Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,32

string of command, wouldn’t you say?’ murmured Wilson. ‘Trent himself, a manager, an assistant, an assistant to the assistant?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, moderately disagreeing. ‘A place like that, open long hours, half the night sometimes, they’d need that number. And the assistant assistant struck me as just a general dogsbody in togs above his station… poor chap.’

Wilson communed vaguely for a while with the South African sherries and then said, ‘Would you know Paul Young again, Mr Beach? Could you pick him out in a roomful of people?’

‘Yes,’ I said positively. ‘As long as I saw him again within a year. After that… I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘And in a photograph?’

‘Um… it would depend.’

He nodded noncommittally and shifted on his chair.

‘I’ve read Sergeant Ridger’s reports. You’ve been most helpful all along, Mr Beach.’

‘Sergeant Ridger did tell me,’ I said mildly, ‘who you are. I asked him if he knew of you, and he told me. And I’ve been surprised, you know, that you’ve come here yourself both times.’

He smiled patiently. ‘I like to keep my hand in, Mr Beach, now and again. When I’m passing, you might say, for a bottle of wine.’

He stood up slowly, preparing to go, and I asked him the thing that had been on my mind since Tuesday.

‘Was Zarac… the wine waiter… dead… before…?’

I stopped in mid-sentence and he finished it for me. ‘Dead before the plaster was applied? Since you ask, Mr Beach, no, he wasn’t. Zarac died of suffocation.’

‘Oh,’ I said numbly.

‘It is possible,’ Wilson said unemotionally, ‘that he had been knocked unconscious first. You may find that thought more bearable perhaps.’

‘Is it true?’

‘It’s not for me to say before the coroner has decided.’

There was a bleakness, I saw, behind his undemanding face. He had been out there for a long time in the undergrowth and found it easy to believe in all manner of horrors.

‘I don’t think,’ I said, ‘that I would like your job.’

‘Whereas yours, Mr Beach,’ he said, his gaze again roving the bottles, ‘yours I would like very much.’

He gave me the small smile and the unemphatic handshake and went on his way: and I thought of people bandaging all over a live man’s head and then soaking the bandage with water to turn it to rock.

EIGHT

Flora sent Gerard McGregor down to see me: or so he said, that Friday evening, when he came into the shop.

He looked just as he had on Sunday when tunnelling away and hauling trestle tables through under the canvas for roofs. Tall, in his fifties, going grey. Ultra-civilised, with experienced eyes. Gerard with a soft J.

We shook hands again, smiling.

‘My wife and I took Flora home to dinner with us yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘We insisted. She said it was chiefly thanks to you that she was feeling better.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘She talked about you for hours.’

‘How utterly boring. She can’t have done.’

‘You know how Flora talks.’ His voice was affectionate. ‘We heard all about you and Larry Trent and the goings on at the Silver Moondance.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Whatever for? Fascinating stuff.’

Not for Zarac, I thought.

Gerard McGregor was looking around him with interest.

‘We don’t live so far from Flora,’ he said. ‘Five miles or so, but we shop in the opposite direction, not in this town. I’ve never been here before.’ He began to walk down the row of wine racks, looking at labels. ‘From what Flora said of the size of the trade you do, I somehow thought your shop would be bigger.’ His faintly Scottish voice was without offence, merely full of interest.

‘It doesn’t need to be bigger,’ I explained. ‘In fact large brightly-lit expanses tend to put real wine-lovers off, if anything. This is just right, to my mind. There’s room to show examples of everything I normally sell. I don’t keep more than a dozen of many things out here. The rest’s in the storeroom. And everything moves in and out pretty fast.’

The shop itself was about twenty-five feet by thirteen, or eight by four if one counted in metres. Down the whole of one long side there were wine racks in vertical columns, each column capable of holding twelve bottles (one case), the top bottle resting at a slant for display. Opposite the wine racks was the counter with, behind it, the shelves for spirits and liqueurs.

More wine racks took up the furthest wall except for the door through to the office and storeroom, and on every other inch of wall-space there were shelves for sherries, beers, mixers