‘Lying up here... on the Pol Roger.’
He looked at me with curiosity. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You look... it can’t be right... you look of all things ashamed.’
I swallowed. ‘When I was up there... I was frightened sick.’
He looked round the storeroom; at the possibilities and limitations of concealment; and he said judiciously, ‘You’d have been a fool not to be scared stiff. I don’t think there’s much doubt Paul Young would have killed you if he’d found you. Killing the second time is easier, I’m told. Fear in a fearful situation is normal. Absence of fear is not. Keeping one’s nerve in spite of fear is courage.’
He had a way, I thought, of speaking without sympathy while giving incredible comfort. I didn’t thank him, but profoundly in my heart I was grateful.
‘Shall we start?’ he said as we rejoined Quigley. ‘Tony, you said the suspect cases are somewhere at the far end?’
‘Yes.’
We all moved through the central canyon between the piled-high city blocks of cartons until we reached the end wall.
‘Where now?’ Quigley demanded. ‘I see nothing wrong. This all looks exactly the same as usual.’
‘Always Bell’s whisky at the end here?’
‘Of course.’
The size of the Bell’s block would have shamed the wholesalers I regularly bought from. Even Gerard looked daunted at the possibility of having to open the whole lot to find the bad apples, which was nothing to the vision of paralytic drunkenness crossing my own imagination.
‘Er...’ I said. ‘There may be marks of some sort on the boxes. Someone was putting black felt tip squiggles on the gin when it was being checked in.’
‘Mervyn, probably,’ Quigley said.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
I walked back to the gin and looked at Mervyn’s handiwork: a hasty curling cross with two diagonals almost joined in a circle on the right side. The only problem was that it appeared also on every Bell’s case in sight. No other distinguishing mark seemed to be on any that we could see without dismantling the whole mountain.
‘Vernon must have been able to tell one from another, easily,’ Gerard said. ‘He wouldn’t risk not knowing his stuff at a glance.’
‘I don’t believe all this,’ Quigley announced irritably. ‘Vernon’s a most efficient manager.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Gerard murmured.
‘Perhaps we could find the wine,’ I suggested. ‘It might be less difficult.’
Wine was stacked in narrower blocks on the opposite wall from the spirits, the quantity in each stack less but the variety more: and I found St Estèphe and St Emilion six deep behind a fronting wall of unimpeachable Mouton Cadet.
Quigley consented to the opening of a case of St Estèphe, which laid bare the familiar false label in all its duplicity.
‘This is it,’ I said. ‘Shall we taste it to make sure?’
Quigley frowned. ‘You can’t be right. It’s come from a respectable supplier. Vintners Incorporated. There’s their name stamped on the box.’
‘Taste the wine,’ Gerard said.
I produced my corkscrew, opened a bottle and went back to the office section to search for a glass. All I could find were throwaway expanded polystyrene beakers which would have given Henri Tavel a fit: but even in the featherweight plastic the bottle’s contents were unmistakable.
‘Not St Estèphe,’ I said positively. ‘Shall I try the St Emilion?’
Quigley shrugged. I opened a case and a bottle, and tasted.
‘It’s the same,’ I said. ‘Shall we look for the other four?’
They were all there, all hidden behind respectable facades of the same sort of wine: the Mâcon behind Mâcon, and so on. The contents of all were identical, as at the Silver Moondance: and all six wines had been supplied, according to the cases, by Vintners Incorporated.
‘Um,’ Gerard said thoughtfully, ‘do Vintners Incorporated supply Bell’s whisky also?’
‘But they’re a well-known firm,’ Quigley protested.
‘Anyone,’ Gerard pointed out, ‘can cut a stencil and slap the name Vintners Incorporated onto anything.’
Quigley opened his mouth and then slowly closed it. We returned to the Bell’s and immediately found a section at the back of the block with Vintners Incorporated emblazoned obviously on the side.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Quigley said. Then, ‘Oh, very well. Taste it.’
I tasted it. Waited. Let aftertaste develop. Beyond that let nuances linger in mouth, throat and nose.
‘He can’t tell,’ Quigley said impatiently to Gerard. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. I told you.’
‘Have you ever had complaints?’ I asked eventually.
‘Of course we have,’ he said. ‘What caterer hasn’t? But none of them has been justified.’
I wondered if Martineau Park would turn up on Ridger’s lists. No hope of finding out until he came back on Wednesday.
‘This isn’t Bell’s,’ I said. ‘Too much grain, hardly any malt.’
‘Sure?’ Gerard said.
‘It’s what we’re looking for,’ I said, nodding.
‘What do you mean?’ Quigley asked, and then without waiting for an answer said aggrievedly, ‘How could Vernon possibly be so disloyal?’
His reply came through the doorway in the shape of the man himself: Vernon in his leather jacket, large, angry and alarmed.
‘What the bloody hell is going on here?’ he shouted, advancing fast down the storeroom. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
He stopped dead when Gerard moved slightly, disclosing the presence of Quigley.
He said, ‘Oh... Miles... I didn’t expect...’
He sensed something ominous in our stillness. His gaze shifted warily from Quigley to Gerard and finally to me: and I was a shock to him of cataclysmic proportions.
Nineteen
‘Let’s straighten this out,’ Gerard said matter of factly in the office section, to which we had all moved. ‘The fraud as I see it is as follows.’
His voice was as unhurried and unemotional as an accountant summing up an unexciting audit and was having a positively calming effect on Quigley if not on Vernon.
‘It appears to me from a preliminary inspection of the invoices at present to hand in this office that the following sequence of events has been taking place. And perhaps I should explain to you,’ he said directly to Vernon, ‘that the unravelling of commercial fraud is my normal and constant occupation.’
Vernon’s small intense eyes stared at him blankly and under the large drooping moustache the mouth moved in twitches, tightening and loosening with tension. He half stood, half sat, his bulk supported by the desk on which he had done his constructive paperwork, and he had folded his arms across his chest as if not accepting in the least the accusations now coming his way. The fine dew, however, stood again on his forehead, and I guessed that all he could be grateful for was that this present inquisitor was not his dangerous friend Paul Young.
‘A supplier proposed to you the following scheme,’ Gerard said. ‘You as liquor manager here would order extensively from him and in return receive a sizable commission. A kick-back. You were to sell what he provided as if it were part of your firm’s regular stock. However, what he provided was not as described on the invoice. Your firm was paying for Bell’s whisky and fine wines and receiving liquor of lower quality. You certainly knew this. It considerably increased your pay off.’
Quigley, standing by the doorway, rocked slowly on his heels as if disassociating himself from the proceedings. Gerard, seated on the only chair, dominated the moment absolutely.
‘Your provider,’ he said, ‘chose the name of a respectable supplier with whom you didn’t already do business and sent you everything stencilled “Vintners Incorporated”. You received normal-looking invoices from your supplier with that heading and your treasurer’s department sent cheques normally in return. They were perhaps negligent in not checking that the address printed on the invoice heading was truly that of Vintners Incorporated, as you have just heard me doing on the telephone, but no doubt Mr Quigley’s firm as a whole deals with dozens of different suppliers and has no habit of checking each one.’ He broke off and turned his head towards Quigley. ‘I always advise firms to check and keep checking. Such a simple matter. When an address has been entered once into a computerised system such as yours, it’s seldom ever checked. The computer goes on sending payments without question. Invoices may indeed be routinely paid without the goods ever being delivered.’ He turned back to Vernon. ‘On how many occasions did that happen?’