David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘Well, the wine business extends all over Europe. There are bound to have been some foreigners there on the Colville side.’

‘I told Milly I’d pass it on, that’s all, Francis. I don’t suppose there’s anything in it.’

Powerscourt did not reply. But as the hours went by that evening he found himself thinking about it more and more. This was the first indication so far that an alien body, a person not a Colville and not a Nash, had been at the scene and could have been the murderer. He wondered if the young Inspector Colville had discovered the same thing, if somewhere on his seating plans there was a guest marked as X or Y because nobody knew their name. Was that why the detective had decided that Cosmo Colville was not the killer?

Powerscourt gasped the following morning as he read the Obituary columns of The Times . Lady Lucy looked at him sharply. This wasn’t normal behaviour for her Francis. ‘Is there anything wrong, my love? Something in the paper that’s upset you?’

Powerscourt held up his hand. ‘Just give me a minute, Lucy, till I’ve finished this.’ When he had finished reading the obituary he folded the newspaper carefully and put it at the back of the table.

‘There’s been another death, Lucy, another Colville gone to meet his maker.’

‘How sad, that’s two in less than a month. Who is it this time?’

‘It’s Walter, the old boy, grandfather of the groom at the wedding, father of Randolph, one of the patriarchs of the Colville wine business.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything suspicious, do you, Francis?’

‘God knows. They do say he was terribly cut up about the wedding and all that followed. A fellow told me the other day he’d aged ten years since the murder.’

‘Poor old man,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘If Randolph hadn’t been killed his father would still be alive today. The Brympton Hall murderer has claimed another victim.’

The walls of Pentonville seemed virtually impregnable to Powerscourt as he made his way there that afternoon for a meeting with Cosmo Colville. Built in the middle of the last century, the prison had not been notorious until it took over from Newgate the role of Hangman’s Prison in 1902. And when they knocked Newgate down, Powerscourt remembered, they replaced it with the Old Bailey, thus ensuring that the courtrooms and the wigs of the lawyers replaced the noose and the drop of the gallows. Indeed the very gallows that had despatched the condemned at Newgate were dismantled and recreated plank by awful plank at Pentonville. As Powerscourt waited in a little office looking out over the exercise yard he wondered if the prisoners still had to do duty all day on the tread wheel, turning a great wheel with their feet time after time after time for no purpose whatsoever. He remembered that some unlucky prisoners had to turn the wheel two thousand times before they were allowed to eat their breakfast. Sadistic warders were known to enforce a daily regimen of twenty thousand turns on their victims.

A middle-aged guard brought Cosmo Colville into the room and sat him down opposite Powerscourt at a mean prison table with mean prison chairs. The guard retreated to stand just outside the door. Prison clothes did little for Cosmo. It was hard to imagine that this prisoner who now looked like all the other prisoners had in earlier times eaten at London’s most fashionable restaurants and danced at the grandest hotels on Park Lane and Piccadilly. He made no acknowledgement of Powerscourt’s presence, not a look, not a nod, not a smile. It was as if he had completed the long retreat into his own head. Cosmo Colville had fair hair and pale brown eyes and a wide forehead. His expression, all through the interview, was one of resolute obstinacy. Powerscourt had talked to one of Colville’s best friends the day before the interview. ‘I was very gentle with him,’ the friend had said. ‘His wife and his children and his other friends are all being gentle with him. Maybe it’s time somebody took a hard line with Cosmo, reminded him of what may happen. What probably will happen if he doesn’t start talking.’

‘Thank you so much for seeing me,’ Powerscourt began, ignoring the fact that Colville had little choice about being brought before him. ‘I thought I would talk to you about what happens here, if you don’t want to talk.’

There was no movement of any kind from Cosmo. ‘The first man to be hanged here was killed in October six years ago,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘John Macdonald he was, a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman. He was a costermonger and petty thief, this Macdonald. He and his partner in crime had a falling-out over the proceeds of a robbery. His victim had his head almost cut off from his body by Macdonald’s knife. Then the trapdoor opened here early one morning and John Macdonald entered the history books as the first man to be hanged in Pentonville. Do you want to end up like that, Mr Colville? If you don’t speak soon, you will enter the same history books as the man who swung because he wouldn’t talk. Is that what you want?’

Cosmo Colville didn’t even look at him. He spoke not a word.

‘Then there was a man called Henry Williams,’ Powerscourt continued his catalogue of murder and retribution. ‘He thought his wife had been unfaithful to him while he was away fighting with his regiment in the Boer War. When he came back he took their little daughter up to London with him. That evening he put her in bed with her favourite doll beside her. When she was asleep he cut her throat and wrapped her little body in the Union flag. To the end he protested that he had done it because he loved her and could not bear his daughter living with her mother and a man who was not her father. Henry Pierrepoint, the executioner, said Williams was the bravest man he ever hanged. But courage didn’t do him any good, did it, Mr Colville? Williams was still left dancing on the air. So will you be if you don’t say something soon. I don’t think that bit lasts very long, the legs flailing about, the neck about to break, everything about to go dark, perhaps a scream or two. What do you say, Mr Colville?’

The only sound in the little room was the distant clanging of some prison bars. The prisoner kept his counsel.

‘Then there was a man called Charles Stowe. He became infatuated with a barmaid. When the girl refused to have anything to do with him he went to the Lord Nelson public house where she worked late one night and grabbed her. Then he stabbed her a number of times. The interesting thing about Stowe is that we know how the hangmen did it. They were brothers called Billington from Lancashire, these hangmen. They always took details of the height and the weight of the prisoners in the condemned cell and used them to work out how big the drop should be. Stowe was five foot four and eleven stone so they gave him a drop of seven feet two inches. I suspect they’d left themselves quite a margin of error, Mr Colville, I expect six feet six would have been more than enough but they weren’t taking any chances. If you don’t speak before your trial I expect the hangman will be along to have you weighed and measured in your turn. Let me see, I’d say you’re about five feet ten and around twelve stone or so. Seven feet drop be all right for you?’

Silence reigned in the little room. Powerscourt could hear the guard hopping from foot to foot outside the door. He wondered how much longer he had left.

‘Some of those hanged in Pentonville have killed more than one person,’ Powerscourt tried once more. ‘Let’s take chemist’s assistant Arthur Devereux. He and his wife Beatrice had a little boy and not long after that they had twins. Money was very tight. He wasn’t paid very much, our Arthur, so he decided on drastic measures. He bought a large tin trunk and a bottle of chloroform and morphine, which he persuaded Beatrice to give to the twins and then take herself. He told her it was cough medicine. When they were dead he put them in the trunk and sealed the lid with glue to keep it airtight. He had the trunk sent off to a warehouse in Harrow and moved away with his son to a new address. But he’d reckoned without the mother-in-law. She didn’t believe his story that they’d all gone on holiday. She learnt that a removal company van from Harrow had called at the house. She set off for Harrow where she found the warehouse and the trunk and the three bodies. Devereux was traced to Coventry and tried to persuade the jury at his trial that Beatrice had killed the twins and then committed suicide. He had found them all and panicked, sending them all to the warehouse. He was not believed. His hangman, Henry Pierrepoint, recorded that Devereux stood five feet eleven and weighed eleven stone four. Pierrepoint gave him a drop of six feet six inches.’