Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,46

the opened cases from beneath the tablecloth.

The wines on and below the table had come from St Emilion, Volnay, Côtes de Roiussillon and Graves, all red. The wines missing from the shop’s racks were of those and some from St Estèphe, Nuits St Georges, Mâcon and Valpoli-cella; also all red.

I went back out into the yard and stooped to look at the contents of the case robber number two had jabbed me with and then dropped. It contained some of the bottles from the tasting table, four of them broken.

Straightening I continued over to Gerard’s car and was relieved to see him looking no worse.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘They weren’t ordinary thieves,’ I said.

‘Go on, then.’

‘They were stealing only the sorts of wines I tasted at the Silver Moondance. The wines which weren’t what the labels said.’

He looked at me, the effort of concentration showing.

I said, ‘I bought those wines, the actual ones, at the Silver Moondance. Paid for them. Got a receipt from the barman. He must have thought I took them away with me… but in fact the police have them. Sergeant Ridger. He too gave me a receipt.’

‘You are saying,’ Gerard said slowly, ‘that if you’d brought those wines here to your shop, today they would have vanished.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Given another half-hour…’

I nodded.

‘They must be of extraordinary importance.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Be nice to know why.’

‘Why did you buy them?’

We were both talking, I saw, so as to give a semblance of normality to the abnormal reality of two ordinary Englishmen quietly bleeding from shotgun wounds in a small town on a Sunday afternoon. I thought ‘This is bloody ridiculous’ and I answered him civilly, ‘I bought them for the labels… to see if the labels themselves were forgeries. As a curio. Like collecting stamps.’

‘Ah,’ he said placidly.

‘Gerard…’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘So you should be. Stupid behaviour.’

‘Yes.’

We waited for a while longer until a police car rolled into the yard without haste, two policemen emerging enquiringly, saying they could see no evidence of any break-in at the wine shop, and did we know who had called them out.

Gerard closed his eyes. I said, ‘This is the back of the wine shop. The thieves broke in the back, not the front. If you look closely you’ll see they broke the washroom window, climbed in over the loo and unbolted the back door from the inside.’

One of them said ‘Oh,’ and went to look. The other took out his notebook. I said mildly, ‘The thieves had a shotgun and… er… shot us. They are driving away in a grey Bedford van, brown lines along the sides, licence number MMO 229Y, containing about four cases of red wine… and they’ll have gone ten miles by now, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Name, sir?’ he said blandly.

I wanted to giggle. I told him my name, however, and to do him justice he wasted no time once he realised that red wasn’t in the original weave of Gerard’s jacket. Gerard and I in due course found ourselves in the casualty department of the local major hospital where he was whisked off to regions unseen and I sat with my bare newly-washed arm on a small table while a middle-aged nursing sister expertly and unemotionally picked pellets out with a glittering instrument reminiscent of tweezers.

‘You look as if you’ve done this before,’ I observed.

‘Every year during the shooting season.’ She paused. ‘Can you feel this?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Good. Some of them have gone deep. If the local anaesthetic isn’t enough, tell me.’

‘I sure will,’ I said fervently.

She dug around for a while until there were eleven little black balls like peppercorns rattling redly in the dish, each of them big enough to kill a pheasant; and to my morbid amusement she said I could take them with me if I liked, many people did.

Carrying my jacket and with a thing like a knitted tube over antiseptic patches replacing the shredded sleeve of my shirt 1 went to find Gerard, discovering him in a cubicle, sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital-issue fawn dressing-gown over his trousers and looking abysmally bored. He had stopped bleeding both inside and out, it appeared, but several pellets were inaccessible to tweezers and he would have to stay overnight until the theatre staff returned in force in the morning. Life-and-death alone got seen to on Sundays, not small spheres of lead lodged behind collar bones.

He said he had telephoned to Tina, his wife, who was bringing his pyjamas. Tina also would retrieve his car and get the windscreen fixed;