by J M Gregson
‘Well done, Mum,’ said Luke. ‘I bet it was one of Dad’s good ’uns, like you say. You know, Jack, he was a great bowler, our dad, long before he was a professor.’
‘Can we eat as soon as possible, please, love? I have to go out again tonight,’ was all that modest luminary said in response to this unwonted filial admiration.
Luke was not going to let him off so easily. After perusing the print beneath the picture carefully, he read with his finger fastened triumphantly on the passage, stressing the forename whenever it occurred. ‘It says here, “Whilst his colleagues were anxious to assure us that Jim Hook was not allowing his academic distinction to go to his head, the great man himself was not available for comment. It seems that conscientious detective Jim was too busy with his work to speak to us. We understand that he is currently engaged on the case of the sensational and as yet unsolved murder of Martin Beaumont, the well-loved local businessman who owned and ran Abbey Vineyards. At the time we went to print, a source described the police as baffled by the crime.”’ Luke looked up with delighted innocence. ‘I don’t think they should call Dad “baffled”, now that he’s a graduate. Do you, Mum?’
‘Dinner’s ready. Get the cutlery out and set the table,’ ordered his mother sternly. Bert forbade all discussion of both degrees and detection for the duration of the meal.
Jack Hook had a parting shot for his father as he left the house and hurried to his car. ‘Best of luck with the detecting, Jim!’
Tom Ogden lived with his wife in a long, low, two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, built in the attractive amber-coloured local stone. The barn alongside it was in good repair but now disused. It had already elicited several enquiries from local property developers, who had been told firmly that it was not for sale in Tom’s lifetime. The other, smaller outbuildings housed the compact modern machinery used in the cultivation of the strawberry fields.
Hook, who was used to the convenience and confinements of modern suburbia, said with genuine appreciation what an attractive place this was to live. Ogden led them across a wide, stone-flagged hall and into a room which comfortably accommodated several easy chairs alongside the old, oak dining-room furniture which denoted its main use.
Tom Ogden looked genuinely pleased with Hook’s compliment. ‘We rattle around a little, now that the children have gone. Enid says we should go for a modern bungalow, but my family’s been here for centuries – I can’t see myself living anywhere else. Besides, there are advantages in living on site, even now, when there are no beasts to milk and we operate like a vast smallholding.’ He delivered the last phrase with a practised contempt, so that they caught a little of the nostalgia for a vanished way of life they often saw in countrymen of his age.
Hook, who was seeking to get a flavour of the man before they began formal questioning, saw the odd but attractive mixture of openness and shrewdness he often found in people who owned and worked the land. He had played cricket with men like this, who had been veterans of the game when he had arrived as a raw but promising teenager, a police cadet newly released from the Barnardo’s home where he had spent his boyhood. He had been a green lad in those days, knowing little of life outside the home and anxious to pick up whatever he could from every experience. He had learned much from men like this.
Ogden had the weather-beaten skin, the tanned face and hands of a man who had spent the bulk of his life in the open air, who had worked outside in all weathers and come through the worst of the heat and the cold, labouring as hard and as long as the men he had eventually employed. At sixty-three, he was a picture of healthy vigour, bulky yet sinewy, an excellent representative of the yeoman stock which had bred him. He was also an intelligent man, who had reacted to the changing demands of farming in the new century.
As if he read those thoughts, Tom looked round the low-ceilinged room and said, ‘I can remember having over thirty people in here for the Sunday tea my mother made, when I was a nipper in the fifties and we had everyone out for the haymaking.’
‘You’ve seen the world of farming change a lot in your working lifetime,’ agreed Bert Hook.
‘Ay. But at the moment I’m wondering what you’re doing here.’ He said it with a smile, but with the air of a man who was used to directness in himself and in others. You wouldn’t get away with much, if you worked for this man, but he would treat you fairly, if you were honest with him.
Lambert said, ‘It’s routine in a murder case. Anyone who was close to the victim is interviewed in case he can provide useful information.’
‘Not on Saturday night, they’re not. And not by the man in charge, the celebrated John Lambert.’ The smile was still there, but this time there was an edge to the words. ‘If this was no more than routine, you’d have sent a copper round, maybe a DC. I wouldn’t have been honoured with a chief superintendent and a detective sergeant.’
Lambert answered the smile, but did not hurry his reply. There was nothing wrong with letting a man who was used to being in control see that you were assessing him. ‘I see you have some knowledge of police procedure, Mr Ogden.’ He waited until he saw the man’s face cloud with anger, then went on briskly, ‘I think you have enough common sense to have expected this visit. Physically, your land is close to Abbey Vineyards. Very nearly surrounded by their vines, in fact. And I don’t think you would expect the fact that you have had what one might call “ongoing discussions” with Mr Beaumont over the years to have escaped us.’
‘All right. So we didn’t see eye to eye and never would have. Doesn’t mean I killed the man, does it?’
‘Indeed it doesn’t, Mr Ogden. But could you now tell us about the source of your disagreements, please?’
‘You already know it. You only have to look at a map. Beaumont wanted my land, but he wasn’t going to have it.’
‘I can certainly see that he would want it. It would have consolidated his holding, made a natural completion of the land he held.’
‘Yes. I’ve watched him swallow up the land of everyone else who held fields adjacent to his, over the years. He was never going to get mine.’
‘You make it sound as if you weren’t friendly neighbours.’
‘I hated his guts. I’m sure he felt the same way about me.’
‘You hadn’t agreed to differ?’
Ogden smiled sourly. ‘You didn’t know Beaumont, or you wouldn’t be asking that. He wasn’t used to being refused things. He warned me years ago that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But that’s what he got and what he’d always have got. He didn’t like it. He was used to getting his own way and he turned nasty when he didn’t.’
Bert Hook looked up from his notes. ‘How nasty, Mr Ogden?’
Tom Ogden looked from the notebook into the rugged face above it. For some reason he could not quite fathom, he felt an affinity with this burly man with the countryman’s face and the Herefordshire accent. He made a real attempt to explain how things had been with his more affluent neighbour. ‘Beaumont first came to me over ten years ago. He made me what would have been a fair offer, if I’d wanted to sell. A very fair offer – the fairness has never been a matter of dispute. Over the years, he’s been back half a dozen times, each time waving a better price under my nose. I’ve told him the same thing every time: I’m not interested in selling, and the price makes no difference. He didn’t seem to understand that. At any rate, he never accepted it.’
Hook nodded, made another note. ‘And when did he make the last of these offers?’
Tom wanted to distance himself from this crime, to tell them that he hadn’t seen the man for many months. But that wouldn’t be safe; for all he knew, they had already learned how recently he had clashed with the man whose death had been so convenient for him. ‘He’d been round to the farm twice in the last couple of months. He always came during the day. I think he wanted my workers to see him, to be unsettled and think that their jobs might be at stake. He was that sort of man.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
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‘Last week. He came round with an even bigger offer than he’d made in April.’
‘Which you rejected.’
‘As I’d rejected all the others. It was more than a fair price, but that wasn’t the issue. Beaumont didn’t seem to understand that. He never learned that there were more important things than money.’
Hook nodded, seeming to Tom to understand how it had been, even to sympathize with his point of view. ‘And how did he take it when you rejected his latest offer?’
‘He didn’t like it. Like I said, he was a man used to getting his own way and to pressurizing you when he didn’t. He turned nasty.’
‘How nasty, Mr Ogden?’
Despite his agitation, Ogden wanted to tell the sergeant to call him Tom, when he’d never have asked the tall bloke to do that. But he sensed he should keep this formal. ‘He threatened me. He said that this was his final offer and it would be all the worse for me if I didn’t take it.’
‘And what did you take that to mean?’
‘That he’d send people in to ruin my crops – soft fruit is very vulnerable and he knew that as well as I did. And that if that didn’t work he’d send people in to attend to me.’
‘You mean that he was threatening you with physical violence.’
‘Yes. I’d seen how he compelled another farmer to sell to him, eight years ago. He’d wrecked his machinery during the night, then sprayed his newly planted crops with weedkiller. The man sold out to him the following week.’
‘So exactly how did he threaten you, Mr Ogden?’
‘I’d told him the farm was doing well and that I was expecting a bumper crop this year. He said it would be a shame if anything happened to ruin that crop.’
‘And how did you react to that?’
Ogden hesitated. He recalled the conversation quite vividly, having been over it in his mind many times since it happened. But he couldn’t recount the full details to these men without compromising his position. ‘I told him that two could play at that game. He said I couldn’t afford to threaten him.’
‘And why was that?’
Tom stared at the Indian carpet which covered the middle of the room; he couldn’t bring himself to look at either of the CID men. ‘I don’t know. I suppose he meant that he could play things far dirtier than I could, if it came to it. He was certainly right about that. God – or in Beaumont’s case, the devil – is always on the side of the big battalions, isn’t he?’
There was a long pause, but Tom knew now that he’d already said too much. It was Lambert who said, ‘If Beaumont is the kind of man you say he was, I expect he’d done his homework on you. I expect he knew that you had a record of previous violence. A criminal record.’
Tom Ogden glared at him resentfully. ‘Beaumont wasn’t the only one who’d done his damned homework, was he?’
Lambert smiled grimly at him. ‘I have people to check these things for me, Mr Ogden. A murder enquiry warrants a big team of officers. It’s automatic that we check on known enemies of the victim to see if they have criminal records.’
‘So it’s once a villain always a villain, is it? It’s a hell of a long time since that happened. I’m not the young fool I was then.’
Lambert nodded. ‘Thirty-seven years, Mr Ogden. But you were then twenty-six, not sixteen. Certainly not an easily led teenager. And Grievous Bodily Harm is a serious charge, to which you pleaded guilty.’
‘Because I was guilty. I hadn’t meant to injure the man seriously, but I did. So I admitted it and took my medicine.’
‘In the form of a hefty fine and a suspended sentence. You must have had a good brief, to get away without a custodial sentence.’
‘I did. My dad got the best man for me, when he’d finished reading me the riot act. I pleaded guilty and it was my first offence. I’ve never been in trouble with the law before or since. It’s years since anyone’s even mentioned this. I didn’t expect it would ever be flung in my face again.’
‘Murder awakens all kinds of sleeping dogs, Mr Ogden. You may think that incident is now irrelevant, but it’s got to interest us. It shows a man with a quick temper and an immediate use of violence as retaliation. The kind of man, in fact, who might see murder as a solution when he was pressed too far.’
‘I didn’t murder Beaumont. I don’t deny that I’d have liked to, but I didn’t kill him.’ Tom looked from the long, grave face of Lambert to the rounder, more sympathetic one of Hook and added defiantly, ‘But I’m bloody glad the bastard’s dead and I’m sure whoever killed him had good reason for it.’
He felt himself trembling with the vehemence of his emotion in the seconds which followed. Then Hook said quietly, ‘Where were you on Wednesday night, Mr Ogden?’
‘I was at the cinema with my wife. Enid will confirm that for you. We don’t go very often, but she wanted to see The Duchess. I think she’d read the book. We’d missed it the first time. Personally, I didn’t think much of it.’ He was aware that he was talking too much, sounding nervous and defensive, filling the silence with irrelevant detail when he was normally sparing with words. He stopped abruptly, looking at Lambert for a reaction.
The chief superintendent studied him for a moment, in which Tom thought he read these thoughts, and said impassively, ‘Then who do you think did kill Martin Beaumont, Mr Ogden?’
‘I don’t know. One of his women, or one of their husbands? The gossip is that he put it about a bit. Someone who worked with him? I don’t know anyone at Abbey Vineyards except Beaumont, and I wish I hadn’t known him.’ It sounded rather desperate, but he ended defiantly, ‘I probably wouldn’t tell you if I did know. I’m delighted the bugger’s dead!’
‘You would be most unwise to withhold any information which could lead to an arrest, Mr Ogden. It would make you an accessory after the fact and lead to very serious charges.’
The two big men were on their feet, leaving the farmer to follow them to the door with a surge of relief that this was over. Lambert paused at the entrance to the handsome old building. ‘We may well need to speak to you again, when we know more of the details of this death.’
The words rang like a threat in Tom Ogden’s mind through the evening which followed.
SEVENTEEN
There is a popular misconception that the team never takes time off during a murder investigation. A moment’s consideration exposes this as the myth it is. Investigations often last for weeks or months, and officers would remain fresh in neither body nor mind if they worked incessantly on them. Indeed, there have been some high-profile failures when senior officers became so obsessed with a case that it took over their lives. Judgements are then impaired, and attention to detail becomes worse, not better, when people drive themselves too hard.
Detectives were too close to the cases and the suspects involved to spot the obvious in two of the most notorious cases of recent years. Peter Sutcliffe, the notorious Yorkshire Ripper, eventually found guilty of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders, was interviewed and released several times by the police in the course of that enquiry. The awful Fred West, who buried several young female victims beneath the concrete of his house and its surrounding area in Gloucester, was a known petty criminal who was deemed to be incapable of such monstrous crimes.
John Lambert had often come near to obsession in his early CID days, to the extent that his preoccupation with detection had endangered the marriage which most of his juniors now saw as a model alliance in a difficult profession. He was aware of the dangers now, and he watched for the signs of fixation in those around him as well as himself.
Sunday morning was not a good time for interviews or any other kind of progress in a case like this one. Lambert made a move which he would once never have made. He arranged that Hook and he would present themselves bright and early on Sunday morning at Ross-on-Wye Golf Club and find themselves a game. Golf would blow away the cobwebs, he assured Bert conventionally. His DS was not convinced. Lambert had played the game for thirty years and mo
re; he played to a handicap of eight and kept his temper on the course. Hook, who had taken up the game only three years previously at his chief’s insistence, was not persuaded that Sunday-morning golf would provide him with the healthy release his senior confidently predicted.
The possibilities of disaster were increased by the opposition John Lambert secured for them. He lined them up against the only scratch player in the club, Tom Bowles. ‘Only a friendly. A chance for us to watch and learn,’ he assured a fearful Bert Hook. Tom had moved to the London area now, but he was down for the weekend with a friend of his who played off four at his new club at Sunningdale. Bert, fearing the slice which made even his modest handicap of sixteen optimistic, was filled with sporting apprehension.
In the event, things worked out pretty well. Bert Hook disappeared into the woods on two holes, but elsewhere produced some sensible and occasionally outstanding golf to take advantage of his handicap strokes. John Lambert was his usual steady self and the pair fitted their scores together to stay alongside the experts to the very end of the game. On the eighteenth hole, with the match all square, Tom Bowles followed an excellent drive with a seven-iron to eight feet. He then directed a curling putt into the heart of the hole, to secure a splendid win for the young tigers and an honourable defeat for the CID pair.
Tom Bowles’s partner made his excuses and left, casting a longing eye at the drinks Lambert was carrying from the bar for the others. He explained that he had to go and eat a dutiful Sunday lunch with his aunt and uncle, who lived in Monmouth. He made them sound ancient; Lambert reflected that they were probably in their fifties and about the age of Christine and himself.
Tom Bowles took an appreciative pull at his pint and said, ‘I expect you’ve cracked the case of the murdered vineyard owner by now.’
Lambert gave him the quiet, unrevealing smile of long practice and prepared to change the subject. But before he could speak, Bowles added reflectively, ‘I played a match in the first round of the knockout against someone from there – Jason Knight, who runs the restaurant. He put it across me on the eighteenth, rather as I did to you two today.’
