In Vino Veritas

by J M Gregson

  Lambert also gave Rushton an item for the station news bulletin:

  Detective Sergeant Bert Hook has graduated as BA with second class honours (division one) in the Open University degree for which he has been studying in his own time for the last six years. He deserves our heartiest congratulations on this very considerable achievement. Bert has informed his senior officers that it is not his intention to look for accelerated promotion through the graduate recruitment scheme!

  Chris Rushton smiled at the idea of stolid, reliable Bert Hook joining the fresh-faced and eager young graduates on the accelerated promotion scheme. He was prepared to agree now that Bert knew more about police work than most of these youngsters would ever learn. It had not always been so: Chris had felt at a moral disadvantage with Bert because he knew the older man had turned down the prospect of promotion to inspector years ago, because he preferred his work as a detective sergeant at the crime-face. It is almost unknown for policemen to turn down the chance of higher rank, and although Bert never broadcast the fact, and few people were aware of it, the considerably younger and newly promoted Chris Rushton had felt uncomfortable in the face of such integrity.

  Hook himself had been in court that morning, sturdily resisting the attempts of a clever young defence barrister to trip him up and cast doubt upon his evidence. The Crown Prosecution Service had secured its conviction and Bert was back in the police canteen at lunch. He found himself much more embarrassed than he had been in court by the police banter about this new Einstein within their midst. Policemen, even sometimes quite senior policemen, feel more threatened by intellectuals than those in any other calling. When, as in Bert’s case, a degree was accompanied almost uniquely by many years of solid work and achievement in feeling collars and putting dangerous men and the occasional woman behind bars, they did not know quite how to react. There was genuine admiration behind all the routine banter and the comments on this new professor in the Oldford ranks.

  Lambert seized him during the afternoon and took him into his own office, where he produced the bottle of whisky which rarely left the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and insisted upon a celebratory toast with his old colleague and friend. ‘I never doubted you could do it intellectually, Bert. I just wondered whether your resolution would hold, with the crazy hours we sometimes work and a family growing up around you.’

  ‘The boys have been a stimulus really, I suppose,’ said Bert. ‘Once I’d started, I could hardly give up, in the face of all their comments. And of course, Eleanor’s been marvellous. I couldn’t have done it without her looking after the kids for long hours on her own, as well as encouraging me whenever it seemed too high a cliff to scale. I expect it’s Eleanor who’s blown the gaff on me now. I didn’t expect to come into a station which was throbbing with the news.’

  ‘You can blame me for that. I’m the one who told Chris to put it in the station information bulletin. The grapevine then relays it pretty quickly, especially on a quiet Monday like this. You might as well bask in a little glory whilst it’s there to be had. You know it will be the centre of gossip for about two days, until something more salacious like an officer’s divorce takes over.’

  ‘I suppose I have Eleanor to thank for you knowing about it.’

  ‘Christine asked her outright over the weekend. You know what wives are like. You wouldn’t have wanted Eleanor to lie, would you?’

  ‘I suppose not. And as you say, it’s probably better to get all the jokes out of the way at once. It won’t last.’

  ‘We could do with a good juicy murder to get everyone’s attention back on the things that matter. Not that one wishes ill upon any of the honest citizens who pay our wages, of course.’ Despite this routine denial, both of them felt the familiar CID men’s lust for a crime that would fully occupy their predatory minds.

  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 finis
hed 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 clichés. 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 clichés 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 ingénue 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 get 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 roué 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.’