Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,38

had sprung like recent mushrooms in a concrete field. The fourth on the right bore the words ‘Charter Carriers Ltd’ in large red letters on a white board attached to the front, while down the side, like piglets to a sow, stretched a long row of silver tankers side by side, engines inwards, sterns out.

NINE

Kenneth Charter wasn’t in the least what I expected, which was, I suppose, a burly North Londoner with a truculent manner. The man who came into the entrance hall to greet us as we pushed through the glass front door was tall, thin, reddish-haired and humorous with an accent distinctly more Scottish than Gerard’s faint Highland.

‘Is this the consultant?’ he said with a lilt. He found my youth more a matter of laughter than concern, it seemed. ‘No greybeard, are you?’ He shook my hand firmly. ‘Come away in, then. And how are you today, Mr McGregor?’

He led the way into a square uninspiring cream-walled office and waved us to two upright armless chairs facing a large unfussy modern desk. There was a brown floor-covering of utilitarian matting, a row of grey filing cabinets, a large framed map of the British Isles and a settled chill in the air which might or might not have been because it was Sunday. Kenneth Charter seemed not to notice it and offered no comment. He had the Scots habit, I suspected, of finding sin in comfort and virtue in thrift and believing morality grew exclusively in a cold climate.

Gerard and I sat in the offered chairs. Kenneth Charter took his place behind his desk in a swivelling chair which he tilted recklessly backward.

‘How much have you told this bonny expert?’ he said, and listened without visible anxiety to Gerard’s recapitulation.

‘Well, now,’ he said to me cheerfully at the end, ‘You’ll want to know what liquid you’re looking for. Or could you guess, laddie, could you guess?’ His very blue eyes were quizzically challenging, and I did a quick flip and a turnover through past occasional nips in customers’ houses and sought for a check against the memory from the bar of the Silver Moondance and said on an instinctive, unreasoned impulse, ‘Rannoch.’

Charter looked cynical and said to Gerard, ‘You told him, then.’

Gerard shook his head. ‘I didn’t.’ He himself was looking smug. His consultant, it seemed, had come up trumps at the first attempt.

‘I guessed,’ I said mildly. ‘I sell that make. I’ve tasted it quite a few times. There aren’t so many whiskies that would be shipped in bulk and bottled in England. Rannoch… just fitted.’

‘Very well, then.’ He opened a drawer in his desk and produced from it a full bottle of Rannoch whisky, the familiar label adorned with an imposing male kilted figure in red and yellow tartan. The seal, I noticed, was unbroken, and Charter showed no signs of altering that.

‘A Christmas gift from the bottling company,’ he said.

‘Last Christmas?’ I asked.

‘Of course last Christmas. We’ll not be getting one this year, now will we?’

‘I guess not,’ I said meekly. ‘I meant… it’s a long time for the bottle to be full.’

He chuckled. ‘I don’t drink alcohol, laddie. Addles your brains, rots your gut. What’s more, I can’t stand the taste. We need someone like you because I wouldn’t recognise that stolen load of firewater if it turned up in the pond in my garden.’

The goldfish would tell him, I thought. They’d die.

‘Did you have a profile of that load?’ I asked.

‘A what?’

‘Um… its composition. What it was blended from. You could get a detailed list from the distiller, I should think. The profile is a sort of chemical analysis in the form of a graph… it looks something like the skyline of New York. Each different blend shows a different skyline. The profile is important to some people… the Japanese import scotch by profile alone, though actually a perfect-looking profile can taste rotten. Anyway, profiles are minutely accurate. Sort of like human tissue typing… a lot more advanced than just a blood test.’

‘All I can tell you is it was fifty-eight per cent alcohol by volume,’ Charter said. ‘The same strength as always with Rannoch. It’s here on the manifest.’ He produced from a drawer a copy of the Customs and Excise declaration and pushed it across for me to see. ‘I don’t ask what’s in the stuff, I just ferry it.’

‘We’ll get on to the profile straight away,’ Gerard murmured.

‘The Customs people probably have already,’ I said. ‘They’ll have the equipment. A gas