Death of a wine merchant lfp-9 Read online

  ‘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 chateau 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 t
he 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?

  10

  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 negociants 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.