Proof by Dick Francis

  Women’s voices in the shop. I stood up slowly and went out there, trying to raise a smile. Found the smile came quite easily when I saw who it was.

  Flora stood there, short, plump and concerned, her kind eyes searching my face. Beside her, tall and elegant, was the woman I’d seen fleetingly with Gerard after the horsebox accident: his wife, Tina.

  ‘Tony, dear,’ Flora exclaimed, coming down the shop to meet me, ‘are you sure you should be here? You don’t look well, dear. They really should have kept you in hospital, it’s too bad they sent you home.’

  I kissed her cheek. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to stay.’ I glanced at Mrs McGregor. ‘How’s Gerard?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Flora said. ‘I should introduce… Tina, this is Tony Beach…’

  Tina McGregor smiled, which was noble considering that her husband’s predicament was my fault, and in answer to my enquiry said Gerard had had the pellets removed that morning, but would be staying one more night for recovery.

  ‘He wants to see you,’ she said. ‘This evening, if you can.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘And Tony, dear,’ Flora said, ‘I was so wanting to ask you… but now I see how dreadfully pale you look I don’t suppose… It would be too much, I’m sure.’

  ‘What would be too much?’ I said.

  ‘You were so frightfully kind coming round the stables with me, and Jack’s still in hospital, they still won’t let him come home, and every day he gets crosser…’

  ‘You want me to visit Jack too, after Gerard?’ I guessed.

  ‘Oh no!’ She was surprised. ‘Though he would love it, of course. No… I wondered… silly of me, really… if you would come with me to the races?’ She said the final words in a rush and looked of all things slightly ashamed of herself.

  ‘To the races…’

  ‘Yes, I know it’s a lot to ask… but tomorrow… we’ve a horse running which has a very awkward owner and Jack insists I must be there and honestly that owner makes me feel so flummoxed and stupid, I know it’s silly, but you were so good with that horrible Howard and I just thought you might enjoy a day at the races and I would ask you… only that was before Tina rang me and told me about last night… and now I can see it wouldn’t be a pleasure for you after all.’

  A day at the races… well, why not? Maybe I’d feel better for a day off. No worse, at any rate.

  ‘Which races?’ I said.

  ‘Martineau.’

  Martineau Park, slightly north east of Oxford, large, popular and not too far away. If ever I went to the races it was either to Martineau Park or to Newbury, because I could reach either track inside forty minutes and combine the trip with shop hours, Mrs Palissey graciously permitting.

  ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said.

  ‘But Tony dear… are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, sure. I’d like to.’

  She looked greatly relieved and arranged to pick me up at one o’clock the next day, promising faithfully to return me by six. Their runner, she explained, was in the big race of the day at three-thirty, and the owner always expected to talk for hours afterwards, analysing every step and consequence.

  ‘As if I can tell him anything,’ Flora said despairingly. ‘I do so wish the horse would win, but Jack’s afraid he won’t, which is why I’ve got to be there… Oh dear, oh dear.’

  The Flat racing season was due to end in two or three weeks and none too soon, I judged, from Jack Hawthorn’s point of view. No stable could long survive the absence of both its main driving forces, left as it was in the hands of a kind unbusinesslike woman with too little knowledge.

  ‘Listen to the owner with respect and agree with everything he says and he’ll think you’re wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘How very naughty, Tony dear,’ she said, but looked more confident all the same.

  I took them out to the yard, as Flora had chiefly brought Tina to retrieve Gerard’s car. It appeared that Tina herself had the ignition key: Gerard had given it to her the previous evening. Tina gazed without comment for a while at the shattered windscreen and the exploded upholstery and then turned towards me, very tall and erect, all emotions carefully straitj acketed.

  ‘This is the third time,’ she said, ‘that he’s been shot.’

  I went to see him in the evening and found him propped against pillows in a room with three other beds but no inmates. Blue curtains, hospital smell, large modern spaces, shiny floors, few people about.

  ‘Utterly boring,’ Gerard said. ‘Utterly impersonal. A waiting room to limbo. People keep coming to read my notes to see why I’m here, and going away again, never to return.’

  His arm was in a sling. He looked freshly shaved, hair brushed, very collected and in control. Hung on the foot of the bed was the clipboard of notes to which he’d referred, so I picked them off and read them also.

  ‘Your temperature’s ninety-nine, your pulse seventy-five, you’re recovering from birdshot pellets, extracted. No complications. Discharge tomorrow.’

  ‘None too soon.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Sore,’ he said. ‘Like you, no doubt.’

  I nodded, put the notes back and sat on a chair.

  ‘Tina said this was the third time for you,’ I said.

  ‘Huh.’ He smiled lop-sidedly. ‘She’s never totally approved of my job. An embezzler took a pot at me once. Very unusual, that, they’re normally such mild people. I suppose it was true to form that he wasn’t altogether successful even at murder. He used too small a pistol and shot me in the thigh. Couldn’t hold the thing steady… I’d swear he shut his eyes just before he fired.’

  ‘He didn’t fire again?’

  ‘Ah. Well I was rushing him, you know. He dropped the pistol and started crying. Pathetic, the whole thing.’

  I eyed Gerard respectfully. Rushing someone intent on killing you wasn’t my idea of pathos.

  ‘And the other time?’ I asked.

  He grimaced. ‘Mm. Much closer to home. Touch and go, that time. Tina wanted me to promise to do office work only after that, but one can’t, you know. If you’re hunting out criminals of any sort there’s always the outside chance they’ll turn on you, even the industrial spies I’m normally concerned with.’ He smiled again, ironically. ‘It wasn’t anyway the disloyal little chemist who sold his company’s secrets to their chief rival who shot me, it was his father. Extraordinary. Father wouldn’t believe his precious son guilty. He telephoned about six times, shouting I’d sent the most brilliant man of a generation to jail out of spite and ruined his career to cover up for someone else… he was obsessed, you know. Mentally disturbed. Anyway, he was waiting for me one day outside the office. Just walked across the pavement and shot me in the chest.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll never forget his face. Evil triumph… quite mad.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ I asked, riveted.

  ‘The father’s in and out of padded cells. Don’t know what’s happened to the son, though he’ll have been out of jail long ago. Sad, you know. Such a clever young man. His father’s pride and joy.’

  I was interested. ‘Do you ever try to find out what becomes of the people you catch… afterwards?’

  ‘No, not often. On the whole they are vain, greedy, heartless and cunning. I don’t care for them. One can feel sorry for them, but it’s with their victims my sympathies normally lie.’

  ‘Not like the old joke,’ I said.

  ‘What old joke?’

  ‘About the man who fell among thieves, who beat him and robbed him and left him bleeding and unconscious in the gutter. And along came two sociologists who looked down upon him lying there and said, the one to the other, “The mar who did this needs our help”.’

  Gerard chuckled and made a face, putting his free hand to his shoulder.

  ‘You mustn’t think,’ he said, ‘that my record is normal. I’ve been unlucky. Only one other man in our firm has ever been wounded. And most policemen, don’t forget, go through their entire careers uninj
ured.’

  Some didn’t, I thought.

  ‘Your bad luck this time,’ I apologised, ‘was my stupidity.’

  He shook his head stiffly, with care. ‘Don’t blame yourself. I drove back into the yard of my own accord. Let’s leave it at that, eh?’

  I thought gratefully that he was generous but I felt nonetheless still guilty. Absolution, it had always seemed to me, was a fake. To err was human, to be easily forgiven was to be sentimentally set free to err again. To be repeatedly forgiven destroyed the soul. With luck, I thought, I wouldn’t do anything else to incur Gerard’s forgiveness.

  The word that best described Gerard, I thought, was decent. As a detective he wasn’t ‘colourful’ as understood in fiction: that’s to say a womaniser, unshaven and drunk. Goodness, easy enough to perceive, was as quicksilver to define, but that most difficult of virtues lived in the strong lines of his face. Serious, rational, calm, he seemed to be without the mental twitches which afflicted many: the bullying pleasure in petty power, the self regarding pomposity, the devouring anxiety of the insecure, all the qualities I saw at work daily not only among customers but in people to whom others had to go in trust, officials and professional people of all sorts. One never knew for certain: Gerard might indulge secret sins galore, locking his Hyde in a closet; but what I saw, I liked.

  I told him about Brian finding the thieves’ shopping list and gave him one of the photostats out of my pocket, explaining about it being very likely in Paul Young’s own handwriting.

  ‘Great God,’ he said, reading it. ‘He might as well have signed a confession.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘But you can see why the robbers needed a written list,’ he said. ‘All those French names. They needed a visible check actually in their hand. They’d never have been sure to take the right things without.’

  ‘Not unless they knew the right labels intimately.’

  Gerard looked up from the list. ‘You mean, the men who broke in are therefore not the designers of the swindle.’

  ‘If they were they wouldn’t have needed the list.’

  ‘Right.’ He smiled slightly. ‘How would they grab you as the murderers of Zarac?’

  I opened my mouth and shut it again: then when the small shock had passed, I slowly and undecidedly shook my head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They were rough .. but there was a moment, when the bigger one picked the gun out of the van, that he pointed it at me and visibly hesitated. If he’d already helped to kill Zarac… wouldn’t he have killed me then?’

  Gerard considered it. ‘We can’t tell. Zarac died out of earshot of a Chinese takeaway. The hesitation may have been because of the more public nature of the yard. But people who take shotguns to robberies have at least thought of killing, never forget.’

  I wouldn’t forget, I thought.

  ‘What made you become a detective?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘Don’t say detective. Tina doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Investigating consultant, then.’

  ‘I was baby-snatched from college while detection still seemed a glamorous idea to my immature mind.’ Again the lop-sided self-mocking smile. ‘I’d done an accountancy course and was at business school but not much looking forward to living what it taught. Rather dismayed, actually, by my prospects. I mentioned to an uncle of mine one day that I thought I’d like to join the police only the family would have mass heart attacks, and a friend of his who was there said why didn’t I join the business police… I didn’t know what he meant, of course, but he steered me to an agency and I think spoke in their ear. They offered me a trial year and started to teach me how to search… It was a different agency, not Deglet’s. Deglet’s took us over, and I was part of the furniture and fittings.’

  ‘And you’ve never regretted it?’

  He said thoughtfully, ‘It’s fashionable to explain away all crime as the result of environment and upbringing, always putting the blame on someone else, never the actual culprit. No one’s born bad, all that sort of thing. If it weren’t for poor housing, violent father, unemployment, capitalism, et cetera, et cetera… You’ll have heard it all, over and over. Then you get a villain from a good home with normal parents who’s in a job and can’t keep his fingers out of the till. I’ve seen far far more of those. They’re the ones I investigate. Sometimes there’s a particular set of circumstances you can point to as the instigation of their thieving or spying or betraying of confidence, but so many of them, I find, simply have an urge to be dishonest. Often not out of dire need, but because that’s how they get their kicks. And whichever way you look at them, as poor little victims of society or as marauding invaders, they damage everyone in their path.’ He shifted against his pillows. ‘I was brought up to respect that most old-fashioned concept, fair play. Even the present weary world tends not to think all’s fair in war… I seek to restore fair play. I only achieve a bit here and there and the next trickster with a computer is being born every minute… What did you ask me?’

  ‘You’ve answered it,’ I said.

  He ran his tongue round his lips as if they were dry. ‘Pass me that water, will you?’ he said.

  I gave him the glass and put it down when he’d drunk.

  Be grateful for villany, I thought. The jobs of millions depended on it, Gerard’s included. Police, lawyers, tax inspectors, prison warders, court officials, security guards, locksmiths and people making burglar alarms… Where would they be the world over but for the multiple faces of Cain.

  ‘Gerard,’ I said.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Where does my consultancy start and end?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well… there wasn’t a tankerful of scotch at the Silver Moondance. That Rannoch scotch is still about somewhere… masquerading perhaps as Laphroaig but more likely as Bell’s.’

  Gerard saw the smile twisting the corners of my mouth and gave another painful chuckle.

  ‘You mean you might find it,’ he said, ‘if you drank at every hostelry from here to John o’Groats?’

  ‘Just Berkshire and Oxfordshire and all the way to Watford. Say fifty thousand places, for starters… A spot of syncopation. Syncopation, as you know, is an uneven movement from bar to bar.’

  ‘Please be quiet,’ he said. ‘Laughing hurts.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Cirrhosis, I love you.’

  ‘All the same…’

  ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘I know. But… as you said.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I’ll drink scotch at every opportunity, if not every bar. But I won’t find it.’

  ‘You never know. Some dark little pub in a Reading back-street…’

  I shook my head. ‘Somewhere like the Silver Moondance with smoke and noise and dancing and a huge turnover.’

  His glance grew thoughtful. ‘It depends how much Kenneth Charter wants to spend. As you say, it’s an incredibly long shot… but I’ll put it to him. Incredibly long shots sometimes pay off, and I’ve known them happen at worse than fifty thousand to one.’

  I hadn’t expected him to take me seriously and it made what I had chiefly been going to say sound unimportant. I said, all the same, ‘I persuaded Sergeant Ridger to let me have one of the Silver Moondance wine bottles. The label might be informative. I know it’s nothing on the face of it to do with Kenneth Charter’s tankers, but… er, if you found out more about the wine it might lead you back to the scotch.’

  He looked at the photostat lying on the sheet. ‘To Paul Young, do you mean?’

  I suppose so… yes.’

  He said calmly, ‘Information about wine labels very definitely comes under the heading of consultancy. Getting too close to Paul Young does not.’

  TWELVE

  Henri Tavel in his robust French asked me to give his felicitations to my dear mother.

  I said I would.

  He said he was delighted to hear my voice after so many months and he again regretted infinitely the death of my so dear E
mma.

  I thanked him.

  He said I would have enjoyed the harvest, it had been an abundant crop of small excellent grapes full of flavour: everyone in Bordeaux was talking of equalling 1970.

  I offered congratulations.

  He asked if I could spare time to visit. All his family and my many friends would welcome it, he said.

  I regretted that my shop prevented an absence at present.

  He understood. C’est la vie. He hoped to be of help to me in some way, as I had telephoned.

  Thus invited and with gratitude I explained about the substitute wine and the existence of various labels.

  ‘Alas,’ he said. ‘This is unfortunately too common. A matter of great annoyance.’

  if I describe one of the labels, could you find out for me if it’s genuine?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘Tomorrow, my dear Tony.’

  I was telephoning from the office in the shop with the St Estèphe bottle in front of me.

  I said, ‘The label is of a château in the region of St Estèphe, a village you know so well.’

  ‘The home of my grandparents. There is no one there of whom I cannot enquire.’

  ‘Yes… Well, this label purports to come from Château Caillot.’ I spelled it out for him. ‘Do you know of it?’

  ‘No, I don’t but don’t forget there must be two hundred small châteaux in that part of Haut Médoc. I don’t know them all. I will find out.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘The rest of the label reads: “Mis en bouteilles par W. Thiery et Fils, négotiants à Bordeaux.” ’

  Henri Tavel’s suspicions came clearly down the line. ‘1 know of no W. Thiery et Fils,’ he said. Monsieur Tavel, négotiant à Bordeaux himself, was more likely to be aware of a fellow wineshipper than of a château seventy kilometres to the north. ‘I’ll find out,’ he said.

  ‘Also the label bears the year of vintage,’ I said.

  ‘Which year?’

  ‘1979.’