'With no luck?' I asked.

'No prosecutions have resulted.'

Quite so. 'All right, Sergeant. You drive, I'll drink, and I've got ro be sober and back here by three to get my arm checked at the hospital.'

He went away looking smug and at nine-thirty to the half minute Mrs Palissey arrived with Brian. I explained that I would be away every mid-day for a while and said I would get her some help by tomorrow if she could possibly manage that morning on her own.

'Help?' She was affronted. 'I don't need help.'

'But your lunch-hour...'

'I'll bring our lunch and we'll eat in the back,' she said, i don't want strangers in here meddling. Brian and I will see to things. You go off and enjoy yourself, you're still looking peaky.'

I was about to say that I wasn't doing police work to enjoy myself but then it occurred to me that I probably was. I'd had no hesitation at all in accepting Ridger's or Wilson's invitation. I was flattered to be thought an expert. Deplorable vanity. Laugh at yourself, Tony. Stay human.

For an hour the three of us restocked the shop, made lists, took telephone orders, served customers, swept and dusted. I looked back when I left with Ridger: to a clean, cosy, welcoming place with Mrs Palissey smiling behind the counter and Brian arranging wine boxes with anxious care. I wasn't an empire builder, I thought. I would never start a chain. That one prosperous place was enough.

Prosperous, I knew, against the odds. A great many small businesses like mine had died of trying to compete with chains and supermarkets, those giants engaged in such fierce undercutting price wars that they bled their own profits to death. I'd started that way and began losing money, and, against everything believed and advised in the trade, had restored my position by going back to fair, not suicidal prices. The losses had stopped, my customers had multiplied, not deserted, and I'd begun to enjoy life instead of waking up at night sweating.

Ridger had brought the Bell's bottle with him in his car; it sat upright on the back seat in the same box in which it had left the Silver Moondance, two-thirds full, as before.

'Before we go,' I said, 'I'll take that whisky into the shop and taste it there.'

'Why not here?'

'The car smells of petrol.' A gift, I thought.

'I've just filled up. What does it matter?'

'Petrol smells block out scotch.'

'Oh. All right.' He got out of his car, removed the box and methodically locked his doors although the car was right outside the shop and perfectly visible through the window: then he carried the box in and set it on the counter.

Casually I slipped my wrist out of the sling, picked up the Bell's bottle, took it back to the office, and with a clink or two poured a good measure through a funnel into a clean small bottle I'd put ready, and then a very little into a goblet. The small bottle had a screw-on cap which I caught against the thread in my haste, but it was closed and hidden with the funnel behind box-files in an instant, and I walked unhurriedly back into the shop sipping thoughtfully at the glass, right wrist again supported.

Ridger was coming towards me. 'I'm not supposed to let that bottle out of my sight,' he said.

'Sorry.' I gestured with the glass. 'It's just on the desk in the office. Perfectly safe.'

He peered into the recess to make sure and turned back nodding. 'How long will you be?'

'Not long.'

The liquid in my mouth was definitely Rannoch, I thought. Straightforward Rannoch. Except that...

'What's the matter?' Ridger demanded; and I realised I'd been frowning.

'Nothing,' I said, looking happier. 'If you want to know if I'll recognise it again, then yes, I will.'

'You're sure?'

'Yes.'

'Why are you smiling?'

'Sergeant,' I said with exasperation, 'this is a collaboration not an inquisition. Let's take the bottle and get the show on the road.'

I wondered if Sergeant Ridger ever achieved friendship; if his suspicious nature ever gave him a rest. Certainly after all our meetings I found his porcupine reflexes as sensitive as at the beginning, and I made no attempt to placate him, as any such attempt would in itself be seen as suspicious.

He drove away from the kerb saying that he would visit the nearest places first, with which I could find no quarrel, and I discovered that by nearest he meant nearest to the Silver Moondance. He turned off the main road about a mile before we reached it, and stopped in a village outside a country pub.

As an inn it had been old when Queen Anne died, when coaches had paused there to change horses. The building of the twentieth century highway had left the pub in a backwater, the old coaching road a dead end now, an artery reduced to an appendix. Emma and I had drunk a few times there, liking the old bulging building with the windows leaning sideways and the Stuart brickwork still in the fireplaces.

'Not here!' I said, surprised, as we stopped.

'Do you know it?'

'I've been here, but not for a year.'

Ridger consulted a clipboard. 'Complaints of whisky being watered, gin ditto. Complaints investigated, found to be unfounded. Investigations dated August 23rd and September 18th last.'

'The landlord's a retired cricketer,' I said. 'Generous. Loves to talk. Lazy. The place needs a facelift.'

'Landlord: Noel George Darnley.'

I turned my head, squinting down at the page. 'Different man.'

'Right.' Ridger climbed out of the car and carefully locked it. 'I'll have a tomato juice.'

'Who's paying?'

Ridger looked blank. 'I haven't much money...'

'No instructions?' I asked. 'No police float?'

He cleared his throat. 'We must keep an account,' he said.

'O.K.,' I said. 'I'll pay. We'll write down at each place what I spend and you'll initial it.'

He agreed to that. Whether the police would reimburse me or not I didn't know, but Kenneth Charter very likely would, if not. If neither did, no great matter.

'And what if we find a match?' I asked.

He was on surer ground. 'We impound the bottle, sealing it, labelling it, and giving a receipt.'

'Right.'

We walked into the pub as customers, Ridger as relaxed as guitar strings.

The facelift, I saw at once, had occurred, but I found I preferred the old wrinkles. True, the worn Indian rugs wih threadbare patches had needed renewing, but not with orange and brown stripes. The underpolished knobbly oak benches had vanished in favour of smooth leather-look vinyl, and there were shiny modern brass ornaments on the mantel instead of antique pewter platters.

The new landlord's new broom had resulted, however, in a much cleaner looking bar, and the landlord himself, appearing from the rear, wasn't fat, sloppily dressed and beaming, but neat, thin and characterless. In the old days the pub had been full: I wondered how many of the regulars still came.

'A Bell's whisky, please,' I said. I looked at his row of bottles. .'And a second Bell's whisky from that bottle over there, and a tomato juice, please.'

He filled the order without conversation. We carried the glasses to a small table and I began on the unlikely task with a judicious trial of the first tot of Bell's.

'Well?' Ridger asked, after fidgeting a full minute. 'What have we got?'

I shook my head. 'It's Bell's all right. Not like the Silver Moondance.'

Ridger had left his clipboard in the car, otherwise I was sure he would have crossed off mine host there and then.

I tried the second Bell's. No luck there either.

As far as I could tell, neither bottle had been watered: both samples seemed full strength. I told Ridger so while he was making inroads into the tomato juice, which he genuinely seemed to enjoy.

I left both whiskies on the table and wandered to the bar.

'You're new here?' I said.

'Fairly.' He seemed cautious, not friendly.

'Settling in well with the locals?' I asked.

'Are you here to make trouble?'

'No.' I was surprised at the resentment he hadn't bothered to hide. 'What do you mean?'

'Sorry, then. It was you ordering two whiskies from different bottles and tasting them carefully, as you did. Someone round here made trouble with the Weights and Measures, saying I gave short measures and watered the spirits. Some of them round here don't like me smartening the place up. But I ask you, trying to get me fined or lose my licence... too much.'

'Yes,' I agreed. 'Malicious.'

He turned away, still not sure of me, which was fair enough, considering. I collected Ridger who was wiping red stains from his mouth and we went outside leaving the unfinished whiskies on the table, which probably hardened the landlord's suspicions into certainty, poor man.

Ridger ticked off the pub on the clipboard and read out the notes of our next destination, which proved to be a huge soulless place built of brick in the thirties and run for a brewery by a prim-looking tenant with a passion for fresh air. Even Ridger in his raincoat shivered before the thrown-open windows of the bar and muttered that the place looked dull. We were the first customers, it was true, but on a greyly chilly morning there were no electric lights to warm and welcome thirsty strangers.

'Tomato juice, please,' I said. 'And a Bell's whisky.'

The puritan landlord provided them, stating the price in a tight-lipped way.

'And could we have the windows closed, please?'

The landlord looked at his watch, shrugged, and went round closing October out with ill grace. I wouldn't sell much in my shop, I reflected, with that scowl: everyone sought to buy more than the product they asked for and it was the intangible extra that repelled or attracted a return. The whisky in that place might be fine, but I'd never go back out of choice.

'Well?' Ridger said, initialling the cost on our list. 'What is it?'

'Bell's.'

Ridger nodded, drinking this time barely a mouthful from his glass. 'Shall we go, then?'

'Glad to.'

We left the landlord bitterly reopening his windows and Ridger consulted his clipboard in the car.

'The next place is a hotel, the Peverill Arms, on the Reading to Henley road. Several complaints of thin or tasteless whisky. Complaints investigated, September 12th. Whisky found to be full strength in random samples.'

His voice told something more than the usual dry information: a reservation, almost an alarm.

'You know the place?' I asked.

'I've been there. Disturbances.' He fell silent with determination and started the car, driving with disapproval quivering in the stiffness of his neck. I thought from these signs that we might be on the way to a rowdy rendezvous with Hell's Angels, but found to my amusement on arrival that Ridger's devil was a woman.

A woman moreover of statuesque proportions, rising six feet tall with the voluptuous shape of Venus de Milo, who had forty-two inch hips.

'Mrs Alexis,' Ridger muttered. 'She may not remember me.'

Mrs Alexis indeed gave our arrival scarcely a glance. Mrs Alexis was supervising the lighting of logs in the vast fireplace in the entrance lounge, an enterprise presently producing acrid smoke in plenty but few actual flames.

Apart from the heavyside layer floating in a haze below the ceiling the hall gave a lift to the entering spirit: clusters of chintz-covered armchairs, warm colours, gleaming copper jugs, an indefinable aura of success. Across the far end an extensive bar stood open but untended, and from the fireplace protruded the trousered behind of the luckless firelighter, to the interest and entertainment of scattered armchaired guests.

'For God's sake, Wilfred, fetch the bloody bellows,' Mrs Alexis said distinctly. 'You look idiotic with your arse in the air puffing like a beetroot.'

She was well over fifty, I judged, with the crisp assurance of a natural commander. Handsome, expensively dressed, gustily uninhibited. I found myself smiling in the same instant that the corners of Ridger's mouth turned down.

The unfortunate Wilfred removed his beetroot-red face from the task and went off obediently, and Mrs Alexis with bright eyes asked what we wanted.

'Drinks,' I said vaguely.

'Come along then.' She led the way, going towards the bar. 'It's our first fire this winter. Always smokes like hell until we get it going.' She frowned upwards at the drifting cloud. 'Worse than usual, this year.'

'The chimney needs sweeping,' Ridger said.

Mrs Alexis gave him a birdlike look from an eye as sharp and yellow as a hawk's. 'It's swept every year in the spring. And aren't you that policeman who told me if I served the local rugger team when they'd won I should expect them to swing from the chandeliers and put beer into my piano?'

Ridger cleared his throat. I swallowed a laugh with difficulty and received the full beam from the hawk eyes.

'Are you a policeman too?' she asked with good humour. 'Come to cadge for your bloody ball?'

'No,' I said. I could feel the smothered laugh escaping through my eyes. 'We came for a drink.'

She believed the simple answer as much as a declaration of innocence from a red-handed thief, but went around behind her bar and waited expectantly.

'A Bell's whisky and a tomato juice, please.'

She pushed a glass against the Bell's optic and waited for the full measure to descend. 'Anything else?'

I said no thank you and she steered the whisky my way and the tomato juice towards Ridger, accepting my money and giving change. We removed ourselves to a pair of armchairs near a small table, where Ridger again initialled our itemised account.