David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘There you go,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘you’re home at last.’

I long for scenes where man has never trod,

A place where woman never smiled or wept:

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,

The grass below – above the vaulted sky.

By late afternoon Lady Lucy Powerscourt was seriously worried. Maybe it was her nerves, maybe it was the local cooking, but the chicken she had at lunchtime had not agreed with her. Stomach pains were added to the knot of anxiety that possessed her. She had walked for an hour round the hotel square, reasoning that if Francis were to return they must surely see each other beneath the plane trees. Beaune had gone quiet by late afternoon. Lady Lucy wondered what the French did for the rest of Sunday. They went to church, of course. Then they had an enormous lunch with as many relatives as they could lay their hands on. And then? Perhaps they all went to sleep from the smallest baby to the oldest grandmere . The worst thing, she kept telling herself as she contemplated French family life, was that, unlike them, she had nobody to talk to. In London she could have picked up the telephone and talked to her relatives for the rest of the day. She could have located Johnny Fitzgerald and poured out her worries to him. She had discovered the telegraphic address of William Burke but she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. She knew men sent telegraphic messages to each other all the time, often concerning the movements of share prices or the winners of important horse races. But the telegraph was an alien male world that she did not understand. Late in the afternoon she enlisted the help of a young man on the hotel reception who had been sending telegraphs all afternoon, triumphant messages of purchases of the contents of the wine auction to the hotels and grand restaurants of Paris. Olivier, for such was the young man’s name, undertook to send her message. It would, he assured her, be with Mr William Burke in his bank first thing in the morning.

‘Francis missing,’ she wrote. She had some distant memory that you weren’t meant to use too many words. ‘Please tell Johnny Fitzgerald and Mr Pugh. Replies to this number. Most urgent.’

She felt slightly better after the despatch. She might not be winning the war, but at least she had sent for reinforcements. Not for the first time that day she wondered what Francis would have wanted her to do. And where he was. And if he was still alive.

As the street lights were illuminated in the fashionable district of Holland Park in west London Sir Jasper Bentinck KC sat at his desk on the top floor of his house overlooking the great wide open spaces across the road. It was his custom at this time to read through the most pressing of his forthcoming cases. Monday and Tuesday, he was appearing for the Crown in Rex versus Griffiths, a straightforward case of fraud. Later in the week he was leading for the prosecution in Rex versus Colville. Sir Jasper had read the papers some weeks before the committal hearing and been astonished at the lack of any proper defence. Charles Augustus Pugh, he saw, was to be the counsel for the defence at the Old Bailey and Pugh was not a man to let his clients down. He also had a reputation for springing surprise witnesses on the court at the very last minute. Sir Jasper lit a large cigar and stared upwards at his ceiling. He remained in this position for some fifteen minutes, searching through the evidence in his mind for what might be the weak link in the prosecution’s case, some unexplored avenue where the defence might yet rally their forces for a surprise victory. Try as he might, Sir Jasper could find no holes in his case. He was not a man given to self-doubt or self-criticism, Sir Jasper. Leading barristers from the Middle Temple or any other Temple seldom are. If he could find no weakness in the case, then there was no weakness in it.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was wondering about the catering arrangements in his new establishment. There were no lists pasted on the back of the door informing clients about the times of meals, particularly breakfast, and the time by which they must vacate their room on their day of departure. Somehow he doubted there was much information available anywhere here about days of departure. Probably there was none at all. Nor were there any menus to be seen. He wondered if the solitaries like himself were given room service for their meals while the rest of the customers, accommodated, he suspected, in vast undecorated dormitories, ate equally cheerless food in some huge canteen. He wondered if the food in a French asylum would be better than in an English one. Did they serve a glass or two of wine with lunch and dinner, surely part of the ancient ancestral inheritance of every Frenchman in this part of the world?

Powerscourt began to pace around his cell. It was not large, about twelve feet by eight. There was one small window looking out over the dark. He pulled as hard as he could on the bars but they yielded nothing at all. There was a slit in the door on to the corridor, designed to let people look in rather than the other way round. The door itself was sturdy and the hinges that bound it to the wall were strong. The floorboards, he discovered, lying flat on them for ease of inspection, were joined together with some adhesive that would not give way to human hand or, he suspected, to human hand with hammer. No plank to batter a warder could be constructed out of this floor. There was nothing for him in the walls either. He tried knocking as hard as he could on the two sides of his cell but there was no reply. There was a crude bucket in the corner that would be useless as a weapon. There remained the bed. Powerscourt pulled off the mattress. It was thicker than he would have expected. Maybe the inmates were encouraged to sleep as long as possible and cause less work for the warders. He remembered suddenly the doctor prescribing for him the same medicine as the rest of the third floor. Were they all solitaries on this floor? And what should he do with the medicine when it came? He felt sure it would be some powerful form of slow-you-down-and-make-you-sleepy medicine, probably designed to turn him into a semi-automaton in a week or so, capable of a few bodily functions, incapable of thought. He suspected this was the target condition as far as the doctors were concerned, a collection of patients who had been turned into zombies. All he could think of doing with the medicine was to try to hold it in the back of his mouth until the warder had gone and then spit it into the bucket.

Five minutes later he was trying to prise one iron leg away from the body of his bed and finding it impossible. He heard footsteps approaching up the corridor outside. He threw the mattress back on the bed and sat on it. An elderly man, clad in that blue uniform of the warders, stood in the doorway. Behind him, Powerscourt could just see, he had a primitive sort of trolley. The man was about Powerscourt’s height with no moustache and a bald head.

‘Good evening,’ said the warder in a guarded sort of voice.

‘Good evening to you,’ said Powerscourt cheerfully. Remember the nursery rules, always be polite to the servants and visiting tradesmen like chimney sweeps.

‘Now then,’ said the warder, reaching for something on his trolley, ‘these are for you.’ He tossed Powerscourt a pair of pale green trousers, a worn vest, a green shirt and a green jumper. ‘You must have this on when somebody calls in the morning. They’ll take what you’re wearing now into safekeeping. And you must wear this at all times.’ He tossed Powerscourt a small disc on a string with a number on it. ‘That’s your hospital number, you see,’ the warder said, ‘so we know who you are.’