Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Papa, I can explain.’

‘No, you can’t.’ He pointed a finger at Bertrand. ‘You. Get out!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Bertrand slipped, stark naked, from the bed, hunched modestly to conceal his embarrassment. He struggled to pull on his shorts and tee-shirt, hopping from one foot to the other.

‘You drank my champagne!’ Enzo wasn’t sure which made him angrier — finding Bertrand in bed with Sophie, or knowing that they had drunk his Moët et Chandon.

Sophie was sitting up, clutching the sheet to her neck. ‘You said you only bought it for the label.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘You did !’

‘Have you any idea how much that bottle cost?’

Bertrand was trying to undo the buckles on his sandals. ‘Probably about a hundred and fifty euros.’

Enzo swung blazing eyes in the unfortunate young man’s direction. ‘And you still drank it?’

‘Papa, it was my fault. I thought you were only interested in the label. And it didn’t go to waste, honestly.’

‘Oh, didn’t it?’

‘No, we really did have something to celebrate.’ She glanced at Bertrand, who prepared himself for an explosion. ‘Bertrand asked me to marry him.’

A black cloud descended on Enzo, and he felt a strange stillness. ‘Over my dead body.’ He turned a steady gaze in Bertrand’s direction. ‘I thought I told you to get out.’

Bertrand shook his head in despair. There was no point in arguing. ‘Yeah, okay, I’m going.’ A sullen calm had overtaken him.

‘Papa-a-a,’ Sophie wailed.

Bertrand brushed past her father and into the hall, sandals dangling from his hand. He muttered something as he went.

Enzo turned on him. ‘What was that?’

Bertrand swivelled to face him. ‘Why would anyone in their right mind pay a hundred and fifty euros just for a label?’

‘A hundred and ninety,’ Enzo corrected him.

‘Then you were robbed.’

Enzo glared at him, inflamed by the knowledge that he was probably right. ‘It’s an important clue in trying to solve a man’s murder.’

‘This Jacques Gaillard thing?’

‘Yes. Only, I can’t figure out what it is.’

‘What’s to figure about a bottle of champagne?’

‘The vintage. It has to have been chosen for a reason.’

‘1990?’

‘Yes.’

Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘When, exactly, was Gaillard murdered?’

‘In 1996.’

The young man shrugged. ‘Well, there’s your connection.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The 1990 Dom Perignon wasn’t released until 1996.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Before I went to CREPS, I trained as a wine waiter for a year.’

‘And that makes you an expert?’

‘No. But I do know a bit about wine.’

Enzo’s frown deepened. ‘Next you’ll be telling me the significance of Dom Perignon.’

‘In relation to the murder of Jacques Gaillard, no.’ Bertrand was standing his ground defiantly. ‘But I do know that he was born Pierre something, sometime in the mid seventeenth century, and that he became a Benedictine monk before he was twenty. He was less than thirty when he was appointed cellar master at the Abbey of Hautvillers. I know that some people have credited him with inventing champagne, but actually sparkling wine was being produced a century earlier by monks in the south of France. I also know he was supposed to have been blind, allegedly heightening his sense of taste. But that’s another myth. The truth is, he was just a damned good winemaker. He introduced blending to the Champagne region, and was the first person to successfully contain local sparkling wine in reinforced glass bottles with Spanish corks.’

Enzo looked at him in amazement. Sophie shuffled into the hall from the bedroom, the sheet wrapped around her. ‘I didn’t know you knew all that stuff,’ she said.

‘I can show you his tomb, if you want.’

Enzo scowled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘On the internet. There’s a site where you can make a three hundred and sixty degrees tour of the church where he’s buried.’

Enzo had forgotten his anger. Through a fugg of drink and fatigue, a strange clarity was starting to emerge. ‘Okay, show me.’

The three of them trundled through to the séjour , and Bertrand seated himself at the computer. ‘I can’t remember the URL, but I’ll find it.’ He made a quick search. ‘Here we are.’ He clicked on a link and up came a site about Dom Perignon, with another link that took them to a pop-up photograph of his tomb — an engraved black slab set in a stone-flagged floor. Beneath it were arrows pointing up and down, right and left. By pointing the mouse at the arrows it was possible to make the image move. Bertrand panned up from the tomb to an altar behind a black-painted rail, and three stained-glass windows beyond that. It was possible to pan all the way up to the roof. By pointing at the left arrow, he swung them along a wood-panelled wall down the side of the church to rows of benches leading to the back. A massive, old-fashioned chandelier hung from the beams overhead. Bertrand kept the cursor over the left arrow, and they went through three hundred and sixty degrees, returning to the altar where they’d begun.

Enzo had never seen anything like it. Sunlight fell in through the stained glass and lay across the floor in geometric patterns. There was a sense of being there, of being able to look in any direction, to focus on anything you wanted. Enzo shook his head in awe. ‘That’s extraordinary. How do they do that?’

‘Six pictures taken with a very wide-angled lens, then somehow they get stitched together to give you the panorama,’ Bertrand said.

Sophie slipped her arm through her father’s, and snuggled up close to him. ‘Am I forgiven, Papa?’

But Enzo was distracted. ‘No,’ he growled. And to Bertrand, ‘What church is this?’

‘It’s the abbey at Hautvillers, just outside Épernay in the Champagne region.’

‘Hautvillers.’ When Bertrand had spoken of the abbey a few minutes earlier, it had lodged somewhere in the back of Enzo’s consciousness, ringing tiny alarm bells that he wasn’t hearing until now — the second mention of it.

‘It’s the home of Moët et Chandon,’ Bertrand added.

But Enzo was remembering something else. ‘Here, let me in.’ He moved Bertrand out of the chair and sat himself in front of the computer. He pulled down the History menu and began searching back through all the sites Nicole had visited earlier, stopping only when he found the link that took him back to the page on Hugues de Champagne. All the time he kept hearing Nicole’s voice. What a lot of Hugues there were in those days . He ran his eye down the page. ‘ Putain con !’

‘Papa, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ Enzo was grinning stupidly. ‘Nothing at all.’ He jumped up and clambered over piles of books to the whiteboard, and then he turned, marker pen in hand, for all the world as if he were lecturing a class at Paul Sabatier. ‘Hugues de Champagne went back to Palestine in the year 1114 in the company of eight other knights. One of them was his vassal, Hugues de Payens, who went on to become the first Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Another was Geoffrey de St. Omer. But here’s the thing….’ Sophie and Bertrand had no idea what he was talking about. ‘There was another Hugues. Hugues d’Hautvillers.’ His face was shining. ‘Don’t you see?’ But they didn’t. He turned to the board and wrote up Hautvillers and drew a circle around it, and then arrows to it from almost everywhere else. ‘Everything leads to Hautvillers. The champagne, Dom Perignon, the crucifix and St. Hugues, the lapel pin and the Knights Templar. Everything.’ He frowned. ‘Except for the dog. But I’ll work that out when I get there.’