobs of millions depended on it, Gerard’s included. Police, lawyers, tax inspectors, prison warders, court officials, security guards, locksmiths and people making burglar alarms... Where would they be the world over but for the multiple faces of Cain.

‘Gerard,’ I said.

‘Mm?’

‘Where does my consultancy start and end?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well... there wasn’t a tankerful of scotch at the Silver Moondance. That Rannoch scotch is still about somewhere... masquerading perhaps as Laphroaig but more likely as Bell’s.’

Gerard saw the smile twisting the corners of my mouth and gave another painful chuckle.

‘You mean you might find it,’ he said, ‘if you drank at every hostelry from here to John O’Groats?’

‘Just Berkshire and Oxfordshire and all the way to Watford. Say fifty thousand places, for starters... A spot of syncopation. Syncopation, as you know, is an uneven movement from bar to bar.’

‘Please be quiet,’ he said. ‘Laughing hurts.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Cirrhosis, I love you.’

‘All the same...’

‘I was only joking.’

‘I know. But... as you said.’

‘Yeah. Well, I’ll drink scotch at every opportunity, if not every bar. But I won’t find it.’

‘You never know. Some dark little pub in a Reading back-street...’

I shook my head. ‘Somewhere like the Silver Moondance with smoke and noise and dancing and a huge turnover.’

His glance grew thoughtful. ‘It depends how much Kenneth Charter wants to spend. As you say, it’s an incredibly long shot... but I’ll put it to him. Incredibly long shots sometimes pay off, and I’ve known them happen at worse than fifty thousand to one.’

I hadn’t expected him to take me seriously and it made what I had chiefly been going to say sound unimportant. I said, all the same, ‘I persuaded Sergeant Ridger to let me have one of the Silver Moondance wine bottles. The label might be informative. I know it’s nothing on the face of it to do with Kenneth Charter’s tankers, but... er, if you found out more about the wine it might lead you back to the scotch.’

He looked at the photostat lying on the sheet. ‘To Paul Young, do you mean?’

I suppose so... yes.’

He said calmly, ‘Information about wine labels very definitely comes under the heading of consultancy. Getting too close to Paul Young does not.’

Henri Tavel in his robust French asked me to give his felicitations to my dear mother.

I said I would.

He said he was delighted to hear my voice after so many months and he again regretted infinitely the death of my so dear Emma.

I thanked him.

He said I would have enjoyed the harvest, it had been an abundant crop of small excellent grapes full of flavour: everyone in Bordeaux was talking of equalling 1970.

I offered congratulations.

He asked if I could spare time to visit. All his family and my many friends would welcome it, he said.

I regretted that my shop prevented an absence at present.

He understood. C’est la vie. He hoped to be of help to me in some way, as I had telephoned.

Thus invited and with gratitude I explained about the substitute wine and the existence of various labels.

‘Alas,’ he said. ‘This is unfortunately too common. A matter of great annoyance.’

‘If I describe one of the labels, could you find out for me if it’s genuine?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘Tomorrow, my dear Tony.’

I was telephoning from the office in the shop with the St Estèphe bottle in front of me.

I said, ‘The label is of a château in the region of St Estèphe, a village you know so well.’

‘The home of my grandparents. There is no one there of whom I cannot enquire.’

‘Yes... Well, this label purports to come from Château Caillot.’ I spelled it out for him. ‘Do you know of it?’