Peter May - The Critic

There is a smell among the vines. Of grape juice and leaves and trodden earth. And something else. A black smell edged by the yellow of the harvest moon, which spills its light across the neat, manicured rows that march side by side across this gentle slope.

A smell which has none of the sweetness of fruit at maturity. It is rotten, and carries the unmistakable stench of death.

The air is warm, soft on the skin, and full of the sound of grapes dropping into plastic buckets. A gentle plop, plop. A rustle of leaves, the snipping of secateurs. Beams of light from flashlights on helmets criss-cross in the dark, then pierce the sky as if searching for stars as heads lift for air.

Annie is young. Just sixteen. It is her first vendange. A night pick by hand to harvest the cool, white mauzac grape for the vin mousseux. She knows nothing of how it is made-a secret stolen centuries before by a monk called Dom Perignon, and made famous in another place on the far side of France. She is young, and ripe like the grapes. Ready for picking. And she knows that Christian is watching her, biding his time with growing impatience. He is in the next row. She can hear him breathing as he examines each bunch in the light, before paring away any mould and then dropping it in his bucket. They have made a tryst, to meet at the source of the stream that tumbles down the hillside to water the vines, clear and sparkling in the moonlight. A place in the woods where lovers have met for hundreds of years, in the shadow of a chateau that is no more, beneath the abandoned church that dominates the hilltop. Far below, the river Tarn forms a seam of gold traversing the night.

It is almost time. Annie glances at her watch. Just after three. And then she hears the tractor as it makes its way back from the chai to collect the next load of grapes for the pressoir. She looks down the row. The others are dragging their buckets towards the big red bins for loading on to the trailer. There is an urgent hissing, and she turns to see Christian signalling through the leaves. Her heart nearly fills her throat and her breath comes with difficulty. They’ll never miss us, he had said. We’ll just switch off our lamps and drift away in the dark, like ghosts.

With sticky fingers she finds the switch and darkness wraps itself around her. She ducks beneath the wire and feels his hands pull her through, sticky like hers, sweeter than sugar. And his lips find her lips, and she tastes the grapes he has been eating as he picked.

They lock hands, and crouching beneath the level of the vines, scamper away up the slope towards the dark line of the trees above. This is fun. The fear has gone now, to be replaced by the thrill of anticipation, the approach, finally, of womanhood. She laughs, and he presses a finger to her lips to shoosh her, and she hears him fight to restrain his own laughter.

They are far enough away now to rise above the vines and run for cover. But even as they turn towards the woods, a figure casts its long, dark shadow towards them, arms outstretched as if to block their way and herd them back to their task.

They stop, and she hears Christian curse. Putain! They are caught. But the man does not move. A long gown hangs from his arms, stirring in the night breeze, a harbinger of the vent d’autan to come. White gloves catch the light. A strange, triangular hat shadows his face. And still he does not move.

‘Who is it?’ Annie whispers, an odd foreboding descending on her, like the darkness of the night as a cloud momentarily masks the moon. The light from Christian’s lamp pierces it, startling and bright, and finds a face, sunken and wrinkled, and stretched back across an impossibly prominent skull. Black holes where once there were eyes. Skin, teeth, hair, the deep, red colour of grape juice, matching the crimson of the gown. The mouth hangs open as if frozen in some dying scream. But it is Annie’s scream that fills the night, full of the fear of mortality that comes from a first encounter with death.

‘Petty must have been one of the most unpopular men in France, Monsieur Macleod.’ The Prefet waved his hand airily, as if all of France lay before him. ‘Imagine. An American who told Frenchmen if their wine was any good.’

Enzo couldn’t resist a tiny smile. ‘I’m sure those chateaux in Bordeaux, whose wines sell for a hundred dollars a bottle or more, were very happy with the ratings Monsieur Petty gave them.’

‘Yes, but that didn’t mean they liked him. Feared him, more like. After all, one bad rating could spell ruin. And there’s been more than one winemaker destroyed by Petty’s disapproval.’

Distaste curled the Prefet’s lip.

The Cathedral of Sainte Cecile, the largest brick building in the world, loomed above them, its basilica dominating the skyline of the city of Albi, a feat of mediaeval engineering yet to be surpassed by twenty-first century architects. The Prefet strolled across the cobbled cathedral square as if he owned it, which he very nearly did. On the far side, there were already queues at the gate of the Toulouse Lautrec museum.

‘Of course, one critic passes, another fills his shoes. Robert Parker is king now. And the journalists of The Wine Spectator. More Americans.’ The Prefet’s distaste was wrinkling his nose now. ‘But none of them has ever come to Gaillac to taste our local wines. Parker was rumoured to have once rated a Chateau Lastours. I don’t know if that is true or not, but Petty was the only one to come to do a comprehensive tasting.’ He sighed and turned a look of curiosity towards Enzo as if it was only just occurring to him to wonder why he was even discussing the matter with this strange, pony-tailed Scotsman. ‘But then we’ll never know what he thought, since his tasting notes were never found. Although I’m sure you know all this already.’

Enzo nodded. He knew every detail of Petty’s disappearance and murder. Not only from what he had read in Raffin’s book, but from the briefing Raffin himself had given him. Originally, there were only to have been six unsolved murders in the book. The Petty case had been a last-minute inclusion. A Stop Press.

‘So I’m not exactly sure how it is I can help you. My opposite number in the Lot spoke very highly of you. We were at ENA together, you know.’

‘Yes, I know, Monsieur le Prefet. I was hoping you might be able to put me in touch with someone at Gaillac. Someone who could help me go undercover. Grape-picking, perhaps.’

‘So you think you’re going to solve Petty’s murder as well as Gaillard’s, do you? Another bet?’

It had been widely reported that Enzo had cracked the Gaillard case as the result of a three-way bet with his local Prefet and the police chief in his home town of Cahors. Albi was two hours south of Cahors, high up above the River Tarn-fast-flowing water coruscating in the slanting September sunlight.

Enzo glanced along the tree-lined river bank, brick-built houses with shallow, red, Roman-tiled roofs rising above turning leaves. ‘Not this time, Monsieur le Prefet. I’m trying to raise funds for the new forensics department at my university in Toulouse. We attracted a lot of publicity with the Gaillard case, so I’m working my way through the other unsolved cases in Raffin’s book.’

They stopped at the foot of steps leading to the elaborate gothic stone entrance that abutted the towering brick edifice of the cathedral. The Prefet was on his way to morning prayers, a religious man filled with piety outside the secular confines of his political office. He turned a speculative eye on Enzo. ‘I’m not sure I approve of amateur sleuths working outside of the law.’