Peter May - The Critic

‘Because by the time he’d been missing for a week, alarm bells had started ringing.’

‘You told me people go missing all the time.’

‘They do. But not famous people. Not celebrities. You or I, we could disappear into the ether. But someone like Petty?’ He shook his head. ‘Not so easy just to vanish when half the world knows your face.’

‘So alarm bells began to ring…’ Enzo prompted him.

‘Missed appointments, conference calls he never logged in for. His agent started hassling us. Then the US embassy. We started taking it more seriously. He’d booked the gite for a month. There were still ten days of the rental left, and he’d been missing for well over a week. All his stuff was still there, including the contents of the bathroom wastebin. So we bagged it all, as a precaution.’

‘Did something right for once.’

Roussel turned sullen eyes away from Enzo’s. ‘Anything else we can do for you, monsieur?’

‘Yes, there is.’ From his shoulder bag, Enzo took the ziplock bags containing the samples of Petty’s hair, and the gunk from his razor. They were labelled and dated, and he held them out to Roussel. ‘It would be useful to have a sample of Petty’s DNA as well.’

From the lab, in its tiny, hidden square in the heart of the old town, Enzo walked through to the Eglise Saint-Pierre. The repeating pattern of arches in an elaborate stone doorway were reflected in the redbrick architecture of its towering facade. Coloured fragments of sunlight, glimpsed beyond the half-open door, fell in through stained-glass windows to cast light in the gloom of its vast, echoing interior. But Enzo did not go inside. Neither prayer nor confession were high on his list of priorities.

He turned left into the Rue Portal and followed the narrow, cobbled street up between oddly canted apartments to the big, leafy Place de la Liberation, where sunlight danced in the shade of tall chestnuts whose leaves were stirred by a light wind. All along its length, old people sat on benches watching leaves fall and time slip away.

Sophie and Bertrand were sitting at a table outside the Grand Cafe des Sports with Nicole, Michelle, and Charlotte. As soon as he joined them, Enzo became aware of an unspoken tension between Charlotte and Michelle-aware, too, that he was probably the cause of it. He was neither flattered nor pleased by the thought, reflecting only that his life would be much less complicated if there were fewer women in it. Sophie was being extra bright in an attempt to gloss over the discordant atmosphere.

‘We went to the Maison du Vin,’ she said. ‘They’ve got an amazing tasting room down in the cellars of the old abbe. Rows and rows of sinks for spitting your wine into.’

Nicole humphed. ‘A waste of good wine.’

Sophie ignored her. ‘Trouble is, Papa, we’re out of season now, and they’re only doing tasting classes on Thursday nights.’ She delved into her bag. ‘But we got these.’ And she produced a sheaf of photocopied documents. ‘ Les etapes de la degustation. Everything you need to know about tasting wine.’ She thrust them at her father, and he flicked through sheets of paper with illustrations of wine glasses being looked at, sniffed, swirled, and quaffed. La vue. La nez. Le gout. There was a list of colour nuances for red, white, and rose wine, categories of smells and tastes, an illustration of the human tongue with its clusters of taste buds capable of distinguishing everything from sweet to acid to salty to bitter.

‘And I used to think wine was easy,’ he said. ‘You drank it, and you liked it. Or you didn’t.’

‘There’s much more to it than that, Monsieur Macleod,’ Bertrand said earnestly. ‘It’s full of subtlety and variety. And once you’ve trained your palate, you know, there’s no going back. Drinking wine will never be the same again.’

‘Hmmmph.’ Enzo was not convinced. He felt something tugging at his feet. ‘What the hell…?’ He looked under the table in time to see a brown puppy dog pulling at his laces before dancing away across the pavement.’

Nicole laughed. ‘It’s just Braucol. Shoelaces are his party trick. We’ve been watching him go round all the tables.’

‘Braucol?’

‘Yeah, that’s what they’ve christened him here.’

‘Well, they should teach him not to bother the customers.’ Enzo stooped to retie his laces.

‘Oh, he doesn’t belong to the cafe. He’s a stray.’

Enzo glared at the dog, which cocked its head and seemed to be smiling at him. He waved his hand at it. ‘Go on, bugger off!’

‘Papa!’

But Braucol seemed to take Enzo’s dismissal as a sign of encouragement and came racing back to the table to put his front paws up on Enzo’s thigh and thrust a big head and floppy ears into his lap.

‘He likes you, Monsieur Macleod.’ Nicole reached over and tousled the puppy’s head.

But he only had eyes for Enzo. Big, soft, irresistible brown eyes which he turned up towards what he clearly took to be the leader of the pack. Enzo sighed and gave in, scratching behind its ears, before pushing it back down on to the terrasse. ‘On you go, shoot the craw!’

Michelle frowned. ‘Shoot the craw?’

‘An old Scottish expression,’ Enzo told her. ‘For…for…’

‘Bugger off?’ Sophie suggested.

‘Something like that.’ Enzo turned to Bertrand. ‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Well, we should still go ahead and do the tasting.’ He riffled through the notes. ‘This is all pretty much what I got taught anyway.’

Enzo felt a tugging at his feet again. ‘Jesus Christ!’

Braucol went scampering off amongst the trees, having successfully undone the pack leader’s shoelaces again.

As he bent to tie them for the second time, Enzo saw the puppy go chasing down the sidewalk after a middle-aged lady wearing pink cut-off pants with laced-up slits at the side of either calf. She was what Enzo’s mother would have described as mutton dressed as lamb. She tried to avoid the dog dancing around her legs, then stumbled on precariously high heels and sat down abruptly as Braucol succeeded in grabbing one of her laces.

‘Braucol!’ Enzo shouted admonishment at the dog, and it immediately turned and raced back to their table. The woman glared in their direction, humiliation flushing her face as pink as her trousers. She got to her feet and strode over to the gathering of would-be wine tasters.

‘Is this your dog?’ she demanded of Enzo.

‘Well, actually…’

But she wasn’t waiting for an explanation. Her hand swung unexpectedly from somewhere beyond her handbag, and its open palm caught Enzo squarely on the side of the face. It made a very loud slapping sound. ‘You should learn to keep your animals under control.’ And she strode off, dignity restored, leaving Enzo speechless, face stinging.

There was a moment of shocked silence around the table, before they all burst out laughing. Except for Enzo. And Braucol began dancing around Enzo’s chair, barking his delight.

The dog sat next to their table all through lunch, gazing up, wide-eyed and expectant, as Nicole and Sophie, to Enzo’s annoyance, threw him scraps of skin and fat from their poulet farci.

‘You’ll only spoil him,’ Enzo growled.

But no matter who it was who fed him the scraps, it was always to Enzo that he came back with upturned eyes.

‘Look, see, he only has eyes for you, Papa.’

Enzo glared at the dog. ‘Go away!’

Braucol smiled. And when, eventually, they paid up and left, crossing the square to the Place d’Hautpoul, where they had parked their cars opposite the mairie, he followed. Initially at a safe distance, before getting bolder, and diving around their feet, rubbing himself against Enzo’s legs. But despite several gentle attempts by Enzo to discourage him with the toe-end of his training shoes, Braucol was determined to remain a part of the group.