Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,12

it was, and he now knew all the regular items by sight. Mrs Palissey said at least once a week that she was ever so proud of him, considering.

Mrs Palissey and I remained by common consent on formal terms of Mrs and Mr: more dignified, she said. By nature she liked to please and was in consequence a good saleswoman, making genuinely helpful suggestions to irresolute customers. ‘Don’t know their own minds, do they, Mr Beach?’ she would say when they’d gone and I would agree truthfully that no, they often didn’t. Mrs Palissey and I tended to have the same conversations over and over and slightly too often.

She was honest in all major ways and unscrupulous in minor. She would never cheat me through the till, but Brian ate his way through a lot more crisps and Mars bars than I gave him myself, and spare light bulbs and half-full jars of Nescafé tended to go home with Mrs P. if she was short. Mrs Palissey considered such things ‘perks’ but would have regarded taking a bottle of sherry as stealing. I respected the distinction and was grateful for it, and paid her a little over the norm.

Whenever we were both there together, Mrs Palissey served the shop customers while I sat in the tiny office within earshot taking orders over the telephone and doing the paperwork, ready to help her if necessary. Some customers, particularly men, came for the wine-chat as much as the product, and her true knowledge there was sweet, dry, cheap, expensive, popular.

It was a man’s voice I could hear saying, ‘Is Mr Beach himself in?’ and Mrs Palissey’s helpfully answering, ‘Yes, sir, he’ll be right with you,’ and I rose and took the few steps into his sight.

The man there, dressed in a belted fawn raincoat, was perhaps a shade older than myself and had a noticeably authoritative manner. Without enormous surprise I watched him reach into an inner pocket for a badge of office and introduce himself as Detective Sergeant Ridger, Thames Valley police. He hoped I might be able to help him with his enquiries.

My mind did one of those quick half-guilty canters round everything possible I might have done wrong before I came to the more sensible conclusion that his presence must have something to do with the accident. And so it had, in a way, but not how I could have expected.

‘Do you know a Mr d’Alban, sir?’ He consulted his memory. ‘The Honourable James d’Alban, sir?’

‘Yes I do,’ I said. ‘He was injured yesterday at the Hawthorn party. He’s not… dying?’ I shied at the last minute away from ‘dead’.

‘No, sir, he’s not. As far as I know he’s in Battle Hospital with broken ribs, a pierced lung, and concussion.’

Enough to be going on with, I thought ironically. Poor Jimmy.

Ridger had a short over-neat haircut, watchful brown eyes, a calculator-wristwatch bristling with knobs and no gift for public relations. He said impersonally, ‘Mr d’Alban woke up to some extent in the ambulance taking him to hospital and began talking disjointedly but repeatedly about a man called Larry Trent and some unpronounceable whisky that wasn’t what it ought to be, and you, sir, who would know for certain if you tasted it.’

I just waited.

Ridger went on, ‘There was a uniformed policeman in the ambulance with Mr d’Alban, and the constable reported the substance of those remarks to us, as he was aware we had reason to be interested in them. Mr d’Alban, he said, was totally unable to answer any questions yesterday and indeed appeared not to know he was being addressed.’

I wished vaguely that Ridger would talk more naturally, not as if reading from a notebook. Mrs Palissey was listening hard though pretending not to, with Brian frowning uncomprehendingly beside her. Ridger glanced at them a shade uneasily and asked if we could talk somewhere in private.

I took him into the miniscule office, large enough only for a desk, two chairs and a heater: about five feet square, approximately. He sat in the visitors’ chair without waste of time and said, ‘We’ve tried to interview Mr d’Alban this morning but he is in Intensive Care and the doctor refused us entry.’ He shrugged. ‘They say to try tomorrow, but for our purposes tomorrow may be too late.’

‘And your purposes are… what?’ I asked.

For the first time he seemed to look at me as a person, not just as an aid to enquiries; but I wasn’t sure I liked the