Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,27

stationery. There was a view through the single window to the sweep of drive outside, my van and Ridger’s car in plain view. There was a sturdy safe the size of a tea-chest, its door wide, its interior bare: and there was the plain clothes constable sitting on the linoleum, his back against a wall, his head down between his knees.

Nothing in that place looked likely at first sight to cause mass unconsciousness. Nothing until one walked round to the chair behind the desk, and looked at the floor; and then I felt my own mouth go dry and my own heart beat suffocatingly against my ribs. There was no blood; but it was worse, much more disturbing than the accidental carnage in the tent.

On the floor, on his back, lay a man in grey trousers with a royal blue padded jacket above. Its zip was fully fastened up the front, I noted, concentrating desperately on details, and there was an embroidered crest sewn on one sleeve, and he was wearing brown shoes with grey socks. His neck was pinkish red above the jacket, the tendons showing tautly, and his arms and hands, neatly arranged, were crossed at the wrists over his chest, in the classic position of corpses.

He was dead. He had to be dead. For a head, above the bare stretched neck, he had a large white featureless globe like a giant puffball, and it was only when one fought down nausea and looked closely that one could see that from the throat up he had been entirely, smoothly and thickly encased in plaster of Paris.

SEVEN

Retreating shakily I walked out of the office with every sympathy for the constable and the assistant assistant and leaned my back against the wall outside with trembling legs.

How could anyone be so barbaric, I wondered numbly. How could anyone do that, how could anyone think of it?

Sergeant Ridger emerged into the hall from the passage and came towards me, looking with more irritation than concern at the still prostrate assistant.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ he said in his usual forceful way.

I didn’t answer. He looked sharply at my face and said with more interest, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘A dead man,’ I said. ‘In the office.’

He gave me a pitying look of superiority and walked purposefully through the door. When he came out he was three shades paler but still admirably in command and behaving every inch like a detective sergeant.

‘Did you touch anything in there?’ he asked me sharply. ‘Any surface? Would your fingerprints be on anything?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Certain?’

‘Certain.’

‘Right.’ He pulled out his radio, extended the aerial and said he needed top priority technical teams in connection with the death in suspicious circumstances of a so far unidentified male.

The disembodied voice in reply said that his message was timed at ten fifty-seven and would be acted upon. Ridger collapsed the aerial, put his head through the office door and crisply told his constable to come out of there, refrain from touching things and go outside for fresh air.

As much to himself as to me Ridger said, ‘It won’t be my case from now on.’

‘Won’t it?’

‘Murder cases go to chief inspectors or superintendents.’

I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was pleased or sorry and concluded he simply accepted the hierarchy without resentment. I said reflectively, ‘Is a man called Wilson anything to do with your force?’

‘There are about four Wilsons. Which one do you mean?’

I described the hunch-shouldered quiet-mannered investigator and Ridger nodded immediately. ‘That’s Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson. He’s not at our station, of course. He’s head of the whole district. Near retirement, they say.’

I said that I’d met him at the Hawthorn accident, and Ridger guessed that Wilson had gone there himself because of the importance of the Sheik. ‘Not his job, normally, traffic incidents.’

‘Will he be coming here?’ I asked.

‘Shouldn’t think so. He’s too senior.’

I wondered in passing why a man of such seniority should come to my shop to ask questions instead of sending a constable, but didn’t get to mentioning it to Ridger because at that point the assistant to the assistant manager began to return to life.

He was disorientated after his long faint, sitting up groggily and looking blankly at Ridger and me.

‘What happened?’ he said; and then without us telling him, he remembered. ‘Oh my God…’ He looked on the point of passing out again but instead pressed his hands over his eyes as if that would shut sight out of memory. ‘I saw… I saw…’

‘We