Gerard said, 'Vernon told you his version of what Paul Young told him, which was itself no doubt only a version of the facts. That's a long way from first-hand knowledge.'

'You mean... I could do nothing?'

'Act as your judgment dictates,' Gerard said pleasantly and unhelpfully, and for once in his life I guessed Quigley was searching his self-importance and finding only doubt and irresolution.

Gerard said, 'Tony and I will tell the police that Paul Young may arrive here at any time from now on. After that, it's up to them.'

'He said he was coming at two o'clock,' Quigley corrected.

'Mm. But he might suspect Vernon would do what Vernon did mean to do, in other words clear off with the loot before Paul Young got here. Paul Young could be here at any minute.' Gerard seemed unconcerned but he was alone in that. Quigley made his mind up to leave us as soon as possible and I felt very much like following.

'He won't be able to get in as I have all the keys,' Quigley said. 'I suppose I must thank you, Mr McGregor. I don't like any of this. I can only hope that with Vernon gone we'll have no more trouble.'

'Certainly hope not,' Gerard said blandly, and we both watched Quigley drive away with hope already straightening the shoulders and throwing forward the chin. 'He might be lucky, he might not,' Gerard said.

'I don't want to be here when Paul Young gets here,' I said.

He half smiled. 'More prudent not. Get in my car and we'll fetch your car first and then find a telephone box.'

We both drove for five miles and stopped in a small village where he made the call from the public telephone outside the post office. I gave him the priority number Ridger had told me, and I listened to his brief message.

'It's possible,' he said to the police, 'that the man known as Paul Young may arrive at the caterers' entrance in the grandstands of Martineau Park racecourse at any time today from now onwards.' He listened to a reply and said, 'No. No names. Goodbye.'

Smiling, he replaced the receiver. 'O.K.,' he said. 'Duty done.'

'To some extent,' I said.

'Everything's relative.' He was cheerful although still looking far from well. 'We know where Kenneth Charter's scotch is.'

'Some of it,' I said.

'Enough.'

'But not where it went between the tanker and the Vintners Incorporated deliveries.'

'To a bottling plant, as you said.'

He was leaning against his car, arm in sling, looking frail, a recuperating English gentleman out for a harmless Sunday morning drive in the country. There was also a glimmer of humour about him and the steel core looking out of the eyes, and I said abruptly, 'You know something you haven't told me.'

'Do you think so? What about?'

'You've found the bottling plant!'

'Found a a bottling plant, yes. Somewhere to start from anyway. I thought I'd go and take a look this afternoon. Preliminary recce.' bottling plant, yes. Somewhere to start from anyway. I thought I'd go and take a look this afternoon. Preliminary recce.'

'But it's Sunday. There'll be no one there.'

'That's sometimes an advantage.'

'You don't mean... break in?'

'We'll see,' he said. 'It depends. Sometimes there's a caretaker. I'm good at government inspectors, even on Sundays.'

Slightly aghast I said, 'Well... where is it?'

'Roughly twenty-five miles this side of Kenneth Charter's headquarters.' He smiled slightly. 'By Friday afternoon we had concluded in the office that your idea of looking first at the plants to which Charter's tankers took wine had been good but wrong. There were five of them. We screened them all first, and all of them were rock-solid businesses. Then some time during last night... you know how things float into your head while you're half asleep... I remembered that one of them had had two links with Charter, not just one, and that maybe, just maybe, that second link is more important than we thought.'

'Tell me,' I said.

'Mm. I don't want to be too positive.'

'For heaven's sake...'

'All right then. We established right at the beginning of our bottle-plant enquiries that one of the plants is owned by a man called Stewart Naylor. It was at the top of the list that Charter gave us, and the first we checked.'

'Stewart Naylor?' I thought. 'He's... he's... um... isn't he mentioned in Kenneth Junior's notebook? Oh yes... the father who plays war games... David Naylor's father.'

'Top of the class. Stewart Naylor owns Bernard Naylor Bottling. Started by his grandfather. Old respectable firm. I woke up with that word Naylor fizzing like a sparkler in my head. I telephoned Kenneth Charter himself early this morning and asked him about his son's friendship with David Naylor. He says he's known the father, Stewart Naylor, for years: they're not close friends but they know each other quite well because of their business connection and because their sons like each other's company. Kenneth Charter says David Naylor is the only good thing in Kenneth Junior's lazy life, he keeps Kenneth Junior off the streets. War games, Kenneth Charter thinks, are a waste of time, but better than glue-sniffing.'

'His words?' I asked amused.

'Aye, laddie.'

'Do you really think...'

'Kenneth Charter doesn't. Grasping at straws, he thinks it. He says Bernard Naylor Bottling is twenty-four carat. But we've found no other leads at all, and we've been checking bottling plants up and down the country until the entire staff are sick at the sound of the words. Three days' concentrated work, fruitless. A lot of them have gone out of business. One's a library now. Another's a boot and shoe warehouse.'

'Mm,' I said. 'Could Stewart Naylor have an illegitimate half-brother?'

'Anyone can have an illegitimate half-brother. It happens to the best.'

'I mean...'

'I know what you mean. Kenneth Charter didn't know of one.' He shrugged. 'Naylor's plant's a long shot. Either a bullseye or a case for apology. I'll go and find out.'

'Right now?'

'Absolutely right now. If Stewart Naylor is by any chance also Paul Young, he should be going to or from Martineau Park this afternoon, not stalking about among his bottles.'

'Did you ask Kenneth Charter what he looked like?'

'Yes... ordinary, he said.'

All these ordinary men... 'Is he deaf?' 1 asked.

Gerald blinked. 'I forgot about that.'

'Ask him,' I said. 'Telephone now, before you go.'

'And if Stewart Naylor is deaf... don't go?'

'Quite right. Don't go.'

Gerard shook his head. 'All the more reason to go.'

'It's flinging oneself into the Limpopo,' I said.

'Perhaps. Only perhaps. Nothing's certain.' He returned to the telephone, however, and dialled Kenneth Charter's house and then his office, and to neither attempt was there a reply.

'That's it, then,' he said calmly. 'I'll be off.'

'Have you ever been in a bottling plant?' I said despairingly. 'I mean... do you know what to look for?'

'No.'

I stared at him. He stared right back. In the end I said, 'I spent a year in and out of bottling plants in Bordeaux.'

'Did you?'

'Yes.'

'Tell me, then, what to look for.'

I thought of pumps and machinery. I thought of vats and what might be in them. I said hopelessly, 'You need me with you, don't you?'

'I'd like it,' he said. 'But I won't ask. It's on the very edge of consultancy... and maybe beyond.'

'You wouldn't know the wine if you fell into it, would you?' I said. 'Nor the scotch?'

'Not a chance,' he agreed placidly.

'Bloody sodding hell,' I said. 'You're a bugger.'

He smiled. 'I thought you'd come, really, if I told you.'

TWENTY.

I put a notice on my shop door saying,'Closed. Very sorry. Staff illness. Open Monday 9.30 a.m.'

I'm mad, I thought. Crazy.

If I didn't go, he would go on his own.

My thoughts stopped there. I couldn't let him go on his own when it was I who had the knowledge he needed. When he felt tired and ill and I was well and almost as strong as ever.

I sat at my desk and wrote a note to Sergeant John Ridger saying I'd been told to look in the Bernard Naylor bottling plant for the Silver Moondance scotch, and I was going there with Gerard McGregor (I gave his address) to check. I sealed the note in an envelope and wrote on it an instruction to Mrs Palissey: Take this to the police station if you haven't heard from me by ten this morning and tell them to open it.

I wedged the envelope on the till where she couldn't miss it and hoped she would never read it. Then with a last look round I locked my door and drove away, and tried not to wonder if I would ever come back.

Half the time I thought Kenneth Charter must know his man. Stewart Naylor was true blue. Half the time I trusted Gerard's fizzler in the night. Intuition existed. Solutions came in sleep.

It would probably turn out to be an anticlimax of a journey not worth melodramatic notes to policemen or all this soul-searching. We would drive to the bottling plant, we would not break in, there would be plentiful evidence of legal prosperity and we would drive sedately home. It would not be another day of Sunday bloody horrors.

Gerard met me in a car park we had agreed on, he having meanwhile been home to leave the Martineau Park spoils in his garage. From there we went towards London in his Mercedes, but with me driving this time.

'Suppose you were Stewart Naylor,' Gerard said. 'Suppose you'd spent your entire working life learning to run the family bottling business and then because of the French changing their regulations found the wine flood drying to a trickle.'

'Longbows,' I said nodding.

'What? Oh yes. Kenneth Charter was wrong, you know, in point of fact. It was the crossbow which put paid to the longbow... well, never mind. Crossbows, guns, whatever, from no fault of your own you're going out of business. Kenneth Charter confirmed this morning that he hardly takes a fifth of what he used to to the Naylor plant, but it's still quite a lot. More than to anywhere else. He says that's how he knows that Naylor's is healthy while others struggle.'

'Huh.'

'Yes, indeed. Suppose you are Stewart Naylor and you look anxiously around for other things to bottle... tomato sauce, cleaning fluid, whatever... and you find everyone else in your line of business is in the same boat and doing the same. Ruin raises its ugly head and gives you a good long threatening glare' He paused as I passed a lorry, then went on, 'We supposed earlier that at that point a convenient crook came along offering salvation in return for dishonesty and that our beleaguered bottler accepted. But suppose it wasn't like that. Suppose Stewart Naylor needed no seducing but without help thought up his own crooked scheme?'

'Which was,' I said, 'to buy wine himself instead of bottling for others. To bottle it and label it as better than it was, and then sell it.' I frowned. 'And at that point you get discovered and prosecuted.'

'Not if you have a half-brother who likes horses. You set him up... on bank money... in a Silver Moondance, and you take him your wine to sell. It sells well and for about twenty times more than it cost you, even including the bottles. Money starts flowing in, not out... and that's when the greed complex hits you.'

'The greed complex?' I asked.

'Addiction,' Gerard said. 'The first step is the huge one. The decision. To snort cocaine or not to. To borrow the Christmas Club's money, just once. To sell the first secret. To design a label for a non-existent chateau and stick it on a bottle of wine-lake. The first step's huge, the second half the size, by the sixth step it's a habit. Suppose our Steward Naylor begins to think that if he could arrange other outlets he could double and redouble his receipts?'

'O.K.' I said. 'Suppose.'

'At this point we have to suppose a henchman called Zarac, whom one conveniently instals as head waiter at the Silver Moondance. One of his duties is to cast about for possibilities of expansion and in due course he arrives on Vernon's doorstep at Martineau Park. He reports back to Paul Young... er... Paul Young query Stewart Naylor... who goes to see Vernon and hey presto, the fake wine business takes a deep breath and swells to double size. Money now rolls in to the extent that concealing it is a problem. Never mind. Half-brother Larry is a whiz at horses. Pass Larry the embarrassing cash, magic-wand it into horseflesh, ship it to California, convert it again at a profit if possible and bank it... intending, I dare say, to collect it one day and live in the sun. In my experience the last chapter seldom happens. The addiction to the crime becomes so integral to the criminal that he can't give it up. I've caught several industrial spies because they couldn't kick their taste for creeping about with cameras.'

'Clean up and clear out,' I suggested.

'Absolutely. Almost never done. They come back for a second bite, and a third, and just once more... and whammo, one too much.'

'So Stewart Naylor turned his ideas to scotch?'

'Ah,' Gerard said. 'Suppose when your son visits his divorced father one day he brings his friend Kenneth Junior with him? Or suppose he's often brought him? Stewart Naylor knows Kenneth Junior's father quite well... Kenneth Charter's tankers have brought wine to Naylor's plant for many years. Suppose our crime-addicted Stewart casts an idle eye on Kenneth Junior and reflects that Charter's tankers carry scotch and gin as well as wine, and that whereas the wine profits are healthy, from stolen scotch they would be astronomical.'

'But he couldn't ask Kenneth Junior outright to sell his dad's tankers' routes and destinations and time-tables. Kenneth Junior might have gone all righteous and buzzed home to spill the beans...'

'But he does think Kenneth Junior is ripe for a spot of treason as he's probably heard him bellyaching about his life with father...'

'So he sends Zarac to recruit him,' I said. 'Sends Zarac perhaps to the Diamond snooker hall? Or the disco? Somewhere like that? And Zarac says here's a lot of money, kid. Get me a tanker's keys, get me a tanker's route, and I'll give you some more cash. And three months later he pays again. And again. And then says get me another tanker's keys, kid, the first one's too hot...'

'Don't see why not, do you?'