In Vino Veritas lah-23

by J M Gregson

  Sarah saw them out, then shut the door firmly and slumped thankfully into her chair. It hadn’t gone too badly, she decided. They’d seemed happy enough with what she had been able to tell them, and she hadn’t revealed what she was most anxious to conceal.

  Sarah Vaughan would have been less sanguine if she had heard the conversation in the police Mondeo as Hook drove it towards the station. They had travelled a mile and more before Lambert said, ‘What did you think of pretty young Miss Vaughan?’

  Hook grinned. ‘She isn’t a girl, John. You’re getting older. But there were moments in the interview when she’d have been happy if we thought of her as at least ten years younger and very gauche. She’s concealing something.’

  ‘I agree. Whether it’s significant or not remains to be seen. But I think we shall need to see the glamorous Miss Vaughan again, in due course.’

  ‘Life has its consolations, if you work at it,’ said Bert Hook, his attention studiously upon the road ahead.

  NINETEEN

  Lambert glared at the television set resentfully. ‘It’s far too early for them to be playing one-day cricket internationals. We’re scarcely into spring yet.’

  Christine set his sandwich in front of him and smiled tolerantly. ‘It’s May the eighteenth and the longest day is in five weeks. You’re just annoyed because you won’t see much of it. If I know you, you’ll be off out again in half an hour. How long is it since you were last home for lunch?’

  ‘I don’t know. A few weeks, I suppose. Everything seems to fly past too quickly, nowadays. I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m getting old.’

  ‘I wasn’t, but you are. You must learn how to wind down. You’re better than you were at relaxing, but there’s still room for improvement.’ Then, running against her own advice but sensing that he wanted her to ask, Christine said, ‘How’s the case going?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here, if I’m honest. To get away from the string of pressmen ringing in and wanting a quote from John Lambert about the progress of the case. You can’t even digest what you’ve learned properly at the station, with people buzzing around your ears all the time.’

  ‘I heard you’d talked to Tom Ogden.’

  He grinned resignedly, where once he might have been annoyed. ‘Local grapevine in operation, I suppose. I expect no less.’

  ‘I saw his wife in Tesco’s. She didn’t seem put out — they’d expected it. Their farm cuts right into the vineyard’s land, doesn’t it? And Tom was apparently no friend of Martin Beaumont’s.’

  ‘That he wasn’t. He didn’t try to disguise it.’ He grinned at the memory of Ogden’s honest avowal of his feelings. ‘He has a decent alibi, though. He was at the cinema with his wife on the night of the murder and she’s confirmed that he went straight home with her afterwards.’ John watched another England batsman sky a catch straight to the man on the boundary and gratefully accepted a large beaker of tea from his spouse.

  Christine Lambert had taught in the area for over twenty years, although since a serious illness three years ago she now only did part time. She knew many of their contemporaries as parents and many of the younger generation as former pupils. John had come to regard her now as a source of information rather than an unwelcome intruder into his affairs. She was pleased that he was letting her into this corner of his working life, which he would never have done at one time. She said as casually as she could, ‘Have you got a prime suspect yet?’

  ‘No. I’d say we have several leading suspects, at the moment. We’ve eliminated the more peripheral figures, but not his wife or any of the people who worked closely with him.’

  ‘Does that include Sarah Vaughan?’

  He looked up sharply. ‘We saw her this morning. She’s in charge of research and development at Abbey Vineyards.’

  Christine laughed. ‘And I remember her as a little girl with flying blonde pigtails and a brace on her teeth! Too small for the netball team, but desperately keen to get into it.’

  ‘She’s thirty-three and quite a looker now. Blonde, blue-eyed and pretty, with long legs and a bust that got Bert Hook’s attention. No fool, though. She certainly isn’t the conventional dumb blonde.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No. And hasn’t been, though she’s thirty-three now. Heterosexual but no serious boyfriend in tow, our research suggests.’

  ‘And your research will no doubt have been meticulous on such a delicious subject. If she’s still unmarried at thirty-three with looks like that, she’s clearly got brains.’

  John decided to ignore this slur upon his sex. ‘She conducts tours of the vineyard and talks about the history of winemaking. Apparently they’re very successful, so she learned something from you.’

  ‘If she impressed you and Bert Hook with her looks and her brains, she must also have impressed her employer. He clearly rated her, to give her the job she has.’

  Food for thought, John Lambert concluded, as he drove back to resume the hunt.

  Gerry Davies lived in the 1950s semi-detached house on the outskirts of Monmouth in which he had spent the last twenty-eight of his thirty-five years of married life.

  The purchase had been a great leap forward at the time, when he had two young children. He had undertaken a mortgage which had then seemed huge. In his boyhood, miners in the Rhondda Valley had lived in rented cottages. The notion of going into debt to acquire a house of your own had seemed a dangerous extravagance to his parents; the mortgage would in his father’s view prove ‘a millstone around your neck’. For a short, nightmare period when he had been unemployed, it had seemed as if his father might be right. His parents hadn’t lived to see him pay off the mortgage and secure the prosperity he now enjoyed. That was a matter of lasting regret for Gerry. To have seen their grandchildren attending university would have been an impossible dream for them.

  He could afford a more expensive house now — perhaps even a detached bungalow with a spacious garden, now that the boys had left home. All in good time, Gerry told Bronwen. The truth was that even after thirteen years of success at Abbey Vineyards, even when he looked at the substantial sum which went into his bank account every month, he could not quite believe in his success. To move to a more expensive residence would not only be presumptuous, but also an invitation to the Fates to put him in his proper place by removing his job and the source of his comfortable income. He did not voice this view and there was not a single fact to support it. But instincts nourished in youth can be stronger than logic.

  He was glad that the CID men had offered to come here to interview him, rather than to his office at work. The less you were seen with policemen the better, in Gerry’s view. It was another thought rooted in the misty distance of his youth, when young men drank too much after rugby and the Saturday night rozzers were not always sympathetic to brawny young forwards from the long terraces of cottages. There had been some hairy moments, especially in strange towns after muscular away victories.

  Gerry took the officers into the rather cramped front room, which had seemed a luxurious extra space when they had moved into the house. Nowadays, they used this dining room only when the boys were down with their wives. Gerry had never been comfortable at the dinner parties which most of the other people in the road seemed to enjoy. He was still happiest in clubs, usually in an all-male setting, but he and Bronwen threw a boisterous and very successful party once a year for their many friends, when all the downstairs rooms of the house were crowded and noisy.

  The two men who came to see him looked with interest at the rugby photographs which lined the walls. There was one of the great Welsh side of the fifties, with Cliff Morgan holding a ball in the centre, another with the greatest of all teams of a generation later, with Barry John and Gareth Edwards and JPR Williams. The rest were of teams just below that national level, in which Gerry Davies himself had figured.

  The CID visitors sat on upright chairs beside each other and confronted the man whose presence dominated this room across his dini
ng table. ‘We’ve been a long time getting to you, Mr Davies,’ said John Lambert. Gerry wasn’t sure whether that sounded apologetic or ominous. ‘We’ve learned quite a lot about Mr Beaumont and a little about the way he died. Now we’d like your views.’

  ‘I’m sure I won’t have a lot to add. Martin was a good employer and I liked him. But other people will have told you that.’

  No one previously had said openly that they liked the man. There had been a little nostalgic recollection of the younger man and his attractions from Vanda North, and much respect for what he had achieved in his business, but his other close associates had been guarded. No one, not even his wife, had previously professed an unqualified liking for the man. In the perverse influence murder exercised over such declarations, it might mean exactly the opposite of what was said. But Gerry Davies, in the comfort of his pleasant, slightly old-fashioned home certainly looked genuine enough, with his square, open face, his burly frame, his still plentiful frizzy black hair, now slightly tinged with silver.

  Lambert said, ‘Tell us a little about what you do at Abbey Vineyards, please.’

  ‘I run the shop. We sell a lot of wine, as you’d expect, plus beer and cider and associated products. Increasingly over the last few years, I’ve also taken on the work of wholesale information and supply. We sell a large number of cases to restaurants now, and our sparkling wines are particularly in demand at weddings.’ Gerry hoped he did not sound too much like their publicity brochures. ‘Martin said that I should describe myself as the sales director on correspondence and invoices, but I only bother to do that with the big customers. He thought it was important to show the big buyers that we aren’t some tinpot little concern, but are used to meeting large orders.’

  ‘I see. Were you happy in this work?’

  ‘Very happy.’ Gerry saw an opportunity to show his respect for Beaumont, as well as a chance to assert his own innocence. ‘Martin ran a happy ship as well as a successful one. He was very easy to approach. He gave me a lot of encouragement and guidance in my early years with the firm. It’s only in the last year or two that I got used to calling him Martin. I still took care to call him Mr Beaumont when there were customers around.’ Gerry didn’t know why he’d told them that — it said more about him than his late employer.

  But the tall man with the intense grey eyes didn’t seem to think it out of place. He said with a little smile, ‘We operate a similar system with ranks in the CID team, Mr Davies. Detective chief superintendent is a mouthful which gets in the way of things. And I don’t like being continually “sirred”. But someone didn’t like Martin Beaumont. Someone either hated him enough or found him obstructive enough to kill him in cold blood. Who do you think might have done that?’

  The challenge was very abrupt, after the pleasantries which had preceded it. Gerry wondered whether those had been a deliberate tactic to soften him up. He must stick to his plans, whatever form of attack they used. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot since we got the news on Friday, but I haven’t come up with anything. Some of us had our differences with Martin, but I can’t think that anyone would have killed him. I think it must be someone from outside.’

  The familiar, entirely understandable, plea from those who had worked close to a murder victim. ‘We’ve considered that, Mr Davies. We haven’t ruled it out completely, but we now think it very unlikely. I think you should enlarge on these “differences” which people had with Mr Beaumont.’

  He was on dangerous ground, but he mustn’t show them that he felt that. ‘It was nothing very serious. Martin operated very much as a one-man business. It was understandable, because he’d built the firm up from very small beginnings. And I must say that it suited me. I was very happy to have my own job clearly defined for me and to consult Martin whenever I felt there was a big decision to be made. I didn’t want to stray outside my limits. For me, his methods worked very well.’

  ‘But not for everyone. We need every detail of this that you can give us, Mr Davies: this is a murder enquiry.’

  Gerry felt his pulses racing, though he told himself that he had known all along that this moment would come. He tried not to remember how Bronwen always found him transparent if ever he tried to lie to her; this was far more important than any little domestic deceit. He delivered the words he had prepared for this moment. ‘I’m the oldest of the senior staff at Abbey Vineyards. I was grateful to Martin for giving me my chance in a senior post. I expect that has continued to influence me even many years later. The other executives are younger. They are all better educated than I am and most of them have a broader work experience, despite my age. I can’t speak for all of them, but I think some of them chafed a little at the system Martin had always used and was continuing to operate. They felt that now that the business was large and prosperous, they wanted rather more say in policy decisions than he was prepared to allow them.’

  He’d got it all out without interruption. He wondered how it sounded to them. Lambert was watching him keenly. For a moment which seemed to Gerry to stretch agonizingly, he did not speak. Then he said quietly, ‘You must see that in these circumstances we must have the names of these people who were not content.’

  ‘I know nothing definite. It’s just a feeling I’ve picked up from things said.’ Gerry knew he had spoken too quickly, almost anticipating Lambert’s instruction, instead of being surprised by it. ‘At our company meeting in March — that involved just the five senior staff and Martin — there were various suggestions about how we should develop things, where we should go from here. Martin took them on board, but made it very clear that it would be he and not any of us who made the final decisions. That was fine as far as I was concerned; it’s worked well in the past and I couldn’t see any reason why we shouldn’t carry on a successful system. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as they say.’

  ‘But other people weren’t happy to leave it at that?’

  Gerry Davies looked and felt uncomfortable as he was pressed. ‘I don’t really know. They may not have been happy with the system, but I’ve no evidence that they did anything about it. Only Martin would know that.’

  ‘I see. And we can’t ask him, can we?’

  Gerry found himself shifting on his seat, feeling those all-seeing grey eyes much too close to him across the table. ‘No. You’ll need to ask the individuals concerned about it.’

  ‘At the moment, I’m asking you, Mr Davies. Are you quite sure there’s nothing else you can recall on the matter?’

  ‘Yes. If you think it’s important, you’ll need to pursue it with the others.’

  Without taking his eyes off his quarry’s face, Lambert gave the slightest of nods to his detective sergeant. Hook made a play of consulting his notes. ‘A week ago today, only two days before he died, Mr Beaumont conducted a meeting with you and Jason Knight, his head chef. What was that meeting about?’

  Gerry Davies was shocked and he failed to conceal it. Perhaps he should have anticipated that they would know of the meeting, but he hadn’t done that. He stumbled into inadequate phrases. ‘I can’t remember much about it now. It was nothing very important. That’s why I didn’t mention it.’

  Hook smiled an understanding smile, a smile which said that he sympathized, but Gerry had been caught out, that he had much better cut his losses now and be honest. ‘This is barely a week ago, Mr Davies. Fiona Cooper, Mr Beaumont’s PA, took us through his diary of appointments in the weeks before his death. She remembers voices being raised behind the door of her boss’s office. Mrs Cooper thought the meeting was important. Mr Beaumont arranged it, she said, and he certainly thought it was important.’

  Hook had picked up Davies’s word ‘important’ and repeated it, until it seemed in Gerry’s ears to have now an ironic, mocking ring. He had a thoroughly miserable air as he said, ‘Martin seemed to think we had been stirring up trouble, trying to undermine him. He was wrong about that and we told him so.’

  ‘And did he accept what you said?’


  Gerry looked at the table. ‘Yes, I think so. It was all a misunderstanding, really.’

  Lambert, who had continued to watch him intently through this interlude with Hook, said sternly, ‘All arguments which take place days before a man is killed have to be of interest to us. You must see that, Mr Davies.’

  ‘Yes, I do. You’re blowing this out of proportion, though.’

  ‘Are we, indeed? Well, maybe Mr Knight will prove to have a clearer memory of the exchanges than you have managed to retain. I do hope so.’

  Hook said in his more informal, persuasive way, ‘One of the things we have learned about Mr Beaumont in the days since his death is that he had an eye for the ladies. More than an eye, in fact. When passions are aroused, violence is rarely far away, in our experience. No doubt having worked with him for thirteen years and got to know him very well, you will be able to tell us more about this.’

  Gerry was confused now. As a naturally honest man, he felt thoroughly ragged after the questioning about last Tuesday’s meeting. He could not think straight, could think only of Sarah Vaughan weeping on his chest in her distress over Beaumont’s attentions. They’d interviewed her in her office at the vineyard this morning. What had she told them about this? He couldn’t afford to be tripped up again, or they wouldn’t believe another word he said. ‘I don’t know any of the details of Martin’s love life. You’ll need to ask Sarah herself about this.’

  He shouldn’t have used that word ‘herself’. It was, in some way he couldn’t immediately grasp, a complete giveaway. Hook was studiously low-key as he said, ‘Beaumont was conducting a relationship with Miss Vaughan, was he?’