Peter May - The Critic

Enzo scratched his head. ‘Jeez. It could take weeks to go through all this stuff.’

‘I’ll bet the French police didn’t. It’s all in English, for a start.’

‘They probably concentrated on finding his Gaillac ratings.’

‘Well, where are they?’ She scanned the screen.

But Enzo could only shake his head. There seemed to be no folder containing work in progress. ‘They’re not here. Unless they’re somehow hidden on the hard disk. Although I’m pretty sure the Police Scientifique would have had an expert take a look at that.’

‘Knowing Dad, he’d have some way of hiding them. He was good at hiding stuff. His emotions, mostly.’ She paused. ‘He was obsessed by secrecy, you know. When his newsletter came out each month, wines that got high ratings could double in price overnight. Anyone who knew in advance what those ratings were could make a killing. Buy cheap, sell expensive. He even wrote a punitive secrecy clause into the contract with his printer.’

‘Well, wherever he kept them, they don’t seem to be on his computer. There weren’t any notebooks or diaries among his things?’

She shook her head.

He thought about it for a moment. ‘Surely he made notes when he was tasting. The police must have kept them as evidence.’ He pulled up the navigation bar from the bottom of the screen and clicked on the mailer. ‘Let’s have a look at his e-mails.’

Petty had organised his e-mail correspondence with the same meticulous care with which he had filed his back catalogue of wine ratings. There were thirty or forty folders containing two-way correspondence with wineries and negociants, journalists, printers, publishers. A huge file of several thousand e-mails under “Miscellaneous.” Nothing personal. Except for a single folder above “Miscellaneous” that was labelled “Michelle.”

Enzo glanced round as she leaned over his shoulder to peer at the screen. She had seen it, too. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Open it.’

He clicked on the folder, and they found themselves staring at an empty screen. Nothing. The folder was empty. He could feel her tension. ‘Did you ever correspond by e-mail?’

‘Never.’

‘So why did he have a folder with your name on it?’

She shook her head, at a complete loss. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe he always meant to write. Don’t they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?’

‘Or maybe he was waiting for you to write to him.’

‘Hell would have frozen over first.’

Enzo was shocked by the vitriol in her tone. He turned to look at her, but she moved back out of his field of vision. ‘Why should I run to him? He was the one who never had time for me.’

He thought for several long moments. ‘You know, sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and make the first move. If you love someone, you have to tell them today. Because they might not be here tomorrow.’

She looked at him curiously, forgetting for a moment her own selfish obsessions. ‘That came from the heart. Personal experience?’

He glanced at his watch and looked out through the window to see the light dying in the east. ‘Maybe we should eat,’ he said. ‘I know a place.’

The old square in Lisle sur Tarn was almost deserted as they walked across the dusty red blaize in the fading light. Lamps illuminated the dark interior of brick arcades around the thirteenth century bastide. Shops were shut, but customers sat at tables outside Le Cepage restaurant, and the Olivier bar in the far corner. There was a function of some kind in the Hotel de Ville, lights blazing in tall windows all along the upper floor, the sound of accordion music drifting on the warm night air. The Musee du Chocolat was locked up tight, air-conditioning keeping chocolate sculptures safe from the heat.

At the southwest corner, they passed beneath enormous oak beams that held up ancient, sagging buildings. Beyond, a long narrow street ran between cantilevered houses down to the river. Lights from Le Romuald restaurant fell out into the evening gloom.

‘So how do you know about this place if you’re not from around here?’ Michelle inclined her head towards him quizzically.

Enzo could see her green eyes fixed on him, bright and interrogative. Gone was the pain that had clouded them earlier as they went through her father’s belongings. ‘It was a recommendation. From the proprietors of the Chateau des Fleurs. They said if I ever wanted to romance a young woman this was the place to come.’

She laughed. ‘They did not.’

He grinned. ‘No, they didn’t. They said that the food gets cooked over the smoking embers of an open fire in a huge cheminee, and that the cuisine is excellent.’

A young man raked through the remains of oak logs on a hearth raised to waist height, pushing freshly burning chunks of wood to the back, and dragging glowing remnants towards him. He set a grilling rack above the embers and marinated lamb cutlets hissed and sizzled, spitting garlic and blood, as he placed them over the heat.

Michelle watched, fascinated, as she finished her salad entree of goat’s cheese and gesiers. She looked at Enzo, a sudden question occurring to her. ‘Why do the French call a starter an entree?’

‘Because that’s what it is,’ Enzo told her. ‘The entry to the meal. It’s a French word. It’s Americans who have corrupted it to mean a main course.’

‘I suppose you Europeans think Americans have corrupted everything.’

Enzo smiled. “Not everything. You make some pretty good wine in California.’

‘My father thought so. Californian reds made up most of his top ten. That and a handful of Bordeaux.’

‘No Burgundies?’

‘He loved Burgundy. He just didn’t rate it as highly. He adored pinot noir, but not as much as cabernet or merlot or syrah.’

‘Which makes his ratings very much a matter of individual taste.’

‘Of course. What else is a critic going to do, but say what it is he likes and what he doesn’t? A lot of people followed my father’s recommendations and found that they agreed with him. That’s why he was so successful.’

‘For someone who wasn’t speaking to him, you seem to know a lot about your father.’

She shook her head in vigorous denial. ‘That was his fault, not mine.’

Enzo let her sudden flame of anger die again before he said, ‘You talked earlier about curling up with him on an armchair, watching television together.’

‘That’s when I was just a kid. He used to call me his little fish, and I would make these fish mouths at him and make him laugh. And he ended up calling me “fishface.” My friends were horrified. But I was happy enough. I used to figure it meant he loved me.’ She pushed the remains of her salad away, as if she had suddenly lost her appetite. ‘But that was before his newsletter took off big time.’

A light came on in a central courtyard which was open to the sky beyond French windows. There were tables and chairs out there for summer diners, potted plants, crimson ivy creeping up brick walls, and a large woodstore at the back to feed the fire. Michelle was distracted for a moment before gathering her thoughts again.

‘At the height of his celebrity, he had nearly sixty thousand subscribers. That’s still more than Robert Parker has today. But he started off with just a handful. It was a hobby. He loved to drink wine. He and mom had friends round for blind tastings, and they’d all get drunk. And summer holidays were always spent wine-tasting, touring around chateaux in France in the cheapest rental car he could find. The great would-be connoisseur of fine wines pitched a tent every night and slept under canvas. He was a bank clerk, for God’s sake. He couldn’t afford any of it, and he was spending more than fifty percent of his income on wine so that he could taste it and rate it for his precious newsletter. Mom had to get a job, and boy did she hate that!’