David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Powerscourt had been making a careful examination of the man’s keys. He carried an enormous bunch of them attached to a ring on his belt. Each one, he saw, had a small tag beside it.

‘Settling in all right, are you?’ The warder believed in being as polite to the patients as he could. That was what his local priest Father Jugie had told him when he discovered the warder’s occupation. ‘They are all God’s children, they are all worthy of his grace. The good Lord does not mind if they speak to him in a different language.’

‘I can’t complain,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m not sure about the food, mind you. I haven’t actually had any yet.’

‘I’ll be back with that in about a quarter of an hour. I have to give the medicine out first. I’ve got yours just here. This’ll calm you down, it calms everybody down.’

He handed over a large beaker filled with a cloudy liquid. Powerscourt smiled at the warder and took it into his mouth. He did not swallow but went back to lie on his bed. He thought it would be easier to avoid conversation if he was lying down. The stuff was beginning to burn the back of his mouth. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold it ‘See you in a moment,’ said the warder and shuffled off on his rounds. Powerscourt strode to his bucket and spat into it. He wondered if the stuff could weaken you even by being in your mouth for a few minutes. A quarter of an hour later the warder, who he discovered was called Jean, brought his supper, a stringy piece of meat that might once have been pork and some overcooked vegetables. There was no wine. As he lay down to sleep Patient Number 35601 reflected that it had indeed been an interesting day. He wondered about Lady Lucy. He decided to stop fretting about the Alchemist as there was nothing he could do about him now. Escape, that was the thing. Escape, before the medicine turned him into one of the waking dead. Escape in time to pursue his inquiries in Beaune. And as he drifted off to sleep he remembered that from the morning there were only a few days left before the trial of Cosmo Colville. Powerscourt fell asleep with the warder’s belt drifting across his brain, huge bunches of keys floating through his mind, enormous keys two or three feet long, long thin keys, pencil slim and several inches long, ordinary-looking keys that might open your own front door, tiny delicate keys for opening drawers or secret caskets. On that belt, he felt sure, were the keys of his kingdom, twelve feet by eight, one rough bed, one bucket in the corner, one small window to the outside world, one slit in a door for your enemies to make sure you were still incarcerated. Welcome to the Maison d’Alienes.

Lady Lucy Powerscourt dozed fitfully through the night in her Beaune hotel. No Dukes of Burgundy after whom the establishment was named came to visit her in her dreams. Sometimes her right arm reached for the space where her husband would have been, but Francis was not there. Some of the time she thought Francis was still alive. The rest of the time she thought he was dead. These fears had crossed her mind often in the past when she felt his life was in danger. How would she tell the children? How would the twins survive, growing up without a father? Would they be damaged in some way? She wondered about the funeral arrangements. Would there be some sort of Memorial Service for him, graced by various forgers and burglars and a whole host of characters Francis had saved from prison or the gallows? And where would he want to be buried, laid to rest? She suspected if she were honest that he might like to join his parents in a Powerscourt grave in a Protestant cemetery in his native Ireland. Then I could not be with him at the end, she said to herself, we’d end up in different cemeteries hundreds of miles apart and I couldn’t bear it. For the first time that day she began to cry.

It was a short paragraph in the newspapers that did it. Nathaniel Colville was just finishing his breakfast when it caught his eye. He was to tell friends later that it was almost a miracle he saw it at all for he scarcely bothered to read the newspapers any more. ‘Trouble at wine merchant’ the headline said. It was part of a daily column that conveyed slightly gossipy information to its readers. ‘We are given to understand,’ Nathaniel read on, ‘that times are not easy for the firm of Colvilles where one of the partners has been murdered and the other is awaiting trial for the deed in Pentonville prison. No figure of substance has, as yet, appeared to take their place in the direction of the firm.’

Nathaniel put down his piece of toast. Trouble at wine merchant indeed. No figure of substance. It was monstrous. There was nothing a man could sue for but the innuendoes were as broad as daylight. The man could almost have put his message up in lights at Piccadilly Circus. Nathaniel shouted for his dog and set forth to walk off his wrath in the back garden. This garden had once been the envy of the other Colvilles. It was enormous. There was a tennis court on one side and a croquet lawn on the other. Banks of roses used to circle the vast expanse of grass. Ranks of fruit trees and bushes were organized at the bottom. Flowers whose names Nathaniel never knew came up every year to grace his garden. Now the senior gardener was on his last legs and the younger one was not much better. He was over seventy and while the spirit might have been willing the flesh was undoubtedly weak. If you knew where to look you could usually spot him asleep in the early afternoons, snoring quietly behind the raspberries. The grass on the tennis court was overgrown, baselines and tram lines scarcely visible now. It was almost halfway up the croquet hoops on the other side, so deep that the balls themselves would have been hard to see. Nathaniel’s dog Bacchus much preferred the wilderness to the order that had prevailed before. He would disappear into the wilder sections of the garden and leap up and down in pursuit of insects. Nathaniel decided this morning that his garden had become the mirror image of his life. Lack of organization. Bad planning. No strategic direction. The problems here were the same as those at the firm. Trouble at wine merchant indeed! Damn the journalists! Damn the newspapers! I may be seventy-two years old, Nathaniel said to himself, but I’m not too ancient to get on top of things. I’m going to pay off these two old fellows and employ some new gardeners. I’m going to put on my best suit and hat and go down to Colvilles this very morning. I’m going to take charge. And I’m going to find somebody to help me in the meantime. And then I’ll find some bright young fellow from some other firm to come and run the place. Colvilles were not born to provide idle tittle-tattle in the financial pages.

He strode back to his house and scribbled a short note. A footman was despatched to deliver it to the Chelsea residence of Sir Pericles Freme. Nathaniel had known him years ago and though he might not be able to secure his services full-time Freme could still join the board of Colvilles in an advisory capacity. He would not be alone. Nathaniel Colville had never felt happy doing business alone. All his life he had worked closely with his brother Walter. Now he would have a new companion in arms.

An hour later Nathaniel and Sir Pericles were installed in the Colville Head Office They brought with them an air of confidence, of experience. These were men who knew what they were doing. Inside forty-eight hours morale had improved dramatically. Colvilles, people in the trade said, are back in business.

Powerscourt slept surprisingly well in his hospital cell. He awoke to find that the outlines of a plan were forming in his mind. He rejected his first option, bribery. He had in his pocket as many francs as a warder here might earn in six months. The warder might help him escape, or he might tell the authorities and then Powerscourt would be a marked man, locked up somewhere even more forbidding, the knock-out drops in his daily medicine increased to a giant’s dose. He wondered at first about violence, about why nobody attacked the warders, about the violence that might be needed to overpower the guard and steal his keys. Surely some of the prisoners must be big and burly, bodies strengthened by years of manual labour, well able to overcome a warder before breakfast. Then he remembered the knock-out medicines. What had the warder said to him yesterday evening? ‘This’ll calm you down, it calms everybody down.’ The hospital authorities must have worked out how much medicine was needed to incapacitate every size and shape of patient they were likely to encounter. Maybe they had a book full of details with patients calibrated by age, weight, height, occupation. Extra large doses for blacksmiths and prize fighters. They didn’t have to worry, the authorities, about violence from the inmates. The madmen were incapable of it. Powerscourt tried to work out if that huge key ring the man carried contained the keys for all the doors in the hospital. He remembered from the way in that he had gone straight from the reception area to the third floor without any gates or barriers in the way. Did the man have the key to the front door? If not, did he have the key of some other exit, back door, side door, tradesmen’s entrance, madmen’s gate?