The hinges creaked as I pulled the door open. My body had almost given up on separate nervous reactions: how could one sweat in some places while one’s mouth was in drought? We went into the building and found it was the store for goods already bottled and boxed ready for sending out. There was a great deal more space than merchandise. There were three lonely pallets laden with cases marked ‘House Wine — Red’, addressed to a restaurant in Surrey and four other pallets for the same place marked ‘House Wine-White’: and that was all.
‘The paperwork for that lot is in the office,’ Gerard said. ‘The restaurant bought and shipped the wine, Naylor bottled it. Regular consignments, it looked like.’
We went back into the yard and locked the dispatch doors.
‘Main plant,’ I said, looking at the high building opposite. ‘Well... let’s see what it’s like.’
The key duly let us in. The building was old, it was clear at once, built by grandfather Naylor sturdily to last for generations. Internal walls were extensively tiled in white to shoulder height, cream-painted (long ago) above. From the central entrance some stairs on the left wound upwards, and Gerard chose to go that way first as his paper-oriented mind looked instinctively for most enlightenment aloft: so we went upstairs and to a great extent he was right.
Upstairs, among much unused and dusty space, we found a locked door to further reaches, a door that opened like Sesame to the ‘label room’ key.
‘Great heavens,’ Gerard said. ‘Is all this usual?’
We stood looking at an expanse of floor covered with heaps of bundles of labels, thousand upon thousand of them altogether, in an apparent muddle but no doubt in some sort of order.
‘Quite usual,’ I said. ‘No one ever tries to order exactly the right number of labels needed for any particular job. You always have to have more, for contingencies. The unused ones just tend to be dumped, and they pile up.’
‘So they do.’
‘Labels in constant use are probably in those small drawers over there. The ones looking like safe deposit boxes. Some of those drawers have labels on the front... they’ll have those labels in the drawers.’
‘What we want are St Estèphe and all the rest, and Bell’s.’
‘Mm.’
We both set to, but none of the fake labels turned up, very much to our dismay.
‘We need something,’ Gerard said. ‘We need proof.’
We didn’t find it in the label room.
At the back of the label room a closed door led presumably to another room beyond, and I suggested taking a look through there, on the off chance.
‘All right,’ Gerard said, shrugging.
The door was locked and the ‘label room’ key didn’t fit. Gerard diagnosed another mortice job and took what seemed to be an age with his probe turning the mechanism, but eventually that door too yielded to him, and we went through.
Inside that room there was a printing press. A clean, oiled, sleek modern machine capable of turning out impeccable labels.
Some of the press’s recent work was still in uncut sheets: rows and rows of Bell’s upon Bell’s, brilliant in colour, indistinguishable from the real thing.
Neither Gerard nor I said a word. We turned instead to the cupboards and boxes stacked around the walls, and we found them all, the neatly printed oblongs saying St Estèphe, St Emilion, Valpolicella, Mâcon, Volnay and Nuits St Georges.
‘It’s the Château de Chenonceaux,’ I said suddenly.
‘What is?’
‘On this St Estèphe label. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. It’s the Château de Chenonceaux on the Loire, without its bridge.’
‘I’m glad you know what you’re talking about.’
He was taking one each of all the fake labels and stowing them tenderly in his wallet, tucking them away in his jacket. We left everything else as it was but on the way out to my relief he didn’t stop to relock the door. We went down again to the hall and from there to a door on the left which unlocked to ‘vats’.
One could immediately smell the wine; a warm rosy air-filling aroma like a lungful of earthy fruit. Gerard lifted his head in surprise and to me it felt like coming home.
‘I’d no idea,’ he said.
A small lobby opened into two long halls, the larger, on the left, containing a row of ten huge round vats down each side. Each vat, painted dark red, was eight feet high, six feet in diameter, and sat eighteen inches above ground level on thick brick pillars. Each vat, on its front, had large valves for loading and unloading, a small valve for testing, a quantity gauge, and a holder into which one could slot a card identifying the present contents.
‘They’re vast,’ Gerard said.
‘Kenneth Charter’s tanker would fill four of these. That size vat holds fifteen hundred gallons. You can get them bigger.’
‘Thanks.’
I smiled. ‘Let’s see what’s in them.’
We read the contents cards. Most of them said ‘empty’, the quantity gauges reading zero. The three nearest the entrance on the left side bore ‘Keely house wine, shipped October 1st’, and another further along, ‘Dinzag private cuve, shipped Sept 24th’. Two together on the opposite side said ‘Linakket, shipped Sept. 10th’; and all of the occupied vats were only three-quarters full.
‘They’re all in the office paperwork,’ Gerard said regretfully.
‘Let’s try the empties, then,’ I said. ‘Quantity gauges can be disconnected.’
I started at the far end under the premise that if Paul Young stacked his loot as far from the entrance as possible at Martineau Park then he might have done so on his own territory: and he had. The very first trickle which came out onto my fingers as I turned the small testing valve bore the raw volatile smell of scotch.
‘Bloody bingo,’ I said. ‘I’ll find a bottle and we’ll take a sample, if you like.’
‘Later. Try the others.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’
I loosed the small valves on all the ‘empty’ monsters, and we found scotch in five of them and wine in three. There was no way of telling how many gallons were in each, but to neither of us did that seem to matter. The wine, as far as I could tell from sucking it from my palm, was similar to our old friend ‘St Estèphe’, and the scotch was Rannoch already mixed with tap. Gerard looked like a cat in cream as I straightened from testing the last ‘empty’ (which was in fact empty) and said we’d seen everything now except the actual bottling department, and where would that be?
‘Follow the hoses,’ I said.
He looked at the three or four hoses which were lying on the ground, fat lightweight grey ridged plastic hoses like giant earthworms as thick as a wrist, some in coils, some straightened out and running the length of the room between the vats.
I said, ‘Those connectors at the end of the hoses lock into the valves on the vats. One of them is connected to one of the so called “empty” vats we found the wine in, see? The wine is pumped from the vats to the bottling plant... so to find the plant, follow the hoses.’
The hoses snaked round a corner into another wide hall which this time contained only two vats, both painted a silvery white, taller, slimmer, and with several upright pipes attached from top to bottom of their sides.
‘White wine?’ Gerard said flippantly.
‘Not really. They’re refrigeration vats.’
‘Go on then, what are they for?’
I went over to the nearest, but it was switched off, and so was the other, as far as I could see. ‘They use them to clear cloudy particles out of spirits and white wine. If you drop the temperature, the bits and pieces fall to the bottom, and you run off the cleared liquid from higher up.’
The hoses ran straight past the refrigeration vats and through another wide doorway, and through there were found what Gerard was looking for, the long light and airy hall, two storeys high, where the liquids were fed into the bottles and stoppered by corks, where the caps and the labels were applied and the bottles packed into cases.