Dick Francis - Proof

‘Yes,’ he nodded.

‘Have you any idea how much water that entails?’

‘No, of course not. How much?’

‘About two thousand seven hundred gallons. More than ten tons by weight.’

‘Good grief!’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘Rannoch’s would be careful about that water. They’d use pure spring water of some sort, even if it hadn’t actually come from a Scottish loch. But I’ll swear that Charter’s stolen loads have been diluted from an ordinary tap.’

‘Is that bad?’

I laughed. ‘It sure is. Any Scottish distiller would have a fit. They say that Scotch whisky is only the way it is because of the softness and purity of loch water. When I tasted the Silver Moondance scotch again in my shop I could sort of smell chemicals very faintly in the aftertaste. A lot of tap water isn’t too bad, but some is awful. Makes disgusting tea. Ask the residents around here.’

‘Here?’ he exclaimed.

‘Western parts of London. Notorious.’

‘Good grief.’

‘It will turn up in the profile, too.’

‘Water?’

‘Mm. Purifying chemicals. There shouldn’t be any in neat scotch.’

‘But won’t tap water spoil the scotch profile? I mean... will we still be able to prove our samples are identical with the original sent off from Scotland?’

‘Yes, don’t worry. Tap water won’t affect the whisky profile, it’ll just show up as extra components.’

‘Will it matter that the scotch is diluted?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The gas chromatograph just shows up the presence of things, not their quantity.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Turn right at the next traffic lights.

Could the gas chromatograph tell where any particular sample of tap water came from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Amazing.’

‘What is?’

‘There’s something you don’t know.’

‘Yeah... Well, I don’t know the dynasties of China or how to say no thanks in fifteen languages or the way to this bottling plant.’ And I’d like to turn straight round and go home, I thought. The nearer we got to Naylor’s the more my nervousness increased... and I thought of my father, brave as brave, setting off into battlefields, inspiring his men... and why couldn’t I be like him instead of feeling my mouth go dry and my breath shorten before we were even in the heartland of deepest Ealing.

‘Turn left here,’ Gerard said. ‘Then the third on the right. That’s our road.’

He was totally calm. No strain or anxiety in voice or face. I consciously unclenched my fingers from their grip on the steering wheel and tried without noticeable success to relax to Gerard’s level.

Hopeless. Even my teeth were tightly together when we turned into the third on the right and went slowly along.

‘There it is,’ Gerard said matter of factly. ‘See?’

I glanced to where he indicated and saw a pair of very tall entrance gates, shut, set in a length of very tall brick wall. On the gates in faded white lettering were the words ‘Bernard Nay tor Bottling’, with below them a padlock the size of a saucer.

We wouldn’t be able to get in, I thought. Thank goodness for that.

‘Turn left at the end,’ Gerard said. ‘Park there if you can.’

It was one of those suburbs built before zoning where light industries sat among dwelling houses as an integral part of the community. When I’d parked the Mercedes at a kerbside among a row of residents’ wheels we walked past lace curtains and shrubby front gardens to get back to the high wall. Eating their roast beef, I thought, and the Yorkshire puddings and the gravy... ten minutes past lunchtime and my stomach fluttering with enough butterflies to stock a Brazilian rain forest.

We walked slowly as if out for a stroll and in the short street there was only one other pedestrian, an elderly man waiting patiently for his dog at lampposts.

When we reached the gates, eight feet high, dark green sun-faded paint, Gerard stopped and faced them, head back as if reading the big white letters spreading across.

‘There’s broken glass embedded in the top of those walls,’ I said. ‘Barbed wire along the top of the gates. Don’t tell me you can pick that half-ton padlock.’

‘No need,’ Gerard said placidly. ‘Open your eyes. In many massive gates conspicuously bolted there’s a smaller door inset, wide enough for one person only. There’s one right ahead of us in the left hand gate with quite an ordinary looking spring lock, and if I can’t let us in through there I’ve been wasting the best years of my life.’

He stopped his apparent reading of the legend on the gates and resumed his stroll, glancing as if casually at the small gate cut in the large.

‘Do you smoke?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said in surprise.

‘Tie a shoelace.’

‘Sure,’ I said, understanding, and bent down obligingly to pretend to tie bows on my laceless slip-ons.

‘A doddle,’ Gerard said, above my head.

‘What?’

‘Step in.’

I saw to my astonishment that the narrow door was already swinging open. He’d been so fast. He was tucking a piece of clear plastic into his top pocket and glancing down to where the dog was again detaining his master.

Gerard stepped through the gate as if belonging there and with a rapid acceleration of heartbeats I went after him. He pushed the gate shut behind me and the spring lock fell into place with a click. He smiled faintly, and I saw with incredulity that beneath the tiredness and the malaise he was quietly enjoying himself.

‘There may be people in here,’ I said.

‘If there are... we found the gate open. Curiosity.’

We both looked at the insides of the very large gates. The padlock outside had been at least partly for show: on the inside there were thick bolts into the ground and a bar let into sockets waist high so that no amount of direct pressure from outside could force the gates open.

‘Factories often cut that hole in their defences,’ Gerard said, waving at the way we had come in. ‘Especially old ones like this, built in the age of innocence.’

We were in a big concreted yard with a high brick building running the whole length of it on our right: small square barred windows pierced the walls in two long rows, one up, one down. At the far end of the yard, facing us, was a one-storey modern office building of panel-like construction, and on our immediate left was a gate-house which on busy days would have contained a man to check people and vehicles in and out.

No gatekeeper. His door was shut. Gerard twisted the knob, but to no avail.

Alongside the door was a window reminiscent of a ticket office, and I supposed that on working days that was where the gate-house keeper actually stood. Gerard peered through it for some time at all angles, and then readdressed himself to the door.

‘Mortice lock,’ he said, inspecting a keyhole. ‘Pity.’

‘Does it matter?’ I said. ‘I mean, there wouldn’t be much of interest in a gate-house.’

Gerard glanced at me forgivingly. ‘In old factories like this it’s quite common to find the keys to all the buildings hanging on a board in the gate-house. The gatekeeper issues keys as needed when employees arrive.’

Silenced, I watched with a parched mouth while he put a steel probe into the keyhole and concentrated on feeling his way through the tumblers, his eyes unfocused and unseeing, all the consciousness in his fingers.

The place was deserted. No one came running across the yard demanding impossible explanations. There was a heavy click from the gate-house door and Gerard with a sigh of satisfaction put his steel probe away and again twisted the doorknob.

‘That’s better,’ he said calmly, as the door opened without protest. ‘Now let’s see.’