The Critic

by Peter May

  He looked at her in astonishment. Had she read his mind? And then he realised that, of course, it was a shared memory. As vivid for her as for him. Something in the moment must have evoked the recollection for them both. He smiled and held out his hand. She took it and sat on his knee, tipping her shoulder into his chest and tucking her head up under his chin, just as she had always done as a child.

  ‘Don’t go interfering in Kirsty’s life,’ she said.

  He tensed. ‘How…?’

  ‘Voices carry in the dark.’

  He sighed. ‘He’s not right for her.’

  ‘That’s for her to decide.’

  After a long moment, he said, ‘Do you see her?’

  ‘I’ve seen her a couple of times. Up in Paris.’

  ‘You never told me.’ The half-sisters had met for the first time only very recently, each regarding the other with deep suspicion, even jealousy.

  ‘I don’t tell you everything in my life.’

  ‘You used to.’

  ‘I’m not a child anymore.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘You don’t tell me everything.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why? I ask you about Charlotte and all I get is, “Don’t even go there.”’

  She did such an accurate parody of his gruff Scottish voice that he couldn’t help but smile. Then, after a moment, ‘So you knew about Kirsty and Roger?’

  ‘It’s none of your business, Papa.’

  He tipped his head down and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have to tuck you in and read to you tonight, do I?’

  She sat up grinning. ‘No, it’s alright. If there’re any monsters, Bertrand can get them.’

  And as she padded off into the house he thought, with a pang of regret, about how the baton of responsibility for daughters as they grew up always got handed on from fathers to lovers.

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

  Chapter Twelve

  I.

  Nicole could smell coffee on the cool morning air as she climbed the steps to the gîte. 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 Château 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 gîte, 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 & nm. ky, ks & 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 Lefèvre had left in the gîte 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.’

 
II.

  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 gîte?’

  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?’

  Roussel eyed him for a long time. ‘Not really.’

  Enzo waited for him to elaborate.

  Roussel couldn’t hold his gaze. He sighed. ‘I loved this job, you know. Gave me a position in society. Big shot cop in a small town. I had such self-confidence. In my own ability. In my own instincts. I coped with everything, from burglary to arson, road deaths to domestics. I knew how to deal with people, how to work the system. I had respect on the street.’ He shook his head. ‘Then Petty comes into my life. Celebrity wine critic. Disappears into thin air. I can’t find him. Then he turns up dead. I can’t find his killer. I get big pressure from upstairs. They appoint people over my head. I start to lose confidence.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘Then you show up. A real pro. And I begin to look like what I am. Big fish in a little pool. Small time cop in a dusty country town.’ His eyes became glazed, faraway thoughts making them cloudy, like cataracts. ‘You take one look at a missing person’s file and see what I never saw in four years.’

  ‘Only because you had no reason to look.’

  Roussel shook his head sharply. ‘No. That’s just an excuse. I should have seen it. If I had, then maybe poor old Serge would never have gone missing. Maybe he and his wife would have agreed, finally, on adoption. They might have had a kid by now. Instead, he’s all hacked up in a refrigerator in the morgue, because I never saw a connection.’

  Enzo realised there was nothing he could say to ameliorate Roussel’s pain. He was inflicting it upon himself, self-castigation for his own perceived failures, when perhaps the failure was systemic rather than personal.

  He crossed the room to the countertop where Roussel had laid out the police photographs taken of Petty at the scene of his discovery. The colours of the cape and of Petty’s wine-stained skin, seemed more lurid, caught in the flash of the camera, the night a black backdrop to the grotesque arrangement of corpse and cape. Although he had been tied by the wrists to a stout wooden cross driven into the ground, the image of Petty was not at all like a crucifixion—more like a scarecrow prominently placed in a newly seeded field to frighten the birds. The shrivelled face beneath the pointed hat seemed almost comical, like a Halloween mask.

  Enzo followed the outstretched arms, draped in long, red sleeves, to white gloves dragged on to hands that were too big for them. He paused and looked carefully at the gloves. The thumbs had not even made it into them; the glove fingers were empty. The gloves were no more than dressing, there for effect, and to reflect the detail of the costume worn by the l’Ordre de la Dive Bouteille.

  He turned to Roussel. ‘Do we have the gloves there, too?’

  Roussel nodded and removed them from one of the sacks. Enzo took them in his own latex-gloved hands and turned them over, examining them in great detail. They were dirty, as if perhaps they had never been washed, and purple stained from the wine. So Petty had been taken fresh from his liquid preservative, still wet when his killer had dressed him. What trouble to go to, every minute spent dressing the body and transferring it to the vineyard increasing the risk of discovery.

  Enzo could see why the murderer had been unable to get Petty’s hands fully into the gloves. They were tiny, and must have belonged, originally, either to a very small man—or to a woman. He remembered seeing at least two women amongst the members of the Ordre in Josse’s photograph album. So it was not unheard of, even if it was uncommon. He said to Roussel, ‘There’s a good chance these gloves belonged to a female. You should be able to get a list from Jean-Marc Josse of all the women members of the Ordre since its inception. Just the dead ones. There can’t have been many. That could seriously narrow the field for us, in terms of identifying families with access to old robes.’

  Roussel nodded grimly. It was almost as if each fresh thought of Enzo’s was another nail in the coffin of the gendarme’s self-esteem. Belief in himself was visibly ebbing.

  Enzo returned his focus to the gloves and carefully pushed the fingers of each into their palms and teased them inside out. The backs and palms were wine-stained from Petty’s fingers, but the fingers of the gloves themselves were almost pristine white. He examined the end of each one in turn, stopping only when he reached the ring-finger of the left hand. He slipped his reading glasses down to the end of his nose and brought the glove up close to his face to examine it. ‘Ah-hah!’

  ‘What?’ Roussel moved closer to see what Enzo had found.

  Enzo pointed to a tiny, dark-stained fleck close to the top of the back of the finger. ‘Almost certainly blood.’ He smiled. ‘It’s amazing how often you’ll find it inside the fingers of a glove. A little tear in the cuticle, a tiny bit of bleeding. Happens to us all. Can’t be Petty’s though, because his fingers never got up there.’

  ‘How on earth did the lab at Toulouse miss that?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask them. But I suspect it’s because they didn’t look. Or, at least, didn’t look carefully enough.’

  ‘Is there enough to get a DNA sample?’

  ‘Should be. Though it’s almost certainly not the killer’s blood. Like Petty, he’d never have got his hands in there. But it’ll mean we can confirm a family connection if we get ourselves a suspect.’

  Roussel nodded. ‘I’ll make a call right now. Arrange to have it couriered to Toulouse this afternoon.’

  When he’d left the room, Enzo took a look at the other plastic evidence sacks. The first label he looked at was marked “Contents of Bin.” He cleared away the robe and hat from the table and emptied the sack on to the white paper. Every item was separately bagged in clear plastic ziplocks. Enzo sifted through them. An empty toothpaste tube, a used razor head, pieces of toilet paper scrunched up around what looked like dried mucus. There was a blood-stained wad of some kind. Enzo held it up to examine it more closely and realised it was a used sanitary pad. He crinkled his nose in distaste and moved on to find an empty pop-out pack of Hedex painkillers, several open plastic sheaths for hemorrhoid suppositories, a piece of chewing gum wrapped in tissue paper.

  He stopped suddenly, realising where these items must have been found. The Hedex, the suppositories—these were things he and Michelle had come across in Petty’s toilet bag. These discarded medications
and toiletries must have been recovered from the bathroom wastebin at the gîte. Then consternation drew his brows together in a frown. A used sanitary pad?

  The door opened, Roussel returning from his phone call. ‘It’s all arranged. A dispatch rider will take the gloves to Toulouse later today.’

  Enzo held up the bag containing the sanitary pad. ‘Might be an idea if he took this, too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that a man living on his own would have a soiled sanitary pad in the wastebin of his toilet?’

  ‘Of course it did. But there was no evidence of anyone else staying there. And neither the Lefèvres nor anyone working at Château des Fleurs, saw Petty with a woman, or even saw a woman coming or going to the gîte.’

  ‘You didn’t think to DNA-test it?’

  ‘Why would we? We had nothing to compare it to.’

  ‘I’d like it tested now, please.’

  ‘Okay.’ Roussel snatched the bag from him, his earlier self-pity turning now to irritation. ‘Anything else, Monsieur Macleod?’

  Enzo was thoughtful for several moments. ‘Yeah. There is.’ He cast an eye over the contents of Petty’s bin strewn across the table. ‘How come you kept the contents of his bin, when you didn’t know he’d been murdered until a year after his disappearance?’

  ‘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 gîte 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.’