In Vino Veritas

by J M Gregson

  In Vino Veritas

  Lambert and Hook [23]

  J. M. Gregson

  Severn House Large Print Books (2010)

  * * *

  Tags: Fiction, Mystery Detective, Police Procedural

  Fictionttt Mystery Detectivettt Police Proceduralttt

  The new Lambert and Hook mystery - Martin Beaumont is the uncompromising owner of a successful Gloucestershire vineyard. He has built the company steadily over the years, with a small but dedicated team by his side. However, he sees Abbey Vineyards as his company, to do with as he pleases, much to the chagrin of his senior staff members. So when he is found dead in his car, Chief Superintendent Lambert and DS Hook don't have to look very far to find people with strong motives for the murder . . .

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by J.M. Gregson from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Recent Titles by J.M. Gregson from Severn House

  Detective Inspector Peach Mysteries

  DUSTY DEATH

  TO KILL A WIFE

  THE LANCASHIRE LEOPARD

  A LITTLE LEARNING

  MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD

  MURDER AT THE LODGE

  ONLY A GAME

  PASTURES NEW

  REMAINS TO BE SEEN

  A TURBULENT PRIEST

  THE WAGES OF SIN

  WHO SAW HIM DIE?

  WITCH’S SABBATH

  WILD JUSTICE

  Lambert and Hook Mysteries

  AN ACADEMIC DEATH

  CLOSE CALL

  DARKNESS VISIBLE

  DEATH ON THE ELEVENTH HOLE

  GIRL GONE MISSING

  A GOOD WALK SPOILED

  IN VINO VERITAS

  JUST DESSERTS

  MORTAL TASTE

  SOMETHING IS ROTTEN

  TOO MUCH OF WATER

  AN UNSUITABLE DEATH

  IN VINO VERITAS

  A Lambert and Hook Mystery

  J.M. Gregson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2010

  in Great Britain and 2010 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2010 by J. M. Gregson.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Gregson, J.M.

  In vino veritas. – (A Lambert and Hook mystery)

  1. Lambert, John (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Hook,

  Bert (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 3. Police–

  England–Gloucestershire–Fiction. 4. Detective and

  mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'14-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-247-4 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6919-7 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-268-0 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To John, a son who has been a constant source of inspiration when he least suspected it.

  ONE

  It was at two minutes to midnight on the third of March that Alistair Morton first entertained the idea of murder.

  He could be very precise about that, for he looked at the clock on the mantelpiece at exactly the moment when the idea came into his head. His wife had already been in bed for an hour, and Alistair had switched the television off at twenty to twelve. Since then, he had been sitting very still in his chair. Ruminating about where he stood in life and what he could do about it. It was a habit he had acquired over the last year, when his existence had moved from being merely frustrated to being embittered.

  He sat in the deep, comfortable chair, which no one else ever used, and wondered whether living had any meaning. His life in particular seemed to be completely without purpose. Murder might be the only thing which could bring some meaning back into his existence.

  Alistair was a practical man. He was an accountant for a start, and accountants were taught early in life what was possible and what was not. They also learned that imagination was the most dangerous of human properties. It had to be imprisoned within very strong walls and not allowed to escape. Better still, imagination had better be discarded altogether. Left to poets and other misfits like them. Dumped in some neglected garret until disuse starved it out of existence.

  Alistair thought he generally controlled his imagination well, but he was aware that it was an unruly and scarcely tameable beast. Of late, it had tended to come out of the shadows late at night. The dangerous time was when his wife was in bed, the television set was switched off, and he was left alone with his thoughts in the quiet sitting room.

  Alistair Morton told himself firmly that the concept of murder should probably be no more than a delightful fantasy, an idea to play with and then discard. But instead of abandoning it as his training told him to do, he now proceeded to give it substance, to put bones and flesh upon the skeleton. It should have given him no more than a minor thrill and then been rejected, like a passing spectre upon a fairground ghost train.

  Yet the more he thought about it, the more the idea began to seem feasible. That magic accountants’ word! Feasible. Instead of seeming upon examination bizarre and impossible, this particular murder began to seem as practical a proposition as tax avoidance. Just this particular murder, Alistair told himself repeatedly. He wasn’t saying that murder in general was feasible, or even desirable. But this particular murder was both of those things.

  Desirable because the man concerned would be no loss to society. Indeed, his demise would be a positive benefit to many people, not just to Alistair himself. His removal would be a public-spirited act. An act which would make a wide circle of humanity much happier in the years to come. ‘Every man’s death diminishes me’, some fusty old poet or philosopher had said; that was the kind of irrelevant nonsense they tried to fill your head with at school. Well, sod that for a game of soldiers! Alistair had never subscribed to that idea. Even when the idea was first put to him, he had immediately thought of several masters in the school whose death would have seemed positively desirable, whose passing wo
uld have diminished him not in the least.

  With the passing years, his sentiments had not changed. Hitler and Stalin, and in his own lifetime Chairman Mao in China: here were three for a start whose deaths would have diminished no one at all and benefited thousands. This man wasn’t a villain on that scale, Alistair wasn’t claiming that. But he couldn’t see that anyone would suffer by his elimination, whereas there were a whole range of people who would benefit. Once you looked at it in those terms, the case for his removal seemed overwhelming. Alistair wriggled his toes in his slippers and luxuriated for a moment in the thought.

  In the next few minutes, he confirmed to himself – and this was the thing which appealed to the accountant in him – that the proposition was feasible. Many murders wouldn’t be, but this one was. There was no hurry, for a start. With a little ingenuity and a lot of careful planning, this death might be arranged so that no one was ever charged with it. And planning was his forte, wasn’t it? Planning was the whole raison d’être of accountants.

  Murder wasn’t just a matter for the imagination, after all.

  That was probably why it was still such a rare crime, once you discounted the impetuous knife crimes of city youth and the domestic killings which were solved within hours. Those weren’t proper murders, not murders in the sense which most people had of the crime, where someone was struck down by person or persons unknown.

  There were probably a lot more murders than people realized from the statistics, because the most successful ones were never recognized as such. That was both a satisfying and a thought-provoking notion. It also marked a challenge which even an accountant should be excited to undertake.

  And even if the police recognized this death as murder, there would be many suspects, wouldn’t there, because the victim was such an unpopular man? Alistair decided that he would be well down that list of suspects; indeed, he might not figure on the list at all, if he planned the crime as carefully as he proposed to do. It was a crime, he supposed. Technically, at any rate. But he’d already proved that some crimes were perfectly justified, hadn’t he?

  When he looked at the clock, he was surprised to find that it was one a.m. Alistair Morton smiled. He wondered when he had last spent an hour in such fruitful and productive thought.

  TWO

  The sun was still quite low, but there was scarcely a cloud in the sky. The long lines of carefully trained grapevines stretched away over the hill, straight and regular as columns of Roman soldiers. Martin Beaumont called out a cheery good morning and waved to the visitors as he passed them in his electric buggy. They wouldn’t know who he was, of course, wouldn’t know that he owned the land as far as their eyes could see. One of the workers would tell them, if they asked. That didn’t really matter, but the thought pleased him.

  ‘As far as the eye could see’ might be pushing it a bit. Eighty-five acres, to be precise; his land didn’t include the long line of the Malvern Hills to the north, or the more distant Welsh mountains to the west: that would be ridiculous. But the strolling visitors he had passed were in the valley. All they could see from there were the long lines of beautifully trained vines running away to the top of the slopes above and behind them, and every inch of that intensively cultivated land was assuredly his. Well, his company’s, if you wanted to be pedantic, but everyone understood that that was just a legal technicality.

  Beaumont stopped at the highest point of his land. He loved this spot on a spring day, loved to survey the scale of his achievement on this rolling land which was bounded by the historic rivers Severn and Wye, neither of them visible from here but each of them imbued with the turbulent history of England. That history was an appropriate setting for his revival of winemaking in this western corner of Gloucestershire. The Romans had made wine in quantity in England, as Martin was fond of reminding anyone who would listen. He was reviving an ancient craft. If global warming was giving him increasing assistance, that was but a happy accident. If your mind favoured the notion of a supreme being, the changing climate might even be seen as a sign of approval from a benevolent Providence.

  It was the middle of March and the sun was rising a little higher each day. It had real warmth in it now. The swelling buds on the vines were bursting into fresh green leaves on the more sheltered south-facing slopes, heralding the lush green and black grapes which would follow, as summer warmth and Gloucestershire rain swelled them towards maturity. Martin loved this time of the year, when summer and its promise were all before them and the earth smelt of growth, whilst each day stretched a little longer and brighter.

  He walked over to where two of his men were screwing wires on to the stout wooden crosses which were to carry the first crops of the new red-wine grape they had planted. ‘Morning, Walter,’ he said to the older of the men, glad that he was able to remember the name. The man had been one of his first workers here and was now a veteran of viniculture.

  ‘Mornin’, Mr Beaumont,’ said Walter in his thick local accent. ‘’E’s comin’ on a treat, this new ’un.’

  Nothing in the local parlance was inanimate: every plant was he or she, and any failure on their part to cooperate was taken as a personal insult. Martin liked that local trait, which meant that even a golf ball had a personality of its own, exhibiting a malignity when it ran into trouble and a friendliness when it bounced favourably for you.

  Walter couldn’t have much longer to work now. Though his movements had slowed imperceptibly with the years, he never shirked and he gave full value for his wages. He had touched the canvas cap he always wore in acknowledgement of the boss’s status, and Martin was pleased despite himself by the gesture. It wasn’t very long since ill-paid rural workers here had touched their forelocks to the lord of the manor who was exploiting them. It was surely harmless for today’s much better paid workers to acknowledge their employer with a touch of the cap. The habit would die with Walter and his contemporaries; the younger workers didn’t see the need for any such demarcation in their status.

  Beaumont glanced at his watch. The meeting was in ten minutes: he had better get back to base.

  He drove the electric buggy swiftly back to the long, low complex of buildings near the entrance to the vineyards. The bricks stretched out further here each year, but there was ample room for additions where once the old farmhouse buildings had sprawled. The dining room and the shop had been extended again during the winter. The single-storey range of rooms which had been built for holiday lets was a lucrative addition to the complex over the last few years.

  His own large office doubled as a room for company meetings. He liked this sort of economy, because it showed his staff where their priorities should lie. He was always reluctant to increase office facilities, which he saw as non-productive. The available funds should go to making the shop, restaurant and residential accommodation more attractive, as these areas were self-evidently the source of the profits on which Abbey Vineyards depended.

  This morning’s meeting shouldn’t occupy them for very long. Martin, as chairman, began by telling them that. It was no more than a necessary evil, his attitude implied. His preference was to act as a benevolent dictator, but a meeting of senior staff was one of those diversions necessitated by their status as a limited company. He looked round affably at the five people who sat around the table which had been brought in for the occasion from the restaurant. There were nervous half-smiles from two of them, but all of them stared down at their brief agendas for the meeting rather than at him.

  Martin reported on a couple of items under the heading of ‘Matters Arising’, then in more detail on the progress of new planting. ‘Abbey Vineyards continues to make excellent progress. I look forward to your reports on your individual sections and to highlighting any problems we may have in particular areas, so that we can give our attention to them.’ Whether intentionally or not, he made the words seem like a threat to the people who were about to speak. ‘First on the agenda is the restaurant. Report from our head chef.’

  Ja
son Knight coughed nervously and said quickly, ‘Things are progressing well, I think.’ That didn’t sound as definite as he had intended it to when he had rehearsed it the night before. He had been determined that when he came in here he would exude a calm confidence, would emphasize how much he was in control of this vital source of profits. But Jason was a practical man, used to achieving results under pressure and driving himself and his kitchen staff hard. Formal reporting like this, in a quiet room full of attentive and possibly critical listeners, was still alien to him.

  But Martin Beaumont wasn’t in the mood for criticism. ‘That’s what we want to hear,’ he boomed out into the quiet room. ‘The extension to the restaurant has given us room for sixteen more covers each evening: I’m sure that as the summer progresses we shall fill the place on most nights. The challenge will be to do that during the winter, when people are less conscious of us and there is less for them to see here. But I’m sure we’re all confident of meeting this new task as efficiently as we have done such challenges in the past!’ The chairman jutted his chin aggressively at the room. His attempt to stir the blood might have been more effective with a larger audience than five.

  Jason Knight said a little defensively, ‘People have to be persuaded to drive out here through the winter darkness. There’s a lot of competition from the pubs, which is going to increase during this recession.’

  ‘If other people can pull in the punters, Abbey Vineyards can,’ said Beaumont firmly. ‘We have a wonderful, spacious set-up here. Plus the individuality offered by our own wines. That is a well-nigh unique selling point.’

  Alistair Morton looked up from his notes, sensing that there was no way the chef was going to win an argument with the more fluent owner of the vineyard. ‘The fact that there is a vineyard around the restaurant has been fully exploited over the last twenty years, Martin. It probably still has some novelty appeal for visitors to our area, but the locals are well aware of it.’