by J M Gregson
On the Thursday of that week, Sarah Vaughan had an attentive audience and was riding upon the adrenalin which came from it. These people were enthusiasts for wine and the work of producing it, anxious to hear what she had to say about the short history of the industry here and the grapes which had been most successful.
This was the second tour she had led this week and probably about her sixteenth during the year. She was confident enough now to take the pulse of an audience. She no longer spoke too quickly in her nervousness, as she was sure she had done when she had begun this work. She hadn’t watched her audience’s faces as she spoke in those early days. Now she not only smiled back in response to their friendliness, but even made the odd joke which she knew had succeeded before. The trick was to make the joke seem spontaneous, not carefully calculated or rehearsed.
There were a lot of questions at the end of the tour, which she took to be a sign of its success. When she was answering questions about the new reds, she let it drop that they had high hopes of the grape in question and that they were taking a low mark-up on last year’s vintage to get the brand established. Two bargain-conscious wine-fanciers among her audience promptly went into the shop and bought cases of red, under the approving eye of Gerry Davies.
It was four thirty when she finished the tour. As usual, she found herself quite tired once the audience had gone and she was alone in her small office. There was a lot of nervous tension involved in being on show before a live audience. She was learning to enjoy the tension, to relish the need to be on her toes in the face of a constantly changing clientele, but it was tiring nonetheless. She had done practice presentations years ago as part of her Business Studies degree, but it was not until this last year that she had undertaken the real thing. It gave her a kick to find that she was reasonably proficient as a communicator, and getting better with practice. She smiled to herself: that was the kind of verdict she might have had from her tutor on the degree all those years ago.
There wasn’t much of the working day left. Sarah decided she might allow herself the luxury of an early departure, then remembered that she had taken her car in for a service that morning. She rang the garage and found that the Honda was ready for collection. Gerry Davies would give her a lift into Ross-on-Wye to pick it up, though it would be a good hour yet before he would be ready to leave. But she’d better go across to the shop and tell him that she needed a lift.
She was halfway across the little courtyard when a vehicle drew up at her side, so silently that it made her start with surprise. A glance sideways reassured her; it was Martin Beaumont’s 3.8 blue Jaguar. The window beside her slid softly down and her boss said, ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere? I see your car isn’t here today.’
‘No, it’s in for service at Ross. But Gerry Davies will give me a lift — it’s almost on his route home.’
‘No need to bother him — he won’t be off for another hour, will he, whereas I can take you now.’
She wondered whether to say that she had work to do, couldn’t leave early. It was such an obvious tactic to impress the boss with her work ethic that someone as shrewd as Martin Beaumont would surely see through it. So she said, ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble,’ and slid gratefully on to the leather passenger seat beside the owner of Abbey Vineyards.
He’d seen her making the tour, had noted the animation of her audience, and now commented approvingly upon it. He didn’t miss much, the boss, as she’d quickly realized when she came here to work for him. He said suddenly, ‘It’s good to see you in a skirt for a change. All the attractive women seem to wear trousers nowadays.’
‘I usually wear a skirt or a dress for the tours, unless it’s cold and blustery. The public seem to like it.’
‘I’m sure they do, when they see legs as attractive as yours, Sarah.’
She was mildly shocked and a little amused. Employers weren’t supposed to make comments like that to their female staff nowadays, though she supposed she should regard herself as out of the working environment at this stage of the day.
As if he read her thoughts, Beaumont said, ‘Of course, I wouldn’t pass compliments like that at work, but we’ve finished for the day now, haven’t we? And they are very attractive legs!’
She couldn’t think of a suitable light-hearted rejoinder. She was willing him not to deliver any more cliches. She resisted the temptation to pull her skirt down a little further over the fifteen denier tights beneath it and said, ‘You won’t say that in a few years, when the varicose veins begin to take over.’
They both laughed at that and he said gallantly, ‘I can’t imagine you with varicose veins, Sarah Vaughan!’
‘Age catches up with all of us, in the end, doesn’t it?’ She had learned to bandy cliches with the best of them, she thought wryly. ‘I’m thirty-three already, and I expect the next ten years will fly past even more quickly than the last.’ It seemed to her a good moment to remind him that she was not some inexperienced ingenue who would be flattered by the attention of the boss, even though he was probably only engaging in a little harmless flirting.
‘No one would think you were in your thirties,’ he said gallantly, swinging the Jaguar round a long left-hand bend. ‘Every time I see you I think what an attractive woman you are.’
‘I think we should change the subject now,’ she said firmly. For the first time, she felt a vague fear, not that anything dire was going to happen, but that she was going to have an embarrassing few minutes. He had taken the B road, she noticed, the old road into Ross rather than the M50. Nothing wrong with that; it was the shorter, if not the quicker, way. But she would rather have been on a route which carried more traffic; this road was hardly used at all since the motorway had become available.
Beaumont said nothing for a full two minutes, so that she hoped he had seen there was nothing in this for him; hopefully, he was thinking, as she was, about being mildly embarrassed when they met at work the next day.
Then, abruptly, he swung the big car into the deserted parking space beside the old road. ‘It’s time we had a little talk,’ he said.
‘Just drive me into Ross as you promised to do, please,’ Sarah said primly.
The speed of his movement caught her by surprise. He flung himself suddenly across her. His hand clutched her shoulder and he kissed her clumsily, holding her lips against his until she managed to twist her mouth away from him. His breath was hot and damp in her ear. ‘You must be able to see what you do to a man, you little minx,’ he muttered. ‘Parading yourself up and down at the vineyard, twitching your hips as though you don’t know what you’re doing.’
She felt as though she had got herself involved in a bad play. He surely could not be saying these things. She felt the panic of claustrophobia which she had known when she was a child, pinned to the floor by other children. Her seat belt was still fastened, and there was no way she could release it with this great bear of a man leaning on her like this. She tried to bring her knee up between his legs, to slam it into his balls the way the self-defence manuals taught you to resist, but his leg was splayed across her, pinning her own thighs to the seat. ‘Let me go! Get your fucking hands off me!’ she shouted into his face.
She did not know where the word had come from: it was one she hadn’t used in years. Her voice, harsh and grating with panic, seemed to have come from someone else. The smell of his aftershave crammed itself into her nose and her mouth, making her want to retch. Past the edge of his head, she could see a low wall, a field, bright green beneath the still steady sun and dotted with black and white cows, an innocent world which seemed to exist but be far beyond her reach.
His hand was on her knee now, trying to lift her skirt, the thick fingers sliding higher even as she tried to prise them off. ‘You’re not as innocent and wide-eyed as you pretend you are, young Sarah. You’re a mature woman, like you said. You know what life’s about and you’re up for it really, however much you try to come the nun.’
Sarah managed at last to g
et her left arm free from under him, to bring it up and get a handful of the hair at the back of his head. She twisted her fingers to secure her grip, then tugged as hard as she could, bringing a scream and a clutch of obscenities from the mouth that was now six inches above her face and full of pain as well as lust. She was sure afterwards that it was the sight of that pain which gave her strength. She twisted abruptly sideways, brought the knee which still had his hand upon it up between his legs, bringing a new gasp of pain from him as he yelled, ‘You bitch! You crazy bitch!’
She had the door of the car open as he clutched himself, but she was not quick enough with the unfamiliar catch on the safety belt. She was still fumbling with it when he clutched her arm with both of his hands, shouting, ‘Stay where you are! If you don’t want it, don’t have it, you bitch! I’ll drop you off at the garage in Ross as promised. You can keep your hand on your precious halfpenny!’
He reached across her, pulled shut the door she had managed to open. Sarah was still fumbling with the wretched safety-belt clasp. He restarted the engine, revving it furiously in his confusion, then moved out of the lay-by and back on to the road. They had ridden a good mile before his breathing steadied and he spoke. ‘You can’t blame me for trying. You’re an attractive woman, Sarah.’
‘I can blame you for forcing yourself upon me, when I quite plainly didn’t want it.’
‘Sometimes women like to play hard to get. Sometimes a little resistance is just part of the game.’
‘I don’t believe that. I certainly don’t accept that I didn’t make my feelings very plain to you.’
He didn’t come back with any reply to that. Perhaps he knew that she was right. They were off the old road, running into the outskirts of Ross now, and there was other traffic around them. She reached for her bag, fumbled for her comb. He reached up and pulled down the sun visor in front of her, said with an attempt at his normal voice, ‘There’s a mirror on the back of that.’
She ran the comb through her hair, resisted the temptation to reach for her lipstick and restore her make-up. Somehow that would have been condoning his action, accepting it as no more than a harmless romantic sally rather than the ugly attack it had been.
As if Martin Beaumont sensed what was in her mind, he said, ‘It was just a pass at you that failed, that’s all, Sarah. You must have dealt with a lot of those in your time. Don’t make it more than it was.’
He was telling her not to make the mistake of taking this further, that this would be his story and that she had no witnesses to help her to establish that it had been anything more than that. Sarah Vaughan wanted to tell him that it had been something much bigger and much uglier than a simple pass. Passes were something callow young men did when they were seeking a kiss; not attacks mounted by an ageing roue who was trying to assert the power of company ownership. All this flashed through her mind, though she was not able to put it into words until much later.
They were running into the forecourt of the garage where her car awaited her now, so she said nothing at all. She did not even look at him again, but slid quickly from the Jaguar’s leather and moved into the office area of the garage without a backward glance.
SIX
Alistair Morton hadn’t given up the idea of murder. Indeed, every time that Martin Beaumont denied him the share in the business he had promised, it seemed a more attractive option. It was true that in the cold light of day murder didn’t seem as easy a proposition as it did when you dreamed of it alone in your armchair in the hour after midnight, but he was still convinced that if you planned it properly the crime was eminently possible.
Sometimes you needed to fan the flames of your hatred, to convince yourself anew of how badly the man was treating you. At the end of April, two months after he had first entertained the delicious notion of ridding the world of Martin Beaumont, Alistair elected to set his grievances before the boss again. You couldn’t be fairer than that, surely? Giving the man a final chance to redeem himself before you proceeded with your plans against him was more than fair.
Had Alistair not been a secretive sort of man, he might have shared his thoughts with someone else. But Morton had a wife who lived her own life and no children. There was no one to tell him that his thinking might be a little unbalanced.
He presented himself at precisely ten o’clock for the meeting he had arranged with the owner of Abbey Vineyards. Exactly on time as usual, as Beaumont observed with a slightly mocking smile. Alistair accepted the boss’s offer to sit in the chair in front of the big desk. He didn’t see how he could do anything else, though he really wanted to stand toe to toe and challenge the man, not go through the rituals of a polite exchange.
‘What can I do for you, Alistair?’ Beaumont had that formal smile which Morton now saw as very false.
‘You can honour your promises!’ said Alistair. He had wanted it to be the harshest of challenges, cutting through the fripperies of polite exchanges. Somehow it sounded rather feeble in this large, quiet room, with its big framed photograph of the Malvern Hills, which always seemed to remind him of man’s impermanence in this ancient landscape.
‘And what would you mean by that?’ Beaumont hadn’t lost his surface affability; the meaningless smile remained glued to his face. But he was on his guard now, Alistair had no doubt about that. He looked beyond Morton, out through the big window to where Sarah Vaughan had just driven her Honda into the car park. Beaumont was glad to note her arrival; he had feared when she was not here at nine o’clock as usual that she might be planning some retribution for yesterday’s little incident.
Alistair glanced at the photograph of Beaumont standing alone beside their first tractor, hoping that the man in the big, round-backed leather chair would follow his look and his thoughts. ‘I worked for practically nothing for you in the early days.’
Beaumont raised his eyebrows. This was familiar ground to him, but he had prepared his tactics. He would pretend that Morton’s renewed accusations were a disappointment to him, a revival of an argument he thought he’d already settled. ‘We all worked hard to get things off the ground. We can all look back to the sacrifices we had to make to get the show on the road. And equally, we can all be proud of the progress we have made since those early days.’ They were the opening words of a press handout he had given to one of the glossy magazines three months ago, but he doubted whether this man would have read that article.
Morton wished the big man would just shut up and let him state his case. He followed the movement of Beaumont’s lips, but as the man went on with his bluster he heard less and less of what he said. Eventually he interrupted him. ‘I worked for almost nothing for you for five years at the beginning. Found and exploited every loophole which a new business could exploit, got you allowances you’d never have dreamed of for yourself. Even cut one or two corners for you, to make sure that every penny could be ploughed back into development.’
Beaumont grinned, happy to show how little he was affected by the man’s earnestness. ‘Careful now, Alistair. We wouldn’t want you to go admitting to any little peccadilloes that might get you struck off, would we? Do they unfrock accountants, or is that just randy vicars?’
Alistair found his voice rising to a shout in the face of this derision. ‘Just shut up, will you, and listen to what I’m saying. I worked for peanuts for at least the first five years when we started this. That was on the clear understanding that I would eventually become a partner and a director of the enterprise.’
‘Not my recollection, I’m afraid. I seem to remember we’ve had this discussion before. I was hoping we’d agreed to differ and get on with our different tasks. Not good for any business to be running a divided ship, is it? Or am I mixing my metaphors there?’ Beaumont frowned and shook his head, as if a proper literary style was at that moment pre-eminent among his objectives.
‘You know as well as I do what was agreed. I was to become a partner in the business as soon as it proved itself a going concern.’
‘Let other people take all the risks until the business was a guaranteed success, you mean? That hardly seems a likely arrangement for a businessman like me to make, does it?’
There was an awful sort of logic about that. Alistair could see him arguing that line with a third party and sounding very convincing. He said doggedly, ‘You know and I know what was agreed.’
Martin Beaumont raised the bushy eyebrows on his wide face as high as they would go, making him look to Morton like a caricature of outraged innocence. ‘It seems we remember things rather differently, Alistair, which is a great pity. Have you anything in writing to support this strange recollection of our relationship during the early years of the company?’
‘You know damned well I haven’t!’ Alistair sought hopelessly for some external evidence to endorse him. ‘My wife remembers it. I gave more and more of my time to your affairs, as the vineyard got off the ground. Worked day and night, sometimes. The other work I scraped together as a freelancer scarcely provided a living wage. We depended on her work as a secretary to survive.’
That oily, ridiculous smile was back on Beaumont’s hated features. ‘Scarcely the most objective of witnesses, a wife. I’m sure that as an experienced financial man you’d readily agree with that, Alistair.’
Morton leaned forward, planting his fingers desperately on the edge of the big desk in front of him. ‘We didn’t think we needed anything in writing, in those early, enthusiastic days. Leastways, you didn’t. And I was foolish enough to let you convince me that we didn’t.’
Beaumont looked at the fingers clasping the other side of his desk for a moment, as if studying with interest the movements of some small mammal. Then he said, ‘It doesn’t really sound like the conduct of a man trained in finance, does it, Alistair? A trained accountant, whose first watchword must surely be prudence? I can’t think that anyone like that would have been party to some wildcat scheme which involved him giving his valuable time and labour for nothing, in exchange for some vague promise of jam in the future. I ask you, does it sound likely behaviour for an accountant, even to you? Do you think you’ve made out the sort of case which would convince any kind of mediator we might choose to bring in to resolve the issue? I don’t think so, and neither will you if you give the matter some sober reflection.’