Hook nodded, thinking of the bright scenes at his graduation yesterday, of the sun beating down on those happy, noisy, celebrating hordes of people from all sorts of backgrounds. The Jaguar and its ghastly contents had been here beneath these green trees through those same hours, silent and unremarked, save for the heedless singing birds and the flies which scented food.
He was beset in that moment by an illogical guilt, as if his heedless rejoicing had in some way contributed to the fact that this corpse had been undiscovered through the vital first day of its existence. Lambert rejoined him and they removed from their shoes the plastic coverings used to avoid contamination of the crime scene, then picked their way slowly back along the grass verge at the edge of the track to Lambert’s old Vauxhall Senator car.
When they looked back a hundred yards to the scene beneath the trees, two men were unloading the plastic body shell from the van the police called the ‘meat wagon’ and were preparing to lever their blood-spattered cargo from the big blue Jaguar.
And still the sun blazed steadily over the quiet scene, as if to remind them how tiny within the cosmos were the petty affairs of men.
THIRTEEN
It was a big house, as they would have expected of the man who had owned Abbey Vineyards. The grounds were tidy enough. A gardener in overalls glanced curiously at the police vehicle, then continued planting long lines of bedding plants alongside the drive. An impressive oak front door stood between the pillars which framed it in the mock-Georgian frontage. The exterior woodwork of the house looked as if it had been recently repainted.
Nevertheless, the house itself looked curiously unloved and uncared for. The curtains of the room to the left of the door had been pulled back untidily and those in the room on the first floor above them were tightly drawn. The end of a newspaper protruded still from the letter box, though it was now two o’clock on this sunny Friday afternoon. They rang the doorbell twice. It was some time after the second effort that their ringing was answered.
‘Sorry. Mrs Forshaw comes in to clean on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but she isn’t here today.’
The woman had straight black hair which fell almost to her shoulders. Her paleness was stark. It was accentuated by the loose-fitting black dress and shoes she wore. Her deep-set eyes must once have been an intriguing feature of the face, but now the rings beneath them made them look haunted, fearful of what might be at hand. Her thin nose seemed pinched, whereas within a healthier setting it would have been attractive. When Lambert announced himself and Hook with their ranks, she smiled and said, ‘Yes. I was told to expect you.’ Her teeth were regular and attractive. As that single smile briefly lit up the face, they had a glimpse of the woman she had been thirty years ago.
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?’