Death of a Wine Merchant (14 page)

Whites was the hotel where the pre-phylloxera dinners were held. Presumably the clients were keen to indulge their passion for these wines at a place where no publicity was likely to leak out. Maybe even their own wives didn’t know where they had gone on these evenings, or of the size of the bills. Powerscourt asked for the general manager and was shown into a small room behind the reception desk. The walls were lined with prints of the great houses of England, Blenheim, Longleat and Wilton House on one wall, Holkham Hall and Castle Howard on the other.

Two or three minutes later a very neat little man, five feet six inches tall and clean shaven in his frock coat, who looked as if he was polished twice a day, announced himself as George Brandon, general manager of Whites Hotel.

‘And how might I be of service to you today, Lord Powerscourt?’

Powerscourt wondered, not for the first time, if the Lord in his name meant that he received speedier service than a mere Mister. He reflected ruefully that he would never find out. ‘Thank you for seeing me so quickly, Mr Brandon. I am most grateful. I am seeking information and guidance on pre-phylloxera wines. I understand that you hold dinners here from time to time when such wines are served.’

George Brandon smiled. ‘You have come to the right place, Lord Powerscourt. Would you like me to arrange to have you added to our list of clients? I don’t think that would be a problem.’

‘Would that it were so easy, Mr Brandon! Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to join your connoisseurs and their ancient vintages around the table. Let me be frank with you. We are talking of a dinner, a celebration, for a relative who is approaching his eightieth birthday. Indeed it may be touch and go whether he reaches that happy day or not. I fear
that some of the younger and more flippant members of the family have been placing wagers on whether the old boy will see his birthday or not. He lives in a crumbling Tudor mansion in the depths of Somerset. His doctors will not let him out as far as Bath, let alone the West End of London.’

‘I see,’ said George Brandon. He rubbed his chin for a moment or two. ‘Let me see what we might be able to do, Lord Powerscourt. On very special occasions we put in motion a very special travel service for special clients. A luxurious, upholstered cab to take them to the station. A special train, equipped with its own doctors and nurses, to bring them up to London. A special motor car, also furnished with medical staff, to bring the clients to the hotel. The pre-phylloxera dinner on a scale and of a complexity to suit the client. A night under supervision in one of our Edward the Seventh suites. The journey in reverse the following day. We activated the service only last month, Lord Powerscourt, for an American millionaire who was taken ill in Yorkshire. It was very satisfactory.’

‘What was wrong with the American gentleman?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘I fear he was somewhat over-concerned about his health. He had a pain in his chest and thought his heart was going to stop.’

‘And was it?’

‘The doctors said his heart was in fine condition. They said he had probably pulled a muscle, coughing from an overgenerous intake of cigarettes.’

‘I see. Let me return to Somerset, Mr Brandon. Even with your superb travelling hospital, as it were, I do not think the family would be happy bringing the old gentleman to London. Let me apologize to you. What I meant to ask you right at the beginning was for the name of your wine merchants. I have been diverted by the quality of your service and the range of what you can supply.’

Powerscourt smiled at the little hotel manager. George Brandon rubbed his hands together again.

‘I should be happy to oblige. All I would ask, Lord Powerscourt, is that you would consider our services for any special occasions in the future. We should be only too happy to oblige. Now then, the name of the pre-phylloxera wine merchant is Piccadilly Wine, of Sackville Street, behind Regent Street. You should ask for Septimus Parry – he’s the gentleman we deal with.’

Powerscourt wondered if Brandon carried the names and addresses of all his principal suppliers – florists, butchers, greengrocers, bakers, tea merchants – round in his head. ‘Might I ask if these gentlemen supply all your wines, or just the special ones?’

George Brandon smiled. ‘They just supply the pre-phylloxera wines. They came to us in the first instance a couple of years ago. They said they had found large stocks of these pre-plague vintages. They more or less threw themselves on our mercy as to what to do with them. Piccadilly knew there were people who would pay a great deal of money to drink these wines but they didn’t know how to find them. Fortunately we were able to help on that score.’

And Piccadilly Wine, in the person of one Septimus Parry, had finessed themselves into a position where they would be able to charge the very top prices, with a band of drinkers assembled by Whites Hotel. God only knew how much they charged for a bottle of the stuff.

‘Mr Brandon, I am most grateful to you. I will detain you no longer. I shall set out for Piccadilly Wine at once.’

Twenty minutes later Lord Francis Powerscourt was shown into the office of Piccadilly Wine. There were two large desks, an enormous map of France on the wall and two young men, Vicary Dodds, attending to his account books with great care and total concentration in his suit of sober grey, and Septimus Parry, leafing idly through some wine catalogues from France
in a suit that looked as if its owner should have been taking bets in the enclosure at Newmarket.

‘Good afternoon to you, sir,’ said Septimus. ‘How may we be of service?’

‘A very good afternoon to you too,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘I am interested in buying some of your pre-phylloxera wines.’

Was it just a normal reaction, Powerscourt wondered, or did Septimus Parry put up his guard at the mention of the word pre-phylloxera? Even Vicary Dodds, keeper of the eternal verities of the account books, put down his pencil and inspected his visitor. Certainly Septimus’s manner from now on was more reserved than it had been when he came in.

‘Who told you we sold these wines?’ said Septimus.

‘I’ve just been informed about them by George Brandon at Whites Hotel.’

‘I see,’ said Septimus. He only realized later that a more devious wine merchant would not have been satisfied with Powerscourt’s answer. George Brandon might have confirmed to Powerscourt that these dinners with these wines existed, but it was unlikely that he would have volunteered the information. Powerscourt must have heard about them from somebody else. But who?

‘We do have access to some of these wines, Lord Powerscourt, but might I ask about the occasion for which they are needed and the quantities required?’

‘Of course you may, Mr Parry. There is an elderly gentleman in our family approaching his eightieth birthday. He lives in the depths of Somerset. He is not very strong or very well. His doctors are not sure if he will reach this birthday. In his youth,’ Powerscourt knew he was embroidering the life and times of the old gentleman every time he spoke, ‘our elderly friend was a great connoisseur of French wines, burgundy and Bordeaux in particular. Most people prefer one or the other, Bordeaux or burgundy. The old boy liked them both. He would travel there in his holidays and taste them on the spot. You know as well as I do, gentlemen, of the terrible
ravages of phylloxera that ran for thirty years or so from the 1860s. Over time all the great vineyards had to be replanted. Our elderly gentleman,’ Powerscourt thought he had better give him a name fairly soon, ‘saw one important part of his life taken away from him, his love of these great French wines. The replacements and their produce he did not care for. He said they might as well come from Morocco as far as he was concerned. Then, somewhere, he can’t remember where, his memory is going so fast, he read of the existence of pre-phylloxera wines in France, and a limited quantity in England. Gentlemen, I am sure you can see why I am here. The chance to bring back to an old man some of the joys of his youth. The chance to let the old gentleman taste once more the wines that he loved so well. The chance to brighten his last days and let him approach the final one floating in a lake of Château Lafite or Château Latour.’

Septimus Parry smiled. ‘I can almost see the old gentleman, tottering slowly round his house, taking a few hesitant steps in the garden. I regret to have to tell you that we have no Latour and no Lafite. That is not to say there is none of it in England – there is – but we cannot persuade the owners to part with it for any amount of money. Just let us know how many red and how many white you would like, what quantities of Bordeaux and burgundy would suit you and we will do the rest.’

‘You don’t have a
carte des vins
, a wine list?’

‘Not as such,’ said Septimus, feeling rather anxious now. ‘As I say, we ask the clients what they would like, in general terms.’

‘Is that not rather unusual?’ said Powerscourt. ‘You mean my old relative can’t even have a bottle of his favourite Nuits St Georges?’

‘I think we could manage that, Lord Powerscourt. You see, the way it works at Whites Hotel is that we supply the wines at our discretion. Their chef plans the meal round the particular vintages we are going to provide and everybody is
happy. So if you let us know the colour and the quantity we can set to straight away.’

Powerscourt wondered if the young man knew that he, Powerscourt, suspected that the wines were fake, that they weren’t playing an elaborate game of charades. ‘I should be most interested to know,’ he said, ‘how you discovered these wines. And how nobody else has discovered them. That’s rather a coup, I should say.’

‘It was luck, really,’ said Septimus, running his fingers through his hair. ‘I’ve got this great-uncle, he’s dead now, but he was a great lover of wine. Every year Berry Bros. & Rudd would send him their pick of the best clarets and the best burgundies of that year. In the early 1860s he saw the writing on the wall – he thought that sooner or later the phylloxera insect would munch its way through all the vineyards of France, starting in the south and going all the way up to Champagne. So he doubled the size of his order. Soon the cellar was full to bursting with this stuff. Then, before he had time to drink a tenth of it, he died. His son wasn’t interested in wine at all, hardly touched it. I knew his son, third in line from the man who bought all the wine, at Oxford. So when we started the business, Vicary and I, we got in touch with this chap. His family knew two or three others who also had supplies. Then we got into touch with Whites to organize the dinners.’

‘How fascinating!’ said Powerscourt. ‘I should love to go and see the cellars where these treasures are kept. Is there any chance of a visit?’

‘I’m afraid not, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Septimus, sending the ball back across the net once more. ‘If it was up to me we could go there this very day, but the owners don’t like people trampling all over their house as they put it. They’re very strict about their privacy.’

‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I can’t see a wine list, I can’t see the place where the bottles are stored – what can I see, Mr Parry?’

Septimus laughed. ‘You come back tomorrow, Lord Powerscourt, and bring us a list for you to choose from. I promise you.’

Powerscourt said he would return and set off on his way back to Markham Square. As he went he reflected that there was only one part of Septimus Parry’s story that might be true but probably wasn’t. The house in the country with the wine lover forty years before ordering his supplies from Berry Bros. & Rudd, that was possible, but probably untrue. This evening Septimus would have a meeting with the Necromancer where they would agree the wines to be faked. Powerscourt looked forward very much to tasting them. And he sent urgent word to Johnny Fitzgerald to ask him to follow Septimus Parry wherever he went the following afternoon. He, Powerscourt, was going to call on Piccadilly Wine in the early afternoon. Maybe Septimus Parry would lead him to the Necromancer.

After three days Tristram Bennett tired of being the replacement for his murdered cousin Randolph. Life as a wine merchant was not quite what he had expected. Tristram had imagined that Colville retainers would appear at regular intervals throughout the day, bringing tea or coffee or drinks. They did not appear. Instead a wide variety of messengers appeared with things for him to read, things for him to sign, people in the trade he must talk to. These conversations did not go easily. For although Tristram had absorbed a certain amount about the wine business in his time with the firm, he was not capable of an opinion on the likely vintage quality in Burgundy or whether they should change shippers for the delivery of their Sancerre. To all difficult questions he told his visitors he would get back to them. He rather wished he could return to his undemanding position in East Anglia.

He wondered what to do about Emily Colville. If Tristram was going to continue his affair, he would have to find a house or a flat to rent close to Emily’s place in Barnes. He knew she would never yield to him in the house she shared with her husband. In Norfolk the rent on the little cottage with the thatched roof had been tiny. In London it would be rather more, but he knew he did not dare mention money to Emily or she would accuse him of putting gold before love. This, in fact, was a proposition that Tristram would gladly have subscribed to, even if not in female company.

It was the formal invitation that finished his incipient career as a wine merchant. It came shortly before lunch on the third day. It was an invitation to the Annual Dinner of the Wine Merchants and Vintners Society of London, to be held in the Vintners Hall in the City. Formal Dress, it said on the bottom line. Tristram was no puritan in questions of food and drink, but he could imagine the whole scene. Row upon row of tables bedecked with flowers and bottles of wine. The men, all in their fifties and sixties, balding, braying and boasting about their wine business or their wives or their children, growing redder and redder as the evening went on, progressing from the colour of rose to the colour of beetroot. And then the speeches! All too long, all too pompous, all too self-obsessed, all too vain. Whatever else the wine business might hold, this was not for Tristram. He did tell Davis before he left for his club in the middle of his last afternoon that Randolph’s position was not for him. He was going back to Norfolk.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was going to the west London suburb of Ealing on the Piccadilly line. He was thinking as he went about the links between the Necromancer in his warehouse, if that, indeed, was where he lived, Whites Hotel and Piccadilly Wine where he proposed to call later in the day. He found the history of these strange wines, real or faked, absolutely fascinating and he knew he would follow the story with great interest. But for the life of him he could not see how it might lead to murder. Faked wines would easily lend themselves to blackmail. The announcement that Colvilles or Piccadilly had been trafficking in these illicit substances would be bad for a day or two. But a sensible firm would quickly put out a statement that a bad apple had been identified and removed, that business was returning to normal and the loyal customers who had been with Colvilles or Piccadilly all these years could sleep easy in their beds as all Colville wines were now genuine.

Thomas Colville opened the door of 27 Inkerman Avenue in person. He was in his late forties or early fifties with a great beard and a handlebar moustache.

‘Good morning to you, Lord Powerscourt, welcome to 27 Inkerman Avenue. The battle may be long over but the house still stands!’ He laughed lightly at his own joke. ‘Come in and sit down, I’ll rouse Ethel up from wherever she’s hiding!’

A few minutes later they were all seated comfortably in the Colville parlour with prints of famous racehorses on the walls, drinking Ethel’s tea and eating Ethel’s biscuits. ‘You must ask whatever you want, Lord Powerscourt. Randolph and Cosmo might not be my very best friends but I wouldn’t wish their fate on anybody.’

‘I think you knew them as children, Mr Colville. What were they like then?’

‘Pretty bloody, if the truth be told,’ said Thomas Colville. ‘The adults all thought that three cousins roughly the same age should get on together and play nicely, as they used to put it. How little did they know!’

‘What happened, Mr Colville?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘There was a lot of bullying, hair pulling, kicking, various forms of physical and mental torture, really. The odd thing is that Randolph didn’t seem to have any moral sense at all. He thought this kind of behaviour was perfectly normal and that he was only exercising his God-given rights in carrying on like this.’

‘What about Cosmo? Did he take the same view as Randolph?’

‘Well, he was more normal, if I can put it like that. I think he knew the difference between right and wrong. He would tell Randolph every now and then to stop what he was doing.’

‘If it was all so grim, why didn’t you tell your parents? They could have stopped you going to the Colvilles, surely.’

‘You know what small boys are like, Lord Powerscourt. My parents were too much in awe of their richer relations to dare take me away.’

‘So what happened when the two others went away to school?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Life must have been somewhat easier then.’

‘During term-time it was, but the holidays were worse, much worse. Randolph had come across all kinds of bullying at school so he simply brought the techniques home with him. I was hung up on trees in the garden. The two of them took great pleasure holding me upside down and forcing my head in the lavatory bowl and then flushing it. Any animals or insects they could catch were given a hard time – birds had their wings pulled off, butterflies cut in two, that sort of thing.’

‘Great God!’ said Powerscourt. ‘How dreadful. Could I ask you, Mr Colville, why it was after all this humiliation that you went to work for the family firm? Surely you must have known that there might well be more grief, years more grief from these two.’

‘Once a Colville, always a Colville,’ said Thomas with a smile. ‘My parents wanted me to join the firm. They still suffered from the illusion that Randolph and Cosmo and I got on very well. So they thought I would be well looked after and would prosper in the business.’

‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Not well looked after? Not prospering?’

‘Very little prospering,’ said Thomas, ‘very little indeed. You see, the one thing I had always shown an aptitude for was maths. Adding up, dividing, algebra, all those equations with 2x + 4 = 3y – 2 were all meat and drink to me. So I asked to work in the accounts department. Randolph, who had manoeuvred himself into a position where he was in charge of my future, sent me to the bottling plant instead. When I’d learnt all there was to know there I applied for a transfer, to the accounts department, naturally. This time I was sent to the labelling section and very boring it was too. After ten or twelve years I’d been round every department bar one, and that was where they did the sums.’

‘And what was Cosmo doing while all this was going on? Was he aiding and abetting his brother?’

‘That’s the curious thing,’ said Thomas. ‘As Randolph turned into more and more of a bully, Cosmo became a more normal member of the human race. He wasn’t Francis of Assisi or anything like that but he was decent and kind and sometimes considerate.’

‘Before we talk about why you left, Mr Colville, could I ask if you were the only one singled out for horrible treatment by Randolph? Or were there others?’

‘I was not alone. No, sir. There were plenty more singled out for bullying, some of it much worse than what I received.’

‘Could I ask Mrs Colville how she coped with all these difficult times?’ said Powerscourt.

‘We got through, Lord Powerscourt. We got through. There were times when I just wanted to walk into the Head Office and tell everybody I saw what a brute Randolph Colville was.’

‘You left, Mr Colville, ten years ago, I think. Do you keep up with any of the people you knew when you were working for the firm?’

‘One or two close friends, that’s all. Oddly enough there’s one chap come to work in the brewery where I do the accounts, Fuller’s in Chiswick. But I hear bits and pieces every now and then.’

‘I want to ask you both a question, and I want you to think very carefully about the answer. Do you think that the bullying could get so bad that somebody might decide to kill Randolph?’

Thomas ate a couple of biscuits and then a couple more. It was Ethel who answered first.

‘I do think it is possible, Lord Powerscourt. I think Thomas is a fairly even-tempered sort of man in spite of everything he has had to put with. But if you were a redhead with a temper, like my younger brother, you could well decide to kill him. I just wonder about the timing, though. If he had been really horrible to you, and you had a gun to hand somewhere in the
offices, you could go and kill him in a fit of fury, so incensed you scarcely knew what you were doing. But leave the office, take a train to Norfolk, get your hands on a gun, I’m not sure. I think common sense would intervene somewhere along the way.’

‘I think what you say is very sensible, Ethel,’ said Thomas Colville, ‘but I’ve been trying to remember exactly how I felt after some of these outrages. I think there are, maybe, different sorts of anger. There’s the hot anger Ethel was talking about but there’s also a kind of cold anger which can last for days or weeks. I’m sure there were times when I could have got on the Norfolk train and killed Randolph Colville.’

‘You’ve both been very honest with me,’ said Lord Powerscourt. ‘Could I ask you one last favour? If you or your friends can think of anybody who might have gone to kill Randolph, could you let me know? I would be most grateful.’

As Powerscourt left, Thomas Colville handed him a bottle of beer. Fuller Smith and Turner, 1845, it said on the label. ‘This is the beer from the place where I work now,’ said Thomas. ‘It’s a bloody sight better than any of the rubbish you can buy in Colvilles off-licences!’

Emily Colville enjoyed the secrecy involved in meeting her lover. Now she had escaped the boring and the humdrum into the mysterious world of romance. Her cab took her from Norwich station, the blinds tightly closed in case she should meet her relations, and round the back of Brympton Hall to the tiny cottage in the woods behind the lake. It looked as though it came from a fairy tale with a round shape and a thatched roof on the top. From such a place elves or fairies might have ventured forth to dance in the woods at midnight, lit by the moon and the stars.

Emily took out her key and settled in the tiny living room to wait for her lover. She busied herself with preparing a fire, for the tiny cottage was cold from lack of use. Her heart sang as
she carried in the logs and began arranging them in the grate. Surely, this was real life. Surely this was far better then organizing tiresome elements of domestic duty, asking the servants to polish the spoons or checking that there were enough pillowcases in the linen cupboard. She checked her watch and remembered the picture of ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’ on the front of the sheet music, the code that had brought her here. He must come soon. Emily had brought the sheet music with her. It sat in a heap of other popular songs by the window. The code was very simple. Emily thought she should offer it to the Foreign Office where she was sure they had need of codes and ciphers of every description in the intelligence war with the Germans. The code was based on the musical keys. A meant Monday, B meant Tuesday, C meant Wednesday and so on. Flat meant morning and sharp meant afternoon. It was such a lovely secret. Emily liked secrets. She was the only person in the country who knew the secret behind Tristram’s mild blackmail of Randolph Colville and she was never going to tell that to anybody.

Tristram Bennett, the man Emily was waiting for, was in no hurry to find his lady. Keep them waiting, that was his motto. After the first success, Tristram believed, the women would be more ardent if they had to sit around wondering if he was ever going to come. So he stretched his legs out in the front parlour of the Nelson Arms a couple of hundred yards from the tiny cottage and ordered a second glass of brandy and another large cigar.

Tristram Bennett was the eldest son of Beatrice, daughter of Walter Colville, younger sister of Randolph and Cosmo. His parents had sent him to Harrow where he had one of those middling sort of school careers, middle of the class, middling in athletics, middling popular with his fellows. The one thing his contemporaries could have told you about him was that he had a passion, some might have called it a mania, for gambling. Tristram’s doting mama had great hopes of him entering the Church and rising through the lower ranks to
become a bishop. He would look so handsome, she thought, in bishop’s robes and a mitre. Her husband put a stop to all that by repeating what Tristram’s housemaster had said, that of course the Church of England was a broad church which would take all manner of persons into its bosom, but a man who might take as the text for his sermon the list of runners and riders in the three-thirty at Sandown Park might not be welcomed with open arms. Beatrice took a violent dislike to the housemaster and continued her policy of secret subventions to her sons’s already generous allowance. It was decided that the Army might prove a better career than the Church Militant and Tristram joined the Blues and Royals. It might have been his charm, it might have been his good looks, it might have been the way those two qualities combined in his dashing uniform, but at this stage Tristram discovered he was very attractive to women. The ones dearest to his heart were the rich ones who would think nothing of helping him out with his gambling debts in return for his helping them into their beds.

Just into his thirties now there was still no sign of a wife. Or rather, there were plenty of signs of wives, but they all belonged to other people. Tristram’s father wondered sometimes if the boy might never marry at all but turn into one of those ageing rakes who frequented the less reputable London clubs. His mother, devoted to the last, thought it was only a matter of time before Tristram marched up the aisle with a daughter of the aristocracy perhaps, or the daughter of some great trading concern with innumerable investments in the Funds.