Peter May - The Critic

‘Can you make any sense of it?’ Katy Roussel’s voice crashed out of the darkness beyond the ring of light. He had almost forgotten she was there, and he was nearly overcome by his own sickening certainty that her husband was dead. But there was no way he could tell her that. And as long as there was no body, there was always hope.

He turned to see concern burned into a face washed out by worry. ‘Do you know what The Great Fear was?’

‘I saw the article on the desk. But I didn’t read it. We got something about The Great Fear at school. It was part of the French Revolution, but I don’t really remember.’ Her confusion was clear in her eyes ‘Is it important?’

Enzo nodded. ‘It’s where madness began, and is still feeding it.’

She shook her head. ‘How?’

‘ The Great Fear took place in July and August of 1789, right at the start of the French Revolution. There were rumours circulating among the peasantry that the nobles had hired bands of thugs to march on the villages and destroy their new harvest. In response, the peasants formed themselves into gangs and sacked the castles of the nobles, and burned all the documentation recording their feudal obligations.’ He turned towards the papers strewn across the desk. ‘What your husband discovered was the thing that linked Petty and the others in his missing persons file. That they were all descendants of a group of vigilantes who rampaged through Gaillac that summer more than two hundred years ago. A notorious gang who committed dreadful atrocities. They beat up the local nobility, sacked their estates, and in some cases set their homes on fire.’

Her frustration bubbled over at Enzo, almost as if he was somehow responsible for it all. ‘I don’t understand. What are you saying? Why has David disappeared?’

Enzo sought resolve in a deep breath. For he knew that his next words would amount to a pronouncement of death on the man she loved. ‘He was one of them, Katy. Directly descended from one of that group of vigilantes. Everyone knew who they were at the time. With Church and State records now widely available on the internet, it would have been a relatively easy matter to trace the lineage of each and every one of them.’

‘You mean someone’s been killing these men because of what their ancestors did? That’s insane!’

‘Madness takes many forms. Sometimes all you need is to give it an excuse.’ He drew one of the open books towards him and focused on a paragraph marked out in fluorescent orange. ‘It seems the gang went too far one night. Maybe they’d been drinking, whipped themselves up into some kind of crusading frenzy. But they marched on a chateau just outside of town, dragged its owner into the courtyard and beat him to death in front of his wife and children. Then they set the place on fire.’ He looked into the desolation in her eyes. ‘Nearly two hundred and twenty years later, someone’s been exacting a very belated revenge.’

There was light somewhere in the chai. But Enzo could not pinpoint its source. It was some kind of nightlight. So dim that he could see only far enough to stop himself bumping into things. He heard wine fermenting in the cuves, bubbling and frothing and producing the carbonic gas that that he could smell all around him. Pungent, nearly overpowering. Rivers of it, unseen, washing around his feet, carried away by water running through drainage channels in the floor.

He stumbled, nearing knocking into a makeshift table. Planks of wood raised on empty barrels, strewn with papers and charts. Empty bottles grouped together rattled, the chink of glass on glass echoing around the vast empty spaces of the winery. The air was so thick he could almost feel it on his skin, brushed soft by the hidden light.

The dark shapes of cuves towered around him as he made his way towards the back of the chai. Again he stumbled, this time tripping over something on the floor, and he fell to his knees. His curses whispered off into the dark. He felt about the floor with his hands and found coils of rubber cable leading to a handheld inspection lamp with a wire mesh guard. It was what had caused him to fall. Enzo fumbled for the switch and turned it on. He had seen winery workers hanging these lamps down inside the cuves to check levels when juice was being pumped from one to the other.

He looked around him, but the lamp didn’t throw its light very far. Outside its circle of illumination, it seemed even darker than before. But he could tell that he was still in the old brick-built chai, extended now to the west through huge sliding doors. Rows of abandoned resin tanks faded into the gloom. He stood up and raised the lamp above his head, realising for the first time that light would pass through the fibreglass. He could see that the nearest tank was more than three-quarters full, the level of the dark, red wine it contained clearly visible just below the rim. And he wondered why, if it was no longer used to ferment wine, it was nearly full. Perhaps these old tanks were simply used for storage. Or maybe their owner had found a more sinister use for them.

At the end of the row, metal steps led up to a grilled walkway that gave access to the tops of the tanks. Enzo checked the length of his cable. There were metres of it coiling off into darkness. Holding the lamp ahead of him, he made his way along to the steps and climbed carefully up to the overhead catwalk. The old, rusted structure rattled and swayed in the dark. He felt it trembling beneath his heavy frame as he clung to the handrail and made cautious progress, just below the angle of the roof, towards the row of disused fibreglass tanks. Black pipes which had once fed cold water to cool fermenting wine ran level with his head.

He stopped at the first tank. Its pulley system enabled a large, flat lid to be lowered in to the level of the wine, forcing oxygen out of the cuve. Enzo hung his lamp over the rail and pulled on a rope that lifted the lid clear of it. He held the rope, braced in position with one hand, and retrieved the inspection lamp with the other. He swung the lamp out over the tank, and peered down into its sharp, red limpidity. The pale upturned face of David Roussel stared back at him, eyes wide, suspended just below the surface.

A startled cry escaped Enzo’s lips quite involuntarily, and he recoiled from the cuve letting go of the rope. The lid dropped back into place, expelling air with a loud whoosh. The inspection lamp fell from his hand and swung back and forth, suspended by its cable from the rail. Shadows lurched crazily about the chai. Enzo grabbed the cable and pulled the lamp back up with shaking hands. He remembered Roussel the day he had met him, arms folded across his chest, U2 playing on the computer, Lara Croft watching them from the wall. ‘People go missing all the time,’ he had said. He himself had been missing for only a short time compared to the others. And now he had transitioned from missing to murdered in the blink of an eye. Enzo was having difficulty controlling his breathing.

He moved along to the next tank and hauled up the lid. The wizened face of a middle-aged man, his mouth gaping, gazed up at him from the wine, coruscating rouge shot through with reflected violet light. His arms were extended to either side, hands floating outstretched, legs fading off into dark, impenetrable red. Enzo lowered the lid and moved to the next. Another face, a younger man this time, a strange, sightless appeal for help in eyes floating like clouds.

Enzo let the lid drop back into place. There was one last tank, at the end of the row. As far as he knew, there was no one else missing, so there was no reason to expect that there might be another body. But something drew him on. Some sixth sense, a premonition that filled him, unaccountably, with a dreadful foreboding. He moved along the catwalk holding up the lamp, steadying himself with his free hand on the rail. He let it go to grab the rope hanging down from above and pulled hard to raise the lid. This time he secured it by tying the rope to the rail, before leaning forward to hold the inspection lamp over the tank.