David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘I’m not, it’s not,’ said Freme, ‘I think I’ll take that bottle away with me too, if I may. Our friend the Necromancer has not done badly, mind you. It’s easy to see how those dinners at Whites Hotel have kept going. I think I’d give him six or seven marks out of ten. Now then, this is my last word.’

He pulled a little notebook out of his pocket and began to read: ‘“White elder wine, very like sweet muscadine from southern France: Boil eighteen pounds of white powder sugar, with six gallons of water and two whites of egg well beaten; then skim it and put in a quarter of a peck of elder berries from the tree that bears white berries; don’t keep them on the fire. When near cold, stir it, and put in six spoonfuls of lemon juice, four or five of yeast and beat well into the liquor; stir it every day; put six pounds of the best raisins, stoned, into the cask and tun the wine. Stop it close and bottle in six months.”’

The Alchemist was fuming with rage. Ever since he arrived in London he had taken great care to defend his privacy. Nobody knew where he worked, the great space in the warehouse filled with bottles of every type and size, locks and bars on the doors. Now he and Septimus Parry had discovered that somebody calling himself Lord Francis Powerscourt and his tame tramp knew his identity and the place where he worked. The most important thing in the Alchemist’s life in London was his isolation, his solitary existence between his lodgings in north London and his bench at the warehouse in the docks. Parry had told him that he did not think Powerscourt was the man’s real name. Neither he nor Vicary Dodds believed a real lord would waste his time ordering pre-phylloxera wines that he suspected might be fakes before he even tasted them. The whole story about the elderly relative in darkest Somerset was, in Septimus’s view, a charade, a story that wasn’t true and wasn’t to be believed. Informed opinion at Piccadilly Wine reckoned the man called Powerscourt must be a government agent of some sort, come to check on the shipping manifests of the wine perhaps, or from one of the innumerable agencies that made it their business to raise taxes for the government.

The Alchemist was due to attend the opera that evening but he didn’t go. He was too upset and too angry, even for Wagner. Terrible fates unwound themselves in his mind, incarceration in the Tower perhaps, exiled to some other terrible prison, an English equivalent of Chateau d’If maybe, deportation to France where his earlier crimes would catch up with him. The Alchemist had learnt the rudiments of his trade in the back streets of Marseilles. They knew what to do with their enemies there, those tough little Corsicans, men from Bastia and Ajaccio and Calvi. One of them had even given him lessons in the use of the knife and the garrotte. The Alchemist had never thought he would need to employ these murderous techniques on his own account. Now, he thought, in a wet November in London, the time had come to defend his privacy and his honour.

Charles Augustus Pugh was seated at his desk in Gray’s Inn. His feet, for once, were on the ground, not resting on his desk. His hands were attending to some piece of paper rather than wrapped round the back of his neck.

‘Damn and blast!’ he said to Powerscourt, just settling himself in on the other side of the formidable desk. ‘I mean, seriously damn and blast!’ He opened a low drawer rather furtively and produced a packet of cheroots and a box of matches. ‘Not meant to have one of these before six o’clock in the evening. Manage it most days. I’ve always said a chap should be allowed a few sins every now and then to make his virtues brighter the rest of the time. Would you agree with that, my friend?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Powerscourt, wondering what fresh catastrophe had reduced Pugh to his tobacco at ten o’clock in the morning. A quick glance out of the window revealed no hecatomb of dead birds or dismembered mammals that might have been massacred by the Pugh chambers cat.

‘The gun,’ said Pugh, blowing a great cloud of smoke past Powerscourt, ‘you will remember the gun in the state bedroom, held by Cosmo, believed to have been the weapon used to kill Randolph?’ Powerscourt nodded. ‘My God, this cheroot tastes good. Maybe you have to smoke them earlier and earlier in the day.’ He took another contented puff. Powerscourt looked expectant.

‘And you will recall, my dear Powerscourt, that you yourself toiled mightily to find a couple of fingerprint experts who might be willing to give evidence, travelling as far as the louche purlieus of Brighton to find one of these gentlemen? And indeed you did find such a man. So I had our solicitors write to the Norfolk Constabulary, copied to the prosecution solicitors, naturally, to ask if one of our own experts might look at the fingerprints on the gun and give his opinion to the court. The law officers of East Anglia, I fear, took some time to reply. Now I know why. This is the relevant portion of their answer: “The Norfolk Constabulary does not, at present, have its own fingerprint service. In any cases where we consider fingerprint evidence necessary, we send the relevant materials to the Metropolitan Police in London and they look after our interests as they would those of their own officers. Unfortunately” – I’ll say this is unfortunate, Powerscourt, wait for it, my friend – “the gun found in the possession of Mr Cosmo Colville was brought back to Fakenham police station. It was not tagged or stored in a safe place. A new cleaning woman, unacquainted with the customs of the force and the need for integrity in the storing of evidence, dusted the gun the very day it was taken to Fakenham. She told the station sergeant that she didn’t like dirty and dusty objects cluttering up the place. It looks much better now it’s cleaned up, that gun, she told the officer in charge. There’s not a print left on the thing now. It’s as clear of fingerprints as the day it left the factory.” God save us all.’

‘Heaven deliver us from Norfolk cleaning women,’ said Powerscourt, ‘especially the ones from Fakenham. How bad is it, Pugh?’

‘Well, suppose there were no prints other than those of Cosmo Colville on the gun. We could have argued that he wiped the gun with his own handkerchief to protect the murderer, that it was entirely consistent with his policy of being prepared to lay down his life for another. And if there had been anybody else’s fingerprints, then they would obviously have been those of the murderer. So far, my lord,’ Pugh pulled at the sleeve of an imaginary gown, ‘we have not been able to find the owner of these other prints. Perhaps he is in hiding or has fled abroad. But, gentlemen of the jury, I would remind you of your duty not to convict my client if you think there is any doubt at all about his guilt. I put it to you that these other fingerprints are themselves eloquent witnesses to the dangers of a conviction and the need for a more prudent acquittal.’

Pugh took another satisfying pull of his cheroot. ‘I could have wittered away for quite a long time in that vein, Powerscourt, you know. It might have done some good.’

‘Is there anything at all you can do with the gun, Pugh?’

‘Well,’ he grinned slightly, ‘I’ve subpoenaed the cleaning woman for a start. I want her to say that nobody had told her about not cleaning certain things, that she regarded everything in the station as fair game for her dusters, that if the Ark of the Covenant itself had dropped into the yard at the back of the premises, she’d have been on to that in a flash, brush and dusters in hand. I shall imply that the Norfolk police were negligent. I shall point out that their incompetence has made it impossible for my client to have a fair trial and that the case should be thrown out because of the tampering with the evidence.’