Peter May - The Critic

And his weariness was lifted by a surge of love and affection. ‘Hey!’ He put his arms around her and held her to him. ‘Sophie, what are you doing here?’ And even to his own ears his voice sounded strange, speaking English with a native Scottish accent that had remained unchanged across all the years. When they were alone together, he and Sophie always spoke English, and he loved to hear the soft, whisky accent he had given her, a legacy of a homeland she had never known. She could hardly have been more French. It was her culture, and her language, and she was a constant reminder to him of her mother. She looked like her. The same black eyes, the same infectious smile. Only the faint silver stripe that ran back through dark hair from her forehead betrayed the genetic link with her father.

She pulled away and pouted at him. ‘Are you not pleased to see me?’

He grabbed her and nearly squeezed the breath from her lungs. ‘Of course I’m pleased to see you. I’m just surprised to see you.’

‘We thought we would come and help?’

‘We?’

‘Me and Bertrand. He’s got someone looking after the gym for a week. He’s a real wine expert, you know.’

‘Sophie, a year as a trainee wine waiter doesn’t make you an expert.’ He put an arm around her waist and they climbed the steps together.

‘Bet he knows more than you.’

As they reached the terrace Bertrand stepped out from the lit interior. Enzo could see his diamond nose-stud catching the light, and the ring through his eyebrow. He was still gelling his hair into spikes, and wore a sleeveless tee-shirt to show off the muscles cultivated during hours of patient weight-lifting at the gymnasium he ran in Cahors. He was not tall, but was very nearly perfectly formed. Enzo sighed inwardly. He had been forced by events to concede that there was more to Bertrand than he had given him credit for. But he was not what Enzo would have wished for his little girl. She was barely twenty. Bertrand was nearly twenty-seven. And worse, he was sleeping with her.

Bertrand shook his hand. ‘Monsieur Macleod.’

‘Bertrand.’ And Enzo had a sudden thought. ‘Where are you staying?’

‘Here,’ Sophie said.

‘You can’t. There’s only one bed, and a clic-clac that’s killing my back.’

‘And two bunk beds up in the mezzanine.’

Enzo groaned inwardly. This was getting ridiculous. Four of them in a house with one bedroom and one bathroom. And he had yet to sleep in the bed. But, ‘cosy,’ was all he said.

Sophie missed his tone. ‘Yeah, it’s a great cottage. And a fabulous chateau.’ Then she paused. ‘So who’s in the bed, then?’

‘Charlotte.’

‘Well, why aren’t you sleeping with her?’

Enzo glowered at her. ‘Don’t even go there.’

They went inside, and Enzo was surprised to see Michelle sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the clic-clac. Charlotte was in the rocker, reading, and Nicole was tap-tapping at Petty’s laptop. ‘Have you been here all day?’ Enzo found it hard to picture Michelle and Charlotte indulging in polite conversation.

‘No, I only came back about half-an-hour ago to find out what happened at Albi.’

A tiny smile flickered across Enzo’s lips as he remembered his conversation with Madame Durand. ‘They made me an official consultant on the investigation.’

Charlotte looked up from her book. ‘Are they paying you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘No, I thought not.’

‘Shhhhh!’ Nicole waved an irritable hand in their direction. ‘I can’t concentrate with all this chatter.’

Enzo crossed to the computer. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Right now I’m trying to get into Michelle’s dad’s webspace.’ She sighed her annoyance and looked up at her mentor. ‘But I wasted half the day trying to persuade Madame Lefevre to let me run a phone extension up from the estate office. There’s no Airport card in this computer. It’s not configured for Wi-Fi.’ She averted her eyes towards the screen again and added. ‘She wasn’t too pleased to discover we’d been tapping into their account.’

‘We?’ Enzo said, his voice rising in pitch with his indignation.

‘You said you were going to tell her.’ But before Enzo could respond, she added, ‘Anyway, I’m beginning to make progress. Finally.’

Michelle got up and approached the table. ‘What have you found?’

‘Your dad was using a free server while he was in France. It’s called Freesurf. Because he wasn’t working from a single, fixed line, he was just paying for the calls as he went. But the thing is, he got a hundred megs of webspace with the account.’

‘Was he using it?’ Enzo peered at the screen to try to see what she was doing.

‘Well, he’s got a piece of software called Fetch in his Applications folder, which would suggest that he was uploading stuff to the internet. Normally you would save your username and password within the programme to make it quicker and easier each time you wanted to connect. But he doesn’t seem to have done that.’

‘And you don’t know what username or password he was using?’

‘I found a username in his mailer. Seems to be the same one he used for everything-gil. petty. But all his passwords are encoded.’ She looked up at Michelle. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what he might have used as a password?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. We weren’t exactly on password exchanging terms.’

Nicole shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’ll be somewhere in amongst his keychains. I’ve just got to figure out how to get in there. I know there’s a way.’

‘Try fishface,’ Enzo said.

‘Fishface!’ Sophie laughed. ‘What kind of password’s that?’

Enzo glanced at Michelle and saw that she had paled. ‘Just try it,’ he said to Nicole, and he watched as she entered “gil. petty” and “fishface” into their respective fields and hit the return key. A new window opened up, full of folders they hadn’t seen before.

Nicole clapped her hands in delight. ‘We’re in!’ She scanned the screen with sparkling eyes. ‘Gaillac ratings. Articles for the October 2003 newsletter.’ She looked up at Enzo. ‘How on earth did you know his password?’

‘Lucky guess,’ Enzo said, and he looked at Michelle to see eyes filled with tears she was trying hard not to spill. In his peripheral vision, he was aware of Charlotte watching them.

But none of them had time to dwell on it. Nicole was opening folders one after the other. ‘All the vineyards he’d visited,’ she said. ‘They’re all here. Chateau Lastours. Domaine Sarrabelle. Chateau Saint-Michel. Domaine Vaysette. Chateau Lacroux. Chateau de Salettes.’ She glanced up at Michelle, then looked back at the list, and for a moment her heart seemed to stop. Domaine de la Croix Blanche. He’d tasted Fabien’s wines. But Fabien had told her that he’d turned Petty away.

‘What is it?’ Enzo said.

‘Nothing.’ She moved quickly on. ‘There are subfiles with a Word document for each wine and each rating. Looks like he’d been to fifteen or twenty vineyards, tasted nearly a hundred wines. He did a lot of tasting in just a week.’

‘ Sommeliers and wine critics’ll do that,’ Bertrand said. ‘I did a wine-tasting stage in Toulouse, and all the training was about identifying tastes and smells fast. Sniffing twice only, and keeping the wine in your mouth for as short a time as possible. That way you can taste a lot of wine without ruining your palate.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know that I was very good at it. Our prof was a former French sommelier of the year. He could pick out and identify every flavour in even the most complex wines.’

Everyone turned at the sound of a cork popping, and Sophie stood holding an open bottle of red wine. ‘Speaking of which, it’s time for aperos don’t you think?’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Papa?’