David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘It is, sir,’ said Marcel.

The doctor rummaged briefly in his papers. ‘And this is the letter from Dr Rives, the distinguished general practitioner from Beaune?’

‘It is,’ said Marcel.

‘Monsieur,’ the doctor turned to Powerscourt, ‘could you please tell us your name?’

‘My name is Francis Powerscourt.’ He was damned if was going to call this ridiculous little man sir.

‘And do you have any titles, monsieur?’

‘Titles?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘What titles?’ Was the man asking him if he was Lord Mayor of London or the Keeper of the Privy Purse?

‘I was wondering if you thought you were a member of the aristocracy perhaps?’

It was now that the severity of his plight struck home. God knows what Dr Rives had said in his letter, written for him by Marcel presumably, but here he was, his hair looking like a scarecrow, his clothes stinking of the farmyard, his flies undone because Marcel had cut the buttons off, a scar across his face, his shoes with holes in them and filthy fingernails, about to announce himself as a Peer of the Realm.

‘My full title,’ said Powerscourt rather sadly, ‘is Lord Francis Powerscourt. I am an Irish peer.’

‘An Irish peer?’ said the doctor, as if this was the most interesting thing he had heard all day. ‘And tell me, pray, how do they differ from English peers or Scottish peers or Welsh peers? We have grown beyond all this nonsense here in France.’

Powerscourt just restrained himself from pointing out that Dr Belfort’s fellow countrymen had cut most of their peers’ heads off on the guillotine. ‘It is a purely honorary title. Irish peers are not allowed to vote in the British House of Lords.’ Powerscourt remembered suddenly the French governess who had lived in his parents’ house when he was aged between two and fifteen. Her mission was to make all the Powerscourt children fluent in French. She succeeded so well that his accent would pass for that of a native. He sounded like a true Frenchman.

‘Really?’ said the doctor in a condescending voice. ‘How very interesting for you all. How unusual. And tell me, do you work for a living? Do you have an occupation?’

‘I am an investigator. People in England employ me to solve cases of mystery and murder.’ Even as he spoke Powerscourt knew he was in real trouble. The man didn’t believe a word he said. The investigating was only going to make it worse.

‘I see,’ said Dr Belfort, casting a meaningful glance at his young companion. ‘So you are Sherlock Holmes, is it not so, leaving Baker Street for the delights of Burgundy?’

‘You could put it like that, I suppose,’ said Powerscourt, wondering desperately if he could find a way out of this horrible place.

‘We have three Sherlock Holmeses in here already,’ said the doctor. ‘An elderly one, a red-headed one, and one who talks to Dr Watson all the time. Perhaps you will be able to hold meaningful conversations with them. No?’

Powerscourt remained silent. ‘And what brings you to Beaune, Mr Investigator? The Case of the Poisoned Meursault? The Curious Affair at the Hotel Dieu, perhaps?’

Powerscourt sighed. ‘I am looking into a murder case. We believe the wrong man has been charged. I need to go back to work at once or else an innocent man may be sent to the gallows.’

‘Of course you must go back to work. Of course. I’m sure you’ll be able to work very well on the top floor here.’

With that the doctor began writing furiously in a large black notebook. ‘We have seen cases of the paranoid delusions, the illusions of self-importance like this before, have we not?’ He looked over his shoulder at his young assistant as he spoke. ‘But rarely one where the various fantasies fit so well together, I think.’ He talked about Powerscourt as if he were not in the room. Powerscourt remembered English doctors doing exactly the same thing in London. It was a different form of mental illness. The patients only exist in the minds of the doctors. They have no independent life of their own.

Dr Belfort rang a bell on the side of the desk. Another member of the staff of the Maison d’Alienes appeared, clad entirely in pale blue smock and trousers.

‘Third floor,’ he pointed to Powerscourt. ‘Solitary. Same medicine as the rest of them up there. Regular observation for now.’

As Powerscourt was led away Marcel stood aside for him at the door. Marcel looked him straight in the eye. ‘The compliments of the Alchemist, monsieur.’ With that he left the room. The warder took him into the reception area and down a long corridor which seemed even longer than it was because of the lack of any decoration on the walls. There were weak electric lights overhead casting feeble shadows on the wooden floor. Weird noises that might have been screams of ecstasy or terror made their way into the corridor.

Back in his office Dr Belfort dismissed Marcel and thanked him for performing his public duty. ‘The really irritating thing,’ he said to his assistant, ‘about these poor patients of ours is how fervently they believe in their own fantasies. The man’s real name, according to the doctor, is Albert Bouchet. Lived around Beaune all his life apparently. But if that peasant who thought he was an Irish peer had been dressed up in fancy clothes we might, we just might have believed him.’

‘I think you underestimate yourself, sir,’ said the young man. ‘I’m sure you’d have rumbled him whatever he’d been wearing.’

There was a staircase to their left at the end of the corridor. Powerscourt stopped cursing the Alchemist and suddenly remembered a very sad poem, written by a man called John Clare who was locked up in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum for over twenty years.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I am the self consumer of my woes,

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;

And yet I am, and live with shadows tossed.

Powerscourt wondered about the inhabitants of this prison disguised as a mental hospital. He tried to work out how the Alchemist had managed to have him locked up in this madhouse. He thought of the three Sherlock Holmeses, deprived of opium and the solid sense of Dr Watson and Mrs Hudson’s cooking. Were there Napoleons strutting round these dismal corridors, triumphant after Austerlitz, worried after Borodino or the retreat from Moscow, despairing on the bleak rock of St Helena before they were fifty years old? Mad poets perhaps, Baudelaires of the insane world, spouting decadent but meaningless verse in their Spartan cells? Philosophe lunatics preaching the rational virtues of The Enlightenment to a few colleagues in the asylum canteen?

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life nor joys

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems:

And e’en the dearest – that I loved the best -

Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

They were on the second floor now, twenty pairs of eyes, alerted by the sound of boot on wood, staring through their peepholes at the latest arrival. Welcome to the Maison de Fous. Welcome to Hell. Powerscourt remembered one doctor telling him how easy it can be to have people declared insane. Convince the relevant people that somebody is mad and then everybody else will believe it. We all know he’s mad. It’s common knowledge. This doctor had terrifying stories of the wrong people being locked up, in Ireland, or in France, or even in England. It was very difficult to liberate victims such as these because nobody knew they had been locked away in the first place.

They were on the third floor now. The warder was sifting his way through an enormous pile of keys. At last he found the right one and pushed Powerscourt into his cell.