'What happened with the rugger club?' I asked interestedly.

His face showed profound disapproval. 'She knew there'd be trouble. They're a rowdy lot. They pulled the chandeliers clean out of the ceiling with a lot of plaster besides and she had them lined up against the wall at gunpoint by the time we got here.'

'Gunpoint?' I said, astonished.

'It wasn't loaded, but the rugger club weren't taking chances. They knew her reputation against pheasants.'

'A shotgun?'

'That's right. She keeps it there behind the bar. We can't stop her, though I'd like to, personally, but she's got a licence for it. She keeps it there to repel villains, she says, though there isn't a local villain who'd face her.'

'Did she send to you for help with the rugger club?'

'Not her. Some of the other customers. She wasn't much pleased when we turned up. She said there wasn't a man born she couldn't deal with.' Ridger looked as if he believed it. 'She wouldn't bring charges for all the damage, but I heard they paid up pretty meekly.'

It would be a brave man, I reflected, who told Mrs Alexis that her Bell's whisky was Rannoch: but in fact it wasn't. Bell's it was: unadulterated.

'Pity,' Ridger said, at the news.

I said thoughtfully, 'She has some Laphroaig up there on the top shelf.'

'Has she?' Ridger's hopes were raised. 'Are you going to try it?'

I nodded and returned to the bar, but Mrs Alexis had departed again towards the fireplace where Wilfred with the bellows was merely adding to the smog.

'The chimney seems to be blocked,' he said anxiously, exonerating himself.

'Blocked?' Mrs Alexis demanded. 'How could it be?' She thought for barely two seconds. 'Unless some bloody bird has built a nest in it, same as three years ago.'

'We'd better wait until it's swept again,' Wilfred suggested.

'Wait? Certainly not.' She strode towards the bar. 'I'll be with you in a moment,' she said, seeing me waiting there. 'Bird's nest. Birds building their bloody nests in my chimney. They did it once before. I'll shift the little buggers. Give them the shock of their lives.'

I didn't bother to point out that nests in October were bound to be uninhabited. She was certain to know. She was also smiling with reckless mischief and reappeared from behind the bar carrying the fabled shotgun and feeding a cartridge into the breach. My own feelings at the sight seemed to be shared by most of the people present as she walked towards the fireplace, but no one thought of stopping her.

Ridger's mouth opened in disbelief.

Mrs Alexis thrust the whole gun up inside the vast chimney and at arm's length unceremoniously pulled the trigger. There was a muffled bang inside the brickwork and a clatter as she dropped the gun on the recoil onto the logs. The eyes of everyone else in the place were popping out but Mrs Alexis calmly picked up her fallen property and returned to the bar.

'Another Bell's?' she asked, stowing the shotgun lengthways under the counter. 'Another tomato juice?'

'Er...' I said.

She was laughing. 'Fastest way to clear a chimney. Didn't you know?'

'No.'

'It's an old gun... the barrel's not straight. I wouldn't treat a good gun like that.' She looked towards the fireplace. 'The damn smoke's clearing, anyway.'

It appeared that she was right. Wilfred, again on his knees with the bellows, was producing smoke which rose upwards, not out into the room. The eyes of the onlookers retreated to their accustomed sockets and the mouths slowly closed: even Ridger's.

'Laphroaig,' I said. 'Please. And could I look at your wine list?'

'Anything you like.' She stretched for the Laphroaig bottle and poured a fair measure. 'You and the policeman... what are you in here for?' The bright eyes searched my face. 'That policeman wouldn't come here just for a drink. Not him. Not tomato juice. Not early.'

I paid for the Laphroaig and took the wine list that she held out. 'We're looking for some scotch that turned up in a Bell's bottle at the Silver Moondance,' I said. 'More of the same, that is.'

The sharp gaze intensified. 'You won't find any here.'

'No, I don't suppose so.'

'Is this because of those complaints last month?'

'We're here because of them, yes.'

'You've shown me no authority.' No antagonism, I thought: therefore no guilt.

'I haven't any. I'm a wine merchant.'

'A wine...?' She considered it. 'What's your name?'

I told her, also the name of my shop.

'Never heard of you,' she said cheerfully. 'Would you know this scotch if you tasted it?'

'That's the general idea. Yes.'

'Then good luck to you.' She gave me an amused and shining glance and turned away to another customer, and I carried my glass across to Ridger expecting the Laphroaig to be Laphroaig and nothing else.

'She's disgraceful,' Ridger said. 'I should arrest her.'

'On what charge?'

'Discharging a firearm in a public place.'

'The inside of a chimney is hardly a public place.'

'It's no laughing matter,' he said severely.

'The smoke's clearing,' I said. 'The shot worked.'

'I would have thought you'd had enough shooting for one lifetime.'

'Well, yes.'

I drank the Laphroaig: smoky, peaty, oak-aged historic Laphroaig, the genuine thing.

Ridger bit on his disappointment, complained about the price and fidgeted unhelpfully while I read the wine list, which was handwritten and extensive. All the familiar Silver Moondance names were there along with dozens of others, but when I pointed this out to him he said stiffly that his brief was for whisky only.

I took the wine list thoughtfully back to the bar and asked Mrs Alexis for a bottle of St Estephe.

She smiled. 'By all means. Do you want it decanted?'

'Not yet.' I went through the rest of the list with her, picking out St Emilion, Macon, Valpolicella, Volnay and Nuits St Georges.

'Sure,' she said easily. 'Do you want all of them?'

'Yes, please.'

She disappeared briefly and came back with a partitioned basket containing the six asked for wines. I picked each bottle up in turn to read the labels: all the right names but none from the right year.

'We've sold all we had of 1979,' she explained patiently when I pointed it out. 'We constantly update the wine list, which is why we don't have it printed. We're writing another at the moment. These present wines are better. Do you want them, then, or not?'

'Sorry,' I said. 'Not.'

She put the basket of bottles without comment on the floor near her feet and smiled at me blandly.

'Do you know the Silver Moondance?' I asked.

'Heard of it. Who hasn't, round here? Never been there. Not my style. I'm told it's a tube job, anyway.'

'A tube...?'

'Down the tubes,' she said patiently. 'The bank's foreclosing on the mortgage. As of this morning the staff have been sacked. I had one of the chefs telephoning to ask for a job.' She spoke with amusement as if the closure were comic, but she'd worn the same expression all the time we'd been there, her cheek muscles seeming to be permanently set in tolerant mockery.

'At the Silver Moondance,' I said mildly, 'they were selling one single wine under six different labels.'

Her expression didn't change but she glanced down at her feet.

'Yes, those,' I said. 'Or rather, not those.'

'Are you insulting me?'

'No, just telling you.'

The brilliant eyes watched me steadily. 'And you're looking for that wine as well as the scotch?'

'Yes.'

'Sorry I can't help you.'

'Perhaps it's as well,' I said.

'Why?'

'Well... I don't think its too utterly safe to know much about that wine. The head waiter of the Silver Moondance undoubtedly knew what he was selling... and he's dead.'

Nothing altered in her face. 'I'm in no danger,' she said. 'I can promise you that. Do you want anything else?'

I shook my head. 'We'll be on our way.'

Her gaze slid past me to rest on Ridger and still without any change of expression she said, 'Give me a man who'll swing from a chandelier. Give me a goddamn man.' Her glance came back to my face, the mockery bold and strong. 'The world's a bloody bore.'

Her abundant hair was a dark reddish brown gleaming with good health and hair dye, and her nails were hard and long like talons. A woman of vibrating appetite who reminded me forcibly of all the species where the female crunched her husband for breakfast.

Wilfred (currently on the menu?) was still on his knees to the fire god when Ridger and I eventually made our way to the door. As Ridger went out ahead of me there was a sort of soft thudding flump flump from the direction of the chimney and a cloud of dislodged shot-up soot descended in a sticky billowing mass onto logs, flames and man beneath. from the direction of the chimney and a cloud of dislodged shot-up soot descended in a sticky billowing mass onto logs, flames and man beneath.

Transfixed, the armchair audience watched Wilfred rise balefully to his feet like a fuzzily inefficient demon king, scattering black rain and blinking great eyes slowly like a surprised owl on a dark night.

'I'll sue that bloody sweep,' Mrs Alexis said.

SIXTEEN.

We went to four more pubs on that first day and I grew tired of the perpetual taste of neat Bell's whisky. Ridger methodically annotated his clipboard and showed not the slightest disappointment as glass after glass proved genuine. The pub crawl was a job to him like any other, it seemed, and he would phlegmatically continue until instructed otherwise.

He was a man without rebellion, I thought, never questioning an order nor the order of things; living at the opposite end of the spectrum from that mean kicker-over-of-traces, Kenneth Charter's son. Somewhere between the two lay the rest of us, grousing, lobbying, enduring and philosophical, making what best we could of our imperfect evolution.

Towards the end I asked him if they'd found any trace of the Bedford van used in the robbery at my shop, and perhaps because by that time he had provisionally accepted me as a full colleague he answered without his usual reservations.

'No, we haven't found it,' he said. 'And we don't expect to.'

'How do you mean?' I asked.

'It belonged to a firm called Quality House Provisions who hadn't noticed it was missing until one of our PCs went there early Monday asking about it. Dozy lot. They'd got several vans, they said. It's now on the stolen-vehicle list marked urgent because of its tie-in with Zarac's murder, but a hot van like that's sure to be dumped somewhere already, probably in a scrap yard miles away with the number plates off. No one will find it except by luck, I shouldn't think.'

'Cheerful.'

'Fact of life.'

He drove me back towards the shop, saying he would return in the morning with tomorrow's list of suspicious premises.

'Can't you bring the whole list instead of in bits?' I asked.

'It's still being compiled. We started today with our own patch, but we may have to wait for information from others.'

'Mm Do you have a first name, Sergeant?'

He looked faintly surprised. 'John,' he said.

'In the pubs tomorrow, do you mind if I use it? I damn nearly called you Sergeant twice in front of barmen today.'

He considered it. 'Yes. All right. Do you want me to call you Tony?'