Hook decided to show that a pretty face and shapely legs were irrelevant to a professional man like him. ‘Ms Vaughan pretended to be more recently appointed to Abbey Vineyards and more gauche than she is. She’s a capable woman of thirty-three, whatever her physical attractions. Beaumont wouldn’t have appointed a dumb blonde. We now know that he had a wandering eye and wandering hands, but he rarely made a bad appointment. And everyone we’ve seen says that Abbey Vineyards was his first and most consistent love, to the point of obsession at times.’
Lambert said quietly, ‘We also know that he demanded his own way and got it. Perhaps he thought that should apply in sexual encounters as well as business. If he arranged to meet Sarah Vaughan last Wednesday night and then went too far, she could well have panicked and shot him. We shall have to investigate that possibility with her. She has no alibi.’
Rushton nodded. ‘Like most of the others. Including our last major suspect, Tom Ogden.’ This time his normally staid exterior could not conceal his excitement.
The others both looked at him keenly before Lambert said, ‘He was at the cinema with his wife last Wednesday night. I understood that she had confirmed it.’
‘She did. She also stated that he went home with her afterwards and didn’t go out again. But it was Thursday night when they went to the cinema, not Wednesday. I was there with Anne and we saw them. It’s most unlikely that they went to the same place to see the same film on two successive nights.’
Lambert and Hook digested this, their brains registering again what Ogden had told them and how he had seemed at the time. Then Lambert said heavily, ‘He didn’t seem a natural liar to me, but that only makes this more significant. He has a record for violence, though admittedly a long time ago. But he more than anyone made no secret of his loathing for Beaumont and his relief that he was off the scene.’
‘Do we get him in here and grill him?’ said Rushton eagerly. As he was coordinating the investigation from the station, he was even more conscious than Lambert of the attention the press and other media were giving to this high-profile case. A man ‘helping with enquiries’ was always a useful placebo to produce for them.
Lambert shook his head. ‘No. If Ogden is our killer, he’s not a danger to anyone else. Let him think he’s got away with his alibi at the moment, whilst we investigate one or two other deceptions.’
Rushton concealed his disappointment; Lambert’s rank and record didn’t permit him to press the matter further. ‘You don’t even want an officer to see his wife and find out whether she wishes to revise her statement?’
‘No. That would alert Ogden himself, which I don’t want to do at the moment. I think we’ll start with a word with Jason Knight, after we’ve grabbed some lunch.’
Rushton didn’t envy the director of catering at Abbey Vineyards his afternoon.
Jason Knight, like many of his calling, looked most confident in the kitchen where he reigned supreme. For a moment, he did not notice the arrival of his CID visitors and they watched him directing his staff in the preparation of the food for the evening menu. He was quiet, confident, obviously both respected and liked by his workers. He was still only thirty-eight, and several of the staff were older than he was, but there was no sign of resentment in what seemed to be a contented group. Knight seemed not at all put out when he noticed Lambert and Hook waiting patiently for his attention near the entrance door.
Lambert remarked how quietly efficient the kitchen looked as Knight led them into the small private room which adjoined it. ‘It gets more hectic when the customers are in and waiting for their food,’ Jason admitted ruefully. ‘But it’s my belief that you rarely improve efficiency by shouting at people. As a result of carefully edited television coverage of one or two of our number, the public has the impression that your cuisine can’t be good unless you’re foul-mouthed and temperamental.’
‘Rather as you have to have a drink problem and at least one broken marriage to be a television sleuth,’ said Lambert wryly.
‘Overall, I suppose we should be grateful for the publicity afforded to our calling,’ said Jason. He was pleased with this informal introduction to a meeting he knew he had to handle smoothly if suspicions were to be removed.
His satisfaction did not last for very long. Lambert glanced around the chef’s den, which was scarcely larger than a police station interview room, and decided its bare walls had nothing new to tell him about its occupant. ‘We’ve found out quite a lot more about Abbey Vineyards and its late owner since we last spoke to you.’
It sounded ominous, as it was meant to do. Jason stalled with the opening he had planned. ‘I’m glad you now know more about the sort of man Martin was. Not everyone’s cup of tea, though all of us here have done well out of his enterprise.’
‘Well enough, no doubt. But some of you felt that it was high time the firm moved on. And apparently thought also that it couldn’t do that with the system Mr Beaumont was operating.’
Jason Knight put his elbows on the small desk, steepled his fingers and smiled affably, trying to look thoroughly in control on his own territory. ‘Nothing wrong with that, is there? A little healthy debate about the ways we might go forward was very much in the interests of the firm, I should have thought. Particularly as we are becoming an ever larger concern, as a result of our success.’
Lambert’s tone was equally pleasant. The bullets were in the words. ‘Nothing wrong at all, on the face of it, Mr Knight. But you chose to conceal not only that view but an acrimonious meeting with Mr Beaumont the day before his death. That is bound to interest officers conducting a murder enquiry. I think you should now tell us why you did that.’
Jason told himself not to get annoyed, not to show that they had troubled him. This must have come from Gerry Davies. He’d known the bloke was too naive for his own good, that these people would get things out of him which he himself had been able to conceal from them. Why hadn’t Gerry told him, given him some warning that they knew? Too anxious to preserve his own skin, probably. Still, there was nothing to fear yet. They hadn’t anything to tie him directly to this death, and they wouldn’t find anything, if he handled this right. ‘I thought when we spoke on Saturday that my views on the way things should be run here were irrelevant to Martin’s murder. I still do. That is why I saw no reason to dwell on the subject when I talked to you then. I did agree with you at the end of our conversation that I had wanted a little more say in policy. I thought that would benefit the company as well as me personally.’
‘Very altruistic of you, Mr Knight. What we have to ask ourselves is whether an innocent man would have chosen to conceal from us a meeting initiated by Mr Beaumont two days before his death. A meeting in which he seems to have taxed you with plotting against him.’
Jason nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps I should have mentioned it. But when you know you didn’t kill a man, you know also that it’s irrelevant.’
Lambert’s smile said that he found this very hollow. ‘And you no doubt also thought it irrelevant that you had been enquiring about exactly what legal means might be available to force the issue on this matter, only a week or two before Mr Beaumont became a murder victim.’
Jason forced himself to keep calm. He hadn’t anticipated this. The way the man had put it made him look bad, like a man who had been plotting against the dead man. But there was no way that it proved he had killed him. ‘I admire your research, Chief Superintendent Lambert. I wish our own research and development department had the personnel to produce this degree of detail. I merely took whatever advice I could gather. Martin Beaumont would have done exactly the same himself, in the same circumstances. He’d built the business up well, but he was a stubborn old sod. And a clever one, as I found out — he’d surrounded himself with all sorts of legal provisions which made it difficult to challenge the way he ran things.’