In Vino Veritas lah-23

by J M Gregson

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’ She frowned in concentration, anxious to show them that she was now giving the matter the attention its significance deserved. ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you the exact time when Vanda arrived. Early evening, I think, because she didn’t want anything to eat. It was still daylight, because I showed her some of the rhododendrons in the garden. The sun was still well up then. It must have been about seven o’clock, I should think.’

  ‘Thank you. That is helpful.’

  She watched him making a note of the time in his round, clear hand. ‘Vanda hadn’t intended to stay the night. I had to lend her a nightdress and a toothbrush.’ She looked very pleased with her recall of these details. ‘She only stayed because she could see I wasn’t very well. Martin and I had argued about the divorce the night before and I’d taken a lot of my pills before he left in the morning — he always wanted me to do that, when we’d quarrelled. I must have taken more than I should have, because Vanda could see that I was falling asleep as we talked to each other in the sitting room. I said that it didn’t look as though Martin was going to be back and she said she didn’t want to leave me on my own. So I put her in a spare room. We’ve plenty of those available, but Martin said we couldn’t entertain people, because of my illness.’

  ‘So Miss North was here overnight.’

  ‘Yes.’ It seemed strange to hear this stolid, friendly fellow calling her Miss North, when she’d got so used to Vanda.

  ‘And what time did she leave on Thursday morning?’

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t be sure of that. You’d need to ask her.’ Realization dawned. ‘But perhaps you already have. That’s why Mr Lambert said I might want to amend things I’d said on Friday, isn’t it?’

  Hook smiled but did not answer her question. ‘After breakfast, was it, when Miss North left?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She brought me a tray in bed. It was probably about nine o’clock when she left, because she made sure I was up and feeling better. But she’d gone before Mrs Forshaw arrived — she’s my cleaner, who comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She arrives here at half past nine.’

  Hook made another note and said ‘Thank you, Mrs Beaumont. That is much clearer. We previously had the impression that you’d been alone overnight, and of course that is what you’d led our officers to believe.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. I wasn’t quite myself last week, as Mr Lambert was kind enough to say earlier. Martin would have had a harsher expression for it, but there’s no need to go into that any more, is there?’

  ‘Indeed there isn’t. And of course we’re happy that you’re feeling so much better than you were. So do you have any idea who killed Martin?’

  He dropped this hand grenade on the tail of his politeness with an inviting smile. That made it even more shocking. She again felt as if her cheeks were colouring, a sensation she had not endured for years. ‘No. I’ve thought a lot about it, as you’d expect. I think I’m going to be a lot better off without Martin. But I’d tell you if I knew anything about how he’d died.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lambert had briefed the full team of twenty-two officers involved in the murder case first thing on Tuesday morning, emphasizing the need to find local witnesses to events at Howler’s Heath on the night of Wednesday, the thirteenth of May. ‘Above all, we need to find someone who has seen a vehicle other than Beaumont’s Jaguar near the scene in the late evening — any time between ten and midnight. There is definitely no record of anyone using a taxi in that area, so there must surely have been a private vehicle around, whether it belonged to the murderer or an accomplice taking him or her away from the scene.’

  Later in the morning, when he and Hook returned from their second interview with Jane Beaumont, he called DI Rushton into his office so that the three of them could review all the information gathered thus far. Hook, snatching a quick coffee in the canteen, found himself still the butt of colleagues who envied him his degree and the unexpected academic distinction it had brought to him. A young female DC who should have known better said, ‘Meeting the chief superintendent and Chris Rushton, are you, prof? I suppose they’ll be expecting you to conduct this morning’s seminar for them!’

  ‘Just you get out on the house-to-house and find us a witness. Find us someone who spotted that car the chief was on about and justify your overtime!’ growled Hook in reply. No respect for their elders, today’s young officers.

  In Lambert’s office, Chris Rushton was putting the revisions to Jane Beaumont’s account into his laptop and awaiting the moment when he could announce the solution to this mystery. Lambert always stressed the need for facts rather than speculation, and Chris had a fact which would make the old dinosaur sit up and take notice. Chris would listen to what the others had to say, as the rules of the game demanded, but Detective Inspector Rushton was pretty certain that he could provide them with a piece of evidence more telling than anything they would be able to offer him.

  Lambert said, ‘Let’s begin with the grieving widow, who from the start has made little secret of the fact that she isn’t grieving very hard. Jane Beaumont has a history of illness. She has a bipolar disorder which was first diagnosed around the time when she married Beaumont. The doctors and medical records confirm that this is genuine and that it has become more pronounced in recent years.’

  ‘I get the impression that Beaumont, whilst pretending to be very concerned about her illness, actually aggravated her troubles,’ said Bert Hook. ‘Whether that was wittingly or unwittingly, we can hardly investigate now. But she seems to me to be better off without him, from a health point of view, as well as being rid of a loveless marriage. She was much more in touch with reality when we saw her this morning than she was last Friday, but I doubt that she’d have been capable of planning and executing a murder such as this one.’

  Sometimes not having seen a suspect can be an advantage, in making you more objective, thought Rushton. He looked at his computer and said, ‘Mrs Beaumont’s changed her story since Friday. She now claims she wasn’t at home alone but that Vanda North was there, thus providing herself neatly with an alibi.’

  ‘And the capable Miss North with one also, as she confirms it,’ said Lambert thoughtfully. ‘For what it’s worth, I did believe Jane Beaumont when she spoke to us today. For a start, someone who’d driven out and killed Beaumont would probably have had her alibi ready from the start, rather than producing it at a second meeting. And secondly, her tale of being drugged up to the eyeballs on the night of Wednesday and Thursday tallies both with Vanda North’s assessment of her and with our first impressions of her when we saw her on Friday. She was certainly much sharper and more in touch with life today. And her changed account tallies with what Miss North had already told us, both about her presence there on Wednesday night and Jane Beaumont’s condition at the time.’

  ‘There is still the possibility of a pact between the two to see off Beaumont whilst providing each other with alibis,’ Rushton pointed out. ‘Though I must say that this alliance of wife and former mistress seems a most unlikely one.’

  ‘Unlikely but genuine, as far as we could see,’ said the usually sceptical Lambert. ‘Miss North’s affection for Beaumont is long gone, and Jane Beaumont has for many years been a lonely and isolated woman — largely as a result of her husband’s efforts, it seems. It’s quite a recent association, and both women say they were surprised by it. They appear to have been bonded by a mutual hatred of Beaumont’s actions towards them over the last few years. We’ll interview Vanda North again, though, and see whether that impression is confirmed.’

  Rushton flicked the North file on his monitor. ‘What about Miss North as a suspect?’

  ‘She appears to be in the clear with Jane Beaumont, if we accept that they were in the Beaumont house together overnight at the time of the murder. She’s cool and intelligent, and the fact that she’s a former mistress of the victim gives an obvious motive. But if this was a crime of passion, would she wait for all these years to co
mmit it? She appears to have dealt with the break-up of her relationship with Beaumont and moved on — even to the extent of forming a friendship with her lover’s wife. How genuine did that friendship seem to you, Bert?’

  ‘Both of them seemed surprised and even slightly embarrassed by the way a bond had formed between them and then strengthened so quickly. If they are acting this, then they are both very accomplished. And if I were a wife looking for some sort of alibi, I’d look for a more likely companion at the crucial time.’

  Rushton nodded and moved on methodically. ‘What about Alistair Morton? He’s been with Beaumont since the start of Abbey Vineyards.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘And he’s resolutely low-profile. That may be merely his personality, but I want to speak to him again, now that we know more about the case and the other people in it. I get the feeling that there was general discontent with the way Beaumont was running things as the firm got bigger and bigger. With his grasp of financial affairs, Morton would be the natural focus for any organized revolt.’

  ‘I might have a little ammunition for you against the low-profile Mr Morton. The Inland Revenue conducted quite a prolonged investigation into the affairs of Abbey Vineyards in the early days. There was even a possibility of the Serious Fraud Squad being brought in at one point, but in the end the whole thing collapsed for lack of reliable evidence. As far as I could gather, the directorate of Abbey Vineyards consisted of Beaumont and Alistair Morton in those days. There were lots of employees on the land, but those two were the only ones who knew what was going on financially and they were the subjects of the investigation.’

  ‘Interesting. Mr Morton presented himself as a pillar of financial respectability. We might be able to shake him up and find out a little more about both him and others, if we can use this when we see him again.’ Lambert looked as if he relished that prospect. He enjoyed pinning down evasive witnesses almost as much as the lawyers all policemen affect to despise.

  Hook grinned at John Lambert’s intensity. ‘We also have grounds to pursue Jason Knight. He’s no doubt an excellent head chef, but he appears to have ideas which were above his station as far as Beaumont was concerned.’

  When Rushton looked a question at his chief, Lambert said, ‘Golf club tittle-tattle, Chris, expertly unearthed by one DS Hook. I told you the game would bring you unexpected rewards, Bert.’

  Hook grinned at Rushton. ‘John and I played with a young industrial lawyer on Sunday morning. He happened to tell us afterwards that Knight had been sounding him out about the possibilities of getting more say in policy and perhaps shares in the business only a week or two before Beaumont was killed.’

  Rushton frowned. ‘It’s a long step from that to murder.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Lambert. ‘But our informant said he told Knight that Beaumont had things so well tied up legally that Knight had very little chance of breaking his monopoly of power and decision-making. I agree it’s still a long way from there to shooting a man in cold blood, but it’s got to interest us that Knight concealed these aspirations from us when we saw him.’

  ‘Gerald Davies,’ said Rushton rather abruptly. He was anxious to get through these lesser suspects and on to the one damning piece of evidence he had unearthed.

  ‘Salt of the earth,’ said Bert Hook, equally abruptly and decisively.

  Lambert grinned. ‘Bert likes him because he’s a sportsman from a working-class background. We have to make allowances for the built-in prejudices of our Barnardo’s boy. Of course, we now also have to take into account the intelligent insights of the new graduate.’

  ‘I came in here to get away from all that bullshit,’ protested Hook. ‘All that I’m saying is that Davies seemed a genuine and decent man to me.’

  ‘And all three of us in this room have seen enough violent crime to realize that decent men can quite easily become murderers in the right circumstances,’ Lambert pointed out gently.

  ‘Which are usually domestic,’ responded Hook. ‘Anyone can be driven beyond his or her limits of control in some domestic set-ups. This isn’t one of those, unless the widow killed him, which we seem to have agreed is most unlikely.’

  Lambert nodded. ‘Davies was trying to conceal things. Ineffectively, in the case of Sarah Vaughan: he let out that Beaumont had made some sort of sexual advance to her. I agree that he isn’t a natural deceiver, but that’s all the better for us.’

  ‘He has no alibi.’ Rushton was looking at his screen. ‘Highly inconvenient for him that his wife was away at her mother’s on the night in question. Or highly convenient, if he wanted to drive twenty-five miles to kill his employer. His residence is further from the scene of crime than those of all the other suspects.’

  ‘That might appeal to a man like Davies,’ said Lambert thoughtfully. ‘He’s the kind of man who’d want any act of violence on his part to be as far from his own patch as possible. And whilst that meeting must have been arranged beforehand, we shouldn’t assume the murder itself was necessarily pre-planned. Jane Beaumont was pretty certain that Beaumont had his pistol in the car that night. The killing might have been on impulse. It might even have been in self-defence, if Beaumont had produced the weapon and threatened whoever met him that night.’

  ‘We’re unlikely to find the weapon. And we still don’t know whether it was Beaumont or his killer who arranged the time and place of their meeting,’ Rushton pointed out. ‘Do you think what Davies told you about Sarah Vaughan is significant?’

  Lambert pursed his lips. ‘She concealed some sort of sexual advance by Beaumont when she spoke to us. I’m not sure how serious it was, but I’d be interested in why she thought it necessary to hide it. Davies clearly thought it had shaken her.’

  Hook decided to show that a pretty face and shapely legs were irrelevant to a professional man like him. ‘Ms Vaughan pretended to be more recently appointed to Abbey Vineyards and more gauche than she is. She’s a capable woman of thirty-three, whatever her physical attractions. Beaumont wouldn’t have appointed a dumb blonde. We now know that he had a wandering eye and wandering hands, but he rarely made a bad appointment. And everyone we’ve seen says that Abbey Vineyards was his first and most consistent love, to the point of obsession at times.’

  Lambert said quietly, ‘We also know that he demanded his own way and got it. Perhaps he thought that should apply in sexual encounters as well as business. If he arranged to meet Sarah Vaughan last Wednesday night and then went too far, she could well have panicked and shot him. We shall have to investigate that possibility with her. She has no alibi.’

  Rushton nodded. ‘Like most of the others. Including our last major suspect, Tom Ogden.’ This time his normally staid exterior could not conceal his excitement.

  The others both looked at him keenly before Lambert said, ‘He was at the cinema with his wife last Wednesday night. I understood that she had confirmed it.’

  ‘She did. She also stated that he went home with her afterwards and didn’t go out again. But it was Thursday night when they went to the cinema, not Wednesday. I was there with Anne and we saw them. It’s most unlikely that they went to the same place to see the same film on two successive nights.’

  Lambert and Hook digested this, their brains registering again what Ogden had told them and how he had seemed at the time. Then Lambert said heavily, ‘He didn’t seem a natural liar to me, but that only makes this more significant. He has a record for violence, though admittedly a long time ago. But he more than anyone made no secret of his loathing for Beaumont and his relief that he was off the scene.’

  ‘Do we get him in here and grill him?’ said Rushton eagerly. As he was coordinating the investigation from the station, he was even more conscious than Lambert of the attention the press and other media were giving to this high-profile case. A man ‘helping with enquiries’ was always a useful placebo to produce for them.

  Lambert shook his head. ‘No. If Ogden is our killer, he’s not a danger to anyone else. Let him think he’s got away
with his alibi at the moment, whilst we investigate one or two other deceptions.’

  Rushton concealed his disappointment; Lambert’s rank and record didn’t permit him to press the matter further. ‘You don’t even want an officer to see his wife and find out whether she wishes to revise her statement?’

  ‘No. That would alert Ogden himself, which I don’t want to do at the moment. I think we’ll start with a word with Jason Knight, after we’ve grabbed some lunch.’

  Rushton didn’t envy the director of catering at Abbey Vineyards his afternoon.

  Jason Knight, like many of his calling, looked most confident in the kitchen where he reigned supreme. For a moment, he did not notice the arrival of his CID visitors and they watched him directing his staff in the preparation of the food for the evening menu. He was quiet, confident, obviously both respected and liked by his workers. He was still only thirty-eight, and several of the staff were older than he was, but there was no sign of resentment in what seemed to be a contented group. Knight seemed not at all put out when he noticed Lambert and Hook waiting patiently for his attention near the entrance door.

  Lambert remarked how quietly efficient the kitchen looked as Knight led them into the small private room which adjoined it. ‘It gets more hectic when the customers are in and waiting for their food,’ Jason admitted ruefully. ‘But it’s my belief that you rarely improve efficiency by shouting at people. As a result of carefully edited television coverage of one or two of our number, the public has the impression that your cuisine can’t be good unless you’re foul-mouthed and temperamental.’

  ‘Rather as you have to have a drink problem and at least one broken marriage to be a television sleuth,’ said Lambert wryly.

  ‘Overall, I suppose we should be grateful for the publicity afforded to our calling,’ said Jason. He was pleased with this informal introduction to a meeting he knew he had to handle smoothly if suspicions were to be removed.