Death of a wine merchant lfp-9

by David Dickinson

  Powerscourt found Inspector Cooper in Fakenham and took him for tea in the town’s best hotel. The Inspector was working on a more orthodox case now, a burglary and break-in at one of Norfolk’s finest Georgian houses. There was, he told Powerscourt, little chance of finding either the villains or the stolen goods, which he believed had disappeared into the welcoming embrace of London’s antique dealers the day after the crime. The Inspector had never met a private investigator before. He had, he told his new acquaintance, followed one or two of his earlier cases, particularly the one in the West Country cathedral which had featured heavily in the local press. But he was not prepared for Powerscourt’s opening question.

  ‘I gather, Inspector, that you don’t think Cosmo Colville killed his brother.’

  The Inspector blushed. ‘What gave you that idea?’ he stammered after a second or two.

  ‘I can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. I can’t, as the newspapermen are so fond of telling us, I can’t reveal my sources. But it’s true, isn’t it?’

  Albert Cooper thought about what might happen to him if his superiors in the force thought he was giving comfort and indeed assistance to the other side. He thought about his mother and his sisters, dependent on his salary. He thought of his girl, Charlotte, so pretty and so quick when they took their walks together on Sunday afternoons. He thought of the proposal of marriage he was hoping to make on Christmas Eve. Could he throw all that away? For one thing stood out about the young man. It came from his mother and the teachers at his school who had liked him so much. He was a good boy, a regular attender at church on Sundays. Every fibre in his being wanted to tell the truth. He had never expected to be put to the test here over English breakfast tea and scones in the front room of the George Hotel.

  Powerscourt waited. He watched the various emotions flicker over the Inspector’s face. ‘Let me try another question. I have the seating plan from Brympton Hall showing where everybody was to sit down at the wedding feast. I believe you have one or two more diagrams, seating or standing diagrams showing where people were in the garden and just before the shot was fired. Let me put it another way, if I may. Is it your opinion that Cosmo didn’t kill his brother, or do you know it? Do you have some hard evidence to his guilt or innocence?’

  Only two days before, after Cosmo had been charged, the young man had taken out his plans once again, not the one indicating where everybody sat down, but the two before, one showing where the guests had been in the garden, and the other showing where they were just before the shot was fired. Taken together they were, he thought, the finest work of detection he had managed since he joined the force. He had looked at them again rather sadly and put them back in his drawer. He looked up at Powerscourt now with a look of appeal in his eyes.

  ‘It’s opinion, it’s a hunch,’ he said quietly. Surely he couldn’t get into trouble for saying that. Chief Inspector Weir might tell him off but he wouldn’t fire him for saying such a thing.

  ‘Very well,’ said Powerscourt, taking pity on the young man, ‘let us leave it at that for now. My investigation is still in its early stages. Maybe I shall find some other evidence. But let me ask you one final question, Inspector.’

  Cooper nodded miserably.

  ‘Have you watched a man hang? Have you watched that dismal procession early in the morning, the hangman, the criminal, the reluctant vicar, the governor of the prison taking what will be, for one of them, the last walk of his life?’

  Inspector Cooper shook his head.

  ‘Pity that,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’ve always thought that all policemen involved in murder cases should be taken to witness it at first hand. Now then, Inspector. If I find, close to this trial, that I am no further forward than I am today, may I come back and speak to you again? I wouldn’t want you to have the death of an innocent man on your conscience. There are loyalties higher than those to the police service, I can assure you.’

  Albert Cooper looked at him desperately. Was there to be no peace? It seemed easier to agree for now. ‘Of course you can come and see me again if you wish. I can’t stop you. But I can’t guarantee that I will say anything other than I have said today.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Now then, enough of this serious business. More tea? Scone with jam and cream? A slice of this excellent chocolate cake?’

  5

  Questions about legal procedure were racing through Powerscourt’s mind as his train took him back to London. Suppose he made no progress in this investigation before the matter came to trial. He thought they could demand access to police documents as part of the defence case. His memory of court procedures told him they could cross-examine Inspector Cooper if he was called as witness for the prosecution. Could they subpoena his various seating plans, for Powerscourt was sure the young man had at least three of them? That would cause a sensation in court. He could hear Pugh’s voice now, echoing round the Old Bailey. ‘I put it to you, Inspector Cooper, that you do not believe the man in the dock, Cosmo Colville, is guilty of this murder. Look at him before you speak. Is that not the case?’ ‘Tell me, Inspector, for I find this scarcely credible, that you, the principal investigating officer, are not sure my client the defendant murdered his brother?’ Powerscourt felt sure that Pugh would not suggest that Inspector Cooper believed Cosmo was innocent. It would be enough to suggest that he was uncertain. Surely that would be enough to sow a doubt so grave that it would lead the jury to an acquittal. He heard Pugh again: ‘Call Inspector Cooper’s superior officer!’

  And what, he said to himself, as they reached the outskirts of the capital, would happen to Inspector Cooper? Would he be dismissed from the service? Would his superiors forbid him from giving evidence? Could they save him from disgrace by leaking the story to the newspapers? ‘Shame on you, Norfolk police!’ the headline might scream. ‘Brave policeman defies superiors to see justice done and is fired by Chief Constable!’ Powerscourt suspected that the police were as closed a society as the regiments in the British Army. They would close ranks behind their inferiors and their superiors alike. Inspector Cooper would be ruined. He prayed he would never have to go back to Fakenham to speak to the young man again. He wondered if he would try to bring him to court and to the end of his career if he had to. At least Cooper would still be alive. In the meantime, he, Powerscourt, must write to Charles Augustus Pugh.

  Powerscourt found a note from Sir Pericles Freme awaiting him on the hall table in Markham Square. ‘Definitely something odd going on with Colville wine,’ he read, ‘need earlier years’ supply before being able to come to a definite conclusion. Have found splendid recipe involving dried lemon peel for you next time you come. Regards, Freme.’

  What in heaven’s name were people doing making wine with lemon peel, Powerscourt asked himself as he went up the stairs to the first-floor drawing room. He found Lady Lucy hard at work writing letters at the little table by the windows. A pile of envelopes, all carefully addressed in her immaculate hand, were awaiting the attentions of the postman.

  ‘Francis!’ She smiled with pleasure and kissed her husband. ‘How nice to see you. How was Norfolk and that poor Mrs Nash of Brympton Hall?’

  ‘I think Mrs Nash will pull through in the end,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but they’re all terribly upset. The husband is even thinking of selling up and moving away apparently.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Lady Lucy, for whom moving house was one of life’s most serious enterprises, never to be undertaken lightly, ‘how truly terrible for them.’

  ‘But tell me, my love,’ said Powerscourt, ‘what of your cousin Milly and the villainous husband?’

  Lady Lucy looked grave. ‘It’s even worse that we thought, Francis. It’s frightful. Husband Timothy rejoiced that Randolph Colville was dead. “I’m absolutely delighted,” he said to Milly, “and with any luck that other bugger Cosmo won’t be far behind him. Best news I’ve heard in ages. One shot through the heart, the other about to feel the noose round his neck. Excellent!”’<
br />
  ‘How did he know Randolph was shot through the heart? I thought the wedding guests were only told he was dead.’

  ‘I expect it will have leaked out,’ said Lady Lucy sadly, ‘and then the husband of the year went off to celebrate in some drinking club he belongs to near Paddington station. He said he was going to drink to the end of the Colvilles.’

  ‘And what about money, Lucy? Do they have any?’

  ‘Not as far as Milly can find out, they haven’t. That’s why I’m writing all these letters, Francis. I want to see what the family feeling is about lending them some money while times are bad. We may have to call a family meeting.’

  ‘Really,’ said Powerscourt, who had never actually seen one of these mass gatherings of Lucy’s tribe in action. He wondered if they would have to hire Lord’s Cricket Ground or the Royal Albert Hall to accommodate all the relations. ‘How will you stop the husband making off with all the money you raise?’

  ‘I’ve asked them all about that too,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Somebody must have an answer. There’s one other thing, I nearly forgot. Milly claims she’s sure she saw a man at the wedding reception who wasn’t English. She didn’t think he could be a Nash or a Colville.’

  ‘Well, the wine business extends all over Europe. There are bound to have been some foreigners there on the Colville side.’

  ‘I told Milly I’d pass it on, that’s all, Francis. I don’t suppose there’s anything in it.’

  Powerscourt did not reply. But as the hours went by that evening he found himself thinking about it more and more. This was the first indication so far that an alien body, a person not a Colville and not a Nash, had been at the scene and could have been the murderer. He wondered if the young Inspector Colville had discovered the same thing, if somewhere on his seating plans there was a guest marked as X or Y because nobody knew their name. Was that why the detective had decided that Cosmo Colville was not the killer?

  Powerscourt gasped the following morning as he read the Obituary columns of The Times. Lady Lucy looked at him sharply. This wasn’t normal behaviour for her Francis. ‘Is there anything wrong, my love? Something in the paper that’s upset you?’

  Powerscourt held up his hand. ‘Just give me a minute, Lucy, till I’ve finished this.’ When he had finished reading the obituary he folded the newspaper carefully and put it at the back of the table.

  ‘There’s been another death, Lucy, another Colville gone to meet his maker.’

  ‘How sad, that’s two in less than a month. Who is it this time?’

  ‘It’s Walter, the old boy, grandfather of the groom at the wedding, father of Randolph, one of the patriarchs of the Colville wine business.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s anything suspicious, do you, Francis?’

  ‘God knows. They do say he was terribly cut up about the wedding and all that followed. A fellow told me the other day he’d aged ten years since the murder.’

  ‘Poor old man,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘If Randolph hadn’t been killed his father would still be alive today. The Brympton Hall murderer has claimed another victim.’

  The walls of Pentonville seemed virtually impregnable to Powerscourt as he made his way there that afternoon for a meeting with Cosmo Colville. Built in the middle of the last century, the prison had not been notorious until it took over from Newgate the role of Hangman’s Prison in 1902. And when they knocked Newgate down, Powerscourt remembered, they replaced it with the Old Bailey, thus ensuring that the courtrooms and the wigs of the lawyers replaced the noose and the drop of the gallows. Indeed the very gallows that had despatched the condemned at Newgate were dismantled and recreated plank by awful plank at Pentonville. As Powerscourt waited in a little office looking out over the exercise yard he wondered if the prisoners still had to do duty all day on the tread wheel, turning a great wheel with their feet time after time after time for no purpose whatsoever. He remembered that some unlucky prisoners had to turn the wheel two thousand times before they were allowed to eat their breakfast. Sadistic warders were known to enforce a daily regimen of twenty thousand turns on their victims.

  A middle-aged guard brought Cosmo Colville into the room and sat him down opposite Powerscourt at a mean prison table with mean prison chairs. The guard retreated to stand just outside the door. Prison clothes did little for Cosmo. It was hard to imagine that this prisoner who now looked like all the other prisoners had in earlier times eaten at London’s most fashionable restaurants and danced at the grandest hotels on Park Lane and Piccadilly. He made no acknowledgement of Powerscourt’s presence, not a look, not a nod, not a smile. It was as if he had completed the long retreat into his own head. Cosmo Colville had fair hair and pale brown eyes and a wide forehead. His expression, all through the interview, was one of resolute obstinacy. Powerscourt had talked to one of Colville’s best friends the day before the interview. ‘I was very gentle with him,’ the friend had said. ‘His wife and his children and his other friends are all being gentle with him. Maybe it’s time somebody took a hard line with Cosmo, reminded him of what may happen. What probably will happen if he doesn’t start talking.’

  ‘Thank you so much for seeing me,’ Powerscourt began, ignoring the fact that Colville had little choice about being brought before him. ‘I thought I would talk to you about what happens here, if you don’t want to talk.’

  There was no movement of any kind from Cosmo. ‘The first man to be hanged here was killed in October six years ago,’ Powerscourt went on. ‘John Macdonald he was, a twenty-four-year-old Scotsman. He was a costermonger and petty thief, this Macdonald. He and his partner in crime had a falling-out over the proceeds of a robbery. His victim had his head almost cut off from his body by Macdonald’s knife. Then the trapdoor opened here early one morning and John Macdonald entered the history books as the first man to be hanged in Pentonville. Do you want to end up like that, Mr Colville? If you don’t speak soon, you will enter the same history books as the man who swung because he wouldn’t talk. Is that what you want?’

  Cosmo Colville didn’t even look at him. He spoke not a word.

  ‘Then there was a man called Henry Williams,’ Powerscourt continued his catalogue of murder and retribution. ‘He thought his wife had been unfaithful to him while he was away fighting with his regiment in the Boer War. When he came back he took their little daughter up to London with him. That evening he put her in bed with her favourite doll beside her. When she was asleep he cut her throat and wrapped her little body in the Union flag. To the end he protested that he had done it because he loved her and could not bear his daughter living with her mother and a man who was not her father. Henry Pierrepoint, the executioner, said Williams was the bravest man he ever hanged. But courage didn’t do him any good, did it, Mr Colville? Williams was still left dancing on the air. So will you be if you don’t say something soon. I don’t think that bit lasts very long, the legs flailing about, the neck about to break, everything about to go dark, perhaps a scream or two. What do you say, Mr Colville?’

  The only sound in the little room was the distant clanging of some prison bars. The prisoner kept his counsel.

  ‘Then there was a man called Charles Stowe. He became infatuated with a barmaid. When the girl refused to have anything to do with him he went to the Lord Nelson public house where she worked late one night and grabbed her. Then he stabbed her a number of times. The interesting thing about Stowe is that we know how the hangmen did it. They were brothers called Billington from Lancashire, these hangmen. They always took details of the height and the weight of the prisoners in the condemned cell and used them to work out how big the drop should be. Stowe was five foot four and eleven stone so they gave him a drop of seven feet two inches. I suspect they’d left themselves quite a margin of error, Mr Colville, I expect six feet six would have been more than enough but they weren’t taking any chances. If you don’t speak before your trial I expect the hangman will be along to have you weighed and measured in your turn. Let me see, I’d say yo
u’re about five feet ten and around twelve stone or so. Seven feet drop be all right for you?’

  Silence reigned in the little room. Powerscourt could hear the guard hopping from foot to foot outside the door. He wondered how much longer he had left.

  ‘Some of those hanged in Pentonville have killed more than one person,’ Powerscourt tried once more. ‘Let’s take chemist’s assistant Arthur Devereux. He and his wife Beatrice had a little boy and not long after that they had twins. Money was very tight. He wasn’t paid very much, our Arthur, so he decided on drastic measures. He bought a large tin trunk and a bottle of chloroform and morphine, which he persuaded Beatrice to give to the twins and then take herself. He told her it was cough medicine. When they were dead he put them in the trunk and sealed the lid with glue to keep it airtight. He had the trunk sent off to a warehouse in Harrow and moved away with his son to a new address. But he’d reckoned without the mother-in-law. She didn’t believe his story that they’d all gone on holiday. She learnt that a removal company van from Harrow had called at the house. She set off for Harrow where she found the warehouse and the trunk and the three bodies. Devereux was traced to Coventry and tried to persuade the jury at his trial that Beatrice had killed the twins and then committed suicide. He had found them all and panicked, sending them all to the warehouse. He was not believed. His hangman, Henry Pierrepoint, recorded that Devereux stood five feet eleven and weighed eleven stone four. Pierrepoint gave him a drop of six feet six inches.’