Death of a wine merchant lfp-9

by David Dickinson

  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?’

  The young man ran his hand through a great mop of straw-coloured hair and did a few quick doodles on the pad in front of him. Vicary was the expert in money and accounting, Septimus the master in the acquisition of the wines and spirits. ‘What do you say to nine shillings a dozen, Septimus? A shilling a case cheaper than Colvilles. That should send the customers flocking in to Piccadilly Wine, don’t you think?’

  ‘Will we still make a profit on that?’

  ‘I should think so. But if it goes well we may need some more of Burgundy’s finest. Could you rustle up another hundred cases or so, do you think?’

  Septimus Parry smiled. ‘I shall see to it now, partner,’ he said and set off at once for a warehouse by the Thames.

  Sir Pericles Freme lived in a small but perfect Georgian house not far from the Powerscourts in Chelsea. An immaculately dressed footman showed Powerscourt into a drawing room on the first floor. Sir Pericles still had the bearing of a man who had spent many years in the military. He was in his late fifties with neatly combed white hair and a small white moustache. He read the note from George Berry and ushered Powerscourt into a chair.

  ‘Can’t say I envy you this job, Powerscourt. Never easy getting a man off a murder charge, still harder if the fellow won’t speak at all. You want to know about the Colville wine business, as I understand it from Berry, you want to know if there was anything going on there that could have led to his death. Am I right?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘How much do you know about wine? Forgive me for asking such an elementary question but it has a bearing on what my response is going to be.’

 
; ‘Well,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I buy, on the whole, what the good people at Berry Bros. tell me to buy. And then I drink it. Or rather my close friend Johnny Fitzgerald drinks it. I’ve always thought he consumes more of my wine than I do myself.’

  ‘I think most people have friends like that,’ said Freme, ‘but you wouldn’t call yourself an expert?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘I see.’ Sir Pericles paused for a moment, flicking a speck of dust from his trousers. ‘It’s a very strange thing, wine. I often think the business is like diamonds, it has such a fascination for some people. It’s totally irrational. I know some of my distinguished colleagues in the trade who will tell you how elated they become at the prospect of tasting some of those very superior Bordeaux or burgundies. They’re in a state of high excitement for days or even weeks beforehand. And when they come back, if they’ve been lucky, they will tell you about the taste of the stuff with a faraway look in their eyes as if they’ve been to paradise. But there are a number of problems with the trade, always have been.

  ‘The first is that the wine isn’t the same from year to year. It never is. Some years the weather is good, some years the weather is bad. If you’re growing Chateau Powerscourt it just isn’t going to taste the same in 1908 as it did in 1906. So what do you do? Some people try to mix the bad years up with the good ones, nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t always work. At the top end of the market the merchants will tell their favoured clients not to buy any of the 1906 at all, to wait for another good year and then buy more than you need for a single year. The problem is more acute at the bottom end of the market. Colvilles and their rivals aren’t going to tell their customers not to buy any of their own-label claret in 1911 because it’s been a bad year. Somehow they have to try to make it taste the same, or nearly the same as in a good year. The people who can tell them how to do that are the blenders, and good blenders earn themselves enormous sums of money. Some of them indeed retire early.’

  ‘Who decides what is good and what is not so good?’ said Powerscourt.

  ‘Very good question that,’ replied Sir Pericles. ‘There’s a sort of Stock Exchange of views at work. The word goes out from the merchants and negociants and the shippers that such and such is a good year. It’s a bit like the Stock Exchange deciding that such and such a share is a good investment and everybody piles in. It’s not like a weighing machine where you can say this crate is exactly one ton and a quarter and everybody will agree. It’s more diffuse than that.’

  ‘Do the experts always agree with each other?’

  ‘Usually they do. Somebody may take a contrary view but that’s quite rare.’

  ‘And how easy is it to cheat, to forge wines in the same way people forge banknotes or pictures?’

  ‘It’s easier than you might think. It’s difficult at the very top end of the scale but not impossible. But in the middle range it’s quite tempting. Suppose you have some land near Montrachet or Chablis. The ground is the same, the grapes are the same, the weather is the same as it is for the great vineyards in those parts. What is to stop you putting Montrachet or Chablis labels on your produce and selling it for two or three times the price you would get for it with the correct label? Labels are changed all the time and the ignorance of the public is the biggest reason the crooks get away with it. Let’s take champagne. Vast amounts of it are consumed at weddings and parties where most of the customers haven’t tasted champagne since the last wedding they went to. How are they to know if it is the real thing or not? The best sparkling Saumur used to get passed off as champagne until some bright fellow – it might even have been a Colville, now I come to think of it – realized that you could sell the Saumur for much less than the champagne and still make a tidy profit because you could sell much more of it.’

  ‘How easy is it to forge the wine altogether, so that it’s never been near the Douro Valley or the Cote d’Or?’

  ‘Powerscourt,’ said Freme sadly, ‘I could take you to Sete on the south coast of France or Hamburg or, I suspect, to places in London where you can walk in and order thousands of bottles of selected wines for collection within forty-eight hours. Sete is particularly famous for forgery because it’s so close to Algeria and all that red they produce. This is aimed at what you might call the bottom end of the market, Colvilles’ house claret if you like. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but that’s the end where forgery becomes very tempting.’

  ‘Some years ago,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I carried out an investigation into a death that involved forged paintings. Much of that revolved round the question of attribution, whose voice would be believed when he said that the Titian was a Titian or was not a Titian. Is it the same with the wine business?’

  ‘In a sense it is. It’s a sort of con trick in a way. At the top end when the posh merchants on the Quai des Chartrons in Bordeaux say this Latour is very good, everybody believes it. At the bottom end people believe they are drinking claret when the label says it is Colvilles’ own. Let me read you something. I’ve been collecting these recipes for years now.’

  Sir Pericles Freme rummaged around in his desk and produced a large sheet of paper. He fixed a pair of pince-nez on his face and began:

  ‘“An admirable wine, very like claret, and even surpassing claret in strength, may be prepared by the following process. Take any quantity of Malaga raisins, chop them very small, put to every pound of them a quart of water, and let them stand in an open vessel having a cloth thrown over it for a week or nine days, stirring them well daily. Then, drawing off as much of the liquid as will run, and straining out the rest from the raisins by pressure, turn up the whole in a seasoned barrel; and, to every gallon of the liquid, add a pint of the cold juice of ripe elder berries, which had previously been boiled or scummed. Let it stand, closely stopped, about six weeks; then draw it off, as far as is tolerably fine, into another vessel; add half a pound of moist sugar to every gallon of liqueur; and when it gets perfectly fine, draw it into bottles.” Less than a century old, that recipe, Powerscourt. Maybe we should try to make it some day.’

  ‘Doubtless somebody already has,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Sir Pericles, could I ask you a favour? Could I ask you to cast your eye or perhaps your palate over the Colville products and let me know if any of them are suspect?’

  ‘With pleasure,’ replied Freme. ‘I presume time is not on your side, Powerscourt. How soon would you like to come back for my report?’

  ‘Could I say in three days? All that tasting must be a time-consuming business. And could I beg you one further favour on my return?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Freme.

  ‘Could we have another of your splendid recipes on my return visit?’

  Sir Pericles laughed. ‘Oh, yes, we can. I’ve got plenty more of those.’

  4

  Powerscourt found Lady Lucy in a very troubled state when he returned home from Freme and his recipes. Even the arrival of Johnny Fitzgerald did not appear to be enough to calm her spirits. Fitzgerald was Powerscourt’s oldest friend and companion in arms. They had served together in the Army in India and Johnny had worked on almost all of Powerscourt’s investigations since. Johnny was just under six feet tall with bright blue eyes that often danced with mischief or merriment.

  ‘Oh, Francis, it’s all too terrible,’ Lady Lucy began, ‘that poor family. And those poor children. I don’t know what we’re going to do!’

  ‘Hold on a moment, my love,’ said her husband, ‘take it slowly. Which family? Whose children? What might we have to do?’ He smiled a smile of welcome at his friend.

  Lady Lucy felt that she might fall victim to one of those male conspiracies where the men look knowingly at each other and you can hear them say ‘Women!’ without actually opening their lips.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, and stared firmly at the painting of one of her ancestors on the wall above the fireplace for a moment. ‘You remember I said I had a cousin who was married into some par
t of the Colvilles? And that she had a rather disagreeable husband called Timothy Barrington White?’

  ‘I do recall that. I remember now. I’ve been hearing horror stories about this Barrington White every now and again for most of our married life.’

  ‘Well,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘he’s really done it this time. You know how he fell in and out of jobs all the time. Eventually my cousin Millicent, Milly we always call her, persuaded one of the Colvilles to give him a job in the wine business. I think he had to look after that enormous gin distillery they have near Hammersmith. I don’t know what exactly went on but something really bad must have happened. You see, the Colvilles fired him.’

  ‘I can’t think it’s a very strenuous job, looking after a gin distillery these days,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald with a knowing air. ‘You put the stuff in, mix it all about, wait a bit and put it into those funny bottles.’

  Lady Lucy was not sure that it was as easy as all that. ‘What’s more, there was a terrible row with Randolph and Cosmo Colville when they fired him.’

  ‘I always thought they looked after their people,’ said Powerscourt, ‘those Colvilles and the other wine merchants. Loyalty a great premium, take care of the staff, noblesse oblige, all that sort of thing.’

  ‘The point is this,’ said Lady Lucy, feeling that the conversation was beginning to drift away from her, ‘there was this tremendous row. The Colvilles told Terrible Timothy that he’d never work in the wine trade in England ever again. They even refused to pay his last month’s wages. And they’ve got no money, no money of their own, that family. I mean, Milly did have some money, but I think Timothy got through that fairly quickly at the start of their marriage. And they’ve got three children under five. What’s poor Milly going to do? I must go and see her, Francis, they only live in West Kensington, it won’t take long to get there.’