Alistair thought he’d managed that rather well. He hadn’t offered the name until it was prised out of him. He watched Hook completing his entry on Ogden before he said, ‘Anyone else?’
‘I’m sure there are lots of people. As Superintendent Lambert suggested, it’s almost impossible to grow a business the way Martin has grown this one without upsetting a lot of people on the way. And even those of us who worked happily for him found him an abrasive character at times. That doesn’t mean that we killed him, does it?’
Hook left that rhetorical question hanging in the air. ‘Where were you on Wednesday night, Mr Morton?’
‘I was here at home. I did an hour or so in the garden after our evening meal. During the latter part of the evening I was watching television, I expect, like most of the rest of the populace.’
‘And overnight?’
‘Here. I didn’t go out on Wednesday after I came home from work.’
‘Is there anyone who can confirm this for us?’
‘Just my wife. As I think I said earlier, we do not have any children.’ He’d read or heard that they didn’t like spouse alibis. But if they couldn’t disprove them, they had to accept them. He wondered if they’d go straight to Amy now and ask her to confirm it, but Hook merely made a note. Lambert said he was to get in touch if he thought of anything else which might help them, and then they were gone.
He sat in the empty dining room and reviewed the meeting. It had certainly gone as well as could be expected, he decided, and perhaps even a little better than that. He went through into the kitchen, where Amy was stirring the beans into the chilli con carne.
He went over and stood behind her, sliding his arms round her waist. ‘That was fine, I think. Just routine stuff about the work I do at the firm and so on. The police may not speak to you at all. If they do, just remember that I was here for the whole of Wednesday evening.’
FIFTEEN
The CID section in the police station at Oldford was unusually busy for a Saturday morning. Murder investigations have that effect. Even overtime budgets are treated flexibly, when chief constables are haunted by the fear of tabloid headlines about unsolved mysteries and police incompetence.
Lambert, Rushton and Hook were gathered around the computer on which the DI recorded the mass of information generated by a murder case. He was about to enter the limited information offered by the post mortem report, much of which they already knew or expected. Powder burns around the temple indicated that Martin Beaumont had been shot at a range of no more than an inch or two by a.38 calibre pistol. The cartridge had now been retrieved, but the weapon had not been found at the site.
The body had in all probability not been touched after the single fatal shot was fired. Beaumont had certainly died in the car where he was discovered and the car had not been driven after his death. He had been in good health for a man of his years at the time of his death. He had died not less than twenty-four and not more than forty-eight hours before the body was found, and probably but not certainly between thirty and forty-two hours before that time.
Stomach contents indicated that a substantial meal had been consumed several hours before death. ‘Several’ in this case probably meant three to five, but it would be impossible to swear to anything so precise in a court of law. A little alcohol was evident, probably imbibed at the same time as the food, but the blood milligram level was well below the legal limit for driving.
The detection team wanted as always a time of death, which would give them a starting point and pinpoint the enquiries of the large team of officers who were doing the dull but necessary work of house-to-house and local motorist enquiries. Rushton had been computerizing such information as it came in: there were already surprisingly substantial files on his computer. He said, ‘The last sighting of Beaumont to date is at half past five in his office at Abbey Vineyards, by his PA Fiona Cooper. She thought he was almost ready to leave. If we assume he ate an evening meal shortly after that, he probably drove out to the spot where he was killed late that evening.’
‘Probably towards midnight.’ Lambert nodded glumly. ‘He died in a very quiet place at almost the quietest time of day.’
‘He may have driven his killer with him to Howler’s Heath,’ said Rushton. ‘It’s early days, but there are so far no other sightings reported of another vehicle parked near the scene. But we have as yet no report of a taxi having been summoned to anywhere in that area in the late hours of Wednesday or early hours of Thursday. We’ve covered the major firms in Gloucester and Tewkesbury, but not all the smaller and individual operators as yet.’ He consulted a note he had made. ‘The only one of his executive workers who lives near enough to have made his way home on foot from the site of the death is Alistair Morton, who I compute lives some six or seven miles from there.’
‘Morton assured us yesterday that he was tucked up at home throughout the evening and overnight,’ said Lambert dryly. ‘We shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that Beaumont might have driven his killer out there with him; it’s possible, if we assume an accomplice, who could have picked up the killer at or near the scene after the murder. But the probability is that Beaumont was fulfilling an assignation with the person who killed him. Whether the place and time were selected by Beaumont or by his killer, we cannot know at this stage.’
Hook said, ‘It would have been quite possible for the killer to park on the lane, somewhere near where we parked when we went out there, and walk the hundred yards or so to the Jaguar under the trees.’
‘It’s also possible that in that place and at that time no one noticed a parked vehicle, especially if it wasn’t there for very long,’ said Rushton grimly. ‘I’ll tell our officers they should now concentrate on a time an hour before or after midnight.’
‘Have forensic come up with anything?’
‘They’re still working on the car, but I don’t expect it to produce anything significant. They’ve got various fibres from the front seat, but whether any of them were left on the night of the killing is another matter. In any case, they’d only be any use much later, probably not until we can match them with the clothing of someone we’ve arrested for this.’ Rushton paused, looking at what he had already entered from Hook’s reports on the interviews already conducted. ‘Has the widow got her own car?’
Lambert smiled. ‘She has. And she made no great pretence of being devastated by her husband’s death. She’d dressed herself in black to meet us, but grief didn’t seem to go any deeper than that. The first thought is that it’s a pretty obscure place to meet a husband whom you could confront at home at any time. But of course, it would divert suspicion away from her to kill him out there, at what looks like a secret meeting. Jane Beaumont admitted that she knew he had a pistol. According to her, she knew nothing definite about where he kept it and wasn’t interested. But for all we know at this stage, she might have had easy access to it.’
Rushton nodded. Then, as if reluctant to raise the possibility, he said, ‘Presumably Mrs Beaumont has the resources to pay a contract killer to do this for her, if she’d wanted to do that.’
Lambert nodded. ‘That had crossed my mind. It would apply to others too, presumably. By definition, all of the people we are considering as likely suspects are well paid, or in Ogden’s case prosperous in his own right. Any one of them might have paid someone else to do their dirty work.’