There was an element of good riddance in that statement, I thought. He wasn’t so much grieving over his offspring’s treason as finding it thoroughly awkward. I smiled at him faintly without thinking and to my surprise he grinned suddenly and broadly back.
‘You’re right,’ he said. The little bugger can stay there, as far as I’m concerned. I’m certainly not trying to fetch him home. I don’t want him charged and tried and maybe flung in jail. I don’t, I definitely don’t want any son of mine behind bars embarrassing the whole family. Making his mother cry, spoiling his sister’s wedding next spring, messing up his brother’s chances of a degree in law. If I have to sell up here, well, I will. There’ll be enough left for me to start something else. And that’s the end of the damage that sod will do. I won’t have him casting a worse blight on the family.’
‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘When was it, did you say, that he went to Australia?’
‘Two weeks ago yesterday, laddie. I took him to Heathrow myself. When I got home I found this notebook on the floor of the car, fallen out of his pocket. I guess he’s sweating now, hoping like hell he dropped it anywhere but at my very feet. I opened it to make sure it was his.’ Charter shrugged, locking it back into the desk drawer. ‘It was his, all right. His writing. Nothing much in it, just a few telephone numbers and lists of things to do. He always made lists of things to do, right from when he was small.’
Something like regret touched Kenneth Charter’s mouth. Any son, I supposed, was loved when small, before he grew up a disappointment.
‘The tanker’s number sort of shouted at me,’ he said. ‘I felt sick, I’ll tell you. My own son! There were the police and the Customs and Excise chasing all over the place looking for the crook who tipped off the thieves, and he’d been right there in my own house.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘So then I took advice from a business I knew who’d had their troubles sorted out for them quietly, and I got on to Deglet’s, and finally Mr McGregor, here. And there you have it, laddie.’
Kenneth Charter’s son, I was thinking, had gone to Australia ten days after the scotch had been stolen and a week before the horsebox had rolled into the marquee. If he was truly in Australia, he’d had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Silver Moondance’s liquid assets or the murder of Zarac. For such small crumbs his father could be grateful.
‘Would it be easy for your son to find out when exactly the tanker would be going to fetch whisky?’ I asked diffidently.
‘Back in April, yes, easy. In June, not so easy. Last month, damned difficult. But there you are, I didn’t know I had to defend myself so close to home.’ Kenneth Charter got to his feet, his big body seeming to rise forever. He grasped the frame of the map of the British Isles and gave it a tug, and the map opened away from the wall like a door, showing a second chart beneath.
The revealed chart was an appointments calendar with registration numbers in a long column down the left hand side, and dates across the top.
‘Tankers,’ Charter said succinctly, pointing to the registration numbers. ‘Thirty-four of them. There’s UNP 786 Y, sixth from the top.’
All the spaces across from that number had a line drawn through: tanker out of commission. For many of the others some of the spaces across were filled with stuck on labels of many colours, blue, green, red, yellow, grey, purple, orange, each label bearing a handwritten message.
‘We use the labels to save time,’ Charter said. ‘Purple for instance is always hydrochloric acid. We can see at a glance which tanker is carrying it. On the label it says where from, where to. Grey is gin, yellow is whisky. Red is wine. Blue is sulphuric acid. Green is any of several disinfectants. And so on. My secretary, whom I trust absolutely, she’s been with me twenty years, writes the labels and keeps the chart. We don’t as a company tell the drivers where they’re going or what they’re carrying until the moment they set out. They change tankers regularly. We often switch drivers at the last minute. Some of the loads could be dangerous, see, if they fell into the wrong hands. We have an absolute rule that all the tanker doors have to be locked if the drivers so much as set foot out of the cabs, and in all three stolen loads the drivers swore they did that, and found nothing to alarm them when they returned. We’ve been careful and until this year we’ve been fortunate.’ His voice was suddenly full of suppressed fury. ‘It took my own son... my own son... to crack our system.’
‘He could come in here, I suppose,’ I said.
‘Not often, he didn’t. I told him if he wouldn’t work in the company, he could stay away. He must have sneaked in here somehow, but I don’t know when. He knew about the chart, of course. But since the first two thefts I’ve not allowed the whisky labels to be written up, just in case the leak was in our own company. Yellow labels, see? All blank. So if he saw the yellow label for that tanker for the Wednesday, it wouldn’t say where it was picking up. Grey for gin, on the Monday, that was written up, but only for the pick up, not the destination. If someone wanted to steal the return load of scotch they’d have to follow the tanker all the way from Berger’s Gin distillery to find out where it was going.’
I frowned, thinking the theory excessive, but Gerard was nodding as if such dedication to the art of theft was commonplace.
‘Undoubtedly what happened,’ Gerard said. ‘But the question remains, to whom did Zarac pass on that message? He didn’t take part in the event himself. He wasn’t away from the Silver Moondance long enough, and was definitely at his post both the Tuesday and Wednesday lunch-times and also in the evenings until after midnight. We checked.’
My mind wandered from the problem I didn’t consider very closely my own (and in any case unanswerable) and I found my attention fastening on the few red labels on the chart. All the information on them had been heavily crossed out, as indeed it had on the grey labels as well. Kenneth Charter followed my gaze, his hairy Scots eyebrows rising.
‘The wine,’ I said, almost apologetically. ‘Didn’t you say red for wine?’
‘Aye, I did. All those shipments have had to be cancelled. Normally we fetch it from France and take it direct to the shippers near here, who bottle it themselves. We used to carry a lot more wine once, but they bottle more of it in France now. Half the bottling plants over here have been scratching round for new business. Hard times, laddie. Closures. Not their fault. The world moves on and changes. Always happening. Spend your life learning to make longbows, and someone invents guns.’
He closed the chart into its secrecy behind the map and dusted his hands on his trousers as if wiping off his son’s perfidy.
‘There’s life in tankers yet,’ he observed. ‘D’you want to see them?’
I said yes, please, as they were clearly his pride, and we left his office with him carefully locking the door behind us. He led the way not to the outside but down a passage lined on either side by office doors and through a heavier door, also locked, at the far end. That door led directly into a large expanse given to the maintenance and cleaning of the silver fleet. There was all the paraphernalia of a commercial garage: inspection pit, heavy-duty jacks, benches with vices, welding equipment, a rack of huge new tyres. Also, slung from the ceiling, chains and machinery for lifting. Two tankers stood in this space, receiving attention from men in brown overalls who from their manner already knew Charter was around on Sunday afternoon and gave Gerard and myself cursory incurious glances.
‘Over there,’ Charter said, pointing, ‘down that side, inside that walled section, we clean the tanks, pumps, valves and hoses. The exteriors go through a carwash outside.’ He began walking down the garage, expecting us to follow. The mechanics called him Ken and told him there was trouble with an axle, and I looked with interest at the nearest tanker, which seemed huge to me, indoors.