David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Powerscourt explained about the gun in Cosmo’s hand, the strongest piece of evidence against him. ‘If, Commissioner, and it is a very big if, I grant you, fingerprint evidence could show that another hand had held the gun, that might help his case, might it not? And am I right in thinking that the expertise of fingerprinting in such cases has not yet reached Norfolk?’

‘You are, and they have made no request for our assistance in this case.’

‘Would it be possible for the defence to request that the gun should be sent for examination here by one of your officers?’

‘Theoretically, it would be,’ said the Commissioner. ‘But each police force in this country is master in its own house. The Norfolk police could refuse. The prosecuting barrister would almost certainly raise a host of objections – how are the jury to know that the gun has not been tampered with, so the evidence is corrupt and should be thrown out and so on and so forth. Do you happen to know who the lead barrister for the Crown is?’

‘I believe it is Sir Jasper Bentinck, Commissioner.’

‘Sir Jasper?’ Sir Edward Henry permitted himself a slight laugh. ‘Have no doubt of it, I tell you, Lord Powerscourt, the objections would stretch out like a string of milestones all the way from the Old Bailey to Wells next the Sea.’

‘What would happen if the defence were to consult an expert in fingerprinting who is not attached to any police force? An independent man?’ Powerscourt had finally arrived at the question that had brought him here.

‘There aren’t many of those around, I’m afraid. Some of our men are lured off to America where the pay is better.’

‘A retired officer? One who had to leave the force for ill health or personal reasons?’

The Commissioner stroked his moustache for some time. ‘Apologies, Lord Powerscourt, I believe we could help you there. But I have something of a moral dilemma. If I give you a few names, am I undermining the cause of my colleagues up there in East Anglia? Am I giving comfort and succour to the enemy?’

‘The life of an innocent man may be at stake here, Commissioner.’

‘I know, I know, Lord Powerscourt. That weighs very heavily with me. And you yourself have always been a great friend to our force. Very well. I think we have two retired fingerprint men on the books. We did have a third but I went to his funeral only last month. I shall send the relevant addresses round to your house in a couple of hours. It’ll take some time to dig them out. But I would give you a word of warning about all this.’

‘Please do. I am most grateful for your assistance. It is beyond the call of duty.’

‘On the face of it,’ Sir Edward rose from his desk and went to his window, looking out over a grey sky and a sluggish Thames, the seagulls swirling round the shore, ‘nothing could be simpler. You find the fingerprint expert. He examines the gun. He finds that there are other fingerprints on it. Whose are those? Surely, says the defence, those are the fingerprints of the killer. The Pentonville Colville merely happened to pick the gun up. I do not know if that would carry as much weight with the jury as the physical presence of your man sitting opposite his dead brother. And the legal complications and obfuscations and arguments would be tiresome. Sir Jasper might well try to wrap the jury up in so much legal undergrowth, case of Rex versus Butterworth 1904, Rex versus Turner 1906, and so on, that they are left with only one fact they can cling on to, one safe port in the legal storm raging round their heads in the Old Bailey.’

‘And that fact would be?’ Powerscourt asked very quietly.

‘That Cosmo Colville was found in a chair, opposite his dead brother, with a gun in his hand.’

The Alchemist was happy in his work that day. The previous evening he had been to the opera and gloried in The Magic Flute . Now he was working on the creation of a series of pre-phylloxera wines for a grand dinner to be held in a couple of weeks at a top London hotel. The Alchemist often wondered where his profession – for he did not regard himself as a mere artisan – would have been without the disease that had wiped out so many of France’s finest vineyards towards the end of the previous century. So many great wines were lost. But some survived, hidden away in obscure abbeys or interred in the cellars of the great chateaux. These fetched high prices. Engaged in this trade in France, working, as the Alchemist used to say to himself, to provide the market with what it so desperately wanted, had proved his undoing. The inspectors had caught him red-handed in a vast cellar under the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux. His superiors denied all knowledge of his activities. He was left as the centre and the chief victim of the scandal. He fled France in a fishing boat and took refuge in the vast obscurity of London’s docks where strangers were commonplace and few questions were asked about a man’s past. Very slowly and very carefully the Alchemist built up his business. He took great pains about secrecy. He refused to meet any clients or customers face to face. Orders had to be delivered by letter. Payment always had to be in cash. The Alchemist didn’t even trust the banks.

He began the business of blending his new ancient vintages. The Alchemist never claimed to be offering the truly great vintages from before the phylloxera plague. Somebody, after all, might have actually tasted them. He picked respectable, steady, unremarkable chateaux that his customers would never have heard of, and so would have no idea of whether the wine they were drinking was genuine or not. They had nothing to compare it with, and without comparisons, as the Alchemist knew only too well, the wisdom of the wine trade disappears as it has nothing to hold on to.

His was a solitary life, alternating between his workplace, his room in an anonymous part of north London and a chop house where he would eat his solitary supper. But he was not unhappy. He had no idea how long he might have been locked up in France, or how huge a fine might have been imposed on him. Loneliness for him was a price worth paying for freedom. He liked women, the Alchemist, but he was terrified of marrying one of them. A wife would always be eager to know the details of his activities, how well he was doing. Such knowledge could only bring him into trouble. He had great doubts about the ability of women to keep their mouths shut. When he remembered his two sisters and his mother, he always recalled what happened when you told one of them something that was meant to be a secret. The other two always knew within the hour. So the Alchemist restricted his activities with the opposite sex to one special prostitute in Soho who never asked him any questions but happily took his money.

By now the Alchemist had two reds ready that he thought might form part of his offerings for the dinner. Leave them to settle for a couple of days and then he would decide. He thought suddenly of the wide open and desolate spaces in the Auvergne, where civilization seemed alien, remote, places like the Aubrac with its strange cattle and vast skies and hardly any people. He had a great love of wide, wild open spaces, and was already planning a great holiday in a few years’ time when he could visit the deserts of the Middle East and the mountains of America. Maybe he could ride right across the United States in a train and stop off on the way to make pilgrimages to the American wildernesses. He placed his two bottles carefully on a shelf and began humming another aria from The Magic Flute .

Nathaniel Colville looked like a patriarch. He was tall and well built with a slim white moustache and a great shock of white hair. He looked about seventy years old but his bearing was still erect, his eye steady. Powerscourt remembered Sir Pericles Freme and his less flamboyant white locks and thought he was surrounded by white-headed men. Nathaniel lived close to his brother in a beautiful house right on the river in a village called Moulsford. A gardener was working among the roses that led down to the Thames. A couple of rowing boats were drifting past towards Pangbourne. A pair of blue tits were conducting what sounded like a vigorous argument in the bushes. Nathaniel Colville showed Powerscourt into a seat by the fire.