David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Johnny looked sternly at the cupboard in the centre of the opposite wall. That was where the Powerscourt wine usually dwelt. But the doors were firmly closed today.

‘I think they may be a bit naughty, the Colvilles,’ he said, ‘but probably not any naughtier than everybody else.’

‘What sort of crimes are they up to, Johnny?’ asked Lady Lucy, very aware of the keen interest her guest was taking in the closed cupboard by the wall.

‘Bit loose with the labels was what my man said. Stuff comes up in a wine train from the south, wagon after wagon full of cheap Languedoc red, gets bottled in Dijon or Beaune and then labelled as Bourgogne Cuvee or some such name. Much more expensive now. My man says everybody’s doing it. This chap, he comes from Beaune by the way, had another story to tell. The Colvilles have a very close relationship with a man called Thevenet, Louis Thevenet, a grower in the Maconnais to the south of Beaune. He’s rather a whiz at wine making, our Louis, and when he produces a really cracking wine every two or three years the Colvilles buy the lot, get out the labels again and call it Meursault, which sells for more than four times the price of the Macon. It all adds up. They’ve also bought up a large parcel of land just inside the official boundary of Puligny Montrachet. Clean the land up, plant your vines, wait for them to grow and then you’ve got your very own world-class white wine at world-class prices. And there’s one other thing I’ve got to report. I’ve found the pub in St John’s Wood where the Colville servants drink. It’s called the Jolly Cricketers, oddly enough. I tried the subject of family rows in there two nights running and got absolutely nowhere. They’re not saying a word.’

‘All this fiddling about with the wines, it’s still not enough to kill for,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if he would ever get to the bottom of the mystery of two brothers, one dead and unable to speak, one alive and refusing to speak, and one gun which took the life of the elder.

Johnny Fitzgerald looked at his watch and sprang to his feet. ‘Francis, Lady Lucy, forgive me, I’m going to be late. I’ve got to go to a meeting with my publishers about the bird book. Bloody man said he’d found a problem with it.’

Half an hour later Johnny’s place in the Powerscourt drawing room was taken by the dapper figure of Sir Pericles Freme, dropped by in a hurry, as he put it, to impart one piece of important news and one rather odd piece of gossip.

‘The important thing,’ he began, checking that the crease on his trousers was still immaculate, ‘is this. Colvilles are in danger of going broke, going out of business. The business hasn’t been run properly for a long time. It’s going to seed really, like a field that hasn’t been cared for in years. Pity, really. In their day they were a fine business.’

Powerscourt wondered how impending bankruptcy might provide a motive for murder but he couldn’t see it.

‘Could anything save them? The return of Cosmo maybe? A general increase in levels of thirst in the population at large?’

Sir Pericles smiled. ‘Fresh management might do the trick. A substantial injection of funds might keep them afloat but they’d still have to put their house in order.’

‘And the gossip, Sir Pericles?’ asked Powerscourt hopefully. He had known many cases where the gossip had been more useful than the facts in solving the mystery.

‘Simply this,’ replied Freme. ‘That chap from Beaune, the one who looked after the Colville interests and has since disappeared, dammit, I’ve forgotten the fellow’s name.’

‘Drouhin,’ said Powerscourt, ‘Jean Pierre Drouhin.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Sir Pericles. ‘Anyway, it seems the fellow is completely ambidextrous, able to sign his name with both hands, write at the same time on both sides of a notebook, all kinds of tricks. Just thought I’d mention it.’

With that Sir Pericles departed into the night.

Neither Powerscourt nor Sir Pericles noticed a figure lurking in the shadows a few doors away from the Powerscourt house in Markham Square. The coat was drawn up and the hat was pulled down over the forehead. The figure appeared to have its eyes locked on the Powerscourt’s front door.

Lady Lucy looked closely at her husband after Sir Pericles had left. He was walking up and down the drawing room again and his face looked as though he had travelled in his mind to some far distant place. Something was nagging at him, some connection he couldn’t quite place. Without a doubt it had to do with what Freme had just said, but was it the facts or the gossip that were swirling round his brain? He sat down by the fire and looked at Lady Lucy as if he hardly knew her. Then he came back.

‘Lucy,’ he began, ‘I think there was somebody else in this case who was ambidextrous but I can’t for the life of me remember who it was.’

‘Somebody in Norfolk perhaps, Francis? Some Colville relation? Someone to do with the wine business?’

Powerscourt shook his head. Lucy was close, surely, but she hadn’t quite pulled it off. Suddenly he knew where he had heard it before. It was at Randolph’s funeral and the remark had come from a neighbour who had watched Randolph play tennis some years before without a backhand ever being employed. The thing was impossible, surely. Powerscourt shot down the stairs to his study where he had a file of information about the case. With difficulty he managed to raise Georgina Nash on the telephone. She was another great shouter down the line as if her words had to travel the entire length of the train tracks between Norwich and London. After checking in her wedding notebook she reported that Jean Pierre Drouhin and his wife had indeed been invited to the happy occasion, but had declined. The reply was in a man’s hand. She provided an address in Beaune. Lord Francis Powerscourt, she informed her husband as he tucked into a large helping of oysters later that evening, appeared to be losing his wits.

Mrs Cosmo Colville’s telephone manner was more regular, coming as it did from a much closer place near Lord’s Cricket Ground. Now she came to think of it, she said, she didn’t think she had ever met this Mr Drouhin. He didn’t seem to cross the Channel very often. On the one occasion when she and Cosmo had made an appointment to visit this Jean Pierre when on holiday in France, he had been called away to a sick relative in Montpellier. As she put the receiver down she also reflected that Powerscourt seemed to be chasing at straws.

‘Lucy!’ Powerscourt was back in the drawing room. ‘It may be a wild goose chase. There’s less than one chance in ten that I am right. Never mind. There’s not a moment to lose! We must catch the first boat out of Dover in the morning. There will be a train to take us there tonight if we hurry.’

Lady Lucy knew where they were going. She had been there before. As they walked as fast as they could to pick up a taxi in the King’s Road, the watching figure slipped his moorings and followed them, about ten or twelve paces behind. When they climbed into a taxi to Victoria the figure was less than fifty yards behind. He was close enough in the ticket queue to hear where they were going. The Alchemist swore briefly when he realized that his prey were travelling to the one country he dare not visit. Then he remembered his little brother Marcel in Lyon. He would send him a telegram first thing in the morning. The neighbours in his fashionable street thought he was a successful businessman, the Alchemist’s brother. All his children’s friends knew him as a very generous man, always prepared to pay for charities and treats for his daughters’ classmates. The police of Lyon, however, would have told you a rather different story. In their view Marcel was one of the most violent gangsters in France.