‘I saw his wife in Tesco’s. She didn’t seem put out — they’d expected it. Their farm cuts right into the vineyard’s land, doesn’t it? And Tom was apparently no friend of Martin Beaumont’s.’
‘That he wasn’t. He didn’t try to disguise it.’ He grinned at the memory of Ogden’s honest avowal of his feelings. ‘He has a decent alibi, though. He was at the cinema with his wife on the night of the murder and she’s confirmed that he went straight home with her afterwards.’ John watched another England batsman sky a catch straight to the man on the boundary and gratefully accepted a large beaker of tea from his spouse.
Christine Lambert had taught in the area for over twenty years, although since a serious illness three years ago she now only did part time. She knew many of their contemporaries as parents and many of the younger generation as former pupils. John had come to regard her now as a source of information rather than an unwelcome intruder into his affairs. She was pleased that he was letting her into this corner of his working life, which he would never have done at one time. She said as casually as she could, ‘Have you got a prime suspect yet?’
‘No. I’d say we have several leading suspects, at the moment. We’ve eliminated the more peripheral figures, but not his wife or any of the people who worked closely with him.’
‘Does that include Sarah Vaughan?’
He looked up sharply. ‘We saw her this morning. She’s in charge of research and development at Abbey Vineyards.’
Christine laughed. ‘And I remember her as a little girl with flying blonde pigtails and a brace on her teeth! Too small for the netball team, but desperately keen to get into it.’
‘She’s thirty-three and quite a looker now. Blonde, blue-eyed and pretty, with long legs and a bust that got Bert Hook’s attention. No fool, though. She certainly isn’t the conventional dumb blonde.’
‘Married?’
‘No. And hasn’t been, though she’s thirty-three now. Heterosexual but no serious boyfriend in tow, our research suggests.’
‘And your research will no doubt have been meticulous on such a delicious subject. If she’s still unmarried at thirty-three with looks like that, she’s clearly got brains.’
John decided to ignore this slur upon his sex. ‘She conducts tours of the vineyard and talks about the history of winemaking. Apparently they’re very successful, so she learned something from you.’
‘If she impressed you and Bert Hook with her looks and her brains, she must also have impressed her employer. He clearly rated her, to give her the job she has.’
Food for thought, John Lambert concluded, as he drove back to resume the hunt.
Gerry Davies lived in the 1950s semi-detached house on the outskirts of Monmouth in which he had spent the last twenty-eight of his thirty-five years of married life.
The purchase had been a great leap forward at the time, when he had two young children. He had undertaken a mortgage which had then seemed huge. In his boyhood, miners in the Rhondda Valley had lived in rented cottages. The notion of going into debt to acquire a house of your own had seemed a dangerous extravagance to his parents; the mortgage would in his father’s view prove ‘a millstone around your neck’. For a short, nightmare period when he had been unemployed, it had seemed as if his father might be right. His parents hadn’t lived to see him pay off the mortgage and secure the prosperity he now enjoyed. That was a matter of lasting regret for Gerry. To have seen their grandchildren attending university would have been an impossible dream for them.
He could afford a more expensive house now — perhaps even a detached bungalow with a spacious garden, now that the boys had left home. All in good time, Gerry told Bronwen. The truth was that even after thirteen years of success at Abbey Vineyards, even when he looked at the substantial sum which went into his bank account every month, he could not quite believe in his success. To move to a more expensive residence would not only be presumptuous, but also an invitation to the Fates to put him in his proper place by removing his job and the source of his comfortable income. He did not voice this view and there was not a single fact to support it. But instincts nourished in youth can be stronger than logic.
He was glad that the CID men had offered to come here to interview him, rather than to his office at work. The less you were seen with policemen the better, in Gerry’s view. It was another thought rooted in the misty distance of his youth, when young men drank too much after rugby and the Saturday night rozzers were not always sympathetic to brawny young forwards from the long terraces of cottages. There had been some hairy moments, especially in strange towns after muscular away victories.
Gerry took the officers into the rather cramped front room, which had seemed a luxurious extra space when they had moved into the house. Nowadays, they used this dining room only when the boys were down with their wives. Gerry had never been comfortable at the dinner parties which most of the other people in the road seemed to enjoy. He was still happiest in clubs, usually in an all-male setting, but he and Bronwen threw a boisterous and very successful party once a year for their many friends, when all the downstairs rooms of the house were crowded and noisy.
The two men who came to see him looked with interest at the rugby photographs which lined the walls. There was one of the great Welsh side of the fifties, with Cliff Morgan holding a ball in the centre, another with the greatest of all teams of a generation later, with Barry John and Gareth Edwards and JPR Williams. The rest were of teams just below that national level, in which Gerry Davies himself had figured.
The CID visitors sat on upright chairs beside each other and confronted the man whose presence dominated this room across his dining table. ‘We’ve been a long time getting to you, Mr Davies,’ said John Lambert. Gerry wasn’t sure whether that sounded apologetic or ominous. ‘We’ve learned quite a lot about Mr Beaumont and a little about the way he died. Now we’d like your views.’
‘I’m sure I won’t have a lot to add. Martin was a good employer and I liked him. But other people will have told you that.’
No one previously had said openly that they liked the man. There had been a little nostalgic recollection of the younger man and his attractions from Vanda North, and much respect for what he had achieved in his business, but his other close associates had been guarded. No one, not even his wife, had previously professed an unqualified liking for the man. In the perverse influence murder exercised over such declarations, it might mean exactly the opposite of what was said. But Gerry Davies, in the comfort of his pleasant, slightly old-fashioned home certainly looked genuine enough, with his square, open face, his burly frame, his still plentiful frizzy black hair, now slightly tinged with silver.
Lambert said, ‘Tell us a little about what you do at Abbey Vineyards, please.’
‘I run the shop. We sell a lot of wine, as you’d expect, plus beer and cider and associated products. Increasingly over the last few years, I’ve also taken on the work of wholesale information and supply. We sell a large number of cases to restaurants now, and our sparkling wines are particularly in demand at weddings.’ Gerry hoped he did not sound too much like their publicity brochures. ‘Martin said that I should describe myself as the sales director on correspondence and invoices, but I only bother to do that with the big customers. He thought it was important to show the big buyers that we aren’t some tinpot little concern, but are used to meeting large orders.’
‘I see. Were you happy in this work?’
‘Very happy.’ Gerry saw an opportunity to show his respect for Beaumont, as well as a chance to assert his own innocence. ‘Martin ran a happy ship as well as a successful one. He was very easy to approach. He gave me a lot of encouragement and guidance in my early years with the firm. It’s only in the last year or two that I got used to calling him Martin. I still took care to call him Mr Beaumont when there were customers around.’ Gerry didn’t know why he’d told them that — it said more about him than his late employer.