Death of a Wine Merchant (9 page)

‘You know the oath the doctors swear, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘The Hippocratic Oath?’

‘That’s the one. The section I’m thinking of says: All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.’

‘With the greatest respect, Mr Chadwick, that sentence is meant to apply to doctors, not to senior accountants. I can fully see the necessity for confidentiality under normal
circumstances but these are not normal times. Come, I am not interested in every last detail of the Colville accounts. But I would be very interested to know how they got through three senior accountants inside five years.’

‘Can you promise me that I won’t have to give evidence in court?’

‘I’m not sure I can promise you that, Mr Chadwick, but I can promise you that you won’t have to go to court if you don’t want to.’

Powerscourt looked again at James Chadwick. There was something seedy about the man. His shirt collar was on the verge of disintegration. His jacket was badly frayed at the elbows. The shoes had seen better days and the trousers were heavily stained. Powerscourt wondered if there had been a wife who had left, or passed away from some terrible illness or died in childbirth. He wondered too if money had become a problem. No sensible employer was likely to take on a man who dressed like this. They might as well take on a tramp from one of the great railway stations. He tried a different tack.

‘Of course, if we find your information valuable there may be a question of a fee. I would have to talk to my colleagues about that.’ Nightmare visions of the prosecuting counsel unleashed on James Chadwick flashed across his brain. ‘Did you say you were paid for this information, Mr Chadwick? Perhaps you would like to tell the court how much? Gentlemen of the jury, it is for you to decide how much weight to attach to evidence which has been purchased as you might purchase a horse or a train ticket.’

The mention of money seemed to act as a tonic on the accountant. He sat up straight in his chair and fiddled with his tie as if that might restore it to health.

‘I will tell you the bald points of my time with the Colvilles, an account I hope will still fall within the general guidelines of the Hippocratic Oath.’

James Chadwick paused briefly. One of the dirty curtains across his window flapped for a moment. Powerscourt
wondered if he would be offered a cup of tea in this place. Probably not, he thought.

‘I didn’t think the accounts were properly organized before I got there, Lord Powerscourt. So I changed them so they followed the wines, if you follow me. Under the old regime everything was organized alphabetically. That might have been fine in earlier times, but it was hopelessly out of date when I got there. I changed the system so that it was organized by wine. Separate accounts for port, Madeira, claret, Bordeaux and so on. I could track all the money in these accounts at the end of every month. Over time, assuming the trade followed consistent patterns year on year, we could have predicted in May how much profit the firm would have made at the close of the year.’

‘It sounds an admirable system, Mr Chadwick. You must have been proud of it.’

‘It was admirable, and, yes, I was proud of it.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘I’ll show you what went wrong. I said I could track the money the firm was making or losing month by month. I knew by the end of the year what the final figures should be, I just had to add the monthly figures together. After that the figures went through Mr Randolph Colville and Mr Cosmo Colville to the main board who signed off on the final figures for the year’s accounts.’

‘That sounds perfectly proper to me, Mr Chadwick.’

‘The difficulty lay in the gap, Lord Powerscourt. I won’t give you exact figures, but the annual profit leaving my accounts might be three hundred thousand pounds. But the final figure in the final accounts would be in the order of two hundred and fifty thousand. Something in the order of fifty or sometimes one hundred thousand pounds was disappearing out of the Colville accounts every year. In good years it might have been worse, if you see what I mean.’

‘Did you know who was doing the intercepting? Would they have been allowed to do this? Was it illegal?’

‘I don’t know who was doing the intercepting, but the most likely candidates had to be Mr Randolph and Mr Cosmo. Only Colvilles were allowed to hold shares in the company, you see. So whoever was doing the fraud was effectively stealing from his own family.’

‘Did you mention this to anybody?’

‘I mentioned it to Mr Randolph,’ James Chadwick laughed bitterly, ‘and I was fired the next day. I haven’t had a full-time position since. The Colvilles put it about that I had helped myself to their money when in fact the problem was the other way round, Colville robbing Colville, not Chadwick robbing Colville.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you have had a hard time of it.’ He was doing a series of calculations in his head. In the five years since James Chadwick left the firm, half a million pounds or more would have disappeared from the family firm, money that could have been spent on expansion, or larger dividends, or buying out your competitors. He had always thought that people were unlikely to murder for a bottle of Sauternes or a Chassagne Montrachet. But for half a million pounds? Or in revenge against those who had defrauded you out of such a sum? And what had the Colville thief done with the money? Where was it? As Powerscourt took his leave of James Chadwick and Ringmer Avenue he wondered if the other two senior accountants would tell him the same story. And if the theft led directly to murder and death.

Emily Colville, née Emily Nash, sat in the drawing room of her new house in Barnes close to Hammersmith Bridge. Emily had been married for less than a month and was already dubious about the supposed virtues of the married state. Their honeymoon to Rome and Florence had been postponed because of the murder of her father-in-law at the wedding reception. Emily missed Brympton. She
missed the company of her younger brothers and sisters. She missed her horse and her dogs who, her father had assured her, would be waiting for her. Secretly, her father hoped that the animals would be a lure to bring her back home.

Many of the things that would have occupied newly married young women were not available to Emily. The all-important consolations of domestic bliss, the transition from doll’s house to real house, the location of furniture and fittings, the vital questions of where to hang the pictures had all been taken care of as the house had been rented furnished and the owners, gone to New York for a year or two, had made it clear that they expected to find the house exactly as they had left it on their return. Every morning her husband Montague walked over Hammersmith Bridge and took the train to his Colville offices in the West End. Every evening he left his Colville office and returned to his house near the river. Emily stayed behind in what was, for her, in danger of turning into a Colville mausoleum. Other fashionable young women might have taken up votes for women and spent the occasional evening breaking the shop windows of Bond Street and Mayfair. Emily thought the suffragettes were faintly ludicrous and didn’t care if she had the vote or not. Then there was charity and good works among the capital’s innumerable poor. Sadly neither charity nor the poor appealed to Emily at all. She was restless, hungry for excitement. Her husband might be kind, reliable, steady, but the heady wine of romance did not flow in his veins. Sometimes Emily thought she was composed of two selves, one respectable, conventional like her parents, the other giddy, longing for escape and adventure and intrigue. It was the first Emily, not the second, who had married Montague. She sought consolation in the women’s magazines but they only left her more dissatisfied than before. More and more she looked back to her summer adventures in Norfolk, the waiting, the secret messages that summoned her to these trysts in the little
cottage. Only in these weeks in Barnes did she come to realize that forbidden activity brings its own excitement and that secret love is a most powerful aphrodisiac. Desperately, she wished for another message, scrabbling through the morning and afternoon posts in the hope that happiness might return.

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 cafés. 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?’