David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

‘No further questions, my lord,’ said Pugh, consulting his notes and giving the jury time to take in Mrs Colville’s evidence.

‘Please call Mrs Randolph Colville,’ said Pugh. Almost a hundred pairs of eyes followed Hermione Colville on her long journey towards the witness box.

‘Mrs Colville,’ Pugh began, ‘we have heard from your sister-in-law about the mental condition of your late husband in the days before his death. Would you agree with her about his state of mind?’

Mrs Randolph Colville glanced quickly over to Sir Jasper. ‘I would agree,’ she said.

‘And would you agree with her that it is possible he committed suicide?’

‘I would, yes,’ she said.

‘Did he mention it in conversation, that he might take his own life?’

‘I’m afraid there was no conversation in those days. We were not speaking to each other.’

‘And was that,’ said Pugh, taking a small sip of water, ‘because he wasn’t speaking to you or because you weren’t speaking to him?’

‘I’m sorry to say I wasn’t speaking to him. I was so angry. The last words we exchanged were a discussion about who should walk the dogs the evening before that letter arrived.’

‘Perhaps you could tell us, Mrs Colville, about your own state of mind in the period following the arrival of the letter from France?’

She stopped and looked up at the prisoner in the dock.

‘Some of the time,’ she said, ‘I was out of my mind with rage. I was angry with Randolph, so angry that I could scarcely look at him. He’d betrayed us all. I was angry at that French whore. But I knew I had to reorder my life. There was no point in being angry all the time.’

Charles Augustus Pugh took a deep breath. Now or never. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

‘Mrs Colville,’ he said, ‘I want to put a proposition to you if I may. We have heard from your sister and from yourself this morning about the possibility of suicide, that Randolph Colville took his own life. It certainly seems to fit some of the available evidence. If the jury were to believe it they would have to acquit the defendant. It would be in both your interests, an acquittal. Your sister-in-law would regain her husband. You would regain your brother-in-law. Mr Cosmo Colville would presumably regain his voice as well as his freedom. Is that not the case, Mrs Colville?’

‘I suppose it is, yes.’

Pugh paused and picked up a piece of stiff cardboard from the table of exhibits. ‘But I want to put to you, Mrs Colville, a rather different sequence of events.’

Mrs Colville looked yet again at Cosmo Colville. There was a desperate pleading in her eyes. There was no signal in reply. Everyone had gone completely silent in court. The eyes of judge, jury, pressmen, spectators were fixed on the slim figure in the witness box whose last conversation with her dead husband had been about who should walk the dogs.

‘I put it to you, Mrs Colville, that on the morning of the wedding, you were indeed out of your mind with rage. Your husband had betrayed you. It wasn’t as if he betrayed you with some compliant mistress hidden away in the Home Counties. Randolph had betrayed you with another woman in another country. Not only had he betrayed you, he had actually married this other woman in Beaune. You were left, only half a wife. Is that not so?’

‘If you say so.’

‘Your future and that of your family were on the very edge of ruin. Your children would be known for ever after as the children of the bigamist. So, you went to the room in your house where the guns are kept. I have heard accounts of this room, gentlemen of the jury. There are enough firearms in there to equip a small regiment. You picked out the pistol because you knew how it worked. Is that not the case?’

Mrs Colville did not reply. A look that might have been fear flashed across her face.

Pugh paused and took another sip of his water. Lady Lucy was holding her husband’s hand very tightly, her eyes fixed on Hermione Colville. Richard Napier appeared to be making a sketch of the scales of justice that sat on top of the Old Bailey roof.

‘You kept the pistol in your bag all the way on that journey to Norfolk. You attended the wedding. You took a glass of champagne in the Nashes’ garden, Dutch courage amid the flower beds and the broken fountain.

‘I put it to you, Mrs Colville,’ Pugh’s eyes were locked on to the face of the woman in the witness box, ‘that at some time in the half-hour between the end of the service and the wedding breakfast, you carried out a quick reconnaissance of the first floor of Brympton Hall. I presume that you thought the state bedroom was a good distance away from the room where the food was to be served.’

Pugh held out his diagram of the first floor of Brympton Hall for the jury.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘here is the Long Gallery, looking out over the gardens. Here is the state bedroom round the corner, where the murder took place. Here and here,’ he pointed to the stairs to the garden at the end of the Long Gallery and the other stairs down from the state bedroom, were the entrances and exits open to those who did not want to come up by the Grand Staircase back here.

‘I put it to you, Mrs Colville, that you managed to speak to your husband to lure him up the staircase into the state bedroom. You pulled the pistol out of your bag. You shot him. You dropped the pistol on the ground and rushed out of the house down the staircase in the state bedroom, along the opposite side of the Hall to where the champagne had been served, and back into the house to join the rest of the guests by the main entrance near the main staircase. Aroused by the shot, Cosmo arrives to see what’s going on. He picks up the gun off the floor and sits down on the chair while he works out what to do. There he is found. There he is arrested while you are preparing to eat your wedding breakfast a couple of rooms away. There, Mrs Colville, that’s how it was, isn’t it?’

She was sobbing now. ‘No, that’s not how it was,’ Hermione Colville managed to say, ‘not the last bit anyway.’

‘Tell us about it,’ said Pugh.

‘Cosmo came in just as I was leaving,’ she said, the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I still had the gun in my hand. Cosmo took it. “Give me that,” he said, “and get back down those stairs as fast as you can.”’

There were shouts of ‘No! No! No!’ from the bar of the court.

For the first time since the trial began Mr Justice Black raised his voice. ‘Mrs Colville! Mrs Colville! Please pay attention! You do not have to answer any further questions that might incriminate yourself in any future proceedings. Do you understand?’

Mrs Randolph Colville nodded sadly. Cosmo looked as though he was trying to climb out of the dock into the main body of the court. The warders manhandled him roughly back into his chair. A great sigh ran through the court. Mrs Randolph Colville had collapsed in a chair, watched over by two sturdy policemen. Lady Lucy was trembling. Detective Chief Inspector Weir was striding across the court for a conference with Sir Jasper. The newspapermen were elbowing their way towards the entrance as fast as they could. Some of them muttered to each other that they hadn’t seen such a sensational case this century. Pugh was sitting down, talking quietly with his junior, other barristers and solicitors whispering their congratulations. Powerscourt felt only pity for this poor woman, driven halfway out of her mind by her husband’s crimes.

Emily Colville nudged her mother gently in the ribs. ‘That’s what I told you on the night of the wedding, Mama,’ she whispered. Emily did not see fit to tell her mother that she had known for years about Randolph’s other wife in France. That, after all, was what Tristram had been blackmailing him about.