Death of a Wine Merchant (4 page)

Sir Pericles Freme lived in a small but perfect Georgian house not far from the Powerscourts in Chelsea. An immaculately dressed footman showed Powerscourt into a drawing room on the first floor. Sir Pericles still had the bearing of a man who had spent many years in the military. He was in his late fifties with neatly combed white hair and a small white moustache. He read the note from George Berry and ushered Powerscourt into a chair.

‘Can’t say I envy you this job, Powerscourt. Never easy getting a man off a murder charge, still harder if the fellow won’t speak at all. You want to know about the Colville wine business, as I understand it from Berry, you want to know if there was anything going on there that could have led to his death. Am I right?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Powerscourt.

‘How much do you know about wine? Forgive me for asking such an elementary question but it has a bearing on what my response is going to be.’

‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I buy, on the whole, what the good people at Berry Bros. tell me to buy. And then I drink it. Or rather my close friend Johnny Fitzgerald drinks it. I’ve always thought he consumes more of my wine than I do myself.’

‘I think most people have friends like that,’ said Freme, ‘but you wouldn’t call yourself an expert?’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Powerscourt.

‘I see.’ Sir Pericles paused for a moment, flicking a speck of dust from his trousers. ‘It’s a very strange thing, wine. I often think the business is like diamonds, it has such a fascination for some people. It’s totally irrational. I know some of my distinguished colleagues in the trade who will tell you how elated they become at the prospect of tasting some of those very superior Bordeaux or burgundies. They’re in a state of high excitement for days or even weeks beforehand. And when they come back, if they’ve been lucky, they will tell you about the taste of the stuff with a faraway look in their eyes as if they’ve been to paradise. But there are a number of problems with the trade, always have been.

‘The first is that the wine isn’t the same from year to year. It never is. Some years the weather is good, some years the weather is bad. If you’re growing Château Powerscourt it just isn’t going to taste the same in 1908 as it did in 1906. So what do you do? Some people try to mix the bad years up with the good ones, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t
always work. At the top end of the market the merchants will tell their favoured clients not to buy any of the 1906 at all, to wait for another good year and then buy more than you need for a single year. The problem is more acute at the bottom end of the market. Colvilles and their rivals aren’t going to tell their customers not to buy any of their own-label claret in 1911 because it’s been a bad year. Somehow they have to try to make it taste the same, or nearly the same as in a good year. The people who can tell them how to do that are the blenders, and good blenders earn themselves enormous sums of money. Some of them indeed retire early.’

‘Who decides what is good and what is not so good?’ said Powerscourt.

‘Very good question that,’ replied Sir Pericles. ‘There’s a sort of Stock Exchange of views at work. The word goes out from the merchants and
négociants
and the shippers that such and such is a good year. It’s a bit like the Stock Exchange deciding that such and such a share is a good investment and everybody piles in. It’s not like a weighing machine where you can say this crate is exactly one ton and a quarter and everybody will agree. It’s more diffuse than that.’

‘Do the experts always agree with each other?’

‘Usually they do. Somebody may take a contrary view but that’s quite rare.’

‘And how easy is it to cheat, to forge wines in the same way people forge banknotes or pictures?’

‘It’s easier than you might think. It’s difficult at the very top end of the scale but not impossible. But in the middle range it’s quite tempting. Suppose you have some land near Montrachet or Chablis. The ground is the same, the grapes are the same, the weather is the same as it is for the great vineyards in those parts. What is to stop you putting Montrachet or Chablis labels on your produce and selling it for two or three times the price you would get for it with the correct label? Labels are changed all the time and the ignorance of the public is the biggest reason the crooks get away with it.
Let’s take champagne. Vast amounts of it are consumed at weddings and parties where most of the customers haven’t tasted champagne since the last wedding they went to. How are they to know if it is the real thing or not? The best sparkling Saumur used to get passed off as champagne until some bright fellow – it might even have been a Colville, now I come to think of it – realized that you could sell the Saumur for much less than the champagne and still make a tidy profit because you could sell much more of it.’

‘How easy is it to forge the wine altogether, so that it’s never been near the Douro Valley or the Côte d’Or?’

‘Powerscourt,’ said Freme sadly, ‘I could take you to Sète on the south coast of France or Hamburg or, I suspect, to places in London where you can walk in and order thousands of bottles of selected wines for collection within forty-eight hours. Sète is particularly famous for forgery because it’s so close to Algeria and all that red they produce. This is aimed at what you might call the bottom end of the market, Colvilles’ house claret if you like. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but that’s the end where forgery becomes very tempting.’

‘Some years ago,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I carried out an investigation into a death that involved forged paintings. Much of that revolved round the question of attribution, whose voice would be believed when he said that the Titian was a Titian or was not a Titian. Is it the same with the wine business?’

‘In a sense it is. It’s a sort of con trick in a way. At the top end when the posh merchants on the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux say this Latour is very good, everybody believes it. At the bottom end people believe they are drinking claret when the label says it is Colvilles’ own. Let me read you something. I’ve been collecting these recipes for years now.’

Sir Pericles Freme rummaged around in his desk and produced a large sheet of paper. He fixed a pair of pince-nez on his face and began:

‘“An admirable wine, very like claret, and even surpassing claret in strength, may be prepared by the following process. Take any quantity of Malaga raisins, chop them very small, put to every pound of them a quart of water, and let them stand in an open vessel having a cloth thrown over it for a week or nine days, stirring them well daily. Then, drawing off as much of the liquid as will run, and straining out the rest from the raisins by pressure, turn up the whole in a seasoned barrel; and, to every gallon of the liquid, add a pint of the cold juice of ripe elder berries, which had previously been boiled or scummed. Let it stand, closely stopped, about six weeks; then draw it off, as far as is tolerably fine, into another vessel; add half a pound of moist sugar to every gallon of liqueur; and when it gets perfectly fine, draw it into bottles.” Less than a century old, that recipe, Powerscourt. Maybe we should try to make it some day.’

‘Doubtless somebody already has,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Sir Pericles, could I ask you a favour? Could I ask you to cast your eye or perhaps your palate over the Colville products and let me know if any of them are suspect?’

‘With pleasure,’ replied Freme. ‘I presume time is not on your side, Powerscourt. How soon would you like to come back for my report?’

‘Could I say in three days? All that tasting must be a time-consuming business. And could I beg you one further favour on my return?’

‘Of course,’ said Freme.

‘Could we have another of your splendid recipes on my return visit?’

Sir Pericles laughed. ‘Oh, yes, we can. I’ve got plenty more of those.’

Powerscourt found Lady Lucy in a very troubled state when he returned home from Freme and his recipes. Even the arrival of Johnny Fitzgerald did not appear to be enough to calm her spirits. Fitzgerald was Powerscourt’s oldest friend and companion in arms. They had served together in the Army in India and Johnny had worked on almost all of Powerscourt’s investigations since. Johnny was just under six feet tall with bright blue eyes that often danced with mischief or merriment.

‘Oh, Francis, it’s all too terrible,’ Lady Lucy began, ‘that poor family. And those poor children. I don’t know what we’re going to do!’

‘Hold on a moment, my love,’ said her husband, ‘take it slowly. Which family? Whose children? What might we have to do?’ He smiled a smile of welcome at his friend.

Lady Lucy felt that she might fall victim to one of those male conspiracies where the men look knowingly at each other and you can hear them say ‘Women!’ without actually opening their lips.

‘Sorry,’ she said, and stared firmly at the painting of one of her ancestors on the wall above the fireplace for a moment. ‘You remember I said I had a cousin who was married into some part of the Colvilles? And that she had a rather disagreeable husband called Timothy Barrington White?’

‘I do recall that. I remember now. I’ve been hearing horror
stories about this Barrington White every now and again for most of our married life.’

‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘he’s really done it this time. You know how he fell in and out of jobs all the time. Eventually my cousin Millicent, Milly we always call her, persuaded one of the Colvilles to give him a job in the wine business. I think he had to look after that enormous gin distillery they have near Hammersmith. I don’t know what exactly went on but something really bad must have happened. You see, the Colvilles fired him.’

‘I can’t think it’s a very strenuous job, looking after a gin distillery these days,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald with a knowing air. ‘You put the stuff in, mix it all about, wait a bit and put it into those funny bottles.’

Lady Lucy was not sure that it was as easy as all that. ‘What’s more, there was a terrible row with Randolph and Cosmo Colville when they fired him.’

‘I always thought they looked after their people,’ said Powerscourt, ‘those Colvilles and the other wine merchants. Loyalty a great premium, take care of the staff,
noblesse oblige
, all that sort of thing.’

‘The point is this,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the conversation was beginning to drift away from her, ‘there was this tremendous row. The Colvilles told Terrible Timothy that he’d never work in the wine trade in England ever again. They even refused to pay his last month’s wages. And they’ve got no money, no money of their own, that family. I mean, Milly did have some money, but I think Timothy got through that fairly quickly at the start of their marriage. And they’ve got three children under five. What’s poor Milly going to do? I must go and see her, Francis, they only live in West Kensington, it won’t take long to get there.’

As Lady Lucy hurried off to fetch her coat and hat Johnny Fitzgerald opened one of the Powerscourt cupboards and pulled out a bottle of Fleurie. ‘I was talking to a man this very day and he asked me about my habits with wine, Johnny.

I said that I bought it and my best friend drank it. Things don’t seem to have changed.’

Johnny settled himself into the deepest armchair and suggested that Powerscourt fill him in on the details of the case. Two glasses later he knew as much as his friend.

‘This silence business, Francis,’ he said, ‘do you think there’s a woman behind it? Or maybe it’s a scandal. If there was some catastrophe about to fall on the house of Colville maybe the only way to put a stop to it is to say nothing at all. If you keep it up long enough, of course, there won’t be any question of you speaking out because you won’t be here. Maybe you could take the scandal with you to the grave and keep it there.’

‘I plan to go up to Norfolk to see the place where it all happened, Johnny. Maybe I’ll get a better sense of it all up there.’

‘And what would you like me to do, Francis? The latest bird book can wait a while. I’ve finished the text and it’s with the publishers now.’ In recent years Johnny had found a profitable and enjoyable occupation as an author and expert on the birds of England and Europe. He had even held conversations recently with his publishers about the possibility of the Birds of India.

Powerscourt grinned at his friend. ‘Do you remember that earlier case we had years ago about the forgers and the art world? On that occasion you managed to infiltrate what you might call the underworld of the art business, the porters, the drivers, the men who carry the stuff round at auctions. I think you should do the same with the Colvilles and the wine business. Make friends with these fellows. See what they have to say about their employers. If there are any scandals at Colvilles, these people will know more about it than the people in the boardroom.’

‘It will be a pleasure, Francis. Mind you, I hope these fellows don’t have the head for drink some of those art people did. Prolonged exposure to them and their drinking haunts could be very bad for the health. I’ll get on to it straight away.’

While he waited for Lady Lucy to return later that evening, Powerscourt wondered if reticence had stopped her drawing the obvious conclusion to the travails of Milly Barrington White. For while the husband’s loss of job and loss of income was very serious, there was one other point that he felt sure Lucy must have seen. Timothy Barrington White, present at the wedding, had a very real motive for wanting to kill Randolph Colville. The undesirable husband was more than a wedding guest, he was also a murder suspect.

Shortly before lunch the next day Georgina Nash was waiting for Powerscourt in the church of St Peter’s, Brympton. She was tall, with light brown hair rather than the flaming red of her daughter and pale blue eyes that looked as if they had been weeping a lot.

‘Mrs Nash,’ said Powerscourt, ‘how very kind of you to meet me here and guide me round where it all happened. It must be very painful for you.’

She just managed a smile. ‘If there’s anything we can do to help, Lord Powerscourt, we’re more than willing. Now, let me show you the church.’

She led the way into the empty building. The door creaked slightly on its hinges. The ropes of the bell ringers were tethered neatly at one end. All the box pews but one had their doors carefully closed. There were fresh flowers around the altar. On Powerscourt’s left as they advanced up the nave was a stone effigy covered with some dark substance. Georgina Nash noticed Powerscourt’s look.

‘Willoughby and the vicar think it’s bats up above doing the damage,’ she said, ‘but we sent one of the stable boys up before the wedding and he couldn’t see any bats at all. Maybe they’ve left by this time of year. Anyway, Lord Powerscourt,’ she stopped at the steps before the altar, ‘it’s a perfectly ordinary church. At this point it was still a perfectly ordinary wedding. The groom’s side were on the right, we were on the
left. The organist behaved himself up there in his organ most of the time, though he did slip in one or two awful modern pieces before Emily arrived. She was a little late, Emily, but she looked so beautiful. I’m not going to desecrate the church by saying what I think about our evangelical vicar, I’ll leave you to work it out on your own. The service took about half an hour.’

‘Did you notice anything unusual, any strange people you’d never seen before, that sort of thing?’

Georgina Nash was leading them out of the church now and towards the great house. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hadn’t seen most of those Colvilles before, if that’s what you mean. There wasn’t anybody looking out of place or anything. They were all properly dressed and so on. Mind you, Lord Powerscourt, if you were a murderer, now I come to think about it, a wedding would be a good place to choose. One half of the people would assume you belonged to the other side, and the other half would think the opposite. A Nash would think you must be a Colville and a Colville would think you must be a Nash.’

They were past the yew trees now, advancing towards the great Jacobean façade. Powerscourt found himself counting the tall pepper pot chimneys and stopped when he reached fifteen.

‘There was the usual jostling around just outside the church,’ Georgina Nash went on, ‘lots of kisses and embraces and congratulations.’ She stopped suddenly and Powerscourt saw the tears in her eyes. Georgina Nash took two very deep breaths and continued. ‘It must have taken about ten or fifteen minutes for everybody to make their way to the garden at the back of the house. You know how it is at weddings, Lord Powerscourt, people are always stopping to chat to their friends and generally milling about.’

By this time she had ushered them both into the garden with the broken fountain that had played its part in the wedding days before.

‘Did you have a time planned for the guests to stay out here
chatting, an hour perhaps, something like that?’ Powerscourt was counting yet more chimneys.

‘Oh yes,’ said Georgina Nash, bending down to pick up a pigeon’s wing from the immaculate grass. ‘Really, why the gardeners can’t be bothered to bend down and pick up this rubbish I don’t know. It was the same with the fountain. Three times before Emily’s big day I asked them to mend it. They never did. It’s too bad. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve diverted myself. Where was I? Ah yes, timetable, that’s what we were talking about. Willoughby and I reckoned half an hour should be enough for a couple of glasses of champagne and for people to loosen up a little. It seemed to be about right.’

‘Did you have a seating plan for the Long Gallery?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘How very curious that you too should ask about seating plans, Lord Powerscourt. That young policeman, Inspector Cooper I think he was called, he looked about fifteen years old, he was obsessed with seating plans. Anyway, we did have one. We had a couple of discreet blackboards set up out here with the plans pinned to them and more on the way to the Gallery itself.’

Powerscourt resolved to leave the question of the fifteen-year-old Detective Inspector till later. He felt Georgina Nash could be sidetracked very easily from the question in hand.

She was leading them back to the gravel drive in front of the house and the main entrance. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Nash, before we go into the house, was there anything unusual going on while the guests were drinking their champagne on the lawn? Any strangers moving about, that sort of thing?’

Georgina Nash stopped in front of a great timber door that opened into the interior of Brympton Hall. ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘Up till this point and a little longer, there was absolutely nothing unusual about Emily’s wedding. Nothing. The horrors came later.’

She led them into the Great Hall, once the heart of the house, now dominated by an enormous double staircase leading to
the first floor. A series of eighteenth-century Norfolk gentlemen, famed perhaps in their own county rather more than in the country at large, lined the walls. Carved wooden figures adorned the stairs, a soldier with musket and powder flasks, a gentleman in hose, a bearded soldier with slashed breeches and a two-handed sword, a kilted Highlander and a Cossack.

‘It’s absolutely splendid,’ said Powerscourt, inspecting one of the Norfolk grandees in a scarlet coat.

‘I suppose it is,’ said Georgina Nash. ‘If you actually live here, of course, you get used to it and you begin to wonder after a while how so much dust manages to settle on and around this staircase.

‘Now then, back to business, Lord Powerscourt. We had two more seating plans on display on either side of the stairs so people could have a check before they reached the Long Gallery.’

She led the way up to the first floor. ‘It’s all quite simple from here on,’ she said. ‘Once they were up here we took them through this little spot we call the anteroom and into the Long Gallery itself.’ Powerscourt was enchanted by the room, over a hundred and fifty feet long, great windows looking out over the grass, a rich and elaborate ceiling. It must, he thought, be one of the finest Long Galleries in the kingdom.

‘Mrs Nash,’ he said, ‘I have had an account from the lawyers of what happened here that day. All I would ask is that you tell me everything you can remember about the time immediately before and immediately after the murder.’

‘And then I could go? I could meet you down in the gardens perhaps? That would be very kind, Lord Powerscourt.’ She paused and stared down the room. ‘All the tables were laid out up here, of course. They looked lovely. Every place had a name on the table in front of it. I was trying to mix them up, the Colvilles and the Nashes and their friends.’ She stopped again and fiddled with her hair. ‘I remember feeling irritated that the people weren’t moving away from this entrance here and up to the far end of the Long Gallery. There was a great
crush in this area until one of the footmen began ushering people up the room. I think the sun went in briefly. I remember thinking how improbably blonde Augusta Nash’s hair was and how improbably handsome her brother Percy was. He’d just become a lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment and he was wearing his scarlet jacket and black trousers. Who am I, Lord Powerscourt,’ Georgina Nash managed a bright smile, ‘to fall for a soldier at my age! After that, it all becomes rather a blur, I’m afraid. Willoughby telling me what had happened, the terrible silence while people played with their food. They felt, I think, that it would be rude to eat it, in those circumstances, and that it would be rude not to eat it. So, most of them fiddled about with this rather splendid fare. Nobody wanted to talk much, they were all too shocked, and every now and then somebody would launch a conversational boat out on to the pond, as it were, only for it to be engulfed in the surrounding quiet. Then the policemen came and we all had to wait until they had questioned everybody before we could leave. Willoughby is saying he’ll never set foot in the Long Gallery again. He’s even talking of selling the Hall.’

Powerscourt felt that Georgina Nash would be better away from this place with its awful memories. ‘You have been most kind, Mrs Nash, and most helpful. If you’d like to take a turn about the garden I’ll join you very shortly. By the way, you wouldn’t by any chance have one of those seating plans left, would you? It might be helpful.’