Dick Francis - Proof

I sat at my desk and wrote a note to Sergeant John Ridger saying I’d been told to look in the Bernard Naylor bottling plant for the Silver Moondance scotch, and I was going there with Gerard McGregor (I gave his address) to check. I sealed the note in an envelope and wrote on it an instruction to Mrs Palissey: Take this to the police station if you haven’t heard from me by ten this morning and tell them to open it.

I wedged the envelope on the till where she couldn’t miss it and hoped she would never read it. Then with a last look round I locked my door and drove away, and tried not to wonder if I would ever come back.

Half the time I thought Kenneth Charter must know his man. Stewart Naylor was true blue. Half the time I trusted Gerard’s fizzler in the night. Intuition existed. Solutions came in sleep.

It would probably turn out to be an anticlimax of a journey not worth melodramatic notes to policemen or all this soul-searching. We would drive to the bottling plant, we would not break in, there would be plentiful evidence of legal prosperity and we would drive sedately home. It would not be another day of Sunday bloody horrors.

Gerard met me in a car park we had agreed on, he having meanwhile been home to leave the Martineau Park spoils in his garage. From there we went towards London in his Mercedes, but with me driving this time.

‘Suppose you were Stewart Naylor,’ Gerard said. ‘Suppose you’d spent your entire working life learning to run the family bottling business and then because of the French changing their regulations found the wine flood drying to a trickle.’

‘Longbows,’ I said nodding.

‘What? Oh, yes. Kenneth Charter was wrong, you know, in point of fact. It was the crossbow which put paid to the longbow... well, never mind. Crossbows, guns, whatever, from no fault of your own you’re going out of business. Kenneth Charter confirmed this morning that he hardly takes a fifth of what he used to to the Naylor plant, but it’s still quite a lot. More than to anywhere else. He says that’s how he knows that Naylor’s is healthy while others struggle.’

‘Huh.’

‘Yes, indeed. Suppose you are Stewart Naylor and you look anxiously around for other things to bottle... tomato sauce, cleaning fluid, whatever... and you find everyone else in your line of business is in the same boat and doing the same. Ruin raises its ugly head and gives you a good long threatening glare’ He paused as I passed a lorry, then went on, ‘We supposed earlier that at that point a convenient crook came along offering salvation in return for dishonesty and that our beleaguered bottler accepted. But suppose it wasn’t like that. Suppose Stewart Naylor needed no seducing but without help thought up his own crooked scheme?’

‘Which was,’ I said, ‘to buy wine himself instead of bottling for others. To bottle it and label it as better than it was, and then sell it.’ I frowned. ‘And at that point you get discovered and prosecuted.’

‘Not if you have a half-brother who likes horses. You set him up... on bank money... in a Silver Moondance, and you take him your wine to sell. It sells well and for about twenty times more than it cost you, even including the bottles. Money starts flowing in, not out... and that’s when the greed complex hits you.’

‘The greed complex?’ I asked.

‘Addiction,’ Gerard said. ‘The first step is the huge one. The decision. To snort cocaine or not to. To borrow the Christmas Club’s money, just once. To sell the first secret. To design a label for a non-existent chateau and stick it on a bottle of wine-lake. The first step’s huge, the second half the size, by the sixth step it’s a habit. Suppose our Steward Naylor begins to think that if he could arrange other outlets he could double and redouble his receipts?’

‘O.K.’ I said. ‘Suppose.’

‘At this point we have to suppose a henchman called Zarac, whom one conveniently instals as head waiter at the Silver Moondance. One of his duties is to cast about for possibilities of expansion and in due course he arrives on Vernon’s doorstep at Martineau Park. He reports back to Paul Young... er... Paul Young query Stewart Naylor... who goes to see Vernon and hey presto, the fake wine business takes a deep breath and swells to double size. Money now rolls in to the extent that concealing it is a problem. Never mind. Half-brother Larry is a whiz at horses. Pass Larry the embarrassing cash, magic-wand it into horseflesh, ship it to California, convert it again at a profit if possible and bank it... intending, I dare say, to collect it one day and live in the sun. In my experience the last chapter seldom happens. The addiction to the crime becomes so integral to the criminal that he can’t give it up. I’ve caught several industrial spies because they couldn’t kick their taste for creeping about with cameras.’

‘Clean up and clear out,’ I suggested.

‘Absolutely. Almost never done. They come back for a second bite, and a third, and just once more... and whammo, one too much.’

‘So Stewart Naylor turned his ideas to scotch?’

‘Ah,’ Gerard said. ‘Suppose when your son visits his divorced father one day he brings his friend Kenneth Junior with him? Or suppose he’s often brought him? Stewart Naylor knows Kenneth Junior’s father quite well... Kenneth Charter’s tankers have brought wine to Naylor’s plant for many years. Suppose our crime-addicted Stewart casts an idle eye on Kenneth Junior and reflects that Charter’s tankers carry scotch and gin as well as wine, and that whereas the wine profits are healthy, from stolen scotch they would be astronomical.’

‘But he couldn’t ask Kenneth Junior outright to sell his dad’s tankers’ routes and destinations and time-tables. Kenneth Junior might have gone all righteous and buzzed home to spill the beans...’

‘But he does think Kenneth Junior is ripe for a spot of treason as he’s probably heard him bellyaching about his life with father...’

‘So he sends Zarac to recruit him,’ I said. ‘Sends Zarac perhaps to the Diamond snooker hall? Or the disco? Somewhere like that? And Zarac says here’s a lot of money, kid. Get me a tanker’s keys, get me a tanker’s route, and I’ll give you some more cash. And three months later he pays again. And again. And then says get me another tanker’s keys, kid, the first one’s too hot...’

‘Don’t see why not, do you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Zarac,’ Gerard said thoughtfully, ‘held a very strong hand anyway when it came to blackmail.’

I nodded. ‘Too strong for his own good.’

We came to the end of the motorway and turned off into narrower streets to thread the way to Ealing.

‘Do you know how to find this plant?’ I said. ‘Or do we ask a policeman?’

‘Map,’ Gerard said succinctly, producing one from the glove compartment. ‘It shows the roads. When we reach the road, drive slowly, keep the eyes skinned.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And drive straight past,’ he said. ‘When we see what’s what, we’ll decide what to do.’

‘All right.’

‘If you turn left a mile ahead we’ll be about five miles from target. I’ll steer you.’

‘Right.’

We turned left at a major intersection onto a dual carriageway through sleepy suburbs where in countless ovens Sunday roasts spluttered to lunchtime.

‘We’ll get a profile done tomorrow of that scotch we took from Martineau,’ Gerard said.

‘And of the sample I took from the Silver Moondance bottle.’

‘They should be the same.’

‘They will be;’

‘You’re exceedingly positive.’

I grinned. ‘Yes.’

‘Go on, then. What’s the joke?’

‘Well... you know that the tankerful set off from Scotland every time at fifty-eight per cent alcohol? And that at Rannoch’s own bottling plant they would have added water to dilute it to forty?’