Death of a wine merchant

10

Charles Augustus Pugh was standing by his window, leaning forward for a better view of the perfectly manicured lawns of Gray’s Inn. Advancing towards him, Powerscourt thought he looked like a cricket umpire stooping towards the other end and trying to establish whether the batsman was leg before wicket.

‘Look at it, Powerscourt, it’s a bloody disgrace.’ He pointed to the sad remains of a blackbird which looked as if it had met a violent and bloody end, its head twisted over to one side, its insides opened out to the autumn air.

‘Mark my words,’ said Pugh, ‘it’s that bloody chambers cat the fools have brought in. I argued against it at the chambers meeting, I said we were a firm of barristers not a wildlife sanctuary or a bloody zoo, for Christ’s sake. No good. I was voted down. Can you imagine? Some of the finest minds in legal London, and they want to have a cat. I ask you. They’ll be drawing up rotas next for the barristers to put out the saucer of milk morning and evening. There are mice here, I grant you, but what’s wrong with poison? We don’t need a bloody cat.

‘Never mind. Let us turn our attention to the Colvilles, one dead on his son’s wedding day, one turned mute in the stone of Pentonville. The solicitors told me yesterday they’d tried again to persuade Cosmo to talk. No joy, not a word out of him. He’ll bloody well have to speak in court to plead guilty or not guilty. Let’s hope he hasn’t forgotten how to get the words out. Do you have anything to report, Powerscourt? Any deus ex machina to solve all our problems?’

Powerscourt had already written about the fingerprints. ‘I don’t think I have anything at present that would get us out of our difficulties. There’s something very odd about the money, though. One of the family solicitors told me very early on that Randolph Colville should have been worth a lot more than he actually was. Colvilles have got through three senior accountants in less than five years. They too tell of funny things going on with the money. Just before the final accounts are signed off, something in the order of one hundred thousand pounds a year simply disappears. Cosmo and the late Randolph seem to be instrumental in the disappearance of these Houdini funds. If you think about it, they’re defrauding members of their own family – only family members can hold shares, you see. And the family don’t make a fuss. Maybe there’s blackmail in there, but you would have to think it’s the whole clan who are being blackmailed. What do you make of it, Pugh?’

Two elegant black shoes descended from the desk as Charles Augustus Pugh began to walk up and down his room, pausing from time to time for emphasis as his thoughts unrolled. ‘I think I like it. I didn’t like the fingerprint angle very much. It would only be really effective if we found other fingerprints on it and we knew whose those were. But blackmail, my friend, blackmail might be better. It gives us motive for a start which we didn’t have before. Juries like motives they can understand. Juries understand blackmail. Suppose one of these Colvilles learns about how they have been defrauded all these years. For some reason the fact of this missing money is very important for our man. Maybe there was a sick relative he couldn’t send to Switzerland or America or somewhere or other. He gets hold of a gun, either Randolph’s gun or one identical to it. Off he trots to the wedding and arranges to have a quiet word with Randolph before the festive board is actually rolled out. Bang, he shoots Randolph dead. He drops the gun on the floor and flees as unobtrusively as he can. Cosmo hears the bang and walks into the room. I say, he says to himself, isn’t that Randolph’s gun? So he picks it up, and then he is found with the gun in his hand and his murdered brother on the floor. Because he knows who the murderer is, Cosmo doesn’t speak. He has to protect the killer. He has to keep quiet.’

Pugh sat down again and brushed a small speck of dust off his dark grey trousers. ‘It’s fine, of course, except we don’t know who the blackmailer is or was or the nature of the blackmail itself. I can’t believe it’ll solve all our problems, Powerscourt, but I could do something with it if I had to. Can you line up these accountants to come to court? If we don’t know who the real murderer is, all we can do is try to persuade the jury that there is doubt about a conviction, that the jury shouldn’t feel comfortable sending Cosmo to the gallows. It’s all we can do.’

Pugh stared over at his window. ‘Bloody cat,’ he said again. ‘Do you know, they haven’t even got a name for it yet? I think I’ll make a suggestion at the next chambers meeting. I’ve wondered about Messalina or Cleopatra but I think we want something simpler.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

‘It’s a perfect description for the bloody animal’s behaviour. Killer, that’s what we should call her. Killer the cat, killer, now I think about it, rather like our unknown murdering friend up in Norfolk.’

Powerscourt found Sir Pericles Freme walking up and down his drawing room in Markham Square in a state of high excitement. It was with difficulty that he persuaded the man to sit down and take a cup of tea.

‘I bring news, Powerscourt, news from the world of Colvilles. I did not receive the intelligence from them directly but I am assured it is correct.’ Freme began rubbing his hands together and nodding his head up and down. ‘Oh, yes!’ he said. ‘Oh, yes!’

‘Please continue, Sir Pericles.’

Sir Pericles stared at Powerscourt for a moment as if collecting his thoughts. Certainly he sounded now less excited than he had before.

‘In the wine business, as you know, everything is governed by the seasons. A time for harvest, a time for bottling, a time for planting. Round about now is the time Colvilles ship over their next consignment of white wine to see them through Christmas and the New Year. The winter is not quite upon us but if the wine does not come soon, the weather may cause problems. One of London’s most distinguished merchants almost went under a few years ago when their vessel sank in the Bay of Biscay with a huge consignment of claret on board. Nobody has tried to ship anything in December since. But the Colville wine is still in Burgundy. It has not left the warehouses. It has not been pulled together ready for shipping.’

‘Can’t they buy some more? Won’t there be some negociants in Beaune or in Dijon who can step into the breach?’

‘There may well be,’ said Freme, ‘but it will take time and money, a lot of money. Word will have flashed round the vineyards that a big English customer has failed to take delivery of his consignment of Chablis and Meursault and so on. Colvilles will have paid for this lot of fine burgundy once. Now they will have to pay again. And there’s worse, much worse.’

‘How much worse?’ said Powerscourt.

‘The agent in Burgundy, a Monsieur Jean Pierre Drouhin, has disappeared. Nobody has seen him for ten days or so. You see, if he was there he could assemble all the Colville wine and organize the shipment in a couple of days, he knows where everything is. He has been with the Colvilles for ten years or more. But now he is not with them. He has vanished.’

‘Does nobody know where he might have gone? Did he have a wife?’

‘A pretty wife and two lovely children, they say.’

‘Parents alive, parents not well, that sort of thing? Has he gone on a mission of mercy to the ancestral farm?’

‘He would have told his wife if he was doing that, surely.’

‘Another woman? Romance in Antibes or Biarritz, perhaps?’

‘Nobody knows, Powerscourt, nobody knows anything at all.’

‘You don’t suppose he’s dead, do you?’ Powerscourt was spinning spiders’ webs in his mind, wondering if there was any connection between death in Brympton, the missing money in Colvilles’ accounts and the missing agent in Burgundy.

‘The French police are investigating, of course.’ Sir Pericles didn’t sound as if he had great confidence in them. ‘I must leave you now, I’m afraid. I have an appointment with a senior figure in Colvilles. Would you like a recipe, or a receipt, before I go?’

‘Very much, Sir Pericles. Let me just fetch Lucy. She’s devoted to the recipes.’

Freme pulled a little book out of his bag and settled a pair of spectacles on his nose.

‘English sherry,’ he began, ‘here we go. “To every pound of good, moist sugar, put one quart of water. Boil it till it is clear. When cool (as near as possible to cold without being so) work it with new yeast, and add of strong beer in the height of working, the proportion of one quart in a gallon. Cover it up, and let it work the same as beer; when the fermentation begins to subside, tun it; and when it has been in the cask a fortnight or three weeks, add raisins, half a pound to a gallon, sugar candy and bitter almonds of each half an ounce to the gallon, and to nine gallons of wine half a pint of the best brandy. Paste a stiff brown paper over the bung hole and if necessary renew it. This wine will be fit to bottle after remaining one year in the cask; but if left longer will be improved. If suffered to remain three years in the cask and one in bottles it can scarcely be distinguished from good foreign wines, and for almost every purpose answers exactly as well.”’

Powerscourt was making his way to the village of Moulsford on the Thames once more. He was going to call on Hermione, widow of the murdered Randolph Colville. He had felt it only polite to delay his visit until now when the death and the funeral were a little time in the past and the pain of bereavement, while still harsh, might not be as sharp as before. Looking up from his notebook he noticed that his train was slowing down. They were enveloped in white mist. Out of the left-hand window it hung in fronds or tendrils as if attached to an invisible washing line. Two ghostly horses stood still about fifty yards from his carriage, pale riders waiting to gallop off to some brighter future. On the other side the mist was packed close, so dense that you could only see for a couple of yards. The train was now advancing slowly through this other world. Powerscourt suddenly remembered coming out of the Hotel Danieli on the Venetian sea front early one morning and finding that the Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, even the Lion of St Mark on his pillar had all disappeared in a dense Venetian fog. Only the water told you it was still there, he recalled, lapping ceaselessly against the quays. After a couple of minutes the mist vanished as quickly as it had arrived. A pale November sun broke through the clouds casting a light that danced on the blue waters of the Thames.

It was shortly after half past ten when a diminutive butler showed Powerscourt into an upstairs drawing room looking out over the river. On the left of the corridor at the top of the stairs he glimpsed a room that seemed to be full of guns of every description. Hermione Colville was sitting in a high-backed chair by a great window with a fine view over the Thames. She was dressed entirely in black. To her left, on a small circular table, was a large goblet. Behind that stood a bottle of wine, presumably white, in a cooler. Powerscourt wondered briefly when she started drinking, this bereaved woman. Ten o’clock? Half past nine? Her voice, however, sounded perfectly sober.

‘Good morning to you, Lord Powerscourt. How very kind of you to come and see me in my widow’s weeds. I understand you are not having much success in your investigation so far. Is that correct?’ She took another mouthful of her wine. Presumably, Powerscourt thought, she got the stuff cheap from Colvilles. Perhaps they sent it up from London in a barge. He wondered how much malice there was in her words.

‘I am most grateful to you for seeing me this morning, Mrs Colville. It is true what you say about my investigation. So far it is not going as well as I would like.’

‘Is that because it is a particularly difficult investigation or because you are not a particularly skilled investigator?’

Powerscourt smiled politely. What should have been a perfectly innocuous conversation was turning into a skirmish. ‘I couldn’t possibly say anything to that, Mrs Colville, but let me proceed with my business. Forgive me if I ask you about your husband at such a time as this but it often helps to talk to those closest to him. Could I ask first of all if you have a photograph of your husband I might borrow?’

Hermione Colville walked rather unsteadily to a little table by the side of the fireplace and gave him a family snapshot.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m sure this will be a great help. In the weeks before his death, Mrs Colville, did he show any signs of anxiety? Would you have said he was worried about something? Did he have a problem on his mind?’

‘No is the answer to all those questions. I cannot see what use they are to you or anybody else. They won’t bring Randolph back.’ She took another large mouthful from her glass and looked defiantly at her visitor.

‘Would you have said your husband had any enemies, Mrs Colville? Perhaps I should say many enemies? People high up in business often do.’

‘He didn’t talk to me about things like that. We didn’t have that kind of marriage, if you want to know.’

‘No?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Well, he was away a lot in France. One of the children used to say he only had half a father because his papa was only here half the time.’ She paused to take another mouthful and then rang a small bell. The diminutive butler appeared as if by magic and popped another opened bottle into the cooler. He slipped out as unobtrusively as he had come. The whole manoeuvre had taken less than thirty seconds.

‘Did your husband have any money concerns, Mrs Colville? Any conversations about the times being bad for business?’

‘I told you, Lord Powerscourt, we didn’t have that sort of marriage.’ Her words were beginning to sound slurred now. Powerscourt wondered if one bottle was going to make her drunk. Then it would be the second bottle and the slow descent into incoherence. Madam is not available in the afternoons, my lord. Maybe he had only got here just in time.

Powerscourt thought he would take a chance, draw a bow at a venture. ‘What kind of marriage would you say you did have, Mrs Colville?’

She looked at him with contempt. She stared defiantly at the view outside her great window, a pair of oarsmen making their way downstream, a heron standing proudly on the bank. If you listened very carefully in that Colville drawing room you could just catch the distant screeching of the gulls. Hermione Colville took another glass of her wine. Powerscourt saw from the label that it was a Chablis. He didn’t suppose Colvilles drank vin ordinaire.

‘What kind of marriage did I have? How long have you got, Lord Powerscourt? It was all right at the beginning. I think most of them are all right at the beginning, or so I’ve been told. I’ve carried out a lot of research into marriages with the women of my acquaintance, you know. Sometimes I think I should have been made a Professor of Unhappy Marriage like that man who’s Professor of Mind and Logic at University College up in London. After a couple of years things begin to go off. Some husbands like little children. Most don’t. Mine didn’t. Being children themselves most husbands resent the amount and the extent of love their wives expend on their children. It’s the love they can’t stand, I think. The love pours out of the mothers into the children. The husbands don’t think they get that sort of unconditional love any more. So some of them look elsewhere. Business keeps them in London overnight. In my case business took Randolph off to France a lot. He had to work very hard when he was there. He was always exhausted when he came home. Sometimes, now the children have left home – they can be so cruel, children, without ever realizing it – I feel like an empty wine bottle. My goodness has all gone, it’s been spent, or consumed, or drunk. Now I’m just a glass shell waiting for the rubbish collection and a last few hours before being smashed to pieces.’

She paused for another drink. Her head was beginning to sway slightly. Powerscourt felt desperately sorry for her.

‘So there you have it, Lord Powerscourt. Ours was a perfectly normal middle-class marriage. There are thousands more like it across the squares of Kensington and Chelsea and the grander houses of the Home Counties. Perfectly normal.’ Hermione Colville began to weep, very gently and very quietly. The tears ran down her cheeks and on to her black silk shirt. Powerscourt fell into the male role in such occasions and offered his handkerchief as a substitute for comfort. There were a number of questions he wanted to ask but he felt the time was not right.

‘We’ve often wondered, you know,’ she looked at him through her tears, ‘the women of my acquaintance and myself, whether we would have been happier if we had never married, if we’d never known the terrible unhappiness marriage sometimes brings. And do you know what most of us conclude? That in spite of everything, all the bad times, we would still rather have had to endure those than to live alone as a spinster in some damp little place in Battersea or go on living at home and watch our parents falling to pieces until they died.’

Powerscourt waited. There might be more to come yet. Would she speak of Randolph’s wandering eye, he wondered? Did he dare ask? How should he phrase it?

She rang the bell again. ‘Lord Powerscourt is just leaving us,’ she said to the dwarf butler, as Powerscourt now referred to him in his mind. ‘I think it’s for the best,’ she said to Powerscourt, trying to rise from her chair and falling back again. Powerscourt bowed to Hermione Colville and set out from the house towards the railway station. The air of Moulsford was refreshing, he thought. Especially when you were out of doors.

Powerscourt wondered about Mrs Colville in his train back to London. How much should he believe of what she had said? All of it? None of it? Was this In Vino Veritas? Or was it rather In Vino A Pack Of Lies? On the whole he subscribed to the latter theory, that most of what Hermione had said could be put down to a maudlin self-pity and an over-dramatized version of her position brought on by the increasing pull of the Chablis.

He wondered too about Timothy Barrington White, married to Lady Lucy’s cousin Milly, and his friend Beauchamp Trumper at their drinking club near Paddington station. For Powerscourt had now reconciled himself to the kind of defence they would have to offer for Cosmo Colville. It was now unlikely that he was going to make one major discovery that would turn the prosecution case upside down and force them to withdraw. He thought of their position in building terms. He no longer felt that he would be able to produce a whole new floor, composed of sound boards and solid walls, large windows letting in the light. Instead, Powerscourt reckoned, they would have to come up with a mosaic of doubts and suspicions and uncertainties that might persuade the jury that they could not be certain Cosmo was the murderer. Into such a mosaic, rather like that in some long-abandoned Roman villa, Timothy Barrington White and his drinking companion might be profitably accommodated. First the friend would have to be persuaded to give evidence about Barrington White’s threat to kill the Colvilles.

Then White would have to take the stand and answer questions about his previous rows with them. Charles Augustus Pugh would remind him of his threat. Pugh would then put it to White that he had, in fact, carried out his threat, that he had, indeed, only gone to the wedding to commit murder. White would deny it, of course, but some collateral damage might have been inflicted on the prosecution case.

There was, Powerscourt well knew, only one problem with his plan, maybe two. Lady Lucy would have to approve for a start. If he organized it with Pugh’s people and Pugh’s chambers without telling Lucy there would be hell to pay. He would, he decided, write to Pugh as soon as he could and ask his advice. Powerscourt suspected the whole scheme might be a waste of time. He approached the subject gingerly as he inspected an atlas of Norfolk for his trip later that day.

‘Do you want me to organize this for you, Francis?’ Lady Lucy said. ‘Talk to the parties concerned and then tell Mr Pugh to sign them up or whatever it is he has to do?’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘let’s wait and see what Pugh has to say.’

The conversation was cut short by the arrival of the twins. Ever since they could understand things they had been fascinated by maps. They stared at the page opened at the county of Norfolk. They understood that the lines of black ladders meant railways. On an earlier occasion, Powerscourt remembered, they had climbed up on the table and run their fingers along the railway symbol all the way from Plymouth to Inverness. On this occasion their interest lay elsewhere.

‘Blue,’ said Christopher.

‘Blue,’ said Juliet.

‘Sea?’ said Christopher, looking hopefully at his father.

The sea, in Powerscourt’s experience, was the only thing known to have reduced the twins to total silence. That summer he and Lady Lucy had taken them to a great beach in Dorset and Powerscourt made them close their eyes until he gave the word. When the party was right at the top of the beach, the sea about four hundred yards away, Powerscourt told them to open their eyes. They looked at their parents. They looked at the sea. They looked at each other. They looked at the sea again. They stood perfectly still for over a minute without any fighting or kicking. Then with a great war whoop they held hands and hurtled off towards the water at full speed.

‘All the way round the coast,’ Powerscourt’s finger ran in a great arc round the coast of Norfolk from Hunstanton to Lowestoft, ‘there is the sea. North Sea, it’s called.’ He closed the atlas rapidly in case the twins worked out where he was going and asked to come too. He was saved by the voice of Cook offering fresh buns in the kitchen. He kissed Lady Lucy on the lips and set off for the railway station.

Powerscourt had arranged to meet Inspector Cooper at the Black Boys Hotel in Aylsham early that evening. He had taken the liberty of asking the young detective to bring copies of his two seating plans with him. He had pointed out that the defence could easily ask for them to be introduced as pieces of evidence at the trial. He thought again about the case against Cosmo with the gun in his hand. He still found it hard to believe that they could assemble a defence that could secure his acquittal. Piece by piece, he said to himself, scintilla of doubt followed by scintilla of doubt, undermining the jury’s confidence like the incoming tide eroding a sandcastle on the beach.

‘Good evening, Lord Powerscourt.’ Inspector Cooper was there to greet him in the lounge of his hotel.

‘I trust I find you well, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, shaking the young man’s hand.

‘More than well,’ said Cooper, beaming broadly at his visitor.

‘Has some happy event brightened up your life?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

‘It has indeed, my lord. I am engaged to be married, so I am, and that’s a fact.’

‘I take it this happened fairly recently?’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I wish you every happiness in your married life.’

‘I asked Charlotte two Sundays ago. I was going to ask her on Christmas Eve, you know, but she looked so lovely that afternoon it sort of slipped out. Then I asked her father for her hand this Sunday gone. He was very happy for us.’

A rising police inspector would be a good match for your daughter, Powerscourt thought, a steadily growing income, sufficient money to support a family, a reliable pension at the end. A man might do worse for his daughter, a lot worse.

Powerscourt thought the Inspector had turned into a puppy, he was so happy. ‘Forgive me for turning to business, Inspector, but were you able to find the time to have copies made of those two seating plans?’

‘Of course,’ said Inspector Cooper, fetching a large envelope from his briefcase. ‘This is the one that relates to the moments before they left the garden and went upstairs, and this relates to where we think they were just before the shooting.’ Each wedding guest, Powerscourt noted, was represented by a circle with a name inside. The large sheets of stiff paper were encrusted with circles.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, popping them back into their envelope for now. ‘You don’t happen to have addresses for all these people, do you, by any chance?’

‘I don’t but Mrs Nash does, I think. She had them all to send out the invitations. I was going to borrow her list when – when other matters intervened and the investigation was closed.’

‘I hope to see Mrs Nash tomorrow as a matter of fact. Tell me, Inspector, has any fresh evidence come to light concerning this case? I presume you have been involved with other cases but there is often a trickle of fresh intelligence.’

‘I have heard nothing,’ said the young man. ‘And how are your investigations proceeding, Lord Powerscourt? Have you cracked the case? Discovered the real murderer?’

Powerscourt decided there could be no harm in a little exaggeration. Nothing huge, just a little nudge that might, just might, persuade the prosecution that their case was already won and they could afford to be complacent.

‘I am here this evening, as you see, Inspector. Tomorrow I carry out more inquiries. The day after that I shall return to London and carry out more. We have made no progress. The case remains exactly where it was when you were taken off it. The date for the trial may come this week. The defence barrister and I both wish we had never taken the business on. It does a man’s career no service at all if is dogged by failure. I have never failed yet in a murder investigation, never. This case is going to be the first one. I am sure of it.’