No Laughing Matter

by Dorothy Simpson

  ‘So how did he acquire this place?’ Though Thanet suspected he could guess.

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘How did he meet his wife, do you know?’

  ‘In the Young Farmers’, I believe.’

  Yes, a good place for an impecunious and ambitious lad interested in farming to meet a prospective bride, thought Thanet. Or was he being unfair to Randish? ‘How did they get on?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! If you want to discuss his marriage, you’ll have to ask his wife.’

  Thanet didn’t know what made him then ask, ‘Are you married, Mr Vintage?’ He watched a bleakness seep into Vintage’s expression. What was wrong there?

  ‘Yes. But what’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Just wondered. Been married long?’

  ‘Two years.’

  Thanet filed away a question mark over Vintage’s marriage, for further investigation later if necessary. ‘How did Mr Randish get on with his father-in-law, Mr Landers?’

  Another hit, it seemed. Once again there was an evasive look in Vintage’s eyes. ‘None of my business.’

  ‘But you must have had an opinion.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t asking for gossip. My personal opinion of Zak’s character, you said you wanted.’

  Vintage was getting annoyed. Good. Thanet hadn’t deliberately set out to needle him, but anger frequently led to loss of control and hence indiscretion. Time to edge towards the main point of the interview.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about Reg Mason’s dispute with Mr Randish?’

  Vintage blinked at the sudden change of tack. ‘That was none of my business, either.’

  ‘I’m getting a little tired of people trying to protect other people. It’s understandable, but misguided and completely pointless. As I was saying to Mrs Prote a moment ago, we always find out sooner or later. She, of course, was trying to protect you.’

  Vintage’s eyebrows went up, but Thanet could tell that his surprise was not genuine and there was even a touch of resignation in his voice as he said, ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you, Mr Vintage.’

  Suddenly, Thanet was fed up. Interviewing was the part of his work that he enjoyed most. He enjoyed planning tactics, drawing on his accumulated experience in order to coax information out of reluctant witnesses. But just occasionally he became tired of all the manoeuvring. He sighed. ‘How on earth can I get it into your head that there really is no point in trying to hide things from us?’ He leaned forward, allowing his frustration to show. ‘I honestly don’t think you realise the seriousness of your position. Your employer was killed here yesterday. This is a murder investigation, and in a murder investigation everyone, but everyone connected with the victim comes under a searchlight and especially those who are known to have quarrelled with him. You all seem to think you live in little worlds of your own, but those worlds overlap, all the time. People see things, they hear things, and even if they don’t want to tell us about them through misguided but perhaps understandable loyalty, sooner or later the truth will come out. As it has in your case. We know you had a row with Mr Randish yesterday and we want to know what it was about. So I suggest you stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about, and tell us.’

  Had he got through? Thanet wondered. If not, which tack should he try next? He was aware of Lineham’s waiting stillness, of the almost palpable tension in the room.

  Vintage’s face was expressionless but Thanet guessed he was thinking furiously. His eyes were narrowed as he stared at Thanet and bunched cheek muscles betrayed clenched teeth.

  At last he took a deep breath, blew the air out softly between pursed lips. ‘I suppose you’re right. You’re bound to find out sooner or later, so you might as well hear it from me.’

  SEVEN

  Vintage slid off the desk again and went to look out of the window. ‘It takes years to build up a place like this,’ he said. ‘I wonder what’ll happen to it now.’ He glanced at Thanet. ‘How much do you know about English wines?’

  ‘Virtually nothing.’

  Vintage turned to face them, resting his buttocks on the windowsill. ‘Well, before I explain about yesterday, just let me give you a little bit of background. It’ll help you to understand what happened.

  ‘If you want to produce a good wine, having the technical knowledge is important, of course. You’ve got to understand soil structure and soil management, know about the correct use of fertilisers and disease and pest control. But say you have that knowledge, say you’ve made a major investment, bought the land, planted your wines, tended them for years, picked your first harvest and got a pretty good wine from it, what then? The trouble is, English wine is not cheap and represents only about a third of a per cent of all the wine that’s drunk in England. We don’t get any of the grants the French and Germans get. So this is where you come up against your main problem: selling. With all other agricultural crops you have a ready-made market, but with wine you have to go out and sell your product and the competition is incredibly stiff. So, even assuming you employ all the right marketing techniques, if you really want to take off you still need something to make your wine stand out from all the rest. A major award, for example.’

  Here, Thanet realised, was a true enthusiast. Vintage’s eyes were glowing, the words flowed off his tongue as fluently as if he were giving a lecture he had delivered many times. This was a subject which he had pondered, discussed and studied from every angle.

  ‘Of course, it’s perfectly possible to make a moderate commercial success of a small vineyard and it has become an increasingly popular thing to do. You need so little land, you see. The reality is that if you have ten acres, once you’re up and running, most years you will get thirty to forty thousand bottles of wine. But as I say, the problem is you have to shift it or you’re going to end up with barns full of wine and no money to live on. Somehow you have to build up a demand for your product. You also have to decide whether you’re going for quality or for a cheaper, more commercial proposition. A good wine-maker like Zak, of course, only ever goes for quality, and his reputation matters. He can do a lot to influence the way the wine turns out; he really holds the strings.

  ‘I’m telling you all this because although I work a lot of the time here at Sturrenden, I’ve also been getting my own vineyard going. I told you how generous my father was, in sending me to Australia for a couple of years. Well, when I got back and he saw how keen I still was, he bought me a cottage with thirty acres to set myself up. I’m an only child, my mother died years ago, and he said I might as well have the money now, when I needed it, than wait until after he was dead to inherit it. Right at the outset I decided I was going for quality. If I could only win a couple of awards I’d be on my way.

  ‘Well, I’ve done fairly well in a modest sort of way. I picked my first grapes two years ago and I’ve managed to shift quite a bit of my stock. But this year I knew I was going to get my big chance. This year, for the first time ever, I had perfectly ripe Pinot noir grapes, as perfect as they get them in Burgundy. The weather conditions were excellent and as the summer went on I was getting more and more excited about them. Believe me, the amount of care I put into looking after those grapes … Anyway, I was going around telling everyone how great this wine was going to be, and finally, just over a week ago, we picked them and brought them over here for pressing. We put them into plastic picking bins and stacked them. You then leave them for a week and the natural yeast in the grapes starts to ferment. You don’t actually add anything. You can only do this if you have a good summer, with really ripe grapes – it’s how they make wine in Burgundy.

  ‘So, we covered the bins with sheets and left them to stand, stirring every day by hand. In the beginning the juice was very light in colour but as the days went on it got darker and richer and I got more and more excited. Every night I said to Zak, let’s press it, let’s press it, but no, every night he kept saying, we’ll leave it one more night, one more night. I cou
ld have done it myself but I didn’t want to. I wanted those grapes to get every ounce of Zak’s expertise. Finally he decided we would press it on Thursday night but we got a bit late with the previous load so he promised he’d stay on here late next morning – yesterday – and we’d do it together.’

  ‘Which you did,’ said Thanet. ‘I remember you telling me you’d pressed a load together.’ He also remembered being certain at the time that Vintage was not telling the whole story. Though he didn’t see where all this was leading.

  ‘Which we did.’ Vintage was nodding, but his expression was sour. ‘The problem was, when I got in yesterday I discovered that one of the bins had split.’

  ‘Ah … You lost all the juice from it?’

  ‘Yes. There it was, all over the floor. My special, potentially award-winning wine! If Zak hadn’t kept on putting it off and putting it off … I’ve told you all this because it was no secret, everybody knew about it and I’d rather you heard the story from me than from anybody else.’

  No wonder Vintage had been ‘in a mood’ all day yesterday. ‘So you had a row with Randish.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I couldn’t afford to really let fly. I was still dependent on Zak’s skill to see me through making the rest of the batch, wasn’t I?’

  ‘You mean you were afraid that if you had a real bust-up with him, he might deliberately spoil it?’

  Vintage shook his head vigorously. ‘Oh no. His professional pride wouldn’t allow him to do that. But he might have, well, taken a little less care over it, shall we say. Not even deliberately, perhaps. But your concentration is never very good after a row, is it? Apart from which, I didn’t want to lose my job here. Zak was my employer, after all, and I still had a lot to learn from him. No, I couldn’t take the risk. Anyway, Zak apologised, handsomely. So that was that.’

  ‘I see.’ Thanet did. Unable to give full vent to his anger, Vintage had bottled it up all day. The perfect recipe for the kind of explosive situation in which Randish had met his death. It also explained why Mrs Prote had been surprised to hear that Vintage and Randish had had a row in the evening – if, indeed, they had. No doubt she would have known about yesterday morning’s disaster and assumed, by the fact that the two men had proceeded to press the batch together, that the matter had been settled between them.

  ‘But the impression we got from Mr Mason was that you had a row with Mr Randish last night.’

  Vintage was shaking his head. ‘To be honest, I deliberately misled him. I told him I didn’t think it would be a good idea to have another go at Zak last night because I’d had a row with him myself earlier and he wasn’t in a very good mood. Which was true. I didn’t say when, deliberately. I thought Reg would do his cause more harm than good if he tackled Zak when he was tired and on edge.’

  And Vintage stuck to his story: he had been fully occupied with the load he was pressing. He had not seen Randish between 7 and 9.30, when he had gone across to the laboratory to tell him the load was finished, and had found him dead, nor had he seen anyone else enter or leave the bottling plant.

  ‘You realise you’re in a very difficult position,’ said Thanet, ‘entirely alone here all evening, apart from the brief conversation with Mr Mason.’

  ‘No need to rub it in,’ said Vintage wearily. ‘I’m not an idiot. But I repeat, I didn’t do it, so you’ll never be able to prove otherwise.’

  And there, Thanet agreed, was the rub. Lack of proof. And if Vintage were guilty, he didn’t see how they would ever get it. The man must have been in the lab thousands of times, so scientific evidence of his presence there wouldn’t help. They’d check his clothes, of course, for bloodstains, but Thanet didn’t think the murderer would have been standing close enough to have been splashed with blood. Randish’s throat had been cut by broken glass as he lost his balance and fell backwards through the window. Still, you never knew. Past experience had shown that it was surprising what might turn up.

  Vintage was anxious to see if he could recruit someone who could at least help him out with the manual work involved in pressing when the vineyard resumed working next day, and Thanet let him go.

  ‘God knows how we’re ever going to catch up,’ said Vintage gloomily as he went off.

  Thanet and Lineham watched him walk to the car park and get into a mud-spattered Land-Rover.

  ‘What d’you think, Mike?’ said Thanet.

  Lineham closed his notebook with a snap. ‘I really don’t know. I mean, it’s all very well for him to say “that was that” after Randish apologised, but how could he have just put it out of his mind? Working alone all day like that he’d have had plenty of time to brood, plenty of time for his sense of grievance to grow … Maybe he had intended to let the matter rest, but suppose that during the evening he had to go across to the lab for some reason and Randish said or did something to trigger him off? It wouldn’t have taken much, I shouldn’t think. And the rest of his wine was safely pressed by then, remember, so he wouldn’t have had that to make him hold back as he did in the morning.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘So what now, sir?’

  ‘Keep digging, I suppose. While we’re here we might as well take a look at Randish’s papers, in case there are any more skeletons in his closet.’

  They spoke to Mrs Prote again first, but learnt nothing of interest. She refused to be drawn into giving a personal opinion of Randish’s character and was adamant that to her knowledge, apart from the long-running dispute with Mason, there had been no disagreement or conflict in his business life which could possibly have led to last night’s tragedy. ‘If there had been, I’d have known about it.’

  A quick skim through the files of correspondence in the office seemed to bear this out, and Thanet and Lineham next went down to the house, to see if they could turn up anything more interesting there.

  Randish’s study overlooked an uninspired back garden, an oblong patch of lawn surrounded by bedraggled flowerbeds. The room was small and square and most of the space was taken up by a wing chair and an oversized pedestal desk, but attempts had been made to give it a masculine air: the wing chair was covered in dark green leather and there were hunting prints on the walls.

  They worked their way quickly down through the desk drawers, Thanet on one side, Lineham on the other, finding only the usual odds and ends which seem to accumulate in any desk, together with stationery, bank statements (healthy without being remarkable), old cheque-book stubs and household bills and receipts. Lineham reached the bottom drawer first, Thanet having been held up by a perusal of the bank statements.

  ‘Hullo, this one’s locked,’ said the sergeant on an optimistic note. ‘Lucky we kept those keys.’ He fished out of his pocket the keyring which had been found in Randish’s pocket last night and which they had held back for just this type of eventuality.

  There were a number of keys on the ring but only three small enough to be possible. The second one Lineham tried turned smoothly in the lock. He slid the drawer right out and put it down on top of the desk. ‘Letters,’ he said. He opened a cardboard box in one corner. ‘And photographs.’

  The photographs were all of girls, mostly taken alone, sometimes with a younger, slimmer Randish, and in all sorts of situations: sitting on bicycles, perched on gates, seated on walls, sprawled on grass, leaning against trees.

  ‘Wild oats,’ said Lineham. ‘Quite a Don Juan, wasn’t he?’

  Thanet was shuffling through the photographs again. There was something … some message which his brain was trying to pick up, here. He shook his head. It was no good, he couldn’t think what it was.

  They picked up the bundles of letters and began glancing at them.

  ‘These are all from girls, too,’ said Lineham. ‘You can see why he wouldn’t want his wife to read them.’

  ‘Ancient history, though,’ said Thanet. ‘They seem to date mostly – exclusively, in fact – from the time when he was away at college.’

  ‘Even so … And lo
ok at this lot.’ Lineham had picked up the fattest bundle. ‘I’ve glanced at one or two. They’re written over a period of three years, mostly headed Trews Farm, Charthurst and signed Alice. From his wife, no doubt, before they were married.’ He handed them to Thanet.

  ‘So he was going out with her then.’

  ‘All the time he was away, by the look of it.’

  Thanet flicked through the bundle. Some of the envelopes were addressed to Randish at Plumpton Agricultural College, some to c/o Mr K Darks, Wentley Farm, Nr Hassocks, Sussex, the rest to c/o Mrs Wood, Jasmine Cottage, Plumpton, Nr Lewes, Sussex. This latter batch had foreign stamps, Thanet noticed. He peered at them. Switzerland. ‘Looks as though Mrs Randish was away at finishing school during his last year at college.’

  ‘And he was two-timing her, that’s the point, for the whole three years. Or should I say three-timing her, or even four, five or six. No wonder he kept this drawer locked.’ Lineham was picking envelopes up at random, peering at postmarks. ‘These others are from all over the place, Bradford, Plymouth, Norwich, from heaven knows where, as well as from Plumpton. And all sent to an address in Sturrenden.’

  Thanet was trying to decipher the dates on postmarks. ‘Written to Randish during college holidays, by the look of it.’ He wondered how Alice Randish was going to feel when she came across these, as she must, eventually. Would it make it easier or harder for her to come to terms with his death?

  ‘If he was two-timing her then,’ said Lineham, ‘then I bet he was two-timing her now.’

  ‘The thought had crossed my mind. But if so, with whom?’

  They stared at each other, thinking.

  ‘Did you notice,’ said Thanet slowly, ‘that Vintage seemed a bit cagey, when I asked him how long he’d been married?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I definitely had the impression there was something wrong. You’re suggesting his wife … and Randish?’

  ‘Could be. Perhaps we’ll pay her a little call later on this morning.’

  ‘In any case, it does open up interesting possibilities, doesn’t it, if he was a ladies’ man? A leopard doesn’t change his spots, as they say.’