Death of a wine merchant

2

The office was hidden away in a corner of an enormous warehouse on the banks of the Thames at Shadwell Basin in the East End of London. It was about twenty feet square with shelves covering virtually every wall. The man who worked here didn’t like cleaners coming in, so there were spiders’ webs hanging off the walls, dust lying thickly on the shelves and mice scampering about the floor, feasting occasionally on the rich liquids that fell there. To his left, on the far side of the wall of his office, the high warehouse was filled with barrels of every description. Above him were six floors devoted to Bordeaux, burgundy, champagne, port, Madeira and vin ordinaire. Stretching out a few feet above his head was a bizarre collection of wine bottles: magnums and Marie Jeannes and double magnums of four bottles from Bordeaux; Jeroboams worth six bottles and Imperiales worth eight; from Burgundy and Champagne came even larger versions, a Salmanazar equivalent to twelve bottles, a Balthazar worth sixteen and a Nebuchadnezzar worth twenty bottles. For some unaccountable reason, the man knew that people would almost always believe that wine contained in these monstrous vessels was the real thing. He did not intend to disabuse them. Other shelves were filled with nameless barrels and a surprising variety of other ingredients ranging from dried gooseberries to turnip juice.

This was the domain of the man they called the Alchemist. Jesus Christ, he used to mutter to himself, could turn water into wine. Well, he could turn rough Algerian into passable claret, consignments of white grapes from more or less anywhere into credible champagne, strange combinations of raisins and sugar into respectable vin ordinaire. He was quite short, the Alchemist, with a stoop and a thin goatee beard. He wore thick glasses to read the labels on the wine bottles and the equations that carried the secrets of his forgeries. Two or three times a year he crossed to France where he and a couple of selected collaborators visited the freight trains carrying wine from the south to the palates of the north. These trains stopped overnight at Dijon station, where they switched the labels over during the hours of darkness. He currently had an order for a consignment of pre-phylloxera wines from a very grand hotel in Mayfair which held pre-phylloxera dinners once a month, elaborate and very expensive occasions where all the wine came from before 1863, the year the phylloxera bug began to devastate the vineyards of France, spreading slowly northwards from its first infestation in the Languedoc. Hardly anybody, the Alchemist reasoned, could remember what these wines tasted of before that date. It was all so long ago, and the few genuine bottles left were locked away in the cellars of the grandest chateaux in the Medoc. He had an enormous order from a British railway company. And then there was the regular order from those damned Americans in London. The Alchemist set to work, draining off some red substance from one of his barrels. He had only one rule and he never broke it. He told nobody his real name.

Three days after the wedding and the murder Inspector Albert Cooper had completed his interviews with the wedding guests. One or two had reappeared at Brympton Hall the day after the incident with information they had forgotten in the confusion of the day. The Sergeant had been sent to make inquiries at Randolph Colville’s house on the Thames about the gun. By now the Inspector could tell you who was sitting against the wall in the church three rows from the front, and who was up there next to the organ on the first floor. He could show you the dispositions of the guests as they drank champagne on the lawn. He could show you how far they had advanced towards their tables when the corpse was discovered. He had obtained from Georgina Nash the details of the final seating plan when Colvilles and Nashes were mixed up together. There were, he thought, two or three guests he could not identify because people could describe them, but didn’t know their names. The Colvilles thought they were Nashes, and the Nashes thought they were Colvilles. His informants spoke of a tall thickset man with dark hair, a middle-aged lady with a slight limp, and a nondescript-looking man nobody could describe in any detail. They troubled Inspector Cooper’s tidy mind, these three unknowns wandering about in the October sunshine at Brympton Hall. He was wondering if he should interview everybody all over again when the summons came to see his superior officer, Chief Inspector Weir.

The Chief Inspector was sitting at a very large desk strewn with papers. Cynics at the station said that Weir had suborned the desk from the office of the Chief Constable when the previous holder of that office had just left and before his successor arrived. A table had been substituted in its place. Weir was well over six feet tall, heavily built and with receding hair. Now in his sixties, even he would have admitted that he thought more about his retirement than about his cases. He and Mrs Chief Inspector Weir, a former primary school teacher, had bought a cottage on the coast near Blakeney where the policeman intended to devote his time to bird watching and the wife was planning an enormous piece of embroidery. Weir’s colleagues would never have said that the Detective Chief Inspector was quick like Inspector Cooper. Nor did he have the sudden flights of intuition that solved a case in a moment like one or two of his younger colleagues. But all agreed on one thing. He may have been ponderous in body and spirit, his mind may have worked incredibly slowly, but he had judgement. In all his years in the force Detective Chief Inspector Weir had scarcely made a mistake in an important case. Defence counsel who looked forward to dancing round his portly person found that he carried on unperturbed and made a very good impression on the jury. Juries liked the big man from Norfolk and seldom caused him to lose a case in court. This afternoon he knew that his young Inspector, whose promotion he had personally recommended, was not going to agree with him.

‘Come in, Cooper, come in, do sit down.’ Weir pointed to a neat little armchair with cushions boasting some of the finest of Mrs Weir’s embroidery. ‘The Sergeant’s back. I have his report on the Colville gun here. There’s little doubt about it. The gun, or one virtually identical to it, came from a drawer in Randolph Colville’s gun room on the first floor of his house. Certainly the gun’s not there now. He must have brought it with him. I’m sure the brother’s guilty, Albert. There must have been a struggle and Cosmo grabbed the gun from his brother. I’m going to see the Chief Constable after our conversation here. Then I’m going to charge him.’

Inspector Albert Cooper looked very unhappy. His eyes pleaded with his superior officer. He knew how difficult it was to change Weir’s mind. He resolved to approach the matter sideways, like a crab on the coast near the Weir cottage at Blakeney.

‘It’s entirely possible, sir, that Cosmo Colville killed his brother, but aren’t we being a bit hasty? You don’t think we should wait a while before committing ourselves?’

Detective Chief Inspector Weir smiled at his young protege, like a grandfather with a favourite grandchild. ‘Why should we wait, Albert? Surely we’ve got all the evidence we need.’

Cooper knew that what was, for him, the most compelling argument for innocence was, for his superior officer, the most compelling argument for guilt. All the same, he had to try.

‘Suppose you’re a killer, sir. Suppose you despatch your victim in a quiet room on the first floor of a great house in Norfolk. Then what do we think the killer would do? Why, he’d dispose of the weapon and get himself away from the scene as fast as he could. The last thing he would want to do is to sit there with the gun in his hand waiting to be discovered. Then there’s the business of his silence. Who is he trying to protect? Some other member of the family? Some woman?’

‘That’s mere speculation and you know it,’ said Weir. Twenty-five years before in Norwich Crown Court he had heard a distinguished counsel dismiss the elegant arguments of the defence barrister as mere speculation and he had been using the phrase ever since. ‘If the man wants to tell us what he was doing all he has to do is to open his mouth. But he won’t. Let’s stick to the facts, Albert. The gun is Randolph Colville’s. It was used to kill him. His brother Cosmo was in and out of that house all the time before the wedding. He was sitting in the chair opposite with the gun in his hand. That’s good enough for me. I’m sure it will be good enough for the Chief Constable. That’s good enough for a jury.’

‘There are still questions we can’t answer, sir. The three unidentified guests at the wedding reception for a start. We haven’t had time to trace them yet. And there’s the whole question of the wine business, whether there was anything unusual going on there. We don’t have to make the arrest so soon.’

Even as he looked at his superior officer he knew it was no good. Weir’s mind was made up. It would take an earthquake to change it. Before he went home that evening, Inspector Cooper learnt that Archibald Beauchamp Cosmo Colville had indeed been charged with murder.

Five days later Lord Francis Powerscourt was crossing the well-manicured lawns of London’s Gray’s Inn, answering a summons from a barrister friend, Charles Augustus Pugh. The two men had worked on a murder trial together some years before. Pugh’s office was lined with even more files than it had contained previously. His feet, clad today in elegant black boots, rested as usual on his desk. His suit was pale grey, his starched white collar was immaculate. He waved Powerscourt to a chair.

‘How are you keeping, my friend? Still packing the murderers off to jail?’

‘I can’t complain,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And yourself, Pugh? The clerks here still keeping the wolf from your door?’

‘They certainly are,’ said Pugh with a smile. ‘I’ve got the devil of a case on now. I’m for the prosecution for a change, Powerscourt. Three high-class con men, Granville, Trevelyan and Lawrence, Financial Consultants. With names like that and their proper cut glass vowel sounds, you’d think they’d been to Eton and Oxford. Not so, my friend, not so.’ Pugh shook his head sadly. ‘Old ladies, that was their thing. Rich old ladies, two of the rogues offering their services round Mayfair and South Kensington, one in the Home Counties. Old ladies especially susceptible to the con man in Epsom for some reason. They offered better investment returns than anyone else, you see, not by huge amounts, that might have made people think twice about them, but by enough to make a difference. They were only caught because a solicitor became suspicious. When they got their hands on the old ladies’ money, ten or fifteen or twenty thousand pounds, sometimes more, they worked out how long she was likely to live. They paid her the slightly better dividends they’d promised every year out of her own money, and kept most of the rest themselves. They created bogus accounts using real investments quoted in the financial pages that showed how much she was losing every year so that by the time the old lady died the investments had virtually all gone. These were real shares and real share prices they pretended to deal in, only they weren’t actually buying and selling, just taking notes of the different prices at different times so they could show how the old ladies might have lost most of their money. When the time came to send in the paperwork after the death, they just put in the figures they already had. Nobody asked to see the actual share certificates or the records of the stockbrokers’ dealings, though I suspect they could have finessed those all right.’

‘How were they caught?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Ah,’ said Pugh, ‘if you were feeling generous, you could say they were unlucky. You might not be so charitable if you were one of the old ladies or the people meant to inherit their money. Three of their victims in six months all had the same solicitors on Kensington High Street. All their clients invested with Granville, Trevelyan and Lawrence. All ended up without a penny. One might have been possible, two might just have been feasible, but three was too much. This solicitor went into every possible detail of the paperwork and found that they didn’t have it. Then he called in the police. Can you believe it, the three rogues have even found a couple of old ladies who testified in court in their favour. I’m not sure they believed me when I told them they were being cheated out of their money. Anyway,’ Pugh slid his feet off his desk and back on to the ground and began riffling through some papers, eventually holding up a brief tied in pink tape, ‘this is why you’re here, Powerscourt. Just been instructed yesterday,’ he went on. ‘Hopeless business, hardly worth turning up in court apart from the fact the fee is rather substantial. Wondered if you’d like to lend a hand. Solicitors keen for everybody they can find to help get our client off, particularly keen to get you on board. Heaps of money.’

‘What sort of case?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Murder,’ replied Pugh. ‘I’m for the defence, you understand. Some defence! Here’s the story.’ There was a brief pause while Charles Augustus Pugh restored his boots to their rightful place on his desk and wrapped his hands behind his neck. ‘Grand wedding, wine merchant family hook up with Norfolk grandees who have huge house. Hundred guests, maybe more, all dressed up as if they’re going to Royal Ascot. Groom’s father found shot in room near the Long Gallery where they were all about to put the nosebags on after the service. Then there’s the dead man’s brother six feet away, sitting on a chair with a gun in his hand. Blood all over the priceless carpet. Same gun, or almost certainly the same gun, police discover, used to shoot the brother. Think Cain and Abel in modern dress in the bloody Fens, for Christ’s sake. Brother Cain charged with murder. Bloody fool won’t speak. All he will say to the authorities is his name and that he didn’t do it. What, my friend, what on earth am I supposed to do with this lot? The committal hearing is next week, the Old Bailey in five or six weeks if everything goes according to plan. It could be less. Can you help me? Can you work a miracle? The loaves and fishes would have nothing on this.’

Powerscourt agreed to take the case on. His only thought at the beginning was that the silence probably meant a woman was involved who was not Cosmo Colville’s wife. Pugh gave him all the details of the families and the wedding party and took him down the street to the solicitors to take up his formal employment in the matter.

Lady Lucy Powerscourt was looking at an auction catalogue when her husband returned to Markham Square from Gray’s Inn. She turned slightly pale when Powerscourt told her the details of his latest case. ‘I’ve got a second cousin, Francis, who’s married to some minor member of the Colville family. I can’t for the moment remember if she’s on the Randolph side or the Cosmo side. How very terrible.’

‘What sort of a fellow was he, the chap your cousin married, I mean?’

‘I’m afraid he was rather a bad lot. He was called Barrington White, Timothy Barrington White, I think, and he embarked on a series of business ventures that seemed to go wrong all the time. The last I heard he had taken a position in the Colville wine business but he didn’t care for it, he never liked being told off by his in-laws. You don’t think he has anything to do with it, do you, Francis? And how do you think you can help that nice Mr Pugh get the Colville person off?’

‘I have absolutely no idea if your relation has anything to do with it, Lucy. I was thinking about possible lines of inquiry on my way back here.’

Powerscourt began pacing up and down his drawing room, hands behind his back, like some thoughtful admiral on his quarterdeck in the Napoleonic Wars. Lady Lucy smiled. The pacing up and down always meant that her husband’s brain was moving towards top speed.

‘There aren’t really all that many motives for murder when you think of it, Lucy. Revenge, that’s always a runner. Jealousy, especially when the opposite sex is concerned, very powerful. Money, securing an inheritance ahead of time or killing off the siblings who might be ahead of you in the queue to inherit grandfather’s millions, another strong contender. Sudden blinding rage, when the murderer goes half insane for the split second it takes to plunge the knife in or pull the trigger, that’s taken a lot of people to the other side. There must be more, lots more.’

‘And which of these deadly sins do you think might apply in this case, Francis?’ Lady Lucy began her question to her husband’s back as he reached the end of his pacing and finished it to his face as he turned round to head back towards the fireplace.

‘I think the silence is important, Lucy, I really do. I think it implies he was protecting somebody, that if he had to answer questions he would end up incriminating somebody, his mistress perhaps. The thing about silence is that there are no two ways about it. Even if he offered to tell just some of what he knows, once he started talking Cosmo Colville would probably find that he had to reveal everything.’

‘You don’t think it might have something to do with his brother, that he was protecting him in some way?’

‘Even after the brother was dead, do you mean? That would have to be some secret, Lucy, don’t you think? Maybe it all has to do with the business.’

‘I find it hard to believe that the wine business could be the reason for murder, Francis. Surely people don’t go round shooting each other in the heart because the claret’s gone off or the Nuits St Georges is corked again.’

‘Maybe there was a scandal waiting to come out. When you refer to the wine business in that way of course it’s hard to see it as a motive for murder. But the Colville business is huge. Think of it as money or as a disgrace that might finish the firm off and it could well be time for pistols in the afternoon. Johnny Fitzgerald is the only wine expert we know and he’s not back from Wales until tomorrow. And even Johnny would be happy to admit that his expertise is more in the consumption end of the trade than in the business side. Lucy, I think it’s time I extended my knowledge of burgundy and Bordeaux. I’m just going to pop into Berry Bros. amp; Rudd. After all, I have been buying wine from them for nearly twenty years.’

The man they called the Alchemist had moved a little table to sit underneath the window. He brought over an electric lamp to increase the visibility further still. On his table he placed three plain bottles with red wine in them and rather unusual labels. The left-hand bottle’s inscription read BX LG68 AG15. The second one said BX LG74 AG12, and the one on the right BX LG78 AG10. Very reverently, as if he was pouring the host at the communion rails in some place of alchemical worship, the man poured a small amount of the liquid from the first bottle into a glass. The Alchemist was humming to himself as he worked. Today it was the Drinking Song from La Traviata. He was very fond of the opera. He went as often as he could. He swirled the liquid round for a moment or two and then tasted it before spitting it out into a small bucket on the floor. He looked thoughtful for a moment and then made some notes in his large notebook. Each legend with the BX heading had a page to itself. When he had finished his tasting the Alchemist smiled a slow smile and replaced the corks in the bottles before placing them on a shelf. ‘They’re coming along well,’ he said out loud, addressing nobody in particular. Blending, the man often reminded himself, was the essence of wine making, as vital to its success as the grapes or the terroir of the vineyard. Was not Haut Brion itself, one of the finest clarets in the world, the result of careful blending? Only the Alchemist knew the secrets of the labels. LG68 meant that sixty-eight per cent of the liquid was composed of standard red vin ordinaire from the Languedoc, AG15 meant that fifteen per cent of it was red from Algeria, a red often referred to as the Infuriator. In the other bottles the mixtures were slightly different, the remaining percentages being composed of good quality claret. The BX at the beginning meant that a claret was being created here, far from the south-west of France and the elegant city of Bordeaux, in a dusty warehouse on London’s river. The wine would be bastard from birth.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was shown into a small library on the first floor of Berry Bros. amp; Rudd at 3 St James’s Street, opposite St James’s Palace and the London home of the Prince of Wales at Marlborough House. Powerscourt was fascinated by the contents of the glass-fronted bookshelves, most of them containing ancient bottles of wine rather than books.

‘Good day to you, Powerscourt,’ said a tall white-haired man of about fifty years, marching across the carpet like the guardsman he had once been to shake Powerscourt by the hand. George Berry had been Powerscourt’s principal point of contact here for all his years with the company, advising more on broad strategies of wine purchase rather than recommending particular bottles. ‘I trust Lady Lucy and the family are well?’

‘Splendid, thanks,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. He had always thought that George Berry with his military bearing, those clear blue eyes and a general impression of tidy competence would have made a perfect con man.

‘What can we do for you today, Lord Powerscourt? Some white burgundies perhaps? We have some splendid wines from Montrachet and Chablis this year.’

‘I want your advice, Berry, and I’m in rather a hurry. Please keep this to yourself but I’ve been asked to look into the Colville murder, the one up in Norfolk. Cosmo’s lawyers have asked me to see if I can come up with anything to help his case.’

‘You’re trying to get him off might be another way of putting it,’ said Berry. ‘What a terrible business. We knew the Colvilles, all of them. We were meant to go to that wedding, but family commitments put a stop to it. Pity, I’ve always wanted to see that house, Brympton Hall. How can I help you?’

‘I’m not quite sure how to put this,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There are all sorts of motives for murder, greed, jealousy, revenge, hatred. Some of those may have been swirling round the Colville business. I need somebody to advise me on the wine trade in general and the Colville companies in particular. Was there anything suspicious going on? Was a scandal about to break? Had they treated anybody or any other company particularly badly?’

George Berry walked over to his window and stared out into the street where a horse-drawn carriage seemed to be overtaking a wheezing motor car, smoke pouring from its bonnet. Powerscourt remembered that Berry’s favourite activity was playing golf at fashionable courses like Huntercombe or Royal St George’s, Sandwich. Men said that George Berry seldom lost. Powerscourt had always wondered what he drank in the bar at the end of a round. Did he have beer? Or did Berry Bros. amp; Rudd supply some of these golf courses with their finest wines for George Berry and his friends to sample after their eighteen holes?

‘I wish I felt able to help you myself,’ Berry said finally, turning back from his vigil at the window overlooking the dark grey palace with its red soldiers like toys in their sentry boxes, ‘but I don’t think my expertise, for what it’s worth, is what you are looking for. You see, we deal with what we like to think of as the more expensive end of the market, the leading hotels in the capital, ten or twelve Oxbridge colleges, most of the top London clubs, a large number of restaurants, and a considerable number of private clients who are interested in their wine and are happy to be advised by us. People like yourself, Lord Powerscourt. But we’re not dealing with the same sort of people as the Colvilles. The new middle class, as they’re often referred to these days, would not buy their wine from us, they would buy it from Colvilles or one of their rivals. I think I know the man you want, he’s got enormous experience in the wine trade. At the moment he is the chief wine buyer for the White Star Line. They sell all kinds of different wine from all kinds of different countries at all kinds of different prices in their ships. He could tell you straight off, I should think, what was a proper claret and what was made in a factory or a warehouse. I’ll give you a letter of introduction.’

George Berry sat down at one of the desks and scribbled a quick note.

‘His name, Berry, you haven’t told me his name.’

‘His name?’ Berry laughed. ‘When he’s happy he says his name has been a great help in his career. When he’s miserable he claims his name has been the ruin of him and he wishes he’d changed it years ago.’

‘For God’s sake, man, what’s he called?’

‘He’s a hereditary baronet. He’s called…’ George Berry paused for a moment for maximum impact. ‘He’s called Sir Pericles Freme.’

‘God bless my soul!’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt.