Peter May - The Critic

Garapin examined the damage to its frontal and temporal lobes. ‘Small areas of subarachnoid hemorrhage,’ he said. ‘But not enough to kill him. Otherwise the brain is substantially normal.’ He turned to Enzo and Roussel. ‘ Messieurs, there’s really nothing more for you to see here. If you’d like to adjourn to my office, I’ll see you in about ten minutes, after I’ve showered.’ Enzo noticed the sweat running in rivulets down Garapin’s forehead and gathering in his thick, black eyebrows.

As they walked along the green-painted corridor to Garapin’s office, Enzo said, ‘Are you okay?’

Roussel was the colour of the walls. His hands were trembling. ‘You know, as a cop, you see stuff. Stabbings, drownings, suicides. Horribly mutilated people in car wrecks. When I first started on the job, there were nights I came home and just lay on the floor shaking. You’d think you’d get used to it.’

‘It’s never quite the same when it’s someone you know.’

‘I kept thinking about Serge when we were kids. He was a character. Always getting in trouble at school. He wasn’t much good academically, but he was clever, you know. Always had a comeback when some smartass teacher got sarcastic. The profs hated him for it.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What a shitty way to end up.’

In the end, Garapin kept them waiting nearly twenty minutes. They didn’t speak much during that time, sitting staring at charts on the walls, diagrams of human organs, musculoskeletal structures, a multicoloured plan of the brain. Attending an autopsy always left Enzo feeling vulnerable. It was a very human response. Pathologists were somehow inured to it, able to separate the living from the dead. Enzo couldn’t do that. It was invariably himself that he saw cut open on the table. A glimpse of the future, an acknowledgement of the inevitable.

Garapin smelled of shower gel and shampoo, but beneath the perfume, there lingered still the stench of death. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you that unless toxicology comes up with something unexpected, I’m going to attribute cause of death to drowning. Not because I can prove that he drowned, but that given all other factors, it’s the most likely explanation.’ He dropped into his chair and sighed, intent, it seemed, on trying to convince himself. ‘Drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion, you see. There really is no specific pathognomonic or diagnostic sign. If you eliminate all other causes, and given the wine absorbed by his lungs, you’re left with drowning.’

Enzo thought about it. It did seem like the only logical conclusion, but he was still concerned by the unexplained injuries, and whether they were inflicted before or after death. ‘I suppose it’s impossible to say how he came by those contusions.’

‘Impossible,’ Garapin agreed.

‘What about the sample of wine retrieved from the stomach?’

‘What about it?’

‘He didn’t drink that.’

‘No, I think it seeped in there over time.’

‘So it’s the same wine he drowned in. The same wine he’s been preserved in for the past year.’

‘That’s a reasonable assumption.’

‘So a chemical analysis of the wine from the stomach could match it to the wine he’d been kept in.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Roussel was a better colour now. ‘We don’t know what wine he was kept in. There’s probably a thousand red wines, maybe more, produced in Gaillac. You couldn’t do a comparison with them all.’

‘We could start with the wines of La Croix Blanche.’

Roussel scowled. ‘You think Fabien did this? He’d have to be insane to dump the bodies in his own back yard.’ And Enzo remembered Charlotte’s words, ‘I’d say that you were dealing with someone suffering from a serious personality disorder-which means it won’t be a simple matter to find reason in his motive.’

Garapin interrupted. ‘In any case, it’s a moot point. The sample we have has been contaminated by stomach acid and tissue decay. We could never make a comparison accurate enough to stand up in court.’

Enzo nodded, conceding the point, then had a sudden thought. ‘Its multi-elemental composition won’t have changed, though.’

This time it was Garapin who conceded. ‘Probably not.’

‘What the hell’s a multi-elemental composition when it’s at home?’ Roussel looked from one to the other, seriously out of his depth, and aware of it.

Enzo said, ‘The minerals and elements that the grapes have absorbed from the soil while still on the vine. They would create a kind of identifiable fingerprint that would be passed on to the wine.’ He was excited by the thought. ‘There’s been a lot of work done on this in recent years to try to prevent fraud in the wine industry. To stop crooks trying to pass off cheap plonk as Bordeaux or Burgundy. People get fooled by the label, you know. Even experienced wine tasters can be conditioned by what they read on the bottle.’ He turned to Garapin. ‘You’ve got a sizeable sample there. Could you keep me some?’

Garapin leaned back lazily in his chair. ‘What are you going to do. Sniff and taste it and tell us the grape and the vintage?’

‘No, but I know a man who might be able to tell us exactly where it came from.’

As they crossed the car park, Roussel said, ‘I’m sorry to be thick about this, but you’re going to have to explain to me how you can take a sample of wine and tell where the grapes were grown.’

Enzo opened the door of the gendarme’s car and leaned on the top of it. ‘Each grape contains a unique and distinctive pattern of trace elements. These are absorbed by the grape through the movement of elements from rock, to soil, to grape, influenced of course by the solubility of inorganic compounds in the soil. But the point is, the multi-elemental pattern of a wine will reflect the geochemistry of its provenance soil-that is, the soil that it’s grown in. It will match it as accurately as a fingerprint.’

The light of understanding began to dawn for the gendarme. ‘So you take a sample of soil, compare it to the wine, and if the fingerprint matches then that’s where the grape was grown.’

‘Exactly.’

‘How would we know what soil samples to use?’

‘We don’t. We’ll have to take samples from all the vineyards that Petty visited. Discreetly, of course.’

‘And this guy you know will do the analysis?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Will he come here?’

‘I doubt it. He’s in California.’

‘So you’ll send them to him.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘No. That could take weeks. And if there’s a fifth victim marked up on our killer’s list, then we don’t have weeks. We might only have days-if that.’

‘What’ll we do, then?’

‘ We won’t do anything, Gendarme Roussel. If my friend agrees to do it at all, I’ll take the samples to him myself.’

The smell of crushed, fermenting grapes was carried from the chai on the pungent edge of invisible carbonic gas escaping from the cuves. It filled the air with the heady scent of autumn wine, and reached Enzo on a light breeze as he walked across the grass towards his gite in the fading evening.

Chateau des Fleurs seemed larger in silhouette against the setting sun, more substantial and imposing. Lights shone out from the cottage, casting shadows towards him from the terrasse. It had been a long day, and he had been away for hours.

A figure stood up from the table on the terrace and ran down the steps towards him. A slight figure, bursting with energy, hair streaming back through warm air. ‘Papa!’ She threw her arms around his neck and nearly knocked him over. She peppered his face and neck with kisses, then buried her head in his chest.