Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,37

same driver but yes it was always the same tanker. The tanker turned up every time abandoned in Scotland in transport cafe carparks, but always with so many extra miles on the clock that it could have been driven as far as London or Cardiff and back.’

Another pause, then he said, ‘The drivers don’t remember what happened to them.’

I blinked. ‘Don’t remember?’

‘No. They remember setting off. They remember driving as far as the English border, where they all stopped at a motorway service station for a pee. They stopped at two different service stations. None of them remembers anything else except waking up in a ditch. Never the same ditch.’ He smiled. ‘After the second theft Kenneth Charter made it a rule that on that run no one was to eat or drink in cafes. The drivers had to take what they wanted with them in the cab. All the same they still had to stop for nature. The police say the thieves must have been following the tanker each time, waiting for that. Then when the driver was out of the cab, they put in an open canister of gas… perhaps nitrous oxide, which has no smell and acts fast… it’s what dentists use… and when the driver climbed back in he’d be unconscious before he could drive off.’

‘How regular was that run?’ I asked.

‘Normally twice a week.’

‘Always the same tanker?’

‘No,’ he said contentedly. ‘Charter’s keep four tankers exclusively for drinkable liquids. One of those. The other three made the run just as often, but weren’t touched. It may be coincidence, maybe not.’

‘How long ago was the last load stolen?’ I asked.

‘Three weeks last Wednesday.’

‘And before that?’

‘One in April, one in June.’

‘That’s three in six months,’ I said, surprised.

‘Yes, exactly.’

‘No wonder the insurers are kicking up a fuss.’

‘Mm.’ He drove quietly for a while and then said, ‘Every time the scotch was destined for the same place, a bottling plant at Watford, north of London. The scotch didn’t however always come from the same distillery, or the same warehouse. The stolen loads came from three different places. The last lot came from a warehouse near Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire, but it set off from there in the normal way and we don’t think that’s where the trouble is.’

‘In the bottling plant?’ I asked.

‘We don’t know, for sure, but we don’t think so. The lead to the Silver Moondance looked so conclusive that it was decided we should start from there.’

‘What was the lead?’ I said.

He didn’t answer immediately but in the end said, ‘I think Kenneth Charter had better tell you himself.’

‘O.K.’

‘I should explain,’ he said presently, ‘that when firms call us in it’s often because there are things they don’t necessarily want to tell the police. Companies very often like to deal privately, for instance, with frauds. By no means do they always want to prosecute, they just want the fraud stopped. Public admission that a fraud was going on under their noses can be embarrassing.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Kenneth Charter told me certain things in confidence which he didn’t tell the police or the Customs and Excise. He wants his transport firm to survive, but not at any price. Not if the price in personal terms is too high. He agreed I should bring you in as a consultant, but I’ll leave it to him to decide how much he wants you to know.’

‘All right,’ I said peacefully.

We left the motorway and Gerard began threading his way across the semi-suburban sprawl to the north of London where one town ran into another without noticeable difference.

‘You’re an undemanding sort of man,’ Gerard observed after a while.

‘What should I demand?’

‘How much a consultancy fee is, perhaps. Conditions, maybe. Assurances.’

‘Life’s like the weather,’ I said wryly. ‘What comes, comes. Even with a sunny forecast you can get wet.’

‘A fatalist.’

‘It rains. You can’t stop it.’

He glanced at my face for almost the first time on the journey, but I doubt if he read much there. I’d spoken not bitterly but with a sort of tiredness, result of failing to come to terms with my own private deluge. I was in truth quite interested in the stolen scotch and the tankers, but it was on an upper and minor level, not down where it mattered.

As if sensing it he said, ‘You’ll do your best for me?’

‘Such as it is,’ I assured him. ‘Yes.’

He nodded as if a doubt had been temporarily stilled and turned off the road into an industrial area where small factories