Death of a Wine Merchant (17 page)

Johnny looked sternly at the cupboard in the centre of the opposite wall. That was where the Powerscourt wine usually dwelt. But the doors were firmly closed today.

‘I think they may be a bit naughty, the Colvilles,’ he said, ‘but probably not any naughtier than everybody else.’

‘What sort of crimes are they up to, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy, very aware of the keen interest her guest was taking in the closed cupboard by the wall.

‘Bit loose with the labels was what my man said. Stuff comes up in a wine train from the south, wagon after wagon full of cheap Languedoc red, gets bottled in Dijon or Beaune
and then labelled as Bourgogne Cuvée or some such name. Much more expensive now. My man says everybody’s doing it. This chap, he comes from Beaune by the way, had another story to tell. The Colvilles have a very close relationship with a man called Thevenet, Louis Thevenet, a grower in the Mâconnais to the south of Beaune. He’s rather a whiz at wine making, our Louis, and when he produces a really cracking wine every two or three years the Colvilles buy the lot, get out the labels again and call it Meursault, which sells for more than four times the price of the Mâcon. It all adds up. They’ve also bought up a large parcel of land just inside the official boundary of Puligny Montrachet. Clean the land up, plant your vines, wait for them to grow and then you’ve got your very own world-class white wine at world-class prices. And there’s one other thing I’ve got to report. I’ve found the pub in St John’s Wood where the Colville servants drink. It’s called the Jolly Cricketers, oddly enough. I tried the subject of family rows in there two nights running and got absolutely nowhere. They’re not saying a word.’

‘All this fiddling about with the wines, it’s still not enough to kill for,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if he would ever get to the bottom of the mystery of two brothers, one dead and unable to speak, one alive and refusing to speak, and one gun which took the life of the elder.

Johnny Fitzgerald looked at his watch and sprang to his feet. ‘Francis, Lady Lucy, forgive me, I’m going to be late. I’ve got to go to a meeting with my publishers about the bird book. Bloody man said he’d found a problem with it.’

Half an hour later Johnny’s place in the Powerscourt drawing room was taken by the dapper figure of Sir Pericles Freme, dropped by in a hurry, as he put it, to impart one piece of important news and one rather odd piece of gossip.

‘The important thing,’ he began, checking that the crease on his trousers was still immaculate, ‘is this. Colvilles are in danger of going broke, going out of business. The business hasn’t been run properly for a long time. It’s going to seed
really, like a field that hasn’t been cared for in years. Pity, really. In their day they were a fine business.’

Powerscourt wondered how impending bankruptcy might provide a motive for murder but he couldn’t see it.

‘Could anything save them? The return of Cosmo maybe? A general increase in levels of thirst in the population at large?’

Sir Pericles smiled. ‘Fresh management might do the trick. A substantial injection of funds might keep them afloat but they’d still have to put their house in order.’

‘And the gossip, Sir Pericles?’ asked Powerscourt hopefully. He had known many cases where the gossip had been more useful than the facts in solving the mystery.

‘Simply this,’ replied Freme. ‘That chap from Beaune, the one who looked after the Colville interests and has since disappeared, dammit, I’ve forgotten the fellow’s name.’

‘Drouhin,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Jean Pierre Drouhin.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Sir Pericles. ‘Anyway, it seems the fellow is completely ambidextrous, able to sign his name with both hands, write at the same time on both sides of a notebook, all kinds of tricks. Just thought I’d mention it.’

With that Sir Pericles departed into the night.

Neither Powerscourt nor Sir Pericles noticed a figure lurking in the shadows a few doors away from the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. The coat was drawn up and the hat was pulled down over the forehead. The figure appeared to have its eyes locked on the Powerscourt’s front door.

Lady Lucy looked closely at her husband after Sir Pericles had left. He was walking up and down the drawing room again and his face looked as though he had travelled in his mind to some far distant place. Something was nagging at him, some connection he couldn’t quite place. Without a doubt it had to do with what Freme had just said, but was it the facts or the gossip that were swirling round his brain? He sat down by the fire and looked at Lady Lucy as if he hardly knew her. Then he came back.

‘Lucy,’ he began, ‘I think there was somebody else in this case who was ambidextrous but I can’t for the life of me remember who it was.’

‘Somebody in Norfolk perhaps, Francis? Some Colville relation? Someone to do with the wine business?’

Powerscourt shook his head. Lucy was close, surely, but she hadn’t quite pulled it off. Suddenly he knew where he had heard it before. It was at Randolph’s funeral and the remark had come from a neighbour who had watched Randolph play tennis some years before without a backhand ever being employed. The thing was impossible, surely. Powerscourt shot down the stairs to his study where he had a file of information about the case. With difficulty he managed to raise Georgina Nash on the telephone. She was another great shouter down the line as if her words had to travel the entire length of the train tracks between Norwich and London. After checking in her wedding notebook she reported that Jean Pierre Drouhin and his wife had indeed been invited to the happy occasion, but had declined. The reply was in a man’s hand. She provided an address in Beaune. Lord Francis Powerscourt, she informed her husband as he tucked into a large helping of oysters later that evening, appeared to be losing his wits.

Mrs Cosmo Colville’s telephone manner was more regular, coming as it did from a much closer place near Lord’s Cricket Ground. Now she came to think of it, she said, she didn’t think she had ever met this Mr Drouhin. He didn’t seem to cross the Channel very often. On the one occasion when she and Cosmo had made an appointment to visit this Jean Pierre when on holiday in France, he had been called away to a sick relative in Montpellier. As she put the receiver down she also reflected that Powerscourt seemed to be chasing at straws.

‘Lucy!’ Powerscourt was back in the drawing room. ‘It may be a wild goose chase. There’s less than one chance in ten that I am right. Never mind. There’s not a moment to lose! We must catch the first boat out of Dover in the morning. There will be a train to take us there tonight if we hurry.’

Lady Lucy knew where they were going. She had been there before. As they walked as fast as they could to pick up a taxi in the King’s Road, the watching figure slipped his moorings and followed them, about ten or twelve paces behind. When they climbed into a taxi to Victoria the figure was less than fifty yards behind. He was close enough in the ticket queue to hear where they were going. The Alchemist swore briefly when he realized that his prey were travelling to the one country he dare not visit. Then he remembered his little brother Marcel in Lyon. He would send him a telegram first thing in the morning. The neighbours in his fashionable street thought he was a successful businessman, the Alchemist’s brother. All his children’s friends knew him as a very generous man, always prepared to pay for charities and treats for his daughters’ classmates. The police of Lyon, however, would have told you a rather different story. In their view Marcel was one of the most violent gangsters in France.

Ten minutes after the Powerscourts’ departure a note was dropped through the door. It came from Charles Augustus Pugh. ‘“Time, like an ever rolling stream,”’ it began, ‘“bears all its sons away.” Or, in this instance, it has borne away the trial due before Cosmo’s. The case has fallen apart. Cosmo’s appearance in court is scheduled for next Thursday, six days from now. God help us all.’

Powerscourt had never known a Channel crossing like it. The captain, it transpired later, had serious reservations about setting forth but had been overruled by the managers of the shipping line. Now the boat, apparently so large and so solid on the quayside at Dover, had turned into a matchstick box, rising and falling in the great swells of the angry sea, its metal shrieking and battered in the fury of the waves. The passengers were confined to the great cabin where they clung on to the seats that were fixed to the floor or held on to the railings by the bar. Anybody on deck would have been swept away to certain death in the swirling embrace of the angry waters. Up on his bridge the captain peered ahead, seeking any respite in the storm. There were several small children on board and they huddled sadly into their mothers’ coats, their faces drawn and pale, asking from time to time when it was going to end or were they all going to die and go to heaven.

Lady Lucy had never been seasick on board ship until today. A nauseous mixture of sea water and vomit swirled round the little table where she and her Francis tried to make a shelter from the tempest. She remembered suddenly that Powerscourt’s first wife Caroline and their little son Thomas had been drowned in a terrible storm in the Irish Sea years before. She hoped Francis wasn’t going to meet his first wife again after another maritime disaster. Perhaps, she thought, they have a special section in heaven for people drowned
at sea. At least she presumed her husband would be going to heaven. Looking at him now, she saw that his eyes were closed and his lips moving. She wondered if he was praying or reciting some of his favourite poetry. Tennyson’s Ulysses, she remembered, had a pretty rough time on the seas of Greece, taking ten years after the Trojan Wars to reach the craggy island of Ithaca that he called home.

It took over three hours to cross the first ten miles of the English Channel. There was nobody on board now who had not been sick. Many were throwing up for the fifth or sixth time and had little left in their stomachs. The captain sent word that he thought the last stages of the journey might be easier than the first. There was a sort of embryonic hospital in the corner of the great cabin now, populated by people who had broken an arm or a leg sliding across the floor, unable to stop before they crashed into some immovable object.

Just when you could dimly see the French coast, a thin pencil line of land that wasn’t moving or sliding or falling over, it began to rain. It rained, as Lady Lucy said afterwards, as if it were the last downfall ever on earth, as if all the rivers and all the oceans of the world had to give up their water for it to be hurled down on to the English Channel. It lashed down in torrents so dense you could only see a couple of yards in front of your face. Any other shipping close by would have been a grave hazard. Powerscourt looked at his watch from time to time, realizing that all their train connections had, quite literally, been blown apart. He might not have been aware of the latest Pugh deadline, now in Markham Square, but he was sure the start of the trial could not be very far away. And here he was, miles away from London on a mission that ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have described as a wild goose chase.

Nearly eight hours after they set out from Dover their ship docked at Calais. The passengers, some still shaking from their ordeal, others wrapped round husbands or wives, small children held very tight in their parents’ arms, descended the
gang plank gingerly and wobbled about helplessly on the unmoving dry land. The captain was waiting to greet them at the bottom, rather like a vicar come to shake hands with his congregation after service on Sunday. He proffered his apologies, assuring everybody that he would never have set forth if he had known the conditions were going to be so harsh. The passengers thanked him for bringing them safely from England to France. Powerscourt found a train bound for Paris that was leaving in twenty minutes. The man in the ticket office said they would have to wait until the next day, a Sunday, to reach Beaune.

Tristram Bennett was back in the tiny cottage behind Brympton Hall. He was lying in bed, completely naked except for an enormous cigar. Emily was lying beside him, her hands folded behind her head, eyes closed, a dreamy look on her face, her shock of red hair bright against the pillows. Tristram had been thinking seriously about his own position in Colvilles and the dues he was owed by society in general. He had been hurt by various episodes in his youth when he felt people, particularly schoolmasters, had not paid him the respect due to a man of his abilities. There had been that refusal to take his going into the Church seriously. On another occasion they had laughed when his mother suggested putting him in for the Diplomatic Service. Only a month ago he had heard of a contemporary of his at school who had just been made a director of a leading bank in the City of London. And here he was, languishing away as junior manager for Colvilles in East Anglia, a post that had provided insufficient scope for his genius.

Emily was not quite asleep. She was dreaming of a great ball where she had gone with Tristram. Now he had left her to play cards and she was besieged by a host of beautiful young men, asking her to dance. The champagne was flowing freely. Through the great windows you could see the garden glowing in the lights strung between the trees and the young couples
strolling arm in arm along the paths. This was where she belonged, Emily thought, as she was led away to the dance floor by a young hussar with a slight scar on his cheek that made him seem even more romantic.

‘I tell you what I’m going to do,’ said Tristram, taking a long pull at his cigar. ‘The firm is now as full of holes as one of those Swiss cheeses. Randolph gone, the fool Cosmo locked up and not speaking for something he didn’t do, the old boy Nathaniel out of his depth and past it. Don’t you agree, Emily? You’ve watched what’s been going on.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Emily although it was hard to tell whether she was speaking to an imaginary lover in her reverie or the real one on her right-hand side.

‘They’ve never given me a chance,’ Tristram went on. ‘Just because I was unlucky enough to back a few wrong horses and put my money on the losing cards once or twice doesn’t mean I haven’t got a financial brain. Oh no. It just needs a chance. And I won’t get a chance to do that mouldering up here with the donkey rides on the beach and the boats messing about on those ridiculous Broads.

‘I’m going to sell my shares, all of them, and set myself up as an independent investor with the proceeds. How about that, Emily?’

Emily was still dancing with the hussar with the scar. ‘That sounds very nice, Tristram,’ she said.

Now it was Tristram’s turn to dream, staring out of the little window at the upper branches of the trees waving in the wind. He saw himself at a large desk in a large office in the City, signing cheques and bankers’ drafts, looking for new investment opportunities. His firm would expand, possibly, into casinos and luxury hotels and horse racing. Surely, he thought, you couldn’t lose if you owned the bookies or the roulette wheel. ‘Yes, Mr Bennett,’ ‘What good taste you have, Mr Bennett,’ ‘Thank you, Mr Bennett.’ He was completely incapable of seeing himself as others saw him. He had, after all, been the only boy in his school who had been totally on
the side of Malvolio through all his troubles at the court of Olivia in Shakespeare’s Illyria. They were both sick with self-love, the lovers, dreaming their way to running Colvilles or enjoying the most perfect romance.

A thin sunshine illuminated the last stage of the Powerscourts’ journey from Dijon to Beaune the following morning. They were following the route of the Côte de Nuits in the heart of Burgundy, one of the most famous wine routes in the world. Powerscourt remembered travelling the same path years before with his father when his three sisters had been left in London with their mother while the men went off to taste the wines of France. Louis the Fourteenth, his father told him, had been devoted to the Côte de Nuits, Madame de Pompadour had more expensive tastes with Romanée Conti, and Napoleon never set forth on campaign without a decent supply of Chambertin. Lady Lucy had fallen asleep, still weary from the ordeals of yesterday. Stretching away on the south-and east-facing slopes the vines reached out in ordered rows like soldiers on parade. The villages with the numinous names, Powerscourt remembered, Marsannay la Côte and Gevrey Chambertin, Chambolle Musigny and Nuits St Georges, Vougeot and Reulle Vergy, Vosne Romanée and Aloxe Corton all had a number of features in common. They all seemed to be virtually uninhabited, windows shuttered, gates to the store rooms locked and barred. Sometimes an occasional peasant could be seen tending the vines as they stretched across the hillside but nobody could describe the art of the
vigneron
as being arduous. And every now and then there was a sudden glimpse of hidden wealth, an imposing new house, a brand new car, a Citroën come to grace the hills and the sleepy villages of Burgundy.

The Alchemist’s brother Marcel had not heard of the terrible storm in the Channel. He had expected Powerscourt to arrive in Beaune the day before. One of his men, Jean Jacques, a
slim young man with only a couple of teeth left from street fighting, had been posted at the railway station for most of the day to vet the arrivals. The Alchemist had sent descriptions of Powerscourt and Lady Lucy over from London.

‘They’re not coming, boss,’ Jean Jacques had told Marcel at the end of the day. ‘They’re probably still in London. We could head back to Lyon.’ Jean Jacques thought he had a girl in Lyon.

‘Don’t hurt yourself trying to think, Jean Jacques,’ had been Marcel’s reply, ‘just get yourself back down the station first thing in the morning.’

Powerscourt overheard his neighbours on the train talking in a very excited fashion. Most French conversations, he would have admitted readily, took place in an excited fashion but this was something more. After a moment or two he looked at the date on his newspaper. He stared out at the vines of Comblanchien going past his window. He looked again at the prosperous pair conducting the conversation. They were both in their Sunday best, boots polished, dark waistcoats and great jackets to conceal their girth, hair washed and moustaches waxed. Powerscourt didn’t think they were going to church. Gradually it came back to him. He remembered the hotel-keeper telling his father and himself about it late one night at their hotel in Meursault when the other guests had gone to bed. He remembered even more clearly the very special bottle the hotel-keeper had fetched from his cellar to keep them company. Powerscourt told Lucy the story as soon as she woke up.

‘This is a special day in Beaune, Lucy, one of the most special days in the year. Hundreds of years ago, in the middle of the fourteen hundreds or somewhere around there, a Chancellor of Burgundy and his wife decided to endow a hospital for the sick here in Beaune. It was going to look after everybody, rich or poor. They’d just had a lot of plagues in these parts, I seem to remember. Nicolas Rolin, that was the man’s name. Anyway, he endowed his hospital not with
money but with vineyards. And not just any old vineyard but ones that sat between Aloxe Corton and Meursault, two of the finest wines in Burgundy, or anywhere in the world come to that. I think the hospital may have been left other parcels of land and vineyards over the years.’

‘What’s all that got to do with today, Francis? There’s nothing special going on in the wine world today, is there?’

‘There is here,’ said her husband triumphantly. ‘On the third Sunday in November the Hospices de Beaune – that’s the all-purpose name for the hospital and its various sections – have an auction where they sell off all their wines from that year. It’s considered a great honour to have acquired one of these great vintages and sometimes the wine goes for far more than anybody expected. But this is the important thing, Lucy. All the money raised at the Hospices de Beaune auction goes to pay for the hospital, the nurses, the doctors, everything is paid for out of the funds realized at the wine auction. And today is the third Sunday in November.’

‘What happens if they have a bad year, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘No idea,’ said her husband cheerfully, ‘I expect they keep some over from the good years.’

Beaune station was packed with visitors when they arrived. Small local trains seemed to have been bringing in more people from the surrounding villages. Lady Lucy noticed Jean Jacques staring with particular interest at her husband and resolved to make appointments with the dentist for all her family as soon as she reached home.

‘Would I be right in thinking, Francis, that you would like to go to this auction?’

Powerscourt laughed. ‘I would, definitely. It can’t take very long and we don’t have to stay till the end. It would be a bit like being in London on the day of a Coronation and not going to see the parades and the procession. This notice here says the auction is to start at eleven o’clock in the courtyard of the
Hôtel Dieu. I presume God’s hotel must be part of the hospice. We just have to follow the crowd.’

They made their way through streets devoted to the complexities of wine making, shops selling staves to hold the vines, bottle makers, barrel makers, label makers, exporters, blenders, even some shops selling the wine itself. Twice more Lady Lucy noticed the man with no teeth drawing very close to them. His eyes seemed to be locked for the moment on Powerscourt’s back.

The Hôtel Dieu had an innocuous-looking frontage. As they handed over what seemed to be an enormous sum of money to gain entrance to the courtyard they saw that they were in an extraordinary building complex. It was long and rectangular in shape. A balcony ran all the way round the first floor. The wings to the left and rear had spectacular roofs of coloured glazed tiles of yellow and blue and red broken up by double rows of dormer windows. Powerscourt thought they had been transported back hundreds of years. A King Henry or a King Edward might ride past on some magnificent horse. Beautiful ladies of the court in long dresses might peep out of the windows. At a high table on the balcony at the opposite end from the entrance there sat four middle-aged men. One was wearing the robes of the Mayor. Another, dressed in white, might have been the superintendent of the hospital. In the very centre, another official-looking figure sat as if he were the centre of attention, the gavel in his hand, his eyes scanning the potential customers on the balcony and in the courtyard below. The table was decorated with bottles of wine, red to the left and white to the right. Right at the front of the table a couple of Nebuchadnezzars holding twenty bottles each kept watch on the proceedings. Powerscourt rather wished that Chancellor Rolin and his wife could return in their fifteenth-century garments to preside over it all. Lady Lucy broke into his reverie and whispered close to his ear.