I couldn’t tell from his voice whether he was pleased or sorry and concluded he simply accepted the hierarchy without resentment. I said reflectively, ‘Is a man called Wilson anything to do with your force?’
‘There are about four Wilsons. Which one do you mean?’
I described the hunch-shouldered quiet-mannered investigator and Ridger nodded immediately. ‘That’s Detective Chief Superintendent Wilson. He’s not at our station, of course. He’s head of the whole district. Near retirement, they say.’
I said that I’d met him at the Hawthorn accident, and Ridger guessed that Wilson had gone there himself because of the importance of the Sheik. ‘Not his job, normally, traffic incidents.’
‘Will he be coming here?’ I asked.
‘Shouldn’t think so. He’s too senior.’
I wondered in passing why a man of such seniority should come to my shop to ask questions instead of sending a constable, but didn’t get to mentioning it to Ridger because at that point the assistant to the assistant manager began to return to life.
He was disorientated after his long faint, sitting up groggily and looking blankly at Ridger and me.
‘What happened?’ he said; and then without us telling him, he remembered. ‘Oh, my God...’ He looked on the point of passing out again but instead pressed his hands over his eyes as if that would shut sight out of memory. ‘I saw... I saw...’
‘We know what you saw, sir,’ said Ridger without sympathy. ‘Can you identify that man? Is he the manager?’
The assistant assistant shook his head and spoke in a muffled voice through his hands. ‘The manager’s fat.’
‘Go on,’ Ridger prompted.
‘It’s Zarac,’ said the assistant assistant. ‘It’s his jacket...’
‘Who’s Zarac?’ Ridger said.
‘The wine waiter.’ The assistant assistant rose unsteadily to his feet and transferred his hands to his mouth before departing with heaving stomach towards the door marked ‘Guys’.
The wine waiter,’ Ridger repeated flatly. ‘Might have guessed.’
I pushed myself off the wall. ‘You don’t actually need me here, do you? I should go back to my shop.’
He thought it over briefly and agreed, saying he supposed he could find me easily if I were wanted. I left him standing virtual guard over the office door and went outside to my van, passing the constable who had relieved himself of his breakfast onto the drive.
‘Gripes,’ he said weakly in an endearing local accent, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’
‘Not an everyday sight,’ I agreed, taking refuge in flippancy: and I thought that I too had seen enough horrors since Sunday to last a lifetime.
I bought more glasses at Tuesday lunchtime and ferried them and the wines to the Thames Ladies for their fund-raising; and little else of note happened for the next three days.
The news media reported briefly on the man with the plaster topping, but no words, I thought, conveyed anything like the shock of actually seeing that football-head lying there blank and inhuman, attached to a human neck.
Cutting off the plaster at the autopsy had confirmed the identity of the victim: Feydor Zaracievesa, British born of Polish descent, succinctly known as Zarac. He had been employed as wine waiter for eighteen months at the Silver Moondance, which had itself been open for business for almost three years. An inquest would shortly be held, it was said, and meanwhile the police were pursuing their enquiries.
Good luck to them, I thought. Pursue away.
On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday Mrs Palissey and Brian set off with the deliveries at four o’clock and at approximately four-thirty I stuck a notice on the shop door saying ‘Open 6–9 pm’ and scooted up the hill to go round the yard with Flora.
Shop hours as far as I was concerned were flexible, and I’d found it didn’t much matter what one did as long as one said what one was doing. The pattern of when most customers came and when they stayed away was on the whole constant: a stream in the mornings, predominantly women, a trickle of either sex in the afternoons, a healthy flow, mostly men, in the evenings.
When Emma had been alive we had opened the shop on Friday and Saturday evenings only, but since I’d been alone I’d added Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, not simply for the extra trade, but for the company. I enjoyed the evenings. Most of the evening people came for wine, which I liked best to selclass="underline" a bottle to go with dinner, champagne for a job promotion, a present on the way to a party.
It was life on a small scale, I dared say. Nothing that would change history or the record books. A passage through time of ordinary mortal dimensions: but with Emma alongside it had contented.
I had never had much ambition, a sadness to my mother and a source of active irritation to my Wellington schoolmasters, one of whom on my last term’s report had written acidly, ‘Beach’s conspicuous intelligence would take him far if only he would stir himself to choose a direction.’ My inability to decide what I wanted to be (except not a soldier) had resulted in my doing nothing much at all. I passed such exams as were thrust my way but hadn’t been drawn to university. French, my best subject, was scarcely in itself a career. I didn’t feel like a stockbroker or anything tidy in the City. I wasn’t artistic. Had no ear for music. Couldn’t face life behind a desk and couldn’t ride boldly enough for racing. My only real ability throughout my teens had been a party trick of telling all makes of chocolate blindfold, which had hardly at that time seemed a promising foundation for gainful employment.
Six months after I left school I thought I might go to France for a while, ostensibly to learn the language better, but unhappily admitting to myself that it was to avoid being seen all too clearly as a disappointing failure at home. I could stand being a failure much better on my own.
By total chance, because of friends of friends of my despairing mother’s, I was despatched to live as a paying guest with a family in Bordeaux, and it had meant nothing to me at first that my unknown host was a wine shipper. It was Monsieur Henri Tavel himself who had discovered that I could tell one wine from another, once I’d tasted them. He was the only adult I’d ever met who was impressed by my trick with the chocolate. He had laughed loudly and begun to set me tests with wine each evening, and I’d grown more confident the more I got them right.
It had still seemed a game, however, and at the end of the planned three months I’d returned home with still no idea of what to do next. My mother applauded my French accent but said it was hardly to be considered a lifetime’s achievement, and I spent my days sneaking out of her sight as much as possible.
She had had to come looking for me the day the letter came, about a month after my return. She held it out in front of her, frowning at it as if it were incomprehensible.
‘Monsieur Tavel suggests you go back,’ she said. ‘He is offering to train you. Train you in what, Tony darling?’
‘Wine,’ I said, feeling the first pricking of interest for many a long day.
‘You?’ She was puzzled more than amazed.
‘To learn the trade, I expect,’ I said.
‘Good heavens.’
‘Can I go?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to?’ she said, astonished. ‘I mean, have you actually found something you’d like to do?’
‘I don’t seem to be able to do anything else.’
‘No,’ she agreed prosaically: and she paid my fare again and my board and lodging with the family and a substantial fee to Monsieur Tavel for tuition.
Monsieur Tavel gave me a year’s intensive instruction, taking me everywhere himself, showing me every stage of wine-making and shipping, teaching me rapidly what he’d spent a long lifetime learning, expecting me never to need telling twice.
I grew to feel at home in the Quai des Chatrons, where many doors into the warehouses were too narrow for modern lorries as a legacy from an ancient tax and where no wine could still be stored within a hundred yards of the street because it had been thought the vibration from horses’ hooves on the quayside would upset it. In the de Luze warehouse, stretching nearly half a mile back, the staff went from end to end by bicycle.