David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

A few minutes later they were all seated comfortably in the Colville parlour with prints of famous racehorses on the walls, drinking Ethel’s tea and eating Ethel’s biscuits. ‘You must ask whatever you want, Lord Powerscourt. Randolph and Cosmo might not be my very best friends but I wouldn’t wish their fate on anybody.’

‘I think you knew them as children, Mr Colville. What were they like then?’

‘Pretty bloody, if the truth be told,’ said Thomas Colville. ‘The adults all thought that three cousins roughly the same age should get on together and play nicely, as they used to put it. How little did they know!’

‘What happened, Mr Colville?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘There was a lot of bullying, hair pulling, kicking, various forms of physical and mental torture, really. The odd thing is that Randolph didn’t seem to have any moral sense at all. He thought this kind of behaviour was perfectly normal and that he was only exercising his God-given rights in carrying on like this.’

‘What about Cosmo? Did he take the same view as Randolph?’

‘Well, he was more normal, if I can put it like that. I think he knew the difference between right and wrong. He would tell Randolph every now and then to stop what he was doing.’

‘If it was all so grim, why didn’t you tell your parents? They could have stopped you going to the Colvilles, surely.’

‘You know what small boys are like, Lord Powerscourt. My parents were too much in awe of their richer relations to dare take me away.’

‘So what happened when the two others went away to school?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘Life must have been somewhat easier then.’

‘During term-time it was, but the holidays were worse, much worse. Randolph had come across all kinds of bullying at school so he simply brought the techniques home with him. I was hung up on trees in the garden. The two of them took great pleasure holding me upside down and forcing my head in the lavatory bowl and then flushing it. Any animals or insects they could catch were given a hard time – birds had their wings pulled off, butterflies cut in two, that sort of thing.’

‘Great God!’ said Powerscourt. ‘How dreadful. Could I ask you, Mr Colville, why it was after all this humiliation that you went to work for the family firm? Surely you must have known that there might well be more grief, years more grief from these two.’

‘Once a Colville, always a Colville,’ said Thomas with a smile. ‘My parents wanted me to join the firm. They still suffered from the illusion that Randolph and Cosmo and I got on very well. So they thought I would be well looked after and would prosper in the business.’

‘Not so?’ said Powerscourt. ‘Not well looked after? Not prospering?’

‘Very little prospering,’ said Thomas, ‘very little indeed. You see, the one thing I had always shown an aptitude for was maths. Adding up, dividing, algebra, all those equations with 2x + 4 = 3y – 2 were all meat and drink to me. So I asked to work in the accounts department. Randolph, who had manoeuvred himself into a position where he was in charge of my future, sent me to the bottling plant instead. When I’d learnt all there was to know there I applied for a transfer, to the accounts department, naturally. This time I was sent to the labelling section and very boring it was too. After ten or twelve years I’d been round every department bar one, and that was where they did the sums.’

‘And what was Cosmo doing while all this was going on? Was he aiding and abetting his brother?’

‘That’s the curious thing,’ said Thomas. ‘As Randolph turned into more and more of a bully, Cosmo became a more normal member of the human race. He wasn’t Francis of Assisi or anything like that but he was decent and kind and sometimes considerate.’

‘Before we talk about why you left, Mr Colville, could I ask if you were the only one singled out for horrible treatment by Randolph? Or were there others?’

‘I was not alone. No, sir. There were plenty more singled out for bullying, some of it much worse than what I received.’

‘Could I ask Mrs Colville how she coped with all these difficult times?’ said Powerscourt.

‘We got through, Lord Powerscourt. We got through. There were times when I just wanted to walk into the Head Office and tell everybody I saw what a brute Randolph Colville was.’

‘You left, Mr Colville, ten years ago, I think. Do you keep up with any of the people you knew when you were working for the firm?’

‘One or two close friends, that’s all. Oddly enough there’s one chap come to work in the brewery where I do the accounts, Fuller’s in Chiswick. But I hear bits and pieces every now and then.’

‘I want to ask you both a question, and I want you to think very carefully about the answer. Do you think that the bullying could get so bad that somebody might decide to kill Randolph?’

Thomas ate a couple of biscuits and then a couple more. It was Ethel who answered first.

‘I do think it is possible, Lord Powerscourt. I think Thomas is a fairly even-tempered sort of man in spite of everything he has had to put with. But if you were a redhead with a temper, like my younger brother, you could well decide to kill him. I just wonder about the timing, though. If he had been really horrible to you, and you had a gun to hand somewhere in the offices, you could go and kill him in a fit of fury, so incensed you scarcely knew what you were doing. But leave the office, take a train to Norfolk, get your hands on a gun, I’m not sure. I think common sense would intervene somewhere along the way.’

‘I think what you say is very sensible, Ethel,’ said Thomas Colville, ‘but I’ve been trying to remember exactly how I felt after some of these outrages. I think there are, maybe, different sorts of anger. There’s the hot anger Ethel was talking about but there’s also a kind of cold anger which can last for days or weeks. I’m sure there were times when I could have got on the Norfolk train and killed Randolph Colville.’

‘You’ve both been very honest with me,’ said Lord Powerscourt. ‘Could I ask you one last favour? If you or your friends can think of anybody who might have gone to kill Randolph, could you let me know? I would be most grateful.’

As Powerscourt left, Thomas Colville handed him a bottle of beer. Fuller Smith and Turner, 1845, it said on the label. ‘This is the beer from the place where I work now,’ said Thomas. ‘It’s a bloody sight better than any of the rubbish you can buy in Colvilles off-licences!’

Emily Colville enjoyed the secrecy involved in meeting her lover. Now she had escaped the boring and the humdrum into the mysterious world of romance. Her cab took her from Norwich station, the blinds tightly closed in case she should meet her relations, and round the back of Brympton Hall to the tiny cottage in the woods behind the lake. It looked as though it came from a fairy tale with a round shape and a thatched roof on the top. From such a place elves or fairies might have ventured forth to dance in the woods at midnight, lit by the moon and the stars.

Emily took out her key and settled in the tiny living room to wait for her lover. She busied herself with preparing a fire, for the tiny cottage was cold from lack of use. Her heart sang as she carried in the logs and began arranging them in the grate. Surely, this was real life. Surely this was far better then organizing tiresome elements of domestic duty, asking the servants to polish the spoons or checking that there were enough pillowcases in the linen cupboard. She checked her watch and remembered the picture of ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’ on the front of the sheet music, the code that had brought her here. He must come soon. Emily had brought the sheet music with her. It sat in a heap of other popular songs by the window. The code was very simple. Emily thought she should offer it to the Foreign Office where she was sure they had need of codes and ciphers of every description in the intelligence war with the Germans. The code was based on the musical keys. A meant Monday, B meant Tuesday, C meant Wednesday and so on. Flat meant morning and sharp meant afternoon. It was such a lovely secret. Emily liked secrets. She was the only person in the country who knew the secret behind Tristram’s mild blackmail of Randolph Colville and she was never going to tell that to anybody.