‘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 Albert 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.