Death of a Wine Merchant Read Online Free Page A

Weir smiled at his young protégé, like a grandfather with a favourite grandchild. ‘Why should we wait, Albert? Surely we’ve got all the evidence we need.’
    Cooper knew that what was, for him, the most compelling argument for innocence was, for his superior officer, the most compelling argument for guilt. All the same, he had to try.
    ‘Suppose you’re a killer, sir. Suppose you despatch your victim in a quiet room on the first floor of a great house in Norfolk. Then what do we think the killer would do? Why, he’d dispose of the weapon and get himself away from the scene as fast as he could. The last thing he would want to do is to sit there with the gun in his hand waiting to be discovered. Then there’s the business of his silence. Who is he trying to protect? Some other member of the family? Some woman?’
    ‘That’s mere speculation and you know it,’ said Weir. Twenty-five years before in Norwich Crown Court he had heard a distinguished counsel dismiss the elegant arguments of the defence barrister as mere speculation and he had been using the phrase ever since. ‘If the man wants to tell us what he was doing all he has to do is to open his mouth. But he won’t. Let’s stick to the facts, Albert. The gun is Randolph Colville’s. It was used to kill him. His brother Cosmo was in and out of that house all the time before the wedding. He was sitting in the chair opposite with the gun in his hand. That’s good enough for me. I’m sure it will be good enough for the Chief Constable. That’s good enough for a jury.’
    ‘There are still questions we can’t answer, sir. The three unidentified guests at the wedding reception for a start. We haven’t had time to trace them yet. And there’s the whole question of the wine business, whether there was anything unusual going on there. We don’t have to make the arrest so soon.’
    Even as he looked at his superior officer he knew it was no good. Weir’s mind was made up. It would take an earthquake to change it. Before he went home that evening, Inspector Cooper learnt that Archibald Beauchamp Cosmo Colville had indeed been charged with murder.
     
    Five days later Lord Francis Powerscourt was crossing the well-manicured lawns of London’s Gray’s Inn, answering a summons from a barrister friend, Charles Augustus Pugh.The two men had worked on a murder trial together some years before. Pugh’s office was lined with even more files than it had contained previously. His feet, clad today in elegant black boots, rested as usual on his desk. His suit was pale grey, his starched white collar was immaculate. He waved Powerscourt to a chair.
    ‘How are you keeping, my friend? Still packing the murderers off to jail?’
    ‘I can’t complain,’ said Powerscourt. ‘And yourself, Pugh? The clerks here still keeping the wolf from your door?’
    ‘They certainly are,’ said Pugh with a smile. ‘I’ve got the devil of a case on now. I’m for the prosecution for a change, Powerscourt. Three high-class con men, Granville, Trevelyan and Lawrence, Financial Consultants. With names like that and their proper cut glass vowel sounds, you’d think they’d been to Eton and Oxford. Not so, my friend, not so.’ Pugh shook his head sadly. ‘Old ladies, that was their thing. Rich old ladies, two of the rogues offering their services round Mayfair and South Kensington, one in the Home Counties. Old ladies especially susceptible to the con man in Epsom for some reason. They offered better investment returns than anyone else, you see, not by huge amounts, that might have made people think twice about them, but by enough to make a difference. They were only caught because a solicitor became suspicious. When they got their hands on the old ladies’ money, ten or fifteen or twenty thousand pounds, sometimes more, they worked out how long she was likely to live. They paid her the slightly better dividends they’d promised every year out of her own money, and kept most of