Dick Francis - Proof

We stepped into a wooden floored room which contained a chair, a time-punch clock with barely six cards in a slot-holder designed for a hundred, a new-looking fire extinguisher, a poster announcing Factory Act regulations and a shallow unlocked wall-cupboard. Gerard opened the cupboard and it was just as he’d said: inside there were four rows of labelled hooks, and upon all the hooks, labelled keys.

‘All there,’ Gerard said with immense satisfaction. ‘There really is no one here. We have the place to ourselves.’ He looked along the labels, reading. ‘We’ll start with the offices. I know more about those. Then... what?’

I read the labels also. ‘Main plant. Bottle store. Label room. Vats. Dispatch. How long have we got?’

‘If Stewart Naylor is Paul Young and does what he said, he’ll be on his way now to Martineau Park. If the police detain him there we’ve at least two or three hours.’

‘It doesn’t feel like that,’ I said.

‘No. Always scary, the first few times.’

He left me again speechless. He took the keys he wanted from the hooks and indicated that I should do the same. Then we left the gate-house, closing the door (unnecessarily, I thought) behind us and walked on into the main part of the yard.

Another large brick building was revealed to the left; and any residual hopes I might have had of our establishing Stewart Naylor’s innocence and retreating in prudence were cancelled at that point. Tucked into the left hand corner of the yard stood a grey Bedford van, brown lines down the sides, devoid of number plates. I went across and looked through its windows but it held nothing: no wine, no fuzzy wigs, no shotgun.

‘God in heaven,’ Gerard said. ‘That’s the very one, isn’t it?’

‘Identical, if not.’

He sighed deeply and glanced round the yard. ‘There’s no big delivery van here marked Vintners Incorporated. It’s probably on its way to Martineau. Let’s take the offices, then, and... er... try not to leave any trace of our having been here.’

‘No,’ I said weakly.

We walked across the concrete, our shoes scrunching it seemed to me with alarming noise, and Gerard unlocked the door of the office building as if he were the manager arriving in pinstripes.

As revealed by the time-punch cards, the plant for its size was almost unstaffed. There were six small offices in the office block, four of them empty but for desk and chair, two of them showing slight paperwork activity: beyond those a locked suite of rooms marked ‘Managing Director’ on the outer door said in smaller letters underneath, ‘Knock and Enter’.

We entered without knocking, using the appropriate key from the gate-house. Inside, first of all, was a pleasasnt looking office, walls lined with calendars, charts, and posters of wine districts in France. There were two desks, one managerial, one secretarial, both clearly in everyday use. In-trays bore letters, receipts were spiked, an african violet bloomed next to a pot of pens.

I left Gerard reading invoices with concentration and went through into the next room which was furnished with an expensive leather-topped desk, green leather armchairs, carpet, brass pot with six foot high evergreen, cocktail cabinet, framed drawings of Bernard Naylor and his bottling plant fifty years earlier and a door into a luxurious washroom.

On the far side of the plushy office another door led into what had probably been designed as a boardroom, but in there, with daylight pouring through the skylights, the whole centre space was taken up by a table larger than a billiard table upon which someone appeared to have been modelling a miniature terrain of hills, valleys, plains and plateaux, all of it green and brown like the earth, with a winding ribbon of pale blue stuck on in a valley as a river.

I looked at it in awe. Gerard poked his head round the door, glanced at the table, frowned and said ‘What’s that?’

‘War games,’ I said.

‘Really?’ He came closer for a look. ‘A battlefield. So it is. Where are the soldiers?’

We found the soldiers in a cupboard against one wall, tidily stacked in trays, hundreds of them in different uniforms, many hand-painted. There were also ranks of miniature tanks and gun carriages of all historical ages and fierce looking missiles in pits. There were troop-carrying helicopters and First-World-War biplanes, baby rolls of barbed wire, ambulances and small buildings of all sorts, some of them bombed-looking, some.painted red as if on fire.

‘Incredible,’ Gerard said. ‘Just as well wars aren’t fought on the throw of dice. I’ve thrown a six, I’ll wipe out your bridgehead.’

We closed the cupboard and in giving the table a last interested look I brushed my hand lightly over the contours of the nearest range of mountains.

They moved.

Slightly horrified I picked them up to put them back into place and stood looking at the hollowed out interior in absolute surprise. I picked up another hill or two. Same thing.

‘What is it?’ Gerard said.

‘The mountains are white inside.’

‘What of it?’

‘See what they’re made of?’

I held the mountains hollow side up so that he could see the hard white interior. ‘Its plaster of Paris,’ I said. ‘Look at the edges... like bandage. I should think he’s modelled that whole countryside in it.’

‘Good grief.’

‘Not an ear nose and throat surgeon. A war games fanatic. Simple material... easily moulded, easily coloured, sets hard as rock.’

I put the hills and the mountains carefully back in position. ‘There must be a fair few rolls of the stuff on this table. And if you don’t mind... let’s get out of here.’

‘Yes,’ Gerard agreed. ‘I suppose he’d just bought some more, the day he went to the Silver Moondance. Just happened to have it in his Rolls.’

People didn’t just happen to wrap people’s heads in it. To do that, people had to have seriously vengeful thoughts and psychotic malice. Paul Young had gone a long way from where Stewart Naylor set out.

We closed the war games room door, crossed the green leather office, returned to the business sector.

‘There’s just enough legitimate trade going on to give an appearance of tottering a fraction this side of bankruptcy,’ Gerard said. ‘I can’t find anything out of place. There were deliveries via Charter Carriers up to a month ago. Nothing since. No invoices as from Vintners Incorporated, no delivery notes, nothing. This office is for accountants and inspectors. Depressingly clean except for many samples of the Young-Naylor handwriting. Let’s try the plant itself.’

He locked our way out of the office block and raised his eyebrows for a decision from me.

‘Let’s try over there,’ I said, pointing to the building by the Bedford van. ‘See what’s in there first.’

‘Right.’

There were two sets of double doors set into the long blank wall, and having tried ‘bottle store’ and ‘vats’ I found the key marked ‘dispatch’ opened one of them.

The hinges creaked as I pulled the door open. My body had almost given up on separate nervous reactions: how could one sweat in some places while one’s mouth was in drought? We went into the building and found it was the store for goods already bottled and boxed ready for sending out. There was a great deal more space than merchandise. There were three lonely pallets laden with cases marked ‘House Wine — Red’, addressed to a restaurant in Surrey and four other pallets for the same place marked ‘House Wine-White’: and that was all.

‘The paperwork for that lot is in the office,’ Gerard said. ‘The restaurant bought and shipped the wine, Naylor bottled it. Regular consignments, it looked like.’

We went back into the yard and locked the dispatch doors.