Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,76

landlord’s suspicions into certainty, poor man.

Ridger ticked off the pub on the clipboard and read out the notes of our next destination, which proved to be a huge soulless place built of brick in the thirties and run for a brewery by a prim-looking tenant with a passion for fresh air. Even Ridger in his raincoat shivered before the thrown-open windows of the bar and muttered that the place looked dull. We were the first customers, it was true, but on a greyly chilly morning there were no electric lights to warm and welcome thirsty strangers.

‘Tomato juice, please,’ I said. ‘And a Bell’s whisky.’

The puritan landlord provided them, stating the price in a tight-lipped way.

‘And could we have the windows closed, please?’

The landlord looked at his watch, shrugged, and went round closing October out with ill grace. I wouldn’t sell much in my shop, I reflected, with that scowl: everyone sought to buy more than the product they asked for and it was the intangible extra that repelled or attracted a return. The whisky in that place might be fine, but I’d never go back out of choice.

‘Well?’ Ridger said, initialling the cost on our list. ‘What is it?’

‘Bell’s.’

Ridger nodded, drinking this time barely a mouthful from his glass. ‘Shall we go, then?’

‘Glad to.’

We left the landlord bitterly reopening his windows and Ridger consulted his clipboard in the car.

‘The next place is a hotel, the Peverill Arms, on the Reading to Henley road. Several complaints of thin or tasteless whisky. Complaints investigated, September 12th. Whisky found to be full strength in random samples.’

His voice told something more than the usual dry information: a reservation, almost an alarm.

‘You know the place?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been there. Disturbances.’ He fell silent with determination and started the car, driving with disapproval quivering in the stiffness of his neck. I thought from these signs that we might be on the way to a rowdy rendezvous with Hell’s Angels, but found to my amusement on arrival that Ridger’s devil was a woman.

A woman moreover of statuesque proportions, rising six feet tall with the voluptuous shape of Venus de Milo, who had forty-two inch hips.

‘Mrs Alexis,’ Ridger muttered. ‘She may not remember me.’

Mrs Alexis indeed gave our arrival scarcely a glance. Mrs Alexis was supervising the lighting of logs in the vast fireplace in the entrance lounge, an enterprise presently producing acrid smoke in plenty but few actual flames.

Apart from the heavyside layer floating in a haze below the ceiling the hall gave a lift to the entering spirit: clusters of chintz-covered armchairs, warm colours, gleaming copper jugs, an indefinable aura of success. Across the far end an extensive bar stood open but untended, and from the fireplace protruded the trousered behind of the luckless firelighter, to the interest and entertainment of scattered armchaired guests.

‘For God’s sake, Wilfred, fetch the bloody bellows,’ Mrs Alexis said distinctly. ‘You look idiotic with your arse in the air puffing like a beetroot.’

She was well over fifty, I judged, with the crisp assurance of a natural commander. Handsome, expensively dressed, gustily uninhibited. I found myself smiling in the same instant that the corners of Ridger’s mouth turned down.

The unfortunate Wilfred removed his beetroot-red face from the task and went off obediently, and Mrs Alexis with bright eyes asked what we wanted.

‘Drinks,’ I said vaguely.

‘Come along then.’ She led the way, going towards the bar. ‘It’s our first fire this winter. Always smokes like hell until we get it going.’ She frowned upwards at the drifting cloud. ‘Worse than usual, this year.’

‘The chimney needs sweeping,’ Ridger said.

Mrs Alexis gave him a birdlike look from an eye as sharp and yellow as a hawk’s. ‘It’s swept every year in the spring. And aren’t you that policeman who told me if I served the local rugger team when they’d won I should expect them to swing from the chandeliers and put beer into my piano?’

Ridger cleared his throat. I swallowed a laugh with difficulty and received the full beam from the hawk eyes.

‘Are you a policeman too?’ she asked with good humour. ‘Come to cadge for your bloody ball?’

‘No,’ I said. I could feel the smothered laugh escaping through my eyes. ‘We came for a drink.’

She believed the simple answer as much as a declaration of innocence from a red-handed thief, but went around behind her bar and waited expectantly.

‘A Bell’s whisky and a tomato juice, please.’

She pushed a glass against the Bell’s optic and waited for the full measure to descend. ‘Anything else?’

I