‘I see,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘Did it come to you that late on, that Mrs Colville was the killer?’
‘I should have seen it much earlier,’ said Powerscourt, ‘in so many cases the husband or the wife is the murderer of the other.’
‘And the money, Francis? All that money that disappeared out of the Colville company accounts?’
‘Well, I think I know what happened to that,’ Powerscourt replied. ‘You remember the French wife over in Burgundy saying her husband had been buying a lot of land, vineyards, that sort of thing? I don’t know if he put it in his French name or in the company name but that’s where the money went.’
He paused for a moment. ‘There is one thing I’m not sure about, and that is the mysterious Frenchman, the one who spent the night in Cawston and took a cab over to Brympton Hall for the wedding the next morning. I’m sure he was real, those two in the hotel were trustworthy people. Perhaps he lost his nerve in a strange place where he didn’t understand a word anybody said to him. Perhaps he thought he would be exposed and ran away before he was caught.’
Johnny Fitzgerald was the first to arrive at the Powerscourt party that evening. He began complaining about his publishers as he broke into a bottle of Chambertin. ‘Honestly, Francis, you’d think they could do better, wouldn’t you. I gave them the bloody manuscript about Birds of the North three months ago. Then they lost a third of the damned thing. Didn’t lose any of the drawings, thank God. I’ve just reconstituted the text and the drawings, it took me five whole days and I’ve missed your trial. You seem to have routed the Philistines pretty successfully.’
Lady Lucy was welcoming Pugh and his young junior Napier, closely followed by Nathaniel Colville, patriarch of the clan, with a bottle in his hand.
‘I’ve been trying to put some sense into young Cosmo,’ Nathaniel said to Lady Lucy. ‘Ridiculous business, blubbing in court like a bloody woman. At least he’s going to show up for the party, must make a change from being cooped up down in Pentonville.’
‘Pugh!’ said Powerscourt, and he shook the lawyer firmly by the hand. ‘Congratulations! You pulled it off, by God!’
‘I say it again, my friend,’ Pugh was smiling an enormous smile, ‘I merely fired the bullets. But you provided them.’
Pugh was virtually engulfed by guests offering him their congratulations. Lady Lucy thought it was slightly unfair.
‘Could I ask you a question, Lord Powerscourt?’ Richard Napier, Pugh’s junior, had all the earnestness of the young. ‘Don’t you think it would have been better all round if the verdict had been suicide? Cosmo is set free. Mrs Hermione Colville returns to her unhappy existence, lubricated with the Chablis by the Thames. Nobody loses.’
‘Are you saying, Richard,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that you believe we have ended up with the wrong verdict?’
‘Not at all. It would just have been better all round if the suicide verdict had won out. That way Mrs Colville might not be hanged or go to prison. No more trials either. Surely it is better for the living to remain living and what people call justice to be pushed to one side?’
‘I’m for justice myself,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Come, young man, you’d better have a glass of Chambertin.’
The room filled up. Powerscourt wondered if the multitude of Colvilles reminded Lucy of one of her own family’s tribal gatherings. He suspected the Colvilles might be even more numerous. Sir Pericles Freme had brought a white piece of paper which he entrusted to Rhys, the Powerscourt butler. Powerscourt could catch snatches of conversation between Cosmo, his uncle, Freme and Richard Napier for the younger generation.
‘The point is, Cosmo,’ said Nathaniel, ‘it’s completely wrong to think that the firm of Colville will be deserted by its clients. Freme and I will take care of that.’
‘Think of it as an opportunity,’ Freme put in. ‘You know what they say, all publicity is good publicity. You have been all over the newspapers for two or three days, Cosmo. Think how much it would cost to buy all that.’
‘This is not how it was meant to be,’ said Cosmo. ‘When I picked up that gun, I thought I could deflect all the attention on to myself. I could take the blame. We could keep all the stuff about the bigamy out of the papers. I didn’t mind being hanged as long as the good name of Colville was preserved and nobody knew about the French Mrs Colville. I couldn’t stand the thought of Hermione going on trial and what might follow. She’s had enough to put up with over the years, God knows. I reckoned without that man Powerscourt, mind you. I don’t know whether to thank him or curse him, even now.’
‘That’s all in the past, Cosmo,’ his uncle boomed, ‘we must look to the future. The firm’s fifty years old now. We must go on. Even if I’m not going to see the end of the next fifty, I’m going to make sure we’re in bloody good shape for the anniversary.’
‘I say we must work out a new advertising campaign while people remember the headlines,’ said Sir Pericles.
‘Colvilles,’ young Napier said, ‘wine to die for, perhaps. Try Colvilles, last drink before you go.’
Powerscourt and Pugh were having a final conversation about the case. ‘Do you know who we have to thank for our good fortune, Pugh?’
‘Who?’ said Pugh.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Powerscourt replied, ‘it’s that cleaning woman from Fakenham police station, that’s who it is. If the police thought they might have a real fingerprint then even Chief Inspector Weir would have sent it off to the Met. So there would have been two sets of prints, one lot belonging to Mrs Randolph Colville who could say she dusted the gun a week or so before. The servants aren’t allowed to touch the guns in case they kill themselves. And, of course, Cosmo’s prints, clear as daylight. That would have been pretty hard work for us, I think.’
By eight o’clock the guests had departed. Powerscourt was going to take Lady Lucy out to dinner to celebrate the end of the case. She was adjusting her hair in the mirror.
There was a knock on the door. Rhys crept into the room carrying an opened bottle and a couple of glasses and an expensive-looking envelope. ‘The envelope is from Sir Pericles, my lord,’ said Rhys. ‘He says you are to read it first.’
‘This recipe,’ Powerscourt read it aloud, ‘comes from no less a personage than Lord Pembroke, he of Wilton House near Salisbury and the Double Cube Room and all those glorious Van Dycks. The good Lord was in the habit of saying to his guests at dinner, “I cannot answer for my champagne and claret, as I only have the word of my wine merchant that it is good, but I can answer for my port wine. I made it myself.” Here it is, from the Family Receipt Book of 1817:
‘“Mix well together forty-eight gallons of turnip juice, or strong rough cyder; eight gallons of malt spirit or brandy; and eight gallons of real port wine; adding a sufficient quantity of elder berry juice to colour it; add some of the branches of the elder tree to give it a proper roughness. Keep it, in cask or bottle, about two years before drinking it. This is Lord Pembroke’s recipe: which perhaps may be improved, with regard to roughness, by the juice or wine of sloes; and, in colour, make to any required tint, by cochineal, logwood, or Brazil wood. French brandy will certainly be better than malt spirit; and perhaps, either a good-bodied raisin wine, or even a raisin cyder, may sometimes, according as excellence or cheapness is the object, be advantageously adopted instead of rough cyder or the juice of turnips.”’
Powerscourt and Lady Lucy laughed. She put her arm through his as Rhys carried on.
‘This bottle is from Mr Nathaniel Colville, my lord, my lady.’ There was a brief pause while Rhys remembered his lines. ‘He says, you are to drink one glass of this wine before you go out, two if you like it. He says you are to note what it says on the bottle. He says, Mr Colville, that the label is the first of its kind to be printed in this country.’
Rhys slipped away. Looking at the label, Powerscourt saw that the spirit that had made Colvilles great was still there, that even in adversity a family could show its resilience and that a dynasty founded fifty years before, wh
en Victoria was twenty years on the throne, still had sap in its bones and fire in its belly.
‘Batard Montrachet 1904’, the label said. And below that, ‘Colvilles and Co., 1857-1907, Fifty Years of Excellence. Wine Merchants of distinction. London Edinburgh Bordeaux Burgundy.’
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Death of a wine merchant lfp-9 Page 33