Death of a wine merchant

6

Sir Pericles Freme was clanking as he walked across the Powerscourt hall towards the Powerscourt dining room. Powerscourt himself, speeding down the stairs to meet his guest, thought he sounded rather like the milkman nearing the end of his round. The dining room was on the ground floor, looking out over Markham Square. There was a long Georgian table with elegant candles. The highlight of the room was a full-length portrait of one of Lady Lucy’s ancestors, a general who had served in the American War of Independence. Lady Lucy’s family always maintained that the work was by the hand of Sir Joshua Reynolds and certainly the painting did have something of the swagger and panache of another Reynolds soldier, Colonel Banastre Tarleton, in the National Gallery. Powerscourt had never been sure. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, was waiting for instructions by the far side of the fireplace.

‘Sir Pericles, how good of you to come,’ said Powerscourt, directing his guest to a chair at the far end of the table. Freme carried out a brief inspection of the general on the wall, nodded as if in posthumous salute, and drew four bottles out of his bag.

‘I changed my modus operandi halfway through this inquiry,’ he began, in the manner of a man telling a friend he has changed his golf swing. ‘That is to say, I decided it might be more illuminating to compare some Colville wines with those of their fellow wine merchants rather than my earlier policy of comparing Colville bottles of today with Colville bottles of earlier years.’

‘Now then,’ Sir Pericles began fiddling about in his bag for a corkscrew, ‘you might think that there is a risk attached to this new policy. How do we know that our other man is a man of probity, that what he calls claret actually is claret? What do you say to that, Powerscourt, eh?’ The old soldier looked sternly at his host.

‘I can only suppose that you are certain that your other claret is the real thing, if you can be certain? Forgive me, Sir Pericles, how many glasses do you think we need? Rhys here can bring them in directly.’

‘Let’s be on the safe side and say a dozen. And could we have some cold water? Now then, this house claret here,’ he pointed to the bottle closest to him, ‘comes from Berry Bros. amp; Rudd. It is the cheapest blend they sell. I have compared it with the same sort of wine from other reputable and rather expensive merchants and they all taste, more or less, the same.’

There was a loud plop as Sir Pericles opened his two bottles of claret in quick succession. Right on cue, Rhys slipped back into the room with the glasses and the water. Sir Pericles poured a small measure from each bottle into a couple of glasses.

‘Now then,’ he swirled the wine around in his glasses, ‘people talk an awful lot of rot about wine, always have. Imbibo, ergo sum. Shouldn’t be surprised if the bloody Romans hadn’t warbled away in their best Latin about heads and bouquets and such nonsense. Probably picked it up from the Greeks. Dodgy morals, those Greeks, always thought so. But I digress. The thing to do, Powerscourt, is to remember what it tastes like. That’s all. Then have a go at the other chap and see if you think they’re from the same family. That’s all we have to do. For God’s sake don’t talk about fruit.’

Raising his glass to the general on the wall, Sir Pericles took a slug of the Berry Bros. amp; Rudd glass and swallowed it. Powerscourt was relieved to see he hadn’t spat it out on to the floor. He didn’t think Lucy would have approved. There might not be many domestic implements not present in the Markham Square household, but spittoons, unfortunately on this occasion, were among them. Powerscourt followed suit. The second glass with the Colville wine followed fairly quickly afterwards.

‘Now then, I’m not going to put words into your mouth, Powerscourt, but tell me what you think.’ Sir Pericles began clearing his palate with a glass of water. Powerscourt paused for a moment.

‘Well,’ he said at last, feeling rather nervous, as if his history essay was being marked by the headmaster in person, ‘there’s definitely a difference. The Berry claret is smoother and maybe richer than the other one. The Colville wine tastes a bit rougher, in my opinion. Maybe the grapes were on the wrong side of the hill.’

‘Well done, Powerscourt, I couldn’t have put it better myself. The question we now have to ask ourselves is whether the Colville offering is a claret at all.’ Sir Pericles took another quick glass of water and rummaged again in his bag. ‘Just one more. On the assumption that the Berry claret is the real thing, we can, I think, safely hazard a guess that this other bottle which says it is a claret will also be a claret. Justerini amp; Brooks, round the corner from Berry’s in St James’s. Let me just pour a couple of glasses of that for us.’

Freme poured two more glasses. Powerscourt suddenly wondered if Johnny Fitzgerald, with his greater experience of quaffing wine in vast quantities, might not have been the better man for this particular job. Sir Pericles and Powerscourt took substantial sips of the latest offering from London’s finest and put their glasses down at virtually the same time.

‘Well?’ said the little man.

‘The same as the Berry one, I should say,’ said Powerscourt, wiping his lips with his handkerchief. ‘I don’t mean it’s exactly the same, but I should say it’s as if they both went to the same school or were taught to sing by the same master.’

‘Capital, we’ll make a connoisseur out of you yet.’ Sir Pericles peered briefly into his bag as if another half-dozen bottles were waiting inside. ‘But you see our difficulty, the general difficulty in the authentication of wines. You and I both think that two of these bottles are claret and the other one probably isn’t. Two other people might take a contrary view. We could pay to have some wine supremos from Bordeaux to give their view on the problem, but they might not agree either. Some of these so-called experts are always reluctant to taste wines blind because they will often get it wrong.’

‘Tell me, Sir Pericles, what do you think the Colville wine actually is? Does it have any claret in there at all?’

‘It’s certainly a blend of something,’ said Sir Pericles, ‘maybe there’s a bit of claret in there somewhere to give it a base. Then there’s probably a whole lot of cheap red from Languedoc and may be a dash of Algerian if it lacks body. The blender will have to change his proportions every year to keep each year’s taste as close as he can to the taste of the year before- even cheap Languedoc isn’t going to be the same in 1908 as it was in 1907. They don’t have a problem with the labels, they put their own on. The stuff is probably cooked up somewhere in the Medoc and shipped from there. It’ll add to the authentic look if the wine has been parcelled up and sent over here by some dodgy shippers or merchants in or near Bordeaux.’

‘Can we prove it? That it’s not proper claret, I mean?’ asked Powerscourt, thinking of Charles Augustus Pugh grilling some unfortunate wine merchant in the Old Bailey.

‘Very difficult. Almost impossible,’ said Sir Pericles, rubbing his hands together cheerfully. ‘For every witness the defence calls to pronounce it a fake, the prosecution will counter with one who says that it is the real thing, maybe the real thing in a bad year, but still the real thing.’

‘What about the money?’ said Powerscourt as another train of thought struck him.

‘What do you mean about the money?’

‘Sorry, I was thinking. If we could show that Colvilles bought their supplies for a lot less than everybody else in the same year, mightn’t that show that they weren’t buying genuine claret?’

Sir Pericles stared at the three open bottles on the table. ‘On the face of it, it would. But they would come back then with a different sort of argument. They buy in great bulk so they usually get a discount. Or they have just begun trading with a new firm in Bordeaux who offered an enormous discount on the first year’s supply to win the contract. Or their suppliers were able to buy a lot of wine cheaply by waiting for the end of the season when prices always go down if it’s not a good year. Always remember, most years are not good years. And,’ Sir Pericles rummaged about in his bag once more, ‘if you can persuade any of the money men who work for the wine merchants like the Colvilles, or even Berry Bros. amp; Rudd, to let you inspect their account books, I’ll buy you your very own vineyard in the Medoc.’

‘We don’t seem to have made much progress, Sir Pericles,’ said Powerscourt sadly. ‘Nothing that would help us in court at any rate.’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Freme. ‘You asked me to find out if there was anything suspicious about the Colville wines. I am happy to say there is, certainly about the claret. I shall continue my researches with various other Colville offerings. I shall ask around in the wine trade generally. Discreetly, of course. And now, before I take my leave, I promised you another recipe. This one,’ he pulled a slim volume out of the side pocket of his bag, ‘is the one with the lemon peel. It comes from The Art and Mystery of Vintners and Wine Coopers, 1692. “How to make Rhenish Wine: Take one handful of dried limon peels and put them into ten or twelve gallons of white wine, and put in one pint of damask rose water; then rowl it up and down, and lay it upright, and open the bung of it, and take a little branch of clary and let it steep twenty-four hours; and take it out and it will taste very well.”’

‘I cannot imagine what that would have tasted like, Sir Pericles, I shudder to think.’

‘Let me leave you with something better, Lord Powerscourt. We were travelling earlier on the lower slopes of the claret mountain. This comes from the very summit and I commend it to you and your wife.’ One last dip into the bag and Sir Pericles pulled out another bottle. ‘Some people think that Lafite here is supreme among clarets, the creme de la creme.’

Powerscourt told Lady Lucy after Sir Pericles had left that he expected Johnny Fitzgerald to materialize in a couple of hours at most. He had always possessed an uncanny knack of knowing when his friend had some special sort of liquid in the house, as if he could smell it from the other side of London. Shortly before six o’clock there he was in the Powerscourt drawing room, his eye drawn like a magnet to the Lafite, recently promoted from the dining room downstairs to a small table by the window in the drawing room on the first floor.

‘I’m delighted to see, Francis, that you’re moving up in the wine world at last. Your stuff has never been bad in the past, I grant you that, but now you’re up there on Mount Olympus.’

He inspected the label with great reverence, as if he were looking at a Shakespeare First Folio. ‘Did you know there’s been a great increase in burglary in these parts in the last few weeks, Francis? Fortnum and Mason burglaries the police are calling them, only the luxury items get taken. The other thing they say about this Lafite stuff is that the bottles have a habit of falling over and breaking of their own accord. They’re famous for it. Happens more often than you might think.’

‘Perhaps you’d better open it, Johnny,’ said his friend with a smile. ‘It would be such a shame if the burglars got it first.’

Johnny Fitzgerald held the bottle up to the light. It glowed a deep red. He inspected the label closely. He ran his hand very slowly down the side of the bottle. ‘I haven’t tasted this Chateau Lafite since my uncle introduced me to it on my sixteenth birthday, Francis. He said it would tell me what real wine should taste like. I was only allowed two glasses of the stuff. Bloody uncle knocked off the rest of the bottle on his own.’

Johnny inserted the corkscrew very slowly. He peered into the depths of the bottle when it was open. ‘We’d better have three glasses, Francis. We couldn’t leave Lady Lucy out of this.’

Shortly the three all had a glass in their hand, Johnny sniffing delicately at the liquid like a bloodhound that might have just found a new scent, a new trail for the elusive fox.

‘By God,’ said Johnny, ‘I don’t think they have much of this stuff down there in the Colville warehouses, it’s superb. Now then, Francis, let me tell you what little I have discovered so far.’

Johnny Fitzgerald cast a quick glance over his shoulder to check the bottle was still present and correct. ‘There are two very different sorts of people who work for the Colvilles at the lower end of the trade. You could call them the workers by hand and the workers by brain as that bearded old man up in Highgate Cemetery put in one of his pamphlets long ago. The workers by hand are essentially moving the stuff around in one way or another. The wine arrives at the docks in barrels or tonneaux or barriques or feuillettes or pipes. The Colville men unload it, take it to the warehouses, store it or bottle it in their own bottling plant with their own label production and finally it’s despatched to the Colville shops or their regional headquarters in Edinburgh or Dublin. The same thing happens with the gin over in Hammersmith. That’s a very crude description. It’s an enormous operation and the men are, on the whole, satisfied with what they do, though there were the usual undercurrents about low wages and the need for strike action. Are you with me so far, Francis, Lady Lucy?’

The Powerscourts nodded. Johnny paused to take another draught of his wine, his face breaking into a smile as the taste sank in. ‘You learn some funny things in this line of work,’ he went on. ‘Did you ever realize what the most important factor is in what a country drinks? You didn’t? Well, let me tell you, it’s politics and it’s taxes. During the Napoleonic Wars precious little French wine ever made it here. They say the Garrick Club was down to its last couple of cases of Chateau Latour when peace broke out. Even if it had managed to get here, the wine, that is, the government would have slapped a great bolt of duty on it. So what were Englishmen drinking for most of last century? Port, that’s what went down, port from those English merchants and growers in the Douro Valley. Portugal, as the Portugese reminded the English every time they even thought of increasing the duty, was England’s oldest ally. All the way back to Henry the bloody Navigator, whoever he was.’

There was a sudden outbreak of motor horns hooting outside, coming from the King’s Road a couple of hundred yards away. Voices could be heard, most of them raised in anger.

‘Later on,’ Johnny continued after a glance out into the square, ‘South African wines began to get a look in as the politicians wanted to encourage the wine industry in the colonies. Now here’s a strange thing, Francis. Even those porters and warehousemen who work for the Colvilles can sing Gladstone’s praises. You might think that he was somewhat odd, an austere old bugger, if you ask me, forever trying to save Ireland by day and the prostitutes of London by night, but he did one thing they’ve never forgotten. Somewhere in the 1860s, I think, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and taking five hours to deliver his Budget, he cut the duty on French wine. He wanted to encourage trade with the French, you see. That was the making of the Colvilles. Unlike the rest of the industry they cut their prices by almost the same as the cut in duty and prospered mightily. The other wine merchants hung on to most of the cut for themselves.’

‘Did I hear you right, Johnny?’ Powerscourt was refilling the glasses. ‘Did you say they have their own label production? Does that mean you can make up any number of phoney vineyards with posh names and stick the label on the bottles? Or indeed real vineyards with posh names and stick them on the bottle, whatever might be inside?’

‘It does, my friend,’ Johnny replied, swirling the fresh wine around in his glass, ‘and there’s worse. Much worse. If you could find the right artist and the right expert in typefaces, you could make, in your Colville labelling manufactory, a label like this one here for Chateau Latour. You don’t, of course, put Chateau Latour in the bottles. You find some good claret from a good year and then, if you’re really clever, you say it’s a Latour from a bad year. That way expectations wouldn’t be so high. But your good Bordeaux in a good year would still cost about half what a Latour would cost you in a bad one. You could make a fortune.’

Powerscourt realized that the possibilities for fraud in the wine industry were virtually limitless, far wider than he had suspected at the beginning of his investigation. But he was still as far away as ever from solving the murder. ‘So tell us, Johnny, what did you learn from these workers by hand down in the docks?’

‘Precious little so far. They’re all East Enders, most of these Colville men, Lady Lucy, and they stick together like the planks of wood on their wine cases. The younger ones were so suspicious they hardly told me anything at all. I think they thought I was an agent from the Customs and Excise, come to learn their secrets. They don’t like Customs and Excise much in those parts. Some of the older ones, nearing retirement, were slightly more forthcoming but usually more about the past than the present. There are a couple of old boys who’ve worked for Colvilles, man and boy since about 1860. For them those early days were like a golden age. Old Walter Colville and his brother Nathaniel were the driving forces back then. They were young, everything was a great adventure and they were happy to take risks that the firm wouldn’t take today.’

A high-pitched scream rose from the bottom of the stairs, followed by the noise of small feet charging up them. The twins were on the warpath once again. The parents smiled to each other.

‘And they were good to their workers back then,’ Johnny went on, ‘far fewer of them then, of course, than there are now. I was told heart-warming tales of all employees being presented with half a dozen bottles every Christmas, and, in one memorable year, a goose for every worker. Now they fear the only present they will get on Christmas Day is the sack. Spirits are very low. I couldn’t work out why. I don’t think it was the murder and the arrest of Cosmo. People are always grumbling about their work, not what it was, new-fangled systems and new-fangled people coming in to replace the old ways, but these warehouse people are just miserable.’

‘And what about the other lot, the clerks and the junior accountants, Johnny. Were they any more forthcoming?’

‘The workers by brain? Well, they were and they weren’t, Francis. They’re all holed up at the back of Oxford Street with a detachment of auxiliaries at Hammersmith to make sure the gin isn’t watered down or whatever you’d do to gin. The ones I managed to pour drink down were all quite junior. Once they reach a certain position, senior clerks or whoever they might be, they don’t go to the pub any more, they take on airs, they’re off to some little villa in north London and Mrs Senior Clerk and maybe Master Senior Clerk and Miss Senior Clerk. The odd thing about these youngsters I talked to, Francis, is they’re all frightened. I think, but I don’t know, that some terrible financial catastrophe is about to hit them. One over-imaginative young man told me he was sure the Colvilles were being buffeted by those winds you get before a hurricane strikes. And it’s not the murder. It’s as if there’s something rotten that is about to come to light and maybe blow them all away. Sorry if that sounds melodramatic, I’m just the messenger for the moment. There are two or three lads I’m seeing tonight who may be able to tell me more.’

‘Well, that’s all fascinating, Johnny,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Did you get the impression they were frightened of a person or persons, or some financial calamity?’

‘The calamity, Lady Lucy, definitely the calamity.’

As Johnny Fitzgerald made his way off for an early evening’s drinking session with the young men of Colvilles, Powerscourt decided to open another line of attack. He had Johnny Fitzgerald at the lower end of the enterprise, Sir Pericles with his tastings of the Colville product in the middle. Now it was time to try for the top. He made his way downstairs to the telephone in his little study on the ground floor. The telephone had only recently been installed. Powerscourt had expected to be the principal user of the instrument, but found that this was not so. Lady Lucy had fallen in love with the possibilities of morning chat, afternoon chat, evening chat with her friends and relations. These, in her turn, she persuaded to subscribe to the new service as soon as possible. Lady Lucy assured them that they didn’t want to be behind the times, to be out of step with fashion. Powerscourt thought his wife should be given some large reward by the telephone companies for swelling their lists of subscribers.

He sat down at his desk and asked the operator for the number of his brother-in-law William Burke. Burke was a great power in the City of London, director of a number of banks and mighty insurance companies, a man widely respected across the City for good advice and sound judgement. At first Powerscourt thought the Burkes must be out, but just when he was on the point of putting down the instrument there was a huge bellow down the line: ‘Burke!’

Powerscourt remembered that William Burke did not believe that his words would be transmitted if he spoke in his normal tone of voice. The magic concealed in those little wires would not work. So he shouted. He yelled. He spoke at the top of his voice. His brother-in-law had often wondered what happened in the Burke offices in Bishopsgate. Had his people built him some special soundproof box where he could holler away to his heart’s content? If not, Powerscourt thought his conversations would have been audible all the way from London Wall to the Bank of England.

‘Powerscourt!’ said Powerscourt, holding the great black receiver a foot or so away from his ear. ‘I need some advice, William.’

‘Fire ahead,’ boomed Burke.

‘I’m investigating the death of that Colville, the man shot at the wedding. You remember?’

‘I do indeed,’ bawled Burke, ‘terrible business, terrible. And the brother locked up in Pentonville. Some fellow told me the other day that you were trying to get him off.’

‘I am, William,’ said Powerscourt, resisting the temptation to hold the instrument even further away. ‘This is where I hope you can help. There is something terribly wrong at Colvilles and I can’t find out what it is. There’s very little time. The clerks think some financial disaster is about to overcome them. I’ve got Johnny Fitzgerald talking to the porters and the junior staff and a chap called Freme trying to find out if the wines are genuine.’

‘Sir Pericles Freme?’ asked Burke. ‘Smallish chap, rather like a gnome, ex-military, white hair?’

‘That’s him,’ said Powerscourt. ‘What of it?’

‘He used to advise my parents about what wines to buy years ago, Francis. Sorry, I’ve interrupted you.’

‘Never mind. The point is this, William. Could you ask around, discreetly, of course? Has anybody heard anything strange about the Colvilles? Is there a scandal waiting to break? Would it be a big enough scandal that it might lead to murder?’

‘Even in this cut-throat world around me,’ boomed Burke, ‘it would have to be a sizeable sort of scandal for pistols at a wedding. Not impossible, mind you. Family honour might be involved, Francis. Now then. I don’t think the Colvilles are with any of my banks,’ Powerscourt at the other end of the line grinned with delight at the mention of ‘my banks’, ‘but I think I know who they are with. And the chap that runs that bank owes me a favour, a bloody great favour. Leave it with me, Francis. I’ll try to call you tomorrow.’

After a final yell of regard to Lucy and the family, Burke was gone – gone, Powerscourt thought, to the mysterious world of money he inhabited, where rumour swirled round the courts and the alleys of the City, where a man might become rich one day and lose it all the next. But were all these transactions a recipe for murder and sudden death?