Proof by Dick Francis
The man who had walked from my shop hadn’t seen me and had his head in the van, transferring the weight of the case from his arms to the floor, a posture whose mechanics I knew well.
I shoved him hard at the base of the spine to push him off balance forwards and slammed both of the van’s doors into his buttocks. He yelled out, swearing with shock and outrage, his voice muffled to all ears but mine. He couldn’t do much to tree himself: I’d got him pinned into the van by the doors, his legs protruding beneath, and I thought with fierce satisfaction that I could easily hold him there until Gerard returned.
I’d overlooked, unfortunately, that robbers could work in pairs. There was a colossal crunch against the small of my back which by thrusting me into the van doors did more damage still, I should imagine, to the man half in the van, and as I struggled to turn I saw a second, very similar man, carrying another case of wine with which he was trying to bore a hole straight through me, or so it felt.
The man half in half out of the van was practically screaming. The urgency of his message seemed to get through to his pal who suddenly removed the pressure from my back and dropped the case of wine at my feet. I had a flurried view of fuzzy black hair, a heavy black moustache and eyes that boded no good for anybody. His fist slammed into my jaw and shook bits I never knew could rattle, and I kicked him hard on the shin.
No one had ever taught me how to fight because I hadn’t wanted to learn. Fighting involved all the scary things like people trying to hurt you, where I considered the avoidance of being hurt a top priority. Fighting led to stamping about with guns, to people shooting at you round corners, to having to kill someone yourself. Fighting led to the Victoria Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, or so it had seemed to my child mind, and the bravery of my father and my grandfather had seemed not only unattainable but alien, as if they belonged to a different race.
The inexpert way I fought that Sunday afternoon had nothing to do with bravery but everything to do with rage. They had no bloody right, I thought breathlessly, to steal my property and they damned well shouldn’t, if I could stop them.
They had more to lose than I, I suppose. Liberty, for a start. Also I had undoubtedly damaged the first one rather severely around the pelvis, and as far as he was able he was looking for revenge.
It wasn’t so much a matter of straight hitting with fists: more of clutching and kicking and ramming against hard surfaces and using knees as blunt instruments. At about the instant I ran out of enthusiasm the second man succeeded finally in what I’d been half aware he was trying to do, and reached in through the driver’s door of the van, momentarily leaning forward in that same risky posture which I would have taken advantage of if I hadn’t had my hands full with robber number one. Too late I kicked free of him and went to go forward.
Number two straightened out of the front of the van, and the fight stopped right there. He was panting a little but triumphantly holding a short-barrelled shotgun which he nastily aimed at my chest.
‘Back off,’ he said to me grimly.
I backed.
All my feelings about guns returned in a rush. It was suddenly crystal clear that a few cases of wine weren’t worth dying for. I walked one step backwards and then another and then a third, which brought me up against the wall beside my rear door. The door tended to close if not propped open, and was at that point shut but on the latch. If I could go through it, I thought dimly, I’d be safe, and I also thought that if I tried to escape through it, I’d be shot.
At the very second it crossed my mind that the man with the gun didn’t know whether to shoot me or not, Gerard drove his car back into my yard. The man with the gun swung round towards him and loosed off one of the barrels and I yanked open my door and leaped to go through it. I knew the gun was turning back my way: I could see it in the side of my frantic vision. I knew also that having shot once he’d shoot again, that the moment of inhibition was past. At five paces he was so close that the full discharge would have blown a hole in an ox. I suppose I moved faster in that second than ever before in my life, and I was jumping sideways through the doorway like a streak when he pulled the trigger.
I fell over inside but not entirely from the impact of pellets: mainly because the passage was strewn with more cases of wine. The bits of shot that had actually landed felt like sharp stings in my arm: like hot stabs.
The door swung shut behind me. If I bolted it, I thought, I would be safe. I also thought of Gerard outside in his car, and along with these two thoughts I noticed blood running down my right hand. Oh well… I wasn’t dead, was I? I struggled to my feet and opened the door enough to see what I’d be walking out to, and found that it wouldn’t be very much, as the two black-headed robbers were scrambling into their van with clear intentions of driving away.
I didn’t try to stop them. They rocketed past Gerard’s car and swerved into the service road, disappearing with the rear doors swinging open and three or four cases of wine showing within.
The windscreen of Gerard’s car was shattered. I went over there with rising dread and found him lying across both front seats, the top of one shoulder reddening and his teeth clenched with pain.
I opened the door beside the steering wheel. One says really such inadequate things at terrible times. I said, ‘I’m so sorry…’ knowing he’d come back to help me, knowing I shouldn’t have gone in there, shouldn’t have needed help.
Sung Li from next door came tearing round the corner on his feet, his broad face wide with anxiety.
‘Shots,’ he said. ‘I heard shots.’
Gerard said tautly, ‘I ducked. Saw the gun. I guess not totally fast enough,’ and he struggled into a sitting position, holding on to the wheel and shedding crazed crumbs of windscreen like snow. ‘The police are coming and you yourself are alive, I observe. It could fractionally have been worse.’
Sung Li, who spoke competent English, looked at Gerard as if he couldn’t believe his ears, and I laughed, transferring his bewilderment to myself.
‘Mr Tony,’ he said anxiously as if fearing for my reason, ‘do you know you are bleeding also?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Sung Li’s face mutely said that all English were mad, and Gerard didn’t help by asking him to whistle up an ambulance, dear chap, if he wouldn’t mind.
Sung Li went away looking dazed and Gerard gave me what could only be called a polite social smile.
‘Bloody Sundays,’ he said, ‘are becoming a habit.’ He blinked a few times. ‘Did you get the number of that van?’
‘Mm,’ I nodded. ‘Did you?’
‘Yes. Gave it to the police. Description of men?’
‘They were wearing wigs,’ I said. ‘Fuzzy black wigs, both the same. Also heavy black moustaches, identical. Clip-ons, I should think. Also surgical rubber gloves. If you’re asking would I know them again without those additions, then unfortunately I don’t think so.’
‘Your arm’s bleeding,’ he said. ‘Dripping from your hand.’
‘They were stealing my wine.’
After a pause he said, ‘Which wine, do you think?’
‘A bloody good question. I’ll go and look,’ I said. ‘Will you be all right?’
‘Yes.’
I went off across the yard to my back door, aware of the warm stickiness of my right arm, feeling the stinging soreness from shoulder to wrist, but extraordinarily not worried. Elbow and fingers still moved per instructions, though after the first exploratory twitches I decided to leave them immobile for the time being. Only the outer scatterings of the shot had caught me, and compared with what might have happened it did truthfully at that moment seem minor.
I noticed at that point how the thieves had got in: the barred washroom window had been comprehensively smashed inward, frame, bars and all, leaving a hole big enough for a man. I went into the washroom, scrunching on broken glass, and picked up the cloth with which I usually dried the glasses after customers had tasted wines, wrapping it a few times round m
For a start I hadn’t lost my small stock of really superb wines in wooden boxes at the back of the storeroom. The prizes, the appreciating Margaux and Lafite, were still there.
I hadn’t lost, either, ten cases of champagne or six very special bottles of old Cognac, or even a readily handy case of vodka. The boxes I’d fallen over in the passage were all open at the tops, the necks of the bottles showing, and when one went into the shop one could see why.
The robbers had been stealing the bottles from the racks. More peculiarly they had taken all the half-drunk wine bottles standing re-corked on the tasting table, and all the opened cases from beneath the tablecloth.
The wines on and below the table had come from St Emilion, Volnay, Côtes de Roiussillon and Graves, all red. The wines missing from the shop’s racks were of those and some from St Estèphe, Nuits St Georges, Mâcon and Valpoli-cella; also all red.
I went back out into the yard and stooped to look at the contents of the case robber number two had jabbed me with and then dropped. It contained some of the bottles from the tasting table, four of them broken.
Straightening I continued over to Gerard’s car and was relieved to see him looking no worse.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘They weren’t ordinary thieves,’ I said.
‘Go on, then.’
‘They were stealing only the sorts of wines I tasted at the Silver Moondance. The wines which weren’t what the labels said.’
He looked at me, the effort of concentration showing.
I said, ‘I bought those wines, the actual ones, at the Silver Moondance. Paid for them. Got a receipt from the barman. He must have thought I took them away with me… but in fact the police have them. Sergeant Ridger. He too gave me a receipt.’
‘You are saying,’ Gerard said slowly, ‘that if you’d brought those wines here to your shop, today they would have vanished.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Given another half-hour…’
I nodded.
‘They must be of extraordinary importance.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Be nice to know why.’
‘Why did you buy them?’
We were both talking, I saw, so as to give a semblance of normality to the abnormal reality of two ordinary Englishmen quietly bleeding from shotgun wounds in a small town on a Sunday afternoon. I thought ‘This is bloody ridiculous’ and I answered him civilly, ‘I bought them for the labels… to see if the labels themselves were forgeries. As a curio. Like collecting stamps.’
‘Ah,’ he said placidly.
‘Gerard…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m very sorry.’
‘So you should be. Stupid behaviour.’
‘Yes.’
We waited for a while longer until a police car rolled into the yard without haste, two policemen emerging enquiringly, saying they could see no evidence of any break-in at the wine shop, and did we know who had called them out.
Gerard closed his eyes. I said, ‘This is the back of the wine shop. The thieves broke in the back, not the front. If you look closely you’ll see they broke the washroom window, climbed in over the loo and unbolted the back door from the inside.’
One of them said ‘Oh,’ and went to look. The other took out his notebook. I said mildly, ‘The thieves had a shotgun and… er… shot us. They are driving away in a grey Bedford van, brown lines along the sides, licence number MMO 229Y, containing about four cases of red wine… and they’ll have gone ten miles by now, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Name, sir?’ he said blandly.
I wanted to giggle. I told him my name, however, and to do him justice he wasted no time once he realised that red wasn’t in the original weave of Gerard’s jacket. Gerard and I in due course found ourselves in the casualty department of the local major hospital where he was whisked off to regions unseen and I sat with my bare newly-washed arm on a small table while a middle-aged nursing sister expertly and unemotionally picked pellets out with a glittering instrument reminiscent of tweezers.
‘You look as if you’ve done this before,’ I observed.
‘Every year during the shooting season.’ She paused. ‘Can you feel this?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Good. Some of them have gone deep. If the local anaesthetic isn’t enough, tell me.’
‘I sure will,’ I said fervently.
She dug around for a while until there were eleven little black balls like peppercorns rattling redly in the dish, each of them big enough to kill a pheasant; and to my morbid amusement she said I could take them with me if I liked, many people did.
Carrying my jacket and with a thing like a knitted tube over antiseptic patches replacing the shredded sleeve of my shirt 1 went to find Gerard, discovering him in a cubicle, sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital-issue fawn dressing-gown over his trousers and looking abysmally bored. He had stopped bleeding both inside and out, it appeared, but several pellets were inaccessible to tweezers and he would have to stay overnight until the theatre staff returned in force in the morning. Life-and-death alone got seen to on Sundays, not small spheres of lead lodged behind collar bones.
He said he had telephoned to Tina, his wife, who was bringing his pyjamas. Tina also would retrieve his car and get the windscreen fixed; and I wondered whether he had told Tina that the velvety upholstery that was where his head would have been if he hadn’t thrown himself sideways was ripped widely apart with the stuffing coming out.
I went back to my shop in a taxi and checked that the police had, as they had promised, sent someone to board up the absent washroom window. I let myself in through the front door, switching on a light, assessing the extent of the mess, seeing it not now with anger but as a practical problem of repair.
For all that it wouldn’t be permanently damaged I had an arm not currently of much use. Lifting cases of wine could wait a day or two. Likewise sweeping up broken glass. Thank goodness for Brian, I thought tiredly, and checked that the bolts were once again in position over the door and the sheet of plywood nailed securely in the washroom.
I left everything as it was, switched off the lights and went out again by the front door. Sung Li was emerging reluctantly from his restaurant, his forehead lined with worry.
‘Oh, it is you, Mr Tony,’ he said with relief. ‘No more burglars.’
‘No.’
‘You want some food?’
I hesitated. I’d eaten nothing all day but felt no hunger.
‘It’s best to eat,’ he said. ‘Lemon chicken, your favourite. I made it fresh.’ He gave me a brief bow. I bowed courteously in return and went in with him: between us there was the same sort of formality as between myself and Mrs Palissey, and Sung Li, also, seemed to prefer it. I ate the lemon chicken seated at a table in the small restaurant section and after that fried shrimp and felt a good deal less lightheaded. I hadn’t known I was lightheaded until then, rather like not knowing how ill one had been until after one felt well again, but, looking back, I imagined I hadn’t been entirely ground-based since I’d looked into the business end of a shotgun and found my legs didn’t reliably belong to my body. The euphoria of escape, I now saw, accounted for Gerard’s and my unconcerned conversation in the yard and for my methodical checking of my losses. It was really odd how the mind strove to pretend things were normal… and there were good chemical reasons why that happened after injury. I’d read an article about it, somewhere.
I stood up, making a stiff attempt to pick my wallet out of my pocket, and Sung Li was at my side instantly, telling me to pay him in the morning. I asked if I could go out to my car in the yard through his kitchen door instead of walking all the way round and he was too polite to tell me I wasn’t fit to drive. We bowed to each other again outside in the darkness, and I’d managed to grasp my keys pretty firmly by the time I reached the Rover.
I drove home. I hit nothing. The anaesthetic wo
I let myself into the cottage. The second Sunday in a row, I thought, that I had gone back there with blood on my clothes and my mind full of horrors.
Emma, I thought, for God’s sake help me. I walked through the empty rooms, not really looking for her, knowing perfectly well she wasn’t there, but desperately in need all the same of someone to talk to, someone to hold me and love me as she had done.
With the lights all brightly shining I swallowed some aspirin and sat in my accustomed chair in the sitting room and told myself to shut up and be sensible. I’d been robbed… so what? Fought… and lost… so what? Been shot in the arm… so what? So Emma… my darling love… help me.
Get a bloody grip on things, I told myself.
Switch off the lights. Go to bed. Go to sleep.
My arm throbbed unmercifully all night.
The new day, Monday, crept into the world at about the level of my perception of it: dull, overcast, lifeless. Stiffly I dressed and shaved and made coffee, averting my mind from the temptation to go back to bed and abdicate. Mondays were hard at the best of times. The shambles ahead beckoned with all the appeal of a cold swamp.
I put the aspirin bottle in my pocket. The eleven separate punctures, announcing themselves as unready to be overlooked, seemed to be competing against each other for my attention, and various bruises were developing gingerly almost everywhere else. Bugger the lot of you, I thought: to little avail.
I drove to the shop and parked in the yard. Gerard’s car stood exactly in the same place where he’d stalled it askew, stamping on the footbrake when he caught sight of the gun swinging round to his face. The keys weren’t in the ignition and I couldn’t remember who had them. One more problem to shelve indefinitely.