The Critic (22 page)

Which was when the penny dropped for Michelle. ‘Lyndon B. Johnston. He was sworn in as President after the assassination of Kennedy.’

‘Good girl.’ He turned back to the board and wrote up
WJC
.

Now Michelle couldn’t keep the smile off her face. ‘William Jefferson Clinton. They’re all Presidents of the United States!’

But Enzo waved a finger of admonishment. ‘Not all of them. There haven’t been ninety-two Presidents.’ He held open palms out towards her. ‘You told me yourself the other night, Michelle. Your dad’s party-piece when he was a kid.’

Realisation dawned on her like sunlight breaking through dark cloud. ‘States!’ she said. ‘Presidents and States.’

Enzo wrote up
KY
.

‘Kentucky.’

Then
NJ
.

‘New Jersey.’

He beamed at them. ‘The most common of all codes. Ones that get used by millions of people every day. Post codes. It’s so simple. His parents made him commit to memory all the States and all the Presidents when he was just a kid. He wasn’t ever going to forget them. So every flavour on the wheel got assigned to one of them.’

‘In what order?’ Sophie said.

Enzo shrugged. ‘The States would be alphabetical, the Presidents chronological. All we have to do is figure out where on the taste wheel he started.’

Sophie said, ‘We need a list of States and Presidents.’ And she rounded the table to the computer and tapped a quick search into Google. A smile spread across her face. ‘Fifty States, and forty-three Presidents. Actually, forty-two, because one of them served twice. Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?’ She clicked a couple of times with her mouse, then hit the print button, and the printer started spewing out a list of US States and American Presidents.

Michelle was looking at the coded scores given to the three wines they had tasted, then glanced up at Enzo’s whiteboard. ‘This doesn’t match, Enzo.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if the A to F and the 1 to 5, were the last things to be coded, then you would expect them all to be recent Presidents. But they’re not. Look.’ She pointed to the score her father had awarded the Château Lastours 2001 Cuvée Special. ‘ALI and CA. That’s got to be Abraham Lincoln and Chester Arthur.’

‘We’ve got them the wrong way round, that’s why.’ Everyone turned to look at Bertrand. ‘Look at the sensory descriptions of the wine in the mouth. WJC. LBJ. GF.’

‘Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnston, Gerald Ford,’ Michelle said. ‘All right down at the most recent end of the list.’

‘So we work backwards through the sensory descriptions,’ Enzo said. ‘Starting with George W. Bush.’ He wrote up
GWB
against
Thin
.

Sophie said, ‘How did Gil Petty describe
Thin
again?’ She pulled up the page of Petty’s flavour and sensory listings, then burst out laughing. ‘Lacking flavour and body.’ She scrolled up the list. ‘And his father? GHWB?
Simple
. A sound, drinkable wine of no great distinction. Two Bush presidencies summed up to perfection.’ She looked at Michelle, grinning. ‘Do you think you’re father matched these on purpose?’

‘I doubt it somehow. More like happy coincidence.’

‘What about Clinton?’ Bertrand said. ‘What’s his sensory adjective.’

Sophie put the two together from the separate lists and could hardly speak for laughing. When, finally, she managed to control herself, she said, ‘William Jefferson Clinton comes under the category of
Smooth
.’ Which brought a spontaneous eruption of laughter from around the room. Braucol woke up and started barking.

‘Maybe your father had a secret sense of humour after all,’ Enzo said. He took the printout of Presidents and States and, starting from the bottom of the board, worked his way back through the list of sensory descriptions, ratings and flavours, putting initials against each. ‘Some of these Presidents had the same initials as States, or each other, so it looks like he’s added the second letter of the surname to distinguish them.’

As he reached the tastes that he had copied down from the flavour wheel, Sophie said, ‘How do you know where he started listing the flavours?’

‘I don’t. But let’s assume that, like me, he started with the biggest grouping,
Fruit
. We’ll assign the initials to the order in which I’ve written them down, then see how they match up with our own tastings.’

It took several more minutes for him to finish writing State postal codes against flavours, finishing with
AL
against
Apple
. He riffled through a confusion of papers to retrieve his notes from the Domenech tastings.

‘Okay, so
oak
would be
NM
. We tasted that in the Lastours and the Sarrabelle.’ He checked the two coded reviews and found
NM
in the taste lines of both. ‘So far so good. We also found
vanilla
in both the Cuvée Léa and the Sarrabelle Syrah. Which means we should find
NJ
in their taste lines.’ He checked. ‘And there they are.’

‘And
liquorice
?’ Bertrand said. ‘We found that in the Syrah, too.’

Enzo looked at the board. ‘
Liquorice
is
OH
.’ He checked it against the review. ‘And there it is.’ He looked up, beaming his satisfaction. ‘By George, I think we’ve got it!’ He pulled the review of the Château Lastours Cuvée Special 2001 off the wall and held it up in front of him, so that he could switch focus between the whiteboard and the paper. His cellphone began to ring. ‘Get that will, you Sophie? I want to translate this.’

Sophie took his phone out on to the
terrasse
, and Enzo began to translate the coded review in front of him.

‘Colour—dark red with brick tones. Nose—smoky oak with wild fruit, following up with strong crushed strawberries. Mouth—soft tannins, velvety and round. Long finish. Longevity—five to eight years. Score—B1.’ He looked at Michelle. ‘No doubt he made it a little more colourful when he wrote it up for the newsletter, but that’s his basic description of the wine.’ He picked up the review of the Sarrabelle Syrah. ‘And it looks like he found his Holy Grail here in Gaillac. He’s given the Syrah an A1.’

Sophie came back in and shut the door gently behind her. Enzo saw immediately that she had paled.

‘What’s wrong?’

She took a tremulous breath, trying to hold back her emotion. ‘Oh, just, you know…We’re here, having a laugh, drinking wine cracking codes…’ She shook her head. ‘That was Nicole. Her mother’s funeral’s the day after tomorrow.’

Chapter Seventeen

I.

Rain wept from a dark sky, steady and slow. Black umbrellas jostled for space above the heads of mourners. Grass turned to mud underfoot, splashing black shoes which had been polished to a shine just that morning. The marble slab that covered the family tomb had been slid to one side by red-faced professionals with ropes. Fetid air rose from the concrete hole below. There were other coffins down there. Nicole’s grandparents. Nicole watched as coffinbearers, straining arms and faces, lowered her mother into blackness. One day her father would join his wife. And Nicole would join them both when her turn came. It was salutary for a young girl, looking down into the gaping darkness of eternity, to know that this was where her future lay.

The sight of her mother disappearing into the dark brought fresh tears to eyes that had fought to stay dry, and she felt the comfort of Fabien’s arm as it slid around her shoulder. She looked up and saw Enzo standing at the other side of the tomb, his mouth set in a grim line, his eyes full of sadness. She knew that Scotsmen often wore their kilts to weddings. She’d had no idea that they wore them to funerals, too. And she was moved that Enzo had taken the trouble. He made a striking figure with his white shirt and black tie, black dress jacket, and the eight metres of pleated tartan wool that made up his kilt. Silver trim on a black leather
sporran
gleamed dully in what little light the sky let through. There were small, thoughtful touches, too. The black flashes on either side of long, dark socks that stretched over sturdy calves and folded down below the knee. Black shoes laced up above the ankles. His black hair, pulled back in its habitual ponytail and held by a black ribbon. But it seemed greyer somehow, its white flash less distinctive.

And then it was over, mourners drifting away from the graveside, among the tombs and headstones of this tiny
cimetière
in the shadow of the hills. Past the old stone chapel with its faded stained-glass windows, out on to the narrow road that wound through the jumble of mediaeval houses gathered around this final resting place. Acorns fallen from a towering oak beyond the wall crunched underfoot, the only sound to break the shuffling silence as they left.

Nicole took her father’s arm as they walked towards the car. He was a big man reduced by loss, stooped and defeated. He looked awkward and uncomfortable in a suit that didn’t fit him, that would not button shut across a belly that had expanded since last he wore it.

Enzo stood back and watched father and daughter with an ache in his heart. Sadness for them, discordant memories for him. He became aware of someone stopping at his side and turned his head to find himself looking into Fabien Marre’s cautious black eyes. Anger displaced melancholy. He kept his voice low. ‘I thought I told you to stay away from Nicole.’

‘And I’m supposed to listen to a man in a skirt?’

If they had not been at a funeral Enzo would have taken him down with a swift left hook. In his imagination, at least. He contained his anger by making and unmaking fists at his side, then shoved his hands into his jacket pockets to keep them under control. He thought about all the hours they had spent decoding Petty’s Gaillac ratings. Enzo had been keen to read what Petty had written about Laurent de Bonneval’s Cuvée Special, since he had tasted it himself. But it hadn’t been among the coded reviews downloaded from the server. The wines of La Croix Blanche, however, had. He said, ‘We decoded Petty’s reviews of your wines.’ And saw Fabien tense.

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t you want to know how he rated them?’

‘I don’t give a damn what Petty thought.’

‘Three A2s and two B1s. We figure he must have been planning to change his value ratings for the Gaillac wines, otherwise they’d all have been 1s. There’s hardly a single wine that costs more than fifteen euros.’

Fabien said nothing.

‘He liked your wines, Monsieur Marre. If he’d published those ratings, you’d have been selling them all over America by now.’

‘So why would I want to kill him?’

Enzo looked at him thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know that you would. But, then, you had no way of knowing he was going to rate you at all, if we’re to believe that you threw him off the vineyard.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me what you believe.’

‘And what about Nicole? Does it matter to you what she thinks?’

A frown gathered the young man’s brows into a knot. ‘Why don’t we just leave Nicole out of this?’

‘You’re the one who’s bringing her into it. You’re the one who’s here.’ He glanced towards the line of cars and saw Nicole’s father and aunt driving off, leaving her standing in the road. She turned and looked back at Enzo and Fabien, and her concern was clear for them both to see. ‘You shouldn’t have come to the funeral, Marre. You’ve no business here.’

And as he walked across the small car park towards Nicole, he realised that the rain had stopped, and he lowered his umbrella. He took her in his arms and held her for a long time, before releasing her with unexpected tears in his eyes.

She said, ‘Thank you for coming, Monsieur Macleod.’ She reached up and touched his face briefly with cold fingertips. A tiny expression of gratitude and affection. ‘When do you leave for America?’

‘I fly out tomorrow. I’m going up to Paris this afternoon.’

She nodded almost imperceptibly towards Fabien, who remained standing, a lone figure, by the cemetery gate. ‘I hope there’s no trouble between the two of you, Monsieur Macleod. I really do.’ She avoided his eye, focusing somewhere off into the middle distance. ‘I think he’s really special.’ And she flicked a quick, apprehensive look at Enzo to guage his reaction.

But he remained impassive. ‘Be careful, Nicole,’ was all he said.

Then she took both of his hands in hers and stared studiously at the ground. She took a deep quivering breath and turned her face up towards him. ‘There’s something you should know.’ He saw the pain in her eyes. ‘I won’t be coming back to university, Monsieur Macleod.’

***

The yard was still crammed with vehicles, and the house full of mourners eating the
quiche
and
petit fours
that Nicole’s aunt had made the previous day, drinking the wine that Fabien had brought in the back of his four-by-four. Nicole’s father had changed out of his suit as soon as he got back to the house. Now he was comfortable again in his dungarees and cloth cap, anxious to move on, to fill his head with work and leave no room for thought or memories. He and Enzo followed the track up the hill above the house to where he had walked with Nicole the day she got back. A warm breeze had sprung up out of the south to sweep the sky from the tops of the hills. The worst of the rain had passed. Battered and torn clouds let fragments of light break through to rush in ever changing shapes across an undulating landscape, messengers bearing the promise of better weather to come.

‘It breaks my heart, Monsieur Macleod. It really does.’ The dogs went barking off ahead of them, scattering a gaggle of hens around the boarded-up remains of the abandoned farmhouse at the top of the hill.

‘She’s a smart girl, Monsieur Lafeuille. Brightest of her year.’

Her father raised his hands in a gesture of guilt and frustration. ‘I know, I know. She deserves better. And I appreciate everything you’ve done for her, I really do.’ He shook his head helplessly. ‘But I just don’t have the money.’ He waved an arm vaguely in the air. ‘The farm is all I have. It’s how I make my living. I have no choice but to work it. And I just can’t do it on my own. God knows, I might even have to let a few fields to my neighbours. We did that once before, for a season, after I nearly cut my foot off with a chainsaw.’

They stopped at the top of his world and looked out over the land that bound him as well as fed him. Land that demanded not only his life, but that of his daughter.

‘The one bright spot for Nicole in this dark place we’re in, Monsieur Macleod, is young Fabien Marre. He arrived yesterday. He’s been a great support to her. A nice lad.’ He managed to raise a smile and turned it towards Enzo. ‘And he’s of the land. Just like us.’ He shook his head. ‘And there was me thinking she was never going to find herself a man.’

Enzo nodded. Whatever doubts he had about Fabien Marre, this was neither the time nor the place to voice them. But where Nicole’s father saw the young winemaker as light in their darkness, Enzo feared he might only be casting ever deeper shadows. He hoped he was wrong.

II.

A dusky, pink twilight fell like a veil across the Paris rooftops. The rain in the southwest had not touched the capital. The air was autumnal soft, vibrating to the sounds of traffic in the boulevards. People sat at tables outside cafés enjoying an Indian summer, sipping chilled wine, animated chatter fusing with the sounds of birds that dived and swooped-in darting clouds between the buildings.

Enzo walked up the Rue de Tournon from the Boulevard Saint-Germain towards the
Sénat
, the floodlit stone of the Upper House painted gold against blue fading to red. He stopped outside huge green doors that opened into a hidden world of Parisian courtyards, and hesitated for just a moment before tapping in the entry code.

From the courtyard beyond, he could see that Raffin’s windows were open to the night. Soft classical music from a stereo drifted in gentle evening air, carried on the light that fell from unshuttered windows across the cobbles. The indignation that days before had fuelled his determination to speak to Raffin, gave way now to a nervous apprehension.

Raffin, too, seemed nervous. He had been hesitant about his availability to see Enzo that night. But Enzo had stressed that it would be their only chance to meet, and so he had cancelled an engagement and called back to tell Enzo to come to the apartment.

There was a bottle of wine open on the table and two glasses set beside it. Raffin wore immaculately pressed, pleated pants that gathered around brown suede Italian shoes. His white shirt looked freshly starched, open at the neck, collar turned up to where soft brown hair grew to meet it. It was longer than when Enzo had last seen him. His sharp, angular jaw was shaved smooth and still carried the scent of some expensive aftershave that Enzo couldn’t identify and probably couldn’t afford. Raffin lit a cigarette, which he held between long fingers, and looked at Enzo with pale green eyes. ‘You’ll take a glass?’

Enzo nodded and sat down uncomfortably at the table.

Raffin poured two glasses. ‘So how’s the investigation going?’

‘Well. I hope this trip to America is going to help me crack it.’

‘Will you be away long?’

‘A couple of days.’ Enzo took a sip of his wine and glanced at the bottle. Of course, it was something good. A Clos Mogador 2001 Priorat. An inky-purple Bordeaux with rich, full tones of blueberry and raspberry and toasty new oak. Enzo thought that it probably cost fifty euros, or more.

Raffin sat down opposite. ‘Tell me.’

And so Enzo told him everything. About Petty’s coded ratings, and how they had broken the code. About his article on GM yeasts recommending a boycott of American wines. Which drew a whistle of astonishment from Raffin. About the attempt on Enzo’s life in the vineyards of Château Saint-Michel. Jean-Marc Josse and the
l’ Ordre de la Dive Bouteille
. Gendarme Roussel and his missing person’s file. The discovery of Serge Coste who, in the space of one evening, had moved from the missing person’s folder to a murder file all on his own. And, of course, Fabien Marre, whose vineyard had played host to two corpses, and who seemed consumed by an unnatural hatred of Gil Petty.

Raffin listened in silence. ‘And the trip to America?’

‘I’m taking soil samples for analysis. If we can match them to the wine taken from Serge Coste’s stomach, it might well lead us to our killer.’

‘Any thoughts?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘What about this Fabien Marre?’

Enzo pursed his lips grimly. ‘I hope not, Roger. Nicole seems to have formed a real attachment to him.’

Raffin raised an eyebrow in surprise, but Enzo didn’t elucidate. ‘And that’s it? That’s what was so important for you to come and tell me? You couldn’t have briefed me by e-mail?’

Enzo nodded. ‘I could.’

‘So what are you really here for?’

Enzo returned his unblinking gaze. ‘Kirsty.’ He saw Raffin’s jaw set.

‘I thought as much. How did you find out?’ But he raised a hand to preempt Enzo’s response. ‘No don’t tell me. It was Charlotte, right? She come down to see you in Gaillac?’

‘I had a right to know.’

‘It’s none of her damned business!’ Raffin’s voice raised itself in anger. ‘Jealous bitch!’

‘That’s not how she tells it.’

‘No. Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’

‘She figures you’re the one who’s jealous of me and her.’

Raffin flashed him a dark look. ‘The way I heard it, there is no you and her.’

‘Well, you might be right there. But I didn’t come to talk about me and Charlotte. Or you and Charlotte.’

‘Kirsty’s a big girl now, Enzo. She doesn’t need her daddy vetting her boyfriends.’

‘I don’t want you seeing her, Roger?’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t think you’re right for her.’

‘Why?’

Enzo stared at him and struggled to find an answer. It wasn’t their age difference, which was only seven years—no more than the gap between Enzo and Pascale. So what was it? Roger was a successful journalist. A good-looking young man. Widowed, so he was available. As much as anything it was what Charlotte had said: ‘There’s something dark about Roger, Enzo. Something beyond touching. Something you wouldn’t want to touch, even if you could.’ ‘You’re just not.’ Even to Enzo, it sounded like the most feeble of reasons.

‘Oh, fuck off, Enzo.’ There was no rancour in it, just a weary dismissal. Raffin stood up, but Enzo reached across the table and held his wrist.

‘I’m not asking you, Roger….’

‘Well, that’s really rich coming from you!’ Her voice startled him. He turned around to find her standing in the bedroom doorway. Enzo could see himself beyond her in the mirrored doors. He could see the shock on his own face.