Death of a Wine Merchant (16 page)

But when the figure came round the bend she saw it was only the vicar, come to open up the Church for evensong.

Lady Lucy had organized the Powerscourt dining room with considerable care. Three places were laid at the top end of the table nearest the hall. There were no knives or spoons, but half a dozen glasses, three for red wine and three for white, and a tumbler for water. By the side of each place was a large French saucepan for the participants to spit their wine into. Lady Lucy didn’t feel they were perfect, the large saucepans, but they would suffice. She wondered if somewhere in London you could buy special glasses for the special substances of the man they called the Necromancer. Francis had put the list of pre-phylloxera wines in the centre of the table.

As they took their places with Powerscourt at the head of the table, Sir Pericles on his right and Lady Lucy on his left, Freme was rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

‘I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this. So many times in my life I have drunk wine that I knew to be fake. Undrinkable stuff composed of water and raisins and elder berries from some slum in the East End, diluted claret, watered down with low-grade red from Languedoc brewed up in some warehouse in the south of France, unspeakable burgundy made with apple juice and brandy cooked up in a seedy cellar in Hamburg, I think I’ve seen them all. But to know every bottle is a fake before you start tasting, that is a great joy. Powerscourt, how to you intend to proceed?’

‘I do have a plan of campaign, as a matter of fact. I think we should start with the Nuits St Georges they gave me the other day, before today’s delivery. Couple of sips of that and then compare it with the ones that came today.’

‘Capital!’ said Sir Pericles Freme and smiled broadly at Lady Lucy. Powerscourt was busy with the corkscrew. He poured three small helpings into their glasses. ‘To the Necromancer,’ he said, sipping at his wine. Sir Pericles took a small sip of his Nuits St Georges and spat expertly into his saucepan. He looked at Powerscourt like a man who cannot quite believe what he is tasting. ‘Would you both oblige me by taking another sip of this one you brought from the shop? I am somewhat confused.’

All three were served another small helping by Powerscourt acting as wine waiter. All three spat carefully into their saucepans. Lady Lucy suspected that the business of spitting wine into saucepans at one’s own dining table would not have met with her mother’s approval. She wondered which of the many words of disapproval in her mother’s wide vocabulary of words of disapproval would have been employed for the practice. Disagreeable? Demeaning? Unworthy? Vulgar? Common? Common, she decided, that would have been the adjective of choice. Sir Pericles, she noticed, looked like a man
who has just been given an enormous and impossible piece of mental arithmetic.

‘I’ll be damned, Powerscourt! Excuse my language, Lady Lucy. Could you put the right cork back in that bottle? You have the right cork? Good. You see, I don’t think that this Nuits St Georges is a forgery at all. I think it’s the real thing. I’ll take it round to one or two people I know after we’ve finished here. It’s the rich taste, the body of the wine. I’m sure it’s real. Come, let us try one of the Nuits St Georges that came today.’ Sir Pericles examined the label with great care, even producing a small magnifying glass from his jacket pocket for a closer look. ‘They sometimes make silly mistakes with the labels, these forgers. We had some Château Margaux years ago labelled Château Margo, as if the spelling had been done phonetically. Last year, I remember, we had a large consignment of Chablis with the year 1909 on the label. Time travelling Chablis perhaps. I’m sure H.G. Wells would have enjoyed a bottle or two.’

Once again Powerscourt poured out three small glasses of the Necromancer’s burgundy. ‘Try to remember the taste of the one before,’ Sir Pericles said quickly before anybody drank. They took cautious sips of the wine.

‘What do you think, Lady Lucy?’ asked Sir Pericles ‘What do you make of it?’

‘Well,’ said Lucy, ‘it’s definitely not the same as the one before. But it’s not absolutely disgusting, though I thought I detected a faint hint of a nasty aftertaste. If you told me at a posh dinner at Whites Hotel that this was pre-phylloxera Nuits St Georges I’d probably believe you. I’ve only ever tasted one bottle of pre-phylloxera wine and that was a Château Lafite with my grandfather shortly before he died. I have to say I can’t remember the taste or the bouquet at all. Is that very bad of me?’

‘Not at all,’ said Sir Pericles, ‘perfectly normal. What about you, Powerscourt?’

‘I agree with Lucy,’ said Powerscourt loyally.

‘Let’s try one more red, one of the Bordeaux, I think. Then we’d better taste the Pouilly Fumé you brought from the shop, Powerscourt. You’ve kept it separate from the others?’

Powerscourt pointed to a small cabinet by the wall where one bottle had been placed. He opened the Château Figeac from Bordeaux and poured a small amount into clean glasses.

‘Well,’ said Sir Pericles, ‘certainly not the real thing, but not bad, not bad at all. I suspect our friend has got hold of some cheaper claret from a lesser Château and diluted it with red from the Languedoc and maybe a shot of brandy. But I should say the fellow knows his blending well, how to mix the things up in the most convincing manner. Now then, last but not least, that Pouilly Fumé, if you please.’

He sipped very slowly at his glass of white. This time he didn’t spit it out. ‘If I was a betting man,’ said Freme,’ I think I’d put money on this Pouilly Fumé being the real thing. I think they were trying to confuse you.’ He finished his glass. ‘Lady Lucy, your thoughts?’

‘Delicious,’ she said, ‘absolutely delicious. We must order some for the cellar. You’re not going to tell me, Sir Pericles, that this one is a forgery?’

‘I’m not, it’s not,’ said Freme, ‘I think I’ll take that bottle away with me too, if I may. Our friend the Necromancer has not done badly, mind you. It’s easy to see how those dinners at Whites Hotel have kept going. I think I’d give him six or seven marks out of ten. Now then, this is my last word.’

He pulled a little notebook out of his pocket and began to read: ‘“White elder wine, very like sweet muscadine from southern France: Boil eighteen pounds of white powder sugar, with six gallons of water and two whites of egg well beaten; then skim it and put in a quarter of a peck of elder berries from the tree that bears white berries; don’t keep them on the fire. When near cold, stir it, and put in six spoonfuls of lemon juice, four or five of yeast and beat well into the liquor; stir it every day; put six pounds of the best raisins, stoned, into the cask and tun the wine. Stop it close and bottle in six months.”’

The Alchemist was fuming with rage. Ever since he arrived in London he had taken great care to defend his privacy. Nobody knew where he worked, the great space in the warehouse filled with bottles of every type and size, locks and bars on the doors. Now he and Septimus Parry had discovered that somebody calling himself Lord Francis Powerscourt and his tame tramp knew his identity and the place where he worked. The most important thing in the Alchemist’s life in London was his isolation, his solitary existence between his lodgings in north London and his bench at the warehouse in the docks. Parry had told him that he did not think Powerscourt was the man’s real name. Neither he nor Vicary Dodds believed a real lord would waste his time ordering pre-phylloxera wines that he suspected might be fakes before he even tasted them. The whole story about the elderly relative in darkest Somerset was, in Septimus’s view, a charade, a story that wasn’t true and wasn’t to be believed. Informed opinion at Piccadilly Wine reckoned the man called Powerscourt must be a government agent of some sort, come to check on the shipping manifests of the wine perhaps, or from one of the innumerable agencies that made it their business to raise taxes for the government.

The Alchemist was due to attend the opera that evening but he didn’t go. He was too upset and too angry, even for Wagner. Terrible fates unwound themselves in his mind,
incarceration in the Tower perhaps, exiled to some other terrible prison, an English equivalent of Château d’If maybe, deportation to France where his earlier crimes would catch up with him. The Alchemist had learnt the rudiments of his trade in the back streets of Marseilles. They knew what to do with their enemies there, those tough little Corsicans, men from Bastia and Ajaccio and Calvi. One of them had even given him lessons in the use of the knife and the garrotte. The Alchemist had never thought he would need to employ these murderous techniques on his own account. Now, he thought, in a wet November in London, the time had come to defend his privacy and his honour.

Charles Augustus Pugh was seated at his desk in Gray’s Inn. His feet, for once, were on the ground, not resting on his desk. His hands were attending to some piece of paper rather than wrapped round the back of his neck.

‘Damn and blast!’ he said to Powerscourt, just settling himself in on the other side of the formidable desk. ‘I mean, seriously damn and blast!’ He opened a low drawer rather furtively and produced a packet of cheroots and a box of matches. ‘Not meant to have one of these before six o’clock in the evening. Manage it most days. I’ve always said a chap should be allowed a few sins every now and then to make his virtues brighter the rest of the time. Would you agree with that, my friend?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Powerscourt, wondering what fresh catastrophe had reduced Pugh to his tobacco at ten o’clock in the morning. A quick glance out of the window revealed no hecatomb of dead birds or dismembered mammals that might have been massacred by the Pugh chambers cat.

‘The gun,’ said Pugh, blowing a great cloud of smoke past Powerscourt, ‘you will remember the gun in the state bedroom, held by Cosmo, believed to have been the weapon used to kill Randolph?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘My God, this cheroot
tastes good. Maybe you have to smoke them earlier and earlier in the day.’ He took another contented puff. Powerscourt looked expectant.

‘And you will recall, my dear Powerscourt, that you yourself toiled mightily to find a couple of fingerprint experts who might be willing to give evidence, travelling as far as the louche purlieus of Brighton to find one of these gentlemen? And indeed you did find such a man. So I had our solicitors write to the Norfolk Constabulary, copied to the prosecution solicitors, naturally, to ask if one of our own experts might look at the fingerprints on the gun and give his opinion to the court. The law officers of East Anglia, I fear, took some time to reply. Now I know why. This is the relevant portion of their answer: “The Norfolk Constabulary does not, at present, have its own fingerprint service. In any cases where we consider fingerprint evidence necessary, we send the relevant materials to the Metropolitan Police in London and they look after our interests as they would those of their own officers. Unfortunately” – I’ll say this is unfortunate, Powerscourt, wait for it, my friend – “the gun found in the possession of Mr Cosmo Colville was brought back to Fakenham police station. It was not tagged or stored in a safe place. A new cleaning woman, unacquainted with the customs of the force and the need for integrity in the storing of evidence, dusted the gun the very day it was taken to Fakenham. She told the station sergeant that she didn’t like dirty and dusty objects cluttering up the place. It looks much better now it’s cleaned up, that gun, she told the officer in charge. There’s not a print left on the thing now. It’s as clear of fingerprints as the day it left the factory.” God save us all.’

‘Heaven deliver us from Norfolk cleaning women,’ said Powerscourt, ‘especially the ones from Fakenham. How bad is it, Pugh?’

‘Well, suppose there were no prints other than those of Cosmo Colville on the gun. We could have argued that he wiped the gun with his own handkerchief to protect the
murderer, that it was entirely consistent with his policy of being prepared to lay down his life for another. And if there had been anybody else’s fingerprints, then they would obviously have been those of the murderer. So far, my lord,’ Pugh pulled at the sleeve of an imaginary gown, ‘we have not been able to find the owner of these other prints. Perhaps he is in hiding or has fled abroad. But, gentlemen of the jury, I would remind you of your duty not to convict my client if you think there is any doubt at all about his guilt. I put it to you that these other fingerprints are themselves eloquent witnesses to the dangers of a conviction and the need for a more prudent acquittal.’

Pugh took another satisfying pull of his cheroot. ‘I could have wittered away for quite a long time in that vein, Powerscourt, you know. It might have done some good.’

‘Is there anything at all you can do with the gun, Pugh?’

‘Well,’ he grinned slightly, ‘I’ve subpoenaed the cleaning woman for a start. I want her to say that nobody had told her about not cleaning certain things, that she regarded everything in the station as fair game for her dusters, that if the Ark of the Covenant itself had dropped into the yard at the back of the premises, she’d have been on to that in a flash, brush and dusters in hand. I shall imply that the Norfolk police were negligent. I shall point out that their incompetence has made it impossible for my client to have a fair trial and that the case should be thrown out because of the tampering with the evidence.’

‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance of that?’ said Powerscourt.

‘No, there isn’t,’ said Pugh, blowing an enormous cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, ‘but it’s worth a try. The thing is, I don’t think many of these judges understand fingerprints. One of them told me after a case not long ago that he believed they changed every time a person washed his hands. Stood to reason, his lordship said, all that water running over the skin, it’s bound to change the patterns.’

‘You are bound to be a much better judge than I of what
might weigh with the jury, Pugh. Now the fingerprint evidence is gone, what are we left with?’

‘Don’t underestimate the cleaning lady, Powerscourt. I have high hopes of the cleaning lady. I shall recall the elderly police person before her. She may show up the Norfolk Constabulary for a collection of fools who couldn’t look after things properly, and ipso facto, were unlikely to have arrested the right man. Mind you, they may get some director person up from the Theatre Royal in Norwich to coach her. I’ve known provincial police forces do stranger things in my time.’

‘The mysterious Frenchman,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how do you rate him?’

‘Ah,’ said Pugh, ‘if anything I like the mysterious Frenchman even more than I like the cleaning lady of Fakenham. That couple from the hotel are going to appear for the defence. Tell me this, Powerscourt, you have been writing to lots of people who were near to where the murder was committed in the Long Gallery, is that not so? And none of them remember a Frenchman?’

‘Not one,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I just wonder if we shouldn’t shift the focus. Look at it this way. If our theory is correct, and the mysterious Frenchman was the murderer, then I don’t think he would have gone back into the crowd after he’d done the deed. He’d have cleared off as fast as he could, down the stairs from the state bedroom and legged it round the empty side of the Hall. So he wouldn’t have been up there in the Long Gallery for any of your correspondents to see. Why don’t we try the other seating plan, the one taken in the garden before they went into the house, and see if any of those people remember a Frenchman or a stranger. He’s bound to have been lurking about then. He had to get into the house to commit the murder after all.’

‘Right,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we’ll write to them all.’

‘What about the vanished under footman or trainee coachman or whatever he was,’ said Pugh. ‘Has he turned up yet?’

‘William Stebbings,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘trainee footman, close to the butler and the murder scene at Brympton Hall. No sign of him as yet. I think the Nashes are beginning to lose hope.’

‘I’m sure you know as well as I do, Powerscourt,’ said Charles Augustus Pugh, ‘horrible thing to say, but he’s more use to us dead than alive. God forgive me, but if he was murdered I could almost guarantee to get Cosmo off.’

Powerscourt nodded across the desk. ‘Lucy and I were saying the same thing only the other day. I’d like to pick your brain on a slightly different tack, if I may. It doesn’t help us in the short term with the defence, mind you.’

‘As things stand at present,’ said Pugh, now nearing the end of his cheroot, ‘we don’t have enough to save Cosmo. Unless we can work a miracle, he’s going to swing. Tell me what you want to pick my brain about.’

‘It’s this,’ said Powerscourt, ‘why is Cosmo refusing to say a word? Nobody’s made any sense of that so far. Let’s leave women out of it for a moment. What on earth would persuade a conservative character like Cosmo to play the hero? Does he know who the murderer is? Does he refuse to give somebody away? Is it a question of honour in some way? Did some dark secret of the Colvilles have to remain a secret? Family honour and all that? I can just about see Cosmo taking that line, you know. Like a lot of people who aren’t necessarily very clever, I’m sure he could be very obstinate when it came to what he saw as his interests or his family’s interests. Did the secret have to do with the family row? God knows, Pugh, I’m sure I don’t.’

‘I’m sure the notion of honour, probably family honour, is a runner. But your theory worked on an assumption that women had nothing to do with it. I seem to remember you telling me that one of his relations said Randolph was a ladies’ man throughout his lifetime, before and after his marriage. Who might he have been carrying on with who could have brought dishonour and disgrace to his family? The
wife of a Colville? The wife of a competitor? Some pretty twenty-year-old serving maid? Somebody whose lowly origins would have brought disgrace to the family? But how could that lead to his death? Unless he promised money, marriage and all that to the girl and then changed his mind. Then she shoots him. That’s no good at all, Powerscourt. It remains the very centre of this case, that little tableau in the state bedroom, Randolph lying dead on the floor, Cosmo sitting opposite him with a gun in his hand, refusing to speak. If we could unravel that we could get Cosmo off, but we can’t.’

Johnny Fitzgerald dropped into Markham Square late that afternoon. He refused all offers of tea. He had further news to report, though none of it, he would be the first to admit, likely to lead to an acquittal.

‘My first piece of news,’ he began, ‘has to do with the man we used to call the Necromancer.’

‘Used to call the Necromancer?’ Powerscourt cut in. ‘Is he dead?’

‘No, he’s not dead. I followed that Septimus Parry to a warehouse in Shadwell. Huge forbidding place, about six or seven floors. Maybe they’re all filled with fake wines. Anyway I was trying to listen at the door when they pulled me in. I was, thank God, a tramp for the afternoon, rather than myself. I had to confess to working for a Lord Francis Powerscourt every now and then, before they kicked me out. Literally. I’ve got a bloody great bruise on my leg. The thing is he’s not called Necromancer at all. He’s called the Alchemist. He was very cross that his fakery had been discovered. He uttered some dire threats against you, Francis.’

‘He’ll get over it,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I’m not too worried about a few threats from a forger. He’ll probably find another corner of another warehouse tomorrow, I shouldn’t wonder. What news of Colvilles, Johnny?’

‘I think I’ve finally discovered what all the young men there are frightened of,’ Johnny said, stretching himself out full-length on a Powerscourt sofa. ‘They think the firm is going to go bust. It was bad enough, they said, with Randolph and Cosmo alive. Neither of them ever paid very much attention to the future. Their main concern was that things should go on as they had done in the past. But now they’re both gone, there’s nobody with any grip left in the place. There’s an old general manager who’s apparently no use to anybody at all. There’s a young relation called Tristram who tried to move into Randolph’s shoes and Randolph’s office recently but he was more interested in going out to lunch than he was in the business. He’s cleared off now. What they should do is to advertise for a first rate man from one of the other wine merchants and pay him handsomely to drag Colvilles back from the brink. One of the young men told me the place was running on collective memory, nothing else.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that any of the young men had any information about dark secrets that might lie beneath the surface?’

Johnny Fitzgerald shook his head. ‘I tried them all, all the bad words. Family rows, blackmail – I went on and on about blackmail – adultery, mistresses, fallen women. None of them registered. One of them told me they were too far from the centre to pick up any of that, and he was probably right.’