David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Powerscourt could see her now in that Spartan cell in Pentonville, her face bright as if she were talking to a small child, reeling off the latest family and domestic gossip, hoping for a word or a reaction that never came. And hovering behind the silence, the secret on the far side of the prison visiting room, the prison chaplain, the prison governor, the prison hangman, the noose and the drop.

‘Tell me, Mrs Colville, do you get any reaction at all? A smile? A kiss when you arrive? An embrace when you leave?’

Isabella Colville shook her head rather sadly. ‘No, there’s none of that. Hold on a minute though, that’s not quite true. His eyes are eloquent sometimes, as if he’s trying to tell me something. That he cares, perhaps. I don’t know.’

Powerscourt had always known how he wanted to end their interview, and in some ways he wished he could ask those questions now. But he stuck to his original plan.

‘Tell me about your husband, Mrs Colville,’ he was speaking very quietly, ‘what sort of a man is he?’

She paused for a moment. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it,’ she said, ‘how difficult it is to answer that question about somebody you know so well. Let me begin with his work, that’s probably the easiest thing.’

She paused again and looked into the fire. ‘Conscientious, that’s how I would describe his attitude to his work. Conservative, maybe even a little old-fashioned. He inherited that whole Bordeaux network from his father and his uncle, you see, the growers, the negociants , the shippers, the owners. He took great care to maintain good relations with all of them. Indeed, as far as I know, and I never followed the wine business very carefully, most of the people he deals with are the same people or the sons of the same people his father dealt with. As far as I know, some of these other wine merchants are forever looking out for new suppliers, changing their shippers, taking a chance on some new grower with revolutionary new ways of doing things, always in a ferment of excitement. That wasn’t Cosmo’s way. He didn’t like ferment very much. He didn’t like change. He didn’t like excitement.’

‘Was his work the most important thing in his life? Some of these second-generation merchants in wine or tea or things like that develop interests which become the mainspring of their lives. Shire horses, maybe, art collecting, that sort of thing. Was your husband one of those?’

‘I think that’s difficult. The business was very important to him. He might not have liked it very much, but it was what he inherited from his father. He had to maintain what he had and pass it on in his turn. The real passion in his life was cricket. That’s what he really cared about. That’s why, I’m sure you will have noticed, we live where we do, so close to Lord’s Cricket Ground. Cosmo has an enormous collection of paintings and prints of Lord’s in his study and on the back stairs. He did say that we could have a cricket-free area in here. He was quite thoughtful in that way.’

‘And in other ways, was he not so thoughtful perhaps?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, Lord Powerscourt. He was very dutiful. He always remembered everybody’s birthday.’

Powerscourt was now close to the end he had planned beforehand. ‘Duty, Mrs Colville, would doing his duty sum up his attitude to life and his role in it?’

‘Duty? Duty?’ Isabella Colville held the word up to the light, as it were, and looked at it carefully. ‘I suppose you could say that. Duty or responsibility, yes, you could.’

‘And what form of duty would compel your husband not to speak a word in his own defence or to explain what had been going on in the Peter the Great room and the state bedroom up at Brympton Hall on the day of the wedding?’

Isabella Colville looked at him helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered, ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Let me try a few suggestions on you, Mrs Colville. Family honour perhaps? Suppose there was some terrible scandal about to break that would be bad for the Colvilles and could be ruinous for the business?’

‘He cared profoundly about anything concerning family honour or scandal that could ruin the family name. He said so in that terrible family row the week before the wedding.’

Isabella Colville paused. She began to turn pink, then red. She looked down at the floor and stammered, ‘I didn’t mean to say that. It was a mistake.’ Two desperate eyes now looked up at Powerscourt. He felt as if somebody had just placed something very slippery – a scallop perhaps, or a Dover sole – in his hand and he must not let it go.

‘Perhaps,’ he said in his mildest voice, ‘you could tell me a little more about the family row. Just the broad outline, of course.’

Isabella Colville shook her head. Powerscourt decided to try sternness.

‘I do not wish to remind you of certain unpleasant facts, Mrs Colville, but this knowledge could help release your husband from Pentonville. Unless something material can be presented by the defence the chances are that he will be found guilty. And you know as well as I do what that means.’

‘It concerns the family, it’s private,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how it has anything to do with the trial.’

‘With the greatest respect, Mrs Colville, I think that’s a matter for myself and the defence counsel Mr Pugh to decide.’

‘It’s family, it’s private.’

‘Nothing is private in a murder trial, Mrs Colville.’

‘This is,’ she said defiantly.

‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we’ll leave it there for now, Mrs Colville. But you are free to change your mind at any time. You have my address. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch at any time of day or night. It could save your husband’s life.’

Powerscourt was thinking of honour on his way back to Chelsea. Was honour, in this most modern age, still capable of bringing a man to a display of honourable silence that could kill him, like Cosmo Colville? He thought of Falstaff’s more cynical or more realistic view of it in Henry IV, ‘What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.’

It was not yet clear on which day of the week Cosmo would die, but die he would unless he, Powerscourt, could pull off a miracle. As he passed down the northern end of Baker Street, close to where 221B would have been, he sent a message to Sherlock Holmes, asking for assistance.

Lady Lucy was reading the Obituary columns of The Times when Powerscourt returned to Markham Square ‘Francis,’ she said, ‘you’ve just missed Sir Pericles. He only left the house five minutes ago.’

‘And what did he have to say, Lucy?’

‘He seems to have got his lines of communication into Colvilles working like clockwork,’ Lady Lucy said. ‘He says they’ve hired a negociant in Burgundy to supervise the despatch of all that Colville wine.’

‘There’s still going to be a gap, isn’t there? Between the current lot running out and the next lot arriving. I wonder what they’ll do about that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Perhaps they’ll give the Necromancer a call.’

‘Do you think they’d do that? Employ a sort of wine forger, Francis?’

‘Well, that posh hotel where they have the pre-phylloxera dinners is happy to serve his wares.’

‘So they are, but the question is, do they know they are buying a heap of fakes, the hotel people, or do they buy them from some apparently respectable wine merchant, supposing them to be real?’

‘Maybe I should go and talk to the wine department of Whites Hotel.’

‘Never mind that, Francis, tell me what Mrs Colville had to say for herself.’

Powerscourt told her everything, the frankness at the beginning, her description of Cosmo’s character, and then the news of the family row before the wedding.