‘The boys have been a stimulus really, I suppose,’ said Bert. ‘Once I’d started, I could hardly give up, in the face of all their comments. And of course, Eleanor’s been marvellous. I couldn’t have done it without her looking after the kids for long hours on her own, as well as encouraging me whenever it seemed too high a cliff to scale. I expect it’s Eleanor who’s blown the gaff on me now. I didn’t expect to come into a station which was throbbing with the news.’
‘You can blame me for that. I’m the one who told Chris to put it in the station information bulletin. The grapevine then relays it pretty quickly, especially on a quiet Monday like this. You might as well bask in a little glory whilst it’s there to be had. You know it will be the centre of gossip for about two days, until something more salacious like an officer’s divorce takes over.’
‘I suppose I have Eleanor to thank for you knowing about it.’
‘Christine asked her outright over the weekend. You know what wives are like. You wouldn’t have wanted Eleanor to lie, would you?’
‘I suppose not. And as you say, it’s probably better to get all the jokes out of the way at once. It won’t last.’
‘We could do with a good juicy murder to get everyone’s attention back on the things that matter. Not that one wishes ill upon any of the honest citizens who pay our wages, of course.’ Despite this routine denial, both of them felt the familiar CID men’s lust for a crime that would fully occupy their predatory minds.
On the Thursday of that week, Sarah Vaughan had an attentive audience and was riding upon the adrenalin which came from it. These people were enthusiasts for wine and the work of producing it, anxious to hear what she had to say about the short history of the industry here and the grapes which had been most successful.
This was the second tour she had led this week and probably about her sixteenth during the year. She was confident enough now to take the pulse of an audience. She no longer spoke too quickly in her nervousness, as she was sure she had done when she had begun this work. She hadn’t watched her audience’s faces as she spoke in those early days. Now she not only smiled back in response to their friendliness, but even made the odd joke which she knew had succeeded before. The trick was to make the joke seem spontaneous, not carefully calculated or rehearsed.
There were a lot of questions at the end of the tour, which she took to be a sign of its success. When she was answering questions about the new reds, she let it drop that they had high hopes of the grape in question and that they were taking a low mark-up on last year’s vintage to get the brand established. Two bargain-conscious wine-fanciers among her audience promptly went into the shop and bought cases of red, under the approving eye of Gerry Davies.
It was four thirty when she finished the tour. As usual, she found herself quite tired once the audience had gone and she was alone in her small office. There was a lot of nervous tension involved in being on show before a live audience. She was learning to enjoy the tension, to relish the need to be on her toes in the face of a constantly changing clientele, but it was tiring nonetheless. She had done practice presentations years ago as part of her Business Studies degree, but it was not until this last year that she had undertaken the real thing. It gave her a kick to find that she was reasonably proficient as a communicator, and getting better with practice. She smiled to herself: that was the kind of verdict she might have had from her tutor on the degree all those years ago.
There wasn’t much of the working day left. Sarah decided she might allow herself the luxury of an early departure, then remembered that she had taken her car in for a service that morning. She rang the garage and found that the Honda was ready for collection. Gerry Davies would give her a lift into Ross-on-Wye to pick it up, though it would be a good hour yet before he would be ready to leave. But she’d better go across to the shop and tell him that she needed a lift.
She was halfway across the little courtyard when a vehicle drew up at her side, so silently that it made her start with surprise. A glance sideways reassured her; it was Martin Beaumont’s 3.8 blue Jaguar. The window beside her slid softly down and her boss said, ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere? I see your car isn’t here today.’
‘No, it’s in for service at Ross. But Gerry Davies will give me a lift — it’s almost on his route home.’
‘No need to bother him — he won’t be off for another hour, will he, whereas I can take you now.’
She wondered whether to say that she had work to do, couldn’t leave early. It was such an obvious tactic to impress the boss with her work ethic that someone as shrewd as Martin Beaumont would surely see through it. So she said, ‘If you’re sure it’s no trouble,’ and slid gratefully on to the leather passenger seat beside the owner of Abbey Vineyards.
He’d seen her making the tour, had noted the animation of her audience, and now commented approvingly upon it. He didn’t miss much, the boss, as she’d quickly realized when she came here to work for him. He said suddenly, ‘It’s good to see you in a skirt for a change. All the attractive women seem to wear trousers nowadays.’
‘I usually wear a skirt or a dress for the tours, unless it’s cold and blustery. The public seem to like it.’
‘I’m sure they do, when they see legs as attractive as yours, Sarah.’
She was mildly shocked and a little amused. Employers weren’t supposed to make comments like that to their female staff nowadays, though she supposed she should regard herself as out of the working environment at this stage of the day.
As if he read her thoughts, Beaumont said, ‘Of course, I wouldn’t pass compliments like that at work, but we’ve finished for the day now, haven’t we? And they are very attractive legs!’
She couldn’t think of a suitable light-hearted rejoinder. She was willing him not to deliver any more cliches. She resisted the temptation to pull her skirt down a little further over the fifteen denier tights beneath it and said, ‘You won’t say that in a few years, when the varicose veins begin to take over.’
They both laughed at that and he said gallantly, ‘I can’t imagine you with varicose veins, Sarah Vaughan!’
‘Age catches up with all of us, in the end, doesn’t it?’ She had learned to bandy cliches with the best of them, she thought wryly. ‘I’m thirty-three already, and I expect the next ten years will fly past even more quickly than the last.’ It seemed to her a good moment to remind him that she was not some inexperienced ingenue who would be flattered by the attention of the boss, even though he was probably only engaging in a little harmless flirting.
‘No one would think you were in your thirties,’ he said gallantly, swinging the Jaguar round a long left-hand bend. ‘Every time I see you I think what an attractive woman you are.’
‘I think we should change the subject now,’ she said firmly. For the first time, she felt a vague fear, not that anything dire was going to happen, but that she was going to have an embarrassing few minutes. He had taken the B road, she noticed, the old road into Ross rather than the M50. Nothing wrong with that; it was the shorter, if not the quicker, way. But she would rather have been on a route which carried more traffic; this road was hardly used at all since the motorway had become available.
Beaumont said nothing for a full two minutes, so that she hoped he had seen there was nothing in this for him; hopefully, he was thinking, as she was, about being mildly embarrassed when they met at work the next day.
Then, abruptly, he swung the big car into the deserted parking space beside the old road. ‘It’s time we had a little talk,’ he said.
‘Just drive me into Ross as you promised to do, please,’ Sarah said primly.
The speed of his movement caught her by surprise. He flung himself suddenly across her. His hand clutched her shoulder and he kissed her clumsily, holding her lips against his until she managed to twist her mouth away from him. His breath was hot and damp in her ear. ‘You must be able to see what you do to a man, you little minx,’ he muttered. ‘Parading yourself up and down at the vineyard, twitching your hips as though you don’t know what you’re doing.’