Death of a wine merchant

4

Powerscourt found Lady Lucy in a very troubled state when he returned home from Freme and his recipes. Even the arrival of Johnny Fitzgerald did not appear to be enough to calm her spirits. Fitzgerald was Powerscourt’s oldest friend and companion in arms. They had served together in the Army in India and Johnny had worked on almost all of Powerscourt’s investigations since. Johnny was just under six feet tall with bright blue eyes that often danced with mischief or merriment.

‘Oh, Francis, it’s all too terrible,’ Lady Lucy began, ‘that poor family. And those poor children. I don’t know what we’re going to do!’

‘Hold on a moment, my love,’ said her husband, ‘take it slowly. Which family? Whose children? What might we have to do?’ He smiled a smile of welcome at his friend.

Lady Lucy felt that she might fall victim to one of those male conspiracies where the men look knowingly at each other and you can hear them say ‘Women!’ without actually opening their lips.

‘Sorry,’ she said, and stared firmly at the painting of one of her ancestors on the wall above the fireplace for a moment. ‘You remember I said I had a cousin who was married into some part of the Colvilles? And that she had a rather disagreeable husband called Timothy Barrington White?’

‘I do recall that. I remember now. I’ve been hearing horror stories about this Barrington White every now and again for most of our married life.’

‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘he’s really done it this time. You know how he fell in and out of jobs all the time. Eventually my cousin Millicent, Milly we always call her, persuaded one of the Colvilles to give him a job in the wine business. I think he had to look after that enormous gin distillery they have near Hammersmith. I don’t know what exactly went on but something really bad must have happened. You see, the Colvilles fired him.’

‘I can’t think it’s a very strenuous job, looking after a gin distillery these days,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald with a knowing air. ‘You put the stuff in, mix it all about, wait a bit and put it into those funny bottles.’

Lady Lucy was not sure that it was as easy as all that. ‘What’s more, there was a terrible row with Randolph and Cosmo Colville when they fired him.’

‘I always thought they looked after their people,’ said Powerscourt, ‘those Colvilles and the other wine merchants. Loyalty a great premium, take care of the staff, noblesse oblige, all that sort of thing.’

‘The point is this,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the conversation was beginning to drift away from her, ‘there was this tremendous row. The Colvilles told Terrible Timothy that he’d never work in the wine trade in England ever again. They even refused to pay his last month’s wages. And they’ve got no money, no money of their own, that family. I mean, Milly did have some money, but I think Timothy got through that fairly quickly at the start of their marriage. And they’ve got three children under five. What’s poor Milly going to do? I must go and see her, Francis, they only live in West Kensington, it won’t take long to get there.’

As Lady Lucy hurried off to fetch her coat and hat Johnny Fitzgerald opened one of the Powerscourt cupboards and pulled out a bottle of Fleurie. ‘I was talking to a man this very day and he asked me about my habits with wine, Johnny.

I said that I bought it and my best friend drank it. Things don’t seem to have changed.’

Johnny settled himself into the deepest armchair and suggested that Powerscourt fill him in on the details of the case. Two glasses later he knew as much as his friend.

‘This silence business, Francis,’ he said, ‘do you think there’s a woman behind it? Or maybe it’s a scandal. If there was some catastrophe about to fall on the house of Colville maybe the only way to put a stop to it is to say nothing at all. If you keep it up long enough, of course, there won’t be any question of you speaking out because you won’t be here. Maybe you could take the scandal with you to the grave and keep it there.’

‘I plan to go up to Norfolk to see the place where it all happened, Johnny. Maybe I’ll get a better sense of it all up there.’

‘And what would you like me to do, Francis? The latest bird book can wait a while. I’ve finished the text and it’s with the publishers now.’ In recent years Johnny had found a profitable and enjoyable occupation as an author and expert on the birds of England and Europe. He had even held conversations recently with his publishers about the possibility of the Birds of India.

Powerscourt grinned at his friend. ‘Do you remember that earlier case we had years ago about the forgers and the art world? On that occasion you managed to infiltrate what you might call the underworld of the art business, the porters, the drivers, the men who carry the stuff round at auctions. I think you should do the same with the Colvilles and the wine business. Make friends with these fellows. See what they have to say about their employers. If there are any scandals at Colvilles, these people will know more about it than the people in the boardroom.’

‘It will be a pleasure, Francis. Mind you, I hope these fellows don’t have the head for drink some of those art people did. Prolonged exposure to them and their drinking haunts could be very bad for the health. I’ll get on to it straight away.’

While he waited for Lady Lucy to return later that evening, Powerscourt wondered if reticence had stopped her drawing the obvious conclusion to the travails of Milly Barrington White. For while the husband’s loss of job and loss of income was very serious, there was one other point that he felt sure Lucy must have seen. Timothy Barrington White, present at the wedding, had a very real motive for wanting to kill Randolph Colville. The undesirable husband was more than a wedding guest, he was also a murder suspect.

Shortly before lunch the next day Georgina Nash was waiting for Powerscourt in the church of St Peter’s, Brympton. She was tall, with light brown hair rather than the flaming red of her daughter and pale blue eyes that looked as if they had been weeping a lot.

‘Mrs Nash,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how very kind of you to meet me here and guide me round where it all happened. It must be very painful for you.’

She just managed a smile. ‘If there’s anything we can do to help, Lord Powerscourt, we’re more than willing. Now, let me show you the church.’

She led the way into the empty building. The door creaked slightly on its hinges. The ropes of the bell ringers were tethered neatly at one end. All the box pews but one had their doors carefully closed. There were fresh flowers around the altar. On Powerscourt’s left as they advanced up the nave was a stone effigy covered with some dark substance. Georgina Nash noticed Powerscourt’s look.

‘Willoughby and the vicar think it’s bats up above doing the damage,’ she said, ‘but we sent one of the stable boys up before the wedding and he couldn’t see any bats at all. Maybe they’ve left by this time of year. Anyway, Lord Powerscourt,’ she stopped at the steps before the altar, ‘it’s a perfectly ordinary church. At this point it was still a perfectly ordinary wedding. The groom’s side were on the right, we were on the left. The organist behaved himself up there in his organ most of the time, though he did slip in one or two awful modern pieces before Emily arrived. She was a little late, Emily, but she looked so beautiful. I’m not going to desecrate the church by saying what I think about our evangelical vicar, I’ll leave you to work it out on your own. The service took about half an hour.’

‘Did you notice anything unusual, any strange people you’d never seen before, that sort of thing?’

Georgina Nash was leading them out of the church now and towards the great house. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hadn’t seen most of those Colvilles before, if that’s what you mean. There wasn’t anybody looking out of place or anything. They were all properly dressed and so on. Mind you, Lord Powerscourt, if you were a murderer, now I come to think about it, a wedding would be a good place to choose. One half of the people would assume you belonged to the other side, and the other half would think the opposite. A Nash would think you must be a Colville and a Colville would think you must be a Nash.’

They were past the yew trees now, advancing towards the great Jacobean facade. Powerscourt found himself counting the tall pepper pot chimneys and stopped when he reached fifteen.

‘There was the usual jostling around just outside the church,’ Georgina Nash went on, ‘lots of kisses and embraces and congratulations.’ She stopped suddenly and Powerscourt saw the tears in her eyes. Georgina Nash took two very deep breaths and continued. ‘It must have taken about ten or fifteen minutes for everybody to make their way to the garden at the back of the house. You know how it is at weddings, Lord Powerscourt, people are always stopping to chat to their friends and generally milling about.’

By this time she had ushered them both into the garden with the broken fountain that had played its part in the wedding days before.

‘Did you have a time planned for the guests to stay out here chatting, an hour perhaps, something like that?’ Powerscourt was counting yet more chimneys.

‘Oh yes,’ said Georgina Nash, bending down to pick up a pigeon’s wing from the immaculate grass. ‘Really, why the gardeners can’t be bothered to bend down and pick up this rubbish I don’t know. It was the same with the fountain. Three times before Emily’s big day I asked them to mend it. They never did. It’s too bad. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve diverted myself. Where was I? Ah yes, timetable, that’s what we were talking about. Willoughby and I reckoned half an hour should be enough for a couple of glasses of champagne and for people to loosen up a little. It seemed to be about right.’

‘Did you have a seating plan for the Long Gallery?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘How very curious that you too should ask about seating plans, Lord Powerscourt. That young policeman, Inspector Cooper I think he was called, he looked about fifteen years old, he was obsessed with seating plans. Anyway, we did have one. We had a couple of discreet blackboards set up out here with the plans pinned to them and more on the way to the Gallery itself.’

Powerscourt resolved to leave the question of the fifteen-year-old Detective Inspector till later. He felt Georgina Nash could be sidetracked very easily from the question in hand.

She was leading them back to the gravel drive in front of the house and the main entrance. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Nash, before we go into the house, was there anything unusual going on while the guests were drinking their champagne on the lawn? Any strangers moving about, that sort of thing?’

Georgina Nash stopped in front of a great timber door that opened into the interior of Brympton Hall. ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘Up till this point and a little longer, there was absolutely nothing unusual about Emily’s wedding. Nothing. The horrors came later.’

She led them into the Great Hall, once the heart of the house, now dominated by an enormous double staircase leading to the first floor. A series of eighteenth-century Norfolk gentlemen, famed perhaps in their own county rather more than in the country at large, lined the walls. Carved wooden figures adorned the stairs, a soldier with musket and powder flasks, a gentleman in hose, a bearded soldier with slashed breeches and a two-handed sword, a kilted Highlander and a Cossack.

‘It’s absolutely splendid,’ said Powerscourt, inspecting one of the Norfolk grandees in a scarlet coat.

‘I suppose it is,’ said Georgina Nash. ‘If you actually live here, of course, you get used to it and you begin to wonder after a while how so much dust manages to settle on and around this staircase.

‘Now then, back to business, Lord Powerscourt. We had two more seating plans on display on either side of the stairs so people could have a check before they reached the Long Gallery.’

She led the way up to the first floor. ‘It’s all quite simple from here on,’ she said. ‘Once they were up here we took them through this little spot we call the anteroom and into the Long Gallery itself.’ Powerscourt was enchanted by the room, over a hundred and fifty feet long, great windows looking out over the grass, a rich and elaborate ceiling. It must, he thought, be one of the finest Long Galleries in the kingdom.

‘Mrs Nash,’ he said, ‘I have had an account from the lawyers of what happened here that day. All I would ask is that you tell me everything you can remember about the time immediately before and immediately after the murder.’

‘And then I could go? I could meet you down in the gardens perhaps? That would be very kind, Lord Powerscourt.’ She paused and stared down the room. ‘All the tables were laid out up here, of course. They looked lovely. Every place had a name on the table in front of it. I was trying to mix them up, the Colvilles and the Nashes and their friends.’ She stopped again and fiddled with her hair. ‘I remember feeling irritated that the people weren’t moving away from this entrance here and up to the far end of the Long Gallery. There was a great crush in this area until one of the footmen began ushering people up the room. I think the sun went in briefly. I remember thinking how improbably blonde Augusta Nash’s hair was and how improbably handsome her brother Percy was. He’d just become a lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment and he was wearing his scarlet jacket and black trousers. Who am I, Lord Powerscourt,’ Georgina Nash managed a bright smile, ‘to fall for a soldier at my age! After that, it all becomes rather a blur, I’m afraid. Willoughby telling me what had happened, the terrible silence while people played with their food. They felt, I think, that it would be rude to eat it, in those circumstances, and that it would be rude not to eat it. So, most of them fiddled about with this rather splendid fare. Nobody wanted to talk much, they were all too shocked, and every now and then somebody would launch a conversational boat out on to the pond, as it were, only for it to be engulfed in the surrounding quiet. Then the policemen came and we all had to wait until they had questioned everybody before we could leave. Willoughby is saying he’ll never set foot in the Long Gallery again. He’s even talking of selling the Hall.’

Powerscourt felt that Georgina Nash would be better away from this place with its awful memories. ‘You have been most kind, Mrs Nash, and most helpful. If you’d like to take a turn about the garden I’ll join you very shortly. By the way, you wouldn’t by any chance have one of those seating plans left, would you? It might be helpful.’

She smiled. ‘I put one aside for you, Lord Powerscourt. I shall have it with me when we meet in the garden.’

Powerscourt strolled slowly up the room. He noticed that you could see very clearly what was happening in the garden, and wondered if the same was true the other way round. He stared regretfully at the splendid ceiling, knowing that under normal circumstances he would have spent far longer examining it. One thing in particular interested him. Was the route he had just taken via the Grand Staircase the only way in? At the far end of the Long Gallery, the opposite end to the Great Hall and the double staircase, was a door which opened out on to a set of steps that led down into the garden. An enterprising murderer might have come in this way and hidden himself away until he could be lost in the crowds. And as he followed what must have been the last journey of Randolph Colville through the Peter the Great room and into the state bedroom on the corner of the Hall, he found another set of stairs leading out on to the gardens on the other side of the house from the fountain. Here was another way in or out for any wedding guest who happened to be a murderer.

Two things had worried Powerscourt about this case from the start. He found that his brain seemed to come up with new answers when he least expected it. The first related to the silence of Cosmo Colville. The second, and the one that assailed him now, had to do with the gun. The prosecution, Charles Augustus Pugh had been adamant on this point, were sure that they could prove that it was Randolph Colville’s own gun. Powerscourt’s initial reaction was that they might be putting two and two and two together and making six. Pugh himself was moderately hopeful that he could open some doubts in the jury’s mind in cross-examination, but he couldn’t be sure. Suppose, Powerscourt’s brain suggested to him, as he stood on the bottom steps of the staircase leading from the state bedroom with a couple of pigeons waddling across the grass in front of him, suppose it really was Randolph’s gun. Why had he brought it? Did he intend to murder somebody at the wedding? Was he bringing it in self-defence? Defence of whose self, of his own, or of some member of his family’s?

He made some detailed drawings in a small black notebook and headed round the house for a final chat with Mrs Colville. She handed him a seating plan, with the writing carried out in one of the most beautiful hands Powerscourt had ever seen.

‘It’s Ursula, Emily’s sister, who does the handwriting, she’s very artistic. Willougby thinks she could be famous one day.’ Mrs Nash looked much more comfortable in her garden than she had in her house. ‘I tell you one thing that might be helpful, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said. ‘I think that young policeman had a seating plan, or maybe it should be a standing plan, for where everybody was when the gun went off. He and his men took very careful statements from everybody here about exactly where they were at the time.’

‘The policeman’s name, I think you said, was Inspector Cooper. You don’t know where I could find him?’

‘He told us he could be found at Fakenham, but that he moved about a lot. Let me tell you something about Inspector Cooper, Lord Powerscourt. This is only female intuition, if you like. I have no evidence for it whatsoever. Willoughby told me some horrid barrister would rip me to shreds if I ever said it in a court of law.’

Mrs Nash paused once more, collecting her thoughts. Powerscourt waited.

‘I don’t believe he thought Cosmo did it, the murder, I mean. He came back here a couple of times after the wedding and I overheard him once telling his sergeant that they’d never persuade the boss that Cosmo hadn’t done it. “Cosmo’s going to hang,” he said, “for something he didn’t do.” Those were his exact words.’

‘How very interesting,’ said Powerscourt, fascinated to hear of dissent in the ranks of the constabulary. ‘That’s very helpful. Thank you so much for everything, Mrs Nash. If there is anything else you remember, please let me know. I’m so grateful for your help this morning.’

Georgina Nash watched him go. She knew there was something she should have told him, something that had been niggling at the edge of her brain for days. When it came back she would send a telegram to Markham Square.

Alfred Davis was a very worried man. Ever since he became general manager of Colville and Sons five years before, he had been worried. And this morning, as he leaned over the balcony on the first floor of the Colville Headquarters, north of Oxford Street, and watched his clerks settle down for another day’s work, he was even more worried than usual. The clerks’ days, he told himself, were often difficult. Alfred had, after all, begun his life with Colvilles as one of them. The accounts might not balance at the end of the day. Some minor arithmetical slip could plunge some mighty calculation involving port revenue into a spin from which it might never recover. But when these clerks put on their coats and hats at the end of the day and went home, they left their troubles at their desks. Alfred’s often pursued him into the night. As he lay beside his wife of twenty-eight years, her best nightcap wrapped tightly round her head, his worries would rise up from the dark and pursue him through the night hours. Continuity of supply, that was always a problem. If the Madeira ran out, there simply wouldn’t be any more customers for it. Reliable shipping. Almost daily in the newspapers Alfred read stories of strikes and lockouts and industrial disputes running through the world’s shipping lines like some contagious disease. Fraudsters and con men. Alfred had been in the business too long not be aware of the dangers of some plausible rogue turning up with an offer of Bordeaux or sherry at unrepeatable prices. Rarely did the samples match up to the deliveries once the contract had been signed. What tasted clean and fruity in the trial bottles had turned into sour vinegar by the time the deliveries rolled into the Colvilles’ warehouses.

And now, as he turned from the balcony and walked back the few paces to his office, there were new worries. Opinion at Colvilles’ Headquarters was divided on the likely impact on business of the murder of one senior member of the family and the arrest of another on the charge of murdering his brother. The younger, jollier employees thought the publicity would be good for trade. One of these cheerful souls had even heard a man in a public house the day before ordering two glasses of murderer’s claret and being served immediately without a question being asked. But the older members of the firm were pessimistic. They reasoned that people associated a glass of champagne or Madeira or sherry with fellowship and good cheer, with companionship and shared pleasure. The drinking public, they maintained, did not wish to be reminded of murder every time they opened a bottle of something.

And what Alfred realized, far more acutely than his fellows, was that the strange events at the Colville Nash wedding had ripped the heart out of the firm’s management. Old Walter, still the chairman, had virtually lost his senses, Alfred had heard, and had now taken to his bed. Certainly he hadn’t been seen north of Oxford Street since the disaster. Nathaniel hadn’t had anything to do with the firm for years. Randolph Colville could issue no instructions from beyond the grave and Cosmo, confined to Pentonville, could do no better. The younger Colvilles had neither the experience nor the training to make a valuable contribution to the business yet. So who was left? Who would have to carry the burden in the heat of the day? There was only one candidate, Alfred Davis told himself. He looked sadly into the mirror on his wall and found the lucky man.

Powerscourt found Inspector Cooper in Fakenham and took him for tea in the town’s best hotel. The Inspector was working on a more orthodox case now, a burglary and break-in at one of Norfolk’s finest Georgian houses. There was, he told Powerscourt, little chance of finding either the villains or the stolen goods, which he believed had disappeared into the welcoming embrace of London’s antique dealers the day after the crime. The Inspector had never met a private investigator before. He had, he told his new acquaintance, followed one or two of his earlier cases, particularly the one in the West Country cathedral which had featured heavily in the local press. But he was not prepared for Powerscourt’s opening question.

‘I gather, Inspector, that you don’t think Cosmo Colville killed his brother.’

The Inspector blushed. ‘What gave you that idea?’ he stammered after a second or two.

‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. I can’t, as the newspapermen are so fond of telling us, I can’t reveal my sources. But it’s true, isn’t it?’

Albert Cooper thought about what might happen to him if his superiors in the force thought he was giving comfort and indeed assistance to the other side. He thought about his mother and his sisters, dependent on his salary. He thought of his girl, Charlotte, so pretty and so quick when they took their walks together on Sunday afternoons. He thought of the proposal of marriage he was hoping to make on Christmas Eve. Could he throw all that away? For one thing stood out about the young man. It came from his mother and the teachers at his school who had liked him so much. He was a good boy, a regular attender at church on Sundays. Every fibre in his being wanted to tell the truth. He had never expected to be put to the test here over English breakfast tea and scones in the front room of the George Hotel.

Powerscourt waited. He watched the various emotions flicker over the Inspector’s face. ‘Let me try another question. I have the seating plan from Brympton Hall showing where everybody was to sit down at the wedding feast. I believe you have one or two more diagrams, seating or standing diagrams showing where people were in the garden and just before the shot was fired. Let me put it another way, if I may. Is it your opinion that Cosmo didn’t kill his brother, or do you know it? Do you have some hard evidence to his guilt or innocence?’

Only two days before, after Cosmo had been charged, the young man had taken out his plans once again, not the one indicating where everybody sat down, but the two before, one showing where the guests had been in the garden, and the other showing where they were just before the shot was fired. Taken together they were, he thought, the finest work of detection he had managed since he joined the force. He had looked at them again rather sadly and put them back in his drawer. He looked up at Powerscourt now with a look of appeal in his eyes.

‘It’s opinion, it’s a hunch,’ he said quietly. Surely he couldn’t get into trouble for saying that. Chief Inspector Weir might tell him off but he wouldn’t fire him for saying such a thing.

‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt, taking pity on the young man, ‘let us leave it at that for now. My investigation is still in its early stages. Maybe I shall find some other evidence. But let me ask you one final question, Inspector.’

Cooper nodded miserably.

‘Have you watched a man hang? Have you watched that dismal procession early in the morning, the hangman, the criminal, the reluctant vicar, the governor of the prison taking what will be, for one of them, the last walk of his life?’

Inspector Cooper shook his head.

‘Pity that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’ve always thought that all policemen involved in murder cases should be taken to witness it at first hand. Now then, Inspector. If I find, close to this trial, that I am no further forward than I am today, may I come back and speak to you again? I wouldn’t want you to have the death of an innocent man on your conscience. There are loyalties higher than those to the police service, I can assure you.’

Albert Cooper looked at him desperately. Was there to be no peace? It seemed easier to agree for now. ‘Of course you can come and see me again if you wish. I can’t stop you. But I can’t guarantee that I will say anything other than I have said today.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, enough of this serious business. More tea? Scone with jam and cream? A slice of this excellent chocolate cake?’