Death of a Wine Merchant (3 page)

Lady Lucy Powerscourt was looking at an auction catalogue when her husband returned to Markham Square from Gray’s Inn. She turned slightly pale when Powerscourt told her the details of his latest case. ‘I’ve got a second cousin, Francis, who’s married to some minor member of the Colville family. I can’t for the moment remember if she’s on the Randolph side or the Cosmo side. How very terrible.’

‘What sort of a fellow was he, the chap your cousin married, I mean?’

‘I’m afraid he was rather a bad lot. He was called Barrington White, Timothy Barrington White, I think, and he embarked on a series of business ventures that seemed to go wrong all the time. The last I heard he had taken a position in the
Colville wine business but he didn’t care for it, he never liked being told off by his in-laws. You don’t think he has anything to do with it, do you, Francis? And how do you think you can help that nice Mr Pugh get the Colville person off?’

‘I have absolutely no idea if your relation has anything to do with it, Lucy. I was thinking about possible lines of inquiry on my way back here.’

Powerscourt began pacing up and down his drawing room, hands behind his back, like some thoughtful admiral on his quarterdeck in the Napoleonic Wars. Lady Lucy smiled. The pacing up and down always meant that her husband’s brain was moving towards top speed.

‘There aren’t really all that many motives for murder when you think of it, Lucy. Revenge, that’s always a runner. Jealousy, especially when the opposite sex is concerned, very powerful. Money, securing an inheritance ahead of time or killing off the siblings who might be ahead of you in the queue to inherit grandfather’s millions, another strong contender. Sudden blinding rage, when the murderer goes half insane for the split second it takes to plunge the knife in or pull the trigger, that’s taken a lot of people to the other side. There must be more, lots more.’

‘And which of these deadly sins do you think might apply in this case, Francis?’ Lady Lucy began her question to her husband’s back as he reached the end of his pacing and finished it to his face as he turned round to head back towards the fireplace.

‘I think the silence is important, Lucy, I really do. I think it implies he was protecting somebody, that if he had to answer questions he would end up incriminating somebody, his mistress perhaps. The thing about silence is that there are no two ways about it. Even if he offered to tell just some of what he knows, once he started talking Cosmo Colville would probably find that he had to reveal everything.’

‘You don’t think it might have something to do with his brother, that he was protecting him in some way?’

‘Even after the brother was dead, do you mean? That would have to be some secret, Lucy, don’t you think? Maybe it all has to do with the business.’

‘I find it hard to believe that the wine business could be the reason for murder, Francis. Surely people don’t go round shooting each other in the heart because the claret’s gone off or the Nuits St Georges is corked again.’

‘Maybe there was a scandal waiting to come out. When you refer to the wine business in that way of course it’s hard to see it as a motive for murder. But the Colville business is huge. Think of it as money or as a disgrace that might finish the firm off and it could well be time for pistols in the afternoon. Johnny Fitzgerald is the only wine expert we know and he’s not back from Wales until tomorrow. And even Johnny would be happy to admit that his expertise is more in the consumption end of the trade than in the business side. Lucy, I think it’s time I extended my knowledge of burgundy and Bordeaux. I’m just going to pop into Berry Bros. & Rudd. After all, I have been buying wine from them for nearly twenty years.’

The man they called the Alchemist had moved a little table to sit underneath the window. He brought over an electric lamp to increase the visibility further still. On his table he placed three plain bottles with red wine in them and rather unusual labels. The left-hand bottle’s inscription read BX LG68 AG15. The second one said BX LG74 AG12, and the one on the right BX LG78 AG10. Very reverently, as if he was pouring the host at the communion rails in some place of alchemical worship, the man poured a small amount of the liquid from the first bottle into a glass. The Alchemist was humming to himself as he worked. Today it was the Drinking Song from
La Traviata
. He was very fond of the opera. He went as often as he could. He swirled the liquid round for a moment or two and then tasted it before spitting it out into a small bucket on the floor. He looked thoughtful for a moment and then
made some notes in his large notebook. Each legend with the BX heading had a page to itself. When he had finished his tasting the Alchemist smiled a slow smile and replaced the corks in the bottles before placing them on a shelf. ‘They’re coming along well,’ he said out loud, addressing nobody in particular. Blending, the man often reminded himself, was the essence of wine making, as vital to its success as the grapes or the
terroir
of the vineyard. Was not Haut Brion itself, one of the finest clarets in the world, the result of careful blending? Only the Alchemist knew the secrets of the labels. LG68 meant that sixty-eight per cent of the liquid was composed of standard red
vin
ordinaire
from the Languedoc, AG15 meant that fifteen per cent of it was red from Algeria, a red often referred to as the Infuriator. In the other bottles the mixtures were slightly different, the remaining percentages being composed of good quality claret. The BX at the beginning meant that a claret was being created here, far from the south-west of France and the elegant city of Bordeaux, in a dusty warehouse on London’s river. The wine would be bastard from birth.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was shown into a small library on the first floor of Berry Bros. & Rudd at 3 St James’s Street, opposite St James’s Palace and the London home of the Prince of Wales at Marlborough House. Powerscourt was fascinated by the contents of the glass-fronted bookshelves, most of them containing ancient bottles of wine rather than books.

‘Good day to you, Powerscourt,’ said a tall white-haired man of about fifty years, marching across the carpet like the guardsman he had once been to shake Powerscourt by the hand. George Berry had been Powerscourt’s principal point of contact here for all his years with the company, advising more on broad strategies of wine purchase rather than recommending particular bottles. ‘I trust Lady Lucy and the family are well?’

‘Splendid, thanks,’ said Powerscourt with a smile. He had always thought that George Berry with his military bearing, those clear blue eyes and a general impression of tidy competence would have made a perfect con man.

‘What can we do for you today, Lord Powerscourt? Some white burgundies perhaps? We have some splendid wines from Montrachet and Chablis this year.’

‘I want your advice, Berry, and I’m in rather a hurry. Please keep this to yourself but I’ve been asked to look into the Colville murder, the one up in Norfolk. Cosmo’s lawyers have asked me to see if I can come up with anything to help his case.’

‘You’re trying to get him off might be another way of putting it,’ said Berry. ‘What a terrible business. We knew the Colvilles, all of them. We were meant to go to that wedding, but family commitments put a stop to it. Pity, I’ve always wanted to see that house, Brympton Hall. How can I help you?’

‘I’m not quite sure how to put this,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There are all sorts of motives for murder, greed, jealousy, revenge, hatred. Some of those may have been swirling round the Colville business. I need somebody to advise me on the wine trade in general and the Colville companies in particular. Was there anything suspicious going on? Was a scandal about to break? Had they treated anybody or any other company particularly badly?’

George Berry walked over to his window and stared out into the street where a horse-drawn carriage seemed to be overtaking a wheezing motor car, smoke pouring from its bonnet. Powerscourt remembered that Berry’s favourite activity was playing golf at fashionable courses like Huntercombe or Royal St George’s, Sandwich. Men said that George Berry seldom lost. Powerscourt had always wondered what he drank in the bar at the end of a round. Did he have beer? Or did Berry Bros. & Rudd supply some of these golf courses with their finest wines for George Berry and his friends to sample after their eighteen holes?

‘I wish I felt able to help you myself,’ Berry said finally, turning back from his vigil at the window overlooking the dark grey palace with its red soldiers like toys in their sentry boxes, ‘but I don’t think my expertise, for what it’s worth, is what you are looking for. You see, we deal with what we like to think of as the more expensive end of the market, the leading hotels in the capital, ten or twelve Oxbridge colleges, most of the top London clubs, a large number of restaurants, and a considerable number of private clients who are interested in their wine and are happy to be advised by us. People like yourself, Lord Powerscourt. But we’re not dealing with the same sort of people as the Colvilles. The new middle class, as they’re often referred to these days, would not buy their wine from us, they would buy it from Colvilles or one of their rivals. I think I know the man you want, he’s got enormous experience in the wine trade. At the moment he is the chief wine buyer for the White Star Line. They sell all kinds of different wine from all kinds of different countries at all kinds of different prices in their ships. He could tell you straight off, I should think, what was a proper claret and what was made in a factory or a warehouse. I’ll give you a letter of introduction.’

George Berry sat down at one of the desks and scribbled a quick note.

‘His name, Berry, you haven’t told me his name.’

‘His name?’ Berry laughed. ‘When he’s happy he says his name has been a great help in his career. When he’s miserable he claims his name has been the ruin of him and he wishes he’d changed it years ago.’

‘For God’s sake, man, what’s he called?’

‘He’s a hereditary baronet. He’s called…’ George Berry paused for a moment for maximum impact. ‘He’s called Sir Pericles Freme.’

‘God bless my soul!’ said Lord Francis Powerscourt.

Randolph Colville’s funeral was finally held a week and a half after his murder. Powerscourt was travelling to the Church of St James the Less at Pangbourne on the Thames where the last melancholy rites were to be performed. He had arranged to travel with one Christopher Fuller, partner in the City law firm of Moorehead, Fuller and Fox who looked after the Colvilles’ affairs. The solicitor, a slim man in his late thirties with brown eyes and dark curly hair, was carrying a particularly large briefcase which he kept beside him on the seat rather than place it in the storage area above.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve had time to make any progress yet, Lord Powerscourt. Innings only just beginning, what?’

Powerscourt smiled. ‘Has your client said anything to you yet? Has he uttered a word?’

‘Not a word, not a single word,’ said Fuller. ‘And I’ve seen him twice now, once in Norwich and once in Pentonville.’

‘Have you any idea what causes the silence? Is he hiding something?’

‘We’re rather hoping you’ll be able to tell us the answers to those questions, Lord Powerscourt.’

‘Look here.’ Powerscourt leaned forward to stress the importance of what he was about to say. ‘I know you’re not meant to say anything about your client’s affairs and all that, but you’re not in the office now and your first duty is surely to keep your man alive, however you do it. Is there anything you
know about the Colvilles that throws light on the murder? You don’t have to be specific, if that’s a problem, just some general guidance.’

‘I wish I could help you, Lord Powerscourt, but I don’t see how I can.’

‘Forgive me, but do you mean that you could if you felt so inclined because you have some information, or do you mean that you can’t because you don’t have any information to give me?’

‘The latter, I’m afraid.’

The train had left London now and was racing along through open countryside. Some two hundred yards away the Thames was meandering peacefully towards the great city and the sea.

‘What about Randolph’s will? Is that will in your briefcase?’

‘It is, as a matter of fact.’

‘Are there any surprises in there? All the money left to charity, or to mistresses tucked away somewhere, that sort of thing?’

Christopher Fuller smiled. ‘You’ll find out in due course, if you come back to the house after the service. There is one surprising thing about Randolph’s will and I don’t understand it at all.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Well, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here, but there’s a lot less money than I would have thought. Hundred thousand less, maybe a couple of hundred thousand less. You see, I would have thought Randolph and Cosmo took about the same amount of money out of the business over the years and Cosmo is worth over twice as much as Randolph.’

‘How do you know that, Mr Fuller?’

Christopher Fuller grimaced. ‘I had to draw up a new will for Cosmo in Pentonville the other day. He wasn’t happy with the previous one that had been drawn up by one of my colleagues. He must be the only Colville in history to have his last will and testament witnessed by a couple of prison warders.’

‘What is Cosmo like, Mr Fuller? What sort of man is he?’

The solicitor took his time before he spoke. ‘In some ways they were similar, the brothers Randolph and Cosmo Colville. From their earliest years it had been drummed into them that the business came first. Nothing else really mattered. Old man Walter may have sent them off to Harrow to learn the manners of their betters, rather like Tom Brown going to Rugby, but he wasn’t going to turn them into gentlemen of leisure living comfortably off their dividends. Work was the thing. Always work. Randolph spent a lot of time in France, in Burgundy. He looked after the firm’s interests there and his children used to joke that he was becoming half French himself. But it was their attitudes outside the business that were so different. Randolph was a man of great enthusiasms, fly fishing one minute, French cathedrals the next. Cosmo was more steady, more circumspect. He looked after the firm’s interests in Bordeaux. They actually own a château there, you know. He never lost his passion for cricket, Cosmo, and the Test Matches at Lord’s. I’ve always thought that was where he was happiest.’

Powerscourt could sympathize with that. He would work even harder for a man whose grand passion was for Test Matches at Lord’s. ‘What will happen to the succession at Colvilles if both brothers are gone?’

‘They say the old man, Walter, has wanted to give up the chairmanship for years and pass it on to the younger generation. But he’s never been able to make up his mind which one of the younger generation, his boys or his brother Nathaniel’s boys, to give it to. Maybe he’ll have to hang on a little longer.’

The train was slowing down for Pangbourne now. The river was speckled with houseboats and a couple of elderly gentlemen were seated optimistically on the bank with fishing rods in their hands. Powerscourt thought he had time for one last question.

‘Mr Fuller, can I ask you one final question. Do you think Cosmo Colville killed his brother?’

‘I do not,’ replied Fuller.

‘Who do you think did it then?’

‘I’m sorry, Powerscourt, I don’t know. I really haven’t a clue. I wish I did.’

As they walked to the church of St James the Less Powerscourt wondered if Fuller had been telling the truth in his very last answer. Had he protested too much? Was there, somewhere in the well-ordered files of Moorehead, Fuller and Fox of Bishopsgate, a clue about one of the Colvilles, a clue so dangerous it could not be divulged, even to the man employed to save a client from the gallows and the rope?

Powerscourt and the solicitor sat discreetly at the back of the church. Randolph Colville had a large turn-out come to see him off. More than half the congregation had been present at a very different service less than a fortnight before when Colville had married Nash at the church of St Peter at Brympton. Willoughby and Georgina Nash had turned up out of sympathy with their daughter’s new family. Walter Colville, father of the dead man, seemed to those who knew him to have aged about five years in the past ten days. His face before the wedding and the murder looked like the face of a man who still entertains hope for the future, who even at the age of seventy-nine can still make plans for himself and his family. Now that face looked as if it had collapsed inwards. His eyes were dead and his cheeks were almost hollow. To bury one son was bad enough; to have to face the prospect of burying the other for murdering the first one, too terrible to contemplate. No parent could think of their child being hung, the rope round the neck, the drop into the dark, the last desperate fluttering of the legs and then oblivion, without shuddering. The only thing Walter had resolved to do was to change his will but he wondered if he should wait till after the trial in case he had to change it again.

At the very back of the church was an elderly porter from Colvilles’ gin manufactory in Hammersmith, who had been with the firm for over forty years. He looked
out for this investigator man people said the family had employed to secure the acquittal of Mr Cosmo. He identified Powerscourt fairly quickly. The elderly porter, whose name was Howard, wondered if he should tell Powerscourt about some of the strange things he had seen at Colvilles in the last six months.

It began to rain heavily when they took the body out of the church for its interment in the Colville grave. The vicar spoke the last words of the service at great speed. Some of the mourners had had the foresight to bring umbrellas. Others stood stoically as the earth was thrown in over Randolph Colville’s coffin and let the water run off their heads and down their faces. One of the Colville children was crying inconsolably by the graveside. Grooms and chauffeurs huddled inside their capes or kept the doors firmly closed in the long queue of vehicles lined up outside the church. Powerscourt suddenly felt that he should not be there, that he was unwelcome.

That feeling was reinforced when he went back to the Colville house for drinks and the reading of the will. Randolph’s house was a very large Victorian villa on the far side of the road that ran beside the Thames. There were handsome reception rooms at the front with views over the river and two floors above, with balconies, devoted to bedrooms and bathrooms. There was a large garden at the back with a tennis court. Powerscourt discovered that the Colvilles seemed to be divided into two hostile camps. One believed, with the police, that the only explanation for the bizarre circumstances surrounding Randolph’s death was indeed that Cosmo had shot him. To this faction he, Powerscourt, was trying to pervert the course of justice. And the other faction, the one that believed in Cosmo’s innocence, which you might have thought would be sympathetic to Powerscourt, was not sympathetic at all. They did not see why it was necessary to employ anybody to establish Cosmo’s innocence. Any fool could see that he was not guilty and there was no need for meddling aristocrats.

There were just two things that Powerscourt learnt in that house of mourning by the Thames. The first came from a man, obviously a neighbour, who had taken one glass too many of Colvilles’ Finest Champagne. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he began, trying to put a friendly arm round Powerscourt’s shoulder, ‘strangest thing I ever saw,’ he shook his head at the memory, ‘took me three or four games to work out what was going on. I was watching Randolph play tennis with a friend of his one weekend a couple of years ago. It was bizarre. Randolph never hit a backhand, not once. The fellow was ambidextrous, left-handed forehand followed right-handed forehand. Bloody effective it was too.’ The other piece of intelligence, delivered with due solemnity by Christopher Fuller, was that Randolph left just over two hundred thousand pounds in his will. Everything was left in trust for his widow in her lifetime and then passed on to the children.

As Powerscourt made his way back to the station to return to London he thought about what the solicitor had said on the train earlier that day. He did some calculations about Randolph Colville’s missing money. If Fuller was right, Colville should have left not two hundred thousand pounds but three hundred, maybe even four hundred thousand pounds. Where had it gone, all this money? Was he being blackmailed? Had the missing money led to his death?

In a small office north of Oxford Street the day after the funeral the newest competitors to the Colvilles were holding their regular morning meeting. Piccadilly Wine consisted of a number of shops in the suburbs of London. The locations, Bromley, Twickenham, Camden Town, were carefully chosen. These were not places where the rich would go to order cases of Château Latour or Château d’Yquem, but in these humble streets were a great many people who would buy cheaper wines regularly. Septimus Parry and Vicary Dodds, both graduates of Westminster and Oxford, were hoping to
make a great fortune for themselves. They might not sell the best champagne to Mr Soames Forsyte in his beautiful house in Chelsea, but they could sell claret and burgundy in enormous volumes to Mr Charles Pooter and his fellow nobodies increasing and multiplying across the suburbs of England. In a way they were following the trail of the Colvilles themselves who had deliberately sought a different clientele from the more ancient and more fashionable wine merchants clustered round St James’s.

There was only one topic of conversation this morning, the fate of the Colvilles.

‘Cosmo is still locked up in some ghastly prison,’ said Vicary Dodds cheerfully.

‘Not much to drink in there, I shouldn’t think. I met a man at the club last night,’ Septimus picked up the baton, ‘who said that Cosmo hasn’t uttered a word in his defence. My man said that if he didn’t start talking soon he’d end up on the gallows.’

Neither of the young men actually said so, but the discomfiture of the Colvilles meant a great business opportunity for Piccadilly Wine.

‘Do you think we should send a card of condolence, or something like that?’ said Vicary.

Septimus laughed. ‘Don’t think that would be in very good taste, Vicary. They say old man Walter is very knocked up about the whole thing. They’ve turned into a ship with almost no officers, Randolph dead, Cosmo in clink, Walter pulling his hair out. What do we do about it?’

Vicary Dodds looked at a great chart on the wall which showed the available stocks the firm had in hand of the various wines they sold. ‘If we’re going to steal some of their customers, we’d better get a special offer into the shops as soon as possible. We’ll have to place some advertisements in the local papers too. We can’t do it with champagne, we haven’t enough of it and it would take too long to get some more here in time. We can’t do it with port as the Colville port is so cheap
we couldn’t undercut them. I’ve always wondered where they get their port from, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had never seen the day break over Portugal at all. Never mind, claret, that’s the thing we do have lots of at the moment.’

Septimus pulled a newspaper from a drawer in his desk. ‘They’re offering claret – a pure Bordeaux luncheon wine at ten shillings a case,’ he said. ‘Pretty good offer that, if you ask me. Mind you, I’ve never heard of pure Bordeaux luncheon wine and I bet you the good drinkers of Bordeaux haven’t either. Probably all grown in somebody’s back garden and diluted with watered-down Algerian. Anyway, what do you think we could manage, Vicary?’

The young man ran his hand through a great mop of straw-coloured hair and did a few quick doodles on the pad in front of him. Vicary was the expert in money and accounting, Septimus the master in the acquisition of the wines and spirits. ‘What do you say to nine shillings a dozen, Septimus? A shilling a case cheaper than Colvilles. That should send the customers flocking in to Piccadilly Wine, don’t you think?’

‘Will we still make a profit on that?’

‘I should think so. But if it goes well we may need some more of Burgundy’s finest. Could you rustle up another hundred cases or so, do you think?’

Septimus Parry smiled. ‘I shall see to it now, partner,’ he said and set off at once for a warehouse by the Thames.