Death of a Wine Merchant (11 page)

‘What kind of marriage did I have? How long have you got, Lord Powerscourt? It was all right at the beginning. I think most of them are all right at the beginning, or so I’ve been told. I’ve carried out a lot of research into marriages with the women of my acquaintance, you know. Sometimes I think I should have been made a Professor of Unhappy Marriage like that man who’s Professor of Mind and Logic at University
College up in London. After a couple of years things begin to go off. Some husbands like little children. Most don’t. Mine didn’t. Being children themselves most husbands resent the amount and the extent of love their wives expend on their children. It’s the love they can’t stand, I think. The love pours out of the mothers into the children. The husbands don’t think they get that sort of unconditional love any more. So some of them look elsewhere. Business keeps them in London overnight. In my case business took Randolph off to France a lot. He had to work very hard when he was there. He was always exhausted when he came home. Sometimes, now the children have left home – they can be so cruel, children, without ever realizing it – I feel like an empty wine bottle. My goodness has all gone, it’s been spent, or consumed, or drunk. Now I’m just a glass shell waiting for the rubbish collection and a last few hours before being smashed to pieces.’

She paused for another drink. Her head was beginning to sway slightly. Powerscourt felt desperately sorry for her.

‘So there you have it, Lord Powerscourt. Ours was a perfectly normal middle-class marriage. There are thousands more like it across the squares of Kensington and Chelsea and the grander houses of the Home Counties. Perfectly normal.’ Hermione Colville began to weep, very gently and very quietly. The tears ran down her cheeks and on to her black silk shirt. Powerscourt fell into the male role in such occasions and offered his handkerchief as a substitute for comfort. There were a number of questions he wanted to ask but he felt the time was not right.

‘We’ve often wondered, you know,’ she looked at him through her tears, ‘the women of my acquaintance and myself, whether we would have been happier if we had never married, if we’d never known the terrible unhappiness marriage sometimes brings. And do you know what most of us conclude? That in spite of everything, all the bad times, we would still rather have had to endure those than to live alone as a spinster in some damp little place in Battersea or
go on living at home and watch our parents falling to pieces until they died.’

Powerscourt waited. There might be more to come yet. Would she speak of Randolph’s wandering eye, he wondered? Did he dare ask? How should he phrase it?

She rang the bell again. ‘Lord Powerscourt is just leaving us,’ she said to the dwarf butler, as Powerscourt now referred to him in his mind. ‘I think it’s for the best,’ she said to Powerscourt, trying to rise from her chair and falling back again. Powerscourt bowed to Hermione Colville and set out from the house towards the railway station. The air of Moulsford was refreshing, he thought. Especially when you were out of doors.

Powerscourt wondered about Mrs Colville in his train back to London. How much should he believe of what she had said? All of it? None of it? Was this In Vino Veritas? Or was it rather In Vino A Pack Of Lies? On the whole he subscribed to the latter theory, that most of what Hermione had said could be put down to a maudlin self-pity and an over-dramatized version of her position brought on by the increasing pull of the Chablis.

He wondered too about Timothy Barrington White, married to Lady Lucy’s cousin Milly, and his friend Beauchamp Trumper at their drinking club near Paddington station. For Powerscourt had now reconciled himself to the kind of defence they would have to offer for Cosmo Colville. It was now unlikely that he was going to make one major discovery that would turn the prosecution case upside down and force them to withdraw. He thought of their position in building terms. He no longer felt that he would be able to produce a whole new floor, composed of sound boards and solid walls, large windows letting in the light. Instead, Powerscourt reckoned, they would have to come up with a mosaic of doubts and suspicions and uncertainties that might persuade the
jury that they could not be certain Cosmo was the murderer. Into such a mosaic, rather like that in some long-abandoned Roman villa, Timothy Barrington White and his drinking companion might be profitably accommodated. First the friend would have to be persuaded to give evidence about Barrington White’s threat to kill the Colvilles.

Then White would have to take the stand and answer questions about his previous rows with them. Charles Augustus Pugh would remind him of his threat. Pugh would then put it to White that he had, in fact, carried out his threat, that he had, indeed, only gone to the wedding to commit murder. White would deny it, of course, but some collateral damage might have been inflicted on the prosecution case.

There was, Powerscourt well knew, only one problem with his plan, maybe two. Lady Lucy would have to approve for a start. If he organized it with Pugh’s people and Pugh’s chambers without telling Lucy there would be hell to pay. He would, he decided, write to Pugh as soon as he could and ask his advice. Powerscourt suspected the whole scheme might be a waste of time. He approached the subject gingerly as he inspected an atlas of Norfolk for his trip later that day.

‘Do you want me to organize this for you, Francis?’ Lady Lucy said. ‘Talk to the parties concerned and then tell Mr Pugh to sign them up or whatever it is he has to do?’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘let’s wait and see what Pugh has to say.’

The conversation was cut short by the arrival of the twins. Ever since they could understand things they had been fascinated by maps. They stared at the page opened at the county of Norfolk. They understood that the lines of black ladders meant railways. On an earlier occasion, Powerscourt remembered, they had climbed up on the table and run their fingers along the railway symbol all the way from Plymouth to Inverness. On this occasion their interest lay elsewhere.

‘Blue,’ said Christopher.

‘Blue,’ said Juliet.

‘Sea?’ said Christopher, looking hopefully at his father.

The sea, in Powerscourt’s experience, was the only thing known to have reduced the twins to total silence. That summer he and Lady Lucy had taken them to a great beach in Dorset and Powerscourt made them close their eyes until he gave the word. When the party was right at the top of the beach, the sea about four hundred yards away, Powerscourt told them to open their eyes. They looked at their parents. They looked at the sea. They looked at each other. They looked at the sea again. They stood perfectly still for over a minute without any fighting or kicking. Then with a great war whoop they held hands and hurtled off towards the water at full speed.

‘All the way round the coast,’ Powerscourt’s finger ran in a great arc round the coast of Norfolk from Hunstanton to Lowestoft, ‘there is the sea. North Sea, it’s called.’ He closed the atlas rapidly in case the twins worked out where he was going and asked to come too. He was saved by the voice of Cook offering fresh buns in the kitchen. He kissed Lady Lucy on the lips and set off for the railway station.

Powerscourt had arranged to meet Inspector Cooper at the Black Boys Hotel in Aylsham early that evening. He had taken the liberty of asking the young detective to bring copies of his two seating plans with him. He had pointed out that the defence could easily ask for them to be introduced as pieces of evidence at the trial. He thought again about the case against Cosmo with the gun in his hand. He still found it hard to believe that they could assemble a defence that could secure his acquittal. Piece by piece, he said to himself, scintilla of doubt followed by scintilla of doubt, undermining the jury’s confidence like the incoming tide eroding a sandcastle on the beach.

‘Good evening, Lord Powerscourt.’ Inspector Cooper was there to greet him in the lounge of his hotel.

‘I trust I find you well, Inspector,’ said Powerscourt, shaking the young man’s hand.

‘More than well,’ said Cooper, beaming broadly at his visitor.

‘Has some happy event brightened up your life?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile.

‘It has indeed, my lord. I am engaged to be married, so I am, and that’s a fact.’

‘I take it this happened fairly recently?’ said Powerscourt. ‘May I wish you every happiness in your married life.’

‘I asked Charlotte two Sundays ago. I was going to ask her on Christmas Eve, you know, but she looked so lovely that afternoon it sort of slipped out. Then I asked her father for her hand this Sunday gone. He was very happy for us.’

A rising police inspector would be a good match for your daughter, Powerscourt thought, a steadily growing income, sufficient money to support a family, a reliable pension at the end. A man might do worse for his daughter, a lot worse.

Powerscourt thought the Inspector had turned into a puppy, he was so happy. ‘Forgive me for turning to business, Inspector, but were you able to find the time to have copies made of those two seating plans?’

‘Of course,’ said Inspector Cooper, fetching a large envelope from his briefcase. ‘This is the one that relates to the moments before they left the garden and went upstairs, and this relates to where we think they were just before the shooting.’ Each wedding guest, Powerscourt noted, was represented by a circle with a name inside. The large sheets of stiff paper were encrusted with circles.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Powerscourt, popping them back into their envelope for now. ‘You don’t happen to have addresses for all these people, do you, by any chance?’

‘I don’t but Mrs Nash does, I think. She had them all to send out the invitations. I was going to borrow her list when – when other matters intervened and the investigation was closed.’

‘I hope to see Mrs Nash tomorrow as a matter of fact. Tell me, Inspector, has any fresh evidence come to light concerning this case? I presume you have been involved with other cases but there is often a trickle of fresh intelligence.’

‘I have heard nothing,’ said the young man. ‘And how are your investigations proceeding, Lord Powerscourt? Have you cracked the case? Discovered the real murderer?’

Powerscourt decided there could be no harm in a little exaggeration. Nothing huge, just a little nudge that might, just might, persuade the prosecution that their case was already won and they could afford to be complacent.

‘I am here this evening, as you see, Inspector. Tomorrow I carry out more inquiries. The day after that I shall return to London and carry out more. We have made no progress. The case remains exactly where it was when you were taken off it. The date for the trial may come this week. The defence barrister and I both wish we had never taken the business on. It does a man’s career no service at all if is dogged by failure. I have never failed yet in a murder investigation, never. This case is going to be the first one. I am sure of it.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt wasn’t absolutely sure what he hoped to find on his voyage round the hotels of northern Norfolk. If he was honest with himself, he was rather ashamed of what he was doing. It was all part of the attempt to build up a case for the defence. He hoped he would find a foreigner who had come to stay in one of these hotels. He hoped Charles Augustus Pugh could imply that the stranger had come for the wedding. Once persuade the jury that the stranger had penetrated the grounds of Brympton Hall and anything might be possible. Juries don’t like foreigners very much, he remembered Pugh telling him about some earlier case. In some parts of the country they really don’t like them at all.

The hotel manager in his own hotel, the Black Boys, at the corner of the main square in Aylsham, a mile and half from the Hall, remembered the night before the wedding well. The hotel was full, every last bed occupied. Mr Willoughby had booked all the rooms six weeks before. Were all the guests English? From London and around there? Powerscourt had asked. Oh, yes, the hotel-keeper had assured him. There had been some sort of sing-song after supper and the guests had all known the words, the hotel-keeper remembered that. No Frenchmen? Powerscourt had asked wistfully, no Italians? None of those, sir. What would them people want with a wedding in Norfolk anyway? Murder, Powerscourt said to himself, murder most foul, and he went in for his supper.

A few miles to the south was the Marsham Arms in Hevingham on the Norwich road, an ancient establishment even older than the Black Boys in Aylsham. It was the lady of the house who received him.

‘The day you’re asking about, sir, that’ll be the day of the big wedding up at Brympton, the one with the murder, would it?’

Powerscourt assured her that it was. She bent down and pulled out a large visitors’ book from a drawer underneath the table. ‘Frederick and I always make sure we get the visitors to sign in. You can’t be sure, of course, if they’re signing with their real names or not. In the summer holidays you’d be surprised at how many strange people we get. A great number of people called Jones come for the weekend in the summer. It must be something in the air. Never mind. Fourth, fifth, sixth, here we are. We were nearly full that night, sir. Would you like to take a look for yourself?’ She spun the book round and Powerscourt read a series of innocuous English names.

‘No Frenchmen?’ he asked. ‘No foreigners?’

‘No, sir, not that we don’t often have some foreigners here. Very welcome we make them too, if I might say so.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully and went on his way.

North-east of Brympton Hall was the Manor House in North Walsham, a fine red-brick building that looked as if it been there for a couple of centuries. The proprietor introduced himself as Archibald Wilkins, a man of average height with pale brown hair and a broken nose and so thin it was painful to behold. He too pulled out a battered visitors’ book. ‘I remember that day well,’ he said, ‘we were short-staffed and I had to wait at table myself. I’d nearly forgotten how to do it. Here we are,’ he swung the book round so Powerscourt could see it clearly, ‘a pair of Robertses, four Donaldsons, a brace of Chadwicks and three Jardines, one about three years old. Any of them of interest to you, sir?’ The man sounded hopeful that one of his customers might be in hot water of one sort or another.

‘I’m afraid not, Mr Wilkins. You didn’t have any foreigners here that night, did you? Frenchman? Italian? That sort of person?’

‘I never did hold with them foreigners wandering about the place and staying in our hotels,’ said Mr Wilkins, ‘don’t give them house room here, if you follow me. We usually send them over to the Saracen’s Head over Erpingham way. They’ll take anything over there. Come to think of it, them Saracens were bloody foreigners too, weren’t they? They’d be well suited, over there.’

Powerscourt wished that Archibald Wilkins could be transferred to London and a position on the jury at the trial of Cosmo Colville. Such xenophobia could come in very useful. He had a list of nine hotels in the area in his pocket. He wondered if he would draw blank in all of them.

His next port of call was at the Bell at Cawston a few miles to the west of Aylsham on the Dereham Road. The landlord here was a great bear of a man in his mid-thirties with a mop of black hair and a black beard called Jack Gill. He offered Powerscourt a cup of tea in the empty saloon bar while he went to fetch his books from another part of the building.

‘Fifth,’ the black beard muttered to himself. ‘We only had three guests that evening and they were all brothers having some sort of birthday reunion. Phelps, their name was, James, Jolyon and John Phelps, as if their parents could only cope with one letter of the alphabet.’

‘You didn’t have any foreigners that night, Frenchmen, Italians, that sort of thing?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Gill, staring suddenly at his visitors’ book. ‘Hilda!’ he shouted suddenly. ‘Hilda! Where the devil are you?’ His voice echoed round the ground floor of the hotel.

Jack Gill took four strides over to the door that opened on to his garden. He was just about to shout once more when a pretty blonde woman, almost covered from head to toe in the biggest apron Powerscourt had ever seen, entered the saloon bar from the opposite side.

‘You didn’t have to shout, Jack,’ she said sweetly, ‘you know this is the day I do the baking in the afternoon.’

‘Sorry about that,’ said Gill. ‘This gentleman is asking who we had here round about the time of the wedding and the murder up at the Hall.’ Powerscourt hadn’t mentioned it in a single establishment – all the hotel people had just assumed that was why he was here.

‘Was that the time we had Philippe the Fair here?’ Gill went on. ‘His reservation was in the name of Legros, Pierre Legros, but I think it was false. He pretended not to understand when we mentioned the visitors’ book and signing in, but I think he knew perfectly well what was wanted. He never did sign it. That’s why I’m not sure exactly when he was here. Can you remember, my dear?’

Hilda scratched vigorously at her blonde hair. Flakes of flour floated to the ground. ‘Do you know, Jack, I think it was then. He was here the same day the man from Norwich came about the drains. That was the day before the wedding, I’m fairly sure of it.’

‘You’re right,’ said Gill, ‘he came just after the drain man left and we were wondering if we could ever afford his bill.’

‘What sort of man was he?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Would I be right in assuming he was French?’

‘He was French, with just a little English. There was something about him made me think he was a military man or had been a military man in his time. That erect bearing, beautifully polished shoes he had, I remember, as if he was going on parade.’

‘Age?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Thirty, thirty-five?’ said Jack Gill.

‘And what did he do when he was here?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Gill. ‘We hardly saw anything of him at all. He paid for his accommodation the minute he arrived. Then he went up to his room and we never saw him again, did we, Hilda, until you spotted him leaving in the morning.’

Powerscourt looked at the hotel-keeper’s wife. ‘He’d ordered a cab to take him away, sir, so he had. And he was all dressed up with the rest of his things in that little bag he was carrying so he wasn’t going to come back here.’

‘How was he all dressed up, Mrs Gill?’

‘Well, sir, he looked as if he was going to a wedding. That Jim Cox who drove him was in here that night having a couple of pints of beer and he said he’d taken him over to Brympton Hall.’

‘The cabbie didn’t pick him up again after the ceremony?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘No, sir, he just left him there in the morning.’

‘Could you describe him for me?’

‘About five foot ten,’ said Jack Gill.

‘Very dark hair, almost black,’ said Hilda Gill. ‘We only called him Philippe the Fair because I thought I remembered some French king with that name.’

‘Slim, he was,’ Jack carried on.

‘Clean-shaven,’ said Hilda. ‘Dark eyes. He looked like a man on a mission of some kind.’

And that, despite all his prompting, was the sum total of what Powerscourt could get out of them. He explained that they might have to come to court to give evidence about the arrival of Philippe the Fair.

‘I’ve always wanted to see the Old Bailey,’ Jack Gill said. ‘But sure to God I never thought I’d have to go and appear there.’

Powerscourt found Georgina Nash sitting in her garden in the last of the sunshine. A couple of workmen were encamped round the fountain. Another seemed to have disappeared inside it head first.

‘Good afternoon, Lord Powerscourt, how nice to see you again.’

‘Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.’

‘Let’s go inside and have some tea,’ said Georgina Nash, rising from her bench and taking a last wistful look at the fountain. ‘I’m sure you’ll remember that fountain wasn’t working at the time of the wedding. They haven’t fixed it yet. Willoughby says I’m getting obsessed about it.’

‘I’m sure it will be working again soon. They can be tricky things, fountains.’

‘Have you been making any progress, Lord Powerscourt? I gather that poor man is still locked up in Pentonville and not speaking a word. Do you have any news?’

‘I have to say, Mrs Nash, that I have very little progress to report. I’m not doing well at this point. I do have one or two matters I would like to ask you about, but perhaps you could tell me first of all if anything new has come to light here about the events on the day of the wedding.’

‘Well, we’ve had all sorts of people who were there on the day come to offer condolences, that sort of thing. I’m afraid we haven’t had any strange-looking person turning up and announcing that he was the murderer.’

‘I don’t know if you remember, Mrs Nash, but you told me at the time that a wedding would be a very good place to commit a murder. If there were any strangers about, you said, the Nashes would think they were Colvilles and the Colvilles would think they were Nashes.’

‘Did I really say that, Lord Powerscourt? That’s rather clever, don’t you think? I shall have to tell Willoughby. He believes I haven’t got any brains at all.’

‘The thing is, Mrs Nash,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘that we have evidence there was a Frenchman here that day. He stayed the night before at the Bell over at Cawston where the landlord and his wife remember him. In the morning he took a cab all dressed up in his wedding clothes and came here, to the Hall.’

‘What did he look like, Lord Powerscourt?’ said Georgina Nash, looking alarmed at the thought of unknown Frenchmen wandering about her property. ‘What was his name?’

‘We don’t have a name. He booked in at the hotel calling himself Legros but he didn’t sign the visitors’ book so I suspect it was a false name. Five feet ten, dark hair, almost black, dark eyes, some hint of a military look about him, the Bell at Cawston people thought. Can you remember such a man, Mrs Nash?’

Georgina Nash stared closely at Powerscourt. ‘Dark hair, five foot ten, military look about him, I might have seen him but I can’t be sure. There were plenty of military people about on the day. You see, even if I had come across him, I think I’d have thought he was a guest of the Colvilles – they’ve got wine interests all over Europe, so it’s only natural they should invite a Frenchman or two. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, that’s not very helpful of me.’

‘Could I just ask you to think very carefully, Mrs Nash, see if you can remember seeing such a man at the far end of your Great Hall where the murder happened?’

If Charles Augustus Pugh used such a technique, Powerscourt said to himself, he would most probably receive a fearful wigging from the judge for leading the witness.

‘It’s no good, Lord Powerscourt,’ said Georgina Nash after a moment or two, ‘I can’t do it, I just can’t.’

‘Perhaps these might help you along,’ said Powerscourt, producing the two seating plans he had obtained from Inspector Cooper and placing them on the low table.

‘How fascinating,’ said Georgina Nash, staring carefully at the Long Gallery seating plan and the garden plan, so carefully filled in, with names in bubbles by the matchstick wedding guests, the whole resembling the identifying key to the people in enormous paintings like Derby Day by artists like Frith, where a reproduction of the painting was made, with blank white spaces where the heads of the MPs or the spectators at Derby Day had been. Inside each head was a number and the numbers matched the names of the people in the main painting in a great panel on the side.

Georgina Nash shook her head slowly. ‘It’s no good,’ she said finally, ‘I can’t do it.’

‘Never mind, Mrs Nash, it’s of no consequence. Could I ask a favour, a double favour of you? Do you have addresses of all these people in these seating plans? I’m sure you must have had them when you sent out the invitations but you may have thrown them away.’

‘No,’ said Georgina Nash, ‘I have them still. I shall fetch them directly. What was the other half of your favour, Lord Powerscourt?’

‘I thought you would have them,’ said Powerscourt. ‘The second favour is to ask if I could shoot upstairs and take another look at the Long Gallery while you are fetching the addresses?’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Nash. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t come with you. Neither Willoughby nor I have set foot in those rooms since the wedding.’

Powerscourt went out to the great staircase where the guests had gathered on that terrible day. He retraced the steps most of them would have taken, into the upper Anteroom with its French hunting tapestries and on into the Long Gallery itself. He headed straight for the far end, looking out over the lake. He checked the door on the right-hand side that opened on to the staircase leading to the garden where the guests had been taking their champagne. Up these, he said to himself, into the Peter the Great room, meet Randolph Colville in the state bedroom, pull out your pistol and shoot him dead. Make your escape back the way you had come. Or take the staircase in the corner of the state bedroom down and out into the west front and the gardens on the opposite side to the wedding party. From here you could vanish, or you could make your way round to the garden party and mingle with them until the time came to climb the stairs. Those two staircases, Powerscourt was sure, in some combination or other, must have provided the way in and the way out for the murderer. There were yet more staircases in the body of the house but
he wasn’t sure how many people would have known about them.