Death of a wine merchant

12

It was just another boring morning in the life of Emily Colville in her little house in Barnes close to Hammersmith Bridge and the river Thames. The maid brought in the post as she sat sipping desultorily at a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Montague had long since departed for the wines and spirits of Colvilles. There was a bill from her dressmaker in Chelsea. Really, the amount these people charged these days was outrageous. She hoped Montague wouldn’t make a scene. She did dislike scenes so, they always gave her a headache. There was another bill from the place where she bought her shoes. That too seemed outrageous. Why was life so unkind to her? Then she noticed another, rather larger envelope in a hand she knew all too well. Emily stared at it and her heart began to beat faster. She hardly dared open it. She took a little walk into the dining room and back to the kitchen. At last she summoned her courage. She opened the letter with a trembling hand. It was the same as all those other letters she had received earlier that summer. There was no letter inside, only a sheet of music for a popular song of the time, ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’. The cover showed a cornfield at night with a couple framed in moonlight at the top. Emily looked at the first page of the sheet music and she smiled. She shivered slightly as she worked out the code hidden among the clefs and the minims. She was to meet her lover in two days’ time in the afternoon in the usual place. She would tell Montague she wished to see her parents for a day or two. Only she would leave on an earlier train and be waiting for her lover in the little house behind the lake in Norfolk.

Why do I always postpone the difficult interviews? Why can’t I go and do them at the beginning? Powerscourt was berating himself. It’s cowardice, pure and simple. Who knows, if I had conducted this interview earlier, the whole case might be over by now. A sensible investigator like Mr Sherlock Holmes would not have been smoking opium and playing the violin in 221B Baker Street. He would have summoned a brougham and driven straight to Wisteria Lodge and taken the interview in hand. Come to think of it, Powerscourt’s internal monologue went on, 221B Baker Street is only a couple of hundred yards away. He was walking across St John’s Wood to the house of Mrs Cosmo Colville, wife of the man incarcerated in Pentonville prison who had scarcely, as far as anybody knew, spoken a single word since he was found opposite the dead body of his brother, with what seemed to be his brother’s gun in his hand. Her reply to his note had been encouraging: ‘Of course you must come and see me. I would be delighted to welcome you to my house. Might I suggest three o’clock on Wednesday?’

So far it had not been a good day for Lord Francis Powerscourt. A note had come for him first thing that morning from Charles Augustus Pugh.

‘Trumper, Barrington White,’ it said. ‘Horse won’t run. No legs. Barrington White goes into witness box. Denies everything. We have no proof of anything at all. Waste of time. Only causes drop in our share price, already at dangerously low levels. Regards. Pugh.’

A military butler showed him into a well-proportioned drawing room with great sofas and prints and pictures covering the walls. Isabella Colville was sitting in an armchair to the left of the fire. She motioned Powerscourt to its twin on the other side. She was a tall, slim woman, with pale hair that was almost blonde and faint lines that might have been caused by worry and strain on her forehead, wearing a long dark grey skirt with a blue blouse that showed off the colour of her hair.

‘Lord Powerscourt, let me say first of all how grateful we are for what you are doing. It is much appreciated, you know.’

Powerscourt waved his hands slightly and shook his head, ‘I thank you for your kind words, Mrs Colville. I wish I could say that I had done enough so far to deserve them. I fear I have not. Not yet at any rate.’

‘But there’s always time, isn’t there. Somebody who knew about one of your earlier cases, Lord Powerscourt, told me the other day that sometimes the answer comes to you in a flash. There’s a sheet of lightning or something like that in your brain and all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.’

‘You’re too kind,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Let’s all pray for lightning.’ They laughed.

‘Now then,’ said Isabella Colville, ‘I’ve been thinking about this conversation, Lord Powerscourt. You must feel free to ask me absolutely anything you want. I don’t mind if it seems rude or in bad taste. You see, that’s my husband and the father of my children in that horrible prison. I’ll do anything I can to help get him out. I gather you’ve seen my sister-in-law over at Pangbourne? Could I ask you what time of day it was?’

‘I arrived about half past ten,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to criticize her sister-in-law.

‘I wish you had talked to me beforehand. The hour between nine and ten is the only safe one in the day. I’ve told the lawyers that. Otherwise the Chablis flows on and on like the Mississippi river. I’m not judging her, mind you. My husband may not be in ideal circumstances but at least he’s still alive.’

‘When did you last see him, your husband I mean?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Not a word, not one.’

‘So what do you talk about? Do you tell him the latest news?’

‘I do.’ Isabella Colville smiled for a moment. ‘I decided early on that it’s like talking to some old person who’s near death’s door and has lost the power of speech. But they can still make sense of most of what you tell them. I do find I prattle on a bit but it’s the best I can do.’

‘So what kind of things do you talk to him about?’

‘Well, I tell him what news I have of the children – they’ve left home now but they’re always keen for the latest about their father. I tell him about what news I have of the other Colvilles. I tell him about the house – yesterday I had to inform him that the footman had dropped a valuable vase on the kitchen floor where it smashed to pieces. Talking of other Colvilles, you should go and see a cousin of ours who worked for the firm for a long time. He grew up with Randolph and Cosmo. He and his wife live in Ealing now.’

Powerscourt could see her now in that Spartan cell in Pentonville, her face bright as if she were talking to a small child, reeling off the latest family and domestic gossip, hoping for a word or a reaction that never came. And hovering behind the silence, the secret on the far side of the prison visiting room, the prison chaplain, the prison governor, the prison hangman, the noose and the drop.

‘Tell me, Mrs Colville, do you get any reaction at all? A smile? A kiss when you arrive? An embrace when you leave?’

Isabella Colville shook her head rather sadly. ‘No, there’s none of that. Hold on a minute though, that’s not quite true. His eyes are eloquent sometimes, as if he’s trying to tell me something. That he cares, perhaps. I don’t know.’

Powerscourt had always known how he wanted to end their interview, and in some ways he wished he could ask those questions now. But he stuck to his original plan.

‘Tell me about your husband, Mrs Colville,’ he was speaking very quietly, ‘what sort of a man is he?’

She paused for a moment. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how difficult it is to answer that question about somebody you know so well. Let me begin with his work, that’s probably the easiest thing.’

She paused again and looked into the fire. ‘Conscientious, that’s how I would describe his attitude to his work. Conservative, maybe even a little old-fashioned. He inherited that whole Bordeaux network from his father and his uncle, you see, the growers, the negociants, the shippers, the owners. He took great care to maintain good relations with all of them. Indeed, as far as I know, and I never followed the wine business very carefully, most of the people he deals with are the same people or the sons of the same people his father dealt with. As far as I know, some of these other wine merchants are forever looking out for new suppliers, changing their shippers, taking a chance on some new grower with revolutionary new ways of doing things, always in a ferment of excitement. That wasn’t Cosmo’s way. He didn’t like ferment very much. He didn’t like change. He didn’t like excitement.’

‘Was his work the most important thing in his life? Some of these second-generation merchants in wine or tea or things like that develop interests which become the mainspring of their lives. Shire horses, maybe, art collecting, that sort of thing. Was your husband one of those?’

‘I think that’s difficult. The business was very important to him. He might not have liked it very much, but it was what he inherited from his father. He had to maintain what he had and pass it on in his turn. The real passion in his life was cricket. That’s what he really cared about. That’s why, I’m sure you will have noticed, we live where we do, so close to Lord’s Cricket Ground. Cosmo has an enormous collection of paintings and prints of Lord’s in his study and on the back stairs. He did say that we could have a cricket-free area in here. He was quite thoughtful in that way.’

‘And in other ways, was he not so thoughtful perhaps?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, Lord Powerscourt. He was very dutiful. He always remembered everybody’s birthday.’

Powerscourt was now close to the end he had planned beforehand. ‘Duty, Mrs Colville, would doing his duty sum up his attitude to life and his role in it?’

‘Duty? Duty?’ Isabella Colville held the word up to the light, as it were, and looked at it carefully. ‘I suppose you could say that. Duty or responsibility, yes, you could.’

‘And what form of duty would compel your husband not to speak a word in his own defence or to explain what had been going on in the Peter the Great room and the state bedroom up at Brympton Hall on the day of the wedding?’

Isabella Colville looked at him helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Let me try a few suggestions on you, Mrs Colville. Family honour perhaps? Suppose there was some terrible scandal about to break that would be bad for the Colvilles and could be ruinous for the business?’

‘He cared profoundly about anything concerning family honour or scandal that could ruin the family name. He said so in that terrible family row the week before the wedding.’

Isabella Colville paused. She began to turn pink, then red. She looked down at the floor and stammered, ‘I didn’t mean to say that. It was a mistake.’ Two desperate eyes now looked up at Powerscourt. He felt as if somebody had just placed something very slippery – a scallop perhaps, or a Dover sole – in his hand and he must not let it go.

‘Perhaps,’ he said in his mildest voice, ‘you could tell me a little more about the family row. Just the broad outline, of course.’

Isabella Colville shook her head. Powerscourt decided to try sternness.

‘I do not wish to remind you of certain unpleasant facts, Mrs Colville, but this knowledge could help release your husband from Pentonville. Unless something material can be presented by the defence the chances are that he will be found guilty. And you know as well as I do what that means.’

‘It concerns the family, it’s private,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how it has anything to do with the trial.’

‘With the greatest respect, Mrs Colville, I think that’s a matter for myself and the defence counsel Mr Pugh to decide.’

‘It’s family, it’s private.’

‘Nothing is private in a murder trial, Mrs Colville.’

‘This is,’ she said defiantly.

‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we’ll leave it there for now, Mrs Colville. But you are free to change your mind at any time. You have my address. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch at any time of day or night. It could save your husband’s life.’

Powerscourt was thinking of honour on his way back to Chelsea. Was honour, in this most modern age, still capable of bringing a man to a display of honourable silence that could kill him, like Cosmo Colville? He thought of Falstaff’s more cynical or more realistic view of it in Henry IV, ‘What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’

It was not yet clear on which day of the week Cosmo would die, but die he would unless he, Powerscourt, could pull off a miracle. As he passed down the northern end of Baker Street, close to where 221B would have been, he sent a message to Sherlock Holmes, asking for assistance.

Lady Lucy was reading the Obituary columns of The Times when Powerscourt returned to Markham Square ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘you’ve just missed Sir Pericles. He only left the house five minutes ago.’

‘And what did he have to say, Lucy?’

‘He seems to have got his lines of communication into Colvilles working like clockwork,’ Lady Lucy said. ‘He says they’ve hired a negociant in Burgundy to supervise the despatch of all that Colville wine.’

‘There’s still going to be a gap, isn’t there? Between the current lot running out and the next lot arriving. I wonder what they’ll do about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Perhaps they’ll give the Necromancer a call.’

‘Do you think they’d do that? Employ a sort of wine forger, Francis?’

‘Well, that posh hotel where they have the pre-phylloxera dinners is happy to serve his wares.’

‘So they are, but the question is, do they know they are buying a heap of fakes, the hotel people, or do they buy them from some apparently respectable wine merchant, supposing them to be real?’

‘Maybe I should go and talk to the wine department of Whites Hotel.’

‘Never mind that, Francis, tell me what Mrs Colville had to say for herself.’

Powerscourt told her everything, the frankness at the beginning, her description of Cosmo’s character, and then the news of the family row before the wedding.

‘Did she say how long the row was before the wedding? Days? Weeks?’

‘She said it was a week before the wedding. Now then, Lucy, I think we should run through what we know so far. Some fresh line of inquiry may come to us. Time is running short, after all. Let’s begin with the murder itself. What do you think was going on?’

‘Let’s think of our French friend, the one who stayed in Norfolk the night before the wedding. Suppose he has some score to settle with Randolph that has to do with the Colville wine business in Burgundy. He reaches the Hall, finds the gun, shoots Randolph and disappears, leaving the gun lying on the floor for Cosmo to pick up.’

‘But the gun, Lucy, how did the gun get there?’

‘How about this. After the family row Randolph was so worried about the possibility of family fights and family violence that he took the gun along to keep the peace if necessary. The Frenchman forced him to hand it over and shot Randolph.’

‘But how did the Frenchman know there was going to be a gun there?’ said Powerscourt. ‘He can’t have been exchanging messages with Randolph across the bloody Channel, can he? Maybe the gun had dropped out of somebody’s pocket. That’s not much good either. I don’t think it would stand up to cross-examination in court, do you?’

‘No, I don’t, Francis. Surely if you were a Frenchman with murderous intent you would bring your own weapon with you. You wouldn’t want to take a chance on finding one lying around at a wedding.’

‘You’re absolutely right. We’re going round in circles so we are. Why don’t we look at it another way, Lucy. I hoped I could run through with Mrs Colville the various reasons that might have persuaded Cosmo to pick up the gun and to keep quiet. We know about family honour, family scandal. What else?’

‘Suppose he was being chivalrous. Suppose there was a woman involved and he wanted to protect her.’

‘Possible, but which woman? Isabella Colville? Well, maybe he would do it for her. I can’t see him doing it for anybody else. I’m afraid there is another explanation that fits the bill perfectly,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Let’s go back to the family row. Let’s suppose that an argument between Randolph and Cosmo is at the centre of it. The row grows even more heated and even more poisonous in the days leading up to the wedding. So Randolph takes his gun along, either in self-defence or because he intends to shoot Cosmo. They arrange to meet in the state bedroom at the far end of the Nashes’ Long Gallery. Either there is a scuffle and Randolph gets shot. Or Cosmo grabs the gun and kills Randolph just before the butler chap comes into the room. He can’t throw the gun away, so he hangs on to it.’

‘But why,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘does he keep quiet? Why doesn’t he speak?’

‘Ah ha,’ said Powerscourt, ‘this is where the row comes in. If he speaks he will have to explain, sooner or later, what the row was about, if not to the police, then under oath to counsel in court. That would bring disgrace on the name of Colville and ruin to the business. The grey hairs of the remaining old gentleman who raised Colvilles to fame and fortune will turn white. His last years will be spent in shame and sorrow. All of that must flash through Cosmo’s brain. He is a man of conscience, after all, susceptible to the call of duty. He keeps his mouth shut.’

‘You mean, the police have got the right man all along, Francis?’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, Lucy. It’s interesting, I think, that we haven’t yet come up with a more convincing explanation of the shooting of Randolph Colville.’ Powerscourt wandered over to the window and looked out at the traffic in Markham Square. Way over to his left there was a rumble of cabs and buses progressing along the King’s Road towards Sloane Square. Two small boys were kicking a stone along the pavement.

‘That’s not the only mystery we haven’t solved, Lucy. There’s the question of the blackmailer, if there is a blackmailer. There’s Randolph’s missing money and the tens of thousands those accountants found disappearing from the Colvilles’ accounts.’

Powerscourt paused and looked back at the traffic again. ‘I don’t think this is doing us any good. We’ll make ourselves confused and depressed. I’m sure I could find some lights of hope if I set my mind to it, but just at the moment hope in this case seems rather far away. Why don’t I take you out to dinner, Lucy? There’s a new restaurant just opened in Lower Sloane Street. They say the seafood is excellent.’

Tristram Bennett, a Colville on his mother’s side, had decided that it was his destiny to save the family. A couple of days before his tryst with Emily he was making his way towards the Colville Head Office behind Oxford Street. He looked down at his tie from time to time. He wasn’t sure that these were the clothes a sober wine merchant should be seen wearing in the heart of the West End. The suit was not a quiet suit. It did not speak of respectability. With its long jacket and wide labels it had a faint air of Regency about it, as if Tristram was on his way to some coffee house in Covent Garden. The shirt was loud and the tie was raffish. Trying to remember when he had last worn this outfit, Tristram recalled that it was on a visit to a club off Park Lane where people gambled for high stakes. He had been wondering about Emily Colville on the way. She was very young and very pretty, but had he had the best of her? She didn’t have enough money to help support his lifestyle and she wasn’t always available. Maybe he should just give her up. As he crossed the Colville threshold he remembered that he might come across Emily’s husband Montague, toiling in some lowly position among the wines and spirits. Montague was never going to set the world on fire, Tristram said to himself, not even the limited world of London’s wine. Montague was one of those regular souls who would work away for years, with only limited doses of promotion, perfectly happy to fill his days in the station and the manner he had been called to. Such a life, however, was not for Tristram. He would, as he often told himself when on the verge of some great adventure, rather die in glory on the battlefield than serve a lifetime in the counting house.

He swept into the Colville Head Office, across the great room where the clerks laboured to keep paper track of all those different bottles and cases that circled the globe, and up to Alfred Davis’s office.

‘Good morning, Davis,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to restore order here. Things have got out of hand since the unfortunate events at the wedding. Take me to Mr Randolph’s room, if you would. I’ll make a start there.’

The one thing instilled into Davis and his fellows was that obedience to any Colville demand was automatic, unquestioning, instant. In such a spirit, centuries before, the servants of the emperors in Rome must have opened doors and bottles and laid out the clothes of their masters. The Colville code, unfortunately, like that of the emperors, had made no allowance for bad Colvilles but Alfred was not to know that. He took Tristram down a floor and showed him into the large office where Randolph had worked. Tristram sat at the desk by the window and told Davis he could go now. When he, Tristram, wanted him, he would send a message. He went over to the door and made sure it was firmly shut. Then he began his morning’s work with Randolph’s diary. Nothing very interesting there. Tristram had imagined endless invitations to wine or port tastings at discreet hotels off Park Lane, lunches in expensive restaurants with leading members of the wine trade, men from Berry Bros. amp; Rudd, or Justerini amp; Brooks perhaps. Instead he found a very mundane list, meetings with wine shippers, meetings with wine merchants who dealt in bulk transport, meetings with bottlers and bottle manufacturers and advertising men. This was not the stuff of high romance, Tristram said to himself, wearying of the mundane. He turned instead to two large files of Randolph’s correspondence. Anybody looking at Tristram at this point would not have described him as a man dabbling around for fun in somebody else’s business. They would have said he was a man definitely looking for something. And he was. Randolph, after all, had served him well for a number of years. The payments were small. They always came on time. There was never any hint of fuss. Randolph’s demise had left a hole in Tristram’s income, a fairly small hole, but a hole nonetheless. As he peered through Randolph’s letters, or the letters to Randolph, he was looking for a replacement, another target who would pay up without any trouble.

Tristram Bennett did not find what he was looking for that morning. Shortly before twelve o’clock he sent word to Alfred Davis that he was going to lunch. He checked his tie was in the right position in the mirror and set off for his club. He had no doubt that sooner or later, in Randolph’s correspondence, or in the late-night drunken confidences at his card parties, he would find another victim. Another Randolph.