Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,103

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