Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,109

‘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