In Vino Veritas (32 page)

‘Thank you. You said just now that you would give us “every assistance”. Will you now tell us in confidence who you think might have put that bullet into Martin Beaumont's skull, please?'

It was an unexpectedly blunt challenge from this quiet, considerate man. Shock tactics, perhaps. Well, it wouldn't shock her. Vanda North said, ‘I've given that much thought, as I expect others also have. I have no name to offer you, I'm afraid.'

Tom Ogden did not immediately recognize his visitors. The two men stood awkwardly in the doorway of the old shippon which had become his administrative headquarters for the strawberry farm. He thought he had seen them before, but he was not sure where.

It was the younger man who introduced them. ‘This is Alistair Morton and I'm Jason Knight. We're working neighbours of yours. We're from Abbey Vineyards.'

This man Knight spoke nervously, as Tom would have expected him to do. He had never made any secret of his dislike for his more powerful neighbour. But today something protected them from his immediate, open hostility. He needed to know how this murder investigation was going. Up the road at Abbey Vineyards, the staff were no doubt busy comparing notes, whereas he was isolated and alone, picking up none of the rumours about what the police might or might not now know. He said gruffly, ‘You'd better come in and sit down.'

It was not really an office. There was a table but no desk, and four chairs in various stages of disrepair which did not match each other. Knight and Morton sat down gingerly on the two which looked most robust, whilst Ogden placed himself on the other side of the table. Tom was not a patient man. Instead of waiting for them to announce why they had come here, he launched into his most urgent query. ‘Have they got anyone for killing Beaumont yet?'

Jason Knight's smile was bleak and humourless. ‘All of us are wondering about that. Including the man who shot him, I presume.'

‘They know it was a man, then?'

‘No, I don't think they do. I was making an assumption.'

‘But it needn't be a man, need it? A woman could have shot him just as easily.' Ogden was anxious for anything which would broaden the field of suspects; it sounded as though he was computing the odds against his own arrest. It was probably no more than a natural nervousness when you were a murder suspect, Jason decided. He said, ‘We just wanted to discuss the future with you, Mr Ogden.'

‘It's Tom. And if you've come to persuade me to sell you this place, you've wasted your journey.' His jaw set in a firm line and he stared his visitor straight in the face for the first time, emboldened by the familiar instinct to protect his ground.

Alistair Morton said quietly, ‘We're not here to offer you money, Tom. We couldn't do that, even if we wanted to. We don't know what the future of our firm is yet, nor even whether we'll have a part in it.'

Tom looked at him for a moment, then nodded brusquely. He liked the look of this older of the two men. Probably the first, subconscious reason was that he could have dealt with him easily in a fight. He was not conscious of any such reaction in himself, but when you worked with your hands in an environment where bodily strength and stamina were important qualities, you felt easier when you started with a physical advantage. Morton was older and slighter than Knight, and a direct contrast in appearance and manner to the blond, ebullient Martin Beaumont who had been his ogre over the years. Ogden said gruffly, ‘What is it you want, then?'

‘We have different ideas about the way our firm should go than Beaumont had. As our nearest neighbour, we'd like to know what you think of them.'

‘How different?'

Alistair took a deep breath. Privately, though he had agreed they should come here, he had not expected that they would even get a hearing from Tom Ogden. He decided the best introduction he could offer was to declare a dislike of his late employer. ‘I'm the financial director at Abbey Vineyards. I'm also the oldest employee, now that the founder is dead. I was in the business from the start, and I don't mind telling you that Beaumont made some dodgy deals and did some hairy things, particularly in those early days. He also made certain promises to me about the future of the firm, on which he failed to deliver. To put it bluntly, he lied to me. He gave me his word on some important things and later denied it absolutely, because it suited him. I didn't like him any more than you did, Tom.'

‘Fair enough. What difference does that make to either of us now?'

‘Maybe none at all. Maybe quite a big one. That's what we're here to discuss.'

‘I'm not going to sell out. You've wasted your time if you think I am.'

‘That might well be so, Tom. We're not fools. We're not here to offer you the moon. We wouldn't propose anything that wasn't in our interests as well as yours. And as Jason says, we can't yet offer anything definite. It's just that if there was a measure of agreement amongst the three of us, that would strengthen our hands in whatever negotiations we may choose to undertake with other interested parties.'

Ogden was interested despite himself. Over twenty years and more, the situation with Beaumont had been black and white; he had never needed to think twice about his rejection of that odious man's proposals. But if he was going to have to deal with a group of people, perhaps making more subtle suggestions than Beaumont ever had, he would be at a disadvantage. He was an independent farmer, proud of his yeoman stock. He knew every yard of his land and he made his own decisions. But that meant he had little experience of negotiation.

Secretly, Tom Ogden feared being outsmarted. The kind of situation where you conceded one thing to gain another was foreign to him, and he felt he was too impulsive and excitable to handle it well. If he could indeed reach some agreement with these qualified, experienced men, he would feel much more confident in dealing with others. He said cautiously, ‘I can see that we are all in a new situation. What is it you want to discuss with me?'

Alistair nodded appreciatively. They had already achieved more than he had expected. ‘We hope that in future the system in our firm will be more democratic than it ever was under Beaumont. We hope that the five of us who have done most to run the place will have power, rather than just wages. We hope that we shall control policy in a way we have never been able to do in the past.'

‘I keep hearing that word “hope”. You're not in a position to make decisions or to come here making offers to me, are you?'

‘Indeed we're not, Tom. Jason here told you that at the outset. We're not here to offer you lies or to make propositions we can't fulfil. All this is tentative, to see if we can establish some common ground between us.'

‘That's all right then. Just so long as you don't expect any commitment from me today, I'm prepared to listen and to decide whether your plans are in my interests too.'

‘That's good. Well, it's obvious to all of us that your land is in a particularly interesting position for us. The acquisitions made by Abbey Vineyards over the years mean that your strawberry farm is almost surrounded by our fields.'

‘It's a prosperous concern. We're about to have our best year yet.'

‘I don't doubt it. And Jason and I are not here to make you any cash offer for your land. We are not in a position to do anything of the sort. But let me tell you how we see the future of our firm, because that will obviously affect you as well, whatever happens. We see Abbey Vineyards as having a board of either five or six, depending on whether the widow of the late owner wishes to be involved. We know that you are not interested in a cash offer for your land and we understand why. But we thought that you might be interested in becoming the sixth or seventh director of the firm, in exchange for the absorption of your land into the vineyard.'

Tom Ogden, who had expected to reject these men as firmly as he had always rejected Beaumont, felt suddenly and unexpectedly exhilarated. His wife had been telling him for years that he needed to contemplate retirement; that he should be considering Beaumont's gold because he had no one to take over from him at the farm; that it was an inevitable fact of life that it would eventually become an anonymous chunk of Abbey Vineyards. This way he would not only get out with head held high, but would have a say in the future of his land, an interest in a thriving business which he could retain as long as he lived. He said guardedly, ‘That would need a lot of discussion. A hell of a lot of discussion!'

‘Of course it would, Tom. On both sides. And we can't even start on that yet, until all of us are clearer about the future. But you're not opposed to the idea in principle?'

‘No. Not in principle. It's different from selling out. It would leave me with an interest in this land and how it was developed.'

‘Of course it would. And from our point of view, it would make obvious sense. We'd like to be able to tell whoever else may be involved in the future of Abbey Vineyards that we've made contact with you and had a favourable response.' He saw the stirrings of dissent in the weather-beaten features opposite him and hastily modified his phrase. ‘Or at any rate that you haven't turned us down flat, as you always did Beaumont. That we've talked about a very different sort of agreement, and that these discussions are ongoing. That would strengthen our hand too. There'd be three of us thinking along the same lines about the future policy for the firm.'

Tom Ogden didn't like some of the glib modern phrases, but he'd already decided the general idea was acceptable. He stood up and offered his hand. ‘I agree that what you have suggested might be possible, that I'm open to further discussion in due course. Let's hope none of us ends up behind bars because we saw off that bloody man Beaumont.'

He had tried to end on a light note, and all three men smiled. But none of them found the notion very amusing.

The flat which Gerry Davies had admired on the previous night seemed smaller, with these two large, threatening men within it. Sarah Vaughan asked them to sit down on the small black and white sofa, crushing them together a little, making their presence less dominating in her home. She sat opposite them on a chair which was a little higher, and gave Lambert a smile which he did not return.

She was used to people congratulating her on her taste and on the neat, minimalist interior of her dwelling, or at least on her securing of a picturesque site beside this quiet reach of the river Wye. This time there were none of those initial niceties. Instead, Lambert issued a direct challenge. ‘Miss Vaughan, you lied to us when we spoke on Monday. You impeded the progress of a murder investigation.'

She felt a flash of anger at Gerry Davies and his clumsiness in revealing what she had sought to conceal, then guilt that she should cavil at this honesty in an honourable man. ‘I didn't tell you about Martin Beaumont's assault on me. Surely you can understand that. It was an embarrassment to me.'

‘And a motive for murder. That is how we have to see it as detectives. Especially when someone takes elaborate steps to conceal it.'

‘I just didn't tell you about it. I didn't lie to you.'

Lambert lifted an eyebrow at Hook, who turned back the pages of his notebook with what seemed to Sarah deliberate slowness. ‘You said about Mr Beaumont, “I didn't see any evidence of the womanizing I heard people gossip about. For all I know, that's all it was – gossip.” That seems a pretty definite denial.'

‘All right. I didn't realize I'd been as emphatic as that. Martin made a pass at me. Well, a lot more than a pass, actually. It was an attempted rape, if you must know. He didn't accept my refusal. It was in his Jaguar and in broad daylight. He'd offered me a lift into Ross to collect my car. He pulled off the road and threw himself across me. Eventually, I managed to grab a handful of his hair and pull his head back, then get my knee into his balls.' She was breathing hard at the recollection of that afternoon, glaring at them accusingly. They were men, weren't they, and thus in some distant way to blame for this degradation?

Hook said quietly, ‘When did this assault take place?'

‘At the end of April. I can give you the date if you want it.'

‘About a fortnight before Mr Beaumont was killed.'

‘I suppose it was, yes.'

Lambert let the seconds stretch, encouraging her to make her own inferences about her hatred of Beaumont and what he had attempted. Then he said coolly, ‘Did you take any action about this attack?'

She was suddenly furious with the man and his calmness. ‘Get real, Detective Chief Superintendent Lambert! If I go to the police, he denies it, says I'm a silly young woman who's fantasizing about her boss. If I go to a solicitor, he wants evidence, which I can't provide. If Beaumont hears I've taken any action at all, I lose a job which I enjoy and earnings which I won't be able to match elsewhere. So I make sure that I don't give the man any opportunity to be with me alone and I get on with my life! That's the action I took.'

Lambert nodded several times, as if this time he accepted her account of things. ‘Have you thought of anyone who can confirm that you were here at the time when Beaumont died?'

‘No. There isn't anyone. I had telephone calls between eight and nine on that evening, but nothing after that.'

‘Who do you think killed Martin Beaumont? We now think it was someone in his immediate circle, not an outsider.'

‘I don't know. It's your business, not mine. It wasn't me. But you're not going to believe that just because I say it, are you?'

‘Not just because you say it, no. The nature of our work does not allow that. You can see that you did not help yourself by concealing what you have now told us.'

‘It's a motive; no more than that. I admit that I was quite pleased when I heard Beaumont was dead. But you must have other motives, as well as mine.'