Proof

Eleven

Mrs Palissey and Brian arrived on time and fell into various attitudes of horror, which couldn’t be helped. I asked her to open the shop for business and asked Brian to start clearing up, and I stayed out in the yard myself knowing it was mostly to postpone answering their eagerly probing questions.

Ridger was still pacing about, estimating and making notes, fetching up finally at a dark red stain on the dirty concrete.

He said, frowning, ‘Is this blood?’

‘No. It’s red wine. The thieves dropped a case of bottles there. Some of them smashed in the case and seeped through onto the ground.’

He looked around. ‘Where’s the case now?’

‘In the sink in the washroom. Your policemen carried it there yesterday evening.’

He made a note.

‘Sergeant...?’

‘Yes?’ He looked up with his eyes only, his head still bent over the notebook.

‘Let me know, would you, how things are going?’

‘What things, for instance?’

‘Whether you find that van... Whether you find a lead to Paul Young.’

He looked up fully and soberly, not refusing at once. I could almost feel his hesitation and certainly see it; and his answer when it came was typically ambivalent.

‘We could perhaps warn you that you might be needed at some future date for identification purposes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Not promising, mind.’ He was retreating into the notebook.

‘No.’

He finished eventually and went away, and Mrs Palissey enjoyed her ooh/ahh sensations. Mrs Palissey wasn’t given to weeping and wailing and needing smelling salts. Mrs Palissey’s eyes were shining happily at the newsvalue of the break-in and at the good isn’t-it-awful gossip she’d have at lunchtime with the traffic warden.

Brian with little change to his normal anxious expression swept and tidied and asked me what to do about the case in the sink.

‘Take out the whole bottles and put them on the draining board,’ I said, and presently he came to tell me he’d done that. I went into the washroom to see, and there they were, eight bottles of St Emilion from under the tablecloth.

Brian was holding a piece of paper as if not knowing where to put it.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘Don’t know. It was down in the case.’ He held it out to me and I took it: a page from a notepad, folded across the centre, much handled, and damp and stained all down one side with wine from the broken bottles. I read it at first with puzzlement and then with rising amazement.

In a plain strong angular handwriting it read:

‘Shall I throw that away, Mr Beach?’ Brian asked helpfully.

‘You can have six Mars Bars,’ I said.

He produced his version of a large smile, a sort of sideways leer, and followed me into the shop for his reward.

Mrs Palissey, enjoyably worried, said she was sure she could cope if I wanted to step out for ten minutes, in spite of customers coming and almost nothing on the shelves, seeing as it was Monday. I assured her I valued her highly and went out along the road to the office of a solicitor of about my age who bought my wine pretty often in the evenings.

Certainly I could borrow his photocopier, he said. Any time.

I made three clear copies of the thieves’ shopping list and returned to my own small lair, wondering whether to call Sergeant Ridger immediately and in the end not doing so.

Brian humped cases of whisky, gin and various sherries from storeroom to shop, telling me each time as he passed what he was carrying, and each time getting it right. There was pride on his big face from the accomplishment; job satisfaction at its most pure. Mrs Palissey restocked the shelves, chattering away interminably, and five people telephoned with orders.

Holding a pen was unexpectedly painful, arm muscles stiffly protesting. I realised I’d been doing almost everything left-handedly, including eating Sung Li’s chicken, but writing that way was beyond me. I took down the orders right-handedly with many an inward curse, and when it came to the long list for the wholesalers, picked it out left-handed on the typewriter. No one had told me how long the punctures might take to heal. No time was fast enough.

We got through the morning somehow, and Mrs Palissey, pleasantly martyred, agreed to do the wholesalers run with Brian in the afternoon.

When they’d gone I wandered round my battered domain thinking that I should dredge up some energy to telephone for replacement wines, replacement window... replacement self-respect. It was my own silly fault I’d been shot. No getting away from it. It hadn’t seemed natural, all the same, to tiptoe off and let the robbery continue. Wiser, of course. Easy in retrospect to see it. But at the time...

I thought about it in a jumbled way, without clarity, not understanding the compulsive and utterly irrational urge that had sent me running towards danger when every scared and skin-preserving instinct in my life had been to shy away from it.

Not that I’d been proud of that, either. Nor ashamed of it. I’d accepted that that was the way I was: not brave in the least. Disappointing.

I supposed I had better make a list of the missing wines for the insurance company, who would be getting as fed up with my repeated claims as Kenneth Charter’s insurers were with his. I supposed I should, but I didn’t do it. Appetite for chores, one might have said, was at an extremely low ebb.

I took some aspirin.

A customer came in for six bottles of port and relentlessly brought me up to date on the family’s inexhaustible and usually disgusting woes. (Father-in-law had something wrong with his bladder.)

Sung Li appeared, bowing, with a gift of spring rolls. He wouldn’t be paid for my previous evening’s dinner, he said. I was an honoured and frequent customer. When I was in need, he was my friend. I would honour him by not offering payment for yesterday. We bowed to each other, and I accepted.

He had never seen China, but his parents had been born there and had taught him their ways. He was a most punctilious neighbour and because of his roaringly successful but unlicensed take-away I sold much wine in the evenings. Whenever I could without offending him I gave him cigars, which he smoked on sunny afternoons sitting on a wooden chair outside his kitchen door.

At three Sergeant Ridger returned carrying a paper bag from which he produced a bottle, setting it on the counter.

St Estèphe: just as I’d asked. Uncorked and sealed with sticky tape, untouched since its departure from the Silver Moondance.

‘Can I keep it?’ I said.

He gave one brief sharp nod. ‘For now. I said you’d been helpful, that it would be helpful for you to have this. I obtained permission from the Chief Inspector in charge of the Silver Moondance murder investigations.’ He dug into a pocket and produced a piece of paper, holding it out. ‘Please sign this chit. It makes it official.’

I signed the paper and returned it to him.

‘I’ve something for you, as well,’ I said, and fetched for him the thieves’ shopping list. The original.

His body seemed to swell physically when he understood what it was, and he looked up from it with sharply bright eyes.

‘Where did you find it?’

I explained about Brian clearing up.

‘This is of great significance,’ he said with satisfaction.

I agreed. I said, ‘It would be particularly interesting if this is Paul Young’s handwriting.’

His staring gaze intensified, if anything.

‘When he wrote his name and address,’ I said, ‘do you remember, he held his pen so awkwardly? He wrote in short sharp downward strokes. It just seemed to me that this list looked similar... though I only saw his name and address very briefly, of course.’

Sergeant Ridger, who had looked at them long and carefully, stared now at the thieves’ list, making the comparison in his mind. Almost breathlessly he said, ‘I think you’re right. I think they’re the same. The Chief Inspector will be very pleased.’

‘A blank wall, otherwise?’ I suggested. ‘You can’t find him?’

His hesitation was small. ‘There are difficulties, certainly,’ he said.

No trace at all, I diagnosed.

‘How about his car?’ I suggested.

‘What car?’

‘Yes... well... he didn’t come to the Silver Moondance that day on foot, would you think? It’s miles from anywhere. But when we went out with the boxes of drinks, there wasn’t an extra car in the car park. So... urn... he must have parked round at the back where the cars of the staff were. Round by that door into the lobby where Larry Trent’s office is, and the wine cellars. So Paul Young must have been to the Silver Moondance some other time... or he would have parked out front. If you see what I mean.’

Detective Sergeant Ridger looked at me long and slowly. ‘How do you know the staff parked round at the back?’

‘I saw cars through the lobby window when I went to fetch the bottles of wine. It seemed commonsense to assume those were the staff’s cars... barman, assistant assistant, waitress, kitchen staff and so on. They all had to get to work somehow, and the front car park was empty.’

He nodded, remembering.

‘Paul Young stayed there after we left,’ I said. ‘So maybe the assistant or the waitress... or somebody... remembers what car he drove away in. Pretty long shot, I suppose.’

Ridger carefully put the folded shopping list into the back of his notebook and then wrote a sentence or two on a fresh page. ‘I’m not of course in charge of that investigation,’ he said eventually, ‘and I would expect this line of questioning has already been thoroughly explored, but... I’ll find out.’

I didn’t ask again if he would tell me the results, nor did he even hint that he might. When he left, however, it was without finality: not so much goodbye as see you later. He would be interested, he said, in anything further I could think of in connection with the bottle of wine he had brought. If I came to any new conclusions, no doubt I would pass them on.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

He nodded, shut the notebook, tucked it into his pocket and collectedly departed, and I took the bottle of St Estèphe carefully into the office, putting it back into the bag in which Ridger had brought it so that it should be out of plain sight.

I sat down at the desk, lethargy deepening. Still a load of orders to make up to go out on the van; couldn’t be bothered even to start on them. Everyone would get their delivery a day late. Goblets and champagne needed for a coming-of-age on Thursday... by Thursday I mightn’t feel so bone weary and comprehensively sore.

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 lopsidedly. ‘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 uninjured.’

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.’