Proof by Dick Francis
He gave me a pitying look of superiority and walked purposefully through the door. When he came out he was three shades paler but still admirably in command and behaving every inch like a detective sergeant.
‘Did you touch anything in there?’ he asked me sharply. ‘Any surface? Would your fingerprints be on anything?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Certain?’
‘Certain.’
‘Right.’ He pulled out his radio, extended the aerial and said he needed top priority technical teams in connection with the death in suspicious circumstances of a so far unidentified male.
The disembodied voice in reply said that his message was timed at ten fifty-seven and would be acted upon. Ridger collapsed the aerial, put his head through the office door and crisply told his constable to come out of there, refrain from touching things and go outside for fresh air.
As much to himself as to me Ridger said, ‘It won’t be my case from now on.’
‘Won’t it?’
‘Murder cases go to chief inspectors or superintendents.’
I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was pleased or sorry and concluded he simply accepted the hierarchy without resentment. I said reflectively, ‘Is a man called Wilson anything to do with your force?’
‘There are about four Wilsons. Which one do you mean?’
I described the hunch-shouldered quiet-mannered investigator and Ridger nodded immediately. ‘That’s Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson. He’s not at our station, of course. He’s head of the whole district. Near retirement, they say.’
I said that I’d met him at the Hawthorn accident, and Ridger guessed that Wilson had gone there himself because of the importance of the Sheik. ‘Not his job, normally, traffic incidents.’
‘Will he be coming here?’ I asked.
‘Shouldn’t think so. He’s too senior.’
I wondered in passing why a man of such seniority should come to my shop to ask questions instead of sending a constable, but didn’t get to mentioning it to Ridger because at that point the assistant to the assistant manager began to return to life.
He was disorientated after his long faint, sitting up groggily and looking blankly at Ridger and me.
‘What happened?’ he said; and then without us telling him, he remembered. ‘Oh my God…’ He looked on the point of passing out again but instead pressed his hands over his eyes as if that would shut sight out of memory. ‘I saw… I saw…’
‘We know what you saw, sir,’ said Ridger without sympathy. ‘Can you identify that man? Is he the manager?’
The assistant assistant shook his head and spoke in a muffled voice through his hands. ‘The manager’s fat.’
‘Go on,’ Ridger prompted.
‘It’s Zarac,’ said the assistant assistant. ‘It’s his jacket…’
‘Who’s Zarac?’ Ridger said.
‘The wine waiter.’ The assistant assistant rose unsteadily to his feet and transferred his hands to his mouth before departing with heaving stomach towards the door marked ‘Guys’.
The wine waiter,’ Ridger repeated flatly. ‘Might have guessed.’
I pushed myself off the wall. ‘You don’t actually need me here, do you? I should go back to my shop.’
He thought it over briefly and agreed, saying he supposed he could find me easily if I were wanted. I left him standing virtual guard over the office door and went outside to my van, passing the constable who had relieved himself of his breakfast onto the drive.
‘Gripes,’ he said weakly in an endearing local accent, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’
‘Not an everyday sight,’ I agreed, taking refuge in flippancy: and I thought that I too had seen enough horrors since Sunday to last a lifetime.
I bought more glasses at Tuesday lunchtime and ferried them and the wines to the Thames Ladies for their fund-raising; and little else of note happened for the next three days.
The news media reported briefly on the man with the plaster topping, but no words, I thought, conveyed anything like the shock of actually seeing that football-head lying there blank and inhuman, attached to a human neck.
Cutting off the plaster at the autopsy had confirmed the identity of the victim: Fey dor Zaracievesa, British born of Polish descent, succinctly known as Zarac. He had been employed as wine waiter for eighteen months at the Silver Moondance, which had itself been open for business for almost three years. An inquest would shortly be held, it was said, and meanwhile the police were pursuing their enquiries.
Good luck to them, I thought. Pursue away.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Mrs Palissey and Brian set off with the deliveries at four o’clock and at approximately four-thirty I stuck a notice on the shop door saying ‘Open 6—9 pm’ and scooted up the hill to go round the yard with Flora.
Shop hours as far as I was concerned were flexible, and I’d found it didn’t much matter what one did as long as one said what one was doing. The pattern of when most customers came and when they stayed away was on the whole constant:a stream in the mornings, predominantly women, a trickle of either sex in the afternoons, a healthy flow, mostly men, in the evenings.
When Emma had been alive we had opened the shop on Friday and Saturday evenings only, but since I’d been alone I’d added Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, not simply for the extra trade, but for the company. I enjoyed the evenings. Most of the evening people came for wine, which I liked best to sell: a bottle to go with dinner, champagne for a job promotion, a present on the way to a party.
It was life on a small scale, I dared say. Nothing that would change history or the record books. A passage through time of ordinary mortal dimensions: but with Emma alongside it had contented.
I had never had much ambition, a sadness to my mother and a source of active irritation to my Wellington schoolmasters, one of whom on my last term’s report had written acidly, ‘Beach’s conspicuous intelligence would take him far if only he would stir himself to choose a direction.’ My inability to decide what I wanted to be (except not a soldier) had resulted in my doing nothing much at all. I passed such exams as were thrust my way but hadn’t been drawn to university. French, my best subject, was scarcely in itself a career. I didn’t feel like a stockbroker or anything tidy in the City. I wasn’t artistic. Had no ear for music. Couldn’t face life behind a desk and couldn’t ride boldly enough for racing. My only real ability throughout my teens had been a party trick of telling all makes of chocolate blindfold, which had hardly at that time seemed a promising foundation for gainful employment.
Six months after I left school I thought I might go to France for a while, ostensibly to learn the language better, but unhappily admitting to myself that it was to avoid being seen all too clearly as a disappointing failure at home. I could stand being a failure much better on my own.
By total chance, because of friends of friends of my despairing mother’s, I was despatched to live as a paying guest with a family in Bordeaux, and it had meant nothing to me at first that my unknown host was a wine shipper. It was Monsieur Henri Tavel himself who had discovered that I could tell one wine from another, once I’d tasted them. He was the only adult I’d ever met who was impressed by my trick with the chocolate. He had laughed loudly and begun to set me tests with wine each evening, and I’d grown more confident the more I got them right.
It had still seemed a game, however, and at the end of the planned three months I’d returned home with still no idea of what to do next. My mother applauded my French accent but said it was hardly to be considered a lifetime’s achievement, and I spent my days sneaking out of her sight as much as possible.
She had had to come looking for me the day the letter came, about a month after my return. She held it out in front of her, frowning at it as if it were incomprehensible.
‘Monsieur Tavel suggests you go back,’ she said. ‘He is offering to train you. Train you in what, Tony darling?’
‘Wine,’ I said, feeli
‘You?’ She was puzzled more than amazed.
‘To learn the trade, I expect,’ I said.
‘Good heavens.’
‘Can I go?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to?’ she said, astonished. ‘I mean, have you actually found something you’d like to do?’
‘I don’t seem to be able to do anything else.’
‘No,’ she agreed prosaically: and she paid my fare again and my board and lodging with the family and a substantial fee to Monsieur Tavel for tuition.
Monsieur Tavel gave me a year’s intensive instruction, taking me everywhere himself, showing me every stage of wine-making and shipping, teaching me rapidly what he’d spent a long lifetime learning, expecting me never to need telling twice.
I grew to feel at home in the Quai des Chatrons, where many doors into the warehouses were too narrow for modern lorries as a legacy from an ancient tax and where no wine could still be stored within a hundred yards of the street because it had been thought the vibration from horses’ hooves on the quayside would upset it. In the de Luze warehouse, stretching nearly half a mile back, the staff went from end to end by bicycle.
In the city long buses had concertina central sections for turning sharp corners into narrow streets and in the country mimosa trees bloomed fluffily yellow in March, and everywhere , every day, all day, there was the talk and the smell of wine. By the time I left it, Bordeaux was my spiritual home. Henri Tavel hugged me with moist eyes and told me he could place me with de Luze or one of the other top négotiants if I would stay: and sometimes since then I’d wondered why I hadn’t.
On my return to England, armed with a too-flattering Tavel reference, I’d got a job with a wine shipper, but I was too junior for much besides paperwork and after the intensities of Bordeaux grew quickly bored. Impulsively one day I’d walked into a wine shop which said ‘Help wanted’ and offered my services, and in a short time began a brilliant non-stop career of lugging cases of booze from place to place.
‘Tony works in a shop,’ my mother would say bravely. My mother was nothing if not courageous. Large fences had to be met squarely. She also, in due course, made me an interest-free loan for basic stock for a shop of my own and had refused to accept repayments once I could afford to start them. As mothers went, in fact, mine wasn’t at all bad.
Flora, in essence a more motherly lady, grew day by day less exhausted and depressed. Jack’s leg was doing well and Jimmy was tentatively out of danger, although with pierced lungs, it seemed, one couldn’t be sure for a fortnight.
Jimmy, Flora said, couldn’t remember anything at all of the party. He couldn’t remember escorting the Sheik round the yard. The last thing he could remember was talking to me about the Laphroaig; and he had been very shocked to learn that Larry Trent was dead.
‘And Jack’s spirits?’ I asked. ‘How are those?’
‘Well, you know him, Tony dear, he hates to sit still, and he’s growing more bad tempered by the minute, which I suppose I shouldn’t say, but you know how he is. He’ll be home by the weekend, he says, and he won’t sit in a wheelchair, he wants crutches, and he’s quite a weight, you know, to support on his arms, and not as young as he was.’
The daily reports, faithfully written by Flora and me, had not unduly cheered Jack, it appeared, because he thought we were keeping disasters from him; but as if in a burst of good luck after bad there had been fewer than usual sprains, knocks and skin eruptions among the string.
By Thursday the horsebox had gone, also the remains of the tent and the matting, only the churned lawn and the gap in the rose-hedge remaining.
‘We’ll never be able to walk on the grass without shoes,’ Flora said. ‘Not that we ever do, come to that. But everywhere you look there are splinters of glass.’
She’d heard of course about the robbery and murder at the Silver Moondance and listened wide-eyed when I told her I’d been there again on the Tuesday morning. ‘How awful,’ she said, and ‘Poor Larry…’ and then with confusion, ‘Oh dear, I’d forgotten for a minute… it’s all so dreadful, so dreadful.’
On Wednesday she told me that Sally and Peter now knew who had let off the brakes of their horsebox. Sally had been again on the telephone, almost equally upset, telling Flora that the parents of the little boy were blaming Peter for leaving the doors unlocked and saying it was all Peter’s fault, not their son’s. They had denied at first that their child could have caused the accident and were very bitter about the fingerprints. Sally was saying they shouldn’t have let their beastly brat run around unsupervised and should have taught it never to touch other people’s property and especially never to get into strange cars or horseboxes and meddle.
‘And who’s right?’ Flora asked rhetorically, sighing. ‘They used to be friends and now they’re all so miserable – it’s awful.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘I wish we’d never had that party. We’ll never have another, I don’t suppose.’
By Thursday afternoon she was almost back to her old cosy self, handling the smarmy Howard on the stable round with sweet-natured assurance, and I said that unless she felt panic-stricken I wouldn’t come the next day, Friday.
‘Dear Tony, you’ve been such a rock, I can’t tell you…’ and she gave me a warm kiss on the cheek when I left and said she would see me again soon, very soon.
Friday proceeded up to a point in the way of most Fridays: morning extra-busy with customers and early afternoon spent making up the big load of orders for week-end delivery. Brian carried countless customers’ goods for them personally to their parked cars and received their tips, beaming. Mrs Palissey gave him six Mars bars when she thought I wasn’t looking and told me brightly that we were running out of Coca-Cola.
Mrs Chance came for her surreptitious gin. A wine shipper telephoned that he’d reserved me fifty cases of Beaujolais Nouveau for November 15th, and did I want more? (November 15 th was to the drinks trade what August 12th was to the food: the race to be first with the new wine, as first with the grouse, was intense. I never waited for the Nouveau to be delivered but fetched it myself from the shipper very early on November 15 th so as to be able to open my doors at practically dawn with it already displayed in the window. At least, I had done that for six years. Whether I would bother without Emma I wasn’t sure. The fun had all gone. Wait and see.) Fifty cases would be fine, I said, considering Nouveau’s short life: it was at its best sold and drunk before Christmas.
Mrs Palissey set off with Brian soon after three on the extra-long delivery round and someone rang up in a great fuss because I’d sent half the amount of beer ordered.
‘Do you need it tonight?’ I asked, apologising.
‘No, Sunday, for after the village football match.’
‘I’ll bring it myself,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow morning at nine.’
In order not to forget I carried the beer immediately out of the back door to the Rover estate, and found on my return that I had a visitor in the shop in the quiet shape of Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson.
‘Mr Beach,’ he said as before, extending his hand.
‘Mr Wilson,’ I said, trying to smother my surprise and no doubt not succeeding.
‘A bottle of wine,’ he said with a small smile. ‘For dinner. What do you suggest?’
He liked full-bodied red, he said, and I offered him a Rioja of distinction.
‘Spanish?’ he murmured dubiously, reading the label.
‘Very well made,’ I said. ‘It’s excellent.’
He said he would take my word for it and punctiliously paid. I rolled the bottle in tissue and stood it on the counter, but he was not, it appeared, in a hurry to pick it up and depart.
‘Your chair…’ he murmured. ‘Would it be available?’
I fetched it at once from the office and he sat gratefully as before.
‘A question or two, Mr Beach…’ His gaze unhurriedly rested on my face and then wandered as if vaguely round the sho
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And wrote a list of the stolen goods.’
‘As much as I could remember, yes.’
‘And on Monday last you went there with Detective Sergeant Ridger and tasted various whiskies and wines?’
‘Yes,’ I said again.
‘And you saw a certain Paul Young there?’
‘Yes.’
His slow gaze finished its wandering and came to rest tranquilly on my face. ‘Can you describe him, Mr Beach?’
That’s why he’s here, I thought. For that.
‘Sergeant Ridger…’ I began.
‘Sergeant Ridger made a full description,’ he said, nodding. ‘But two sets of eyes… Mr Beach?’
I thought back and told him what I could remember of the man from the head office that didn’t exist.
‘A businessman,’ I said. ‘About fifty. Thickset, rather short, dark haired, pale skin. Big fleshy hands. No rings. He wore glasses with black frames, but narrow frames, not heavy. He had… um… the beginnings of a double chin… and a hearing aid behind his right ear.’
Wilson received the description benignly without giving me any indication of whether or not it was a carbon copy of Ridger’s. ‘His voice, Mr Beach?’
‘No special accent,’ I said. ‘Plain English. I doubt if he’d been deaf from birth… he didn’t sound toneless. He spoke ordinarily and heard everything anyone said. One wouldn’t have known he was deaf without seeing the hearing aid.’
‘And his manner, Mr Beach?’
‘A bull,’ I said without hesitation. ‘Used to having people jump when he said so.’ I thought back. ‘He didn’t seem like that at first sight, though. I mean, if he came in here now, he wouldn’t seem aggressive… but he developed aggression very fast. He didn’t like Sergeant Ridger’s authority… he wanted to diminish him somehow.’ I smiled faintly. ‘Sergeant Ridger was pretty much a match for him.’
Wilson lowered his eyes briefly as if to avoid showing whatever comment lay there and then with a few blinks raised them again. ‘Other impressions, Mr Beach?’