Death of a wine merchant lfp-9 Read online

  ‘No, no,’ said Marcel. ‘We’ve got other plans for our friend here.’ With that he bestowed on Powerscourt a ghastly smile. ‘Get him out of those clothes. I’ve got something appropriate for where he’s going in the bag here.’

  Powerscourt needed no assistance. He climbed out of his London suit and put on the clothes of a French peasant, a pair of dark trousers that might once have been blue, a filthy shirt and a sweater with holes in both arms. He managed to conceal about his person a large amount of money that had been in the trousers of his suit. He stood still for inspection.

  ‘Rub some earth in his hair, would you, please? And scuff up those shoes, we don’t want him looking as though he’s just walked down the Champs-Elysees.’

  Jean Jacques produced a pair of scissors and proceeded to chop random tufts out of Powerscourt’s hair. The final result was a bedraggled peasant, complete with a cut on his forehead from the scissors.

  ‘Good,’ said Marcel. ‘He’ll do. If you try to escape, monsieur,’ he addressed the latest recruit to the French peasantry, ‘I shall shoot you. If you do not try to escape, I shall not shoot you. Do I make myself clear?’

  They set off down the little track back towards the main road. At the junction Marcel led them to the right, away from the lights being turned on in Beaune. Powerscourt reflected sadly that they were taking him further away from Lucy. Marcel was in the lead, Powerscourt second, with the other two close behind. On either side of the road the vines stretched far into the distance. Powerscourt wondered if they belonged to the Hospices de Beaune and if their produce had been auctioned in that beautiful courtyard so very long ago that morning. A cart passed them, going towards the city, driven by a silent crone. A dog barked somewhere ahead of them. Looming up ahead on the right Powerscourt could see a large building some distance from the road. As they grew nearer he thought it might be a barracks. Rows and rows of small windows were set back slightly from the walls. Closer still and he noticed that all the windows, without exception, were barred. Was it a prison? There was no sign that he could see on the outside to tell him the building’s function. They turned off the main road and proceeded to the front door, a massive creation that looked to Powerscourt as if its principal purpose was to keep the insiders in rather than the visitors out.

  Marcel pulled firmly on the rope. A surly porter who looked as if was expecting them let them in. He showed them to a small waiting area with no chairs. Then Powerscourt knew where he was. A very official-looking sign on the wall welcomed them to the Maison d’Alienes, Departement de Cote d’Or. No visitors, it proclaimed, unless by prior arrangement. This was the local lunatic asylum, also known as Maison de Fous. The Madhouse. Welcome to Bedlam.

  The porter indicated that Jean Jacques and Barrel were to remain in the waiting area. He brought Powerscourt and Marcel to an office off on the left of the main corridor. He knocked firmly on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ said a tired voice on the other side. They were placed on two chairs opposite a wide desk littered with files. The only decoration in the room, apart from the grey paint on the walls, was a great etching of the Palace of Versailles. Perhaps they were all mad in there too, Powerscourt thought, Marie Antoinette playing with her pretend dairy at Le Petit Trianon, the courtiers measuring out their importance across the chateau floors, a court inhabited entirely by lunatics until they were swept aside by the wilder lunacy of the Revolution. A sign facing them announced that they were in the presence of Dr Charles Belfort, Professor of Medicine at the University of Dijon and Director of the Maison d’Alienes. He was a small tubby man with a slim moustache and greying hair. A younger medical man stood sentry behind him.

  ‘This is the man you spoke of earlier today, monsieur?’ he said to Marcel. The doctor looked Powerscourt up and down distastefully. There was a faint smell of countryside and cow-dung coming from his new clothes.

  ‘It is, sir,’ said Marcel.

  The doctor rummaged briefly in his papers. ‘And this is the letter from Dr Rives, the distinguished general practitioner from Beaune?’

  ‘It is,’ said Marcel.

  ‘Monsieur,’ the doctor turned to Powerscourt, ‘could you please tell us your name?’

  ‘My name is Francis Powerscourt.’ He was damned if was going to call this ridiculous little man sir.

  ‘And do you have any titles, monsieur?’

  ‘Titles?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘What titles?’ Was the man asking him if he was Lord Mayor of London or the Keeper of the Privy Purse?

  ‘I was wondering if you thought you were a member of the aristocracy perhaps?’

  It was now that the severity of his plight struck home. God knows what Dr Rives had said in his letter, written for him by Marcel presumably, but here he was, his hair looking like a scarecrow, his clothes stinking of the farmyard, his flies undone because Marcel had cut the buttons off, a scar across his face, his shoes with holes in them and filthy fingernails, about to announce himself as a Peer of the Realm.

  ‘My full title,’ said Powerscourt rather sadly, ‘is Lord Francis Powerscourt. I am an Irish peer.’

  ‘An Irish peer?’ said the doctor, as if this was the most interesting thing he had heard all day. ‘And tell me, pray, how do they differ from English peers or Scottish peers or Welsh peers? We have grown beyond all this nonsense here in France.’

  Powerscourt just restrained himself from pointing out that Dr Belfort’s fellow countrymen had cut most of their peers’ heads off on the guillotine. ‘It is a purely honorary title. Irish peers are not allowed to vote in the British House of Lords.’ Powerscourt remembered suddenly the French governess who had lived in his parents’ house when he was aged between two and fifteen. Her mission was to make all the Powerscourt children fluent in French. She succeeded so well that his accent would pass for that of a native. He sounded like a true Frenchman.

  ‘Really?’ said the doctor in a condescending voice. ‘How very interesting for you all. How unusual. And tell me, do you work for a living? Do you have an occupation?’

  ‘I am an investigator. People in England employ me to solve cases of mystery and murder.’ Even as he spoke Powerscourt knew he was in real trouble. The man didn’t believe a word he said. The investigating was only going to make it worse.

  ‘I see,’ said Dr Belfort, casting a meaningful glance at his young companion. ‘So you are Sherlock Holmes, is it not so, leaving Baker Street for the delights of Burgundy?’

  ‘You could put it like that, I suppose,’ said Powerscourt, wondering desperately if he could find a way out of this horrible place.

  ‘We have three Sherlock Holmeses in here already,’ said the doctor. ‘An elderly one, a red-headed one, and one who talks to Dr Watson all the time. Perhaps you will be able to hold meaningful conversations with them. No?’

  Powerscourt remained silent. ‘And what brings you to Beaune, Mr Investigator? The Case of the Poisoned Meursault? The Curious Affair at the Hotel Dieu, perhaps?’

  Powerscourt sighed. ‘I am looking into a murder case. We believe the wrong man has been charged. I need to go back to work at once or else an innocent man may be sent to the gallows.’

  ‘Of course you must go back to work. Of course. I’m sure you’ll be able to work very well on the top floor here.’

  With that the doctor began writing furiously in a large black notebook. ‘We have seen cases of the paranoid delusions, the illusions of self-importance like this before, have we not?’ He looked over his shoulder at his young assistant as he spoke. ‘But rarely one where the various fantasies fit so well together, I think.’ He talked about Powerscourt as if he were not in the room. Powerscourt remembered English doctors doing exactly the same thing in London. It was a different form of mental illness. The patients only exist in the minds of the doctors. They have no independent life of their own.

  Dr Belfort rang a bell on the side of the desk. Another member of the staff of the Maison d’Alienes appeared, clad entirely in pale blue smock and trousers.
r />   ‘Third floor,’ he pointed to Powerscourt. ‘Solitary. Same medicine as the rest of them up there. Regular observation for now.’

  As Powerscourt was led away Marcel stood aside for him at the door. Marcel looked him straight in the eye. ‘The compliments of the Alchemist, monsieur.’ With that he left the room. The warder took him into the reception area and down a long corridor which seemed even longer than it was because of the lack of any decoration on the walls. There were weak electric lights overhead casting feeble shadows on the wooden floor. Weird noises that might have been screams of ecstasy or terror made their way into the corridor.

  Back in his office Dr Belfort dismissed Marcel and thanked him for performing his public duty. ‘The really irritating thing,’ he said to his assistant, ‘about these poor patients of ours is how fervently they believe in their own fantasies. The man’s real name, according to the doctor, is Albert Bouchet. Lived around Beaune all his life apparently. But if that peasant who thought he was an Irish peer had been dressed up in fancy clothes we might, we just might have believed him.’

  ‘I think you underestimate yourself, sir,’ said the young man. ‘I’m sure you’d have rumbled him whatever he’d been wearing.’

  There was a staircase to their left at the end of the corridor. Powerscourt stopped cursing the Alchemist and suddenly remembered a very sad poem, written by a man called John Clare who was locked up in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for over twenty years.

  I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

  My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

  I am the self consumer of my woes,

  They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

  Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;

  And yet I am, and live with shadows tossed.

  Powerscourt wondered about the inhabitants of this prison disguised as a mental hospital. He tried to work out how the Alchemist had managed to have him locked up in this madhouse. He thought of the three Sherlock Holmeses, deprived of opium and the solid sense of Dr Watson and Mrs Hudson’s cooking. Were there Napoleons strutting round these dismal corridors, triumphant after Austerlitz, worried after Borodino or the retreat from Moscow, despairing on the bleak rock of St Helena before they were fifty years old? Mad poets perhaps, Baudelaires of the insane world, spouting decadent but meaningless verse in their Spartan cells? Philosophe lunatics preaching the rational virtues of The Enlightenment to a few colleagues in the asylum canteen?

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life nor joys

  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems:

  And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best -

  Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

  They were on the second floor now, twenty pairs of eyes, alerted by the sound of boot on wood, staring through their peepholes at the latest arrival. Welcome to the Maison de Fous. Welcome to Hell. Powerscourt remembered one doctor telling him how easy it can be to have people declared insane. Convince the relevant people that somebody is mad and then everybody else will believe it. We all know he’s mad. It’s common knowledge. This doctor had terrifying stories of the wrong people being locked up, in Ireland, or in France, or even in England. It was very difficult to liberate victims such as these because nobody knew they had been locked away in the first place.

  They were on the third floor now. The warder was sifting his way through an enormous pile of keys. At last he found the right one and pushed Powerscourt into his cell.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘you’re home at last.’

  I long for scenes where man has never trod,

  A place where woman never smiled or wept:

  There to abide with my Creator, God,

  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

  Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,

  The grass below – above the vaulted sky.

  By late afternoon Lady Lucy Powerscourt was seriously worried. Maybe it was her nerves, maybe it was the local cooking, but the chicken she had at lunchtime had not agreed with her. Stomach pains were added to the knot of anxiety that possessed her. She had walked for an hour round the hotel square, reasoning that if Francis were to return they must surely see each other beneath the plane trees. Beaune had gone quiet by late afternoon. Lady Lucy wondered what the French did for the rest of Sunday. They went to church, of course. Then they had an enormous lunch with as many relatives as they could lay their hands on. And then? Perhaps they all went to sleep from the smallest baby to the oldest grandmere. The worst thing, she kept telling herself as she contemplated French family life, was that, unlike them, she had nobody to talk to. In London she could have picked up the telephone and talked to her relatives for the rest of the day. She could have located Johnny Fitzgerald and poured out her worries to him. She had discovered the telegraphic address of William Burke but she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. She knew men sent telegraphic messages to each other all the time, often concerning the movements of share prices or the winners of important horse races. But the telegraph was an alien male world that she did not understand. Late in the afternoon she enlisted the help of a young man on the hotel reception who had been sending telegraphs all afternoon, triumphant messages of purchases of the contents of the wine auction to the hotels and grand restaurants of Paris. Olivier, for such was the young man’s name, undertook to send her message. It would, he assured her, be with Mr William Burke in his bank first thing in the morning.

  ‘Francis missing,’ she wrote. She had some distant memory that you weren’t meant to use too many words. ‘Please tell Johnny Fitzgerald and Mr Pugh. Replies to this number. Most urgent.’

  She felt slightly better after the despatch. She might not be winning the war, but at least she had sent for reinforcements. Not for the first time that day she wondered what Francis would have wanted her to do. And where he was. And if he was still alive.

  As the street lights were illuminated in the fashionable district of Holland Park in west London Sir Jasper Bentinck KC sat at his desk on the top floor of his house overlooking the great wide open spaces across the road. It was his custom at this time to read through the most pressing of his forthcoming cases. Monday and Tuesday, he was appearing for the Crown in Rex versus Griffiths, a straightforward case of fraud. Later in the week he was leading for the prosecution in Rex versus Colville. Sir Jasper had read the papers some weeks before the committal hearing and been astonished at the lack of any proper defence. Charles Augustus Pugh, he saw, was to be the counsel for the defence at the Old Bailey and Pugh was not a man to let his clients down. He also had a reputation for springing surprise witnesses on the court at the very last minute. Sir Jasper lit a large cigar and stared upwards at his ceiling. He remained in this position for some fifteen minutes, searching through the evidence in his mind for what might be the weak link in the prosecution’s case, some unexplored avenue where the defence might yet rally their forces for a surprise victory. Try as he might, Sir Jasper could find no holes in his case. He was not a man given to self-doubt or self-criticism, Sir Jasper. Leading barristers from the Middle Temple or any other Temple seldom are. If he could find no weakness in the case, then there was no weakness in it.

  Lord Francis Powerscourt was wondering about the catering arrangements in his new establishment. There were no lists pasted on the back of the door informing clients about the times of meals, particularly breakfast, and the time by which they must vacate their room on their day of departure. Somehow he doubted there was much information available anywhere here about days of departure. Probably there was none at all. Nor were there any menus to be seen. He wondered if the solitaries like himself were given room service for their meals while the rest of the customers, accommodated, he suspected, in vast undecorated dormitories, ate equally cheerless food in some huge canteen. He wondered if the food in a French asylum wou
ld be better than in an English one. Did they serve a glass or two of wine with lunch and dinner, surely part of the ancient ancestral inheritance of every Frenchman in this part of the world?

  Powerscourt began to pace around his cell. It was not large, about twelve feet by eight. There was one small window looking out over the dark. He pulled as hard as he could on the bars but they yielded nothing at all. There was a slit in the door on to the corridor, designed to let people look in rather than the other way round. The door itself was sturdy and the hinges that bound it to the wall were strong. The floorboards, he discovered, lying flat on them for ease of inspection, were joined together with some adhesive that would not give way to human hand or, he suspected, to human hand with hammer. No plank to batter a warder could be constructed out of this floor. There was nothing for him in the walls either. He tried knocking as hard as he could on the two sides of his cell but there was no reply. There was a crude bucket in the corner that would be useless as a weapon. There remained the bed. Powerscourt pulled off the mattress. It was thicker than he would have expected. Maybe the inmates were encouraged to sleep as long as possible and cause less work for the warders. He remembered suddenly the doctor prescribing for him the same medicine as the rest of the third floor. Were they all solitaries on this floor? And what should he do with the medicine when it came? He felt sure it would be some powerful form of slow-you-down-and-make-you-sleepy medicine, probably designed to turn him into a semi-automaton in a week or so, capable of a few bodily functions, incapable of thought. He suspected this was the target condition as far as the doctors were concerned, a collection of patients who had been turned into zombies. All he could think of doing with the medicine was to try to hold it in the back of his mouth until the warder had gone and then spit it into the bucket.

  Five minutes later he was trying to prise one iron leg away from the body of his bed and finding it impossible. He heard footsteps approaching up the corridor outside. He threw the mattress back on the bed and sat on it. An elderly man, clad in that blue uniform of the warders, stood in the doorway. Behind him, Powerscourt could just see, he had a primitive sort of trolley. The man was about Powerscourt’s height with no moustache and a bald head.