Death of a wine merchant

9

Powerscourt had always thought that Brighton was the place where the pickpockets of London would go for their holidays. Latter-day Artful Dodgers and their companions could ply their trade in the crowds that thronged the station in summer and mingle profitably with holidaymakers on the sea front and the Palace Pier. Latter-day Fagins could supervise their flock from one of the smaller suites in one of Brighton’s less reputable hotels. As his train drew into the station he saw that the crowds were not there in the autumn. Waiting for the passengers to leave he spotted the man he had come to see, former Detective Inspector Walter Baker, one-time fingerprint expert for Scotland Yard. Retired policemen and retired military men were usually easy to spot, something to do, Powerscourt thought, with all those hours standing to attention.

‘How very kind of you to see me, Inspector Baker,’ said Powerscourt, extending his hand with a smile.

‘You don’t need to bother with the Inspector any more,’ said Baker, ‘I’ve done with inspecting now, thank God. We could walk to my little house, if you like, or we could take a cab if you’re in a hurry.’

There was a fine rain falling and a stiff breeze from the sea. ‘I think I’d like to walk, if that’s all right with you,’ said Powerscourt and the two men set off down the hill past the clock tower towards the Palace Pier and the sea. Powerscourt filled Baker in on his problems with the murder and the gun as they went. Baker stopped by the railings at the bottom of the pier and stared out across the Channel. Powerscourt wondered what he was looking at, the structure nearly a mile long, the elegant struts and girders holding it in position, the various entertainments that lined its walkways, the squadrons of seagulls wheeling and squawking along the sides, the gunmetal grey of the water.

‘I’d just like to think about it all for a moment, if I may, my lord,’ said Baker apologetically. ‘I’m a bit out of practice with fingerprints and I was never one of those policemen whose minds work like lightning and are often wrong. I’ll have some questions for you when you reach my house. Not far now.’

Over to his left Powerscourt saw the beginnings of the Regency terraces of Kemptown. The wind had strengthened and was driving the few visitors off the pier or into the cafes. The former Inspector Baker let them into a small bow-fronted house in a neat terrace. There was a portrait of Queen Victoria on one side of the hall and another of Edward the Seventh on the opposite side. As he sat down in the little front parlour Powerscourt saw that he was in a temple devoted to the British Royal Family. Henry the Seventh, looking as if he might have been torn from a school textbook, was to the right of the door. The rest of the Tudors followed in line of ascent, the Virgin Queen in the Armada Portrait looking perfectly content as if this was her favourite among the many palaces she could call her own. George followed George, the Third looking as if he was rehearsing for losing his wits, the Prince Regent scowling at him from the next available slot on the wall. On and on the cavalcade went, culminating in a portrait of the Kaiser in some Ruritanian uniform with his consort, Victoria’s daughter. On the bookshelves were various volumes relating to the Royal Family, and a whole series of knick-knacks of varying kinds, plates, medals, watches. It was rather like being at Lourdes, Powerscourt thought, with those terrible tourist shops dispensing holy trash to the sick and the dying.

‘My goodness me, Mr Baker,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I had no idea you were so devoted to the Royal Family.’

‘It’s not me, my lord, it’s Mabel, the wife. She’s been collecting this stuff for years. There’s a lot more of it upstairs. Whole bloody house is turning into a royal junk shop.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Such devotion!’

‘I’ll just see if I can persuade Mabel to make us some tea, my lord. I’ll be back in a second.’

The tea, when it arrived, came in an Edward the Seventh Coronation teapot, and was served on Edward the Seventh Coronation saucers in Edward the Seventh teacups. Mrs Baker was breathing heavily as she performed her duties. Powerscourt thought she had the air of one about to confirm with her doctor that she did indeed have a serious illness.

‘Lord Powerscourt,’ she spoke with great reverence, ‘seeing that you are a lord and all that, could I ask you…’ Mrs Baker paused, her eyes fixed on Powerscourt’s face. He thought he knew what was coming. He prepared the necessary lies. ‘Have you, in your time as a lord, I mean, oh dear, maybe you’ve always been a lord, have you met…’ She paused again, wondering, Powerscourt thought, whether she would be struck down if she uttered the names out loud, like one who dared speak the ninety-nine names of God. ‘Have you met any of the Royal Family in your time?’

‘I have as a matter of fact,’ said Powerscourt, omitting to mention that one of his earliest cases in England after his return from India had involved examining the corpse of an important member of the family, his throat cut from ear to ear, his blood, not blue alas, but the normal red, lying in puddles on the floor in a Sandringham House bedroom. ‘Very charming they were too, Mrs Baker.’

She purred with delight. Her husband, feeling perhaps that the due tax had been paid to the local authorities, reminded her that he needed to speak to Lord Powerscourt alone. Their business was important and confidential.

‘Of course, dear,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you in peace now. But I would like to ask a question of our guest before he goes, if I may.’

‘I think I may turn into a republican or an anarchist before my time is up.’ Baker was running his fingers through the remains of his hair. ‘One of those people who takes a pot shot at the Sovereign as they drive up the Mall on the way to some service or other. Since Mabel turned monarchist like this I’ve come to have increasing admiration for the Gunpowder Plotters and that fellow Catesby. Reckon they had the right idea – get rid of the whole lot of them in one go. Enough of this. Let us turn to your problem with the gun in Norfolk.’

The former policeman walked a few times up and down his little front room and eventually settled himself in front of an enormous cream-coloured plate in honour of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.

‘I can still remember how excited some people became when the fingerprinting came in, my lord.’ Walter Baker was making a steeple with his fingers as he spoke. ‘Some people could hardly believe it – that every single person had a set of fingerprints unique to them. We had one chap, a Detective Inspector I think he was, who was a devoted Baptist or Quaker or one of those funny religions, who said the fingerprints were God’s filing system, the Good Lord’s way of putting his mark on every one of his creatures. Cynics told the man it’d have to be a bloody big file, big enough to hold every single person on the planet. And did God remove the dead from the files, asked the cynics? Otherwise he’d have a system clogged up with people going right back to Adam and Eve themselves. Other people like me thought at the beginning that it was going to be a very useful tool in solving crimes and putting criminals away. Well, I still think it’s useful, but I don’t think it’s as useful as we thought it might be.’

‘And why is that, Mr Baker?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘It’s like this, my lord. At the start when nobody knew how it all worked, the criminals didn’t know what to do. Now they realize that all they have to do is to wear gloves. There’s a couple of sergeants over in the East End who are keeping an unofficial record of the sales of fine gloves in Shoreditch and Whitechapel. They talk to the relevant shopkeepers and so on. Fine glove sales in those parts are going up at the rate of ten per cent a year. That might be the fashion but it might be something else.

‘I don’t know if the Norfolk police are using fingerprint analysis on the gun in this murder case of yours, but let’s suppose they are. On the face of it, you might think it is all straightforward. If the living brother, Cosmo I believe you said he was called, had his fingerprints on the gun, you might think that was pretty serious. But then you tell me the gun probably came from the drawer in the desk in his brother’s house where he was a regular visitor. At any rate the gun used to kill Randolph Colville was the same make and so on. It used the same ammunition. If it came from that drawer, it could well have had his fingerprints on it. Even if it came from somewhere else – in other words we might be talking about two different guns here – there could be perfectly innocent explanations for Cosmo’s prints, if they are there. He could have picked it up off the floor or taken it from whoever was holding it at the time. A good defence counsel could run rings round the jury with fingerprint evidence in cases like this.’

‘What happens,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if the gun is found to have other fingerprints on it? Prints that might be those of the murderer?’

‘That gets very hypothetical, my lord. Think about it. On this gun there are Cosmo’s fingerprints. If he has been holding the gun he must surely have left fingerprints. Fine. Now, gentlemen of the jury, says the defence barrister, hold on a minute, we have this other set of prints or two other sets of prints, also on the gun. We do not know who they belong to, these fingerprints, but they could well belong to the murderer, a man who spent no time at all in Brympton Hall but just long enough to kill his victim. It’s not surprising we don’t know who he is, he has got clean away.’

‘Ah,’ said Powerscourt, his fingers touching an imaginary gown, and addressing an imaginary judge, ‘in my role as counsel for the prosecution, objection, my lord, objection. My learned friend is trying to present conjecture and guesswork as if they were fact. There may well be other sets of prints on the weapon, my lord, but we do not know who they belong to. For all we know they could belong to Mr Lloyd George or the Bishop of London. I submit, my lord, this is not evidence, it is mere conjecture.’

‘Mr Defence Counsel?’ Former Inspector Baker, now playing the part of the judge, had watched these games all too many times before.

‘I was merely trying to let the jury know, my lord,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that there are other marks on the pistol which must have belonged to somebody else, and that the somebody else could well have been the murderer.’

Powerscourt turned into the judge, rising to his feet and turning from time to time to address an imaginary jury. ‘Could well have been, Mr Defence Counsel,’ he boomed, ‘is not good enough. It is guesswork. Mr Foreman, gentlemen of the jury, I direct you to place no weight on these imaginary suppositions. They bear no credibility in this court. Objection sustained.’

Powerscourt and Walter laughed as they reached the end of their courtroom drama. ‘Mr Baker,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I must confer with the real defence counsel before I decide what is for the best. But would you be willing to appear in court for us if necessary?’

‘I would,’ said Baker.

There was a sudden rustling noise by the door. Mrs Baker swept in, past Henry the Eighth and Queen Anne, and came to rest in front of a small picture of George the Second. ‘Don’t you let this Lord Powerscourt go without my question now, Walter.’

‘And what, pray, is your question, madam?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I want you to send a message to that Edward the Seventh for me,’ she began.

‘You mean the King?’

‘I do. I want you to tell him that we, his loyal subjects of Brighton, wish him to have a Jubilee. Those two his mother had, Diamond and Golden, were the happiest days of my life. He’s not looking well, that King. If he doesn’t have a Jubilee soon he’ll be dead before they have time to organize it. If he likes he can just have it down here in Brighton, he needn’t bother with the rest of the country and all that Empire beyond the seas stuff. I’m sure we could find a foreigner or two to wave a flag at him if he thinks it’s important. He could eat the big dinner in our Royal Pavilion. Maybe the Prince Regent and Mrs Fitzherbert could come back from the dead to join him. I’m sure they’d have a lot in common.’

‘Have no fear, Mrs Baker,’ said Powerscourt gravely, ‘I shall make every effort to pass your request on to the appropriate authorities.’

‘Look here, Vicary, I’ve had another idea.’ Septimus Parry and Vicary Dodds were in conference about the progress and performance of their wine business, Piccadilly Wine, a recent arrival in the London area and a challenger to the supremacy of the Colvilles. Septimus Parry looked after the acquisition of the wine, Vicary Dodds looked after the accounts. Septimus stared up at the great blackboard where they kept a summary of their current stock. ‘The thing is,’ Septimus was a very slim young man, looking, his friends used to tell him, rather like a Spy cartoon, ‘we’ve got all the conventional products on offer in our shops, port, claret, champagne, all of that stuff. What happens if we go for the cheapest red and maybe the cheapest white we can find? Genuine vin ordinaire, as drunk by the solid citizens of La Belle France, comes to England’s capital. The Entente Cordiale in a glass. Maybe I wouldn’t actually use the word genuine now I come to think about it, but cheap is the way to sell it. That should bring the customers in. Then they save so much on our vin ordinaire that they buy a load of other wine as well. What do you think, Vicary?’

‘I’m not sure I like the sound of your reservations about the word genuine, Septimus, but I’ll let it pass for the present. Where do we get hold of this vin ordinaire?’

‘Kind of you to ask,’ said Septimus. ‘I’ve got some samples here in my bag.’

He pulled out a bottle with no label that appeared to contain red. He fetched a couple of glasses and a corkscrew and poured it out. ‘Don’t think you need to swirl it around or give it a sniff, if you see what I mean. Straight down the hatch, that’s the thing.’

Both young men took a respectable gulp of the liquid. Septimus did not seem affected one way or the other. Vicary Dodds turned rather pale. He coughed as if he were suffering from the final stages of consumption. Tears began trickling down his cheeks.

‘My God, Septimus, where did you get this?’

‘You don’t like it then?’

‘As you can see I’m not exactly wild about this consignment. If Christ had produced this for his miracle at the Feast of Cana they’d have been asking him to turn it back into water as fast as he could. Do you have any more poisonous mixtures in there?’

‘As a matter of fact, I do, Vicary. Try your tears on this one.’ Septimus whipped out another bottle and fetched some more glasses. Vicary tasted his incredibly slowly, a fraction of a mouthful at a time. This time he did not cough. No tears rolled down his cheeks. Instead he screwed his mouth into a rictus of dislike and peered incredulously into the glass.

‘My God, Septimus, I think this one is even worse. I tell you what we could do with it. We could market this one as a means of giving up alcohol. Have you tried to give up the demon drink? Is alcohol ruining your life? Is your wife on at you all the time to forsake the juice of the vine and the products of the malt and the barley? This is the answer to your prayers. One tablespoonful of Piccadilly Wine’s special elixir three times a day and you’ll never want a drink again. I’m sure we could find some medicine man to give it the seal of approval.’

‘Might not do a lot for the rest of the business, my friend,’ said Septimus. ‘Can’t sell wines and spirits with one hand and try to turn them all teetotal with the other. We might go out of business rather quickly if the elixir proved a success.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Vicary sadly, staring hard at Septimus’s bag. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got another foul bottle in there, I don’t think my taste buds would stand it.’

‘Last one,’ said Septimus, ‘it’s closing time after this.’

Vicary Dodds eyed the red substance with maximum suspicion, as if he were Socrates inspecting the hemlock that would kill him. At last, very reluctantly he took a small sip. A quizzical look crossed his features. He took another, slightly larger sip. Slowly, very slowly, a smile spread across his face.

‘Good God, Septimus,’ he said, ‘this one isn’t at all bad. A bit thin perhaps, but it’s not going to send you mad or make you blind like those other two. Where on earth did you find them all?’

‘Don’t you trouble yourself about where they came from, Vicary. Let me just say that my contact said one of them might do rather well in Bulgaria and Rumania. Those Eastern Europeans like their wine a bit rough apparently, like their women. Anyway I could lay in enough of the final one to last a couple of weeks. Sort of trial run. What do you say?’

‘Let’s do it,’ said Vicary Dodds, ‘and let’s throw some more mud in the Colvilles’ eyes.’

‘Let’s not forget the white,’ said Septimus, heading for the door. ‘I’ll bring a couple of bottles of that in next week.’

‘White? Did you say white?’ Vicary stared at his disappearing friend. ‘I may need some time to build up my strength for a white like those. God save us all.’

Powerscourt thought it was one of the best-kept house fronts he had ever seen. The black door glistened and shone in the afternoon sun. The windows on either side looked as if somebody cleaned them once a week if not once a day. The orderly brickwork was immaculate. This little house in Weltje Road in Hammersmith, close to the Thames, was the home of his second Colville senior acountant, one Wilfred Jones. Apart from his name and his previous position Powerscourt knew nothing about him. The door was opened after he rang the bell twice by a fully clad yeoman warder of the Tower of London, resplendent in a red and dark blue uniform with spear in hand and Tudor bonnet on his head.

‘I’m terribly sorry, I must have come to the wrong place,’ said Powerscourt, beating the retreat.

‘I don’t think you have,’ said the gentleman warder. ‘I’m expecting a visitor but I’m damned if I can remember his name.’

‘I presume you’re expecting one of your colleagues from the Tower,’ said Powerscourt, nearly out of earshot.

‘I was an accountant once,’ said the yeoman warder, ‘before I went to work at the Tower. An accountant. I think that’s what you have come to see me about. An accountant at Colvilles.’

Powerscourt began to retrace his steps. He had seen stranger transformations in his time than accountants turned into yeoman warders, but not in England.

‘Wilfred Jones,’ said the man, escorting Powerscourt into the front room of his house. Powerscourt wondered if it would be full of ceremonial swords and halberds and tabards and antique spears. It was not. It was full of sheet music, mainly religious works, Powerscourt observed, Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

‘I’m not holding you up or anything, Mr Jones? said Powerscourt. ‘I mean, you’re not meant to be on duty at this time, I hope?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said the warder, ‘I’m not on duty for a little while yet.’

‘Can I ask you, Mr Jones, how you have managed the transformation from senior accountant to yeoman warder? It’s not a normal sort of journey.’

The accountant smiled. ‘That’s easy. The firm I was with before Colvilles used to do a lot of the accounts for the Tower. I was the man responsible for looking after them. I went on doing work for the warders after I went to Colvilles. When I departed from the drinks industry we came to an understanding: I would do the Tower accounts for nothing; they would make me a warder. It was all a bit unofficial but nobody seems to mind. I’ve always liked dressing up ever since I was a boy being Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the back garden. Now then. What can I tell you about the Colvilles?’

‘I think you took over from James Chadwick, Mr Jones? I talked to him the other day.’

‘Might I ask you, Lord Powerscourt, how he described the position in the firm?’ Wilfred Jones was smoothing the front of his uniform across his knees. Powerscourt suspected he performed this little ritual so many times a day that he had virtually forgotten he was doing it.

‘Two things mainly,’ said Powerscourt, wondering suddenly if his accountant sang the Refiner’s Fire from the Messiah in full yeoman warder uniform. ‘That he rearranged the accounting system into categories, wine, port, gin, whisky and so forth. And that when he produced his annual figures, they were intercepted before they reached the full board, the figures I mean. Something like a hundred thousand pounds a year simply disappeared. Spirited away, he thought, by one lot of Colvilles who were defrauding another lot of Colvilles.’

The yeoman warder was twiddling his bonnet in his hands, picking nervously at the top.

‘Chadwick did warn me about what happened to him,’ he said, ‘and they had obviously worked out new tactics for me. It was all fine until the end of the year. The division into types of drink went on. I prepared all those individual accounts in the normal way. Usually when you hand them over, they are provisional figures, you get the final set of accounts when the board and everybody else have had a go at them. I never saw the final accounts. It was as if I didn’t exist or wasn’t worth bothering with.’

‘So what did you do?’

Jones laughed. ‘I was angry, very angry. I told the two brothers that I was leaving, that I had never seen accounts or accountants treated in such a cavalier fashion. And that their behaviour was unethical and probably illegal.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They offered me extra money to stay on. Quite a lot of extra money, now, I think about it. Perhaps they didn’t want it known abroad that they had lost another chief accountant.’

‘So what did you think was going on, Mr Jones?’ asked Powerscourt.

Jones looked solemn. Suddenly Powerscourt could see him on duty at the Tower in his uniform centuries before, the names of the recusants scratched into the walls of the cells by their fingernails, the escort for the doomed, Anne Boleyn or Thomas More or Lady Jane Grey, led across to the little patch of grass on Tower Hill, the executioner with the great axe, the blow to the neck, the screams of the dying, Guido Fawkes racked till he could no longer write his name.

‘I had a number of theories, Lord Powerscourt, one of them rather far-fetched, I’m afraid. You know how in some old families – it may be dying out now, I’m not sure – there’s often somebody who has to get served first at meal times. It might be a grandparent or a very old-fashioned father always keen to have the first serving of the roast beef or the Dover sole. It was as if there was somebody like that in the Colville tribe, somebody who had to be fed first with the money. But why didn’t the others complain? Perhaps they never knew. Maybe the money went on some common project of the family, that chateau they had near Bordeaux. But I checked that one out and all the payments came out of the French accounts. They didn’t need to siphon the money off in London. Maybe Randolph and Cosmo were rewarded for being senior directors. But they were already paid more than the old boys Walter and Nathaniel anyway.’

‘You said you had one rather far-fetched theory, Mr Jones. I don’t think I’ve heard it yet.’

Jones laughed rather nervously and smoothed his uniform across his knees once more.

‘Suppose somebody was blackmailing the Colvilles. Not just one Colville but the whole collective of Colvilles if you follow me. So it wasn’t just a question of any individual member being at fault. The whole bloody lot of them were. So once a year, it’s payday for the blackmailer. They all want a quiet life so they cough up this enormous sum every year. What do you think?’

‘It’s certainly ingenious,’ said Powerscourt, preparing to take his leave, ‘and it certainly makes some sense of it all. I just have one difficulty with it. I can’t think what hidden crime would enable a man to blackmail the whole lot of them. It if it was just one family, it might be a child born out of wedlock or something like that. But all of them? I don’t see it.’

Powerscourt wished Wilfred Jones good luck in his wardering and good voice in his singing as he left. As he headed back towards the tube station, the great bulk of Hammersmith Bridge towering above him, he wondered if the man wore his uniform all day. Perhaps he went to sleep in it, a snoring yeoman warder serenading the night sky of west London. But as he thought of the blackmail theory he realized that there was something else wrong with it. It was the wrong way round. In blackmail cases it was usually the blackmailer who gets killed as the victim tires of the endless payments. Suppose Randolph Colville was being blackmailed. You would expect him to be the killer of the blackmailer, not to be the victim himself. Unless Randolph had decided to kill his blackmailer. Suppose there had been some sort of a struggle and Randolph rather than the blackmailer had been shot. But in that case, why was Cosmo holding the gun and still maintaining his vow of silence?