Proof by Dick Francis
I thought sourly of my stolen champagne and kept quiet.
‘She said they came in the horsebox only because they’d been to fetch a new hunter they’d just bought and were on their way home. The hunter’s still here, you know, in one of our spare boxes round the back. Sally says she never wants to see it again. She was totally, absolutely, distraught. It’s all so awful.’
Flora came with me as I carried the box of empty glasses out to the van, reluctant to let me go. ‘We didn’t make that list for Jack,’ she said; so we returned to the kitchen and made it.
‘If you still feel shaky tomorrow I’ll come again for evening stables,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed it, to be honest.’
‘You’re a dear, Tony,’ she said. ‘I’d love you to,’ and again she came out to the van to say goodbye.
‘The police were here all morning swarming around the horsebox,’ she said, looking over to the silent green monster. ‘Blowing dust all over it and shaking their heads.’
‘Looking for fingerprints, I suppose.’
‘I suppose so. Whatever it was they found, they didn’t like it. But you know how they are, they didn’t tell me a thing.’
‘Did you take a look, when they’d gone?’ I asked.
She shook her head as if it hadn’t occurred to her, but immediately set of towards the horsebox across the grass. I followed, and together we made a rectangular tour, looking at a great deal of pinkish-greyish dust with smudges all over it.
‘Hundreds of people must have touched it,’ Flora said resignedly.
Including the people with the crane, I thought, and the people who’d released the horse, and any number of people before that.
On impulse I opened the passenger door, which was still not locked, and climbed into the cab.
‘Do you think you ought to, dear?’ Flora asked anxiously.
‘They didn’t tell you to stay away, did they?’
‘No… not today.’
‘Don’t worry, then.’
I looked around. There was a great deal more of the dust inside the cab, and also a great many fingerprints, but those inside were less smudged. I looked at them curiously but without expectation: it was just that I’d never actually seen the real thing, only dozens of representations in films.
Something about many of the prints struck me suddenly with a distinct mental jolt.
They were tiny.
Tiny fingerprints all over the vinyl surfaces of both front seats. Tiny fingerprints all over the steering-wheel and on the gear lever and on the brake. Tiny…
I climbed down from the cab and told Flora, and I told her also about the investigator Wilson’s interest when I’d mentioned a little boy and a dog.
‘Do you mean,’ she said, very distressed, ‘… it was a child who caused such horror?’
‘Yes, I’d think so. You know how they play. They love cars. They’re always climbing into my van when I deliver things. Little wretches, if you don’t watch them. I’d guess that that child released the brake and gear. Then when he’d run off with the dog the weight of the van would eventually make it roll if it was on even the slightest incline.’
‘Oh dear.’ She looked increasingly upset. ‘Whose child?’
I described the boy as best I could but she said she didn’t know everyone’s children by sight, they changed so fast as they grew.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Wilson has addresses for all your guests. He’ll find out. And dearest Flora, be grateful. If it was someone else’s child who let off the brakes, your friends Peter and Sally won’t be ruined.’
‘It wasn’t their child… they haven’t any. But that poor little boy!’
‘If everyone’s got any sense,’ I said, ‘which you can be sure they haven’t, no one will tell him he killed eight people until he’s long grown up.’
On my way home from Flora’s I got no further than the second delivery because my customer, a retired solicitor, was delighted (he said) that I had brought his order myself, and I must come in straightaway and share a bottle of Chåteau Palmer 1970 which he had just decanted.
I liked the man, who was deeply experienced after countless holidays spent touring vineyards, and we passed a contented evening talking about the small parcels of miraculous fields in Pauillac and Margaux and about the universal virtues of the great grape Cabernet Sauvignon which would grow with distinction almost anywhere on earth. Given poor soil, of course, and sun.
The solicitor’s wife, it transpired, was away visiting relatives. The solicitor suggested cold underdone beef with the claret, to which I easily agreed, thinking of my own empty house, and he insisted also on opening a bottle of Clos St Jacques 1982 to drink later.
‘It’s so seldom,’ he said to my protestations, ‘that I have anyone here with whom I can truly share my enthusiasm. My dear wife puts up with me, you know, but even after all these years she would as soon drink ordinary everyday Beaujolais or an undemanding Mosel. Tonight, and please don’t argue, my dear chap, tonight is a treat.’
It was for me also. I drank my share of the Château Palmer and of the Clos St Jacques, which I had originally tasted when I sold it to him a year earlier; and I greatly enjoyed discovering how that particular wine was satisfactorily changing colour from purplish youth to a smooth deep burgundy red as it matured in excellence and power. It might well improve, I thought, and he said he would put it away for maybe a year. ‘But I’m getting old, my dear chap. I want to drink all my treasures, you know, before it’s too late.’
What with one thing and another it was nearly midnight before I left. Alcohol decays in the blood at a rate of one glass of wine an hour, I thought driving home, so with luck, after six glasses in five hours, I should be legitimately sober. It wasn’t that I was unduly moral; just that to survive in business I needed a driving licence.
Perhaps because of the wine, perhaps because of the tossing and turning I’d done the previous night, I slept long and soundly without bad dreams, and in the morning rose feeling better than usual about facing a new day. The mornings were in any case always better than the nights. Setting out wasn’t so bad; it was going home that was hell.
My mother had advised me on the telephone to sell and live somewhere else.
‘You’ll never be happy there,’ she said. ‘It never works.’
‘You didn’t move when Dad died,’ I protested.
‘But this house was mine to begin with,’ she said, surprised. ‘Inherited from my family. Quite different, Tony darling.’
I wasn’t quite sure where the difference lay, but I didn’t argue. I thought she might possibly be right that I should move, but I didn’t. All my memories of Emma were alive there in the old renovated cottage overlooking the Thames, and to leave it seemed to be an abandonment of her: an ultimate unfaithfulness. I thought that if I sold the place I would feel guilty, not released, so I stayed there and sweated for her at nights and paid the mortgage and could find no ease.
The morning deliveries were widely scattered which meant a fair amount of zig-zagging, but free home delivering brought me so much extra business that I never minded.
Bad news travels as fast as the thud of jungle drums, and it was at only ten-fifteen, at my last port of call, that I heard about the Silver Moondance.
‘Frightful, isn’t it?’ said a cheerful woman opening her back door to me on the outskirts of Reading. ‘Someone broke in there last night and stole every bottle in the place.’
‘Did they?’ I said.
She nodded happily, enjoying the bad news. ‘The milkman just told me, five minutes ago. The Silver Moondance is just along the road from here, you know. He went in there as usual with the milk and found the police standing around scratching their heads. Well, that’s what the milkman said. He’s not overkeen on the police, I don’t think.’
I carried her boxes into the kitchen and waited while she wrote a cheque.
‘Did you know the owner of the Silver Moondance was killed in that accident on Sunday, the one with t
I said that I’d heard.
‘Frightful, isn’t it, people going in and looting his place as soon as he’s dead?’
‘Frightful,’ I agreed.
‘Goodbye, Mr Beach,’ she said blithely. ‘Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone was good?’
The plundered Silver Moondance, so close to her house, lay on my own direct route back to the shop, and I slowed as I approached it, unashamedly curious. There was indeed a police car standing much where Ridger had parked the day before, and on impulse I turned straight into the driveway and pulled up alongside.
There was no one about outside, nor, when I went in, in the entrance hall. There were fewer lights on than before and even less air of anything happening. I pushed through the swinging western doors to the saloon, but the black and scarlet expanse lay dark and empty, gathering dust.
I tried the restaurant on the opposite side of the entrance hall, but that too was deserted. That left the cellars, and I made my way as on the previous day along a passage to a door marked ‘Private’ and into the staff area beyond. The cellars were not actually in a basement but consisted of two cool interconnecting windowless storerooms off a lobby between the dining room and what had been Larry Trent’s office. The lobby opened onto a back yard through a door laden with locks and bolts which now stood wide open, shedding a good deal of physical light onto the hovering figure of Sergeant Ridger, if no enlightenment.
The belted raincoat had been exchanged for an overcoat buttoned with equal military precision, and every hair was still rigidly in place. His brusque manner, too, was unchanged. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded, stiffly, as soon as he saw me.
‘Just passing.’
He gave me a dour look but didn’t tell me to leave, so I stayed.
‘What was in here yesterday?’ he asked, pointing to the open doors of the cellars. ‘The assistant manager is useless. But you saw what was here. You came here for that wine, didn’t you, so what do you remember of the contents?’ No ‘sir’, I noticed, today. I’d progressed in his mind to ‘police expert’, perhaps.
‘Quite a lot,’ I said reflectively. ‘But what about the wine list? Everything was itemised on that.’
‘We can’t find any wine lists. They seem to have gone with the wine.’
I was astonished. ‘Are you sure?’
‘We can’t find any,’ he said again. ‘So I’m asking you to make a list.’
I agreed that I would try. He took me into Larry Trent’s office, which was plushly comfortable rather than functional with a busily patterned carpet, several armchairs and many framed photographs on the walls. The photographs, I saw, were nearly all of the finishes of races, the winning post figuring prominently. Larry Trent had been a good picker, Flora had said, and a good gambler… whose luck had finally run out.
I sat in his own chair behind his mahogany desk and wrote on a piece of paper from Ridger’s official notebook. Ridger himself remained standing as if the original occupant were still there to disturb him, and I thought fleetingly that I too felt like a trespasser on Larry Trent’s privacy.
His desk was almost too neat to be believable as the hub of a business the size of the Silver Moondance. Not an invoice, not a letter, not a billhead showing. No government forms, no cash book, no filing cabinets, no typewriter and no readily available calculator. Not a working room, I thought: more a sanctuary.
I wrote what I could remember of bins and quantities of wines and then said I could perhaps add to the list if I went into the cellars and visualised what I’d seen before. We transferred therefore into the first of the rooms, where the bulk of the wines had been kept, and I looked at the empty racks and partitioned shelving and added a couple more names to my list.
From there we went through the sliding inner door into the second cellar, which had contained stocks of spirits, liqueurs, canned beer and mixers. The beer and mixers remained: brandy, gin, vodka, whisky, rum and liqueurs were absent.
‘They did a thorough job,’ I remarked, writing.
Ridger grunted. ‘They cleared the trolley in the dining room besides.’
‘And the bar?’
‘That too.’
‘Highly methodical,’ I said. ‘Head office must be fuming. What did your friend Paul Young have to say?’
Ridger looked at me broodingly and then glanced at the list which I still held. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said unwillingly, ‘the telephone number he gave me is unobtainable. I’m having it checked.’
I blinked. ‘He wrote it down himself,’ I said.
‘Yes, I know that.’ He slightly pursed his lips. ‘People sometimes make mistakes.’
What ever comment I might have made was forestalled by the arrival at the open door of the lobby of a young man in an afghan jacket who turned out to be a detective constable in plain(ish) clothes. He reported briefly that he’d finished peering into outhouses with the assistant manager, and that there seemed to be nothing missing from those. The assistant manager, he added, would be in the manager’s office, if required.
‘Where’s that?’ Ridger asked.
‘Near to the front door. Behind the door marked “Staff only” in the entrance hall, so the assistant manager said.’
‘Did you search in there?’ Ridger asked.
‘No, Sergeant, not yet.’
‘Get on with it, then,’ Ridger said brusquely, and without expression the constable turned and went away.
The radio inside Ridger’s coat crackled to life, and Ridger pulled it out and extended its aerial. The metallic voice which came from it reached me clearly in the quiet cellar. It said, ‘Further to your enquiry timed ten-fourteen, the telephone number as given does not exist and never has existed. Furthermore the address as given does not exist. There is no such street. This message timed ten-forty-eight. Please acknowledge. Over.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Ridger said grimly. ‘Out.’ He pushed the aerial down and said, ‘I suppose you heard that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shit,’ he said forcefully.
‘Quite so,’ I agreed sympathetically, for which I received an absentminded glare. I handed him the completed list of what had all at once become not just the simple tally of an opportunist break-in but the evidence of a more thorough and purposeful operation. His job, however, not mine. ‘I’ll be in my shop if you want me again,’ I said. ‘I’ll be glad to help.’
‘Very good, sir,’ he said vaguely, and then with more attention, ‘Right, then. Thanks.’
I nodded and went back through the ‘Private’ door into the entrance hall, glancing across at the inconspicuous ‘Staff only’ door which merged chameleon-like with the decor of the walls: and it was while I was supposing that the manager preferred not to be tracked down by grievance-bearing diners that the door itself opened and the assistant assistant manager reeled out backwards through the gap, staring at some sight cut off by the door swinging shut behind him.
The weakly inefficient man of the day before was now in a complete state of non-function, gasping and looking faint. I fairly sprinted across the entrance hall carpet and caught him as he sagged.
‘What is it?’I said.
He moaned slightly, his eyes rolling upwards, his weight growing heavier. I let him slide all the way to the carpet until he lay flat and spent a second or two pulling his tie loose. Then with a raised pulse and some shortening of my own breath I opened the door of the manager’s office and went in.
It was here, I saw immediately, that the real business was done. Here in this office, very functional indeed, were all the forms, files and untidy heaps of paperwork in progress so conspicuously missing from Larry Trent’s. Here there was a metal desk, old and scratched, with a plastic chair behind it and pots of pens among the clutter on its top.
There were stacks of miscellaneous stores in boldy labelled boxes all around: light bulbs, ashtrays, toilet rolls, tablets of soap. There was a floor-to-ceiling cupboard, open, spilling out stat
Nothing in that place looked likely at first sight to cause mass unconsciousness. Nothing until one walked round to the chair behind the desk, and looked at the floor; and then I felt my own mouth go dry and my own heart beat suffocatingly against my ribs. There was no blood; but it was worse, much more disturbing than the accidental carnage in the tent.
On the floor, on his back, lay a man in grey trousers with a royal blue padded jacket above. Its zip was fully fastened up the front, I noted, concentrating desperately on details, and there was an embroidered crest sewn on one sleeve, and he was wearing brown shoes with grey socks. His neck was pinkish red above the jacket, the tendons showing tautly, and his arms and hands, neatly arranged, were crossed at the wrists over his chest, in the classic position of corpses.
He was dead. He had to be dead. For a head, above the bare stretched neck, he had a large white featureless globe like a giant puffball, and it was only when one fought down nausea and looked closely that one could see that from the throat up he had been entirely, smoothly and thickly encased in plaster of Paris.
SEVEN
Retreating shakily I walked out of the office with every sympathy for the constable and the assistant assistant and leaned my back against the wall outside with trembling legs.
How could anyone be so barbaric, I wondered numbly. How could anyone do that, how could anyone think of it?
Sergeant Ridger emerged into the hall from the passage and came towards me, looking with more irritation than concern at the still prostrate assistant.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ he said in his usual forceful way.
I didn’t answer. He looked sharply at my face and said with more interest, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘A dead man,’ I said. ‘In the office.’