Death of a wine merchant
( Lord Francis Powerscourt - 9 )
David Dickinson
David Dickinson
Death of a wine merchant
1
The living walked past the dead on their way to the wedding on a bright Saturday in October. The path to the church of St Peter, Brympton, was flanked by the tombs of the faithful, laid out in random fashion in the dark Norfolk earth, the words and the letters on the tombs faded with the centuries. St Peter’s was very old and very simple. Shaped like a cross, it had a large choir, an organ in a gallery at the back where there were pegs for the local farmers to hang their hats, and a series of box pews on either side of the nave. The great Hall of Brympton was a couple of hundred yards away.
In the second pew from the front Hermione Colville, mother of the groom, checked the angle of her hat and took a discreet look behind her. Solid phalanxes of relatives stretched back to the rear of the church, all ready for active service. Strange discordant noises were coming from the organ. The young man, believed to hold advanced musical views, was not delivering the Bach he had promised, but horrid sounds that might, in Hermione’s view, have been composed by a gang of monkeys hanging off their trees in some damp and humid forest on the banks of the Amazon.
There were still ten minutes or more before the arrival of the bride. Hermione reviewed her forces. In the pew in front of her, the son and heir who was about to become a husband, Montague Colville, flanked by his rather dubious best man Algy Price, a young gentleman who found little favour with the more discerning mamas of the district. Marriage, her husband Randolph had often proclaimed, helped a man settle down. In Hermione’s slightly cynical view, her son’s marriage would have a great deal of work to do.
Behind them, the grandfather of the groom Walter Colville and his brother Nathaniel, the two men who had raised the Colvilles out of Hampshire obscurity into a position of power and prominence.
The Colvilles were wine merchants. The little firm that began in humble offices off Chancery Lane had risen to become one of the most successful in the country. One of their accountants had calculated recently that one bottle in every twelve of champagne, wine, port and Madeira drunk in Britain was sold under the Colville label. And that was without taking account of the whisky from Scotland or the whiskey from Ireland or the gin from Hammersmith, produced in a vast factory near the Thames and shipped round the world. Next year the firm would reach its fiftieth anniversary and plans were already being drawn up for a monstrous party of celebration. Secretly Walter, now aged seventy-eight, hoped that his life’s work and the fifty-year stretch might run to a knighthood or, in his wilder moments, a seat in the House of Lords. He had been contributing generously to Liberal Party funds ever since they won the election the previous year.
Behind the veterans a wide collection of Colville outriders and auxiliaries, cousins, nephews and nieces, filled the pews. There was even an overspill of some of the more outlying members of the family into the gallery near the organ.
Colville was to be united with Nash here at three o’clock this afternoon. The organist averted the wrath of Hermione Colville by switching to a more decorous Bach. The bride this day, Emily Nash, was the eldest daughter of Willoughby and Georgina Nash, of Brympton Hall in the county of Norfolk. The Colvilles might have been in trade for almost fifty years but the Nashes had been in business in their native county for three hundred years. Nashes had spread out around Norfolk like the tentacles of some enormous squid, washed up perhaps on the North Sea coast nearby after a terrible storm. They began as bankers in Norwich and part of that bank had transferred to London in the eighteenth century. From time immemorial they had owned great swathes of land near Brympton Hall. You could still find Nash bankers in Fakenham, Nash landowners at Holt and Melton Constable, even a Nash headmaster at Blakeney. But it was the law that seemed to run in the blood. Willoughby Nash, father of the bride, was senior partner in the family firm in Norwich with offices near the cathedral. Upstart solicitors sought to dignify their position with multiple names by the door outside their place of work. Nash, solicitors, was all the advertising needed for the owner of Brympton Hall and his colleagues. There were other Nash solicitors at Cromer and King’s Lynn and Little Snoring. The local newspaper editor swore vehemently that the Nash brainpower declined the further away they went from Norwich Cathedral, but that was only his fancy. They had one tradition, the family, that went back as far as they could read the names on their tombstones. The eldest son was always called Willoughby, the eldest daughter Emily.
It was now close to three o’clock. The less important Colvilles and Nashes at the very back of the church peered eagerly out of the door for a sight of the bride. Three o’clock passed, then three minutes past. The nervous members in the congregation wondered if there had been some terrible accident, a twisted ankle from a fall on the path, a thunderbolt sent from God perhaps. Five minutes past three. Randolph Colville was wondering if he had settled too much money on the son being married today. He had two other children to support after all. His banker, Mr Horatio Finch of Finch’s, a man renowned in the City of London for his pessimism, was forever telling his clients that the good times would not last for ever. And there were new competitors springing up in the wine business all the time. Maybe Horatio Finch was right. Hermione Colville had never been quite certain about Emily Nash. She was pretty, of course, she was clever, she seemed competent, but, in Hermione’s eyes, there was something you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Mrs Randolph Colville didn’t think Emily was reliable, she wasn’t sound.
Emily’s mother Georgina had more prosaic concerns. She, after all, was in charge of the catering, the wedding lunch and all the rest. Would the caterers be as good as everybody said they were? Would it keep dry for the rest of the day? Eight minutes past. The organist seemed to be torn between the classical and the modern. One minute his instrument sounded like Haydn, the next it sounded like no music that had ever been heard before at a wedding in a Norfolk church. Then the organist saw somebody dressed in white approaching the church. ‘Here Comes the Bride’ thundered forth. Emily stepped shyly into the church, holding very firmly on to her father’s arm. She was of medium height, with green eyes and a great shock of bright red hair. It was not Flaming June in Norfolk this day, it was Flaming October. Willoughby Nash was feeling as sad he had ever felt in his life. After this day he would never have his daughter as his own again. Of course she would visit them, but as the wife of another. He had complained to his wife about how unfair it was that he had to bring his precious Emily up the aisle on her wedding day when he would have preferred to postpone the ceremony indefinitely. Georgina had spoken to him softly about concepts like duty and responsibility and his daughter’s happiness, and the possibility of grandchildren playing in the garden. So here he was, walking as slowly as he dared, hoping that this journey up the aisle would never end.
‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony…’ The vicar was a very Low Church evangelical sort of vicar with a beautiful speaking voice. High Church members of the congregation, wistful for the smells and bells of his predecessor, said it was his only redeeming feature. They sang ‘All People that on Earth do Dwell’. The vicar took the young couple through their marriage vows very slowly as if he’d never done it before. Then he took them through their duties as man and wife, as laid out in the Book of Common Prayer.
‘Ye husbands, dwell with your wives according to knowledge; giving honour to the wife as unto the weaker vessel and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers be no
t hindered.’ One or two of the younger children were growing restless.
‘Wives,’ the vicar continued, ‘submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is Head of the Church and he is the Saviour of the body. Therefore as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husband in every thing.’
There was a loud snort from the middle of the congregation as if a Pankhurst disciple had made a missionary voyage to Norfolk. As the newly married pair went off to sign the register, Georgina Nash wondered if she and her husband were the only people in the church that day to know why Emily Nash looked so faint on her wedding day, and why there was something very curious about her choice of husband.
Shortly after a quarter to four, the marriage service was over. The party drifted back to Brympton Hall on the path that led past the gravestones and across a field. As they turned on to the road beyond the church the south front of Brympton Hall confronted them, a dramatic Jacobean pile of red brick and limestone, guarded by massive yew hedges on sentry duty on either side, adorned by gables and turrets and service wings at the front. It looked as though it had been dropped down from a different world.
Champagne was served in the garden at the back of the house with battalions of late roses and a fountain in the centre sending forth an irregular and intermittent spout of water. Georgina Nash had asked for it to be repaired more times than she could think of in the days leading up to the ceremony. At this stage of the proceedings Nash still spoke unto Nash, Colville still spoke unto Colville. The ice was not yet broken between the two families though Mrs Nash believed her seating plan and the finest Colville burgundy should do the trick.
Sometimes on these grand social occasions the conversation seems to die away for a moment and a single, occasionally inappropriate voice breaks in to fill the silence.
‘At sixty it was like going up a great wide road and coming to a very small signpost on the left, pointing at a narrow track to Death.’ The speaker was the groom’s uncle, Nathaniel Colville, a man well into his seventies. Nathaniel was explaining to a pretty young niece called Charlotte how he tried to write his autobiography, and how his views on the coming of death had changed over the decades. His publishers, he told his niece, expected him to spill the beans on all the manifold sins of the wine trade, fake burgundies, phoney ports, champagne made in factories, table wine that was virtually industrial waste. He had refused. It was not the behaviour of a gentleman to slander his competitors, he told the head publisher, who promptly decided to halve the print run for Nathaniel’s memoir. The metaphor of the road changed over time, he assured Charlotte, pausing only to help himself to a refill of his Krug. By your seventies, the path you were walking grew ever narrower, while the side roads leading towards death became wider and wider. He did wonder, Nathaniel told his niece, what the travelling dispositions would be like when the time finally arrived for the last journey of them all.
Nobody at the wedding feast knew it but the number of guests had been determined not by ties of blood or friendship but by the number of people Georgina Nash could seat in her Long Gallery on the first floor of Brympton Hall. After half an hour of champagne and celebration the wedding guests were led up to this spectacular chamber. This room was one of the finest of its kind in England, over a hundred and fifty feet long with dramatic plasterwork on the ceiling and views out into the garden with the malfunctioning fountain. Here Georgina Nash had mixed the party up completely, Nashes sitting next to Colvilles at all the tables, bottles of champagne and Meursault waiting on the white tablecloths to lubricate friendship and fellowship on this special day. By the fireplace was a larger table for the bride and groom and senior members of the families.
The guests were circulating round the room looking for their names and their positions. Champagne corks were popping loudly as the footmen did their work. Then there was a different noise that might have been the cork being drawn from some enormous bottle of champagne, a double magnum perhaps. Or it could have been a shot from a gun. The noise came from the north end of the room, at the opposite end from the staircase used by the guests. Charlie Healey, butler to the Nash establishment, was a man well used to emergency and crisis. He had served as a sergeant in some of the bloodiest engagements of the Boer War. Beckoning a junior footman to accompany him he flitted through one ornate bedroom to the side of the Long Gallery. It was empty. The second ornate bedroom was not empty. Lying on the floor, with blood pouring forth on to the exquisite carpet, was Randolph Colville, father of the groom. And sitting on a chair some six feet away with a pistol in his hand was his younger brother Cosmo. One glance was enough to tell Charlie that the man on the floor was dead.
‘Don’t move,’ he said to Cosmo Colville, who had turned deathly pale. ‘William,’ he turned to the junior footman, ‘bring the doctor in here. And the man of God. And Mr Nash. And a tray. And when you’ve done that, go and telephone the police. Tell them there’s been a murder and they’re to come as fast as they can. Don’t say a word to that new parlourmaid or she’ll make a mess of everything.’
The doctor shook his head sadly as he inspected the remains of Randolph Colville. The vicar muttered a few unconvincing prayers. Charlie Healey motioned to Cosmo Colville that he should place his gun on the tray. Cosmo could, after all, have decided to embark on a killing spree as long as he had it. Charlie gave instructions that nobody was to touch the gun, which he sent to a secret place in the pantry until the police came. The dead man did not move from his position on the floor. If you bent down to floor level and looked at his face you could see that he had a look of pained surprise on his face. Cosmo without his gun maintained the demeanour of Cosmo with the gun, a withdrawal into some recess of his mind, a reluctance to lift his eyes from the floor, a refusal to speak whatever anybody said to him. Willoughby Nash felt this was one of the most awkward moments of his entire career. His Long Gallery full of a hundred wedding guests. Vast quantities of food waiting in his kitchens on the floor below. The police about to arrive. And death, the most unwelcome wedding guest of all, staining the priceless carpet in his state bedroom. His beloved daughter Emily’s special day ruined beyond repair. He conferred briefly with the vicar and returned slowly to his seat at the top table. He held a whispered conference with his wife. Then he tapped loudly on the table and appealed for silence. Willoughby made a brief address to the wedding guests. He told them of a dead man but did not mention that it was probably murder. Nor did he give a name to the corpse, reasoning that the police would not wish him to do that yet. He explained that they would all have to wait for the officers of the law to arrive. He suggested that they should proceed with the wedding lunch, however difficult the circumstances. They needed to keep their strength up. The vicar was going to offer up a few short prayers now. They would congregate back in the church when they could for a brief service of prayers for the dead. Emily Nash, now Emily Colville, held very tightly to her new husband. Neither of them knew that a father was dead and an uncle who had held a gun in his hand was under guard a few feet away.
The police brought trouble with them when they arrived. Or rather, it wasn’t the police that brought the trouble, but the attitude of the guests to the police. For in apparent charge of the investigation was the Norfolk Constabulary’s youngest Detective Inspector, Albert Cooper, aged thirty-two years, and still in the first week of his new promotion. Cooper’s problem was that he looked much younger still, possibly in his mid to late twenties. Only a couple of years past people often asked him if he had started shaving yet, or if he had stopped growing. Detective Inspector Cooper took it all in his stride. He was almost certainly the cleverest policeman in Norfolk. His father had died when he was in his teens and it became important for him to start earning money to support his mother and the younger brothers. The teachers at his school thought he was very intelligent and wished he could continue with his education but bowed to the inevitable as they had with so many like Albe
rt in the past. Accountancy, they suggested to him, the maths teacher was sure he could secure him a post at a firm in Aylsham. Newspapers, his English teacher suggested, the school could find him a position on the staff of the local paper in Norwich. From there all things might be possible. It was the headmaster who suggested the police force, one of the few institutions that was not totally in thrall to the class system and tried to promote on merit rather than by birth.
As he rose to address the wedding guests, flanked by a sergeant and a constable, he realized that this was the most distinguished company he had ever been part of, and that he was attending on the first blue-blooded murder of his career. He knew what they were thinking, most of these guests. And while Willoughby Nash had been politeness itself, Inspector Albert Cooper did not expect all the rest to be as well behaved. He had scarcely finished his opening sentence when he was interrupted by a choleric-looking gentleman in military uniform.
‘Nash,’ spluttered the man with the medals, ‘this is preposter ous. Can’t you get us a proper policeman, for God’s sake? We can’t have an incident like this looked into by some babe in arms in uniform, it’s absurd.’
Nash was about to rise to his feet when the Inspector waved him down. ‘I can’t help looking whatever age you think I am, any more than you can help looking whatever age I think you are, sir,’ he said, before he was interrupted.
‘Impertinent young pup!’ roared the red jacket. ‘Nash, can’t you do something? I have some influence with the Lord Lieutenant. We need a proper policeman here, for heaven’s sake. I for one am not going to co-operate until we do. I suggest we take a vote.’
Inspector Cooper had already sent for reinforcements but he was not going to tell his audience here that. Not yet at any rate. Once more he made a gesture to Willoughby Nash to remain in his chair. He motioned to his sergeant and his constable to take up their positions on either side of the military gentleman.
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