'Flora's idea, mine.'

'Sensible lady.'

'I'll get the wine.'

In the office I poured some genuine wine from St Estephe and some of the Silver Moondance version into two glasses and carried them out to the counter.

'Taste them both,' I said. 'Say what you think.'

'What are they?'

'Tell you later.'

'I'm no expert,' he protested. He sipped the first, however, rolling it round his gums and grimacing as if he'd sucked a lemon.

'Very dry,' he said.

'Try the other.'

The second seemed at first to please him better, but after a while he eyed it thoughtfully and put the glass down carefully on the counter.

'Well?' I asked.

He smiled. 'The first is demanding. The second is pleasant... but light. You're going to tell me that the first is more expensive.'

'Pretty good. The second one, the pleasant but light one, came from the Silver Moondance. The first is near enough what it should have tasted like, according to the label.'

He savoured the various significances. 'Many might prefer the take. People who didn't know what to expect.'

'Yes. A good drink. Nothing wrong with it.'

He sipped the genuine article again. 'But once you know this one, you grow to appreciate it.'

'If I had any just now I'd give you one of the great St Estephes... Cos d'Estournel, Montrose, Calon-Segur... but this is a good cru bourgeois... lots of body and force.'

'Take your word for it,' he said amiably. 'I've often wished I knew more about wine.'

'Stick around.'

I tasted both the wines again myself, meeting them as old friends. The Silver Moondance wine had stood up pretty well to being opened and refastened, but now that I'd poured the second sample out of the bottle what was left would begin to deteriorate. For wine to remain perfect it had to be in contact with the cork. The more air in the bottle the more damage it did.

I fetched and showed him both of the bottles, real and fake, and told him what Henri Tavel had had to say about forgeries.

He listened attentively, thought for a while, and then said, 'What is it about the fake wine that seems more significant to you than the fake whisky? Because it does, doesn't it?'

'Just as much. Equally.'

'Why, then?'

'Because...' I began, and was immediately interrupted by a row of customers wanting to know what to drink inexpensively with Sung Li's crispy duck and Peking prawn and beef in oyster sauce. Gerard listened with interest and watched them go one by one with their bottles of Bergerac and Soave and Cotes du Ventoux.

He said, 'You sell knowledge, don't you, as much as wine?'

'Yeah. And pleasure. And human contact. Anything you can't get from a supermarket.'

A large man with eyes awash shouldered his way unsteadily into the shop demanding beer loudly, and I sold him what he wanted without demur. He paid clumsily, belched, went on his weaving way: and Gerard frowned at his departing back.

'He was drunk,' he said.

'Sure.'

'Don't you care?'

'Not as long as they're not sick in the shop,'

'That's immoral.'

I grinned faintly. 'I sell escape also.'

'Temporary,' he objected disapprovingly, sounding austerely Scots.

'Temporary is better than nothing,' I said. 'Have an aspirin.'

He made a noise between a cough and a chuckle. 'I suppose you've lived on them since Sunday.'

'Yes, quite right.' I swallowed two more with some St Estephe, in itself a minor heresy. 'I'm all for escape.'

He gave me a dry look which I didn't at first understand, and only belatedly remembered my rush down the yard.

'Well... as long as I'm not being robbed.'

He nodded sardonically and waited through two more sales and a discussion about whether Sauternes would go with lamb chops, which it wouldn't; they would each taste dreadful.

'What goes with Sauternes then? I like Sauternes.'

'Anything sweet,' I said. 'Also perhaps curry. Or ham. Also blue cheese.'

'(rood heavens,' said Gerard when he'd gone. 'Blue cheese with sweet wine... how odd.'

'Wine and cheese parties thrive on it.'

He looked round the shop as if at a new world. 'Is there anything you can't drink wine with?' he said.

'As far as I'm concerned... grapefruit.'

He made a face.

'And that's from one,' I said, 'who drinks wine with baked beans... who practically scrubs his teeth in it.'

'You really love it?'

I nodded. 'Nature's magical accident.'

'What?'

'That the fungus on grapes turns the sugar in grape juice to alcohol. That the result is delicious.'

'For heaven's sake...'

'No one could have invented it,' I said. 'It's just there. A gift to the planet. Elegant.'

'But there are all sorts of different wines.'

'Oh, sure, because there are different sorts of grapes. But a lot of champagne is made from black-skinned grapes... things may not be as they seem, which should please you as a detective.'

'Hm,' he said dryly. His glance roved over the racks of bottles. 'As a detective what pleases me is proof... so what's proof?'

'If you mix a liquid with gunpowder and ignite it, and it burns with a steady blue flame, that's proof.'

He looked faintly bemused. 'Proof of what?'

'Proof that the liquid is at least fifty per cent alcohol. That's how they proved a liquid was alcohol three centuries ago when they first put a tax on distilled spirits. Fifty percent alcohol, one hundred percent proved. They measure the percentage now with hydrometers, not gunpowder and fire. Less risky, I dare say.'

'Gunpowder,' he said, 'is something you and I have had too much of recently.' He stood up stiffly. 'Your half-hour is up. I'll get the food.'

FOURTEEN.

Gerard followed me home in his mended Mercedes and came into the house bearing Sung Li's fragrant parcels.

'You call this a cottage?' he said sceptically, looking at perspectives. 'More like a palace.'

'It was a cottage beside a barn, both of them falling to pieces. The barn was bigger than the cottage... hence the space.'

We had joyfully planned that house, Emma and I, shaping the rooms to fit what we'd expected to be our lives, making provision for children. A big kitchen for family meals; a sitting room, future playroom; a dining room for friends; many bedrooms; a large quiet drawing room, splendid for parties. The conversion, done in three stages as we could afford it, had taken nearly five years. Emma had contentedly waited, wanting the nest to be ready for the chicks, and almost the moment it was done she had become pregnant.

Gerard and I had come into the house through the kitchen, but I seldom ate there any more. When the food was re-heated and in dishes we transferred it to the sitting room, putting it on a coffee table between two comfortable chairs and eating with our plates balanced on our knees.

It was in that warm looking room with its bookshelves, soft lamplight, television, photographs and rugs that I mostly lived, when I was there at all. It was there that I now kept a wine rack and glasses lazily to hand and averted my mind from chores like gardening. It was there, I dare say, that my energy was chronically at its lowest ebb, yet it was to there also that I instinctively returned.

Gerard looked better for the food, settling deep into his chair when he'd finished with a sigh of relaxation. He put his arm back in its sling and accepted coffee and a second glass of Californian wine, a 1978 Napa Cabernet Sauvignon I'd been recently selling and liked very much myself.

'It's come a long way,' Gerard observed, reading the label.

'And going further,' I said. 'California's growing grapes like crazy, and their best wine is world class.'

He drank a little and shook his head, it's pleasant enough but I honestly couldn't tell it from any old plonk. A terrible admission, but there you are.'

'Just what the Silver Moondance ordered... customers like you.'

He smiled. 'And I'd guess I'm in the majority.'

'It doesn't matter. Liking wine at all is the main thing.'

He said, 'You were going to tell me why the substitute wines were equally as important as the substitute scotch at the Silver Moondance.'

I glanced at him, hearing the hardening tone in the sub-Scottish voice and seeing the same change in him as there had been in the car the previous Sunday: the shedding of the social shell, the emergence of the investigator. His eyes were steady and intent, his face concentrated, the mouth unsmiling: and I answered to this second man with recognition and relief, dealing in facts and guesses dispassionately.

'People who steal scotch whisky,' I said, 'usually go for a shipment of bottles in cases. The proceeds are ready to sell... the receiver's probably already lined up. There's no difficulty. It's all profit. But if you steal a tankerful of the liquid in bulk you have the trouble and expense in bottling it. Cost of bottles, cost of labour, all sorts of incidentals.'

'Right,' he said nodding.

'There were six thousand gallons of scotch at roughly fifty-eight per cent alcohol content in each of Kenneth Charter's three lost loads.'

'Right.'

'Each load was of a higher concentration than is ever sold for drinking. When they received the tankerload the Rannoch people would have added water to bring the scotch down to retail strength, around forty per cent alcohol by volume.'

Gerard listened and nodded.

'At that point they'd have enough scotch to fill approximately fifty thousand bottles of standard size.'

Gerard's mouth opened slightly with surprise. 'Kenneth Charter never said that.'

'He shifts the stuff, he doesn't bottle it. He maybe never did the arithmetic. Anyway, with three tankersful we're talking about one hundred and fifty thousand bottles in six months, and that's not something you can mess about with in the back yard.'

He was silent for a while thinking about it, and then said merely, 'Go on.'

'On each occasion the whole load was pumped out of the tanker pretty fast, as the tanker was found empty on the following day.'

'Right.'

'So unless the point of the operation was simply to ruin Kenneth Charter, in which case it's conceivable the loads were dumped in ditches like the drivers, the scotch was pumped from the tanker into some sort of storage.'

'Yes, of course.'

'So the logical place for the tanker to be unloaded was at a bottling plant.'

'Yes, but it never reached there.'

'It never reached Rannoch's bottling plant. There's a difference.'

'All right.' His eyes smiled. 'Go on.'