In Vino Veritas

by J M Gregson

  She took them into a large, well-furnished sitting room, which somehow seemed too big a setting for this wan, uneasy figure. Lambert was seeking to ease his way into the interview with the bereaved spouse, which was usually the most difficult of those to follow a suspicious death. He said, ‘You know why we’re here then, Mrs Beaumont?’

  ‘Yes. The two young women in uniform told me this morning that Martin was dead. I’m afraid they had to get me out of bed, even though it wasn’t very early. I often don’t sleep very well.’

  ‘I’m sorry we have to intrude at a time like this, Mrs Beaumont, and we’ll be as brief as we can. But we have to follow certain procedures.’

  ‘Was he killed? Did someone murder Martin?’

  ‘That is yet to be formally confirmed, but we very much fear he was killed, yes. Forgive me, but you sound as though you were expecting that.’

  ‘You’ll need someone to do a formal identification, won’t you?’

  ‘We will need that, in due course, yes. But if you don’t feel up to it, I’m sure that we can—’

  ‘I’ll do it. No problem, Superintendent, I’ll do it. How did he die?’

  Lambert smiled at her, seeking to mask the rebuke in what he had to say. ‘Mrs Beaumont, you are understandably rather on edge at the moment, as we all would be in these circumstances. But the idea of this meeting is that we ask the questions and you answer them, to the best of your ability.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m jumping the gun, aren’t I? I tend to do that, I think.’

  He watched her carefully to see whether she would recognize her unfortunate choice of metaphor, but she looked only like a woman on edge. It was an effect which was to persist throughout the interview.

  Hook flicked open his notebook and said, ‘When did you last see Mr Beaumont?’

  She looked at him as if registering his presence for the first time, though she had nodded to him politely enough when Lambert had introduced him. ‘Wednesday morning. He spoke to me before he went out to work.’

  Bert registered a puzzlement he scarcely felt upon his homely features, persuading his listener as usual towards the notion that he was less intelligent, and thus less threatening, than was the reality. ‘That is a full forty-eight hours before his body was found. Did you not wonder where he might have got to, or feel any anxiety on his behalf during those hours, Mrs Beaumont?’

  ‘No.’ She seemed to think for a moment that it was an odd notion that she should be worried about her husband. Then she said, ‘I was used to him being away at nights, you see. I expect he was at Abbey Vineyards on Wednesday. And on Thursdays he was always away. Drumming up new business, he said. I expect that he was, some of the time.’

  She caught a glance between the sergeant and his grave-faced superior. What did that mean? Vanda had told her to play the grieving wife, when she’d phoned to say they were coming. That way, they won’t get much from you, she’d said. It was curious how close she and Vanda had become, in just a few days. It seemed odd now that she’d been full of such apprehension when she’d gone to meet Martin’s ex-mistress in her own home. It was because of Vanda’s advice that she’d put on this black dress she hadn’t worn for years. It was a little creased, but it was the right colour.

  It was the older man who now asked her, ‘Did he give you any idea of where he was proposing to go on this particular Thursday?’

  She stared down at the carpet and frowned, giving the question the concentration of a dutiful schoolgirl. ‘No, I’m afraid he didn’t. Is that when he was killed? Sorry, I’m asking you questions again, aren’t I?’

  ‘That’s all right. We don’t know yet exactly when Mr Beaumont died. We expect to have a better idea within twenty-four hours.’ He didn’t mention post mortems if he could avoid it. The thought of the body of a loved one being severely cut and mutilated upset many people, though he suspected this rather abstracted woman would have accepted it without much emotion. ‘We need you and everyone else to assist us as much as possible as we try to fill in the story of his last hours. Murder is one of the few crimes where the victim cannot speak for himself. We shall need to find out what sort of man he was, what kind of appointments he might have made. We shall assemble that information not only from such facts as we can gather but from the thoughts of you and of others.’

  ‘Am I allowed to know how he died?’

  She was brittle, unpredictable. But hardly likely to collapse into hysterics, Lambert judged. He watched her closely as he said, ‘He was shot through the head whilst sitting in the driver’s seat of his car.’

  Jane Beaumont seemed neither surprised nor shaken. Whether that was because she knew these facts already or not, he found it impossible to judge. She was silent for a moment, nodding slowly, as if lost in her own thoughts. Then she said, ‘You don’t know about us, do you?’

  Lambert smiled encouragingly at her, trying to get her to concentrate on him rather than the wall behind him. ‘We don’t know very much about anything concerned with your husband at present, Mrs Beaumont. We need to know much more, and we need the help of people like you.’

  ‘I see.’ She nodded slowly, as if she was having some difficulty in assimilating the simple idea he had put to her.

  She didn’t seem inclined to offer anything by way of response. It was Hook who eventually prompted gently, ‘Mrs Beaumont, you said just now, “You don’t know about us, do you?” That is very true, and we need to know. We’re asking you to help us, though we realize this is a difficult time for you.’

  ‘Difficult, yes.’ She took a deep breath and frowned, as if striving hard to give the matter her full attention. ‘We weren’t close, Martin and I.’ She nodded again, perhaps congratulating herself upon the precision of her grammar. ‘We hadn’t been close for years. Maybe some of that was my fault – he always said it was.’

  Hook said hastily, ‘There is no need for you to speculate about the reasons why you were no longer as close as you once were. What would be useful to us is the most precise summary you can give us of the state of your relationship at the time of Mr Beaumont’s death.’

  ‘Yes, I see. Well, I wanted a divorce. He wasn’t going to give me one. But we were going to fight him about that.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Oh, a friend of mine. A female friend. No one can really resist divorce permanently nowadays, if you can prove the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage.’ She spoke carefully, as if she was repeating phrases which might be new to them. Then she suddenly brightened, looking at Hook for the first time as if conducting a genuine conversation. ‘I was going to fight him for my divorce. I won’t need to do that any more, will I?’

  ‘No, you won’t, Mrs Beaumont. Is it because you no longer felt close to your husband that you seem to know so little about his movements since Wednesday morning?’

  ‘Yes, that would be it, wouldn’t it? I haven’t known much about his movements on any particular day for quite a long time, now. For many years, I suppose.’ Her brow puckered again, and for a moment she was like an adolescent determined to be fair to an errant boyfriend. ‘I haven’t wanted to know. I suppose I could have found out more about what he was up to, but it’s a long time since I was interested.’

  ‘I see. Well, this is useful information for us. We shall probably be able to get a good idea of his movements on Wednesday from his staff at Abbey Vineyards. I appreciate that you have no certain knowledge of what he was planning to do on Wednesday night or Thursday, but have you any thoughts on where he might have been then?’

  Jane Beaumont gave the question that dutiful, rather touching, attention she had given to all of his queries. ‘No. I’m sorry. I wasn’t very interested. I was more concerned with my plans for divorce, so I was quite happy that Martin wasn’t around.’ She watched Hook make a brief note and added apologetically, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not being very helpful, am I?’

  Bert gave her an encouraging smile. ‘I think you’re being honest, Mrs Beaumont, and that is the most we can ask of anyone we t
alk to. It may be that something will occur to you over the next few hours, when you’ve had time to accustom yourself to the shock of this. Please get in touch with us immediately at this number with anything at all you think might be useful. Even the smallest things can turn out to be significant, sometimes.’

  She took the card and studied it for a moment, as if she had been handed some strange and technical artefact. Then she nodded. ‘I’ll ring you immediately, if I think of anything. I’m afraid all I can think of at the moment is things to ask you, which is the wrong way round, as Mr Lambert pointed out.’

  Lambert said hastily, ‘You’ve been very honest with us, Mrs Beaumont. If there are questions we are able to answer, we will certainly do that.’

  ‘Yes, I see. You told me how he died, didn’t you, Mr Lambert?’

  He looked at her, deciding that there was a strange and sturdy strength beneath her abstracted air. She seemed to have more rather than less control of herself and her emotions as she had accustomed herself to the idea of this death. Lambert watched her closely as he said quietly, ‘I told you that he was shot through the head in his car, Mrs Beaumont.’

  She winced slightly, then nodded. She did not seem to be disturbed by the picture. ‘He didn’t shoot himself, did he?’

  It sounded more a statement than a question, but he answered, ‘No, we’re already certain he didn’t do that. We’re sure in fact that he was killed by person or persons unknown, as the law has it.’

  ‘The law, yes. But you’re going to find out who that person or persons are, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I hope so, Mrs Beaumont. That is our job.’

  ‘He didn’t use his own pistol, then.’ She nodded to herself again, as if that was a reassuring thought.

  Lambert, who had been preparing to take his leave, sat down again quickly. ‘Your husband had a firearm?’

  ‘A pistol, yes. That’s what you have to call it, he said. Not a gun.’ She smiled a small, private smile at her satisfaction in recalling that.

  ‘Do you know the make?’

  ‘No. I don’t know anything about it, I’m afraid, except that it was a pistol. The thing frightened me. I didn’t like having it in the house, but he said he needed it to protect himself.’

  ‘And you think he might have had it with him when he was killed?’

  She gave the query careful attention in that curiously touching, diligent way again. ‘I think he probably did. I think he carried it about with him in the car. I haven’t seen the pistol in the house for years. Didn’t you find it there?’

  ‘No, we didn’t, Mrs Beaumont. But this is useful information. This is the sort of thing Detective Sergeant Hook meant when he said that if you think of anything that might be useful you should let us know.’

  She smiled. It seemed in simple delight that she had been able to help them, though her cheeks remained as white as ever. ‘I’ll certainly phone if I think of anything else. I hope you find who did this. I didn’t want him killed, did I, even though I wanted to be rid of him?’

  It was a question which rang in their heads for a long time as they drove away from the big, neglected house.

  FOURTEEN

  Whilst Lambert and Hook were conducting their rather strange interview with the newly bereaved Mrs Beaumont, DI Rushton rang the dead man’s PA, as he had promised her that morning he would.

  ‘I can confirm for you that we are indeed treating Mr Beaumont’s death as murder. There are not many more details available as yet, but I can tell you that Mr Beaumont’s body was found in his own car, near a hamlet called Howler’s Heath.’

  Fiona Cooper was making notes on the pad in front of her. ‘I don’t know where that is.’

  ‘No. Very few people would – it’s a tiny place, just a farm and one or two cottages, I believe. I had to look it up on a large-scale map myself. It’s in a valley at the southern end of the Malverns. The car wasn’t in the place itself, but some way beyond it, under a copse of trees. It was because it was so isolated that the crime wasn’t discovered for some time after it happened.’

  ‘When can I let people know about this? They’re all wondering exactly what’s happened. I had to cancel all Mr Beaumont’s appointments.’

  ‘You can release the news now. That is why I rang you. The bare facts of what I have just told you will be embodied in a press release, which will be carried by the evening papers and by radio and television.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll let the senior staff know immediately.’

  ‘You can let everyone know, Mrs Cooper. You could also make it clear that Detective Chief Superintendent Lambert will be taking charge of the case, and that he and his staff would be delighted to hear from anyone who knows anything at all which they think might have a bearing on this death.’ Throw in the local hero now: John Lambert’s name was likely to elicit more contacts than that of some anonymous inspector.

  ‘I’ll do that. It won’t take long for the news to spread.’

  ‘No. Bad news always spreads quickly. And sensational bad news such as violent murder spreads quickest of all.’

  ‘Well, you’d know more about that than I would, Detective Inspector Rushton,’ Fiona said primly. She felt a sudden need to distance herself from this awful thing. The vision of the blue Jaguar with its driver dead at the wheel was for the first time appallingly vivid to her. She had worked closely and happily with this man for the last five years. And someone she knew here, one of these people she greeted each day as a friend, might be involved in this, might even have committed murder.

  She gave Rushton the extension and home telephone numbers of the five senior people she had named to him earlier in the day, so that he might set up meetings with them.

  Fiona sat for a few minutes to compose herself after she had put down the phone, deciding exactly how she would phrase this sensational disclosure for the rest of the staff on the site. It was whilst she was deciding upon the correct form of words that Vanda North tapped briefly on her door and came into the office.

  The director of residential accommodation looked very animated. A few strands of her shortish fair hair, usually so tightly disciplined, flew free on the right of her head, creating an effect which was quite attractive. Her blue eyes glittered with life and her cheeks had more colour than Fiona could remember them ever having before. Miss North looked perhaps five years younger than her forty-six as she asked, ‘Is there any news yet on how this happened?’

  Fiona took her through the sparse facts which Rushton had just released to her. She could not understand why she felt so disturbed, why she was delivering her information as though on automatic pilot. By the time she concluded her brief bulletin, she realized what it was that was so alarming. Vanda North should have known nothing about this death, yet her opening enquiry had shown quite plainly that she did. And her reaction to the facts Fiona had just given her was unsurprised, even a little impatient.

  Had she unearthed her employer’s killer at the outset, simply through this woman’s disclosure of knowledge she should not have had? Fiona Cooper said, through a throat which now felt very tight, ‘You knew about this, didn’t you? But I’ve only just found out some of these facts myself, only just been given police permission to release them.’

  Vanda North looked at her for a moment as if she could not understand the accusation behind the words. Then she laughed abruptly, the unexpected sound shrill and loud in the quiet room. She realized the reason for the apprehension she had seen for a moment in the woman behind the desk. ‘Of course, you wouldn’t know, would you? I spoke to Jane Beaumont this morning. She told me about it – two policewomen had been round quite early to break the news of Martin’s death to her.’

  Fiona hoped that the horror she had felt for a moment had not shown on her face. She dropped into her PA’s efficient, non-committal voice. ‘I knew it must be something like that.’

  The house of the finance director of Abbey Vineyards was altogether less grand than that of the company’s late owner.<
br />
  It was a pleasant, rather boxy, detached house in a cul-de-sac of identical buildings on the outskirts of Tewkesbury. It would have been more impressive if allowed more space, but the developer had followed the modern trend in building the maximum number of residences the local authority planning committee would allow him to erect on the site. The land had once been the gardens of the two late-Victorian houses he had demolished to allow this project. There were now fourteen residences here, so that the houses were nothing like as elegant as the artist’s impression on the front of the brochure. They had built-in garages and were set in pocket-handkerchief gardens.

  Alistair Morton himself opened the door to Lambert and Hook. The room into which he led them was square and well lit by its single broad window in the front wall of the house. The dining-room set of table and six chairs and matching long sideboard made it seem quite small. The three oil-paintings of what seemed to be Scottish Highland scenes combined with a few ornaments to make the decor seem almost fussy.

  Perhaps Morton noticed them taking note of the room, in the calm, unhurried way which is common in CID officers anxious to pick up every informative detail from the living spaces of those they interview. He said nervously, ‘This is a dining room, but we don’t use it much for that. I needed it for a study and a place to do freelance work, until I was fully established and provided with my own facilities at Abbey Vineyards.’

  Lambert turned his attention with a polite smile to the human being at the centre of this room. Morton was slightly built, his thinness making him seem a little taller than he was. He had straight black hair, neatly parted in the style of a previous generation and closely cut at the back and sides of his head. ‘Have you been with Abbey Vineyards for a long time, Mr Morton?’

  ‘Very nearly since the outset. I came to Mr Beaumont as a newly qualified chartered accountant, doing his books in my spare time in the early days. Even when I decided to throw in my lot with him, I still did other work on a freelance basis, because he couldn’t afford to pay me much at the beginning.’