David Dickinson - Death of a wine merchant

Powerscourt and the solicitor sat discreetly at the back of the church. Randolph Colville had a large turn-out come to see him off. More than half the congregation had been present at a very different service less than a fortnight before when Colville had married Nash at the church of St Peter at Brympton. Willoughby and Georgina Nash had turned up out of sympathy with their daughter’s new family. Walter Colville, father of the dead man, seemed to those who knew him to have aged about five years in the past ten days. His face before the wedding and the murder looked like the face of a man who still entertains hope for the future, who even at the age of seventy-nine can still make plans for himself and his family. Now that face looked as if it had collapsed inwards. His eyes were dead and his cheeks were almost hollow. To bury one son was bad enough; to have to face the prospect of burying the other for murdering the first one, too terrible to contemplate. No parent could think of their child being hung, the rope round the neck, the drop into the dark, the last desperate fluttering of the legs and then oblivion, without shuddering. The only thing Walter had resolved to do was to change his will but he wondered if he should wait till after the trial in case he had to change it again.

At the very back of the church was an elderly porter from Colvilles’ gin manufactory in Hammersmith, who had been with the firm for over forty years. He looked out for this investigator man people said the family had employed to secure the acquittal of Mr Cosmo. He identified Powerscourt fairly quickly. The elderly porter, whose name was Howard, wondered if he should tell Powerscourt about some of the strange things he had seen at Colvilles in the last six months.

It began to rain heavily when they took the body out of the church for its interment in the Colville grave. The vicar spoke the last words of the service at great speed. Some of the mourners had had the foresight to bring umbrellas. Others stood stoically as the earth was thrown in over Randolph Colville’s coffin and let the water run off their heads and down their faces. One of the Colville children was crying inconsolably by the graveside. Grooms and chauffeurs huddled inside their capes or kept the doors firmly closed in the long queue of vehicles lined up outside the church. Powerscourt suddenly felt that he should not be there, that he was unwelcome.

That feeling was reinforced when he went back to the Colville house for drinks and the reading of the will. Randolph’s house was a very large Victorian villa on the far side of the road that ran beside the Thames. There were handsome reception rooms at the front with views over the river and two floors above, with balconies, devoted to bedrooms and bathrooms. There was a large garden at the back with a tennis court. Powerscourt discovered that the Colvilles seemed to be divided into two hostile camps. One believed, with the police, that the only explanation for the bizarre circumstances surrounding Randolph’s death was indeed that Cosmo had shot him. To this faction he, Powerscourt, was trying to pervert the course of justice. And the other faction, the one that believed in Cosmo’s innocence, which you might have thought would be sympathetic to Powerscourt, was not sympathetic at all. They did not see why it was necessary to employ anybody to establish Cosmo’s innocence. Any fool could see that he was not guilty and there was no need for meddling aristocrats.

There were just two things that Powerscourt learnt in that house of mourning by the Thames. The first came from a man, obviously a neighbour, who had taken one glass too many of Colvilles’ Finest Champagne. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he began, trying to put a friendly arm round Powerscourt’s shoulder, ‘strangest thing I ever saw,’ he shook his head at the memory, ‘took me three or four games to work out what was going on. I was watching Randolph play tennis with a friend of his one weekend a couple of years ago. It was bizarre. Randolph never hit a backhand, not once. The fellow was ambidextrous, left-handed forehand followed right-handed forehand. Bloody effective it was too.’ The other piece of intelligence, delivered with due solemnity by Christopher Fuller, was that Randolph left just over two hundred thousand pounds in his will. Everything was left in trust for his widow in her lifetime and then passed on to the children.

As Powerscourt made his way back to the station to return to London he thought about what the solicitor had said on the train earlier that day. He did some calculations about Randolph Colville’s missing money. If Fuller was right, Colville should have left not two hundred thousand pounds but three hundred, maybe even four hundred thousand pounds. Where had it gone, all this money? Was he being blackmailed? Had the missing money led to his death?

In a small office north of Oxford Street the day after the funeral the newest competitors to the Colvilles were holding their regular morning meeting. Piccadilly Wine consisted of a number of shops in the suburbs of London. The locations, Bromley, Twickenham, Camden Town, were carefully chosen. These were not places where the rich would go to order cases of Chateau Latour or Chateau d’Yquem, but in these humble streets were a great many people who would buy cheaper wines regularly. Septimus Parry and Vicary Dodds, both graduates of Westminster and Oxford, were hoping to make a great fortune for themselves. They might not sell the best champagne to Mr Soames Forsyte in his beautiful house in Chelsea, but they could sell claret and burgundy in enormous volumes to Mr Charles Pooter and his fellow nobodies increasing and multiplying across the suburbs of England. In a way they were following the trail of the Colvilles themselves who had deliberately sought a different clientele from the more ancient and more fashionable wine merchants clustered round St James’s.

There was only one topic of conversation this morning, the fate of the Colvilles.

‘Cosmo is still locked up in some ghastly prison,’ said Vicary Dodds cheerfully.

‘Not much to drink in there, I shouldn’t think. I met a man at the club last night,’ Septimus picked up the baton, ‘who said that Cosmo hasn’t uttered a word in his defence. My man said that if he didn’t start talking soon he’d end up on the gallows.’

Neither of the young men actually said so, but the discomfiture of the Colvilles meant a great business opportunity for Piccadilly Wine.

‘Do you think we should send a card of condolence, or something like that?’ said Vicary.

Septimus laughed. ‘Don’t think that would be in very good taste, Vicary. They say old man Walter is very knocked up about the whole thing. They’ve turned into a ship with almost no officers, Randolph dead, Cosmo in clink, Walter pulling his hair out. What do we do about it?’

Vicary Dodds looked at a great chart on the wall which showed the available stocks the firm had in hand of the various wines they sold. ‘If we’re going to steal some of their customers, we’d better get a special offer into the shops as soon as possible. We’ll have to place some advertisements in the local papers too. We can’t do it with champagne, we haven’t enough of it and it would take too long to get some more here in time. We can’t do it with port as the Colville port is so cheap we couldn’t undercut them. I’ve always wondered where they get their port from, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had never seen the day break over Portugal at all. Never mind, claret, that’s the thing we do have lots of at the moment.’

Septimus pulled a newspaper from a drawer in his desk. ‘They’re offering claret – a pure Bordeaux luncheon wine at ten shillings a case,’ he said. ‘Pretty good offer that, if you ask me. Mind you, I’ve never heard of pure Bordeaux luncheon wine and I bet you the good drinkers of Bordeaux haven’t either. Probably all grown in somebody’s back garden and diluted with watered-down Algerian. Anyway, what do you think we could manage, Vicary?’