Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,19

walls, ‘… as being positively sinful. Forbidden. Pernicious. Much as we regard cocaine. To him I’m a pusher. In his own country I’d be in jail, or worse. I wouldn’t have introduced myself to him. Not unless I wanted to invite contempt.’

‘I see,’ he said, almost nodding, contemplating the Islamic view. Then he slightly pursed his lips, approaching, I guessed, the question he had really come to ask.

‘Think back,’ he said, ‘to when you were outside the tent, when the horsebox rolled.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why were you out there?’

I told him about fetching more champagne.

‘And when you went out, the horsebox was already rolling?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘When I went out I glanced up at the cars and everything was all right. I remember noting that no one had yet left… and hoped I’d taken enough champagne to last out.’

‘Was there anyone near the horsebox?’

‘No.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘Yes. No one that I could see.’

‘You’ve consulted your memory… before this moment?’

I half smiled. ‘Yes. You might say so.’

He sighed. ‘Did you see anyone at all anywhere near any of the cars?’

‘No. Except… only a child with a dog.’

‘Child?’

‘They weren’t near the horsebox. Nearer the Sheik’s Mercedes, really.’

‘Can you describe the child?’

‘Well…’ I frowned. ‘A boy.’

‘Clothes?’

I looked away from him, gazing vacantly at the racks of wine, thinking back. ‘Dark trousers… perhaps jeans… and a dark blue sweater.’

‘Hair?’

‘Urn… light brown, I suppose. Not blond, not black.’

‘Age?’

I pondered, looking again at the patient questioner. ‘Young. Small. Four, I should think.’

‘Why are you so definite?’

‘I’m not… his head was still big in proportion to his body.’

Wilson’s eyes glimmered deeply. ‘What sort of dog?’ he said.

I stared vaguely once more into the distance, seeing the child on the hill. ‘A whippet,’ I said.

‘On a leash?’

‘No… running and turning back towards the boy.’

‘What sort of shoes did the boy have?’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I only saw him for a couple of seconds.’

His mouth twitched. He looked down at his hands and then up again. ‘No one else?’

‘No.’

‘How about the Sheik’s chauffeur?’

I shook my head. ‘He might have been sitting in the car, but one couldn’t tell. It had tinted windows, as you saw.’

He stirred and said thank you and began to get to his feet.

‘Incidentally,’ I said, ‘someone stole three cases of champagne and some other bottles out of my van sometime after the accident. I need to report the theft to the police before I claim insurance… May I report it to you?’

He gave me a smile. ‘I will note that you have reported it.’

‘Thanks.’

He held his hand out to me over the counter and I shook it. ‘It’s I who thank you, Mr Beach,’ he said.

‘I haven’t been much help.’

He smiled his small uncommunicative smile, nodded benignly, and went away.

Good grief, I thought inconsequentially, watching his hunched departing back, one hundred and fifty goblets were lying in splinters in the Hawthorns’ back garden, and it was all very well talking of insurance, I was due to supply those very glasses to the Thames Ladies Christmas Charities fund-raising wine and cheese party on the following day, Tuesday, which I had forgotten clean about.

Tentatively I rang the Hawthorns’ number, not wanting to overload Flora but to ask all the same how many glasses if any remained intact, and I got not Flora but an answering machine with Jimmy’s voice, loud, healthy and languid, inviting me to leave my name, number, and message.

I complied, wondering how Jimmy was doing in intensive care, and when Mrs Palissey came back I took Brian with me to the wholesalers, where he helped me shift umpteen cases from the stores onto trolleys, and from those trolleys to other trolleys at the pay desk, for rolling out to the van, and from the second trolleys into the van, and, back at the shop, from the van into the storeroom. My own muscles, after roughly twelve years of such exercise, would have rivalled a fork-lift truck, and Brian’s, too, were coming along nicely. He grinned while he worked. He enjoyed lifting the cases. Two-at-a-time he had begun to scorn; he liked me to pile him with three.

Brian never talked much, which I appreciated. He sat placidly beside me in the van on the way back, lips apart as usual, and I wondered what went on in that big vacant head, and how much one could teach him if one tried. He’d learned quite a lot in the three or so months he’d been with me, I reflected. He was brilliantly useful compared with day one.

He unloaded the van