Death of a wine merchant

5

Questions about legal procedure were racing through Powerscourt’s mind as his train took him back to London. Suppose he made no progress in this investigation before the matter came to trial. He thought they could demand access to police documents as part of the defence case. His memory of court procedures told him they could cross-examine Inspector Cooper if he was called as witness for the prosecution. Could they subpoena his various seating plans, for Powerscourt was sure the young man had at least three of them? That would cause a sensation in court. He could hear Pugh’s voice now, echoing round the Old Bailey. ‘I put it to you, Inspector Cooper, that you do not believe the man in the dock, Cosmo Colville, is guilty of this murder. Look at him before you speak. Is that not the case?’ ‘Tell me, Inspector, for I find this scarcely credible, that you, the principal investigating officer, are not sure my client the defendant murdered his brother?’ Powerscourt felt sure that Pugh would not suggest that Inspector Cooper believed Cosmo was innocent. It would be enough to suggest that he was uncertain. Surely that would be enough to sow a doubt so grave that it would lead the jury to an acquittal. He heard Pugh again: ‘Call Inspector Cooper’s superior officer!’

And what, he said to himself, as they reached the outskirts of the capital, would happen to Inspector Cooper? Would he be dismissed from the service? Would his superiors forbid him from giving evidence? Could they save him from disgrace by leaking the story to the newspapers? ‘Shame on you, Norfolk police!’ the headline might scream. ‘Brave policeman defies superiors to see justice done and is fired by Chief Constable!’ Powerscourt suspected that the police were as closed a society as the regiments in the British Army. They would close ranks behind their inferiors and their superiors alike. Inspector Cooper would be ruined. He prayed he would never have to go back to Fakenham to speak to the young man again. He wondered if he would try to bring him to court and to the end of his career if he had to. At least Cooper would still be alive. In the meantime, he, Powerscourt, must write to Charles Augustus Pugh.

Powerscourt found a note from Sir Pericles Freme awaiting him on the hall table in Markham Square. ‘Definitely something odd going on with Colville wine,’ he read, ‘need earlier years’ supply before being able to come to a definite conclusion. Have found splendid recipe involving dried lemon peel for you next time you come. Regards, Freme.’

What in heaven’s name were people doing making wine with lemon peel, Powerscourt asked himself as he went up the stairs to the first-floor drawing room. He found Lady Lucy hard at work writing letters at the little table by the windows. A pile of envelopes, all carefully addressed in her immaculate hand, were awaiting the attentions of the postman.

‘Francis!’ She smiled with pleasure and kissed her husband. ‘How nice to see you. How was Norfolk and that poor Mrs Nash of Brympton Hall?’

‘I think Mrs Nash will pull through in the end,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but they’re all terribly upset. The husband is even thinking of selling up and moving away apparently.’

‘Good Lord,’ said Lady Lucy, for whom moving house was one of life’s most serious enterprises, never to be undertaken lightly, ‘how truly terrible for them.’

‘But tell me, my love,’ said Powerscourt, ‘what of your cousin Milly and the villainous husband?’

Lady Lucy looked grave. ‘It’s even worse that we thought, Francis. It’s frightful. Husband Timothy rejoiced that Randolph Colville was dead. “I’m absolutely delighted,” he said to Milly, “and with any luck that other bugger Cosmo won’t be far behind him. Best news I’ve heard in ages. One shot through the heart, the other about to feel the noose round his neck. Excellent!”’

‘How did he know Randolph was shot through the heart? I thought the wedding guests were only told he was dead.’

‘I expect it will have leaked out,’ said Lady Lucy sadly, ‘and then the husband of the year went off to celebrate in some drinking club he belongs to near Paddington station. He said he was going to drink to the end of the Colvilles.’

‘And what about money, Lucy? Do they have any?’

‘Not as far as Milly can find out, they haven’t. That’s why I’m writing all these letters, Francis. I want to see what the family feeling is about lending them some money while times are bad. We may have to call a family meeting.’

‘Really,’ said Powerscourt, who had never actually seen one of these mass gatherings of Lucy’s tribe in action. He wondered if they would have to hire Lord’s Cricket Ground or the Royal Albert Hall to accommodate all the relations. ‘How will you stop the husband making off with all the money you raise?’

‘I’ve asked them all about that too,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Somebody must have an answer. There’s one other thing, I nearly forgot. Milly claims she’s sure she saw a man at the wedding reception who wasn’t English. She didn’t think he could be a Nash or a Colville.’

‘Well, the wine business extends all over Europe. There are bound to have been some foreigners there on the Colville side.’

‘I told Milly I’d pass it on, that’s all, Francis. I don’t suppose there’s anything in it.’

Powerscourt did not reply. But as the hours went by that evening he found himself thinking about it more and more. This was the first indication so far that an alien body, a person not a Colville and not a Nash, had been at the scene and could have been the murderer. He wondered if the young Inspector Colville had discovered the same thing, if somewhere on his seating plans there was a guest marked as X or Y because nobody knew their name. Was that why the detective had decided that Cosmo Colville was not the killer?

Powerscourt gasped the following morning as he read the Obituary columns of The Times. Lady Lucy looked at him sharply. This wasn’t normal behaviour for her Francis. ‘Is there anything wrong, my love? Something in the paper that’s upset you?’

Powerscourt held up his hand. ‘Just give me a minute, Lucy, till I’ve finished this.’ When he had finished reading the obituary he folded the newspaper carefully and put it at the back of the table.

‘There’s been another death, Lucy, another Colville gone to meet his maker.’

‘How sad, that’s two in less than a month. Who is it this time?’

‘It’s Walter, the old boy, grandfather of the groom at the wedding, father of Randolph, one of the patriarchs of the Colville wine business.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything suspicious, do you, Francis?’

‘God knows. They do say he was terribly cut up about the wedding and all that followed. A fellow told me the other day he’d aged ten years since the murder.’

‘Poor old man,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘If Randolph hadn’t been killed his father would still be alive today. The Brympton Hall murderer has claimed another victim.’

The walls of Pentonville seemed virtually impregnable to Powerscourt as he made his way there that afternoon for a meeting with Cosmo Colville. Built in the middle of the last century, the prison had not been notorious until it took over from Newgate the role of Hangman’s Prison in 1902. And when they knocked Newgate down, Powerscourt remembered, they replaced it with the Old Bailey, thus ensuring that the courtrooms and the wigs of the lawyers replaced the noose and the drop of the gallows. Indeed the very gallows that had despatched the condemned at Newgate were dismantled and recreated plank by awful plank at Pentonville. As Powerscourt waited in a little office looking out over the exercise yard he wondered if the prisoners still had to do duty all day on the tread wheel, turning a great wheel with their feet time after time after time for no purpose whatsoever. He remembered that some unlucky prisoners had to turn the wheel two thousand times before they were allowed to eat their breakfast. Sadistic warders were known to enforce a daily regimen of twenty thousand turns on their victims.

A middle-aged guard brought Cosmo Colville into the room and sat him down opposite Powerscourt at a mean prison table with mean prison chairs. The guard retreated to stand just outside the door. Prison clothes did little for Cosmo. It was hard to imagine that this prisoner who now looked like all the other prisoners had in earlier times eaten at London’s most fashionable restaurants and danced at the grandest hotels on Park Lane and Piccadilly. He made no acknowledgement of Powerscourt’s presence, not a look, not a nod, not a smile. It was as if he had completed the long retreat into his own head. Cosmo Colville had fair hair and pale brown eyes and a wide forehead. His expression, all through the interview, was one of resolute obstinacy. Powerscourt had talked to one of Colville’s best friends the day before the interview. ‘I was very gentle with him,’ the friend had said. ‘His wife and his children and his other friends are all being gentle with him. Maybe it’s time somebody took a hard line with Cosmo, reminded him of what may happen. What probably will happen if he doesn’t start talking.’

‘Thank you so much for seeing me,’ Powerscourt began, ignoring the fact that Colville had little choice about being brought before him. ‘I thought I would talk to you about what happens here, if you don’t want to talk.’

There was no movement of any kind from Cosmo. ‘The first man to be hanged here was killed in October six years ago,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘John Macdonald he was, a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman. He was a costermonger and petty thief, this Macdonald. He and his partner in crime had a falling-out over the proceeds of a robbery. His victim had his head almost cut off from his body by Macdonald’s knife. Then the trapdoor opened here early one morning and John Macdonald entered the history books as the first man to be hanged in Pentonville. Do you want to end up like that, Mr Colville? If you don’t speak soon, you will enter the same history books as the man who swung because he wouldn’t talk. Is that what you want?’

Cosmo Colville didn’t even look at him. He spoke not a word.

‘Then there was a man called Henry Williams,’ Powerscourt continued his catalogue of murder and retribution. ‘He thought his wife had been unfaithful to him while he was away fighting with his regiment in the Boer War. When he came back he took their little daughter up to London with him. That evening he put her in bed with her favourite doll beside her. When she was asleep he cut her throat and wrapped her little body in the Union flag. To the end he protested that he had done it because he loved her and could not bear his daughter living with her mother and a man who was not her father. Henry Pierrepoint, the executioner, said Williams was the bravest man he ever hanged. But courage didn’t do him any good, did it, Mr Colville? Williams was still left dancing on the air. So will you be if you don’t say something soon. I don’t think that bit lasts very long, the legs flailing about, the neck about to break, everything about to go dark, perhaps a scream or two. What do you say, Mr Colville?’

The only sound in the little room was the distant clanging of some prison bars. The prisoner kept his counsel.

‘Then there was a man called Charles Stowe. He became infatuated with a barmaid. When the girl refused to have anything to do with him he went to the Lord Nelson public house where she worked late one night and grabbed her. Then he stabbed her a number of times. The interesting thing about Stowe is that we know how the hangmen did it. They were brothers called Billington from Lancashire, these hangmen. They always took details of the height and the weight of the prisoners in the condemned cell and used them to work out how big the drop should be. Stowe was five foot four and eleven stone so they gave him a drop of seven feet two inches. I suspect they’d left themselves quite a margin of error, Mr Colville, I expect six feet six would have been more than enough but they weren’t taking any chances. If you don’t speak before your trial I expect the hangman will be along to have you weighed and measured in your turn. Let me see, I’d say you’re about five feet ten and around twelve stone or so. Seven feet drop be all right for you?’

Silence reigned in the little room. Powerscourt could hear the guard hopping from foot to foot outside the door. He wondered how much longer he had left.

‘Some of those hanged in Pentonville have killed more than one person,’ Powerscourt tried once more. ‘Let’s take chemist’s assistant Arthur Devereux. He and his wife Beatrice had a little boy and not long after that they had twins. Money was very tight. He wasn’t paid very much, our Arthur, so he decided on drastic measures. He bought a large tin trunk and a bottle of chloroform and morphine, which he persuaded Beatrice to give to the twins and then take herself. He told her it was cough medicine. When they were dead he put them in the trunk and sealed the lid with glue to keep it airtight. He had the trunk sent off to a warehouse in Harrow and moved away with his son to a new address. But he’d reckoned without the mother-in-law. She didn’t believe his story that they’d all gone on holiday. She learnt that a removal company van from Harrow had called at the house. She set off for Harrow where she found the warehouse and the trunk and the three bodies. Devereux was traced to Coventry and tried to persuade the jury at his trial that Beatrice had killed the twins and then committed suicide. He had found them all and panicked, sending them all to the warehouse. He was not believed. His hangman, Henry Pierrepoint, recorded that Devereux stood five feet eleven and weighed eleven stone four. Pierrepoint gave him a drop of six feet six inches.’

Powerscourt wondered if Colville had lost his voice. There was no reply, no response, nothing at all. Cosmo might as well have been a statue. Powerscourt pulled a book out of his pocket and began to read:

‘“He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed.”’

‘This is an account of the last days and hours of a man called Charles Thomas Wooldridge, sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards, executed HM Prison, Reading, Berkshire, 7th July 1896.’

Not a muscle moved in Cosmo’s face. Powerscourt read on until he came to the morning of the execution. In the corridor outside a group of prisoners were being escorted to some unknown destination.

‘“At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,

At seven all was still,

But the sough and swing of a mighty wing

The prison seemed to fill,

For the Lord of Death with icy breath

Had entered in to kill.”’

Even the Lord of Death drew no reaction from Cosmo Colville. Powerscourt saw that the prison warder had tiptoed right up to the door and seemed to be listening to the words.

‘“And as one sees most fearful things

In the crystal of a dream,

We saw the greasy hempen rope

Hooked to the blackened beam,

And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare

Strangled into a scream.”’

Still there was no reaction from Cosmo. The man must have a heart like a stone. There was one last passage Powerscourt hoped might draw out some reaction.

‘“The Warders strutted up and down,

And kept their herd of brutes,

Their uniforms were spick and span,

And they wore their Sunday suits,

But we knew the work they had been at,

By the quicklime on their boots.”’

The warder had opened the door a fraction to catch the end of the poem. Powerscourt carried on reading. Far off, deep inside the prison, a man was screaming.

‘“For where a grave had opened wide,

There was no grave at all:

Only a stretch of mud and sand

By the hideous prison-wall,

And a little heap of burning lime,

That the man should have his pall.”’

Powerscourt looked up again into the face of Cosmo Colville. There was nothing there, only a flicker in the eyes that might have been contempt. Cosmo moved his chair back from the table.

‘“For he has a pall, this wretched man,

Such as few men can claim:

Deep down below a prison-yard,

Naked for greater shame, He lies, with

fetters on each foot,

Wrapt in a sheet of flame!”’

Still there was no reaction from Cosmo. Powerscourt could have been reading from the Book of Job for all the impact he was having.

‘“And all the while the burning lime

Eats flesh and bone away,

It eats the brittle bone by night,

And the soft flesh by day,

It eats the flesh and bones by turns,

But it eats the heart alway.”’

‘Do you fancy that, Cosmo?’ Powerscourt asked suddenly. ‘The burning lime? Your soft flesh? Fetters on each foot?’

At last Cosmo Colville spoke for the first and last time between his arrest and his appearance in the Old Bailey. ‘That’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ he said, ‘by Oscar Wilde. I never liked the bugger when he was alive. I like the bugger even less now he’s dead.’ He rose from his chair and opened the door. The last words Powerscourt heard him say were: ‘Can I go back to my cell now, please?’

In his warehouse by the Thames the Alchemist was having a further wine tasting. He slid his special corkscrew down the side of three bottles of red with strange labels. He poured a small amount of liquid into three separate glasses on his table by the window. He tried each one carefully, leaving an interval of a couple of minutes between each tasting. He was humming the Overture from Cosi Fan Tutte as he worked. The Alchemist had tickets for Mozart’s opera in a couple of days’ time. It had always been one of his favourites. He made notes in his black book. BX LG68 AG15 was the winner of this particular session. Now the Alchemist would have to go to France to supervise the blending of this particular bastard and see that the barrels and the labels were properly French. He would also organize the shipping of the final consignment of phoney claret to its ultimate destination in London. The Alchemist had done this many times before. He still had some more pre-phylloxera wines to create. He hoped he could be back in time for the opera. And, as he contemplated his own cut from this consignment, he thought he might be able to buy a better seat. Maybe he would watch Fiordiligi and Dorabella and their lovers from the luxury of his very own box.

Emily Nash, daughter of Georgina and Willoughby Nash of Brympton Hall, was not a bad person. Certainly in the months leading up to her wedding she had behaved very well. Perhaps it would have been fairer to say she had behaved well most of the time. She may have been too romantic for her own good, Emily. She may have dreamed more often about glittering futures than was good for her. Her imagination may have run on champagne when it would have run better on old-fashioned Indian tea. But her impulses didn’t often win her over completely. Consider the case of her sick grandfather. This elderly gentleman had come to stay in his son’s house and fallen ill. After a couple of days his condition deteriorated and his relatives wondered if he would ever leave Brympton alive. A full-time nurse was hired to help look after him. When she disappeared Emily volunteered to take her place until a replacement could be found. The grandfather’s mind was going. His memory might be sharp in the morning and disappear after lunch. He was losing control of his limbs and his faculties. For a while Emily told herself how brave, how considerate she was being, a junior version of Florence Nightingale in the Fens. Her parents were proud of her when they could drag their attention away from the old man who had come to their house to die. They found little time to praise their daughter who was helping him live through the last days.

The replacement nurse was slow to arrive. Days passed. Emily’s mother helped out when she could but she had other duties to fulfil. Anyway, Georgina Nash reckoned, Emily was doing such a good job she hardly needed any help at all. For some people the mantle of heroine and martyr sits happiest when they are being praised and thanked by all around them. The praise and the thanks seemed to Emily to decrease as time went by. Sometimes her parents didn’t bother to thank her at all. She began to grow resentful, not towards her grandfather but towards her parents. She longed for her nursing days to finish so she could do something dramatic to celebrate her freedom.

The replacement nurse finally arrived. Almost at the same time her friend Tristram called, fresh from his duties as Colville representative in East Anglia. Tristram happened to have brought a number of samples of the firm’s finest with him. Emily longed for her freedom, for a gesture of independence. It came as the sun was setting over the North Sea, lying in a grassy hollow behind the beach, the second bottle of champagne wedged in Tristram’s boot.

Some weeks later she told her mother the results of her gesture of independence. She showed little remorse. If that first nurse hadn’t walked out, and if they hadn’t taken so long to find a replacement, Emily reasoned, then nothing like this would have happened. Georgina Nash thought about the girl’s options. She was deeply shocked but found it hard to be very cross with her daughter. Looking back, they should have taken more trouble to find a replacement nurse for her father-in-law. Secretly she was thrilled at the prospect of a grandchild. It would roll away the years, having a little one in the Hall again, playing hide and seek as the child grew older, Willoughby and the grooms teaching him or her to ride, floating on the lake in a boat in high summer with the dragonflies dancing on the water.

‘I don’t suppose Tristram has offered to marry you,’ Georgina said to her daughter, thinking how very unpleasant it might be to have that young man as an intimate member of her family.

‘He said he wouldn’t,’ said Emily. ‘I mean, I like Tristram well enough, but I’m not sure I’d want to spend the rest of my life with him.’

‘Indeed,’ said her mother firmly. ‘Now, this is what we must do. I am going to put in train a great deal of social organization, dinner parties, dances, balls, everything I can think of. And you, my child, are going to have a whirlwind romance. You have to be bowled over as you have never been bowled over before. Remember always, you need to be at the altar in about six weeks’ time. The young man must have the normal number of arms and legs, that sort of thing. Brains would be an advantage but are not essential. We do not have the time to indulge ourselves with good looks, but don’t turn them down if they come your way. You must do anything, and I mean anything, Emily, to persuade a young man to marry you. And you must do it quickly.’