She felt as though she had got herself involved in a bad play. He surely could not be saying these things. She felt the panic of claustrophobia which she had known when she was a child, pinned to the floor by other children. Her seat belt was still fastened, and there was no way she could release it with this great bear of a man leaning on her like this. She tried to bring her knee up between his legs, to slam it into his balls the way the self-defence manuals taught you to resist, but his leg was splayed across her, pinning her own thighs to the seat. ‘Let me go! Get your fucking hands off me!’ she shouted into his face.
She did not know where the word had come from: it was one she hadn’t used in years. Her voice, harsh and grating with panic, seemed to have come from someone else. The smell of his aftershave crammed itself into her nose and her mouth, making her want to retch. Past the edge of his head, she could see a low wall, a field, bright green beneath the still steady sun and dotted with black and white cows, an innocent world which seemed to exist but be far beyond her reach.
His hand was on her knee now, trying to lift her skirt, the thick fingers sliding higher even as she tried to prise them off. ‘You’re not as innocent and wide-eyed as you pretend you are, young Sarah. You’re a mature woman, like you said. You know what life’s about and you’re up for it really, however much you try to come the nun.’
Sarah managed at last to get her left arm free from under him, to bring it up and get a handful of the hair at the back of his head. She twisted her fingers to secure her grip, then tugged as hard as she could, bringing a scream and a clutch of obscenities from the mouth that was now six inches above her face and full of pain as well as lust. She was sure afterwards that it was the sight of that pain which gave her strength. She twisted abruptly sideways, brought the knee which still had his hand upon it up between his legs, bringing a new gasp of pain from him as he yelled, ‘You bitch! You crazy bitch!’
She had the door of the car open as he clutched himself, but she was not quick enough with the unfamiliar catch on the safety belt. She was still fumbling with it when he clutched her arm with both of his hands, shouting, ‘Stay where you are! If you don’t want it, don’t have it, you bitch! I’ll drop you off at the garage in Ross as promised. You can keep your hand on your precious halfpenny!’
He reached across her, pulled shut the door she had managed to open. Sarah was still fumbling with the wretched safety-belt clasp. He restarted the engine, revving it furiously in his confusion, then moved out of the lay-by and back on to the road. They had ridden a good mile before his breathing steadied and he spoke. ‘You can’t blame me for trying. You’re an attractive woman, Sarah.’
‘I can blame you for forcing yourself upon me, when I quite plainly didn’t want it.’
‘Sometimes women like to play hard to get. Sometimes a little resistance is just part of the game.’
‘I don’t believe that. I certainly don’t accept that I didn’t make my feelings very plain to you.’
He didn’t come back with any reply to that. Perhaps he knew that she was right. They were off the old road, running into the outskirts of Ross now, and there was other traffic around them. She reached for her bag, fumbled for her comb. He reached up and pulled down the sun visor in front of her, said with an attempt at his normal voice, ‘There’s a mirror on the back of that.’
She ran the comb through her hair, resisted the temptation to reach for her lipstick and restore her make-up. Somehow that would have been condoning his action, accepting it as no more than a harmless romantic sally rather than the ugly attack it had been.
As if Martin Beaumont sensed what was in her mind, he said, ‘It was just a pass at you that failed, that’s all, Sarah. You must have dealt with a lot of those in your time. Don’t make it more than it was.’
He was telling her not to make the mistake of taking this further, that this would be his story and that she had no witnesses to help her to establish that it had been anything more than that. Sarah Vaughan wanted to tell him that it had been something much bigger and much uglier than a simple pass. Passes were something callow young men did when they were seeking a kiss; not attacks mounted by an ageing roue who was trying to assert the power of company ownership. All this flashed through her mind, though she was not able to put it into words until much later.
They were running into the forecourt of the garage where her car awaited her now, so she said nothing at all. She did not even look at him again, but slid quickly from the Jaguar’s leather and moved into the office area of the garage without a backward glance.
SIX
Alistair Morton hadn’t given up the idea of murder. Indeed, every time that Martin Beaumont denied him the share in the business he had promised, it seemed a more attractive option. It was true that in the cold light of day murder didn’t seem as easy a proposition as it did when you dreamed of it alone in your armchair in the hour after midnight, but he was still convinced that if you planned it properly the crime was eminently possible.
Sometimes you needed to fan the flames of your hatred, to convince yourself anew of how badly the man was treating you. At the end of April, two months after he had first entertained the delicious notion of ridding the world of Martin Beaumont, Alistair elected to set his grievances before the boss again. You couldn’t be fairer than that, surely? Giving the man a final chance to redeem himself before you proceeded with your plans against him was more than fair.
Had Alistair not been a secretive sort of man, he might have shared his thoughts with someone else. But Morton had a wife who lived her own life and no children. There was no one to tell him that his thinking might be a little unbalanced.
He presented himself at precisely ten o’clock for the meeting he had arranged with the owner of Abbey Vineyards. Exactly on time as usual, as Beaumont observed with a slightly mocking smile. Alistair accepted the boss’s offer to sit in the chair in front of the big desk. He didn’t see how he could do anything else, though he really wanted to stand toe to toe and challenge the man, not go through the rituals of a polite exchange.
‘What can I do for you, Alistair?’ Beaumont had that formal smile which Morton now saw as very false.
‘You can honour your promises!’ said Alistair. He had wanted it to be the harshest of challenges, cutting through the fripperies of polite exchanges. Somehow it sounded rather feeble in this large, quiet room, with its big framed photograph of the Malvern Hills, which always seemed to remind him of man’s impermanence in this ancient landscape.
‘And what would you mean by that?’ Beaumont hadn’t lost his surface affability; the meaningless smile remained glued to his face. But he was on his guard now, Alistair had no doubt about that. He looked beyond Morton, out through the big window to where Sarah Vaughan had just driven her Honda into the car park. Beaumont was glad to note her arrival; he had feared when she was not here at nine o’clock as usual that she might be planning some retribution for yesterday’s little incident.
Alistair glanced at the photograph of Beaumont standing alone beside their first tractor, hoping that the man in the big, round-backed leather chair would follow his look and his thoughts. ‘I worked for practically nothing for you in the early days.’
Beaumont raised his eyebrows. This was familiar ground to him, but he had prepared his tactics. He would pretend that Morton’s renewed accusations were a disappointment to him, a revival of an argument he thought he’d already settled. ‘We all worked hard to get things off the ground. We can all look back to the sacrifices we had to make to get the show on the road. And equally, we can all be proud of the progress we have made since those early days.’ They were the opening words of a press handout he had given to one of the glossy magazines three months ago, but he doubted whether this man would have read that article.