Death of a wine merchant

21

Charles Augustus Pugh had been looking directly at the jury during most of his encounter with Detective Chief Inspector Weir. He thought he might have won on points, that one or maybe two members of the jury could have been added to the few he thought might vote for an acquittal. His junior, not as experienced at reading juries as Pugh, but no slouch nonetheless, reckoned that three or possibly four were in the acquittal camp. They might, mind you, he told Pugh later that day, be lured back into the conviction team fairly easily.

Pugh was surprised to see Inspector Albert Cooper in the witness box. There was his youth and his youthful appearance for a start. Then there was the fact, as Powerscourt had briefed Pugh before, that Cooper did not think there should have been an arrest at all. He did not think the evidence was strong enough for a conviction. Powerscourt had approached the matter with extreme cynicism.

‘If he doesn’t appear,’ he had told Pugh over lunch at his club in Pall Mall, ‘then it means he’s an honest man. They have failed to nobble him.’

‘They being?’ asked Pugh.

‘His immediate superiors, their immediate superiors, their immediate superiors, the Superintendents and the Commanders and the Chief Constable in person. Not necessarily in that order.’

‘And if he does appear?’ asked Pugh.

‘Some or maybe all those superiors will have got to him. Maybe not to him, maybe to that girl he’s going to marry. His parents, her parents perhaps. Why should Albert throw up such a promising career for a few doubts about an arrest? If every police officer followed his doubts about arresting people then the prisons would be empty and the courthouses all boarded up. God knows how the senior officers in the Norfolk police will do it, but they’ll certainly try.’

Sir Jasper Bentinck found Detective Inspector Cooper a much better witness than his immediate superior. There weren’t the pauses for a start. Cooper brought an air of freshness into the courtroom, of youth and hope. He told the story of the aftermath of the murder very well, not omitting the complaints about his age. Sir Jasper did not bother to ask about any doubts Cooper might have had about an arrest. Pugh was wondering right up to the point where the examination in chief came to an end about whether to cross-examine or not. Of all the witnesses so far, Cooper was making the best impression on the jury. Georgina Nash came from a different world. The Detective Chief Inspector was too old and too slow. This young man, so quick and so bright, was the one for them. Pugh thought one or two of his recent converts to an acquittal vote might have defected back to the other side. Napier had sent him a note suggesting no cross-examination at all.

In the end Pugh couldn’t resist. If Powerscourt’s realpolitik in the Pall Mall club was right, then Cooper might prove a godsend. It was worth a try.

‘Detective Inspector Cooper,’ an emollient, a charming Pugh began. ‘I believe you have made the acquaintance of a colleague of mine, Lord Francis Powerscourt, who has been investigating this case?’

‘I have indeed,’ said Cooper, smiling back at the defence barrister.

‘Lord Powerscourt told me right at the beginning of the case that Mrs Nash over there informed him that you thought Detective Chief Inspector Weir was going to arrest the wrong man. Is that the case?’

Albert Cooper thought about all the arguments brought to bear on him not to repeat his doubts at the trial. Weir himself had spoken to Charlotte when he was out, trying to persuade her to persuade him to deny it. He remembered the ploy that had finally brought him round. The Chief Constable himself had told his parents that if he didn’t do what he was told, his career in the Norfolk Constabulary or any other Constabulary would be over for ever. His mother, never strong, had grown ill. It was his father saying that he couldn’t bear to see his mother going downhill that finally turned him. What, asked his father, were a few white lies compared with his mother’s health?

‘That’s quite right,’ said Detective Inspector Cooper cheerfully, ‘I did think that at the beginning of the case.’

‘Could you tell the court what persuaded you into that judgement?’ Pugh was still emollient.

‘Well, sir, it seemed to me to be too obvious that the defendant had done it. It was as if somebody meant us to think like that.’

‘Really?’ said Pugh. ‘And what made you change your mind?’

‘I think there were two things, sir. Chief Inspector Weir is a detective of great experience. He has been investigating murders in Norfolk since before I was born. You have to take account of things like that, especially when you’ve only just been promoted like I had been at the time.’

‘And the second reason?’

‘I think I was influenced by the fact that there didn’t seem to me to be any other explanation. None of the guests at the wedding came up with anything and as time went by no other explanation presented itself.’

‘I see,’ said Pugh. ‘I put it to you, Detective Inspector, that your superiors put considerable pressure on you to change your mind. How much more convenient to have all the officers in the case singing the same tune. Did they talk to you about your future prospects? Did they put pressure on your family to make you come round?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Inspector Cooper, but he had turned a shade of deep red.

Charles Augustus Pugh remained on his feet for half a minute or so, staring at Detective Inspector Cooper. Then he turned abruptly on his heel and sat down.

‘No further questions,’ he said.

Sir Jasper rose quickly to his feet, aware of the damage that might have been done to his case.

‘Detective Inspector Cooper, could you just confirm one or two points for the gentlemen of the jury? It is your belief that the defendant, Cosmo Colville, murdered his brother Randolph at Brympton Hall at a wedding in October of this year?’

‘It is,’ said Cooper, the red fading from his cheeks.

‘And you reached that opinion entirely on your own with no external pressure?’

Mistake, thought Pugh. The young man can control what he says but not what happens to the colour of his face.

‘I did,’ said Albert Cooper, the colour rising up his cheeks again.

Sir Jasper was quick to react. ‘No further questions,’ he said, and it so happened that right at that very moment he fell victim to a coughing fit that involved a great deal of noise and apologies to the judge while this storm raged about him. The fit also led to the production of a quite magnificent red handkerchief from his trouser pocket, an enormous kerchief about the size of a tea towel which appeared to bring some relief. Under cover of this display Albert Cooper was able to slip away with the gentlemen of the jury unaware of whether he had turned pink once more or not. Out of the corner of his eye Pugh caught an angry glower on the face of Detective Chief Inspector Weir, as though the young man had let them down. You could control his words but you couldn’t control the colour on his face. Weir in angry mode, thought Pugh, did have a remarkable similarity to an aged warhorse.

It was just after four o’clock now. Outside the lamps were being lit. A couple of hundred yards away the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral were preparing for the daily ritual of evensong. Sir Jasper thought he had chosen his last witness well. Willoughby Nash, husband of Georgina, owner of Brympton Hall, leading solicitor in the city of Norwich, chairman of this and director of that in the city where he worked, captain and leading run scorer for Aylsham Cricket Club, was a man of substance, a man of weight. Even in the alien territory of the witness box of the Old Bailey, seldom, if ever, the scene of courtroom encounters for the solicitors of Norwich, Willoughby Nash radiated an easy power. Sir Jasper hoped that he would prove a fitting final witness for the close of the prosecution case.

‘Mr Nash.’ Sir Jasper seemed to have recovered from his coughing fit by now. ‘Perhaps you could give us your account of the day of the murder. You were at the very centre of events after all.’

Willoughby Nash looked at the gentlemen of the jury as if he might be about to sell them at an auction and needed to determine the appropriate prices.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course. There was nothing untoward about the wedding itself apart from the fact that the organist fellow didn’t play what he’d been told to play. After that people milled around at the front of the church as they usually do, trying to kiss the bride or shake hands with the groom. Eventually they all drifted into the gardens at the rear – Brympton has gardens to the front as well as the back, being such a large house – and we served them champagne.’

Sir Jasper was now holding his hand up, rather in the manner of a traffic policeman.

‘Forgive me, Mr Nash, were there any strangers you could see, milling about in the crowds?’

Sir Jasper thought that the only viable defence Pugh might be able to run would be The Mysterious Stranger and he was determined to nip it in the bud if he could.

‘Strangers?’ said Willoughby Nash, and he began stroking his chin. ‘Well, as my wife told you this morning, there were some people one didn’t know. It’s not possible to have made the acquaintance of all the groom’s family before these occasions, but the Colville people looked absolutely fine to me. Quite a lot of them you’d be happy to go hunting with. A lot of medals on display, one or two people who’d obviously been wounded in the Boer War. You’d be hard pressed to find a more respectable body of people. I’d have been more than happy to propose the lot of them for my own club in Norwich.’

‘I see,’ said Sir Jasper, asking himself briefly if Willoughby Nash would propose him for the club. ‘Could you tell us now about the sequence of events leading up to the murder?’

Pugh suddenly noticed the prisoner in the dock opposite Willoughby Nash, the low wooden walls keeping him in, the stairs just visible to bring Cosmo Colville up and down from the holding cells below. He had been slumped in his chair for most of the day. Now he was leaning forward intently as if this was the witness he was most interested in.

‘Of course.’ Any slight nervousness Nash might have had at the beginning had gone now. Pugh wondered if this witness might not be too grand for the jury. They might prefer plainer men and plainer fare.

‘There was a lot of trouble getting the guests to sit down in their proper places,’ Willoughby Nash went on. ‘I thought at the time it was rather like trying to get the horses lined up in the correct order before a race at Fakenham or Ascot or one of those places. There’s always some damned filly that won’t get into line. This jostling was still going on, guests not yet in their proper stalls if you follow me, when I heard the shot. It’s an unmistakable noise even if it was a bit muffled with the people all talking at the top of their voices. Next thing I know our butler Charlie Healey takes me to the room with the body and the silent figure of Cosmo Colville. We sent for a doctor and the police and all that sort of thing.’

Sir Jasper’s hand had risen slightly once more in the stop the traffic position.

‘And what was your impression, there on the spot? What did you think had happened, Mr Nash?’

‘Well,’ said the owner of Brympton Hall, ‘call me simple, call me naive, but I know what I thought then. It seemed to me to be perfectly obvious. I said to Georgina after the doctor had taken a look at the corpse and before the police arrived, “Cosmo’s killed his brother,” I said. “Randolph’s lying on the floor with blood running out of him like it might run out of a side of beef cooked rare, and Cosmo’s sitting in that chair like someone’s just cast a spell over him.” As I said before, that was my opinion then and it remains so to this day. All these theories about strangers and so on aren’t worth a brass farthing.’

Pugh had been wondering for some time if he should cross-examine or not. Another note arrived from Richard Napier. ‘The trouble is that there is really only one word for knowledge in the English language. In this case the knowledge that Randolph is dead in English seems to be the same sort of knowledge as Cosmo killed him. But it’s not. Could you try Plato? Episteme is knowledge, Randolph is dead, doxa is opinion. Cosmo killed him is doxa. Socrates often droned on about the difference. Too difficult for the jury? Flatter them into thinking they’re more intelligent than they are?’ Pugh looked across at his junior. He could suddenly see him lying on the grass by the Cam, volume of Plato in hand, progressing serenely towards his double first in Philosophy before he changed over to the law.

‘Just to sum up…’ Sir Jasper was keen to keep Willoughby Nash out of the clutches of Charles Augustus Pugh for as long as possible. This judge was always anxious to get away at close of play. ‘You’ve made it very clear what your views were on the day of the murder. In all the events since, the visits from the police and the detectives and so on, you say you haven’t changed your mind?’

‘No, sir. Just take a look at the facts on the ground. No guessing and speculating like these shifty young men who write for the newspapers nowadays. Get on the horse and head for the fox, that’s what I always say. No point wondering if you’ve got the wrong mount. Waste of time.’

Charles Augustus Pugh decided to take a chance. It was risky, he thought, rather like bringing the spinners on after only four overs on a fast wicket suited to the quick bowlers.

‘Gentlemen of the jury, I would like to remind you, if I may, subject to his lordship having no objections, of one particular element in the wisdom of the ancient Greek philosopher called Plato which I believe has bearing on this case.’

Pugh looked attentively at the judge. ‘As long as your detour doesn’t last too long, Mr Pugh,’ said Mr Justice Black, smiling slightly. ‘I always liked Plato at school, but that man Socrates sometimes went on too long.’

‘Thank you, my lord,’ said Pugh, aware that Sir Jasper was rattling with fury beside him like a ship’s boiler.

‘I just want to remind you, gentlemen of the jury, of the distinction Plato drew between knowledge and opinion. Episteme in Greek meant knowledge, hard knowledge, hard facts. Randolph Colville is dead, that is episteme, the doctors and the pathologists would confirm it. Opinion for the Greeks was doxa. Opinion was what people believed to be true. It might be or it might not. Doxa, opinion, did not have the same weight as episteme, knowledge. Cosmo Colville killed his brother is opinion, doxa.

‘So, Mr Nash, do you accept Plato’s distinctions between different sorts of knowledge? And would you accept that Randolph is dead is not in the same category of knowledge as Cosmo killed him?’

Willoughby Nash had seen too many courtroom dramas in his own city to fall into the trap of trading philosophical niceties with the lead counsel for the defence.

‘You can stick to Plato, Mr Pugh. I thought his works were boring and unintelligible when I had to read them at university. I thought Cosmo killed him, as I said, and I still do. You just had to look at him sitting in that chair with the gun in his hand and a faraway look in his eye to realize what was going on.’

Not even Plato, Pugh reflected, could change Willoughby Nash’s mind. He wondered if the man’s bombastic manner might put the jury off. Perhaps they wouldn’t want to be on the same side. He wondered if he could launch one last question that might show the man in the worst possible light. He was aware of the judge shuffling his papers and gathering up his collection of pencils great and small.

‘And what, Mr Nash,’ he asked, ‘do you think of the people who read the matter differently from yourself, who think that while it is perfectly possible that the defendant killed his brother, nonetheless we have no definite proof that he did so and therefore he should be given the benefit of the doubt?’

Willoughby Nash had had enough. Questions to his wife that lacked what he thought of as the proper respect. Some damn Greek philosopher dragged into the case to confuse things. Willoughby Nash knew perfectly well what he would have done if he had been a member of the jury of Athenian citizens who tried Socrates for corrupting the young. He would have voted for the prosecution, for the death penalty and the richly deserved glass of the fatal hemlock. He would, furthermore, have burnt all the books written by that man Plato as well if he could. The life of the nation’s young, he felt, would be better and happier without philosophy of any kind.

Out of the corner of his eye Pugh suddenly spotted a man in a dark blue coat slipping into the back of the court. Reinforcements were arriving and he hoped they were not too late to save the day. Johnny Fitzgerald had come to the Old Bailey.

‘I think such people are fools.’ Willoughby Nash thought the court could do with a strong dose of common sense. He felt like making a derogatory reference to the suffragettes but found he couldn’t make the connection. ‘Let’s face facts. You find a man with a piece of your silver in his hand creeping out of your house. He is a burglar. Some footballer kicks the ball into the back of the net on a football field. That is a goal. You find a man holding a gun opposite his brother who is lying dead on the floor. He is a murderer. He should pay the penalty. Society must have rules or we should all descend into anarchy.’

Willoughby Nash stared defiantly at the jury. He glowered at Charles Augustus Pugh. The judge completed the tidying of his desk and the formation of his armada of pencils. They were to meet again, he reminded the court, on Monday morning at half past nine of the clock. With that he went to his rooms. Sir Jasper Bentinck smiled at Pugh and headed off to his modest home. Pugh and his junior headed for Gray’s Inn to confer with Johnny Fitzgerald.

Pugh hung his gown on the back of the door of his chambers. Then he opened a bottle of Aloxe Corton and handed a glass to Johnny Fizgerald.

‘Bought a case of this stuff the other day when I heard Powerscourt was invading Burgundy,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Not a very good day in court, I fear. Not necessarily bad, but I would say things were going more in Sir Jasper’s direction than in ours. Would you agree with that, young man?’

Richard Napier sipped appreciatively at his wine.

‘I think you’d have to say, sir, that they have built up a considerable first innings lead. Not that we can’t come back, mind you.’

‘You arrive, Johnny,’ Pugh looked across at Johnny who was now draped across a small sofa, ‘like that messenger chappie who came from Marshal Blucher to tell Wellington that the Prussians were coming to help him at Waterloo. What news of Powerscourt?’

‘He should be here tomorrow,’ Johnny said, digging about in his inside pocket for Powerscourt’s pieces of paper. ‘He gave me this, for me to give to you with the main points he’s discovered over there.’

‘And what are the chief points?’ said Pugh, beginning to peruse the document.

‘It’s quite dramatic, really. We’ve found a man who swore he would kill Randolph Colville. He must be the fellow who checked into that hotel in Norfolk and set off for the wedding the next morning.’ Johnny took another pull at his Aloxe Corton. ‘And Randolph was a bigamist. He had another wife and another family tucked up in a pretty house near Beaune.’

‘A bigamist, did you say? A second wife? Like he was a Musselman or one of those Mormons from Utah? God bless my soul! I never heard of such a thing in all my years at the Bar. Pretty, was she, Number Two, I mean?’

‘I never saw her. I don’t think I heard Francis describe her one way or the other. Younger than Number One he said.’

‘Look here, Johnny, we need to think of the practicalities of the court,’ said Pugh, scratching his head and passing the first page over to his junior. ‘I don’t think Francis’s note is going to be admissible in evidence. You don’t suppose he has packed the two ladies into a railway carriage to confront the judge and Sir Jasper on Monday morning? No? Even then it would be the devil’s own job to have their evidence accepted.’

‘I was just coming to that,’ said Johnny, staring hard at his glass, ‘Francis was hoping to get signed statements out of both of them, witnessed by some local lawyer and looking as official as possible. That’s why he’s coming back a bit later than me.’

‘That’s something,’ said Pugh. ‘You say Francis is coming back tomorrow? If not then, Sunday?’ He scribbled something on a piece of paper. ‘I’ve just got one of these telephone machines. Perhaps he could ring me as soon as he gets back and we can arrange to meet. I’m going to have to rethink my entire plan of campaign. It’s as if some kind person at the War Office has sent you another fifteen thousand troops the day before a battle, but you’ve no idea how reliable they’re going to be. Now then, young man,’ he turned to his junior, ‘I’m afraid we’re working late, you and I. Can you see if you can find some precedents for the late admission of evidence and the various procedures that have to be gone through? If Sir Jasper decides to cut up rough we may not be able to use any of this. God knows what the judge will make of it. He’s not an adventurous man, Mr Justice Black. If we can find a precedent it’ll be easier for him.’

‘Does it matter how long ago it was, sir?’ Richard Napier was collecting his notebook for a long vigil in the Gray’s Inn Library.

‘Well, don’t go as far back as the trial of bloody Socrates,’ said Pugh, recalling his junior’s suggestion that afternoon. ‘Anything modern should do.’

As Johnny Fitzgerald took his leave of the lawyers he glanced at the bottle. In the middle of the label it said ‘Corton – Charlemagne, Grand Cru.’ And above that in a slightly larger typeface was the legend, ‘Hospices de Beaune’.