Proof

Eight

Flora sent Gerard McGregor down to see me: or so he said, that Friday evening, when he came into the shop.

He looked just as he had on Sunday when tunneling away and hauling trestle tables through under the canvas for roofs. Tall, in his fifties, going grey. Ultra-civilised, with experienced eyes. Gerard with a soft J.

We shook hands again, smiling.

‘My wife and I took Flora home to dinner with us yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘We insisted. She said it was chiefly thanks to you that she was feeling better.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘She talked about you for hours.’

‘How utterly boring. She can’t have done.’

‘You know how Flora talks.’ His voice was affectionate. ‘We heard all about you and Larry Trent and the goings on at the Silver Moondance.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Whatever for? Fascinating stuff.’

Not for Zarac, I thought.

Gerard McGregor was looking around him with interest.

‘We don’t live so far from Flora,’ he said. ‘Five miles or so, but we shop in the opposite direction, not in this town. I’ve never been here before.’ He began to walk down the row of wine racks, looking at labels. ‘From what Flora said of the size of the trade you do, I somehow thought your shop would be bigger.’ His faintly Scottish voice was without offence, merely full of interest.

‘It doesn’t need to be bigger,’ I explained. ‘In fact large brightly-lit expanses tend to put real wine-lovers off, if anything. This is just right, to my mind. There’s room to show examples of everything I normally sell. I don’t keep more than a dozen of many things out here. The rest’s in the storeroom. And everything moves in and out pretty fast.’

The shop itself was about twenty-five feet by thirteen, or eight by four if one counted in metres. Down the whole of one long side there were wine racks in vertical columns, each column capable of holding twelve bottles (one case), the top bottle resting at a slant for display. Opposite the wine racks was the counter with, behind it, the shelves for spirits and liqueurs.

More wine racks took up the furthest wall except for the door through to the office and storeroom, and on every other inch of wall-space there were shelves for sherries, beers, mixers and coke and all the oddments that people asked for.

At the end of the counter, standing at a slight angle into the main floorspace, was a medium sized table covered to the ground with a pretty swagged tablecloth that Emma had made. A sheet of plate glass protected the top, and on it there stood a small forest of liqueur and aperitif and wine bottles, all opened, all available for customers to taste before buying. Coyly out of sight below the tablecloth stood open cartons of the same wines, ready to hand. We’d always sold a great deal because of the table: impulse buys leading to more and more repeat orders. Gerard fingered the bottles with interest, as so many did.

‘Would you like to see behind the scenes?’ I said, and he answered, ‘Very much.’

I showed him my tiny office and also the tiny washroom, and the not-so-tiny storeroom beyond. ‘That door,’ I said, pointing, ‘opens outward to the yard where we park the cars and load and unload deliveries. I usually keep it bolted. Through here is the storeroom.’ I switched on the lights as the store had no window, and he looked with interest at the columns of cases ranged all round the walls and in a double row down the centre.

‘I didn’t always have as much stock as this,’ I said. ‘It was a terrible struggle to begin with. The storeroom was almost empty. Some weeks I’d buy things one afternoon, sell them the next morning and buy more with the same money again in the afternoon, and so on, round and round. Hair-raising.’

‘But not now, I see.’

‘Well, no. But it took us a while to get known, because this wasn’t a wine shop before. We had to start from utter scratch.’

‘We?’ he said.

‘My wife.’

‘Oh, yes... Flora said...’

‘Yes,’ I said flatly. ‘She died.’

He made sympathetic motions with his hands, and we went back to the shop.

‘When do you close?’ he said, and suggested we might have dinner together.

‘Is nine o’clock too late?’

Nine o’clock would do quite well, he said, and he returned at that time and drove me to a restaurant far outside my own catchment area. It seemed a long way to go, but he had reserved a table there, saying the food would be worth it.

We talked on the way about the accident and our excursions in the tent, and over dinner about Flora and Jack, and after that about the Silver Moondance and Larry Trent. We ate trout mousse followed by wild duck and he asked me to choose the wine. It was a pleasant enough evening and seemed purposeless; but it wasn’t.

‘What would you say,’ he said casually over coffee, ‘to a consultant’s fee?’

‘For what?’

‘For what you’re good at. Distinguishing one whisky from another.’

‘I wouldn’t mind the fee,’ I said frankly. ‘But I’m not an expert.’

‘You’ve other qualities.’ His eyes, it seemed to me, were all at once concentrating on my face as if he could read every hidden response I might have. ‘Observation, resource and leadership.’

I laughed. ‘Not me. Wrong guy.’

‘I’d like to hire your services,’ he said soberly, ‘for one particular job.’

I said in puzzlement, ‘What sort of job?’

For answer he felt in an inner pocket and drew out a sheet of paper which he unfolded and spread on the tablecloth for me to read: and it was a photostat copy, I saw in some bewilderment, of a page from the Yellow Pages telephone directory.

DETECTIVE AGENCIES, it said in capital letters at the top. Underneath were several boldly outlined box advertisements and a column of small firms. The word ‘investigation’ figured prominently throughout.

‘I am one of the management team of that concern,’ McGregor said, pointing to one of the bigger boxes.

‘A private detective?’ I asked, astounded. ‘About the last thing I’d have guessed.’

‘Mm.’ McGregor’s tone was dry. ‘We prefer to be known as investigative consultants. Read the advertisement.’

I did as he asked.

‘Deglet Ltd’, it announced. ‘Comprehensive service offered in complete confidence to commercial clients. Experienced consultants in the fields of industrial counter-espionage, fraud detection, electronic security, personnel screening. Business investigations of all sorts. International links.’

At the bottom there was a London box number and telex and telephone numbers, but no plain address. Confidential to the bone, I thought.

‘No divorce?’ I asked lightly.

‘No divorce,’ McGregor agreed easily. ‘No debt collecting and no private clients. Commercial enquiries only.’

Any image one might have of mean streets didn’t fit with McGregor. Boardrooms and country weekends, yes. Fist fights and sleazy night-life, no.

‘Do you yourself personally...’ I flicked a finger at the page, ‘go rootling around in factories?’

‘Not exactly.’ He was quietly amused. ‘When we’re approached by a prospective client I go along to size up what’s happening and what’s needed, and then either alone or with colleagues, according to the size of the problem, I plan how to get results.’

There was a pause while I thought over what he had and hadn’t so far told me. I evaded all the head-on questions and in the end said only, ‘Don’t you have any better business cards than photostats of the ‘phone book?’

Unruffled, he said, ‘We don’t advertise anywhere else. We have no pamphlets or brochures and carry only personal cards ourselves. I brought the photostat to show you that we exist, and what we do.’

‘And all your business conies from the Yellow Pages?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘And from word of mouth. Also, of course, once-satisfied clients call upon us again whenever they need us, which believe me the larger corporations do constantly.’

‘You enjoy your job?’

‘Very much,’ he said. I listened to the quiet assurance in his depths and thought that I wasn’t a hunter and never would be. Not I, who ducked through gates to avoid jumping fences, even if the fox escaped.

‘Occasionally,’ he said conversationally, ‘we’re asked to investigate in areas for which none of our regular people are ideal.’

I looked at my coffee.

‘We need someone now who knows whisky. Someone who can tell malt whisky from grain whisky, as Flora says you can.’

‘Someone who knows a grain from the great grey green greasy Limpopo River?’ I said. ‘The Limpopo River, don’t forget, was full of crocodiles.’

‘I’m not asking you to do anything dangerous,’ he said reasonably.

‘No.’ I sighed. ‘Go on, then.’

‘What are you doing on Sunday?’ he said.

‘Opening the shop from twelve to two. Washing the car. Doing the crossword.’ Damn all, I thought.

‘Will you give me the rest of your day from two o’clock on?’ he asked.

It sounded harmless, and in any case I still felt considerable camaraderie with him because of our labours in the tent, and Sundays after all were depressing, even without horseboxes.

‘O.K.’ I said. ‘Two o’clock onwards. What do you want me to do?’

He was in no great hurry, it seemed, to tell me. Instead he said, ‘Does all grain whisky taste the same?’

‘That’s why you need a real expert,’ I said. ‘The answer is no it doesn’t quite, but the differences are small. It depends on the grain used and the water, and how long the spirit’s been aged.’

‘Aged?’

‘Newly distilled scotch,’ I said, ‘burns your throat and scrubs your tongue like fire. It has to be stored in wooden casks for at least three years to become drinkable.’

‘Always in wood?’

‘Yes. Wood breathes. In wooden casks all spirit grows blander but if you put it in metal or glass containers instead it stays the same for ever. You could keep newly distilled spirits a thousand years in glass and when you opened it it would be as raw as the day it was bottled.’

‘One lives and learns,’ he said.

‘Anyway,’ I added after a pause. ‘Practically no one sells pure grain whisky. Even the cheapest bulk whisky is a blend of grain and malt, though the amount of malt in some of them is like a pinch of salt in a swimming pool.’

‘Flora said you told her some of the scotch at the Silver Moondance was like that,’ McGregor said.

‘Yes, it was. They were selling it in the bar out of a Bell’s bottle, and in the restaurant as Laphroaig.’

McGregor called for the bill. ‘This wasn’t my case to begin with,’ he said almost absentmindedly as he sorted out a credit card. ‘One of my colleagues passed it on to me because it seemed to be developing so close to my own doorstep.’

‘Do you mean,’ I asked, surprised, ‘that your firm were already interested in the Silver Moodance?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But how? I mean, in what connection?’

‘In connection with some stolen scotch that we were looking for. And it seems, my dear Tony, that you have found it.’

‘Good grief,’ I said blankly. ‘And lost it again.’

‘I’m afraid so. We’re very much back where we started. But that’s hardly your fault, of course. If Jack’s secretary had been less fond of Laphroaig... if Larry Trent hadn’t invited him to dinner... One can go back and back saying “if”, and it’s profitless. We were treading delicately towards the Silver Moondance when the horsebox plunged into the marquee; and it’s ironic in the extreme that I didn’t know that the Arthur Lawrence Trent who owned that place had horses in training with Jack, and I didn’t know he was at the party. I didn’t know him by sight... and I didn’t know that he was one of the men we found dead. If I’d known he was going to be at the party I’d have got Jack or Flora to introduce me.’ He shrugged, ‘If and if.’

‘But you were... um... investigating him?’ I asked.

‘No,’ McGregor said pleasantly. ‘The person we suspected was an employee of his. A man called Zarac’

I’m sure my mouth physically dropped open. Gerard McGregor placidly finished paying the bill, glancing with dry understanding at my face.

‘Yes, he’s dead,’ he said. ‘We really are totally back at the beginning.’

‘I don’t consider,’ I said intensely, ‘that Zarac is a matter of no crocodiles.’

I spent most of Saturday with my fingers hovering over the telephone, almost deciding at every minute to ring Flora and ask her for Gerard McGregor’s number so that I could cancel my agreement for Sunday. If I did nothing he would turn up at two o’clock and whisk me off heaven knew where to meet his client, the one whose scotch had turned up on my tongue. (Probably.)

In the end I did ring Flora but even after she’d answered I was still shilly-shallying.

‘How’s Jack?’ I said.

‘In a vile temper, I’m afraid, Tony dear. The doctors won’t let him come home for several more days. They put a rod right down inside his bone, through the marrow, it seems, and they want to make sure it’s all settled before they let him loose on crutches.’

‘And are you all right?’

‘Yes, much better every day.’

‘A friend of yours,’ I said slowly, ‘came to see me. Er... Gerard McGregor.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Flora said warmly. ‘Such a nice man. And his wife’s such a dear. He said you and he together had helped a good few people last Sunday. He asked who you were, and I’m afraid, Tony dear, that I told him quite a lot about you and then about everything that happened at the Silver Moondance, and he seemed frightfully interested though it seems to me now that I did go on and on a bit.’

‘I don’t think he minded,’ I said soothingly. ‘Um... what does he do, do you know?

‘Some sort of business consultant, I believe. All those jobs are so frightfully vague, don’t you think? He’s always travelling all over the place, anyway, and Tina... that’s his wife... never seems to know when he’ll be home.’

‘Have you known them long?’ I asked.

‘We met them at other people’s parties several times before we really got to know them, which would be about a year ago.’

‘I mean... has he always lived near here?’

‘Only about five years, I think. They were saying the other evening how much they preferred it to London even though Gerard has to travel more. He’s such a clever man, Tony dear, it just oozes out of his pores. I told him he should buy some wine from you, so perhaps he will.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Er... do you have his telephone number?’

‘Of course,’ Flora said happily, and found it for me. I wrote it down and we disconnected, and I was still looking at it indeterminately at nine o’clock when I closed the shop.

‘I half expected you to cry off,’ he said, when he picked me up at two the next day.

‘I half did.’

‘But?’

‘Curiosity, I suppose.’

He smiled. Neither of us pointed out that it was curiosity that got the Elephant’s Child into deep trouble with the crocodiles in the Limpopo River, though it was quite definitely in my mind, and Gerard, as he had told me to call him, was of the generation that would have had the Just So Stories fed to him as a matter of course.

He was dressed that afternoon in a wool checked shirt, knitted tie and tweed jacket, much like myself, and he told me we were going to Watford.

I sensed a change in him immediately I’d committed myself and was too far literally along the road to ask him to turn back. A good deal of surface social manner disappeared and in its place came a tough professional attitude which I felt would shrivel irrelevant comment in the utterer’s throat. I listened therefore in silence, and he spoke throughout with his eyes straight ahead, not glancing to my face for reactions.

‘Our client is a man called Kenneth Charter,’ he said.‘Managing Director and Founder of Charter Carriers, a company whose business is transporting bulk liquids by road in tankers. The company will transport any liquid within reason, the sole limiting factor being that it must be possible to clean the tanker thoroughly afterwards, ready for a change of contents. Today’s hydrochloric acid, for instance, must not contaminate next week’s crop-sprayer.’

He drove steadily, not fast, but with easy judgement of available space. A Mercedes, fairly new, with velvety upholstery and a walnut dash, automatic gears changing on a purr.

‘More than half of their business,’ he went on, ‘is the transport of various types of inflammable spirit, and in this category they include whisky.’ He paused. ‘It’s of course in their interest if they can arrange to pick up one load near to where they deliver another, the limiting factor again being the cleaning. They have steam cleaning facilities and chemical scrubbing agents at their Watford headquarters, but these are not readily available everywhere. In any case, one of their regular runs has been to take bulk gin to Scotland, wash out the tanker with water, and bring scotch back.’

He stopped talking to navigate through a town of small streets, and then said, ‘While the scotch is in the tanker it is considered to be still in a warehouse. That is to say, it is still in bond. Duty has not been paid.’

I nodded. I knew that.

‘As Charter’s tankers carry six thousand imperial gallons,’ Gerard said neutrally, ‘the amount of duty involved in each load is a good deal more than a hundred thousand pounds. The whisky itself, as you know, is of relatively minor worth.’

I nodded slightly again. Customs and Excise duty, value added tax and income tax paid by the shopkeeper meant that three-quarters of the selling price of every standard bottle of whisky went in one way or another to the inland revenue. One quarter paid for manufacture, bottles, shipping, advertising, and all the labour force needed between the sowing of the barley and the wrapping in a shop. The liquid itself, in that context, cost practically nothing.

‘Three times this year,’ Gerard said, ‘a tanker of Charter’s hasn’t reached its destination. It wouldn’t be accurate to say the tanker was stolen, because on each occasion it turned up. But the contents of course had vanished. The contents each time were bulk scotch. The Customs and Excise immediately demanded duty since the scotch was no longer in the tanker. Charter Carriers have twice had to pay up.’

He paused as if to let me catch up with what he was saying.

‘Charter Carriers are of course insured, or have been, and that’s where they’ve run into serious trouble. The insurers, notwithstanding that they rocketed their premiums on each past occasion, now say that enough is enough, they are not satisfied and are withholding payment. They also say no further cover will be extended. Charter’s face having to raise the cash themselves, which would be crippling, but more seriously they can’t operate without insurance. On top of that the Customs and Excise are threatening to take away their licence to carry goods in bond, which would in itself destroy a large part of their business.’ He paused again for appreciable seconds. ‘The Excise people are investigating the latest theft, but chiefly because they want the duty, and the police also, but routinely. Charter’s feel that this isn’t enough because it in no way guarantees the continuation of their licence or the reinstatement of their insurance. They’re extremely worried indeed, and they applied to us for help.’

We were speeding by this time along the M40. Another silence lengthened until Gerard eventually said, ‘Any questions?’

‘Well... dozens, I suppose.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as why was it always the scotch that was stolen and not the gin? Such as was it always the same driver and was it always the same tanker? Such as what happened to the driver, did he say? Such as where did the tankers turn up? Such as how did you connect it all with Zarac?’

He positively grinned, his teeth showing in what looked like delight.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘Such as where did the scotch start from and where was it supposed to be going and how many crooks have you turned up at each place, and such as does Kenneth Charter trust his own office staff and why wasn’t his security invincible third time around?’.

I stopped and he said without sarcasm, ‘Those’ll do to be going on with. The answers I can give you are that no it wasn’t always the same driver but yes it was always the same tanker. The tanker turned up every time abandoned in Scotland in transport café carparks, but always with so many extra miles on the clock that it could have been driven as far as London or Cardiff and back.’

Another pause, then he said, ‘The drivers don’t remember what happened to them.’

I blinked. ‘Don’t remember?’

‘No. They remember setting off. They remember driving as far as the English border, where they all stopped at a motorway service station for a pee. They stopped at two different service stations. None of them remembers anything else except waking up in a ditch. Never the same ditch.’ He smiled. ‘After the second theft Kenneth Charter made it a rule that on that run no one was to eat or drink in cafés. The drivers had to take what they wanted with them in the cab. All the same they still had to stop for nature. The police say the thieves must have been following the tanker each time, waiting for that. Then when the driver was out of the cab, they put in an open canister of gas... perhaps nitrous oxide, which has no smell and acts fast... it’s what dentists use... and when the driver climbed back in he’d be unconscious before he could drive off.’

‘How regular was that run?’ I asked.

‘Normally twice a week.’

‘Always the same tanker?’

‘No,’ he said contentedly. ‘Charter’s keep four tankers exclusively for drinkable liquids. One of those. The other three made the run just as often, but weren’t touched. It may be coincidence, maybe not.’

‘How long ago was the last load stolen?’ I asked.

‘Three weeks last Wednesday.’

‘And before that?’

‘One in April, one in June.’

‘That’s three in six months,’ I said, surprised.

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘No wonder the insurers are kicking up a fuss.’

‘Mm.’ He drove quietly for a while and then said, ‘Every time the scotch was destined for the same place, a bottling plant at Watford, north of London. The scotch didn’t however always come from the same distillery, or the same warehouse. The stolen loads came from three different places. The last lot came from a warehouse near Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire, but it set off from there in the normal way and we don’t think that’s where the trouble is.’

‘In the bottling plant?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know, for sure, but we don’t think so. The lead to the Silver Moondance looked so conclusive that it was decided we should start from there.’

‘What was the lead?’ I said.

He didn’t answer immediately but in the end said, ‘I think Kenneth Charter had better tell you himself.’

‘O.K.’

‘I should explain,’ he said presently, ‘that when firms call us in it’s often because there are things they don’t necessarily want to tell the police. Companies very often like to deal privately, for instance, with frauds. By no means do they always want to prosecute, they just want the fraud stopped. Public admission that a fraud was going on under their noses can be embarrassing.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Kenneth Charter told me certain things in confidence which he didn’t tell the police or the Customs and Excise. He wants his transport firm to survive, but not at any price. Not if the price in personal terms is too high. He agreed I should bring you in as a consultant, but I’ll leave it to him to decide how much he wants you to know.’

‘All right,’ I said peacefully.

We left the motorway and Gerard began threading his way across the semi-suburban sprawl to the north of London where one town ran into another without noticeable difference.

‘You’re an undemanding sort of man,’ Gerard observed after a while.

‘What should I demand?’

‘How much a consultancy fee is, perhaps. Conditions, maybe. Assurances.’

‘Life’s like the weather,’ I said wryly. ‘What comes, comes. Even with a sunny forecast you can get wet.’

‘A fatalist.’

‘It rains. You can’t stop it.’

He glanced at my face for almost the first time on the journey, but I doubt if he read much there. I’d spoken not bitterly but with a sort of tiredness, result of failing to come to terms with my own private deluge. I was in truth quite interested in the stolen scotch and the tankers, but it was on an upper and minor level, not down where it mattered.

As if sensing it he said, ‘You’ll do your best for me?’

‘Such as it is,’ I assured him. ‘Yes.’

He nodded as if a doubt had been temporarily stilled and turned off the road into an industrial area where small factories had sprung like recent mushrooms in a concrete field. The fourth on the right bore the words ‘Charter Carriers Ltd’ in large red letters on a white board attached to the front, while down the side, like piglets to a sow, stretched a long row of silver tankers side by side, engines inwards, sterns out.