Proof

Twenty

I put a notice on my shop door saying, ‘Closed. Very sorry. Staff illness. Open Monday 9.30 a.m.’

I’m mad, I thought. Crazy.

If I didn’t go, he would go on his own.

My thoughts stopped there. I couldn’t let him go on his own when it was I who had the knowledge he needed. When he felt tired and ill and I was well and almost as strong as ever.

I sat at my desk and wrote a note to Sergeant John Ridger saying I’d been told to look in the Bernard Naylor bottling plant for the Silver Moondance scotch, and I was going there with Gerard McGregor (I gave his address) to check. I sealed the note in an envelope and wrote on it an instruction to Mrs Palissey: Take this to the police station if you haven’t heard from me by ten this morning and tell them to open it.

I wedged the envelope on the till where she couldn’t miss it and hoped she would never read it. Then with a last look round I locked my door and drove away, and tried not to wonder if I would ever come back.

Half the time I thought Kenneth Charter must know his man. Stewart Naylor was true blue. Half the time I trusted Gerard’s fizzler in the night. Intuition existed. Solutions came in sleep.

It would probably turn out to be an anticlimax of a journey not worth melodramatic notes to policemen or all this soul-searching. We would drive to the bottling plant, we would not break in, there would be plentiful evidence of legal prosperity and we would drive sedately home. It would not be another day of Sunday bloody horrors.

Gerard met me in a car park we had agreed on, he having meanwhile been home to leave the Martineau Park spoils in his garage. From there we went towards London in his Mercedes, but with me driving this time.

‘Suppose you were Stewart Naylor,’ Gerard said. ‘Suppose you’d spent your entire working life learning to run the family bottling business and then because of the French changing their regulations found the wine flood drying to a trickle.’

‘Longbows,’ I said nodding.

‘What? Oh, yes. Kenneth Charter was wrong, you know, in point of fact. It was the crossbow which put paid to the longbow... well, never mind. Crossbows, guns, whatever, from no fault of your own you’re going out of business. Kenneth Charter confirmed this morning that he hardly takes a fifth of what he used to to the Naylor plant, but it’s still quite a lot. More than to anywhere else. He says that’s how he knows that Naylor’s is healthy while others struggle.’

‘Huh.’

‘Yes, indeed. Suppose you are Stewart Naylor and you look anxiously around for other things to bottle... tomato sauce, cleaning fluid, whatever... and you find everyone else in your line of business is in the same boat and doing the same. Ruin raises its ugly head and gives you a good long threatening glare’ He paused as I passed a lorry, then went on, ‘We supposed earlier that at that point a convenient crook came along offering salvation in return for dishonesty and that our beleaguered bottler accepted. But suppose it wasn’t like that. Suppose Stewart Naylor needed no seducing but without help thought up his own crooked scheme?’

‘Which was,’ I said, ‘to buy wine himself instead of bottling for others. To bottle it and label it as better than it was, and then sell it.’ I frowned. ‘And at that point you get discovered and prosecuted.’

‘Not if you have a half-brother who likes horses. You set him up... on bank money... in a Silver Moondance, and you take him your wine to sell. It sells well and for about twenty times more than it cost you, even including the bottles. Money starts flowing in, not out... and that’s when the greed complex hits you.’

‘The greed complex?’ I asked.

‘Addiction,’ Gerard said. ‘The first step is the huge one. The decision. To snort cocaine or not to. To borrow the Christmas Club’s money, just once. To sell the first secret. To design a label for a non-existent chateau and stick it on a bottle of wine-lake. The first step’s huge, the second half the size, by the sixth step it’s a habit. Suppose our Steward Naylor begins to think that if he could arrange other outlets he could double and redouble his receipts?’

‘O.K.’ I said. ‘Suppose.’

‘At this point we have to suppose a henchman called Zarac, whom one conveniently instals as head waiter at the Silver Moondance. One of his duties is to cast about for possibilities of expansion and in due course he arrives on Vernon’s doorstep at Martineau Park. He reports back to Paul Young... er... Paul Young query Stewart Naylor... who goes to see Vernon and hey presto, the fake wine business takes a deep breath and swells to double size. Money now rolls in to the extent that concealing it is a problem. Never mind. Half-brother Larry is a whiz at horses. Pass Larry the embarrassing cash, magic-wand it into horseflesh, ship it to California, convert it again at a profit if possible and bank it... intending, I dare say, to collect it one day and live in the sun. In my experience the last chapter seldom happens. The addiction to the crime becomes so integral to the criminal that he can’t give it up. I’ve caught several industrial spies because they couldn’t kick their taste for creeping about with cameras.’

‘Clean up and clear out,’ I suggested.

‘Absolutely. Almost never done. They come back for a second bite, and a third, and just once more... and whammo, one too much.’

‘So Stewart Naylor turned his ideas to scotch?’

‘Ah,’ Gerard said. ‘Suppose when your son visits his divorced father one day he brings his friend Kenneth Junior with him? Or suppose he’s often brought him? Stewart Naylor knows Kenneth Junior’s father quite well... Kenneth Charter’s tankers have brought wine to Naylor’s plant for many years. Suppose our crime-addicted Stewart casts an idle eye on Kenneth Junior and reflects that Charter’s tankers carry scotch and gin as well as wine, and that whereas the wine profits are healthy, from stolen scotch they would be astronomical.’

‘But he couldn’t ask Kenneth Junior outright to sell his dad’s tankers’ routes and destinations and time-tables. Kenneth Junior might have gone all righteous and buzzed home to spill the beans...’

‘But he does think Kenneth Junior is ripe for a spot of treason as he’s probably heard him bellyaching about his life with father...’

‘So he sends Zarac to recruit him,’ I said. ‘Sends Zarac perhaps to the Diamond snooker hall? Or the disco? Somewhere like that? And Zarac says here’s a lot of money, kid. Get me a tanker’s keys, get me a tanker’s route, and I’ll give you some more cash. And three months later he pays again. And again. And then says get me another tanker’s keys, kid, the first one’s too hot...’

‘Don’t see why not, do you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Zarac,’ Gerard said thoughtfully, ‘held a very strong hand anyway when it came to blackmail.’

I nodded. ‘Too strong for his own good.’

We came to the end of the motorway and turned off into narrower streets to thread the way to Ealing.

‘Do you know how to find this plant?’ I said. ‘Or do we ask a policeman?’

‘Map,’ Gerard said succinctly, producing one from the glove compartment. ‘It shows the roads. When we reach the road, drive slowly, keep the eyes skinned.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And drive straight past,’ he said. ‘When we see what’s what, we’ll decide what to do.’

‘All right.’

‘If you turn left a mile ahead we’ll be about five miles from target. I’ll steer you.’

‘Right.’

We turned left at a major intersection onto a dual carriageway through sleepy suburbs where in countless ovens Sunday roasts spluttered to lunchtime.

‘We’ll get a profile done tomorrow of that scotch we took from Martineau,’ Gerard said.

‘And of the sample I took from the Silver Moondance bottle.’

‘They should be the same.’

‘They will be;’

‘You’re exceedingly positive.’

I grinned. ‘Yes.’

‘Go on, then. What’s the joke?’

‘Well... you know that the tankerful set off from Scotland every time at fifty-eight per cent alcohol? And that at Rannoch’s own bottling plant they would have added water to dilute it to forty?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded.

‘Have you any idea how much water that entails?’

‘No, of course not. How much?’

‘About two thousand seven hundred gallons. More than ten tons by weight.’

‘Good grief!’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘Rannoch’s would be careful about that water. They’d use pure spring water of some sort, even if it hadn’t actually come from a Scottish loch. But I’ll swear that Charter’s stolen loads have been diluted from an ordinary tap.’

‘Is that bad?’

I laughed. ‘It sure is. Any Scottish distiller would have a fit. They say that Scotch whisky is only the way it is because of the softness and purity of loch water. When I tasted the Silver Moondance scotch again in my shop I could sort of smell chemicals very faintly in the aftertaste. A lot of tap water isn’t too bad, but some is awful. Makes disgusting tea. Ask the residents around here.’

‘Here?’ he exclaimed.

‘Western parts of London. Notorious.’

‘Good grief.’

‘It will turn up in the profile, too.’

‘Water?’

‘Mm. Purifying chemicals. There shouldn’t be any in neat scotch.’

‘But won’t tap water spoil the scotch profile? I mean... will we still be able to prove our samples are identical with the original sent off from Scotland?’

‘Yes, don’t worry. Tap water won’t affect the whisky profile, it’ll just show up as extra components.’

‘Will it matter that the scotch is diluted?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The gas chromatograph just shows up the presence of things, not their quantity.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Turn right at the next traffic lights.

Could the gas chromatograph tell where any particular sample of tap water came from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Amazing.’

‘What is?’

‘There’s something you don’t know.’

‘Yeah... Well, I don’t know the dynasties of China or how to say no thanks in fifteen languages or the way to this bottling plant.’ And I’d like to turn straight round and go home, I thought. The nearer we got to Naylor’s the more my nervousness increased... and I thought of my father, brave as brave, setting off into battlefields, inspiring his men... and why couldn’t I be like him instead of feeling my mouth go dry and my breath shorten before we were even in the heartland of deepest Ealing.

‘Turn left here,’ Gerard said. ‘Then the third on the right. That’s our road.’

He was totally calm. No strain or anxiety in voice or face. I consciously unclenched my fingers from their grip on the steering wheel and tried without noticeable success to relax to Gerard’s level.

Hopeless. Even my teeth were tightly together when we turned into the third on the right and went slowly along.

‘There it is,’ Gerard said matter of factly. ‘See?’

I glanced to where he indicated and saw a pair of very tall entrance gates, shut, set in a length of very tall brick wall. On the gates in faded white lettering were the words ‘Bernard Nay tor Bottling’, with below them a padlock the size of a saucer.

We wouldn’t be able to get in, I thought. Thank goodness for that.

‘Turn left at the end,’ Gerard said. ‘Park there if you can.’

It was one of those suburbs built before zoning where light industries sat among dwelling houses as an integral part of the community. When I’d parked the Mercedes at a kerbside among a row of residents’ wheels we walked past lace curtains and shrubby front gardens to get back to the high wall. Eating their roast beef, I thought, and the Yorkshire puddings and the gravy... ten minutes past lunchtime and my stomach fluttering with enough butterflies to stock a Brazilian rain forest.

We walked slowly as if out for a stroll and in the short street there was only one other pedestrian, an elderly man waiting patiently for his dog at lampposts.

When we reached the gates, eight feet high, dark green sun-faded paint, Gerard stopped and faced them, head back as if reading the big white letters spreading across.

‘There’s broken glass embedded in the top of those walls,’ I said. ‘Barbed wire along the top of the gates. Don’t tell me you can pick that half-ton padlock.’

‘No need,’ Gerard said placidly. ‘Open your eyes. In many massive gates conspicuously bolted there’s a smaller door inset, wide enough for one person only. There’s one right ahead of us in the left hand gate with quite an ordinary looking spring lock, and if I can’t let us in through there I’ve been wasting the best years of my life.’

He stopped his apparent reading of the legend on the gates and resumed his stroll, glancing as if casually at the small gate cut in the large.

‘Do you smoke?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said in surprise.

‘Tie a shoelace.’

‘Sure,’ I said, understanding, and bent down obligingly to pretend to tie bows on my laceless slip-ons.

‘A doddle,’ Gerard said, above my head.

‘What?’

‘Step in.’

I saw to my astonishment that the narrow door was already swinging open. He’d been so fast. He was tucking a piece of clear plastic into his top pocket and glancing down to where the dog was again detaining his master.

Gerard stepped through the gate as if belonging there and with a rapid acceleration of heartbeats I went after him. He pushed the gate shut behind me and the spring lock fell into place with a click. He smiled faintly, and I saw with incredulity that beneath the tiredness and the malaise he was quietly enjoying himself.

‘There may be people in here,’ I said.

‘If there are... we found the gate open. Curiosity.’

We both looked at the insides of the very large gates. The padlock outside had been at least partly for show: on the inside there were thick bolts into the ground and a bar let into sockets waist high so that no amount of direct pressure from outside could force the gates open.

‘Factories often cut that hole in their defences,’ Gerard said, waving at the way we had come in. ‘Especially old ones like this, built in the age of innocence.’

We were in a big concreted yard with a high brick building running the whole length of it on our right: small square barred windows pierced the walls in two long rows, one up, one down. At the far end of the yard, facing us, was a one-storey modern office building of panel-like construction, and on our immediate left was a gate-house which on busy days would have contained a man to check people and vehicles in and out.

No gatekeeper. His door was shut. Gerard twisted the knob, but to no avail.

Alongside the door was a window reminiscent of a ticket office, and I supposed that on working days that was where the gate-house keeper actually stood. Gerard peered through it for some time at all angles, and then readdressed himself to the door.

‘Mortice lock,’ he said, inspecting a keyhole. ‘Pity.’

‘Does it matter?’ I said. ‘I mean, there wouldn’t be much of interest in a gate-house.’

Gerard glanced at me forgivingly. ‘In old factories like this it’s quite common to find the keys to all the buildings hanging on a board in the gate-house. The gatekeeper issues keys as needed when employees arrive.’

Silenced, I watched with a parched mouth while he put a steel probe into the keyhole and concentrated on feeling his way through the tumblers, his eyes unfocused and unseeing, all the consciousness in his fingers.

The place was deserted. No one came running across the yard demanding impossible explanations. There was a heavy click from the gate-house door and Gerard with a sigh of satisfaction put his steel probe away and again twisted the doorknob.

‘That’s better,’ he said calmly, as the door opened without protest. ‘Now let’s see.’

We stepped into a wooden floored room which contained a chair, a time-punch clock with barely six cards in a slot-holder designed for a hundred, a new-looking fire extinguisher, a poster announcing Factory Act regulations and a shallow unlocked wall-cupboard. Gerard opened the cupboard and it was just as he’d said: inside there were four rows of labelled hooks, and upon all the hooks, labelled keys.

‘All there,’ Gerard said with immense satisfaction. ‘There really is no one here. We have the place to ourselves.’ He looked along the labels, reading. ‘We’ll start with the offices. I know more about those. Then... what?’

I read the labels also. ‘Main plant. Bottle store. Label room. Vats. Dispatch. How long have we got?’

‘If Stewart Naylor is Paul Young and does what he said, he’ll be on his way now to Martineau Park. If the police detain him there we’ve at least two or three hours.’

‘It doesn’t feel like that,’ I said.

‘No. Always scary, the first few times.’

He left me again speechless. He took the keys he wanted from the hooks and indicated that I should do the same. Then we left the gate-house, closing the door (unnecessarily, I thought) behind us and walked on into the main part of the yard.

Another large brick building was revealed to the left; and any residual hopes I might have had of our establishing Stewart Naylor’s innocence and retreating in prudence were cancelled at that point. Tucked into the left hand corner of the yard stood a grey Bedford van, brown lines down the sides, devoid of number plates. I went across and looked through its windows but it held nothing: no wine, no fuzzy wigs, no shotgun.

‘God in heaven,’ Gerard said. ‘That’s the very one, isn’t it?’

‘Identical, if not.’

He sighed deeply and glanced round the yard. ‘There’s no big delivery van here marked Vintners Incorporated. It’s probably on its way to Martineau. Let’s take the offices, then, and... er... try not to leave any trace of our having been here.’

‘No,’ I said weakly.

We walked across the concrete, our shoes scrunching it seemed to me with alarming noise, and Gerard unlocked the door of the office building as if he were the manager arriving in pinstripes.

As revealed by the time-punch cards, the plant for its size was almost unstaffed. There were six small offices in the office block, four of them empty but for desk and chair, two of them showing slight paperwork activity: beyond those a locked suite of rooms marked ‘Managing Director’ on the outer door said in smaller letters underneath, ‘Knock and Enter’.

We entered without knocking, using the appropriate key from the gate-house. Inside, first of all, was a pleasasnt looking office, walls lined with calendars, charts, and posters of wine districts in France. There were two desks, one managerial, one secretarial, both clearly in everyday use. In-trays bore letters, receipts were spiked, an african violet bloomed next to a pot of pens.

I left Gerard reading invoices with concentration and went through into the next room which was furnished with an expensive leather-topped desk, green leather armchairs, carpet, brass pot with six foot high evergreen, cocktail cabinet, framed drawings of Bernard Naylor and his bottling plant fifty years earlier and a door into a luxurious washroom.

On the far side of the plushy office another door led into what had probably been designed as a boardroom, but in there, with daylight pouring through the skylights, the whole centre space was taken up by a table larger than a billiard table upon which someone appeared to have been modelling a miniature terrain of hills, valleys, plains and plateaux, all of it green and brown like the earth, with a winding ribbon of pale blue stuck on in a valley as a river.

I looked at it in awe. Gerard poked his head round the door, glanced at the table, frowned and said ‘What’s that?’

‘War games,’ I said.

‘Really?’ He came closer for a look. ‘A battlefield. So it is. Where are the soldiers?’

We found the soldiers in a cupboard against one wall, tidily stacked in trays, hundreds of them in different uniforms, many hand-painted. There were also ranks of miniature tanks and gun carriages of all historical ages and fierce looking missiles in pits. There were troop-carrying helicopters and First-World-War biplanes, baby rolls of barbed wire, ambulances and small buildings of all sorts, some of them bombed-looking, some.painted red as if on fire.

‘Incredible,’ Gerard said. ‘Just as well wars aren’t fought on the throw of dice. I’ve thrown a six, I’ll wipe out your bridgehead.’

We closed the cupboard and in giving the table a last interested look I brushed my hand lightly over the contours of the nearest range of mountains.

They moved.

Slightly horrified I picked them up to put them back into place and stood looking at the hollowed out interior in absolute surprise. I picked up another hill or two. Same thing.

‘What is it?’ Gerard said.

‘The mountains are white inside.’

‘What of it?’

‘See what they’re made of?’

I held the mountains hollow side up so that he could see the hard white interior. ‘Its plaster of Paris,’ I said. ‘Look at the edges... like bandage. I should think he’s modelled that whole countryside in it.’

‘Good grief.’

‘Not an ear nose and throat surgeon. A war games fanatic. Simple material... easily moulded, easily coloured, sets hard as rock.’

I put the hills and the mountains carefully back in position. ‘There must be a fair few rolls of the stuff on this table. And if you don’t mind... let’s get out of here.’

‘Yes,’ Gerard agreed. ‘I suppose he’d just bought some more, the day he went to the Silver Moondance. Just happened to have it in his Rolls.’

People didn’t just happen to wrap people’s heads in it. To do that, people had to have seriously vengeful thoughts and psychotic malice. Paul Young had gone a long way from where Stewart Naylor set out.

We closed the war games room door, crossed the green leather office, returned to the business sector.

‘There’s just enough legitimate trade going on to give an appearance of tottering a fraction this side of bankruptcy,’ Gerard said. ‘I can’t find anything out of place. There were deliveries via Charter Carriers up to a month ago. Nothing since. No invoices as from Vintners Incorporated, no delivery notes, nothing. This office is for accountants and inspectors. Depressingly clean except for many samples of the Young-Naylor handwriting. Let’s try the plant itself.’

He locked our way out of the office block and raised his eyebrows for a decision from me.

‘Let’s try over there,’ I said, pointing to the building by the Bedford van. ‘See what’s in there first.’

‘Right.’

There were two sets of double doors set into the long blank wall, and having tried ‘bottle store’ and ‘vats’ I found the key marked ‘dispatch’ opened one of them.

The hinges creaked as I pulled the door open. My body had almost given up on separate nervous reactions: how could one sweat in some places while one’s mouth was in drought? We went into the building and found it was the store for goods already bottled and boxed ready for sending out. There was a great deal more space than merchandise. There were three lonely pallets laden with cases marked ‘House Wine — Red’, addressed to a restaurant in Surrey and four other pallets for the same place marked ‘House Wine-White’: and that was all.

‘The paperwork for that lot is in the office,’ Gerard said. ‘The restaurant bought and shipped the wine, Naylor bottled it. Regular consignments, it looked like.’

We went back into the yard and locked the dispatch doors.

‘Main plant,’ I said, looking at the high building opposite. ‘Well... let’s see what it’s like.’

The key duly let us in. The building was old, it was clear at once, built by grandfather Naylor sturdily to last for generations. Internal walls were extensively tiled in white to shoulder height, cream-painted (long ago) above. From the central entrance some stairs on the left wound upwards, and Gerard chose to go that way first as his paper-oriented mind looked instinctively for most enlightenment aloft: so we went upstairs and to a great extent he was right.

Upstairs, among much unused and dusty space, we found a locked door to further reaches, a door that opened like Sesame to the ‘label room’ key.

‘Great heavens,’ Gerard said. ‘Is all this usual?’

We stood looking at an expanse of floor covered with heaps of bundles of labels, thousand upon thousand of them altogether, in an apparent muddle but no doubt in some sort of order.

‘Quite usual,’ I said. ‘No one ever tries to order exactly the right number of labels needed for any particular job. You always have to have more, for contingencies. The unused ones just tend to be dumped, and they pile up.’

‘So they do.’

‘Labels in constant use are probably in those small drawers over there. The ones looking like safe deposit boxes. Some of those drawers have labels on the front... they’ll have those labels in the drawers.’

‘What we want are St Estèphe and all the rest, and Bell’s.’

‘Mm.’

We both set to, but none of the fake labels turned up, very much to our dismay.

‘We need something,’ Gerard said. ‘We need proof.’

We didn’t find it in the label room.

At the back of the label room a closed door led presumably to another room beyond, and I suggested taking a look through there, on the off chance.

‘All right,’ Gerard said, shrugging.

The door was locked and the ‘label room’ key didn’t fit. Gerard diagnosed another mortice job and took what seemed to be an age with his probe turning the mechanism, but eventually that door too yielded to him, and we went through.

Inside that room there was a printing press. A clean, oiled, sleek modern machine capable of turning out impeccable labels.

Some of the press’s recent work was still in uncut sheets: rows and rows of Bell’s upon Bell’s, brilliant in colour, indistinguishable from the real thing.

Neither Gerard nor I said a word. We turned instead to the cupboards and boxes stacked around the walls, and we found them all, the neatly printed oblongs saying St Estèphe, St Emilion, Valpolicella, Mâcon, Volnay and Nuits St Georges.

‘It’s the Château de Chenonceaux,’ I said suddenly.

‘What is?’

‘On this St Estèphe label. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. It’s the Château de Chenonceaux on the Loire, without its bridge.’

‘I’m glad you know what you’re talking about.’

He was taking one each of all the fake labels and stowing them tenderly in his wallet, tucking them away in his jacket. We left everything else as it was but on the way out to my relief he didn’t stop to relock the door. We went down again to the hall and from there to a door on the left which unlocked to ‘vats’.

One could immediately smell the wine; a warm rosy air-filling aroma like a lungful of earthy fruit. Gerard lifted his head in surprise and to me it felt like coming home.

‘I’d no idea,’ he said.

A small lobby opened into two long halls, the larger, on the left, containing a row of ten huge round vats down each side. Each vat, painted dark red, was eight feet high, six feet in diameter, and sat eighteen inches above ground level on thick brick pillars. Each vat, on its front, had large valves for loading and unloading, a small valve for testing, a quantity gauge, and a holder into which one could slot a card identifying the present contents.

‘They’re vast,’ Gerard said.

‘Kenneth Charter’s tanker would fill four of these. That size vat holds fifteen hundred gallons. You can get them bigger.’

‘Thanks.’

I smiled. ‘Let’s see what’s in them.’

We read the contents cards. Most of them said ‘empty’, the quantity gauges reading zero. The three nearest the entrance on the left side bore ‘Keely house wine, shipped October 1st’, and another further along, ‘Dinzag private cuve, shipped Sept 24th’. Two together on the opposite side said ‘Linakket, shipped Sept. 10th’; and all of the occupied vats were only three-quarters full.

‘They’re all in the office paperwork,’ Gerard said regretfully.

‘Let’s try the empties, then,’ I said. ‘Quantity gauges can be disconnected.’

I started at the far end under the premise that if Paul Young stacked his loot as far from the entrance as possible at Martineau Park then he might have done so on his own territory: and he had. The very first trickle which came out onto my fingers as I turned the small testing valve bore the raw volatile smell of scotch.

‘Bloody bingo,’ I said. ‘I’ll find a bottle and we’ll take a sample, if you like.’

‘Later. Try the others.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes.’

I loosed the small valves on all the ‘empty’ monsters, and we found scotch in five of them and wine in three. There was no way of telling how many gallons were in each, but to neither of us did that seem to matter. The wine, as far as I could tell from sucking it from my palm, was similar to our old friend ‘St Estèphe’, and the scotch was Rannoch already mixed with tap. Gerard looked like a cat in cream as I straightened from testing the last ‘empty’ (which was in fact empty) and said we’d seen everything now except the actual bottling department, and where would that be?

‘Follow the hoses,’ I said.

He looked at the three or four hoses which were lying on the ground, fat lightweight grey ridged plastic hoses like giant earthworms as thick as a wrist, some in coils, some straightened out and running the length of the room between the vats.

I said, ‘Those connectors at the end of the hoses lock into the valves on the vats. One of them is connected to one of the so called “empty” vats we found the wine in, see? The wine is pumped from the vats to the bottling plant... so to find the plant, follow the hoses.’

The hoses snaked round a corner into another wide hall which this time contained only two vats, both painted a silvery white, taller, slimmer, and with several upright pipes attached from top to bottom of their sides.

‘White wine?’ Gerard said flippantly.

‘Not really. They’re refrigeration vats.’

‘Go on then, what are they for?’

I went over to the nearest, but it was switched off, and so was the other, as far as I could see. ‘They use them to clear cloudy particles out of spirits and white wine. If you drop the temperature, the bits and pieces fall to the bottom, and you run off the cleared liquid from higher up.’

The hoses ran straight past the refrigeration vats and through another wide doorway, and through there were found what Gerard was looking for, the long light and airy hall, two storeys high, where the liquids were fed into the bottles and stoppered by corks, where the caps and the labels were applied and the bottles packed into cases.

There were four separate lines of filling, corking, labelling and capping machines, a capacity way beyond the jobs in hand. The machines themselves, like the vats and hoses, were new compared with the buildings. It all looked bright, clean, orderly, spacious and well run.

‘I somehow expected something dark and Dickensian,’ Gerard said. ‘Where do we look?’

‘Those big wooden slatted crates standing around probably contain empty bottles,’ I said, ‘but some might have full ones ready for labelling. Look in those.’

‘What are those glass booth things?’

‘The actual bottling machines and corking machines and automatic labellers are enclosed with glass for safety and they don’t work unless the glass doors are shut. One set of the machines looks ready to go. See the corks in that transparent hopper up there? And up there,’ I pointed, ‘on that bridge, see those four vats? The wine or whatever is pumped along from those huge storage vats in the long hall through the hoses up into these vats on the bridge, then it feeds down again by gravity into the bottles. The pumps for those vats look as if they’re up on the bridge. I’ll go up and see if there’s anything in those feeder vats, if you like.’

Gerard nodded and I went up the stairs. The bridge, stretching from side to side of the bottling hall, was about twelve feet wide, railed at the sides, with four feeder vats on it standing taller than my head, each with a ladder bolted to its side so that one could go up to the entry valves on top.

There were four electric pumps on the bridge, one for each feeder vat, but only one was connected to hoses. In that one case a hose came up from the floor below and a second hose ran from the pump to the top of one of the feeder vats. In that vat I thought I might find more of the ‘St Estèphe’, and I squatted at the base of it and released a few drops through the small valve there.

Gerard was rattling bottles in the slatted wooden crates, looking for full ones. The crates were about five feet square, four feet high, very heavy, constructed of rows of timber rather like five barred gates. One could see the bottles inside glinting between the slats, hundreds in each crate.

I had become so at home in my more or less natural surroundings that I’d forgotten to be frightened for the past ten minutes: and that was a fundamental mistake because a voice suddenly spoke from directly beneath me, harsh, fortissimo and threatening.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Back off, put your hands up and turn round.’