Proof

Nine

Kenneth Charter wasn’t in the least what I expected, which was, I suppose, a burly North Londoner with a truculent manner. The man who came into the entrance hall to greet us as we pushed through the glass front door was tall, thin, reddish-haired and humorous with an accent distinctly more Scottish than Gerard’s faint Highland.

‘Is this the consultant?’ he said with a lilt. He found my youth more a matter of laughter than concern, it seemed. ‘No greybeard, are you?’ He shook my hand firmly. ‘Come away in, then. And how are you today, Mr McGregor?’

He led the way into a square uninspiring cream-walled office and waved us to two upright armless chairs facing a large unfussy modern desk. There was a brown floor-covering of utilitarian matting, a row of grey filing cabinets, a large framed map of the British Isles and a settled chill in the air which might or might not have been because it was Sunday. Kenneth Charter seemed not to notice it and offered no comment. He had the Scots habit, I suspected, of finding sin in comfort and virtue in thrift and believing morality grew exclusively in a cold climate.

Gerard and I sat in the offered chairs. Kenneth Charter took his place behind his desk in a swivelling chair which he tilted recklessly backward.

‘How much have you told this bonny expert?’ he said, and listened without visible anxiety to Gerard’s recapitulation.

‘Well, now,’ he said to me cheerfully at the end, ‘You’ll want to know what liquid you’re looking for. Or could you guess, laddie, could you guess?’ His very blue eyes were quizzically challenging, and I did a quick flip and a turnover through past occasional nips in customers’ houses and sought for a check against the memory from the bar of the Silver Moondance and said on an instinctive, unreasoned impulse, ‘Rannoch.’

Charter looked cynical and said to Gerard, ‘You told him, then.’

Gerard shook his head. ‘I didn’t.’ He himself was looking smug. His consultant, it seemed, had come up trumps at the first attempt.

‘I guessed,’ I said mildly. ‘I sell that make. I’ve tasted it quite a few times. There aren’t so many whiskies that would be shipped in bulk and bottled in England. Rannoch... just fitted.’

‘Very well, then.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and produced from it a full bottle of Rannoch whisky, the familiar label adorned with an imposing male kilted figure in red and yellow tartan. The seal, I noticed, was unbroken, and Charter showed no signs of altering that.

‘A Christmas gift from the bottling company,’ he said.

‘Last Christmas?’ I asked.

‘Of course last Christmas. We’ll not be getting one this year, now will we?’

‘I guess not,’ I said meekly. ‘I meant... it’s a long time for the bottle to be full.’

He chuckled. ‘I don’t drink alcohol, laddie. Addles your brains, rots your gut. What’s more, I can’t stand the taste. We need someone like you because I wouldn’t recognise that stolen load of firewater if it turned up in the pond in my garden.’

The goldfish would tell him, I thought. They’d die.

‘Did you have a profile of that load?’ I asked.

‘A what?’

‘Um... its composition. What it was blended from. You could get a detailed list from the distiller, I should think. The profile is a sort of chemical analysis in the form of a graph... it looks something like the skyline of New York. Each different blend shows a different skyline. The profile is important to some people... the Japanese import scotch by profile alone, though actually a perfect-looking profile can taste rotten. Anyway, profiles are minutely accurate. Sort of like human tissue typing... a lot more advanced than just a blood test.’

‘All I can tell you is it was fifty-eight per cent alcohol by volume,’ Charter said. ‘The same strength as always with Rannoch. It’s here on the manifest.’ He produced from a drawer a copy of the Customs and Excise declaration and pushed it across for me to see. ‘I don’t ask what’s in the stuff, I just ferry it.’

‘We’ll get on to the profile straight away,’ Gerard murmured.

‘The Customs people probably have already,’ I said. ‘They’ll have the equipment. A gas chromatograph.’

I had an uncomfortable feeling that Gerard was thinking I should have told him about profiles on the way, but it hadn’t crossed my mind.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘if they took a sample from the distillers and matched it with the sample the police took from the Silver Moondance, they would know for sure one way or another.’

There was a silence. Finally Gerard cleared his throat and said, ‘Perhaps you might tell Tony how we were led to the Silver Moondance. Because at this moment,’ he looked straight at me, ‘there is no reason for the Customs to connect that place to the stolen tanker or to compare the samples. They aren’t aware of any link.’

I said ‘Oh’ fairly vaguely and Kenneth Charter consulted the ceiling, tipping his chair back to where it should surely have overbalanced. He finally let his weight fall forward with a thud and gave me the full blast from the blue eyes.

‘Promise of silence, laddie,’ he said.

I looked at Gerard, who nodded off-handedly as if such demands were an everyday business fact, which I supposed to him they were.

‘Promise of silence,’ I said.

Kenneth Charter nodded his long head sharply as if taking it for granted that promises would be kept; then he pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket and unlocked the centre drawer of his desk. The object within needed no searching for. He pulled out a small slim black notebook and laid it on the desk before him, the naturally humorous cast of his face straightening to something like grimness.

‘You can trust this laddie?’ he said to Gerard.

‘I’d believe so.’

Charter sighed, committed, turned to the page that fell open immediately in a way that spoke of constant usage.

‘Read that,’ he said, turning the notebook round for me to see but retaining it under the pressure of his thumb. ‘That’ was a long telephone number beginning 0735, which was the code for the Reading area, with underneath it two lines of writing.

‘Tell Z UNP 786 Y picks up B’s Gin Mon 10 a.m. approx.’

‘I’ve read it,’ I said, not knowing what exactly was expected.

‘Mean anything?’

‘I suppose it’s the Silver Moondance number, and Z is Zarac?’

‘Right. And UNP 786 Y is the registration number of my tanker.’ His voice was cold and unemotional.

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Berger’s Gin is where it set out from at 10.15 a.m. a month ago tomorrow. It went to Scotland, discharged the gin, was sluiced through in Glasgow and picked up the bulk scotch at Fairley’s warehouse near Helensburgh, in Dunbartonshire. Wednesday morning it set off from there. Wednesday evening it didn’t arrive at the bottling plant. By Thursday morning we know it was parked outside a drivers’ café on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but it wasn’t identified until Friday as its registration plates had been changed. The Customs and Excise have impounded it, and we haven’t got it back.’

I looked at Gerard and then again at Kenneth Charter.

‘And you know,’ I said slowly. ‘You know who wrote the message.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘My son.’

Highly complicating, as Gerard had hinted.

‘Um...’ I said, trying to make my question as noncommittal as Charter’s own voice. ‘What does your son say? Does he know where the bulk in the tanker vanished to? Because... er... six thousand gallons of scotch can’t be hidden all that easily, and the Silver Moondance wouldn’t use three times that much in six years, let alone six months... if you see.’

The blue eyes if anything grew more intense. ‘I haven’t spoken to my son. He went to Australia two weeks ago for a holiday and I don’t expect him back for three months.’

There was an element of good riddance in that statement, I thought. He wasn’t so much grieving over his offspring’s treason as finding it thoroughly awkward. I smiled at him faintly without thinking and to my surprise he grinned suddenly and broadly back.

‘You’re right,’ he said. The little bugger can stay there, as far as I’m concerned. I’m certainly not trying to fetch him home. I don’t want him charged and tried and maybe flung in jail. I don’t, I definitely don’t want any son of mine behind bars embarrassing the whole family. Making his mother cry, spoiling his sister’s wedding next spring, messing up his brother’s chances of a degree in law. If I have to sell up here, well, I will. There’ll be enough left for me to start something else. And that’s the end of the damage that sod will do. I won’t have him casting a worse blight on the family.’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘When was it, did you say, that he went to Australia?’

‘Two weeks ago yesterday, laddie. I took him to Heathrow myself. When I got home I found this notebook on the floor of the car, fallen out of his pocket. I guess he’s sweating now, hoping like hell he dropped it anywhere but at my very feet. I opened it to make sure it was his.’ Charter shrugged, locking it back into the desk drawer. ‘It was his, all right. His writing. Nothing much in it, just a few telephone numbers and lists of things to do. He always made lists of things to do, right from when he was small.’

Something like regret touched Kenneth Charter’s mouth. Any son, I supposed, was loved when small, before he grew up a disappointment.

‘The tanker’s number sort of shouted at me,’ he said. ‘I felt sick, I’ll tell you. My own son! There were the police and the Customs and Excise chasing all over the place looking for the crook who tipped off the thieves, and he’d been right there in my own house.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘So then I took advice from a business I knew who’d had their troubles sorted out for them quietly, and I got on to Deglet’s, and finally Mr McGregor, here. And there you have it, laddie.’

Kenneth Charter’s son, I was thinking, had gone to Australia ten days after the scotch had been stolen and a week before the horsebox had rolled into the marquee. If he was truly in Australia, he’d had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Silver Moondance’s liquid assets or the murder of Zarac. For such small crumbs his father could be grateful.

‘Would it be easy for your son to find out when exactly the tanker would be going to fetch whisky?’ I asked diffidently.

‘Back in April, yes, easy. In June, not so easy. Last month, damned difficult. But there you are, I didn’t know I had to defend myself so close to home.’ Kenneth Charter got to his feet, his big body seeming to rise forever. He grasped the frame of the map of the British Isles and gave it a tug, and the map opened away from the wall like a door, showing a second chart beneath.

The revealed chart was an appointments calendar with registration numbers in a long column down the left hand side, and dates across the top.

‘Tankers,’ Charter said succinctly, pointing to the registration numbers. ‘Thirty-four of them. There’s UNP 786 Y, sixth from the top.’

All the spaces across from that number had a line drawn through: tanker out of commission. For many of the others some of the spaces across were filled with stuck on labels of many colours, blue, green, red, yellow, grey, purple, orange, each label bearing a handwritten message.

‘We use the labels to save time,’ Charter said. ‘Purple for instance is always hydrochloric acid. We can see at a glance which tanker is carrying it. On the label it says where from, where to. Grey is gin, yellow is whisky. Red is wine. Blue is sulphuric acid. Green is any of several disinfectants. And so on. My secretary, whom I trust absolutely, she’s been with me twenty years, writes the labels and keeps the chart. We don’t as a company tell the drivers where they’re going or what they’re carrying until the moment they set out. They change tankers regularly. We often switch drivers at the last minute. Some of the loads could be dangerous, see, if they fell into the wrong hands. We have an absolute rule that all the tanker doors have to be locked if the drivers so much as set foot out of the cabs, and in all three stolen loads the drivers swore they did that, and found nothing to alarm them when they returned. We’ve been careful and until this year we’ve been fortunate.’ His voice was suddenly full of suppressed fury. ‘It took my own son... my own son... to crack our system.’

‘He could come in here, I suppose,’ I said.

‘Not often, he didn’t. I told him if he wouldn’t work in the company, he could stay away. He must have sneaked in here somehow, but I don’t know when. He knew about the chart, of course. But since the first two thefts I’ve not allowed the whisky labels to be written up, just in case the leak was in our own company. Yellow labels, see? All blank. So if he saw the yellow label for that tanker for the Wednesday, it wouldn’t say where it was picking up. Grey for gin, on the Monday, that was written up, but only for the pick up, not the destination. If someone wanted to steal the return load of scotch they’d have to follow the tanker all the way from Berger’s Gin distillery to find out where it was going.’

I frowned, thinking the theory excessive, but Gerard was nodding as if such dedication to the art of theft was commonplace.

‘Undoubtedly what happened,’ Gerard said. ‘But the question remains, to whom did Zarac pass on that message? He didn’t take part in the event himself. He wasn’t away from the Silver Moondance long enough, and was definitely at his post both the Tuesday and Wednesday lunch-times and also in the evenings until after midnight. We checked.’

My mind wandered from the problem I didn’t consider very closely my own (and in any case unanswerable) and I found my attention fastening on the few red labels on the chart. All the information on them had been heavily crossed out, as indeed it had on the grey labels as well. Kenneth Charter followed my gaze, his hairy Scots eyebrows rising.

‘The wine,’ I said, almost apologetically. ‘Didn’t you say red for wine?’

‘Aye, I did. All those shipments have had to be cancelled. Normally we fetch it from France and take it direct to the shippers near here, who bottle it themselves. We used to carry a lot more wine once, but they bottle more of it in France now. Half the bottling plants over here have been scratching round for new business. Hard times, laddie. Closures. Not their fault. The world moves on and changes. Always happening. Spend your life learning to make longbows, and someone invents guns.’

He closed the chart into its secrecy behind the map and dusted his hands on his trousers as if wiping off his son’s perfidy.

‘There’s life in tankers yet,’ he observed. ‘D’you want to see them?’

I said yes, please, as they were clearly his pride, and we left his office with him carefully locking the door behind us. He led the way not to the outside but down a passage lined on either side by office doors and through a heavier door, also locked, at the far end. That door led directly into a large expanse given to the maintenance and cleaning of the silver fleet. There was all the paraphernalia of a commercial garage: inspection pit, heavy-duty jacks, benches with vices, welding equipment, a rack of huge new tyres. Also, slung from the ceiling, chains and machinery for lifting. Two tankers stood in this space, receiving attention from men in brown overalls who from their manner already knew Charter was around on Sunday afternoon and gave Gerard and myself cursory incurious glances.

‘Over there,’ Charter said, pointing, ‘down that side, inside that walled section, we clean the tanks, pumps, valves and hoses. The exteriors go through a carwash outside.’ He began walking down the garage, expecting us to follow. The mechanics called him Ken and told him there was trouble with an axle, and I looked with interest at the nearest tanker, which seemed huge to me, indoors.

The tank part was oval in section, resting solidly on its chassis with what I guessed was a low centre of gravity, to make overturning a minor hazard. There was a short ladder bolted on at the back so that one could climb onto the top, where there were the shapes of hatches and loading gear. The silver metal was unpainted and carried no information as to its ownership, only the words ‘Flammable Liquid’ in small red capitals towards the rear.

The paintwork of the cab, a dark brownish red, was also devoid of name, address and telephone number. The tanker was anonymous, as the whole fleet was, I later saw. Kenneth Charter’s security arrangements had kept them safe for years from every predator except the traitor within.

‘Why did he do it?’ Charter said from over my shoulder, and I shook my head, not knowing.

‘He was always jealous as a little boy, but we thought he’d grow out of it.’ He sighed. ‘The older he got the more bad tempered he was, and sullen, and dead lazy. I tried to speak kindly to him but he’d be bloody rude back and I’d have to go out of the room so as not to hit him sometimes.’ He paused, seeking no doubt for the thousandth time for guilt in himself, where there was none. ‘He wouldn’t work. He seemed to think the world owed him a living. He’d go out and refuse to say where he’d been, and he wouldn’t lift a finger to help his mother in the house. He sneered all the time at his brother and sister, who are bonny kids. I offered him his fare to Australia and some money to spend there, and he said he’d go. I hoped, you know, that they’d knock some sense into him over there.’ His tall body moved in a sort of shudder. ‘I’d no idea he’d done anything criminal. He was a pain in the arse... Didn’t he know he would ruin me in this business? Did he care? Did he mean to?’

The son sounded irredeemable to me and for the sake of the rest of the Charter family I hoped he’d never come home, but life was seldom so tidy.

‘Mr McGregor may save your business,’ I said, and he laughed aloud in one of his mercurial changes of mood and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘A politician, Mr McGregor, that’s what you’ve brought me here. Aye, laddie, so he may, so he may for the healthy fee I’m paying him.’

Gerard smiled indulgently and we walked on through the length of the maintenance area and out through the door at the far end. Outside, as Charter had said, there was a tall commercial-sized car wash, but he turned away from that and led us round to the side of the building to where the fleet of tankers nestled in line.

‘We’ve some out on the road,’ Charter said. ‘And I’m having to arrange huge insurance for every one separately, which is wiping out our profit. I’ve drivers sitting at home watching television and customers going elsewhere. We can’t carry alcohol, the Customs won’t let us. It’s illegal for this company to operate if it can’t pay its workforce and other debts; and I reckon we can keep running on reserves for perhaps two weeks from now, if we’re lucky. We could be shut down in five minutes then if the bank foreclosed on the tankers, which they will. Half of these tankers at any one time are being bought on loans, and if we can’t service the loans, we’re out.’ He smoothed a loving hand over one of the gleaming monsters. ‘I’ll be bloody sorry, and that’s a fact.’

The three of us walked soberly along the imposing row until we were back at the entrance, and Gerard’s car.

‘Two weeks, Mr McGregor,’ Kenneth Charter said. He shook our hands vigorously. ‘Hardly a sporting chance, would you say?’

‘We’ll try for results,’ Gerard assured him in a stockbroker voice, and we climbed into his car and drove away.

‘Any thoughts?’ he asked me immediately, before we’d even left the industrial estate.

‘Chiefly,’ I said, ‘why you need me at all.’

‘For your knowledge, as I told you. And because people talk to you.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Kenneth Charter told you far more about his son than he told me. Flora says she talks to you because you listen. She says you hear things that aren’t said. I was most struck by that. It’s a most useful ability in a detective.’

‘I’m not...’

‘No. Any other thoughts?’

‘Well...’ I said. ‘Did you see the rest of the son’s notebook, when you were there before?’

‘Yes, I did. Charter didn’t want me to take it for some reason, so I used his photocopier to reproduce every page that was written on. As he said, there were just some telephone numbers and a few memos about things to do. We’ve checked on all the telephone numbers these last few days but they seem to be harmless. Friends’ houses, a local cinema, a snooker club and a barber. No lead to how the son knew Zarac, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Mm. I’ll show you the photostats presently. See if you can suggest anything we’ve missed.’

Unlikely, I thought.

‘Is he actually in Australia?’ I asked.

‘The son? Yes, he is. He stayed in a motet in Sydney the night he arrived. His father made the reservation, and the son did stay there. We checked. Beyond that, we’ve lost him, except that we know he hasn’t used his return ticket. Quite possibly he doesn’t know Zarac’s dead. If he does know, he’s likely to drop even further out of sight. In any case, Kenneth Charter’s instructed us not to look for him, and we’ll comply with that. We’re having to work from the Silver Moondance end, and frankly, since Zarac’s murder, that’s far from easy.’

I reflected for a while and then said, ‘Can you pick the police brains at all?’

‘Sometimes. It depends.’

‘They’ll be looking for Paul Young,’ I said.

‘Who?’

‘Did Flora mention him? A man who came to the Silver Moondance from what he said was head office. He arrived while I was there with Detective Sergeant Ridger, who took me there to taste the Laphroaig.’

Gerard frowned as he drove. ‘Flora said one of the managers had come in when you were tasting the whisky and wine, and was furious.’

I shook my head. ‘Not a manager.’ I told Gerard in detail about Paul Young’s visit, and he drove more and more slowly as he listened.

‘That makes a difference,’ he said almost absently when I’d finished. ‘What else do you know that Flora didn’t tell me?’

‘The barman’s homosexual,’ I said flippantly. Gerard didn’t smile. ‘Well,’ I sighed, ‘Larry Trent bought a horse for thirty thousand pounds, did she tell you that?’

‘No... Is that important?’

I related the saga of the disappearing Ramekin. ‘Maybe the Silver Moondance made that sort of money, but I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Larry Trent kept five horses in training, which takes some financing, and he gambled in thousands. Gamblers don’t win, bookmakers do.’

‘When did Larry Trent buy this horse?’ Gerard asked.

‘At Doncaster Sales a year ago.’

‘Before the whisky thefts,’ he said regretfully.

‘Before those particular whisky thefts. Not necessarily before all the red wines in his cellar began to taste the same.’

‘Do you want a full-time job?’ he said.

‘No thanks.’

‘What happened to Ramekin, do you think?’

‘I would think,’ I said, ‘that at a guess he was shipped abroad and sold.’