David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘It sounds an admirable system, Mr Chadwick. You must have been proud of it.’

‘It was admirable, and, yes, I was proud of it.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘I’ll show you what went wrong. I said I could track the money the firm was making or losing month by month. I knew by the end of the year what the final figures should be, I just had to add the monthly figures together. After that the figures went through Mr Randolph Colville and Mr Cosmo Colville to the main board who signed off on the final figures for the year’s accounts.’

‘That sounds perfectly proper to me, Mr Chadwick.’

‘The difficulty lay in the gap, Lord Powerscourt. I won’t give you exact figures, but the annual profit leaving my accounts might be three hundred thousand pounds. But the final figure in the final accounts would be in the order of two hundred and fifty thousand. Something in the order of fifty or sometimes one hundred thousand pounds was disappearing out of the Colville accounts every year. In good years it might have been worse, if you see what I mean.’

‘Did you know who was doing the intercepting? Would they have been allowed to do this? Was it illegal?’

‘I don’t know who was doing the intercepting, but the most likely candidates had to be Mr Randolph and Mr Cosmo. Only Colvilles were allowed to hold shares in the company, you see. So whoever was doing the fraud was effectively stealing from his own family.’

‘Did you mention this to anybody?’

‘I mentioned it to Mr Randolph,’ James Chadwick laughed bitterly, ‘and I was fired the next day. I haven’t had a full-time position since. The Colvilles put it about that I had helped myself to their money when in fact the problem was the other way round, Colville robbing Colville, not Chadwick robbing Colville.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you have had a hard time of it.’ He was doing a series of calculations in his head. In the five years since James Chadwick left the firm, half a million pounds or more would have disappeared from the family firm, money that could have been spent on expansion, or larger dividends, or buying out your competitors. He had always thought that people were unlikely to murder for a bottle of Sauternes or a Chassagne Montrachet. But for half a million pounds? Or in revenge against those who had defrauded you out of such a sum? And what had the Colville thief done with the money? Where was it? As Powerscourt took his leave of James Chadwick and Ringmer Avenue he wondered if the other two senior accountants would tell him the same story. And if the theft led directly to murder and death.

Emily Colville, nee Emily Nash, sat in the drawing room of her new house in Barnes close to Hammersmith Bridge. Emily had been married for less than a month and was already dubious about the supposed virtues of the married state. Their honeymoon to Rome and Florence had been postponed because of the murder of her father-in-law at the wedding reception. Emily missed Brympton. She missed the company of her younger brothers and sisters. She missed her horse and her dogs who, her father had assured her, would be waiting for her. Secretly, her father hoped that the animals would be a lure to bring her back home.

Many of the things that would have occupied newly married young women were not available to Emily. The all-important consolations of domestic bliss, the transition from doll’s house to real house, the location of furniture and fittings, the vital questions of where to hang the pictures had all been taken care of as the house had been rented furnished and the owners, gone to New York for a year or two, had made it clear that they expected to find the house exactly as they had left it on their return. Every morning her husband Montague walked over Hammersmith Bridge and took the train to his Colville offices in the West End. Every evening he left his Colville office and returned to his house near the river. Emily stayed behind in what was, for her, in danger of turning into a Colville mausoleum. Other fashionable young women might have taken up votes for women and spent the occasional evening breaking the shop windows of Bond Street and Mayfair. Emily thought the suffragettes were faintly ludicrous and didn’t care if she had the vote or not. Then there was charity and good works among the capital’s innumerable poor. Sadly neither charity nor the poor appealed to Emily at all. She was restless, hungry for excitement. Her husband might be kind, reliable, steady, but the heady wine of romance did not flow in his veins. Sometimes Emily thought she was composed of two selves, one respectable, conventional like her parents, the other giddy, longing for escape and adventure and intrigue. It was the first Emily, not the second, who had married Montague. She sought consolation in the women’s magazines but they only left her more dissatisfied than before. More and more she looked back to her summer adventures in Norfolk, the waiting, the secret messages that summoned her to these trysts in the little cottage. Only in these weeks in Barnes did she come to realize that forbidden activity brings its own excitement and that secret love is a most powerful aphrodisiac. Desperately, she wished for another message, scrabbling through the morning and afternoon posts in the hope that happiness might return.

Powerscourt had always thought that Brighton was the place where the pickpockets of London would go for their holidays. Latter-day Artful Dodgers and their companions could ply their trade in the crowds that thronged the station in summer and mingle profitably with holidaymakers on the sea front and the Palace Pier. Latter-day Fagins could supervise their flock from one of the smaller suites in one of Brighton’s less reputable hotels. As his train drew into the station he saw that the crowds were not there in the autumn. Waiting for the passengers to leave he spotted the man he had come to see, former Detective Inspector Walter Baker, one-time fingerprint expert for Scotland Yard. Retired policemen and retired military men were usually easy to spot, something to do, Powerscourt thought, with all those hours standing to attention.

‘How very kind of you to see me, Inspector Baker,’ said Powerscourt, extending his hand with a smile.

‘You don’t need to bother with the Inspector any more,’ said Baker, ‘I’ve done with inspecting now, thank God. We could walk to my little house, if you like, or we could take a cab if you’re in a hurry.’

There was a fine rain falling and a stiff breeze from the sea. ‘I think I’d like to walk, if that’s all right with you,’ said Powerscourt and the two men set off down the hill past the clock tower towards the Palace Pier and the sea. Powerscourt filled Baker in on his problems with the murder and the gun as they went. Baker stopped by the railings at the bottom of the pier and stared out across the Channel. Powerscourt wondered what he was looking at, the structure nearly a mile long, the elegant struts and girders holding it in position, the various entertainments that lined its walkways, the squadrons of seagulls wheeling and squawking along the sides, the gunmetal grey of the water.

‘I’d just like to think about it all for a moment, if I may, my lord,’ said Baker apologetically. ‘I’m a bit out of practice with fingerprints and I was never one of those policemen whose minds work like lightning and are often wrong. I’ll have some questions for you when you reach my house. Not far now.’

Over to his left Powerscourt saw the beginnings of the Regency terraces of Kemptown. The wind had strengthened and was driving the few visitors off the pier or into the cafes. The former Inspector Baker let them into a small bow-fronted house in a neat terrace. There was a portrait of Queen Victoria on one side of the hall and another of Edward the Seventh on the opposite side. As he sat down in the little front parlour Powerscourt saw that he was in a temple devoted to the British Royal Family. Henry the Seventh, looking as if he might have been torn from a school textbook, was to the right of the door. The rest of the Tudors followed in line of ascent, the Virgin Queen in the Armada Portrait looking perfectly content as if this was her favourite among the many palaces she could call her own. George followed George, the Third looking as if he was rehearsing for losing his wits, the Prince Regent scowling at him from the next available slot on the wall. On and on the cavalcade went, culminating in a portrait of the Kaiser in some Ruritanian uniform with his consort, Victoria’s daughter. On the bookshelves were various volumes relating to the Royal Family, and a whole series of knick-knacks of varying kinds, plates, medals, watches. It was rather like being at Lourdes, Powerscourt thought, with those terrible tourist shops dispensing holy trash to the sick and the dying.