Peter May - The Critic

‘What is it?’ Bertrand said.

She looked at the label. ‘Chateau Clement Termes. Memoire rouge.’

Enzo gave her a sour look. ‘You have the most unerring instinct, Sophie, for picking the most expensive wines.’

Sophie grinned. ‘I have good taste, that’s all. Must have got it from my mother.’ She started pouring glasses.

Enzo displaced Nicole from her seat in front of the computer. ‘Move.’

‘Aw, Monsieur Macleod, you always get to do the good stuff.’ She moved away from the table to take a glass from Sophie’s outstretched hand, and sipped at it sulkily, in search of consolation. She brightened immediately. ‘This is very good.’

‘It ought to be. It cost enough.’

‘Oh, don’t be so Scottish, Papa.’

Enzo glowered at his daughter, then turned to scan the screen and open a folder entitled Articles, October 2003. There were several documents. Wines of Gaillac. History. Cepages. GM Yeast. Editorial. The unfinished content of a newsletter that was never published. Something drew him to the document entitled GM Yeast and he clicked on it. It was an article written for The Wine Critic by an American professor of genetics, revealing for the first time the widespread use of genetically modified yeast in the production of Californian wines. None of it made much sense to Enzo: ‘The yeast ML01 was modified using a shuttle vector containing a chromosome integration cassette with genes for malolactic enzyme, malate transporter (permease), regulatory genes and a sequence directing homologous recombination at a chromosomal locus.’ He wasn’t sure Petty’s subscribers would have made much sense of it either.

He turned to the document entitled, Editorial, and ran his eye down the text, leaping from sentence to sentence with a growing sense of disbelief: ‘The Food and Drug Administration in the United States alone reviews and approves GM microbes such as yeasts used in food products. But international faith in the FDA is fast eroding because approvals are frequently influenced by political pressure, and the approval of wine yeast leaves fundamental questions to be answered. It is certainly premature to market GM wine yeast, and since the wines produced using GM yeast are not labelled in the marketplace, it is only prudent to avoid all US wines.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ He looked up to find the others staring at him.

‘What is it?’ Michelle looked alarmed.

Enzo could still scarcely believe it. ‘In his October newsletter, the one he never published, your father was going to launch a campaign to boycott American wines.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of widespread use of genetically modified yeasts that the consumer wasn’t being told about. Yeasts approved in June 2003 by the FDA following tests that he claims were…’ he searched for the quote, ‘based on faith rather than science.’ He stared at Michelle and shook his head. ‘This is dynamite. A man of your father’s influence. If he had published this stuff, it could have caused catastrophic damage to the California wine industry.’

Charlotte pushed herself back in her rocking chair. ‘And provided a motive for any number of people to want to see him dead.’

Sophie sipped her wine thoughtfully. ‘But if it was never published, and he kept all his notes hidden on the internet, who would have known about it?’

‘If we knew the answer to that,’ Enzo said, ‘we might be a lot closer to knowing who killed him.’

It was Nicole who spotted the flaw in the logic. ‘But whoever killed Gil Petty, also killed the man we found last night, right?’

Enzo nodded, the memory of the autopsy still only too fresh in his mind. ‘Almost certainly.’

‘But you said this morning there didn’t appear to be any connection between them. Has that changed?’

‘No. The second victim was a local man called Serge Coste. He managed a bricolage store in Gaillac. No connection with Petty, or the wine industry.’

‘So wine wasn’t necessarily the motive for the murders.’

Enzo inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘You might be right, Nicole. And it’s certainly a danger that, if we focus too much on motive, we could miss stuff that’s right under our noses. Which is why we’ll carry on working our way, step by dull step, through every scrap of information we can dig out. Just like the Chinese.’ He turned towards Sophie. ‘Do I get a glass of my own wine or not?’

‘Sure, Papa.’ She brought him a glass and pecked him on the cheek. ‘Me and Bertrand’ll just go and get our bags from the car and get ourselves sorted out up the stairs.’

Enzo took a small sip of the Memoire and enjoyed the silky vanilla texture of it on his tongue. Then he took a full mouthful and felt himself relax a little as the alcohol slipped back over his throat. He let the aftertaste fill his mouth and nasal passages for a moment before turning back to the computer screen. He selected a vineyard at random, Domaine Sarrabelle, and went into the folder. There were four wines reviewed in separate documents. The Saint-Andre that he and Michelle had drunk the previous night, a chardonnay, a syrah and a sweet vin doux. He opened the syrah review, and sat staring at it for a long time, lost in a deep, puzzled concentration.

‘What’s wrong?’ Michelle’s voice came to him through a fog of confusion.

He looked up. ‘You said your father was obsessed with secrecy. Did you know he used a cipher?’

She looked at him blankly. ‘No, I didn’t.’

Enzo hit the print button, and the inkjet printer on the bookcase chattered and spewed out a page. He lifted it up and crossed to his whiteboard and began copying onto it what he had printed out. The others watched in silence as his blue marker pen squeaked its way across the shiny, white surface. He wrote:

Domaine Sarrabelle-Syrah -2002

100 % Syrah

Tile red oh amp; nm. ky, ks amp; la ky ms amp; nj. wjc. gf+ amp; lbj++ 5–8 jb ca

As he turned around, Sophie and Bertrand came heaving huge travel bags in from the terrasse. Enzo eyed the bags in disbelief. ‘I thought you were only here for a week?’

‘We are,’ Sophie said. ‘I had to leave so-o much stuff behind.’ She looked at the board. ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s Petty’s review of Domaine Sarrabelle’s 2002 syrah.’

She gazed at it for a moment. ‘It’s in code.’

Enzo grimaced. ‘Well spotted.’

Sophie ignored his sarcasm. ‘Great. A puzzle. You’re good at those, Papa.’

Enzo looked at the board. Random groupings of letters and numbers in twos and threes. Petty had been a man of exceptional talent and intelligence. It was not going to be a simple matter, he knew, to unpick a code created by him.

Nicole lay on her back gazing up at the ceiling in the dark. She glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was just after midnight. Her mind was a seething mass of facts and fears. Random pairs of letters swam in front of her eyes. Without a starting point, how could they ever crack Petty’s code? She tried to focus on it, but the recollection of the folder entitled La Croix Blanche kept forcing its way into her thoughts. Why had Fabien told her that he had turned Petty away, when Petty had in fact reviewed his wines?

The reflected headlights of a vehicle in the yard swept across her ceiling, and she heard a car door slam shut. Fabien had not been home when she got back to the house, and she had received only a chilly greeting from Madame Marre.

She slipped out from between the covers and pulled her curtains aside in time to see Fabien, caught in the full glare of security lamps outside the house, striding across the yard and into the chai. After a moment, lights flickered on in the shed, and fluorescent light fell out into the night. Nicole made a very fast decision, and turned quickly to pull on her jeans and drag a warm, hooded sweatshirt over her head. She slipped into her training shoes and opened the door to the hall. A night-light cast the faintest glow down its length. She listened for a moment and, hearing nothing, closed the door behind her and made her way carefully towards the stairs. The top step creaked loudly and she froze, listening intently for any indication that the formidable Madame Marre might have heard her. But all that broke the silence of the house was the heavy tick, tick of an antique grandfather clock in the downstairs hall.