Death of a Wine Merchant (10 page)

‘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 château 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?

Charles Augustus Pugh was standing by his window, leaning forward for a better view of the perfectly manicured lawns of Gray’s Inn. Advancing towards him, Powerscourt thought he looked like a cricket umpire stooping towards the other end and trying to establish whether the batsman was leg before wicket.

‘Look at it, Powerscourt, it’s a bloody disgrace.’ He pointed to the sad remains of a blackbird which looked as if it had met a violent and bloody end, its head twisted over to one side, its insides opened out to the autumn air.

‘Mark my words,’ said Pugh, ‘it’s that bloody chambers cat the fools have brought in. I argued against it at the chambers meeting, I said we were a firm of barristers not a wildlife sanctuary or a bloody zoo, for Christ’s sake. No good. I was voted down. Can you imagine? Some of the finest minds in legal London, and they want to have a cat. I ask you. They’ll be drawing up rotas next for the barristers to put out the saucer of milk morning and evening. There are mice here, I grant you, but what’s wrong with poison? We don’t need a bloody cat.

‘Never mind. Let us turn our attention to the Colvilles, one dead on his son’s wedding day, one turned mute in the stone of Pentonville. The solicitors told me yesterday they’d tried again to persuade Cosmo to talk. No joy, not a word out of him. He’ll bloody well have to speak in court to plead guilty
or not guilty. Let’s hope he hasn’t forgotten how to get the words out. Do you have anything to report, Powerscourt? Any deus ex machina to solve all our problems?’

Powerscourt had already written about the fingerprints. ‘I don’t think I have anything at present that would get us out of our difficulties. There’s something very odd about the money, though. One of the family solicitors told me very early on that Randolph Colville should have been worth a lot more than he actually was. Colvilles have got through three senior accountants in less than five years. They too tell of funny things going on with the money. Just before the final accounts are signed off, something in the order of one hundred thousand pounds a year simply disappears. Cosmo and the late Randolph seem to be instrumental in the disappearance of these Houdini funds. If you think about it, they’re defrauding members of their own family – only family members can hold shares, you see. And the family don’t make a fuss. Maybe there’s blackmail in there, but you would have to think it’s the whole clan who are being blackmailed. What do you make of it, Pugh?’

Two elegant black shoes descended from the desk as Charles Augustus Pugh began to walk up and down his room, pausing from time to time for emphasis as his thoughts unrolled. ‘I think I like it. I didn’t like the fingerprint angle very much. It would only be really effective if we found other fingerprints on it and we knew whose those were. But blackmail, my friend, blackmail might be better. It gives us motive for a start which we didn’t have before. Juries like motives they can understand. Juries understand blackmail. Suppose one of these Colvilles learns about how they have been defrauded all these years. For some reason the fact of this missing money is very important for our man. Maybe there was a sick relative he couldn’t send to Switzerland or America or somewhere or other. He gets hold of a gun, either Randolph’s gun or one identical to it. Off he trots to the wedding and arranges to have a quiet word with Randolph before the festive board is
actually rolled out. Bang, he shoots Randolph dead. He drops the gun on the floor and flees as unobtrusively as he can. Cosmo hears the bang and walks into the room. I say, he says to himself, isn’t that Randolph’s gun? So he picks it up, and then he is found with the gun in his hand and his murdered brother on the floor. Because he knows who the murderer is, Cosmo doesn’t speak. He has to protect the killer. He has to keep quiet.’

Pugh sat down again and brushed a small speck of dust off his dark grey trousers. ‘It’s fine, of course, except we don’t know who the blackmailer is or was or the nature of the blackmail itself. I can’t believe it’ll solve all our problems, Powerscourt, but I could do something with it if I had to. Can you line up these accountants to come to court? If we don’t know who the real murderer is, all we can do is try to persuade the jury that there is doubt about a conviction, that the jury shouldn’t feel comfortable sending Cosmo to the gallows. It’s all we can do.’

Pugh stared over at his window. ‘Bloody cat,’ he said again. ‘Do you know, they haven’t even got a name for it yet? I think I’ll make a suggestion at the next chambers meeting. I’ve wondered about Messalina or Cleopatra but I think we want something simpler.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

‘It’s a perfect description for the bloody animal’s behaviour. Killer, that’s what we should call her. Killer the cat, killer, now I think about it, rather like our unknown murdering friend up in Norfolk.’

Powerscourt found Sir Pericles Freme walking up and down his drawing room in Markham Square in a state of high excitement. It was with difficulty that he persuaded the man to sit down and take a cup of tea.

‘I bring news, Powerscourt, news from the world of Colvilles. I did not receive the intelligence from them directly
but I am assured it is correct.’ Freme began rubbing his hands together and nodding his head up and down. ‘Oh, yes!’ he said. ‘Oh, yes!’

‘Please continue, Sir Pericles.’

Sir Pericles stared at Powerscourt for a moment as if collecting his thoughts. Certainly he sounded now less excited than he had before.

‘In the wine business, as you know, everything is governed by the seasons. A time for harvest, a time for bottling, a time for planting. Round about now is the time Colvilles ship over their next consignment of white wine to see them through Christmas and the New Year. The winter is not quite upon us but if the wine does not come soon, the weather may cause problems. One of London’s most distinguished merchants almost went under a few years ago when their vessel sank in the Bay of Biscay with a huge consignment of claret on board. Nobody has tried to ship anything in December since. But the Colville wine is still in Burgundy. It has not left the warehouses. It has not been pulled together ready for shipping.’

‘Can’t they buy some more? Won’t there be some
négociants
in Beaune or in Dijon who can step into the breach?’

‘There may well be,’ said Freme, ‘but it will take time and money, a lot of money. Word will have flashed round the vineyards that a big English customer has failed to take delivery of his consignment of Chablis and Meursault and so on. Colvilles will have paid for this lot of fine burgundy once. Now they will have to pay again. And there’s worse, much worse.’

‘How much worse?’ said Powerscourt.

‘The agent in Burgundy, a Monsieur Jean Pierre Drouhin, has disappeared. Nobody has seen him for ten days or so. You see, if he was there he could assemble all the Colville wine and organize the shipment in a couple of days, he knows where everything is. He has been with the Colvilles for ten years or more. But now he is not with them. He has vanished.’

‘Does nobody know where he might have gone? Did he have a wife?’

‘A pretty wife and two lovely children, they say.’

‘Parents alive, parents not well, that sort of thing? Has he gone on a mission of mercy to the ancestral farm?’

‘He would have told his wife if he was doing that, surely.’

‘Another woman? Romance in Antibes or Biarritz, perhaps?’

‘Nobody knows, Powerscourt, nobody knows anything at all.’

‘You don’t suppose he’s dead, do you?’ Powerscourt was spinning spiders’ webs in his mind, wondering if there was any connection between death in Brympton, the missing money in Colvilles’ accounts and the missing agent in Burgundy.

‘The French police are investigating, of course.’ Sir Pericles didn’t sound as if he had great confidence in them. ‘I must leave you now, I’m afraid. I have an appointment with a senior figure in Colvilles. Would you like a recipe, or a receipt, before I go?’

‘Very much, Sir Pericles. Let me just fetch Lucy. She’s devoted to the recipes.’

Freme pulled a little book out of his bag and settled a pair of spectacles on his nose.

‘English sherry,’ he began, ‘here we go. “To every pound of good, moist sugar, put one quart of water. Boil it till it is clear. When cool (as near as possible to cold without being so) work it with new yeast, and add of strong beer in the height of working, the proportion of one quart in a gallon. Cover it up, and let it work the same as beer; when the fermentation begins to subside, tun it; and when it has been in the cask a fortnight or three weeks, add raisins, half a pound to a gallon, sugar candy and bitter almonds of each half an ounce to the gallon, and to nine gallons of wine half a pint of the best brandy. Paste a stiff brown paper over the bung hole and if necessary renew it. This wine will be fit to bottle after remaining one year in the cask; but if left longer will be improved. If suffered to remain three years in the cask and one in bottles it
can scarcely be distinguished from good foreign wines, and for almost every purpose answers exactly as well.”’

Powerscourt was making his way to the village of Moulsford on the Thames once more. He was going to call on Hermione, widow of the murdered Randolph Colville. He had felt it only polite to delay his visit until now when the death and the funeral were a little time in the past and the pain of bereavement, while still harsh, might not be as sharp as before. Looking up from his notebook he noticed that his train was slowing down. They were enveloped in white mist. Out of the left-hand window it hung in fronds or tendrils as if attached to an invisible washing line. Two ghostly horses stood still about fifty yards from his carriage, pale riders waiting to gallop off to some brighter future. On the other side the mist was packed close, so dense that you could only see for a couple of yards. The train was now advancing slowly through this other world. Powerscourt suddenly remembered coming out of the Hotel Danieli on the Venetian sea front early one morning and finding that the Basilica, the Doge’s Palace, even the Lion of St Mark on his pillar had all disappeared in a dense Venetian fog. Only the water told you it was still there, he recalled, lapping ceaselessly against the quays. After a couple of minutes the mist vanished as quickly as it had arrived. A pale November sun broke through the clouds casting a light that danced on the blue waters of the Thames.

It was shortly after half past ten when a diminutive butler showed Powerscourt into an upstairs drawing room looking out over the river. On the left of the corridor at the top of the stairs he glimpsed a room that seemed to be full of guns of every description. Hermione Colville was sitting in a high-backed chair by a great window with a fine view over the Thames. She was dressed entirely in black. To her left, on a small circular table, was a large goblet. Behind that stood a bottle of wine, presumably white, in a cooler. Powerscourt
wondered briefly when she started drinking, this bereaved woman. Ten o’clock? Half past nine? Her voice, however, sounded perfectly sober.

‘Good morning to you, Lord Powerscourt. How very kind of you to come and see me in my widow’s weeds. I understand you are not having much success in your investigation so far. Is that correct?’ She took another mouthful of her wine. Presumably, Powerscourt thought, she got the stuff cheap from Colvilles. Perhaps they sent it up from London in a barge. He wondered how much malice there was in her words.

‘I am most grateful to you for seeing me this morning, Mrs Colville. It is true what you say about my investigation. So far it is not going as well as I would like.’

‘Is that because it is a particularly difficult investigation or because you are not a particularly skilled investigator?’

Powerscourt smiled politely. What should have been a perfectly innocuous conversation was turning into a skirmish. ‘I couldn’t possibly say anything to that, Mrs Colville, but let me proceed with my business. Forgive me if I ask you about your husband at such a time as this but it often helps to talk to those closest to him. Could I ask first of all if you have a photograph of your husband I might borrow?’

Hermione Colville walked rather unsteadily to a little table by the side of the fireplace and gave him a family snapshot.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m sure this will be a great help. In the weeks before his death, Mrs Colville, did he show any signs of anxiety? Would you have said he was worried about something? Did he have a problem on his mind?’

‘No is the answer to all those questions. I cannot see what use they are to you or anybody else. They won’t bring Randolph back.’ She took another large mouthful from her glass and looked defiantly at her visitor.

‘Would you have said your husband had any enemies, Mrs Colville? Perhaps I should say many enemies? People high up in business often do.’

‘He didn’t talk to me about things like that. We didn’t have that kind of marriage, if you want to know.’

‘No?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Well, he was away a lot in France. One of the children used to say he only had half a father because his papa was only here half the time.’ She paused to take another mouthful and then rang a small bell. The diminutive butler appeared as if by magic and popped another opened bottle into the cooler. He slipped out as unobtrusively as he had come. The whole manoeuvre had taken less than thirty seconds.

‘Did your husband have any money concerns, Mrs Colville? Any conversations about the times being bad for business?’

‘I told you, Lord Powerscourt, we didn’t have that sort of marriage.’ Her words were beginning to sound slurred now. Powerscourt wondered if one bottle was going to make her drunk. Then it would be the second bottle and the slow descent into incoherence. Madam is not available in the afternoons, my lord. Maybe he had only got here just in time.

Powerscourt thought he would take a chance, draw a bow at a venture. ‘What kind of marriage would you say you did have, Mrs Colville?’

She looked at him with contempt. She stared defiantly at the view outside her great window, a pair of oarsmen making their way downstream, a heron standing proudly on the bank. If you listened very carefully in that Colville drawing room you could just catch the distant screeching of the gulls. Hermione Colville took another glass of her wine. Powerscourt saw from the label that it was a Chablis. He didn’t suppose Colvilles drank
vin ordinaire
.