‘Does it mention injuries of any kind?’
‘As a matter of fact, it does. Now I think of it, I believe I did mention it to Jamie at the time.’
‘What does it say?’
‘That there was evidence of past trauma and reconstructive surgery to the left patella and left upper tibia.’
‘Hmm. Any idea what caused the damage?’
‘Nothing definitive, no. Why?’
Kingston’s answer was slow in coming. ‘Well, if we knew it was from a gunshot—then it could very well be Ryder’s body, after all.’
‘You make a good point but I’m convinced more than ever that the likelihood of someone successfully posing as Ryder for that many years is either very slim or none.’
There was a momentary gap in the conversation.
‘Did you ask Jamie about the watch?’
‘Damn. Stupid of me, I forgot to tell her.’
‘Well, let me know when you do.’
Chapter Fourteen
No more than a minute after his conversation with Chadwick, Kingston dialled Loftus’s number in Nottingham. His sister answered, clearly distraught. Her brother had suffered a mild stroke and was in hospital, she said. He had lost some movement on his right side but his speech wasn’t impaired. The doctor was confident that, given time and with therapy, he would make a complete recovery.
Kingston had been hoping that Loftus might be able to clarify something. He remembered the old man saying that, in the struggle for Ryder’s pistol, Ryder had been shot. But he hadn’t said where on his body. In his note, he had said that Kershaw was wounded, too. Kingston was going to have to wait for a while to get the answers now.
Over the summer, Kingston had developed the habit of winding up the day with Jamie at the office or sometimes at the house where he would bring her up to date on recent work and they could discuss the events of the day over a glass of wine. At first it was all business, mostly dealing with the gardens, but as their get-togethers became more frequent and drawn-out, they began to talk more and more about other things. It had reached the point now where Kingston looked upon her as much as a friend as an employer. He was glad that she’d given no signs of discouraging what he wanted to believe was an easygoing and symbiotic relationship.
At first, it was just one glass of wine each evening. But lately their discussions invariably featured a special bottle of wine, often an unusual varietal. The tasting of le vin de soir as Kingston had come to call it became a much looked forward to ritual and the bottle was nearly always consumed by the time they parted. As the days progressed, he was quickly broadening his already respectable knowledge of wine and winemaking, which pleased him no end.
Over the years, Kingston had visited quite a few wineries in France, Italy, Spain and England and had inched along with the camera-toting shuffle of visitors through many a winery tour. Now, after many hours of listening to Jamie talk about the subject, he had come to realize how minuscule a picture those tours presented and how little he really knew about the complex business of producing great wines.
The long journey from the day the first furrow is ploughed to the moment the precious liquid is poured into a glass can take five years or more. And along the way there are innumerable decisions to be made and no guarantees. Jamie quoted a writer who said that ‘there is nothing so irascibly difficult as making a truly fine wine, given a thousand unpredictable variables.’
During one of their earlier chats, when they had tasted a particularly nice 1995 Musigny Burgundy wine, Kingston asked an innocent question about terroir, a French word that has no English equivalent. It attempts to describe all of the natural conditions in a vineyard as they relate to the growing of grapes: the land, soil, slope, elevation, orientation to the sun, rainfall, wind, fog and so on.
‘There’s an industry cliché,’ said Jamie, ‘that wines are made in the vineyard. And I agree with that. If you screw up great grapes, you’ll never get a great wine.’ She held up a hand, fingers splayed. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, you being a professor of botany and me spouting off about growing grapes. It’s more than just agriculture, though.’
‘Don’t you worry one bit, growing grapes was hardly a hot topic in my teaching days. I’m learning a lot, believe me.’ He paused to take a sip of the silky wine. ‘You were saying that it’s not necessarily a form of agriculture, right?’
‘Exactly. Most people assume that viticulture is a subset of agriculture but philosophically and in practice they are quite different. With conventional farming, the goal is usually to achieve standardization, uniformity, high yield and consistency on a large scale. Growing grapes for the purpose of making wines is much more a matter of individuality—manipulating the fruit in a lot of different ways, not to produce the biggest and meatiest grape but one that will make the kind of wine the winemaker is aiming for—often with low yield as opposed to high. The business of growing grapes and making wine is really all about balance. It’s one great year-long balancing act.’