Dick Francis - Proof

‘No, we haven’t found it,’ he said. ‘And we don’t expect to.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It belonged to a firm called Quality House Provisions who hadn’t noticed it was missing until one of our PCs went there early Monday asking about it. Dozy lot. They’d got several vans, they said. It’s now on the stolen-vehicle list marked urgent because of its tie-in with Zarac’s murder, but a hot van like that’s sure to be dumped somewhere already, probably in a scrap yard miles away with the number plates off. No one will find it except by luck, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Cheerful.’

‘Fact of life.’

He drove me back towards the shop, saying he would return in the morning with tomorrow’s list of suspicious premises.

‘Can’t you bring the whole list instead of in bits?’ I asked.

‘It’s still being compiled. We started today with our own patch, but we may have to wait for information from others.’

‘Mm —Do you have a first name, Sergeant?’

He looked faintly surprised. ‘John,’ he said.

‘In the pubs tomorrow, do you mind if I use it? I damn nearly called you Sergeant twice in front of barmen today.’

He considered it. ‘Yes. All right. Do you want me to call you Tony?’

‘It would make more sense.’

‘All right.’

‘What do you do off duty?’ I asked.

‘Garden,’ he said. ‘Grow vegetables, mostly.’

‘Married?’

‘Yes, been married fourteen years. Two daughters, proper little madams.’ An indulgence in his face belied the sharpness in his voice. ‘Your wife died, they say.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

He nodded. John was for business, a temporary intimacy that wouldn’t commit him to friendship. I could sense his approval, almost his relief, at my avoidance of John in private.

He left me outside my door and drove tidily away, indicator blinking, carefully efficient to the last. Mrs Palissey had been rushed off her feet, she was glad to say, and was I sure I was fit to drive myself to the hospital because to be honest, Mr Beach, I did smell a wee bit of drink.

I reflected that I’d ordered, paid for and swallowed a good deal of a dozen neat whiskies and if I still felt sober it was an illusion. I went to the hospital by taxi and received disgusted sniffs from the nursing sister (the same one), who stripped off the tube bandage to see what was cooking underneath.

‘People who drink heal more slowly,’ she said severely.

‘Do they?’

‘Yes.’

With her head not far from mine she one by one unstuck the antiseptic patches she’d applied the previous Sunday, and I tried to breathe shallowly through my nose in the opposite direction. Without much success, it seemed, judging from the offended twitch of her nostrils.

‘Most of these are healing better than you deserve,’ she said finally. ‘Three are inflamed and another looks troublesome... Do they hurt?’

‘Well... sort of.’

She nodded. ‘One should expect it. Several were more than an inch deep.’ She began sticking on new patches. ‘I’ll put a stitch in this bad one up here on your biceps, to hold it together. And keep off alcohol. There are much better pain killers.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said dryly, and thought of the boozy tomorrow and of fifty thousand pubs to Watford.

Back in the shop I saw Mrs Palissey and Brian off with the deliveries and dealt with some paperwork, and in the lull between late afternoon customers eventually got dutifully around to looking at the photostats of Kenneth Junior’s notebook.

Gerard’s firm had made a good job of their deciphering and checking and my respect for his organisation consolidated from vague expectation into recognition that Deglet’s were experienced experts in a way I hadn’t appreciated.

Gerard’s fat envelope contained an explanatory note and about fifteen sheets of typing paper. The centre of each sheet bore the stat of one page of the small notebook, and from each entry in the notebook a fine straight line led to explanation in the margin.

Gerard’s note was typewritten:

Tony,

All the enquiries were done by telephone, not in person. Answers were given freely by Kenneth Charter himself, also by his wife and daughter and elder son, although with them as with friends and shops our questions had to be cautious, as Kenneth Charter forbade us to represent Kenneth Junior in a criminal light.

The sheets are numbered in the order in which the pages occurred in the notebook. Kenneth Charter dates the first page as having been written at the beginning of August as it refers to Mrs Charter’s birthday on August 8th. One may assume that the entries were written consecutively after that, but it is not certain, and there are no other positive dates, as you will see.

Please write down immediately any thoughts which cross your mind as you read. Don’t leave such thoughts until afterwards as they are apt to evaporate.

G

I turned to the first of the notebook pages and found that the first entry of all read:

Buy card for Mum’s birthday next week.

A fine straight line led to the marginal note: August 8th.

Kenneth Junior’s handwriting was inclined to shoot off at both forward and backward sloping angles in the same word, but was otherwise distinctly formed and easy to read. The Deglet’s annotator had written in neat fine black script, utterly different but equally legible. I could hardly complain that Gerard had set me a technically difficult task.

The second entry on the first page read:

Go to D.N.’s for w.g.

The marginal note said: D.N. is David Naylor, Kenneth Junior’s only close friend. It is thought the letters w.g. stand for war games, as they are David Naylor’s hobby.

The first page also read:

Collect trousers front cleaners.

Ask Dad for cash.

Tell B.T. to fuck off.

The line from the last entry led to: B.T. is probably Betty Townsend, a girl Kenneth Junior had been seeing. Mrs Charter says she was a nice girl but clinging.

Poor Betty Townsend.

I turned to page two and found a list of telephone numbers, each with an identification in the margin, along with an address.

Odeon cinema (local)

Diamond snooker club (local)

David Naylor (Friend. Unemployed)

Clipjoint (Barber’s shop, local)

Lisa Smithson (Occasional girlfriend. Unemployed)

Ronald Haleby (Friend. Works as doorman at local disco)

The next many pages contained entries which were only understandable because of the telephone numbers and spoke eloquently of a drifting purposeless life. Kenneth Junior’s lists were almost a diary, embracing such revelations as ‘Snort with R.H. Sunday, take cash’ and ‘Get abortion number for L.S.’ but were mainly on the more mundane level of ‘Tell Mum to buy toothbrush’, ‘Play snooker at Diamond’s’ and ‘Rewire plug on stereo’.

One later page read:

Haircut.

Go to Halifax.

Buy tank for w.g., Phone D.N.

Get keys of N.T. for duplicates.

Meet R.H. in Diamond’s.

Pay L.S. for abortion.

Deglet’s annotations were:

(1) Clipjoint say Kenneth Junior went there at about ten day intervals for shampoo and styling. He bought expensive products and tipped lavishly.

(2) Kenneth Junior is most unlikely to have been to the town of Halifax. Suggest this reference means Halifax Building Society, though his parents don’t know if he had an account there. Kenneth Charter thought that apart from unemployment benefit his son had no money except what he himself gave him, but this cannot be right as Charter did not give him enough extra for cocaine and abortions.