Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,68

going to tell me why the substitute wines were equally as important as the substitute scotch at the Silver Moondance.’

I glanced at him, hearing the hardening tone in the sub-Scottish voice and seeing the same change in him as there had been in the car the previous Sunday: the shedding of the social shell, the emergence of the investigator. His eyes were steady and intent, his face concentrated, the mouth unsmiling: and I answered to this second man with recognition and relief, dealing in facts and guesses dispassionately.

‘People who steal scotch whisky,’ I said, ‘usually go for a shipment of bottles in cases. The proceeds are ready to sell… the receiver’s probably already lined up. There’s no difficulty. It’s all profit. But if you steal a tankerful of the liquid in bulk you have the trouble and expense in bottling it. Cost of bottles, cost of labour, all sorts of incidentals.’

‘Right,’ he said nodding.

‘There were six thousand gallons of scotch at roughly fifty-eight per cent alcohol content in each of Kenneth Charter’s three lost loads.’

‘Right.’

‘Each load was of a higher concentration than is ever sold for drinking. When they received the tankerload the Rannoch people would have added water to bring the scotch down to retail strength, around forty per cent alcohol by volume.’

Gerard listened and nodded.

‘At that point they’d have enough scotch to fill approximately fifty thousand bottles of standard size.’

Gerard’s mouth opened slightly with surprise. ‘Kenneth Charter never said that.’

‘He shifts the stuff, he doesn’t bottle it. He maybe never did the arithmetic. Anyway, with three tankersful we’re talking about one hundred and fifty thousand bottles in six months, and that’s not something you can mess about with in the back yard.’

He was silent for a while thinking about it, and then said merely, ‘Go on.’

‘On each occasion the whole load was pumped out of the tanker pretty fast, as the tanker was found empty on the following day.’

‘Right.’

‘So unless the point of the operation was simply to ruin Kenneth Charter, in which case it’s conceivable the loads were dumped in ditches like the drivers, the scotch was pumped from the tanker into some sort of storage.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘So the logical place for the tanker to be unloaded was at a bottling plant.’

‘Yes, but it never reached there.’

‘It never reached Rannoch’s bottling plant. There’s a difference.’

‘All right.’ His eyes smiled. ‘Go on.’

‘Fifty thousand bottles three times over isn’t going to keep any reasonable plant in operation for anything like six months. Small chateaux bottle that much themselves in a few weeks without blinking. So… um… what if in between times the whisky bottling changed over to wine… to Silver Moondance wine, to be precise.’

‘Ah.’ It was a deep note, an acknowledgement that we’d arrived at the centre of things. ‘Carry on.’

‘Well… with a bottling plant it would be easy to fill any shape of bottle from a single source of wine… and the shapes of the bottles at the Silver Moondance fitted the labels: claret bottles for claret labels, burgundy bottles for burgundy labels and so on. The very fact that there were both scotch and wine under false labels at the Silver Moondance… well, for the simplest explanation I’d bet you a pea to a case of Krug they were bottled in the same place.’

Gerard drank some of his wine absentmindedly.

‘Where?’ he said succinctly.

‘Mm… that’s the rub.’

‘Any ideas?’

‘It did occur to me that it might be in one of those plants that Kenneth Charter described, that got into difficulties or went bust when the French started bottling more of their own wines. I mean… suppose someone came to you if you were on the verge of bankruptcy and offered you work. Even if you knew it was crooked you might do it and keep quiet. Or suppose a bottling plant was for sale or lease at a ridiculous price, which they’re bound to have been… if the game looked worth it… if it was going to go on maybe for years…’

‘Yes,’ Gerard said. ‘It’s possible.’ He gave it about five seconds’ thought. ‘So provisionally we’re looking for a bottling plant. Now let’s shelve that for a moment.’ He paused again, considering, and then said, ‘In Deglet’s we often work in pairs, discussing a case, bouncing ideas off each other, coming up sometimes with things neither of us had considered on our own. It’s a way that I’m used to, that I like… but my usual partner’s in London, and frankly I’m too tired to go there… and