David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Georgina Nash slept badly in her enormous bedroom at Brympton Hall that night. Beside her, husband Willoughby was snoring with the same metronomic regularity that had measured out his nights for the past twenty years. Something was nagging at the back of Georgina’s mind. When she thought about the day’s events they all bundled themselves into a couple of moments of horror. It was something somebody had said to her that she thought must be important. But who? And when? And where? She began running through in her mind the guests who had come to the wedding on this fateful day. Nothing worked. Shortly before dawn Georgina Nash fell asleep.

The office was hidden away in a corner of an enormous warehouse on the banks of the Thames at Shadwell Basin in the East End of London. It was about twenty feet square with shelves covering virtually every wall. The man who worked here didn’t like cleaners coming in, so there were spiders’ webs hanging off the walls, dust lying thickly on the shelves and mice scampering about the floor, feasting occasionally on the rich liquids that fell there. To his left, on the far side of the wall of his office, the high warehouse was filled with barrels of every description. Above him were six floors devoted to Bordeaux, burgundy, champagne, port, Madeira and vin ordinaire . Stretching out a few feet above his head was a bizarre collection of wine bottles: magnums and Marie Jeannes and double magnums of four bottles from Bordeaux; Jeroboams worth six bottles and Imperiales worth eight; from Burgundy and Champagne came even larger versions, a Salmanazar equivalent to twelve bottles, a Balthazar worth sixteen and a Nebuchadnezzar worth twenty bottles. For some unaccountable reason, the man knew that people would almost always believe that wine contained in these monstrous vessels was the real thing. He did not intend to disabuse them. Other shelves were filled with nameless barrels and a surprising variety of other ingredients ranging from dried gooseberries to turnip juice.

This was the domain of the man they called the Alchemist. Jesus Christ, he used to mutter to himself, could turn water into wine. Well, he could turn rough Algerian into passable claret, consignments of white grapes from more or less anywhere into credible champagne, strange combinations of raisins and sugar into respectable vin ordinaire . He was quite short, the Alchemist, with a stoop and a thin goatee beard. He wore thick glasses to read the labels on the wine bottles and the equations that carried the secrets of his forgeries. Two or three times a year he crossed to France where he and a couple of selected collaborators visited the freight trains carrying wine from the south to the palates of the north. These trains stopped overnight at Dijon station, where they switched the labels over during the hours of darkness. He currently had an order for a consignment of pre-phylloxera wines from a very grand hotel in Mayfair which held pre-phylloxera dinners once a month, elaborate and very expensive occasions where all the wine came from before 1863, the year the phylloxera bug began to devastate the vineyards of France, spreading slowly northwards from its first infestation in the Languedoc. Hardly anybody, the Alchemist reasoned, could remember what these wines tasted of before that date. It was all so long ago, and the few genuine bottles left were locked away in the cellars of the grandest chateaux in the Medoc. He had an enormous order from a British railway company. And then there was the regular order from those damned Americans in London. The Alchemist set to work, draining off some red substance from one of his barrels. He had only one rule and he never broke it. He told nobody his real name.

Three days after the wedding and the murder Inspector Albert Cooper had completed his interviews with the wedding guests. One or two had reappeared at Brympton Hall the day after the incident with information they had forgotten in the confusion of the day. The Sergeant had been sent to make inquiries at Randolph Colville’s house on the Thames about the gun. By now the Inspector could tell you who was sitting against the wall in the church three rows from the front, and who was up there next to the organ on the first floor. He could show you the dispositions of the guests as they drank champagne on the lawn. He could show you how far they had advanced towards their tables when the corpse was discovered. He had obtained from Georgina Nash the details of the final seating plan when Colvilles and Nashes were mixed up together. There were, he thought, two or three guests he could not identify because people could describe them, but didn’t know their names. The Colvilles thought they were Nashes, and the Nashes thought they were Colvilles. His informants spoke of a tall thickset man with dark hair, a middle-aged lady with a slight limp, and a nondescript-looking man nobody could describe in any detail. They troubled Inspector Cooper’s tidy mind, these three unknowns wandering about in the October sunshine at Brympton Hall. He was wondering if he should interview everybody all over again when the summons came to see his superior officer, Chief Inspector Weir.

The Chief Inspector was sitting at a very large desk strewn with papers. Cynics at the station said that Weir had suborned the desk from the office of the Chief Constable when the previous holder of that office had just left and before his successor arrived. A table had been substituted in its place. Weir was well over six feet tall, heavily built and with receding hair. Now in his sixties, even he would have admitted that he thought more about his retirement than about his cases. He and Mrs Chief Inspector Weir, a former primary school teacher, had bought a cottage on the coast near Blakeney where the policeman intended to devote his time to bird watching and the wife was planning an enormous piece of embroidery. Weir’s colleagues would never have said that the Detective Chief Inspector was quick like Inspector Cooper. Nor did he have the sudden flights of intuition that solved a case in a moment like one or two of his younger colleagues. But all agreed on one thing. He may have been ponderous in body and spirit, his mind may have worked incredibly slowly, but he had judgement. In all his years in the force Detective Chief Inspector Weir had scarcely made a mistake in an important case. Defence counsel who looked forward to dancing round his portly person found that he carried on unperturbed and made a very good impression on the jury. Juries liked the big man from Norfolk and seldom caused him to lose a case in court. This afternoon he knew that his young Inspector, whose promotion he had personally recommended, was not going to agree with him.

‘Come in, Cooper, come in, do sit down.’ Weir pointed to a neat little armchair with cushions boasting some of the finest of Mrs Weir’s embroidery. ‘The Sergeant’s back. I have his report on the Colville gun here. There’s little doubt about it. The gun, or one virtually identical to it, came from a drawer in Randolph Colville’s gun room on the first floor of his house. Certainly the gun’s not there now. He must have brought it with him. I’m sure the brother’s guilty, Albert. There must have been a struggle and Cosmo grabbed the gun from his brother. I’m going to see the Chief Constable after our conversation here. Then I’m going to charge him.’

Inspector Albert Cooper looked very unhappy. His eyes pleaded with his superior officer. He knew how difficult it was to change Weir’s mind. He resolved to approach the matter sideways, like a crab on the coast near the Weir cottage at Blakeney.

‘It’s entirely possible, sir, that Cosmo Colville killed his brother, but aren’t we being a bit hasty? You don’t think we should wait a while before committing ourselves?’