Death of a wine merchant lfp-9 Read online

  Sir Edward Henry was the third Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police known to Powerscourt. He was a tall man with a military moustache that looked as if it might have been more at home on a Prussian grenadier. The walls of his office were still lined with the four great maps of London with the more recent crimes marked out in red. Powerscourt observed that the greatest concentration of red dots was where it had been every time he had been in this room, over the East End of London.

  Powerscourt explained that he was investigating the Colville murder in Norfolk.

  ‘Terrible business that,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I’ve been buying our wine at home from those Colvilles for years. How can we assist you, Lord Powerscourt? I gather that our colleagues in East Anglia are fairly certain they have the right man.’

  Powerscourt did not think it prudent to mention that the junior detective himself, an Inspector, no less, harboured doubts about the case. The police forces would close ranks like a cavalry squadron on drill duty.

  ‘In my position, Commissioner, I am merely a hired hand. I have to do the best for my client, the unfortunate Cosmo Colville, currently, as you know, a guest of His Majesty in Pentonville prison. I wanted to ask your advice on the question of fingerprints. After all, you are one of the great experts on the subject – you were a leading member of the committee which recommended their introduction in London back at the turn of the century.’

  ‘Fingerprints, Lord Powerscourt…’ said the Commissioner with a dreamy look in his eye. ‘Back then I could have talked for days about the things, origin in India, advantages in the solving of crime, the fact that no two fingerprints are the same. I am pleased, if that is the right word, when a man is hanged at the end of the trial, that his fingerprints have been the decisive proof of guilt, as they were in a murder trial here in London a couple of years back. Some of the officers who work in the Fingerprint Bureau see a great future in the science. Two of my brightest young men tried to persuade me the other day that every citizen in the land should have their fingerprints recorded and placed on file. Crime, they said would be eradicated in five years. I could hear our elected representatives in the House of Commons braying on forever about the ancient rights of freeborn Englishmen so I turned them down. But I have gone off the subject. How can our expertise be useful to you, Lord Powerscourt?’

  Powerscourt explained about the gun in Cosmo’s hand, the strongest piece of evidence against him. ‘If, Commissioner, and it is a very big if, I grant you, fingerprint evidence could show that another hand had held the gun, that might help his case, might it not? And am I right in thinking that the expertise of fingerprinting in such cases has not yet reached Norfolk?’

  ‘You are, and they have made no request for our assistance in this case.’

  ‘Would it be possible for the defence to request that the gun should be sent for examination here by one of your officers?’

  ‘Theoretically, it would be,’ said the Commissioner. ‘But each police force in this country is master in its own house. The Norfolk police could refuse. The prosecuting barrister would almost certainly raise a host of objections – how are the jury to know that the gun has not been tampered with, so the evidence is corrupt and should be thrown out and so on and so forth. Do you happen to know who the lead barrister for the Crown is?’

  ‘I believe it is Sir Jasper Bentinck, Commissioner.’

  ‘Sir Jasper?’ Sir Edward Henry permitted himself a slight laugh. ‘Have no doubt of it, I tell you, Lord Powerscourt, the objections would stretch out like a string of milestones all the way from the Old Bailey to Wells next the Sea.’

  ‘What would happen if the defence were to consult an expert in fingerprinting who is not attached to any police force? An independent man?’ Powerscourt had finally arrived at the question that had brought him here.

  ‘There aren’t many of those around, I’m afraid. Some of our men are lured off to America where the pay is better.’

  ‘A retired officer? One who had to leave the force for ill health or personal reasons?’

  The Commissioner stroked his moustache for some time. ‘Apologies, Lord Powerscourt, I believe we could help you there. But I have something of a moral dilemma. If I give you a few names, am I undermining the cause of my colleagues up there in East Anglia? Am I giving comfort and succour to the enemy?’

  ‘The life of an innocent man may be at stake here, Commissioner.’

  ‘I know, I know, Lord Powerscourt. That weighs very heavily with me. And you yourself have always been a great friend to our force. Very well. I think we have two retired fingerprint men on the books. We did have a third but I went to his funeral only last month. I shall send the relevant addresses round to your house in a couple of hours. It’ll take some time to dig them out. But I would give you a word of warning about all this.’

  ‘Please do. I am most grateful for your assistance. It is beyond the call of duty.’

  ‘On the face of it,’ Sir Edward rose from his desk and went to his window, looking out over a grey sky and a sluggish Thames, the seagulls swirling round the shore, ‘nothing could be simpler. You find the fingerprint expert. He examines the gun. He finds that there are other fingerprints on it. Whose are those? Surely, says the defence, those are the fingerprints of the killer. The Pentonville Colville merely happened to pick the gun up. I do not know if that would carry as much weight with the jury as the physical presence of your man sitting opposite his dead brother. And the legal complications and obfuscations and arguments would be tiresome. Sir Jasper might well try to wrap the jury up in so much legal undergrowth, case of Rex versus Butterworth 1904, Rex versus Turner 1906, and so on, that they are left with only one fact they can cling on to, one safe port in the legal storm raging round their heads in the Old Bailey.’

  ‘And that fact would be?’ Powerscourt asked very quietly.

  ‘That Cosmo Colville was found in a chair, opposite his dead brother, with a gun in his hand.’

  The Alchemist was happy in his work that day. The previous evening he had been to the opera and gloried in The Magic Flute. Now he was working on the creation of a series of pre-phylloxera wines for a grand dinner to be held in a couple of weeks at a top London hotel. The Alchemist often wondered where his profession – for he did not regard himself as a mere artisan – would have been without the disease that had wiped out so many of France’s finest vineyards towards the end of the previous century. So many great wines were lost. But some survived, hidden away in obscure abbeys or interred in the cellars of the great chateaux. These fetched high prices. Engaged in this trade in France, working, as the Alchemist used to say to himself, to provide the market with what it so desperately wanted, had proved his undoing. The inspectors had caught him red-handed in a vast cellar under the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux. His superiors denied all knowledge of his activities. He was left as the centre and the chief victim of the scandal. He fled France in a fishing boat and took refuge in the vast obscurity of London’s docks where strangers were commonplace and few questions were asked about a man’s past. Very slowly and very carefully the Alchemist built up his business. He took great pains about secrecy. He refused to meet any clients or customers face to face. Orders had to be delivered by letter. Payment always had to be in cash. The Alchemist didn’t even trust the banks.

  He began the business of blending his new ancient vintages. The Alchemist never claimed to be offering the truly great vintages from before the phylloxera plague. Somebody, after all, might have actually tasted them. He picked respectable, steady, unremarkable chateaux that his customers would never have heard of, and so would have no idea of whether the wine they were drinking was genuine or not. They had nothing to compare it with, and without comparisons, as the Alchemist knew only too well, the wisdom of the wine trade disappears as it has nothing to hold on to.

  His was a solitary life, alternating between his workplace, his room in an anonymous part of north London and a chop house where he would eat his solitary supper.
But he was not unhappy. He had no idea how long he might have been locked up in France, or how huge a fine might have been imposed on him. Loneliness for him was a price worth paying for freedom. He liked women, the Alchemist, but he was terrified of marrying one of them. A wife would always be eager to know the details of his activities, how well he was doing. Such knowledge could only bring him into trouble. He had great doubts about the ability of women to keep their mouths shut. When he remembered his two sisters and his mother, he always recalled what happened when you told one of them something that was meant to be a secret. The other two always knew within the hour. So the Alchemist restricted his activities with the opposite sex to one special prostitute in Soho who never asked him any questions but happily took his money.

  By now the Alchemist had two reds ready that he thought might form part of his offerings for the dinner. Leave them to settle for a couple of days and then he would decide. He thought suddenly of the wide open and desolate spaces in the Auvergne, where civilization seemed alien, remote, places like the Aubrac with its strange cattle and vast skies and hardly any people. He had a great love of wide, wild open spaces, and was already planning a great holiday in a few years’ time when he could visit the deserts of the Middle East and the mountains of America. Maybe he could ride right across the United States in a train and stop off on the way to make pilgrimages to the American wildernesses. He placed his two bottles carefully on a shelf and began humming another aria from The Magic Flute.

  Nathaniel Colville looked like a patriarch. He was tall and well built with a slim white moustache and a great shock of white hair. He looked about seventy years old but his bearing was still erect, his eye steady. Powerscourt remembered Sir Pericles Freme and his less flamboyant white locks and thought he was surrounded by white-headed men. Nathaniel lived close to his brother in a beautiful house right on the river in a village called Moulsford. A gardener was working among the roses that led down to the Thames. A couple of rowing boats were drifting past towards Pangbourne. A pair of blue tits were conducting what sounded like a vigorous argument in the bushes. Nathaniel Colville showed Powerscourt into a seat by the fire.

  ‘How very good of you to see me, Mr Colville,’ said Powerscourt. ‘This must be a very difficult time for you all.’

  ‘It’s good of you to come all this way,’ said Nathaniel Colville. ‘I don’t suppose I shall be much use to you. I haven’t had very much to do with the family business for years. I still get the dividends, of course, and I’m still meant to be writing the history of the firm. I’m supposed to have been doing that for the last eight years. I’ve got all the early records in a room at the top of the house but I don’t even read them any more. I don’t think I’m ever going to finish it now.’

  ‘There’s still time, plenty of time,’ said Powerscourt, thinking ruefully of his own unfinished second volume on the Cathedrals of England, the notes and descriptions still mouldering in a cupboard in Markham Square. ‘Tell me, Mr Colville, is there anything you can tell me about your nephews, Randolph and Cosmo? Anything you can remember about their early years, about their characters?’

  Nathaniel Colville shook his head. ‘I was thinking about that before you came, Lord Powerscourt. They were both perfectly normal little boys. They spent a lot of time, obviously, with my own children and another cousin when they were growing up. There was nothing that suggested one was going to be shot at his son’s wedding and the other one arrested with a gun in his hand, nothing at all.’ The old man shook his head slowly.

  ‘Is there anything in the firm’s history that might have left somebody bearing a grudge against them?’

  ‘A vendetta come to Norfolk to take revenge for some sins committed long ago? I don’t know anything of that sort but, as I said, I haven’t had much to do with the business for a long time.’

  ‘Were things very different in your days, Mr Colville, when the firm started up?’ Powerscourt suspected that Nathaniel Colville might be happier with the past than the present.

  ‘I know I’m old, Lord Powerscourt, God knows when you get to my age, you are reminded of it every day. But I think of those early years when we were establishing the business as a time of great happiness. We were doing something none of us had done before. We didn’t really know what the rules were, if there were any rules. We took risks, we spent an awful lot of money advertising our wares in the newspapers once we were up and running. Nobody had ever done that before. We tried to do the best we could for our customers. We worked very hard. We were very intensely alive, if you know what I mean. There wasn’t a great deal of time for children. Anyway we were away in France quite a lot of the time.’

  ‘Do you think that times are less happy now? In the wine trade, I mean.’

  ‘Do you remember the Jubilee, Lord Powerscourt? The second one, not the first? I remember watching the procession to St Paul’s, the soldiers marching through London from all over the world, all come from parts of the British Empire, the royal carriages in procession with the little Queen at the end? I saw them all pass by from the windows of my club on Pall Mall and I remember thinking that this was the end of an era. Two days before, you see, we learned that one of our competitors had been offering champagne at two shillings a case less than we were. In the old days that would have been unthinkable. The rivals might put their stuff on the market at the same price. We all had to make a living after all. But now it was no longer live and let live, it was live and let die. I remember thinking very strongly that this was the end of an age. What have we had since? That fat adulterer on the throne. Women, suffragettes they call themselves, marching about the place throwing stones through shop windows and demanding votes for women. These dreadful motor cars belching smoke over us all – only the other day the gardener and the footman and I had to help pull some fool in his car out of the river down there. Brakes failed, the man said. God help us all. Right through my life, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve been interested in politics. I can’t imagine saying today that things are better than they were at the time of the Jubilee. Entente Cordiale with our oldest enemy, the French, hoping to lure us into some terrible war of revenge with Germany over Alsace Lorraine. The Germans building up a vast navy and spoiling for a fight. Russia honeycombed with revolutionaries seeking a final reckoning with the Tsar – they had a damned good go at it only a couple of years back.’

  ‘Has the wine trade become more and more competitive, Mr Colville?’ Powerscourt was wondering if anything concrete was going to come out of his visit.

  ‘Well, I’m not there now, but I would say it has, yes.’ Nathaniel Colville laughed suddenly. ‘My dear Lord Powerscourt, I realize I must have been sounding dreadfully reactionary just now. I’m not that bad. I try to do what the doctor tells me, regular exercise, moderation in all things. Did you learn Greek at school, Lord Powerscourt?’

  Powerscourt nodded.

  ‘Do you remember that they had a favourite saying back then, the Greeks I mean? Maiden agan. Nothing to excess. Think of it, man. Nothing to excess? Greeks? These were people who served up their guests children cooked in a stew at banquets, who went to war for twenty years because a king’s wife ran off with another man, who ended up with their most restrained philosopher Aristotle educating a prince, Alexander, who wanted to conquer the whole bloody world. Nothing to excess? Some day I’m going to tell my doctor what I’ve just told you but the right moment hasn’t come yet.’

  ‘Let me just go back to where I started, Mr Colville. Anything at all you can tell me about Randolph and Cosmo?’

  The old man looked at Powerscourt carefully as if sizing him up, as if he were a colt he might buy at the sales. ‘You seem a perfectly respectable sort of fellow to me,’ he said finally. ‘There is perhaps one thing you ought to know, though please don’t tell any of my relations I told you.’ He stopped and stared into his fire. ‘It’s about Randolph,’ he said and paused again. It was as if he wasn’t sure he could get the words out. ‘They say he was a terrible man for the women
, chased anything that took his fancy.’

  ‘Before his marriage,’ asked Powerscourt, ‘or after?’

  ‘Damn it, man, I only know what I hear. But I should say the answer to your question is both before and after. All the way through.’

  8

  Alfred Davis, general manager of Colville and Sons, was staring in disbelief at four sheets of paper on the table in front of him. The latest disaster to strike the Colville company was the non-arrival of a great consignment of wine from Burgundy, wine in every price range. The receipts in front of Alfred were the records of these deliveries in the previous years. Always they had left Burgundy in the second week of October and arrived in London a week or so later. Now there were no records at all. Every attempt to contact the firm of Chanson, Pere et Fils, had failed. Alfred had first been made aware of the lack of incoming burgundy the evening before. He had spent most of his time since staring at the records of previous years. Alfred Davis did not wonder if anything had gone wrong at the wine merchants in France, a serious illness, a death perhaps which might have impeded business. He worried only about the firm of Colvilles. This consignment was meant to last them into the New Year. Another shipment usually came along in February. But Christmas, granted the long lead times involved in the trade, was almost upon them. Alfred did not know what he could do if the shipment simply failed to turn up at the docks. Mr Randolph had looked after the Burgundy business for years. No doubt he could have conjured some more wine out of those wily negociants and filled the gap. But Mr Randolph was rotting in his grave near the Thames and would trouble the wine trade no more. Alfred could not imagine what damage the loss of the Burgundy wines would do the business at one of the busiest times in the wine merchant’s year, Christmas and New Year.