David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘I’m not holding you up or anything, Mr Jones? said Powerscourt. ‘I mean, you’re not meant to be on duty at this time, I hope?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said the warder, ‘I’m not on duty for a little while yet.’

‘Can I ask you, Mr Jones, how you have managed the transformation from senior accountant to yeoman warder? It’s not a normal sort of journey.’

The accountant smiled. ‘That’s easy. The firm I was with before Colvilles used to do a lot of the accounts for the Tower. I was the man responsible for looking after them. I went on doing work for the warders after I went to Colvilles. When I departed from the drinks industry we came to an understanding: I would do the Tower accounts for nothing; they would make me a warder. It was all a bit unofficial but nobody seems to mind. I’ve always liked dressing up ever since I was a boy being Robin Hood and his Merry Men in the back garden. Now then. What can I tell you about the Colvilles?’

‘I think you took over from James Chadwick, Mr Jones? I talked to him the other day.’

‘Might I ask you, Lord Powerscourt, how he described the position in the firm?’ Wilfred Jones was smoothing the front of his uniform across his knees. Powerscourt suspected he performed this little ritual so many times a day that he had virtually forgotten he was doing it.

‘Two things mainly,’ said Powerscourt, wondering suddenly if his accountant sang the Refiner’s Fire from the Messiah in full yeoman warder uniform. ‘That he rearranged the accounting system into categories, wine, port, gin, whisky and so forth. And that when he produced his annual figures, they were intercepted before they reached the full board, the figures I mean. Something like a hundred thousand pounds a year simply disappeared. Spirited away, he thought, by one lot of Colvilles who were defrauding another lot of Colvilles.’

The yeoman warder was twiddling his bonnet in his hands, picking nervously at the top.

‘Chadwick did warn me about what happened to him,’ he said, ‘and they had obviously worked out new tactics for me. It was all fine until the end of the year. The division into types of drink went on. I prepared all those individual accounts in the normal way. Usually when you hand them over, they are provisional figures, you get the final set of accounts when the board and everybody else have had a go at them. I never saw the final accounts. It was as if I didn’t exist or wasn’t worth bothering with.’

‘So what did you do?’

Jones laughed. ‘I was angry, very angry. I told the two brothers that I was leaving, that I had never seen accounts or accountants treated in such a cavalier fashion. And that their behaviour was unethical and probably illegal.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They offered me extra money to stay on. Quite a lot of extra money, now, I think about it. Perhaps they didn’t want it known abroad that they had lost another chief accountant.’

‘So what did you think was going on, Mr Jones?’ asked Powerscourt.

Jones looked solemn. Suddenly Powerscourt could see him on duty at the Tower in his uniform centuries before, the names of the recusants scratched into the walls of the cells by their fingernails, the escort for the doomed, Anne Boleyn or Thomas More or Lady Jane Grey, led across to the little patch of grass on Tower Hill, the executioner with the great axe, the blow to the neck, the screams of the dying, Guido Fawkes racked till he could no longer write his name.

‘I had a number of theories, Lord Powerscourt, one of them rather far-fetched, I’m afraid. You know how in some old families – it may be dying out now, I’m not sure – there’s often somebody who has to get served first at meal times. It might be a grandparent or a very old-fashioned father always keen to have the first serving of the roast beef or the Dover sole. It was as if there was somebody like that in the Colville tribe, somebody who had to be fed first with the money. But why didn’t the others complain? Perhaps they never knew. Maybe the money went on some common project of the family, that chateau they had near Bordeaux. But I checked that one out and all the payments came out of the French accounts. They didn’t need to siphon the money off in London. Maybe Randolph and Cosmo were rewarded for being senior directors. But they were already paid more than the old boys Walter and Nathaniel anyway.’

‘You said you had one rather far-fetched theory, Mr Jones. I don’t think I’ve heard it yet.’

Jones laughed rather nervously and smoothed his uniform across his knees once more.

‘Suppose somebody was blackmailing the Colvilles. Not just one Colville but the whole collective of Colvilles if you follow me. So it wasn’t just a question of any individual member being at fault. The whole bloody lot of them were. So once a year, it’s payday for the blackmailer. They all want a quiet life so they cough up this enormous sum every year. What do you think?’

‘It’s certainly ingenious,’ said Powerscourt, preparing to take his leave, ‘and it certainly makes some sense of it all. I just have one difficulty with it. I can’t think what hidden crime would enable a man to blackmail the whole lot of them. It if it was just one family, it might be a child born out of wedlock or something like that. But all of them? I don’t see it.’

Powerscourt wished Wilfred Jones good luck in his wardering and good voice in his singing as he left. As he headed back towards the tube station, the great bulk of Hammersmith Bridge towering above him, he wondered if the man wore his uniform all day. Perhaps he went to sleep in it, a snoring yeoman warder serenading the night sky of west London. But as he thought of the blackmail theory he realized that there was something else wrong with it. It was the wrong way round. In blackmail cases it was usually the blackmailer who gets killed as the victim tires of the endless payments. Suppose Randolph Colville was being blackmailed. You would expect him to be the killer of the blackmailer, not to be the victim himself. Unless Randolph had decided to kill his blackmailer. Suppose there had been some sort of a struggle and Randolph rather than the blackmailer had been shot. But in that case, why was Cosmo holding the gun and still maintaining his vow of silence?

Charles Augustus Pugh was standing by his window, leaning forward for a better view of the perfectly manicured lawns of Gray’s Inn. Advancing towards him, Powerscourt thought he looked like a cricket umpire stooping towards the other end and trying to establish whether the batsman was leg before wicket.

‘Look at it, Powerscourt, it’s a bloody disgrace.’ He pointed to the sad remains of a blackbird which looked as if it had met a violent and bloody end, its head twisted over to one side, its insides opened out to the autumn air.

‘Mark my words,’ said Pugh, ‘it’s that bloody chambers cat the fools have brought in. I argued against it at the chambers meeting, I said we were a firm of barristers not a wildlife sanctuary or a bloody zoo, for Christ’s sake. No good. I was voted down. Can you imagine? Some of the finest minds in legal London, and they want to have a cat. I ask you. They’ll be drawing up rotas next for the barristers to put out the saucer of milk morning and evening. There are mice here, I grant you, but what’s wrong with poison? We don’t need a bloody cat.

‘Never mind. Let us turn our attention to the Colvilles, one dead on his son’s wedding day, one turned mute in the stone of Pentonville. The solicitors told me yesterday they’d tried again to persuade Cosmo to talk. No joy, not a word out of him. He’ll bloody well have to speak in court to plead guilty or not guilty. Let’s hope he hasn’t forgotten how to get the words out. Do you have anything to report, Powerscourt? Any deus ex machina to solve all our problems?’