Death of a Wine Merchant (21 page)

By nightfall Powerscourt was ready. He had managed to tear his sheets into strips that could be used if necessary to tie the warder up. He had placed his bed underneath the window. He had very few advantages in this business. Darkness might be one of them. He waited on the far side of the door. Over the next forty minutes he prayed that the warder would continue the pattern set by all of them on their rounds, morning or evening. Find the key. You could hear the clinking on the other side of the wall. Put it in the keyhole. Turn it in the lock. Open the door. Turn back to your trolley. Pick up the medicine. Come into the room. Powerscourt would be waiting.

He felt nervous, as he used to feel nervous before a battle. In this encounter he had only one chance. There would only be five or ten seconds where he had to get it right. If he failed, he dreaded to think what might happen to him. Maybe they would transfer him to some other ghastly hospital and Lady Lucy would not know he had gone.

He heard the keys jangling now. Not his door, but the one next door. There was a brief conversation while the man took his medicine. Then the key went back in the door. Powerscourt’s turn now. Open the door and look inside. Powerscourt saw that his guess had been right. The warder took a couple of steps into the room and stood still, staring into the gloom. The door, kicked by Powerscourt using both feet with all his force from a sitting position on the ground, caught him full in the face. The warder began to fall backwards into the corridor. In a second Powerscourt was on him, pulling him back into the cell, slamming the man’s head into the wall until he passed out and slumped to the floor. Powerscourt checked he was still alive – death and the guillotine had little appeal – and closed the door. He taped
up the warder’s mouth so any calls for assistance would not be heard. He pulled off the jacket and the belt with the keys. Getting the trousers off the warder was incredibly difficult for a man on his own. Powerscourt remembered some funeral attendant telling him once how difficult it was to undress the dead. At last he had the trousers to go with the jacket. The warder began making faint groaning noises as if he might be about to wake up. Powerscourt used up his last two sections of sheet and tied up his wrists and his ankles. He put on his new clothes and inspected the keys. Then he stepped into the corridor and locked what had been his door. ‘You’ll find the bucket in the corner,’ he whispered to the trussed warder before he left. He had decided against liberating any of his fellow inmates. They might start singing on their way to the front door or wander off on their own. Indiscipline, he thought, might be rife in the ranks of the
aliénés
. He pushed the trolley down the corridor until he came to the stairs. Each floor, he saw, had a trolley of its own, waiting for the staff to place their trays. He wondered how many patients would miss their evening dose. Then he remembered that there was, according to the warder, a fifteen-minute gap at his cell between the medicine and the evening meal. He had less than ten minutes to get out.

He made his way down the stairs carefully, listening intently for any movement from somebody in authority. Occasional groans drifted out into the corridor from distressed inmates, more
aliéné
than their fellows. He was on the first-floor landing now, a small window with bars on at the end facing the outside world. Down the last flight of stairs, tiptoe to the front door, inspect the keys. He had one key with the legend Front Door on its tag. There were three locks in the door. He unlocked the central lock which he hoped might be the main one. The door did not open. Growing slightly frantic he tried his key in the other locks in the hope that one key might be able to open all three. It couldn’t. Powerscourt tried pushing the door but it did not move an inch. The bolts at the top and
bottom were still undone. Somebody must come along later to draw them. Would the somebody have the keys as well?

He heard voices now. One of them was shouting. ‘Jean, Jean, where the devil are you? The supper’s ready to go round. Come along, for God’s sake.’

Powerscourt didn’t think Jean was going to wake up very soon. He wondered if they would realize what had happened to their fellow warder, that they would have to open the doors of every single cell until they found him. It seemed possible to Powerscourt that they would assume Jean had gone home early, or had been taken ill and gone to lie down somewhere. Maybe they wouldn’t realize he was locked in one of the cells, unable to speak, and in that case they wouldn’t come looking for him. A prisoner escaping was just impossible. It had never happened before.

The events of the next ten minutes confirmed to Powerscourt that they had no idea that one of their charges was at large. They shouted messages for Jean, some of them rather rude, and they returned to their own quarters. Powerscourt crept into the room where the doctor had talked to him, close to the front door. Even in here the windows were barred. He padded round the room, removing a doctor’s white coat from a hook on the door and some bandages from a drawer in the desk. To the side of the window was an enormous closet, large enough to hold a man. There was a bathroom to the side and from a little window in there Powerscourt had a view of the path leading up to the main gate. His plan now depended on somebody coming up to the front door and being able to open it. He put on his doctor’s coat and felt safer inside it. He put a couple of large pens in the top pocket. He put a stethoscope round his neck just in case. Everything in here depends on the colour of your clothes, he said to himself. Dress or be dressed in pale green and they’ll pour medicine down your throat two or three times a day. Pale blue and you’re a warder with vast powers over the patients. But a white coat? You’re virtually God.

He checked the time on the clock on the wall. The bastards had taken his watch and he didn’t think now was an ideal time to ask for it back. It had probably been sold already somewhere in the back streets of Beaune. Eight minutes to eight. He thought any more staff clocking on would come on the hour or the half-hour. Maybe a few minutes earlier to be on the safe side. Peering out of the bathroom window, Powerscourt saw that nothing moved for now. There was nobody in sight. He wondered if he should explore other parts of the hospital in search of windows with no bars or doors with no keys. He decided against because he might open a door on to a room full of warders and be sent straight back to the cells with extra dosage for having knocked out Jean. He checked that he could breathe if he was concealed inside the cupboard for a while.

Eight fifteen came. Eight thirty. Powerscourt was back on duty at the bathroom window, rubbing at the glass from time to time. He wondered about Lady Lucy and hoped she was bearing up. He hoped she had remembered to send a message to William Burke. If anybody could organize reinforcements it was Burke. Powerscourt thought his brother-in-law would have made a most efficient adjutant in the Army. He wondered about the theory that had brought them to France. It didn’t seem that important now, he told himself, until he remembered the forthcoming trial of Cosmo Colville on a capital charge.

At twenty to nine he heard footsteps. But they were on the inside, the footsteps, not outside, and there were voices too. Two people were heading for the front door. Powerscourt had a split second to make his decision. He waited until he saw the door opening. He patted the stethoscope round his neck and fastened his coat buttons all the way to the top and strode out into the corridor.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said cheerfully, ‘time to go home at last, I see. Even we doctors must rest.’ He was halfway out the door now, one of the men busy with keys in the locks.

‘Good evening, doctor,’ the men said in unison, peeling off to the side of the building to pick up their bicycles.

Powerscourt didn’t risk any more conversation. He was out. He was free. It had been brief, his stay in the Maison des Aliénés, but it had been one of the more disagreeable experiences of his life. That and the monstrous
pressoir
where you felt your limbs could be crushed at any moment. A few stars were visible in the night sky. The two cyclists must have gone in the other direction, away from Beaune, south towards Chalon sur Saône. In the distance the low hills of Burgundy were dark against the night. Powerscourt felt glad to be breathing proper air again after the stale fug back in the hospital. Looking behind him he could just make out its great bulk, dark except for a couple of lighted windows on the ground floor. Ahead, over to his left, was Beaune and Lady Lucy and a welcome in a French hotel. He was just enjoying a mental glass of beer when the world behind him went mad. All the lights in the hospital had been turned on. Darkness was banished from every floor. A powerful bell was ringing continuously as if the Maison d’Aliénés was an ocean liner in distress. ‘Man the lifeboats! We’ve struck an iceberg!’

Powerscourt wondered if they would send out a search party of warders. Either Jean had made his escape, or the two on the bicycles had returned to the asylum to reveal that they had met a strange man pretending to be a doctor at the front door. He could just see three figures emerging from the door and come trotting after him. Powerscourt wrapped his white coat round his waist and ran as fast as he could towards Beaune, checking behind him as he went. The gap appeared to be closing. He was in the street that led out of the town now. He plunged into the side streets, aiming for where he thought the centre of Beaune should be. He felt in his pocket for his money. It was still there. He saw a sign for the station and hurried towards it. Surely stations would have taxis in them, even this late. He put his white coat back on. Now he was in the station square, great puffs of smoke rising into the night
sky from the Paris express. As he made his way towards it he crossed the path of a group of six gendarmes, commanded by a sergeant.

‘Forgive me, doctor,’ said the sergeant, ‘there is an escaped lunatic at large. He made his way out of the Maison de Fous back there. Forty years of age or thereabouts. Brown hair. Have you seen such a man, doctor?’

‘I do believe I might have seen him just now, sergeant. Running away from Beaune on the Chalon road. If you’re quick, you’ll catch him. Good luck!’

The sergeant and his men marched off at the double. Dr Powerscourt hurried off to the station and hailed the first cab he saw. ‘Hôtel des Ducs de Bourgogne, if you please,’ he said, sinking into the red upholstery. As the cab rattled its way north into the town, Powerscourt saw yet more Beaune policemen marching towards the asylum. Even here you could still hear the bell.

He gave the cabbie a generous tip. ‘Would you like to earn some easy money, monsieur?’ he said, riffling through a bundle of French banknotes.

‘Of course,’ said the cabbie, ‘but not if I have to break the law and go to prison.’

‘You need have no fear on that score. All you have to do is to forget that you brought me here. If anybody should ask, say nothing. Deny it. Here.’

Powerscourt handed over the equivalent of a week’s earnings if not more.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the cabbie. He held his finger to his lips. ‘Mum’s the word.’

The man at the front desk told Powerscourt that Lady Lucy was in room twenty, at the end of the corridor on the first floor. He was just about to ask his dishevelled visitor a question, but the man had gone, bounding up the stairs two at a time.

When he knocked on the door of the room Lady Lucy thought it must be one of the porters bringing another message. ‘Come in’ she said, rather sadly, standing at the window, looking out over the square. When she turned round she saw that she was looking at a scarecrow. The white coat had long since lost its freshness. There were great stains across the front. The pale green trousers beneath looked as though they might belong to an attendant in a Turkish bath. The hair was tousled and uneven with patches that were almost bare sitting next to the natural curls. The scar on the face, left by Jean Jacques’s scissors, was still there. But if it was a scarecrow it was her scarecrow. She had, after all, married the scarecrow. She had lived with the scarecrow and loved the scarecrow for longer than she cared to remember.

‘Francis!’ she cried and rushed across the floor to embrace him. ‘I am so pleased to see you!’

Powerscourt held her very tight. ‘I hope you haven’t been too worried,’ he said. ‘I usually manage to come back in the end.’

‘What have you been doing, my love? Why are you wearing these dreadful clothes? And what’s happened to your poor
hair? It looks as if some wild animal has been pulling lumps out of it!’

Powerscourt explained about Marcel’s gang and his abduction to the
pressoir
and the lunatic asylum. It was, he told her, all the revenge of the Alchemist for ruining his privacy in London. His hair, he explained, had been cut off by one of the thugs who had virtually no teeth.

‘I’m so pleased you are back,’ she said, holding tightly on to her scarecrow. ‘The hotel people have been very good about things like telegrams, and there’s a helpful young man here from the British Embassy in Paris. And Johnny Fitzgerald is on his way.’

‘Very good,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Could I tell you what I’d like to do, Lucy? Right now, I need a bath. Washing facilities haven’t been too good in the company I’ve been keeping. Then I can get into some decent clothes. And then we can see what the food is like in this hotel. Where I’ve been it was rather primitive. And then I can tell you the rest of what’s happened and we can make our plans for tomorrow.’

As Powerscourt and Lady Lucy slept the church bells marked the passing of another day. There were two days left before Cosmo Colville was due to stand trial in the dock in Court Number Two of the Old Bailey on a charge of murder.

Shortly before three o’clock the next afternoon a cab took Powerscourt and Lady Lucy to the little village of Givray, up in the hills outside Beaune. The house of Monsieur Jean Pierre Drouhin, the Colville wine merchant who had disappeared, was at one end of a pleasant square. Lady Lucy had insisted on sending a note in the morning, saying they had come on Colville business and proposed calling on Madame Drouhin after lunch. The house itself was a handsome eighteenth-century building. Inspecting it as he got down from the cab Powerscourt thought that in England such a house would
look masculine, wearing metaphorical braces and starched collars and a smart waistcoat. Here in France the building was feminine, adorned with imaginary ringlets and flounces and bonnets.

Madame Drouhin opened the door. She was a pretty woman in her early thirties with light brown eyes and very dark hair, dressed in sober grey. She led them up to the drawing room on the first floor with a fine view of the boulangerie across the street.

‘It’s very kind of you to spare us the time,’ said Powerscourt, smiling at the lady. ‘As we said in the note, we have come about your husband. Could you tell us how long ago he disappeared?’

‘Of course,’ replied Madame Drouhin. ‘It’s now a month and a half since he vanished.’

‘Did he behave strangely before he went?’ Lady Lucy said. ‘Was there anything odd about him then? Even the best of husbands,’ she glanced loyally at Powerscourt, ‘can have their strange moods, they can withdraw into themselves if you like.’

‘I don’t think there was anything strange about his going. He said he had to go to England on business. There was nothing unusual about that. He went to London a lot. He must have spent nearly half the year there, now I come to think about it. But he never wrote this time – normally he was a good if irregular correspondent. He just got on the train in Beaune one morning and disappeared out of our lives.’

‘And since then, madame,’ said Powerscourt, ‘you haven’t heard anything at all? Not even a letter or a card?’

‘Nothing, monsieur, not a word.’

‘And had your husband, madame,’ Lady Lucy was trying to sound as sympathetic as she could, ‘ever disappeared like this before? Gone to visit his family perhaps?’

‘Often he has left us,’ said Madame Drouhin, ‘but he has always told us where he was going and written to us while
he was there. It was usually London or near London that he went to.’

For twenty minutes or more Powerscourt and Lady Lucy questioned Madame Drouhin about her husband and his movements. Finally Powerscourt felt he could delay no longer.

‘Can I ask you a question, Madame Drouhin?’ Powerscourt was leaning forward in his chair. ‘It may seem rather odd if the answer is No. Could your husband write equally well with both hands?’

‘How interesting that you should know that,’ she said with a smile. ‘Yes, he could. The children were always fascinated by it.’

Powerscourt had been looking carefully round the room. On a small table by the window there were some photographs but he couldn’t see them clearly.

‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there,’ said Madame Drouhin. ‘That’s why you’re here. There must be something wrong, very wrong.’ She looked at Lady Lucy with pleading eyes.

‘I’m afraid there is,’ she said. ‘Francis will tell you.’

Powerscourt pulled a photograph out of his pocket, the one Mrs Colville had given him while she was still sober. ‘Is that your husband, madame?’

‘Of course it is,’ she said. Randolph Colville was standing next to a punt by the side of the Thames with a boater on his head, smiling happily at the world. By his side was a handsome woman of about forty-five, some years older than Madame Drouhin. In front of them were a couple of children with determined smiles for the camera.

‘How very English,’ said Madame Drouhin with a note of bitterness in her voice. ‘On the outside we have the smiles, inside we have the cold hearts and the betrayal.’

‘Do you know who these other people are in the photograph, madame?’ Powerscourt was speaking very softly.

‘I do not know,’ she replied and her voice was filled with despair, ‘but I can guess. That is the English wife of
Mr Drouhin, and those must be two of the children he had with her.’

‘You knew?’ said Powerscourt. ‘You knew your husband had two wives?’

‘I did. I have known for some time.’ Silence fell in the handsome room as Powerscourt and Lady Lucy digested this astonishing piece of information. Bigamy. They had suspected it might be here but to find it in reality was stunning. And terrible. Bigamy. A unique arrangement whereby one man could betray two women at the same time twenty-four hours a day. A clock on the mantelpiece announced that it was half past three. Outside in the square a group of starlings were holding a concert in the trees. Powerscourt felt so very very sorry for Madame Drouhin, so dignified with them this afternoon.

‘When did you find out?’ said Powerscourt, astonished that Madame Drouhin already knew.

‘It must have been about two months ago, maybe more.’

‘May I ask how you found out?’

‘It was silly, really, silly of Jean Pierre, I mean. He left a letter from his first wife in the back pocket of his trousers one day. He left his trousers on the floor as he usually did. The piece of paper virtually fell out when I picked them up. Normally you’d never find anything at all in Jean Pierre’s pockets. He was always very careful. Not surprising really with two different lives to lead. I took the letter to the schoolmaster and he told me what it said. All kinds of things about his life made sense to me then. Those regular trips to England for a start. There are a number of other merchants round here, you see, who have the same sort of business with other houses in London like the Colvilles. They only go to London two or three times in a whole year, these other merchants. My Jean Pierre was going ten or twelve times. Often I have suspected that he must have a woman over there. Only now do I realize that it wasn’t just a wife but a whole family as well.’

‘How did he take it? When you confronted him with the letter, I mean?’ Lady Lucy was feeling full of sympathy for a woman so badly wronged by a member of the opposite sex.

‘His first reaction was to laugh. I found that strange. Then he said that he had always thought he might get caught at some time on either side of the Channel. I think he found that element of danger exciting. He said he still loved me and our children. He wasn’t going to run away from his responsibilities.’

It was one thing, Powerscourt thought, to travel to France and tell somebody they were married to a bigamist. Then you had to tell them that their husband was dead. Not to tell Madame Drouhin would have been too cruel.

‘I fear there is more bad news, madame,’ he said.

She looked him straight in the eye. ‘You’re going to tell me he’s dead, aren’t you?’

‘I’m afraid I am.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ she said, ‘I think I’ve known he was dead for about three weeks now. I couldn’t think of any other explanation. Always before there were letters. Always. This time there were none. That bastard from up the road has got to him at last. I knew it, I knew it!’ Madame Drouhin paused for a moment while she contemplated the bastard from up the road.

‘My wife and I extend to you our most sincere condolences.’ said Powerscourt.

Madame Drouhin folded her hands over and over again in her lap. She looked at them both in turn, as if in supplication.

‘Can you tell me how he died?’

Powerscourt gave a heavily censored version of what had happened. The unfortunate event, he said, took place at a house in Norfolk. He did not say that there was a wedding in progress. He made no mention of wedding guests either. Jean Pierre had been shot, he told her. He decided to mention the dead man’s brother being found in the same room with a gun in his hand, and that the brother Cosmo was about
to stand trial for murder in London any day now, and that he, Powerscourt, was trying to secure the release of Cosmo. Madame Drouhin only asked one question. The killing itself, the arrest of the brother did not seem to interest her very much.

‘What was he called? In England, I mean. My husband.’

‘He was called Colville, madame, Randolph Colville.’

That seemed to please her. ‘Colville.’ She rolled the strange English word round her tongue. ‘Randolph Colville. So he was one of the family. No wonder he always seemed to have so much money. He bought an enormous amount of land over here, you know. Vineyards, mostly.’

Powerscourt wondered if this was where the missing Colville money had gone, beautiful houses on the edge of the Burgundy hills, another wife to maintain, another life to lead, another family to feed and support.

‘Forgive me, madame, we have no wish to disturb you any more at this time. We shall make our departure in a moment. Just now you referred to somebody as that bastard down the road who has got him at last. Could I ask who that somebody is?’

Madame Drouhin got up and walked over to the windows. ‘This is difficult for me, very difficult,’ she began, still facing the square. ‘I’m sure you can understand that any man with two wives is going to have an eye for the ladies. That’s how he got into marital difficulties in the first place, being unable to resist the charms of another woman. Jean Pierre or Randolph in the English version was a relentless pursuer of women. I imagine he had been like that since he was about sixteen years old. Chase anything in a skirt, as my grandmother used to put it. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying he was committing adultery all the way from here to Dijon. It was just a kiss here, an embrace there and he was on his way. Sometimes I’m sure he would have liked to go further. Anyway, the point of this story is that in the street that runs into the bottom of the square here there lives a very pretty young wife of about
twenty-five years. Yvette is her name, Yvette Planchon. It was she who told me this story.’

Powerscourt thought suddenly that Randolph’s targets seemed to drop ten years each time.

‘Jean Pierre was very struck with this girl. Her husband was believed to be away in North Africa. He was a soldier, a sergeant in the Army. Eventually the young wife gives in to Jean Pierre’s flirting. She gives him a kiss in their kitchen. She told me later that she thought he might go away after one kiss and leave her in peace, But then, dear me, in the middle of the kiss the husband walks in. He has unexpected leave from his regimental duties. He swears that he will take the traditional Frenchman’s revenge against my husband. He does not believe Yvette when she tells him it was only a kiss. They were never in the bedroom upstairs, never. Yvette’s husband does not believe her. He is very jealous. He is consumed with jealousy. He tells my Jean Pierre he is going to kill him. Jean Pierre flees out the kitchen door pursued by the jealous husband with a poker in his hand.’

‘What is the traditional Frenchman’s revenge, madame?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘Why, in some parts of the country it still holds good. The French male believes he has the right to kill a man who has interfered with his wife without penalty. You can’t be sent to jail or the guillotine, you get off scot free. It’s as simple as that.’

‘God bless my soul,’ said Lady Lucy. ‘It does seem rather extreme.’

‘Does it still apply in these parts?’ asked Powerscourt, wondering about court cases where defendants could be given a sort of automatic acquittal for murdering their wives’ lovers.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that,’ said Madame Drouhin. Powerscourt thought there was no chance he would be able to persuade any of these women to cross the Channel with him and give evidence in an English court. Could he,
perhaps, find a lawyer who would take a signed statement from them? But first they had to meet Yvette.