Death of a wine merchant lfp-9 Read online

  ‘General,’ he said firmly, ‘we have had enough of your comments. For everybody here this has been a terrible day, for many, no doubt, the worst day of their lives. You are now making things worse. If you utter one more word, you will be arrested. You are obstructing the police in their inquiries, a most serious offence. The County Jail in Norwich has accommodated all sorts of distinguished prisoners over the years. What a tragedy it would be if such a distinguished career were to end in those circumstances.’ Cooper realized that it might be time for an olive branch. Sending distinguished former generals off for a spell in the cells might not look good on his record. ‘I understand, of course, General,’ he went on, ‘that you, like everybody else, must be very upset by what has gone on here. And I have already sent a request for reinforcements. My superior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Weir, should be with us later this afternoon. You will be pleased to hear, General, that he is a lot older than me.’

  Inspector Cooper waited for any reaction and then pressed on with his plans. Two tables at the front would be taken over by the constabulary and one at the back. After people were interviewed they would be free to go provided they left an address where they could be contacted. The police would be maintaining a presence at Brympton Hall for some days, if people remembered something that slipped their mind during the first interview.

  Who sat next to you in the church? Who else was in your pew? Who was in front of you? Who was behind you? Who was sitting in the pew across the nave? Did you see anybody acting suspiciously?

  Some of the wedding guests whispered quietly among themselves. Some closed their eyes and prayed or tried to fall asleep. Outside the sun still shone on the Brympton gardens. Water spouted erratically from the Brympton fountain and a peacock in full glory took possession of the gravel walk nearest to the house.

  Who were you talking to during the champagne session in the garden? How far along the east front of the house were you standing? Who was standing close to you?

  The hosts, Willoughby and Georgina Nash, could not believe what was happening. Surely this must all be a dream. Their daughter’s new father-in-law couldn’t be lying on their grand carpet with blood dripping from his head. Surely his brother wasn’t sitting in what appeared to be a catatonic trance, refusing to speak, the gun but recently removed from his hand. These weren’t real policemen licking their pens and writing everything down in their notebooks. Were they?

  Going into the Long Gallery, who was in front of you? Who was behind you? Who else was sitting at your table? How far up the room was your table? Do you remember seeing anybody or anything suspicious?

  The shadows were lying across the gardens when the last guest departed. Randolph Colville had been removed to the morgue for a post-mortem report. Cosmo Colville still refused to speak to anybody and was taken away to spend the night in the local jail. The bride and groom had to change their plans and booked themselves into a local hotel where they partook of an indifferent supper and slept on a lumpy bed. Inspector Albert Cooper looked forward to collating all the interviews about people’s whereabouts into a single document which would virtually be a seating plan for the church and the Long Gallery. His superior officer still had not appeared. Chief Inspector Weir was not known for speed of movement either mental or physical. Maybe he wouldn’t appear at all on this day.

  ‘I tell you one thing, Tom,’ Cooper said to his sergeant as they set off for the nearest town of Aylsham.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ said Tom.

  ‘I hope that bloke with the gun starts talking soon.’

  ‘Why is that, sir?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think he did it, if you see what I mean. Nobody who’s just killed somebody is going to sit there holding on to the bloody weapon, even if it is his brother, are they?’

  ‘You could have a point there, sir. But why do you hope he starts talking?’

  ‘Think about it, Tom. You know what the Chief is like. Here’s a corpse. Here’s a man with a gun in his hand. The man with the gun won’t speak. Man must be guilty. Nearly certain to get a conviction with those attendant circumstances. “The sentence of this court upon you is that you be taken from hence to the place from which you came,”’ Albert Cooper had heard these words over half a dozen times in court and they still chilled him to the bone, ‘“and thence to a place of execution, and you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead and your body shall be buried in the precincts of the prison in which you shall have last been confined, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.” Our silent friend, Tom, could be pushing up the daisies within a month.’

  Georgina Nash slept badly in her enormous bedroom at Brympton Hall that night. Beside her, husband Willoughby was snoring with the same metronomic regularity that had measured out his nights for the past twenty years. Something was nagging at the back of Georgina’s mind. When she thought about the day’s events they all bundled themselves into a couple of moments of horror. It was something somebody had said to her that she thought must be important. But who? And when? And where? She began running through in her mind the guests who had come to the wedding on this fateful day. Nothing worked. Shortly before dawn Georgina Nash fell asleep.

  2

  The office was hidden away in a corner of an enormous warehouse on the banks of the Thames at Shadwell Basin in the East End of London. It was about twenty feet square with shelves covering virtually every wall. The man who worked here didn’t like cleaners coming in, so there were spiders’ webs hanging off the walls, dust lying thickly on the shelves and mice scampering about the floor, feasting occasionally on the rich liquids that fell there. To his left, on the far side of the wall of his office, the high warehouse was filled with barrels of every description. Above him were six floors devoted to Bordeaux, burgundy, champagne, port, Madeira and vin ordinaire. Stretching out a few feet above his head was a bizarre collection of wine bottles: magnums and Marie Jeannes and double magnums of four bottles from Bordeaux; Jeroboams worth six bottles and Imperiales worth eight; from Burgundy and Champagne came even larger versions, a Salmanazar equivalent to twelve bottles, a Balthazar worth sixteen and a Nebuchadnezzar worth twenty bottles. For some unaccountable reason, the man knew that people would almost always believe that wine contained in these monstrous vessels was the real thing. He did not intend to disabuse them. Other shelves were filled with nameless barrels and a surprising variety of other ingredients ranging from dried gooseberries to turnip juice.

  This was the domain of the man they called the Alchemist. Jesus Christ, he used to mutter to himself, could turn water into wine. Well, he could turn rough Algerian into passable claret, consignments of white grapes from more or less anywhere into credible champagne, strange combinations of raisins and sugar into respectable vin ordinaire. He was quite short, the Alchemist, with a stoop and a thin goatee beard. He wore thick glasses to read the labels on the wine bottles and the equations that carried the secrets of his forgeries. Two or three times a year he crossed to France where he and a couple of selected collaborators visited the freight trains carrying wine from the south to the palates of the north. These trains stopped overnight at Dijon station, where they switched the labels over during the hours of darkness. He currently had an order for a consignment of pre-phylloxera wines from a very grand hotel in Mayfair which held pre-phylloxera dinners once a month, elaborate and very expensive occasions where all the wine came from before 1863, the year the phylloxera bug began to devastate the vineyards of France, spreading slowly northwards from its first infestation in the Languedoc. Hardly anybody, the Alchemist reasoned, could remember what these wines tasted of before that date. It was all so long ago, and the few genuine bottles left were locked away in the cellars of the grandest chateaux in the Medoc. He had an enormous order from a British railway company. And then there was the regular order from those damned Americans in London. The Alchemist set to work, draining off some red substance from one of his barrels. He had only one rule and he never broke it. He told nobody his r
eal name.

  Three days after the wedding and the murder Inspector Albert Cooper had completed his interviews with the wedding guests. One or two had reappeared at Brympton Hall the day after the incident with information they had forgotten in the confusion of the day. The Sergeant had been sent to make inquiries at Randolph Colville’s house on the Thames about the gun. By now the Inspector could tell you who was sitting against the wall in the church three rows from the front, and who was up there next to the organ on the first floor. He could show you the dispositions of the guests as they drank champagne on the lawn. He could show you how far they had advanced towards their tables when the corpse was discovered. He had obtained from Georgina Nash the details of the final seating plan when Colvilles and Nashes were mixed up together. There were, he thought, two or three guests he could not identify because people could describe them, but didn’t know their names. The Colvilles thought they were Nashes, and the Nashes thought they were Colvilles. His informants spoke of a tall thickset man with dark hair, a middle-aged lady with a slight limp, and a nondescript-looking man nobody could describe in any detail. They troubled Inspector Cooper’s tidy mind, these three unknowns wandering about in the October sunshine at Brympton Hall. He was wondering if he should interview everybody all over again when the summons came to see his superior officer, Chief Inspector Weir.

  The Chief Inspector was sitting at a very large desk strewn with papers. Cynics at the station said that Weir had suborned the desk from the office of the Chief Constable when the previous holder of that office had just left and before his successor arrived. A table had been substituted in its place. Weir was well over six feet tall, heavily built and with receding hair. Now in his sixties, even he would have admitted that he thought more about his retirement than about his cases. He and Mrs Chief Inspector Weir, a former primary school teacher, had bought a cottage on the coast near Blakeney where the policeman intended to devote his time to bird watching and the wife was planning an enormous piece of embroidery. Weir’s colleagues would never have said that the Detective Chief Inspector was quick like Inspector Cooper. Nor did he have the sudden flights of intuition that solved a case in a moment like one or two of his younger colleagues. But all agreed on one thing. He may have been ponderous in body and spirit, his mind may have worked incredibly slowly, but he had judgement. In all his years in the force Detective Chief Inspector Weir had scarcely made a mistake in an important case. Defence counsel who looked forward to dancing round his portly person found that he carried on unperturbed and made a very good impression on the jury. Juries liked the big man from Norfolk and seldom caused him to lose a case in court. This afternoon he knew that his young Inspector, whose promotion he had personally recommended, was not going to agree with him.

  ‘Come in, Cooper, come in, do sit down.’ Weir pointed to a neat little armchair with cushions boasting some of the finest of Mrs Weir’s embroidery. ‘The Sergeant’s back. I have his report on the Colville gun here. There’s little doubt about it. The gun, or one virtually identical to it, came from a drawer in Randolph Colville’s gun room on the first floor of his house. Certainly the gun’s not there now. He must have brought it with him. I’m sure the brother’s guilty, Albert. There must have been a struggle and Cosmo grabbed the gun from his brother. I’m going to see the Chief Constable after our conversation here. Then I’m going to charge him.’

  Inspector Albert Cooper looked very unhappy. His eyes pleaded with his superior officer. He knew how difficult it was to change Weir’s mind. He resolved to approach the matter sideways, like a crab on the coast near the Weir cottage at Blakeney.

  ‘It’s entirely possible, sir, that Cosmo Colville killed his brother, but aren’t we being a bit hasty? You don’t think we should wait a while before committing ourselves?’

  Detective Chief Inspector Weir smiled at his young protege, like a grandfather with a favourite grandchild. ‘Why should we wait, Albert? Surely we’ve got all the evidence we need.’

  Cooper knew that what was, for him, the most compelling argument for innocence was, for his superior officer, the most compelling argument for guilt. All the same, he had to try.

  ‘Suppose you’re a killer, sir. Suppose you despatch your victim in a quiet room on the first floor of a great house in Norfolk. Then what do we think the killer would do? Why, he’d dispose of the weapon and get himself away from the scene as fast as he could. The last thing he would want to do is to sit there with the gun in his hand waiting to be discovered. Then there’s the business of his silence. Who is he trying to protect? Some other member of the family? Some woman?’

  ‘That’s mere speculation and you know it,’ said Weir. Twenty-five years before in Norwich Crown Court he had heard a distinguished counsel dismiss the elegant arguments of the defence barrister as mere speculation and he had been using the phrase ever since. ‘If the man wants to tell us what he was doing all he has to do is to open his mouth. But he won’t. Let’s stick to the facts, Albert. The gun is Randolph Colville’s. It was used to kill him. His brother Cosmo was in and out of that house all the time before the wedding. He was sitting in the chair opposite with the gun in his hand. That’s good enough for me. I’m sure it will be good enough for the Chief Constable. That’s good enough for a jury.’

  ‘There are still questions we can’t answer, sir. The three unidentified guests at the wedding reception for a start. We haven’t had time to trace them yet. And there’s the whole question of the wine business, whether there was anything unusual going on there. We don’t have to make the arrest so soon.’

  Even as he looked at his superior officer he knew it was no good. Weir’s mind was made up. It would take an earthquake to change it. Before he went home that evening, Inspector Cooper learnt that Archibald Beauchamp Cosmo Colville had indeed been charged with murder.

  Five days later Lord Francis Powerscourt was crossing the well-manicured lawns of London’s Gray’s Inn, answering a summons from a barrister friend, Charles Augustus Pugh. The two men had worked on a murder trial together some years before. Pugh’s office was lined with even more files than it had contained previously. His feet, clad today in elegant black boots, rested as usual on his desk. His suit was pale grey, his starched white collar was immaculate. He waved Powerscourt to a chair.

  ‘How are you keeping, my friend? Still packing the murderers off to jail?’

  ‘I can’t complain,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And yourself, Pugh? The clerks here still keeping the wolf from your door?’

  ‘They certainly are,’ said Pugh with a smile. ‘I’ve got the devil of a case on now. I’m for the prosecution for a change, Powerscourt. Three high-class con men, Granville, Trevelyan and Lawrence, Financial Consultants. With names like that and their proper cut glass vowel sounds, you’d think they’d been to Eton and Oxford. Not so, my friend, not so.’ Pugh shook his head sadly. ‘Old ladies, that was their thing. Rich old ladies, two of the rogues offering their services round Mayfair and South Kensington, one in the Home Counties. Old ladies especially susceptible to the con man in Epsom for some reason. They offered better investment returns than anyone else, you see, not by huge amounts, that might have made people think twice about them, but by enough to make a difference. They were only caught because a solicitor became suspicious. When they got their hands on the old ladies’ money, ten or fifteen or twenty thousand pounds, sometimes more, they worked out how long she was likely to live. They paid her the slightly better dividends they’d promised every year out of her own money, and kept most of the rest themselves. They created bogus accounts using real investments quoted in the financial pages that showed how much she was losing every year so that by the time the old lady died the investments had virtually all gone. These were real shares and real share prices they pretended to deal in, only they weren’t actually buying and selling, just taking notes of the different prices at different times so they could show how the old ladies might have lost most of their money. When the time came to send in the paperwork
after the death, they just put in the figures they already had. Nobody asked to see the actual share certificates or the records of the stockbrokers’ dealings, though I suspect they could have finessed those all right.’

  ‘How were they caught?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘Ah,’ said Pugh, ‘if you were feeling generous, you could say they were unlucky. You might not be so charitable if you were one of the old ladies or the people meant to inherit their money. Three of their victims in six months all had the same solicitors on Kensington High Street. All their clients invested with Granville, Trevelyan and Lawrence. All ended up without a penny. One might have been possible, two might just have been feasible, but three was too much. This solicitor went into every possible detail of the paperwork and found that they didn’t have it. Then he called in the police. Can you believe it, the three rogues have even found a couple of old ladies who testified in court in their favour. I’m not sure they believed me when I told them they were being cheated out of their money. Anyway,’ Pugh slid his feet off his desk and back on to the ground and began riffling through some papers, eventually holding up a brief tied in pink tape, ‘this is why you’re here, Powerscourt. Just been instructed yesterday,’ he went on. ‘Hopeless business, hardly worth turning up in court apart from the fact the fee is rather substantial. Wondered if you’d like to lend a hand. Solicitors keen for everybody they can find to help get our client off, particularly keen to get you on board. Heaps of money.’

  ‘What sort of case?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Murder,’ replied Pugh. ‘I’m for the defence, you understand. Some defence! Here’s the story.’ There was a brief pause while Charles Augustus Pugh restored his boots to their rightful place on his desk and wrapped his hands behind his neck. ‘Grand wedding, wine merchant family hook up with Norfolk grandees who have huge house. Hundred guests, maybe more, all dressed up as if they’re going to Royal Ascot. Groom’s father found shot in room near the Long Gallery where they were all about to put the nosebags on after the service. Then there’s the dead man’s brother six feet away, sitting on a chair with a gun in his hand. Blood all over the priceless carpet. Same gun, or almost certainly the same gun, police discover, used to shoot the brother. Think Cain and Abel in modern dress in the bloody Fens, for Christ’s sake. Brother Cain charged with murder. Bloody fool won’t speak. All he will say to the authorities is his name and that he didn’t do it. What, my friend, what on earth am I supposed to do with this lot? The committal hearing is next week, the Old Bailey in five or six weeks if everything goes according to plan. It could be less. Can you help me? Can you work a miracle? The loaves and fishes would have nothing on this.’