Death of a Wine Merchant (7 page)

‘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 Château Latour. You don’t, of course, put Château 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?

There was a letter from Charles Augustus Pugh waiting for Powerscourt the following morning. As he slit it open in his upstairs drawing room he suddenly wondered what Pugh’s telephone manner would be like. Would each sentence be a question? A suggestion perhaps? I put it to you, Lord Powerscourt, that you have been less than truthful with this court? The news inside was grim.

‘Committal hearing yesterday. Bow Street Magistrates Court. Magistrate virtually asleep throughout the proceedings. Sir Jasper Bentinck on parade for the prosecution. The man is said to be very good with police witnesses for some reason. Only bright note from our side is that both policemen were called to give evidence, so I shall be able to cross-examine them when the time comes. Case looks pretty watertight to me. There is Randolph, dead on the floor. There is Cosmo, gun in hand. There is Cosmo, refusing to speak. Juries always think a man is guilty if he refuses to speak, however much you try to persuade them to the contrary. No sign of any of the wedding guests to be called as witnesses. Can you read anything significant into that? I said nothing, of course. I pretended to be holding my fire for another day. They looked at me with great sadness. As things stand, my friend, it’s as if I’m the last man in to bat for England against Australia in the Lord’s Test. England need over five hundred to win. The last man is a hopeless batsman. The last rites are but a few
minutes away. Do you have any hope? I don’t mind being beaten in court but I’m damned if I’m going to be pitied. I reckon we have three weeks at most before the Old Bailey. Regards, Pugh.’

Powerscourt swore violently under his breath. Time was running out. Somewhere at the back of his brain there was a question hovering just below the surface. He began to write his letters. He wrote to Nathaniel Colville, requesting an interview. Nathaniel in a way was the last Colville left standing, his brother dead, one nephew murdered, another enclosed in the unforgiving brick of Pentonville. Powerscourt assured him that he had no intention of upsetting him, but hoped the old gentleman might remember something that would help his nephew become a free man once again. He wrote to the Norfolk police requesting another interview. He wrote to Mrs Georgina Nash asking if he might call on her once more. The trial was very close now. And then, just before he left his house, the thought surfaced. He began pacing up and down the drawing room, ignoring the traffic outside in the square, ignoring the paintings on his walls, ignoring the coals spitting in his fire.

Why hadn’t he thought about it before? Fingerprints. Fingerprints, first used by the British in India to make accurate records of people who spoke no English. Fingerprints, coming into use by police forces in Europe and in Britain. Fingerprint evidence had already been accepted in British courts of law. He didn’t know if the Norfolk police used fingerprint techniques. He rather thought not. Cosmo’s fingerprints must be on the gun. But were there fingerprints of another as well, another person who might be the murderer? Even if not, the idea could certainly be used, in Charles Augustus Pugh’s immortal phrase, to throw mud in their eye. Powerscourt knew that no serving police fingerprint expert would give evidence against another police force. Could he bring one in from America? Somehow he suspected the twelve good men and true on Cosmo’s jury might
not be too impressed with foreign evidence from a faraway country which had kicked the British out a hundred and fifty years before. Maybe there was an alternative. With a look of determination about his person, Lord Francis Powerscourt set off for New Scotland Yard to find a British fingerprint expert who might yet save the life of Cosmo Colville.

Two questions were swirling round Powerscourt’s brain as he made his way to the Metropolitan Police Headquarters on the Embankment. The first concerned the motive for murder. Powerscourt did not believe, as he had told himself so many times already during this inquiry, that wine could lead to murder. People did not kill for bottles of Krug. They did not murder for Meursault. So what was left? Money? So far there was precious little evidence of that apart from the solicitor’s rather Delphic reference to Randolph being worth one or two hundred thousand pounds less than he should have been. Affairs of the heart? Of that there was, as yet, no sign at all. Then there was the question of the gun. It seemed scarcely credible that a man would go to a family wedding with a gun in his hand or his pocket unless he was going to some marriage in the American Wild West years before, when guns were as necessary an item of clothing as socks and shoes and those big hats they all had to wear. And, if Randolph had taken the gun with him, who was he defending? Himself? His brother? His family? Round and round they floated, these questions, like children’s ducks on an aimless progress round a bath.

Sir Edward Henry was the third Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police known to Powerscourt. He was a tall man with a military moustache that looked as if it might have been more at home on a Prussian grenadier. The walls of his office were still lined with the four great maps of London with the more recent crimes marked out in red. Powerscourt observed
that the greatest concentration of red dots was where it had been every time he had been in this room, over the East End of London.

Powerscourt explained that he was investigating the Colville murder in Norfolk.

‘Terrible business that,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I’ve been buying our wine at home from those Colvilles for years. How can we assist you, Lord Powerscourt? I gather that our colleagues in East Anglia are fairly certain they have the right man.’

Powerscourt did not think it prudent to mention that the junior detective himself, an Inspector, no less, harboured doubts about the case. The police forces would close ranks like a cavalry squadron on drill duty.

‘In my position, Commissioner, I am merely a hired hand. I have to do the best for my client, the unfortunate Cosmo Colville, currently, as you know, a guest of His Majesty in Pentonville prison. I wanted to ask your advice on the question of fingerprints. After all, you are one of the great experts on the subject – you were a leading member of the committee which recommended their introduction in London back at the turn of the century.’

‘Fingerprints, Lord Powerscourt…’ said the Commissioner with a dreamy look in his eye. ‘Back then I could have talked for days about the things, origin in India, advantages in the solving of crime, the fact that no two fingerprints are the same. I am pleased, if that is the right word, when a man is hanged at the end of the trial, that his fingerprints have been the decisive proof of guilt, as they were in a murder trial here in London a couple of years back. Some of the officers who work in the Fingerprint Bureau see a great future in the science. Two of my brightest young men tried to persuade me the other day that every citizen in the land should have their fingerprints recorded and placed on file. Crime, they said would be eradicated in five years. I could hear our elected representatives in the House of Commons
braying on forever about the ancient rights of freeborn Englishmen so I turned them down. But I have gone off the subject. How can our expertise be useful to you, Lord Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt explained about the gun in Cosmo’s hand, the strongest piece of evidence against him. ‘If, Commissioner, and it is a very big if, I grant you, fingerprint evidence could show that another hand had held the gun, that might help his case, might it not? And am I right in thinking that the expertise of fingerprinting in such cases has not yet reached Norfolk?’

‘You are, and they have made no request for our assistance in this case.’

‘Would it be possible for the defence to request that the gun should be sent for examination here by one of your officers?’

‘Theoretically, it would be,’ said the Commissioner. ‘But each police force in this country is master in its own house. The Norfolk police could refuse. The prosecuting barrister would almost certainly raise a host of objections – how are the jury to know that the gun has not been tampered with, so the evidence is corrupt and should be thrown out and so on and so forth. Do you happen to know who the lead barrister for the Crown is?’

‘I believe it is Sir Jasper Bentinck, Commissioner.’

‘Sir Jasper?’ Sir Edward Henry permitted himself a slight laugh. ‘Have no doubt of it, I tell you, Lord Powerscourt, the objections would stretch out like a string of milestones all the way from the Old Bailey to Wells next the Sea.’

‘What would happen if the defence were to consult an expert in fingerprinting who is not attached to any police force? An independent man?’ Powerscourt had finally arrived at the question that had brought him here.

‘There aren’t many of those around, I’m afraid. Some of our men are lured off to America where the pay is better.’

‘A retired officer? One who had to leave the force for ill health or personal reasons?’

The Commissioner stroked his moustache for some time. ‘Apologies, Lord Powerscourt, I believe we could help you there. But I have something of a moral dilemma. If I give you a few names, am I undermining the cause of my colleagues up there in East Anglia? Am I giving comfort and succour to the enemy?’

‘The life of an innocent man may be at stake here, Commissioner.’

‘I know, I know, Lord Powerscourt. That weighs very heavily with me. And you yourself have always been a great friend to our force. Very well. I think we have two retired fingerprint men on the books. We did have a third but I went to his funeral only last month. I shall send the relevant addresses round to your house in a couple of hours. It’ll take some time to dig them out. But I would give you a word of warning about all this.’

‘Please do. I am most grateful for your assistance. It is beyond the call of duty.’

‘On the face of it,’ Sir Edward rose from his desk and went to his window, looking out over a grey sky and a sluggish Thames, the seagulls swirling round the shore, ‘nothing could be simpler. You find the fingerprint expert. He examines the gun. He finds that there are other fingerprints on it. Whose are those? Surely, says the defence, those are the fingerprints of the killer. The Pentonville Colville merely happened to pick the gun up. I do not know if that would carry as much weight with the jury as the physical presence of your man sitting opposite his dead brother. And the legal complications and obfuscations and arguments would be tiresome. Sir Jasper might well try to wrap the jury up in so much legal undergrowth, case of Rex versus Butterworth 1904, Rex versus Turner 1906, and so on, that they are left with only one fact they can cling on to, one safe port in the legal storm raging round their heads in the Old Bailey.’

‘And that fact would be?’ Powerscourt asked very quietly.

‘That Cosmo Colville was found in a chair, opposite his dead brother, with a gun in his hand.’

The Alchemist was happy in his work that day. The previous evening he had been to the opera and gloried in
The Magic Flute
. Now he was working on the creation of a series of pre-phylloxera wines for a grand dinner to be held in a couple of weeks at a top London hotel. The Alchemist often wondered where his profession – for he did not regard himself as a mere artisan – would have been without the disease that had wiped out so many of France’s finest vineyards towards the end of the previous century. So many great wines were lost. But some survived, hidden away in obscure abbeys or interred in the cellars of the great châteaux. These fetched high prices. Engaged in this trade in France, working, as the Alchemist used to say to himself, to provide the market with what it so desperately wanted, had proved his undoing. The inspectors had caught him red-handed in a vast cellar under the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux. His superiors denied all knowledge of his activities. He was left as the centre and the chief victim of the scandal. He fled France in a fishing boat and took refuge in the vast obscurity of London’s docks where strangers were commonplace and few questions were asked about a man’s past. Very slowly and very carefully the Alchemist built up his business. He took great pains about secrecy. He refused to meet any clients or customers face to face. Orders had to be delivered by letter. Payment always had to be in cash. The Alchemist didn’t even trust the banks.

He began the business of blending his new ancient vintages. The Alchemist never claimed to be offering the truly great vintages from before the phylloxera plague. Somebody, after all, might have actually tasted them. He picked respectable, steady, unremarkable châteaux that his customers would never have heard of, and so would have no idea of whether the wine they were drinking was genuine or not. They had nothing to compare it with, and without comparisons, as the
Alchemist knew only too well, the wisdom of the wine trade disappears as it has nothing to hold on to.

His was a solitary life, alternating between his workplace, his room in an anonymous part of north London and a chop house where he would eat his solitary supper. But he was not unhappy. He had no idea how long he might have been locked up in France, or how huge a fine might have been imposed on him. Loneliness for him was a price worth paying for freedom. He liked women, the Alchemist, but he was terrified of marrying one of them. A wife would always be eager to know the details of his activities, how well he was doing. Such knowledge could only bring him into trouble. He had great doubts about the ability of women to keep their mouths shut. When he remembered his two sisters and his mother, he always recalled what happened when you told one of them something that was meant to be a secret. The other two always knew within the hour. So the Alchemist restricted his activities with the opposite sex to one special prostitute in Soho who never asked him any questions but happily took his money.

By now the Alchemist had two reds ready that he thought might form part of his offerings for the dinner. Leave them to settle for a couple of days and then he would decide. He thought suddenly of the wide open and desolate spaces in the Auvergne, where civilization seemed alien, remote, places like the Aubrac with its strange cattle and vast skies and hardly any people. He had a great love of wide, wild open spaces, and was already planning a great holiday in a few years’ time when he could visit the deserts of the Middle East and the mountains of America. Maybe he could ride right across the United States in a train and stop off on the way to make pilgrimages to the American wildernesses. He placed his two bottles carefully on a shelf and began humming another aria from
The Magic Flute
.