Proof

Fifteen

I let myself into the shop the next morning wondering what I could trade with Sergeant Ridger for a sample of the Silver Moondance scotch, and he solved the problem himself by appearing almost immediately at my door as if transported by telekinesis.

‘Morning,’ he said, as I let him in. Raincoat belted, shoes polished, hair brushed. Hadn’t he heard, I wondered, that plain clothes policemen these days were supposed to dress in grubby jeans and look unemployed?

‘Good morning,’ I replied, shutting the door behind him. ‘Can I sell you something?’

‘Information.’ He was serious, as always, coming into the centre of the shop and standing solidly there with his feet apart.

‘Ah. Yes, well fire away.’

‘Is your arm worse? You didn’t have a sling last time I came.’

‘No worse.’ I shook my head. ‘More comfortable.’

He looked not exactly relieved but reassured. ‘Good. Then... I’m making an official request to you to aid us in our enquiries.’

‘What aid? What enquiries?’

‘This is a direct suggestion from Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson.’

‘Is it?’ I was interested. ‘To me personally?’

‘He suggested you himself, yes.’ Ridger cleared his throat. ‘It is in connection with our enquiries into complaints received about goods supplied by licensed premises other than the Silver Moondance.’

‘Er...’ I said. ‘Sergeant, would you drop the jargon?’

Ridger looked surprised. What he’d said had been obviously of crystal clarity to his notebook mind. He said, ‘In the course of our investigations into the murder of Zarac it was suggested that we should follow up certain other complaints of malpractice throughout the whole area. There was a top level regional conference yesterday, part of which I attended as the officer first on the spot in the drinks fraud, and Chief Superintendent Wilson requested me directly to enlist your help as before. He said if we could find another place passing off one whisky as another, and if such whisky were similar or identical to that in the Silver Moondance, we might also find a lead to Zarac’s supplier and murderer. It was worth a try, he said, as there were so few other lines of enquiry. So, er, here I am.’

I gazed at him in awe. ‘You’re asking me to go on a pub crawl?’

‘Er... if you must put it like that, yes.’

Beautiful, I thought. Stunning. Fifty thousand bars between home and Watford... with the known bad apples offered on the platter of a police list.

‘Would you be driving me, like last time?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been assigned to that duty.’ He showed no feelings either for or against. ‘Can I take it you will be available?’

‘You can,’ I said. ‘When?’

He consulted his bristling wristwatch. ‘Ten-fifteen.’

‘This morning?’

‘Of course. I’ll go back now and report and return for you later.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘And Sergeant, when you return, would you bring with you the Bell’s whisky bottle from the Silver Moondance bar?’

Re looked concentratedly doubtful.

‘I’d like to taste its contents again,’ I explained. ‘It’s ten days since that morning in the Silver Moondance. If more of that scotch is what you’re looking for in these enquiries, I’ll have to learn it well enough to know it anywhere.’

He saw the logic. ‘I’ll request it.’

‘Mm... say it’s a requirement. I can’t do what you’re asking without it.’

‘Very well.’ He pulled out the notebook and wrote in it, rolling his wrist for another time check and adding nine-fourteen punctiliously.

‘How many places are we going to?’ I asked.

‘It’s quite a long list.’ He spoke matter-of-factly. ‘It’s a big area, of course. My Chief Inspector’s hoping we can complete the enquiry within two weeks.’

‘Two weeks!’

‘Working from ten-thirty to two o’clock daily in licensing hours.’

‘Is this an official appointment with pay?’

He checked internally before he answered. ‘It was being discussed.’

‘And?’

‘They used to have an available consultant expert, but he’s just retired to live in Spain. He was paid. Sure to have been.’

‘How often was he... consulted?’

‘Don’t rightly know. I only saw him once or twice. He could tell things by taste like you. The Customs and Excise people use instruments, same as the Weights and Measures. They’re concerned with alcohol content, not flavour.’

‘Did they check any of the places on your list?’

He said, ‘All of them,’ disapprovingly, and I remembered what he’d said before about someone in one of those two departments tipping off the Silver Moondance that investigators were on their way.

‘With no luck?’ I asked.

‘No prosecutions have resulted.’

Quite so. ‘All right, Sergeant. You drive, I’ll drink, and I’ve got ro be sober and back here by three to get my arm checked at the hospital.’

He went away looking smug and at nine-thirty to the half minute Mrs Palissey arrived with Brian. I explained that I would be away every mid-day for a while and said I would get her some help by tomorrow if she could possibly manage that morning on her own.

‘Help?’ She was affronted. ‘I don’t need help.’

‘But your lunch-hour...’

‘I’ll bring our lunch and we’ll eat in the back,’ she said, i don’t want strangers in here meddling. Brian and I will see to things. You go off and enjoy yourself, you’re still looking peaky.’

I was about to say that I wasn’t doing police work to enjoy myself but then it occurred to me that I probably was. I’d had no hesitation at all in accepting Ridger’s — or Wilson’s — invitation. I was flattered to be thought an expert. Deplorable vanity. Laugh at yourself, Tony. Stay human.

For an hour the three of us restocked the shop, made lists, took telephone orders, served customers, swept and dusted. I looked back when I left with Ridger: to a clean, cosy, welcoming place with Mrs Palissey smiling behind the counter and Brian arranging wine boxes with anxious care. I wasn’t an empire builder, I thought. I would never start a chain. That one prosperous place was enough.

Prosperous, I knew, against the odds. A great many small businesses like mine had died of trying to compete with chains and supermarkets, those giants engaged in such fierce undercutting price wars that they bled their own profits to death. I’d started that way and began losing money, and, against everything believed and advised in the trade, had restored my position by going back to fair, not suicidal prices. The losses had stopped, my customers had multiplied, not deserted, and I’d begun to enjoy life instead of waking up at night sweating.

Ridger had brought the Bell’s bottle with him in his car; it sat upright on the back seat in the same box in which it had left the Silver Moondance, two-thirds full, as before.

‘Before we go,’ I said, ‘I’ll take that whisky into the shop and taste it there.’

‘Why not here?’

‘The car smells of petrol.’ A gift, I thought.

‘I’ve just filled up. What does it matter?’

‘Petrol smells block out scotch.’

‘Oh. All right.’ He got out of his car, removed the box and methodically locked his doors although the car was right outside the shop and perfectly visible through the window: then he carried the box in and set it on the counter.

Casually I slipped my wrist out of the sling, picked up the Bell’s bottle, took it back to the office, and with a clink or two poured a good measure through a funnel into a clean small bottle I’d put ready, and then a very little into a goblet. The small bottle had a screw-on cap which I caught against the thread in my haste, but it was closed and hidden with the funnel behind box-files in an instant, and I walked unhurriedly back into the shop sipping thoughtfully at the glass, right wrist again supported.

Ridger was coming towards me. ‘I’m not supposed to let that bottle out of my sight,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’ I gestured with the glass. ‘It’s just on the desk in the office. Perfectly safe.’

He peered into the recess to make sure and turned back nodding. ‘How long will you be?’

‘Not long.’

The liquid in my mouth was definitely Rannoch, I thought. Straightforward Rannoch. Except that...

‘What’s the matter?’ Ridger demanded; and I realised I’d been frowning.

‘Nothing,’ I said, looking happier. ‘If you want to know if I’ll recognise it again, then yes, I will.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Sergeant,’ I said with exasperation, ‘this is a collaboration not an inquisition. Let’s take the bottle and get the show on the road.’

I wondered if Sergeant Ridger ever achieved friendship; if his suspicious nature ever gave him a rest. Certainly after all our meetings I found his porcupine reflexes as sensitive as at the beginning, and I made no attempt to placate him, as any such attempt would in itself be seen as suspicious.

He drove away from the kerb saying that he would visit the nearest places first, with which I could find no quarrel, and I discovered that by nearest he meant nearest to the Silver Moondance. He turned off the main road about a mile before we reached it, and stopped in a village outside a country pub.

As an inn it had been old when Queen Anne died, when coaches had paused there to change horses. The building of the twentieth century highway had left the pub in a backwater, the old coaching road a dead end now, an artery reduced to an appendix. Emma and I had drunk a few times there, liking the old bulging building with the windows leaning sideways and the Stuart brickwork still in the fireplaces.

‘Not here!’ I said, surprised, as we stopped.

‘Do you know it?’

‘I’ve been here, but not for a year.’

Ridger consulted a clipboard. ‘Complaints of whisky being watered, gin ditto. Complaints investigated, found to be unfounded. Investigations dated August 23rd and September 18th last.’

‘The landlord’s a retired cricketer,’ I said. ‘Generous. Loves to talk. Lazy. The place needs a facelift.’

‘Landlord: Noel George Darnley.’

I turned my head, squinting down at the page. ‘Different man.’

‘Right.’ Ridger climbed out of the car and carefully locked it. ‘I’ll have a tomato juice.’

‘Who’s paying?’

Ridger looked blank. ‘I haven’t much money...’

‘No instructions?’ I asked. ‘No police float?’

He cleared his throat. ‘We must keep an account,’ he said.

‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay. We’ll write down at each place what I spend and you’ll initial it.’

He agreed to that. Whether the police would reimburse me or not I didn’t know, but Kenneth Charter very likely would, if not. If neither did, no great matter.

‘And what if we find a match?’ I asked.

He was on surer ground. ‘We impound the bottle, sealing it, labelling it, and giving a receipt.’

‘Right.’

We walked into the pub as customers, Ridger as relaxed as guitar strings.

The facelift, I saw at once, had occurred, but I found I preferred the old wrinkles. True, the worn Indian rugs with threadbare patches had needed renewing, but not with orange and brown stripes. The underpolished knobbly oak benches had vanished in favour of smooth leather-look vinyl, and there were shiny modern brass ornaments on the mantel instead of antique pewter platters.

The new landlord’s new broom had resulted, however, in a much cleaner looking bar, and the landlord himself, appearing from the rear, wasn’t fat, sloppily dressed and beaming, but neat, thin and characterless. In the old days the pub had been full: I wondered how many of the regulars still came.

‘A Bell’s whisky, please,’ I said. I looked at his row of bottles. ’And a second Bell’s whisky from that bottle over there, and a tomato juice, please.’

He filled the order without conversation. We carried the glasses to a small table and I began on the unlikely task with a judicious trial of the first tot of Bell’s.

‘Well?’ Ridger asked, after fidgeting a full minute. ‘What have we got?’

I shook my head. ‘It’s Bell’s all right. Not like the Silver Moondance.’

Ridger had left his clipboard in the car, otherwise I was sure he would have crossed off mine host there and then.

I tried the second Bell’s. No luck there either.

As far as I could tell, neither bottle had been watered: both samples seemed full strength. I told Ridger so while he was making inroads into the tomato juice, which he genuinely seemed to enjoy.

I left both whiskies on the table and wandered to the bar.

‘You’re new here?’ I said.

‘Fairly.’ He seemed cautious, not friendly.

‘Settling in well with the locals?’ I asked.

‘Are you here to make trouble?’

‘No.’ I was surprised at the resentment he hadn’t bothered to hide. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Sorry, then. It was you ordering two whiskies from different bottles and tasting them carefully, as you did. Someone round here made trouble with the Weights and Measures, saying I gave short measures and watered the spirits. Some of them round here don’t like me smartening the place up. But I ask you, trying to get me fined or lose my licence... too much.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Malicious.’

He turned away, still not sure of me, which was fair enough, considering. I collected Ridger who was wiping red stains from his mouth and we went outside leaving the unfinished whiskies on the table, which probably hardened the landlord’s suspicions into certainty, poor man.

Ridger ticked off the pub on the clipboard and read out the notes of our next destination, which proved to be a huge soulless place built of brick in the thirties and run for a brewery by a prim-looking tenant with a passion for fresh air. Even Ridger in his raincoat shivered before the thrown-open windows of the bar and muttered that the place looked dull. We were the first customers, it was true, but on a greyly chilly morning there were no electric lights to warm and welcome thirsty strangers.

‘Tomato juice, please,’ I said. ‘And a Bell’s whisky.’

The puritan landlord provided them, stating the price in a tight-lipped way.

‘And could we have the windows closed, please?’

The landlord looked at his watch, shrugged, and went round closing October out with ill grace. I wouldn’t sell much in my shop, I reflected, with that scowl: everyone sought to buy more than the product they asked for and it was the intangible extra that repelled or attracted a return. The whisky in that place might be fine, but I’d never go back out of choice.

‘Well?’ Ridger said, initialling the cost on our list. ‘What is it?’

‘Bell’s.’

Ridger nodded, drinking this time barely a mouthful from his glass. ‘Shall we go, then?’

‘Glad to.’

We left the landlord bitterly reopening his windows and Ridger consulted his clipboard in the car.

‘The next place is a hotel, the Peverill Arms, on the Reading to Henley road. Several complaints of thin or tasteless whisky. Complaints investigated, September 12th. Whisky found to be full strength in random samples.’

His voice told something more than the usual dry information: a reservation, almost an alarm.

‘You know the place?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been there. Disturbances.’ He fell silent with determination and started the car, driving with disapproval quivering in the stiffness of his neck. I thought from these signs that we might be on the way to a rowdy rendezvous with Hell’s Angels, but found to my amusement on arrival that Ridger’s devil was a woman.

A woman moreover of statuesque proportions, rising six feet tall with the voluptuous shape of Venus de Milo, who had forty-two inch hips.

‘Mrs Alexis,’ Ridger muttered. ‘She may not remember me.’

Mrs Alexis indeed gave our arrival scarcely a glance. Mrs Alexis was supervising the lighting of logs in the vast fireplace in the entrance lounge, an enterprise presently producing acrid smoke in plenty but few actual flames.

Apart from the heavyside layer floating in a haze below the ceiling the hall gave a lift to the entering spirit: clusters of chintz-covered armchairs, warm colours, gleaming copper jugs, an indefinable aura of success. Across the far end an extensive bar stood open but untended, and from the fireplace protruded the trousered behind of the luckless firelighter, to the interest and entertainment of scattered armchaired guests.

‘For God’s sake, Wilfred, fetch the bloody bellows,’ Mrs Alexis said distinctly. ‘You look idiotic with your arse in the air puffing like a beetroot.’

She was well over fifty, I judged, with the crisp assurance of a natural commander. Handsome, expensively dressed, gustily uninhibited. I found myself smiling in the same instant that the corners of Ridger’s mouth turned down.

The unfortunate Wilfred removed his beetroot-red face from the task and went off obediently, and Mrs Alexis with bright eyes asked what we wanted.

‘Drinks,’ I said vaguely.

‘Come along then.’ She led the way, going towards the bar. ‘It’s our first fire this winter. Always smokes like hell until we get it going.’ She frowned upwards at the drifting cloud. ‘Worse than usual, this year.’

‘The chimney needs sweeping,’ Ridger said.

Mrs Alexis gave him a birdlike look from an eye as sharp and yellow as a hawk’s. ‘It’s swept every year in the spring. And aren’t you that policeman who told me if I served the local rugger team when they’d won I should expect them to swing from the chandeliers and put beer into my piano?’

Ridger cleared his throat. I swallowed a laugh with difficulty and received the full beam from the hawk eyes.

‘Are you a policeman too?’ she asked with good humour. ‘Come to cadge for your bloody ball?’

‘No,’ I said. I could feel the smothered laugh escaping through my eyes. ‘We came for a drink.’

She believed the simple answer as much as a declaration of innocence from a red-handed thief, but went around behind her bar and waited expectantly.

‘A Bell’s whisky and a tomato juice, please.’

She pushed a glass against the Bell’s optic and waited for the full measure to descend. ‘Anything else?’

I said no thank you and she steered the whisky my way and the tomato juice towards Ridger, accepting my money and giving change. We removed ourselves to a pair of armchairs near a small table, where Ridger again initialled our itemised account.

‘What happened with the rugger club?’ I asked interestedly.

His face showed profound disapproval. ‘She knew there’d be trouble. They’re a rowdy lot. They pulled the chandeliers clean out of the ceiling with a lot of plaster besides and she had them lined up against the wall at gunpoint by the time we got here.’

‘Gunpoint?’ I said, astonished.

‘It wasn’t loaded, but the rugger club weren’t taking chances. They knew her reputation against pheasants.’

‘A shotgun?’

‘That’s right. She keeps it there behind the bar. We can’t stop her, though I’d like to, personally, but she’s got a licence for it. She keeps it there to repel villains, she says, though there isn’t a local villain who’d face her.’

‘Did she send to you for help with the rugger club?’

‘Not her. Some of the other customers. She wasn’t much pleased when we turned up. She said there wasn’t a man born she couldn’t deal with.’ Ridger looked as if he believed it. ‘She wouldn’t bring charges for all the damage, but I heard they paid up pretty meekly.’

It would be a brave man, I reflected, who told Mrs Alexis that her Bell’s whisky was Rannoch: but in fact it wasn’t. Bell’s it was: unadulterated.

‘Pity,’ Ridger said, at the news.

I said thoughtfully, ‘She has some Laphroaig up there on the top shelf.’

‘Has she?’ Ridger’s hopes were raised. ‘Are you going to try it?’

I nodded and returned to the bar, but Mrs Alexis had departed again towards the fireplace where Wilfred with the bellows was merely adding to the smog.

‘The chimney seems to be blocked,’ he said anxiously, exonerating himself.

‘Blocked?’ Mrs Alexis demanded. ‘How could it be?’ She thought for barely two seconds. ‘Unless some bloody bird has built a nest in it, same as three years ago.’

‘We’d better wait until it’s swept again,’ Wilfred suggested.

‘Wait? Certainly not.’ She strode towards the bar. ‘I’ll be with you in a moment,’ she said, seeing me waiting there. ‘Bird’s nest. Birds building their bloody nests in my chimney. They did it once before. I’ll shift the little buggers. Give them the shock of their lives.’

I didn’t bother to point out that nests in October were bound to be uninhabited. She was certain to know. She was also smiling with reckless mischief and reappeared from behind the bar carrying the fabled shotgun and feeding a cartridge into the breach. My own feelings at the sight seemed to be shared by most of the people present as she walked towards the fireplace, but no one thought of stopping her.

Ridger’s mouth opened in disbelief.

Mrs Alexis thrust the whole gun up inside the vast chimney and at arm’s length unceremoniously pulled the trigger. There was a muffled bang inside the brickwork and a clatter as she dropped the gun on the recoil onto the logs. The eyes of everyone else in the place were popping out but Mrs Alexis calmly picked up her fallen property and returned to the bar.

‘Another Bell’s?’ she asked, stowing the shotgun lengthways under the counter. ‘Another tomato juice?’

‘Er...’ I said.

She was laughing. ‘Fastest way to clear a chimney. Didn’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘It’s an old gun... the barrel’s not straight. I wouldn’t treat a good gun like that.’ She looked towards the fireplace. ‘The damn smoke’s clearing, anyway.’

It appeared that she was right. Wilfred, again on his knees with the bellows, was producing smoke which rose upwards, not out into the room. The eyes of the onlookers retreated to their accustomed sockets and the mouths slowly closed: even Ridger’s.

‘Laphroaig,’ I said. ‘Please. And could I look at your wine list?’

‘Anything you like.’ She stretched for the Laphroaig bottle and poured a fair measure. ‘You and the policeman... what are you in here for?’ The bright eyes searched my face. ‘That policeman wouldn’t come here just for a drink. Not him. Not tomato juice. Not early.’

I paid for the Laphroaig and took the wine list that she held out. ‘We’re looking for some scotch that turned up in a Bell’s bottle at the Silver Moondance,’ I said. ‘More of the same, that is.’

The sharp gaze intensified. ‘You won’t find any here.’

‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

‘Is this because of those complaints last month?’

‘We’re here because of them, yes.’

‘You’ve shown me no authority.’ No antagonism, I thought: therefore no guilt.

‘I haven’t any. I’m a wine merchant.’

‘A wine...?’ She considered it. ‘What’s your name?’

I told her, also the name of my shop.

‘Never heard of you,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Would you know this scotch if you tasted it?’

‘That’s the general idea. Yes.’

‘Then good luck to you.’ She gave me an amused and shining glance and turned away to another customer, and I carried my glass across to Ridger expecting the Laphroaig to be Laphroaig and nothing else.

‘She’s disgraceful,’ Ridger said. ‘I should arrest her.’

‘On what charge?’

‘Discharging a firearm in a public place.’

‘The inside of a chimney is hardly a public place.’

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ he said severely.

‘The smoke’s clearing,’ I said. ‘The shot worked.’

‘I would have thought you’d had enough shooting for one lifetime.’

‘Well, yes.’

I drank the Laphroaig: smoky, peaty, oak-aged historic Laphroaig, the genuine thing.

Ridger bit on his disappointment, complained about the price and fidgeted unhelpfully while I read the wine list, which was handwritten and extensive. All the familiar Silver Moondance names were there along with dozens of others, but when I pointed this out to him he said stiffly that his brief was for whisky only.

I took the wine list thoughtfully back to the bar and asked Mrs Alexis for a bottle of St Estèphe.

She smiled. ‘By all means. Do you want it decanted?’

‘Not yet.’ I went through the rest of the list with her, picking out St Emilion, Mâcon, Valpolicella, Volnay and Nuits St Georges.

‘Sure,’ she said easily. ‘Do you want all of them?’

‘Yes, please.’

She disappeared briefly and came back with a partitioned basket containing the six asked for wines. I picked each bottle up in turn to read the labels: all the right names but none from the right year.

‘We’ve sold all we had of 1979,’ she explained patiently when I pointed it out. ‘We constantly update the wine list, which is why we don’t have it printed. We’re writing another at the moment. These present wines are better. Do you want them, then, or not?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Not.’

She put the basket of bottles without comment on the floor near her feet and smiled at me blandly.

‘Do you know the Silver Moondance?’ I asked.

‘Heard of it. Who hasn’t, round here? Never been there. Not my style. I’m told it’s a tube job, anyway.’

‘A tube...?’

‘Down the tubes,’ she said patiently. ‘The bank’s foreclosing on the mortgage. As of this morning the staff have been sacked. I had one of the chefs telephoning to ask for a job.’ She spoke with amusement as if the closure were comic, but she’d worn the same expression all the time we’d been there, her cheek muscles seeming to be permanently set in tolerant mockery.

‘At the Silver Moondance,’ I said mildly, ‘they were selling one single wine under six different labels.’

Her expression didn’t change but she glanced down at her feet.

‘Yes, those,’ I said. ‘Or rather, not those.’

‘Are you insulting me?’

‘No, just telling you.’

The brilliant eyes watched me steadily. ‘And you’re looking for that wine as well as the scotch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry I can’t help you.’

‘Perhaps it’s as well,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Well... I don’t think its too utterly safe to know much about that wine. The head waiter of the Silver Moondance undoubtedly knew what he was selling... and he’s dead.’

Nothing altered in her face. ‘I’m in no danger,’ she said. ‘I can promise you that. Do you want anything else?’

I shook my head. ‘We’ll be on our way.’

Her gaze slid past me to rest on Ridger and still without any change of expression she said, ‘Give me a man who’ll swing from a chandelier. Give me a goddamn man.’ Her glance came back to my face, the mockery bold and strong. ‘The world’s a bloody bore.’

Her abundant hair was a dark reddish brown gleaming with good health and hair dye, and her nails were hard and long like talons. A woman of vibrating appetite who reminded me forcibly of all the species where the female crunched her husband for breakfast.

Wilfred (currently on the menu?) was still on his knees to the fire god when Ridger and I eventually made our way to the door. As Ridger went out ahead of me there was a sort of soft thudding flump from the direction of the chimney and a cloud of dislodged shot-up soot descended in a sticky billowing mass onto logs, flames and man beneath.

Transfixed, the armchair audience watched Wilfred rise balefully to his feet like a fuzzily inefficient demon king, scattering black rain and blinking great eyes slowly like a surprised owl on a dark night.

‘I’ll sue that bloody sweep,’ Mrs Alexis said.