Peter May - The Critic

But where Kirsty was concerned, despite Sophie’s warning, he did not want to pass that baton on to Roger Raffin.

Nicole could smell coffee on the cool morning air as she climbed the steps to the gite. She had been awake early, to find La Croix Blanche blanketed in a fog that had risen up from the river. Without waiting for breakfast, she had left the house and climbed the hill to the old church, emerging from the autumn brume into brilliant sunshine, finding the church and hilltop like an island in a sea of mist. A studded wooden door closed off an archway of stone and brick, and standing on the steps she’d had a view out across the ocean of cloud below. It seemed to lap through the vines at the very foundations of the church.

Then, as she’d followed the path down to Chateau des Fleurs, the mist had simply melted away, rising on air warmed by the sun to evaporate and reveal a sky of the clearest, palest blue.

But her good spirits, which had risen with the mist, ended abruptly as she entered the gite, and Enzo turned towards her from his whiteboard without so much as a bonjour. His brow was furrowed in concentration. ‘I’ve been thinking, Nicole. You can’t stay at La Croix Blanche. In fact, if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have let you go back there last night.’

Her hackles rose. ‘Why not?’

‘Because Fabien Marre has made it perfectly clear that he had nothing but antipathy towards Petty. And since both bodies were found on his vineyard, he has to be considered a suspect.’

‘No!’

Her abrupt response startled him. ‘No, what?’

‘You’re wrong about Fabien.’

‘Nicole…’

She did all but stamp her foot. ‘I’m staying at La Croix Blanche, Monsieur Macleod. And if you don’t like it, then I’ll just go home. You’re not my father. You can’t tell me what to do.’

Charlotte turned from the kitchen worktop where she was grilling toast, and she and Enzo exchanged glances.

Enzo shrugged. Long experience had told him that when Nicole was in this frame of mind, rational argument was wasted on her. He raised his hands in self-defence. ‘Okay, okay. Just don’t come crying to me later telling me what a terrible mistake you made.’

Nicole did not consider this worthy of a response and instead installed herself noisily at the computer and hit the start-up button.

A creak on the stairs made them all look up, and Bertrand came down wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. Enzo was aware of both Charlotte and Nicole eyeing him with interest. He was stunningly well-built, smooth, tanned skin stretched over taut muscles, and Enzo suffered a moment of irrational jealousy. It was a long time since women had cast such lascivious eyes in his direction. If ever. He had certainly never had a body like that.

Bertrand was clutching an old, well-thumbed copy of Gil Petty’s newsletter which had been among Enzo’s papers. There was a spontaneous exchange of compulsory bonjours before he waved the copy of The Wine Critic at Enzo. ‘I’ve had an idea about how to crack the code.’

Enzo eyed him skeptically. A well-developed body often reflected a less well-developed brain. But Bertrand had surprised him before.

‘I’ve been looking at his old reviews, and they all follow the same pattern.’ He reached the foot of the stairs and crossed to the whiteboard.

A sleepy-looking Sophie emerged from the mezzanine above him and looked down into the room, sweeping the hair out of her face. ‘What’s all the noise?’

But Bertrand ignored her. He pointed to the first line of the coded review, which was not in fact coded at all. “Tile red.” ‘Okay, he starts with the colour. That’s clear. Then he sticks his nose in the glass and describes what he smells.’ He stabbed a finger at the second line-“oh amp; nm. ky, ks amp; la”. ‘So these groupings of letters must represent the smells he’s going to describe when he writes up his review. Strawberry, oak, vanilla, whatever they might be.’

Enzo shuffled patiently, stifling a mild irritation. All of this seemed rather obvious, and had occurred to him almost immediately the night before. He couldn’t see how it helped.

‘The next line represents the taste, or the texture of the wine in his mouth, and then the finish.’ He ran his finger down to the next line- 5–8. ‘That’s not code at all. He’s just telling us how many years the wine can be laid down for. Then the last line, of course, is his rating. Which, I guess, was the thing he was most concerned about keeping secret.’

Enzo tried not to sound patronising. ‘I had thought through most of this already, Bertrand. What’s your point?’

The young man didn’t seem in the least dismayed. He beamed. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? All we have to do is get a bottle of the wine he’s describing and taste it for ourselves. If we can identify the smells and the flavours, and then cross-reference them to other reviews and taste those wines, we should be able to figure out what some of these codes represent.’

Enzo glanced towards Charlotte and saw the tiny smile playing about her lips. She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he found himself revising his opinion of Bertrand yet again. It wasn’t a bad idea. If they could identify even two, or three, of those flavours or smells, and relate them to Petty’s code, then it would give them a starting point for breaking it.

‘Neat, huh?’ Sophie beamed down at them from the mezzanine, basking proudly in the reflected glory of her petit ami.

‘There’s just one drawback.’ Everyone turned towards Nicole, and she blushed. ‘I mean, Monsieur Macleod’s an experienced drinker of wine. Everyone knows that.’ Enzo glared at her. ‘But Bertrand’s the only experienced taster among us.’

‘Not a problem.’ Sophie padded down the stairs and lifted a flyer from the selection of leaflets and tourist guides that Madame Lefevre had left in the gite for her locataires. ‘I was just looking at this last night. They run daily wine-tasting courses at the Maison du Vin in Gaillac. It’s just a couple of hours. We could all do it. It would be fun.’

The table was covered in clear plastic, then white butcher’s paper. With fastidious care, Enzo laid out the red cape on the paper. It smelled of damp earth and stale alcohol and death, and its black trim was marred by a fine cast of green mould. The three-pointed red hat was bashed and stained. There were still hairs clinging to the interior of its black headband. Enzo wondered if they had belonged to Petty, or to its original owner.

He looked around to find Roussel watching him, plastic evidence sacks piled on the chairs beside him. Space at the gendarmerie was at a premium, and so the police officer had acquired a room at the town’s medical laboratoire for Enzo to examine the evidence from the Petty case. He had been to Albi early that morning to collect everything from the parquet.

‘Were there any notebooks found amongst Petty’s things at the gite?’

Roussel shook his head. ‘No. I thought that was odd at the time. Because everyone said he took notes when he was tasting. Always in a small, moleskin notebook. But there was nothing.’

Enzo thought about it. Petty’s murderer must have taken it. Or destroyed it. Why? Might there have been something incriminating in it? They could only speculate. He turned his attention back to the hat. ‘Was there any attempt to establish if this was Petty’s hair?’

Roussel nodded. ‘There was Petty’s hair and hair from at least two other people. Unidentified.’ He stooped to lift a hefty document from his leather briefcase, and handed it to Enzo. ‘That’s the report from the lab in Toulouse.’

Enzo took it, and glanced at the policeman. He looked terrible. There were penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes. He seemed tired, and drawn, diminished somehow, almost as if he had lost weight overnight. And Enzo was certain that he could smell stale alcohol on his breath. ‘You okay?’