Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,79

that bloody sweep,’ Mrs Alexis said.

SIXTEEN

We went to four more pubs on that first day and I grew tired of the perpetual taste of neat Bell’s whisky. Ridger methodically annotated his clipboard and showed not the slightest disappointment as glass after glass proved genuine. The pub crawl was a job to him like any other, it seemed, and he would phlegmatically continue until instructed otherwise.

He was a man without rebellion, I thought, never questioning an order nor the order of things; living at the opposite end of the spectrum from that mean kicker-over-of-traces, Kenneth Charter’s son. Somewhere between the two lay the rest of us, grousing, lobbying, enduring and philosophical, making what best we could of our imperfect evolution.

Towards the end I asked him if they’d found any trace of the Bedford van used in the robbery at my shop, and perhaps because by that time he had provisionally accepted me as a full colleague he answered without his usual reservations.

‘No, we haven’t found it,’ he said. ‘And we don’t expect to.’

‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It belonged to a firm called Quality House Provisions who hadn’t noticed it was missing until one of our PCs went there early Monday asking about it. Dozy lot. They’d got several vans, they said. It’s now on the stolen-vehicle list marked urgent because of its tie-in with Zarac’s murder, but a hot van like that’s sure to be dumped somewhere already, probably in a scrap yard miles away with the number plates off. No one will find it except by luck, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Cheerful.’

‘Fact of life.’

He drove me back towards the shop, saying he would return in the morning with tomorrow’s list of suspicious premises.

‘Can’t you bring the whole list instead of in bits?’ I asked.

‘It’s still being compiled. We started today with our own patch, but we may have to wait for information from others.’

‘Mm – Do you have a first name, Sergeant?’

He looked faintly surprised. ‘John,’ he said.

‘In the pubs tomorrow, do you mind if I use it? I damn nearly called you Sergeant twice in front of barmen today.’

He considered it. ‘Yes. All right. Do you want me to call you Tony?’

‘It would make more sense.’

‘All right.’

‘What do you do off duty?’ I asked.

‘Garden,’ he said. ‘Grow vegetables, mostly.’

‘Married?’

‘Yes, been married fourteen years. Two daughters, proper little madams.’ An indulgence in his face belied the sharpness in his voice. ‘Your wife died, they say.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

He nodded. John was for business, a temporary intimacy that wouldn’t commit him to friendship. I could sense his approval, almost his relief, at my avoidance of John in private.

He left me outside my door and drove tidily away, indicator blinking, carefully efficient to the last. Mrs Palissey had been rushed off her feet, she was glad to say, and was I sure I was fit to drive myself to the hospital because to be honest, Mr Beach, I did smell a wee bit of drink.

I reflected that I’d ordered, paid for and swallowed a good deal of a dozen neat whiskies and if I still felt sober it was an illusion. I went to the hospital by taxi and received disgusted sniffs from the nursing sister (the same one), who stripped off the tube bandage to see what was cooking underneath.

‘People who drink heal more slowly,’ she said severely.

‘Do they?’

‘Yes.’

With her head not far from mine she one by one unstuck the antiseptic patches she’d applied the previous Sunday, and I tried to breathe shallowly through my nose in the opposite direction. Without much success, it seemed, judging from the offended twitch of her nostrils.

‘Most of these are healing better than you deserve,’ she said finally. ‘Three are inflamed and another looks troublesome… Do they hurt?’

‘Well… sort of.’

She nodded. ‘One should expect it. Several were more than an inch deep.’ She began sticking on new patches. ‘I’ll put a stitch in this bad one up here on your biceps, to hold it together. And keep off alcohol. There are much better pain killers.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said dryly, and thought of the boozy tomorrow and of fifty thousand pubs to Watford.

Back in the shop I saw Mrs Palissey and Brian off with the deliveries and dealt with some paperwork, and in the lull between late afternoon customers eventually got dutifully around to looking at the photostats of Kenneth Junior’s notebook.

Gerard’s firm had made a good job of their deciphering and checking and my respect for his organisation consolidated from vague expectation into recognition