Death of a wine merchant lfp-9 Read online

  Johnny paused and took a sip of his tea. All this talk of wine and ancient vintages was making him thirsty and not for the produce of Assam or Darjeeling.

  ‘What did the man called Fred say, Johnny?’ said Lady Lucy, who remembered Johnny spinning out stories for so long that you almost wanted to scream.

  ‘This is what he said.’ Johnny lent forward to stare into Lady Lucy’s face. ‘The wine at these dinners is fake. It doesn’t come from the cellars of some abandoned abbey or closed-down hotel. It’s manufactured here in London, in a warehouse, where they have great stocks of pre-phylloxera labels from real chateaux they can replicate and all sorts of different wines they can blend together to produce the fakes. The chief forger has a strange name called the Necromancer or something like that. He’s very secretive. Nobody knows his real name.’

  ‘Surely the guests must smell a rat?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Surely they must suspect something is wrong?’

  ‘Fred was rather sharp about that, Francis. I asked him precisely those questions. Think of it like this, he said. Sometimes I have to wait at table on these occasions. Everybody is dressed up. The table is beautifully laid out. You are told when you arrive which wines you are going to drink. These will not be the great wines of Bordeaux, the Lafites, the Latours, Margaux. Rather they will be decent second division wines most people will not have heard of. You have paid all this money. You are surrounded by fellow wine connoisseurs. Everything conspires to tell you these wines are real. It would never occur to you to think otherwise. The ambience, the candles, the silver, the elegant glasses all conspire to complete the illusion. And there’s one other thing Fred pointed out. Very few people know a lot about wine. Nobody, but nobody would have tasted these wines before the onset of the phylloxera. So nobody would know what they were meant to taste like. So the dinners continue. The Necromancer produces the batch for the next event. The hotel must know what is going on but they and the forger are making a great deal of money.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I don’t suppose we know what the Necromancer uses to produce his fakes, do we? And I suspect you have more information for us, Johnny. I don’t believe you would have broken the customs of a lifetime to come here for breakfast and tell us about forged pre-phylloxera vintages. I think there’s more. And I think it must have to do with this Necromancer person. Who else does he provide for, Johnny? How extensive is his client list?’

  Johnny Fitzgerald laughed. ‘A hit,’ he said, ‘a very palpable hit. There is indeed more, though it is not all definite. Yes, the Necromancer has other customers. Yes, they include some of the leading wine merchants of London. Piccadilly Wine, a new and well-run competitor to the Colvilles in the London area, is believed to be a client. The Colvilles themselves? Nobody knows. I don’t actually think Fred knows one way or the other. I could ask him to find out, of course, but I don’t think reliable information is easy to find. It’s not like you’re dealing with Fortnum and Mason or the Army and Navy stores, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Do we know where the Necromancer lives? Or where he works? I wonder which law he is actually breaking. Anyway, Johnny, well done indeed. Think of the possibilities for blackmail all round. Consider the hotel with the dinners and the pre-plague wines. Roll up one morning and tell them you know the wines are all fakes and forgeries. For a small consideration, fifty pounds a dinner, hundred pounds a dinner, you will keep the knowledge to yourself. The potential shame and the potential scandal mean that you are almost certain to pay up. No hotel could bring it out into the open and appear in court. They’d be finished.’

  ‘Surely there’s something else,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Suppose the Colvilles are also customers. Might not that be the key to the blackmail, if there is blackmail? Pay up or we’ll tell the world that some of your wines don’t come from France at all, but are cooked up in some Devil’s Kitchen in a warehouse in Shoreditch. You’d pay up pretty quickly then, I should think.’

  Johnny Fitzgerald rose. ‘I’m most grateful for my breakfast. Now I must sleep. I shall give my full attention to the other customers of the man they call the Necromancer. I only have one other matter to attend to early this evening.’

  ‘What’s that, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy.

  ‘Why,’ said Johnny very seriously, ‘it concerns a young dragon called Drago who has lost his parents and fallen asleep on the riverbank in Chelsea. Do you think he should enter your house by the front door or by coming down the chimney breathing fire and smoke?’

  12

  It was just another boring morning in the life of Emily Colville in her little house in Barnes close to Hammersmith Bridge and the river Thames. The maid brought in the post as she sat sipping desultorily at a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. Montague had long since departed for the wines and spirits of Colvilles. There was a bill from her dressmaker in Chelsea. Really, the amount these people charged these days was outrageous. She hoped Montague wouldn’t make a scene. She did dislike scenes so, they always gave her a headache. There was another bill from the place where she bought her shoes. That too seemed outrageous. Why was life so unkind to her? Then she noticed another, rather larger envelope in a hand she knew all too well. Emily stared at it and her heart began to beat faster. She hardly dared open it. She took a little walk into the dining room and back to the kitchen. At last she summoned her courage. She opened the letter with a trembling hand. It was the same as all those other letters she had received earlier that summer. There was no letter inside, only a sheet of music for a popular song of the time, ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’. The cover showed a cornfield at night with a couple framed in moonlight at the top. Emily looked at the first page of the sheet music and she smiled. She shivered slightly as she worked out the code hidden among the clefs and the minims. She was to meet her lover in two days’ time in the afternoon in the usual place. She would tell Montague she wished to see her parents for a day or two. Only she would leave on an earlier train and be waiting for her lover in the little house behind the lake in Norfolk.

  Why do I always postpone the difficult interviews? Why can’t I go and do them at the beginning? Powerscourt was berating himself. It’s cowardice, pure and simple. Who knows, if I had conducted this interview earlier, the whole case might be over by now. A sensible investigator like Mr Sherlock Holmes would not have been smoking opium and playing the violin in 221B Baker Street. He would have summoned a brougham and driven straight to Wisteria Lodge and taken the interview in hand. Come to think of it, Powerscourt’s internal monologue went on, 221B Baker Street is only a couple of hundred yards away. He was walking across St John’s Wood to the house of Mrs Cosmo Colville, wife of the man incarcerated in Pentonville prison who had scarcely, as far as anybody knew, spoken a single word since he was found opposite the dead body of his brother, with what seemed to be his brother’s gun in his hand. Her reply to his note had been encouraging: ‘Of course you must come and see me. I would be delighted to welcome you to my house. Might I suggest three o’clock on Wednesday?’

  So far it had not been a good day for Lord Francis Powerscourt. A note had come for him first thing that morning from Charles Augustus Pugh.

  ‘Trumper, Barrington White,’ it said. ‘Horse won’t run. No legs. Barrington White goes into witness box. Denies everything. We have no proof of anything at all. Waste of time. Only causes drop in our share price, already at dangerously low levels. Regards. Pugh.’

  A military butler showed him into a well-proportioned drawing room with great sofas and prints and pictures covering the walls. Isabella Colville was sitting in an armchair to the left of the fire. She motioned Powerscourt to its twin on the other side. She was a tall, slim woman, with pale hair that was almost blonde and faint lines that might have been caused by worry and strain on her forehead, wearing a long dark grey skirt with a blue blouse that showed off the colour of her hair.

  ‘Lord Powerscourt, let me say first of all how grateful we are for what you are doing. It is much appreciated, you kno
w.’

  Powerscourt waved his hands slightly and shook his head, ‘I thank you for your kind words, Mrs Colville. I wish I could say that I had done enough so far to deserve them. I fear I have not. Not yet at any rate.’

  ‘But there’s always time, isn’t there. Somebody who knew about one of your earlier cases, Lord Powerscourt, told me the other day that sometimes the answer comes to you in a flash. There’s a sheet of lightning or something like that in your brain and all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.’

  ‘You’re too kind,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Let’s all pray for lightning.’ They laughed.

  ‘Now then,’ said Isabella Colville, ‘I’ve been thinking about this conversation, Lord Powerscourt. You must feel free to ask me absolutely anything you want. I don’t mind if it seems rude or in bad taste. You see, that’s my husband and the father of my children in that horrible prison. I’ll do anything I can to help get him out. I gather you’ve seen my sister-in-law over at Pangbourne? Could I ask you what time of day it was?’

  ‘I arrived about half past ten,’ said Powerscourt, reluctant to criticize her sister-in-law.

  ‘I wish you had talked to me beforehand. The hour between nine and ten is the only safe one in the day. I’ve told the lawyers that. Otherwise the Chablis flows on and on like the Mississippi river. I’m not judging her, mind you. My husband may not be in ideal circumstances but at least he’s still alive.’

  ‘When did you last see him, your husband I mean?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Not a word, not one.’

  ‘So what do you talk about? Do you tell him the latest news?’

  ‘I do.’ Isabella Colville smiled for a moment. ‘I decided early on that it’s like talking to some old person who’s near death’s door and has lost the power of speech. But they can still make sense of most of what you tell them. I do find I prattle on a bit but it’s the best I can do.’

  ‘So what kind of things do you talk to him about?’

  ‘Well, I tell him what news I have of the children – they’ve left home now but they’re always keen for the latest about their father. I tell him about what news I have of the other Colvilles. I tell him about the house – yesterday I had to inform him that the footman had dropped a valuable vase on the kitchen floor where it smashed to pieces. Talking of other Colvilles, you should go and see a cousin of ours who worked for the firm for a long time. He grew up with Randolph and Cosmo. He and his wife live in Ealing now.’

  Powerscourt could see her now in that Spartan cell in Pentonville, her face bright as if she were talking to a small child, reeling off the latest family and domestic gossip, hoping for a word or a reaction that never came. And hovering behind the silence, the secret on the far side of the prison visiting room, the prison chaplain, the prison governor, the prison hangman, the noose and the drop.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Colville, do you get any reaction at all? A smile? A kiss when you arrive? An embrace when you leave?’

  Isabella Colville shook her head rather sadly. ‘No, there’s none of that. Hold on a minute though, that’s not quite true. His eyes are eloquent sometimes, as if he’s trying to tell me something. That he cares, perhaps. I don’t know.’

  Powerscourt had always known how he wanted to end their interview, and in some ways he wished he could ask those questions now. But he stuck to his original plan.

  ‘Tell me about your husband, Mrs Colville,’ he was speaking very quietly, ‘what sort of a man is he?’

  She paused for a moment. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how difficult it is to answer that question about somebody you know so well. Let me begin with his work, that’s probably the easiest thing.’

  She paused again and looked into the fire. ‘Conscientious, that’s how I would describe his attitude to his work. Conservative, maybe even a little old-fashioned. He inherited that whole Bordeaux network from his father and his uncle, you see, the growers, the negociants, the shippers, the owners. He took great care to maintain good relations with all of them. Indeed, as far as I know, and I never followed the wine business very carefully, most of the people he deals with are the same people or the sons of the same people his father dealt with. As far as I know, some of these other wine merchants are forever looking out for new suppliers, changing their shippers, taking a chance on some new grower with revolutionary new ways of doing things, always in a ferment of excitement. That wasn’t Cosmo’s way. He didn’t like ferment very much. He didn’t like change. He didn’t like excitement.’

  ‘Was his work the most important thing in his life? Some of these second-generation merchants in wine or tea or things like that develop interests which become the mainspring of their lives. Shire horses, maybe, art collecting, that sort of thing. Was your husband one of those?’

  ‘I think that’s difficult. The business was very important to him. He might not have liked it very much, but it was what he inherited from his father. He had to maintain what he had and pass it on in his turn. The real passion in his life was cricket. That’s what he really cared about. That’s why, I’m sure you will have noticed, we live where we do, so close to Lord’s Cricket Ground. Cosmo has an enormous collection of paintings and prints of Lord’s in his study and on the back stairs. He did say that we could have a cricket-free area in here. He was quite thoughtful in that way.’

  ‘And in other ways, was he not so thoughtful perhaps?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, Lord Powerscourt. He was very dutiful. He always remembered everybody’s birthday.’

  Powerscourt was now close to the end he had planned beforehand. ‘Duty, Mrs Colville, would doing his duty sum up his attitude to life and his role in it?’

  ‘Duty? Duty?’ Isabella Colville held the word up to the light, as it were, and looked at it carefully. ‘I suppose you could say that. Duty or responsibility, yes, you could.’

  ‘And what form of duty would compel your husband not to speak a word in his own defence or to explain what had been going on in the Peter the Great room and the state bedroom up at Brympton Hall on the day of the wedding?’

  Isabella Colville looked at him helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘Let me try a few suggestions on you, Mrs Colville. Family honour perhaps? Suppose there was some terrible scandal about to break that would be bad for the Colvilles and could be ruinous for the business?’

  ‘He cared profoundly about anything concerning family honour or scandal that could ruin the family name. He said so in that terrible family row the week before the wedding.’

  Isabella Colville paused. She began to turn pink, then red. She looked down at the floor and stammered, ‘I didn’t mean to say that. It was a mistake.’ Two desperate eyes now looked up at Powerscourt. He felt as if somebody had just placed something very slippery – a scallop perhaps, or a Dover sole – in his hand and he must not let it go.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said in his mildest voice, ‘you could tell me a little more about the family row. Just the broad outline, of course.’

  Isabella Colville shook her head. Powerscourt decided to try sternness.

  ‘I do not wish to remind you of certain unpleasant facts, Mrs Colville, but this knowledge could help release your husband from Pentonville. Unless something material can be presented by the defence the chances are that he will be found guilty. And you know as well as I do what that means.’

  ‘It concerns the family, it’s private,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how it has anything to do with the trial.’

  ‘With the greatest respect, Mrs Colville, I think that’s a matter for myself and the defence counsel Mr Pugh to decide.’

  ‘It’s family, it’s private.’

  ‘Nothing is private in a murder trial, Mrs Colville.’

  ‘This is,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we’ll leave it there for now, Mrs Colville. But you are free to change yo
ur mind at any time. You have my address. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch at any time of day or night. It could save your husband’s life.’

  Powerscourt was thinking of honour on his way back to Chelsea. Was honour, in this most modern age, still capable of bringing a man to a display of honourable silence that could kill him, like Cosmo Colville? He thought of Falstaff’s more cynical or more realistic view of it in Henry IV, ‘What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’

  It was not yet clear on which day of the week Cosmo would die, but die he would unless he, Powerscourt, could pull off a miracle. As he passed down the northern end of Baker Street, close to where 221B would have been, he sent a message to Sherlock Holmes, asking for assistance.

  Lady Lucy was reading the Obituary columns of The Times when Powerscourt returned to Markham Square ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘you’ve just missed Sir Pericles. He only left the house five minutes ago.’

  ‘And what did he have to say, Lucy?’

  ‘He seems to have got his lines of communication into Colvilles working like clockwork,’ Lady Lucy said. ‘He says they’ve hired a negociant in Burgundy to supervise the despatch of all that Colville wine.’

  ‘There’s still going to be a gap, isn’t there? Between the current lot running out and the next lot arriving. I wonder what they’ll do about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Perhaps they’ll give the Necromancer a call.’

  ‘Do you think they’d do that? Employ a sort of wine forger, Francis?’

  ‘Well, that posh hotel where they have the pre-phylloxera dinners is happy to serve his wares.’