Peter May - The Critic

Her hair was fanned out all around her head like an aura, chestnut stained red. Her head was tipped back, the striking green of her eyes staring up at him, magnified by the wine. For a moment he thought he saw a rebuke in them. Why hadn’t he listened to her? She’d had something to tell him, and he hadn’t given her the chance. And then he realised that there was no rebuke there. Only his own guilt. And an enormous rush of pain and regret that rose in his throat to almost choke him. Poor, neglected, dead Michelle. The tears that pricked his eyes were held at bay only by the anger that threatened to overwhelm him. It took him several moments to control the urge to bellow his anguish at the top of his voice. And then it passed, leaving him weak and trembling.

He had seen enough. It was time to go and get help. And right now, there was no way he could get out of there fast enough.

He hurried back along the walkway. It swayed and rattled beneath him. When he reached the steps he turned to climb down backwards. But as he grasped the rail, the electric cable caught on something unseen, and the inspection lamp was pulled from his grasp. It went tumbling off into space. In as much time as it took him to look down, it struck the floor with a loud crack, and the lamp shattered. Darkness closed around him like a glove.

‘Shit!’ He heard his own whispered imprecation snuffed out like a flame.

Anxious not to lose his footing, he moved slowly downwards, one careful step at a time, until he felt concrete solid and safe beneath his feet. There was more light now than he remembered. The dark shadows of cuves and bottling plant, of pumps and barrels, seemed less ill-defined. And he became aware of light bleeding faintly from an open door further down the shed. It was a strange, feeble, flickering light. But it washed around the chai in barely perceptible waves, and guided him to the door, which groaned softly as he pushed it open. He saw the red rail around the edge of the pit, the insulated necks of cuves set in cement, like so many ceramic chimney tops. He had been here before. Had made an almost fatal mistake. A misstep in ignorance, his life saved by a man who had killed without pity. Revenge for a murdered ancestor.

He stepped into the room and saw a candle flickering on the top step of the stairs. It had only just been lit, molten wax not yet pooling in its holder. He peered down into the maintenance pit to the tiled floor below. There was no one there. No one living, at any rate. He moved along the rail to the top of the steps and peered beyond them into darkness. He could see a ladder leaning against the wall, pipes snaking around the concrete apron. The scrape of a shoe echoed in the gloom, and Laurent de Bonneval stepped into the candlelight. He looked down at Enzo from the apron two feet above, his face chiselled from gneiss, hard and expressionless.

Enzo said, ‘Your wife told me I’d find you out here.’

Bonneval fixed him with emotionless eyes. ‘You know, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

A barely audible sigh. ‘He was going to ruin us, you know. He didn’t like our wines.’

‘He told you that?’ Enzo found it hard to believe.

‘Not at first. But I could tell. The little questions he asked after each barrel-tasting. His lack of conviction as he scribbled in his notebook.’ His pause was momentary. ‘I burned it afterwards.’

‘How did you know what he was going to write?’

‘Normally he wouldn’t have told me, I know that. But when I accused him of trying to finish off what his ancestor had started, he pretended not to know what I was talking about. Then when I confronted him he laughed and told me not to be ridiculous. He said if he was going to give my wines a poor rating it was because they were too thin, that they lacked the body and maturity that he expected of a good French wine.’ Bonneval shook his head. ‘No one should have that much power, Monsieur Macleod. One man’s taste determining another man’s fate.’ He drew a long breath, and Enzo wondered if he detected regret in it.

‘So you killed him.’

‘I couldn’t let him leave. Do you have any idea how much I have invested in this place? In its future? The future of my son? He would have destroyed my family all over again. Just like his forebearers did two hundred years ago.’

‘How long had you known about that?’

‘I discovered the details of the full, sordid story about ten years back. Old family diaries locked away in a bureau, in a room that had been shut up for decades. It was my grandfather who had gathered the records, pieced together the whole history. It was shocking, Monsieur Macleod. I was truly shocked.’

Some unrecorded memory flickered across his face. ‘Petty gave me an excuse for taking my revenge. But when Coste showed up the following year, I knew it wasn’t going to be possible to stop there. The man had been working on a family tree and was looking for my help. It was only a matter of time before he found out the truth. Before people made a connection between me and Petty that went way beyond wine. I realised then that they all had to go.’

He gazed off into some distant landscape that only he could see, a landscape stalked by the twin devils of madness and revenge.

‘Hubert de Bonneval was a great philanthropist. No one treated his workers better. He was a major contributor to the local community. He opened a brick factory to provide bricks for the enlargement of the chateau, and jobs for the people of Gaillac. He paid his grape pickers well at harvest time.’ The descendant of the murdered man breathed out in anger. ‘And they rewarded him by killing him in front of his own family. His son wrote about it decades later. Watching his father clubbed to death, his mother abused and beaten, his home robbed of everything valuable, and then set alight. You could feel his pain on the page, Monsieur Macleod. I wept when I read it.’

Some courant d’air stirred the flame of the candle, and it dipped and dived and nearly went out. Almost as if the ghost of Hubert de Bonneval had drifted past, dragging cold air in his wake.

But Laurent de Bonneval was only momentarily distracted. He focused dull, dark eyes on Enzo. ‘Fortunately, it was only the east wing that was destroyed by the fire, the original chai. Most of the chateau survived intact. But it damned near ruined my family. It took them two generations to get back on their feet, to rebuild and restore the chateau, to produce wine they could sell and recover their wealth. And Hubert’s murderers walked free, laden with the riches they had stolen.’

‘It’s a sad story, Monsieur de Bonneval,’ Enzo said. ‘But I don’t see how two hundred years later you can blame the actions of these men on their descendants.’

‘I didn’t. At least, not until Petty started trying to do it all over again…and I remembered my bible. Exodus chapter twenty, Verse Five. “I the Lord God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” There was justice in it.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘ Romans. Twelve. “Avenge not yourselves, but give place unto the wrath of God: for it is written, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”’

A slight smile cracked the gneiss. ‘You know your bible, too, then Monsieur Macleod.’

‘I know that it is a dangerous tool in the hands of people who twist and corrupt its words to justify their own ends.’

Sudden anger flared in the winemaker. ‘My ancestor was brutally murdered in cold blood, my family cast into the wilderness. And because of a quirk of history, his killers escaped justice, and their descendants lived to profit from their sins. Comfortable little men leading comfortable little lives. Well-fed, well-mannered, well-meaning progeny of murderers! And here was Petty, like the ghost of his own ancestor, coming back to finish the job.’