Death of a Wine Merchant (28 page)

‘I put it to you, Mrs Colville,’ Pugh’s eyes were locked on to the face of the woman in the witness box, ‘that at some time in the half-hour between the end of the service and the wedding breakfast, you carried out a quick reconnaissance of the first floor of Brympton Hall. I presume that you thought the state bedroom was a good distance away from the room where the food was to be served.’

Pugh held out his diagram of the first floor of Brympton Hall for the jury.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘here is the Long Gallery, looking out over the gardens. Here is the state bedroom round the corner, where the murder took place. Here and here,’ he pointed to the stairs to the garden at the end of the Long Gallery and the other stairs down from the state bedroom, were the entrances and exits open to those who did not want to come up by the Grand Staircase back here.

‘I put it to you, Mrs Colville, that you managed to speak to your husband to lure him up the staircase into the state bedroom. You pulled the pistol out of your bag. You shot him. You dropped the pistol on the ground and rushed out of the house down the staircase in the state bedroom, along the opposite side of the Hall to where the champagne had been served, and back into the house to join the rest of the guests by the main entrance near the main staircase. Aroused by the shot, Cosmo arrives to see what’s going on. He picks up the gun off the floor and sits down on the chair while he works out what to do. There he is found. There he is arrested while you are preparing to eat your wedding breakfast a couple of rooms away. There, Mrs Colville, that’s how it was, isn’t it?’

She was sobbing now. ‘No, that’s not how it was,’ Hermione Colville managed to say, ‘not the last bit anyway.’

‘Tell us about it,’ said Pugh.

‘Cosmo came in just as I was leaving,’ she said, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I still had the gun in my hand. Cosmo took it. “Give me that,” he said, “and get back down those stairs as fast as you can.”’

There were shouts of ‘No! No! No!’ from the bar of the court.

For the first time since the trial began Mr Justice Black raised his voice. ‘Mrs Colville! Mrs Colville! Please pay attention! You do not have to answer any further questions that might incriminate yourself in any future proceedings. Do you understand?’

Mrs Randolph Colville nodded sadly. Cosmo looked as though he was trying to climb out of the dock into the main body of the court. The warders manhandled him roughly back into his chair. A great sigh ran through the court. Mrs Randolph Colville had collapsed in a chair, watched over by two sturdy policemen. Lady Lucy was trembling. Detective Chief Inspector Weir was striding across the court for a conference with Sir Jasper. The newspapermen were elbowing their way towards the entrance as fast as they could. Some of them muttered to each other that they hadn’t seen such a sensational case this century. Pugh was sitting down, talking quietly with his junior, other barristers and solicitors whispering their congratulations. Powerscourt felt only pity for this poor woman, driven halfway out of her mind by her husband’s crimes.

Emily Colville nudged her mother gently in the ribs. ‘That’s what I told you on the night of the wedding, Mama,’ she whispered. Emily did not see fit to tell her mother that she had known for years about Randolph’s other wife in France. That, after all, was what Tristram had been blackmailing him about.

Georgina Nash leaned over to whisper back. ‘What did you tell me on the night of the wedding, Emily?’

‘Why, Mama, I told you I had seen Mrs Colville, Mrs Randolph Colville, running down the stairs out of the state bedroom after the shot. Where the murder was.’

Georgina Nash stared at her daughter. Of course. That was what she had tried to remember about that awful day. That was what she had intended to tell Lord Powerscourt only it had slipped out of her mind. And at some point between the wedding and today, she realized, she had forgotten that she had forgotten. She wondered how much work and trouble and expense might have been avoided if her memory hadn’t let her down. The whole affair began with Emily’s wedding. It was ending now with Emily telling her that she had seen the murderer leaving the scene of the crime. Should she tell Lord Powerscourt? There didn’t seem much point now. It was over.

Pugh leant back and whispered to Powerscourt and Lady Lucy: ‘I wonder if some sharp solicitor advised her on how to tell her story. You see, if she goes on with the line of being out of her mind with anger and grief, it could go well for her. Her counsel could argue that she didn’t know what she was doing, that she was suffering from a kind of temporary insanity. I don’t think it would get her off, but they wouldn’t hang her.’

Sir Jasper Bentinck was rising to his feet now. ‘My lord,’ he began, speaking loudly to rise above the noise in court, ‘I have just been having a conference with Detective Chief Inspector Weir of the Norfolk Constabulary. I have to inform your lordship that in the light of recent events the Crown no longer believes in the case against the defendant Mr Colville.’

The judge beckoned Pugh and Sir Jasper over to his position for a brief conversation. Then he banged his gavel very firmly on his desk.

‘Gentlemen of the jury, you have heard what Sir Jasper has just told us, that the Crown have lost faith in their case. That means they do not believe Mr Colville is guilty. But even in these circumstances, the law must have a verdict. Mr Cosmo Colville has been on trial here on the most serious charge a man may face in an English court, that of murder. The Crown no longer believe Mr Colville to be guilty. But he must be seen to be Not Guilty. That is why I am going to send you out now to consider your verdict. Only you can put Mr Colville back into society as an innocent man. I recommend most strongly that you give your verdict in favour of the defence, a verdict of Not Guilty.’

The judge nodded at the foreman, who led the jury out. He stared at the spectators and the remaining newspapermen, as if daring them to speak. Pugh was taking sips of his water, holding a whispered conversation with his junior who sent Powerscourt a note.

‘Can’t stop for drink afterwards. New case.’

‘Markham Square, six o’clock,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘We’ll contact everybody.’

Yet another note arrived for Powerscourt saying the judge would like a word in his rooms when the trial was over. The jury were returning now. Lady Lucy worked out that it had taken about four minutes to save a man from the gallows. The sombre litany rang out across Court Number Two of the Old Bailey as it had done for centuries.

‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ said the Clerk, ‘have you reached your verdict?’

‘We have.’

‘Do you find the defendant Cosmo Colville guilty or not guilty on the charge of murder?’

‘Not guilty.’

Mrs Randolph Colville fainted clean away. Perhaps she knew she would be next. She was led away by the two policemen when she came round. Cosmo Colville was weeping in the dock, the warders astonished that a man just released from the death penalty should take his freedom so hard. The judge spent some time collecting his things. Pugh and his junior shook hands with Powerscourt and Lady Lucy and promised to come to the party. Detective Chief Inspector Weir of the Norfolk Constabulary felt angry with himself. This was the first murder case in over thirty years where he had lost. Perhaps he should have listened more carefully to young Cooper and his ideas. Georgina and Willoughby Nash were pleased that their house would fade from the news. Two of the newspapers had used diagrams of Brympton Hall and the layout of the rooms to explain the case to their readers. Now they were returning to the old anonymity that should surround their home.

Powerscourt was wondering what the judge wanted to see him about. Had he committed some faux pas in the course of the case? Should he not have sent any of those notes to Charles Augustus Pugh? The Clerk of the Court ushered him into the presence of the majesty of the law.

‘Ah, Powerscourt,’ said Mr Justice Black, ‘how good of you to come and see me. Minor matter, actually, more a question
of family history really. Aren’t you a Cambridge man? Trinity Hall if I’m not mistaken? Cricket?’

Powerscourt admitted the charge was true.

‘My youngest brother was up at the same time as you,’ the judge went on, ‘I saw you both batting together in a match against St John’s. He made twenty-nine and you were undefeated on thirty-seven. I was watching that day, God knows how many years ago it was. I knew I’d seen you before.’

Powerscourt bowed slightly and headed for the door. ‘One last thing, Powerscourt. You’re not a bridge player by any chance, are you? Four Spades? Three No Trumps? That sort of thing? It’s my partner, you see. We’ve been together for years. Then he dropped down dead yesterday. Collapsed into the roast beef at the Garrick. Always good, mind you, the roast beef at the Garrick. Good way to go.’

Powerscourt admitted that he was not proficient at bridge. As he made his way towards the street he wondered what sort of tariff might await the judge’s partner. Three months for the wrong lead perhaps. One year’s hard labour for failing to count trumps. Three years in Pentonville for not reading your partner’s signals correctly.

By three o’clock that afternoon the Powerscourts were ensconced in the drawing room in Markham Square. Powerscourt was wondering about taking Lucy to Rome once things had calmed down.

‘Francis,’ she said, ‘can I ask you a question?’

‘Of course, my love, fire ahead.’

‘That note you sent to Mr Pugh, before he cross-examined the Colville women in court this morning, what did it say?’

‘I think I said we couldn’t be sure of winning with the suicide argument. Sir Jasper, after all, could have used the family disgrace as a motive for Cosmo to kill his brother. There is a different murderer, I said.
Cherchez la femme
.’

‘I see,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Did it come to you that late on, that Mrs Colville was the killer?’

‘I should have seen it much earlier,’ said Powerscourt, ‘in so many cases the husband or the wife is the murderer of the other.’

‘And the money, Francis? All that money that disappeared out of the Colville company accounts?’

‘Well, I think I know what happened to that,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘You remember the French wife over in Burgundy saying her husband had been buying a lot of land, vineyards, that sort of thing? I don’t know if he put it in his French name or in the company name but that’s where the money went.’

He paused for a moment. ‘There is one thing I’m not sure about, and that is the mysterious Frenchman, the one who spent the night in Cawston and took a cab over to Brympton Hall for the wedding the next morning. I’m sure he was real, those two in the hotel were trustworthy people. Perhaps he lost his nerve in a strange place where he didn’t understand a word anybody said to him. Perhaps he thought he would be exposed and ran away before he was caught.’

Johnny Fitzgerald was the first to arrive at the Powerscourt party that evening. He began complaining about his publishers as he broke into a bottle of Chambertin. ‘Honestly, Francis, you’d think they could do better, wouldn’t you. I gave them the bloody manuscript about Birds of the North three months ago. Then they lost a third of the damned thing. Didn’t lose any of the drawings, thank God. I’ve just reconstituted the text and the drawings, it took me five whole days and I’ve missed your trial. You seem to have routed the Philistines pretty successfully.’

Lady Lucy was welcoming Pugh and his young junior Napier, closely followed by Nathaniel Colville, patriarch of the clan, with a bottle in his hand.

‘I’ve been trying to put some sense into young Cosmo,’ Nathaniel said to Lady Lucy. ‘Ridiculous business, blubbing in court like a bloody woman. At least he’s going to show up for the party, must make a change from being cooped up down in Pentonville.’

‘Pugh!’ said Powerscourt, and he shook the lawyer firmly by the hand. ‘Congratulations! You pulled it off, by God!’

‘I say it again, my friend,’ Pugh was smiling an enormous smile, ‘I merely fired the bullets. But you provided them.’

Pugh was virtually engulfed by guests offering him their congratulations. Lady Lucy thought it was slightly unfair.

‘Could I ask you a question, Lord Powerscourt?’ Richard Napier, Pugh’s junior, had all the earnestness of the young. ‘Don’t you think it would have been better all round if the verdict had been suicide? Cosmo is set free. Mrs Hermione Colville returns to her unhappy existence, lubricated with the Chablis by the Thames. Nobody loses.’

‘Are you saying, Richard,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that you believe we have ended up with the wrong verdict?’

‘Not at all. It would just have been better all round if the suicide verdict had won out. That way Mrs Colville might not be hanged or go to prison. No more trials either. Surely it is better for the living to remain living and what people call justice to be pushed to one side?’

‘I’m for justice myself,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Come, young man, you’d better have a glass of Chambertin.’

The room filled up. Powerscourt wondered if the multitude of Colvilles reminded Lucy of one of her own family’s tribal gatherings. He suspected the Colvilles might be even more numerous. Sir Pericles Freme had brought a white piece of paper which he entrusted to Rhys, the Powerscourt butler. Powerscourt could catch snatches of conversation between Cosmo, his uncle, Freme and Richard Napier for the younger generation.

‘The point is, Cosmo,’ said Nathaniel, ‘it’s completely wrong to think that the firm of Colville will be deserted by its clients. Freme and I will take care of that.’

‘Think of it as an opportunity,’ Freme put in. ‘You know what they say, all publicity is good publicity. You have been all over the newspapers for two or three days, Cosmo. Think how much it would cost to buy all that.’

‘This is not how it was meant to be,’ said Cosmo. ‘When I picked up that gun, I thought I could deflect all the attention on to myself. I could take the blame. We could keep all the stuff about the bigamy out of the papers. I didn’t mind being hanged as long as the good name of Colville was preserved and nobody knew about the French Mrs Colville. I couldn’t stand the thought of Hermione going on trial and what might follow. She’s had enough to put up with over the years, God knows. I reckoned without that man Powerscourt, mind you. I don’t know whether to thank him or curse him, even now.’