The Critic ef-2

by Peter May

  ‘Charlotte!’ Enzo was startled. ‘How did…’

  ‘The Lefevres let me in. I think they thought I was your lover.’ Her eyes flickered towards Michelle. ‘Obviously they were wrong.’

  Enzo glanced at Michelle, self-conscious and embarrassed. ‘We were just going to have a nightcap.’

  ‘Don’t let me stop you.’

  Michelle cleared her throat. ‘Actually, it’s late. I should really be going.’ She looked at Charlotte. ‘We only came back to get my car.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘This is Gil Petty’s daughter, Michelle,’ Enzo said.

  ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Charlotte’s a forensic psychologist. From Paris. I’m not quite sure what she’s…’ He turned to Charlotte, ‘what you’re doing here.’

  ‘I had no patients for a few days. I thought maybe I could help. But you seem to have things very well in hand.’

  The tension in the room nearly crackled. Embarrassment flushed Michelle’s face. ‘Well, anyway. I should be getting back to the hotel.’ And to Enzo. ‘I’ll come and get my father’s things tomorrow.’

  He nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘Good night,’ Charlotte called after her as she hurried down the steps, and Enzo closed the door.

  He turned to face her and remembered why he found her so bewitching. She was a beautiful woman, a good ten years older than Michelle, smart and full of wit and barbed humour. A slight, quizzical smile played around her full lips, and the desire he had felt earlier returned, though now it had a different focus. One without guilt or apprehension. But, still, it was fighting for a place in his emotions with a spear of anger.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t.’

  She smiled. Enzo had never been a convincing liar. ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You have no right to be jealous, Charlotte. We have no relationship, remember? You’re the one who’s always made that clear to me.’

  ‘Why on earth would you think I was jealous?’

  He gave her a long, hard stare. Desire, frustration, anger, all in conflict. ‘How long are you staying?’

  ‘I think I should probably leave in the morning. There’s nothing worse than being superfluous to requirements.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Charlotte…’

  But she didn’t want to hear it. She stood up and waved a dismissive hand. ‘I’ll take the bed, if that’s alright. I see the clic-clac’s already made up. You can have that.’ And she went through to the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

  Enzo remained standing for some moments in the harsh electric light, looking at the clic-clac, wondering how a night which had begun so promisingly, could have ended so bleakly. And he wondered, too, if he would ever get to sleep in the bed he was paying for.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  Her hair fell across his face in the darkness. He felt her skin naked and warm against his. He smelled her breath, hot and sweet, her lips so very close. She reached down and held him, guiding him towards that place where he could lose himself in her forever. And the phone began to ring.

  ‘Jesus!’ he hissed. ‘Just leave it.’

  ‘We can’t. It might be important.’

  ‘Nothing’s more important than this.’ But already his ardour was diminishing.

  ‘The moment’s passed, Roger.’

  He felt a stab of hurt. ‘I’m not Roger, I’m Enzo.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he heard her say in the dark, and he woke up in a tangle of sheets, perspiring, lying face down, an erection pressed hard into his belly. The phone was still ringing, an insistent, warbling, electronic rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He was torn between disappointment that her presence in his bed was only a dream and relief that she had not, after all, called him Roger. Somewhere deep in his subconscious, there must still have been a festering seed of jealousy over her relationship with Raffin. Which was ridiculous. It was months since she and Raffin had broken up. And it had been at Charlotte’s bidding.

  The phone stopped ringing. Either the caller had given up, or Enzo’s answering service had kicked in. He had left the cellphone on a charger somewhere in the room but couldn’t remember where. Now he couldn’t decide whether to get up and try to find it or to stay in bed and go in search of his lost dream. He had no idea how long he had slept, and it was too dark to see his watch. But he was wide awake now and lay on his back staring up into nothingness. It was no good. He was not going to get back to sleep in a hurry. He cursed softly and rolled over, finding cold floorboards with warm feet.

  He got up and walked smack into the rocking chair. He heard the crack of wood on shinbone almost before he felt it and, this time, cursed more loudly. He fumbled around, grabbing for bits of furniture until he found the table and the small green desklamp that stood on it.

  Its light hurt his eyes, and he blinked several times to clear his focus. The cellphone was on the top of a bookcase behind the table. He looked at its display and saw that there was a message. As he dialled the repondeur the bedroom door opened, and a sleepy Charlotte emerged in her nightdress, the light from behind her outlining the shadow of the tall, elegant body he had been dreaming about only moments earlier.

  ‘Who’s calling at this hour?’

  He looked at his watch. It was a little after two. Then he heard Nicole’s breathless voice. ‘Monsieur Macleod, where are you?’ There was a desperation in it. ‘They’ve found another body. In the same state as Gil Petty. Up in the woods, not far from where they found him.’

  II

  Three hundred metres past the turn-off to La Croix Blanche, a gate stood open to a track which left the road and made its stony progress up through the vineyard towards a brooding treeline. Moonlight spilled across the slope etching lines of silver between the dark rows of vines, as if a comb had been drawn through black hair revealing the white scalp beneath. Enzo’s 2CV rolled and bounced over the uneven surface on its soft suspension. He had read once that 2CV owners congregated in annual competition to try to overturn their cars in bumpy fields. So giving was the suspension that it was almost impossible to do. He was grateful for that now as he steered his way towards the blaze of headlamps and the flash of blue and orange up ahead.

  A gendarme stepped into the light of his headlamps, one hand raised, the other resting nervously on his holster. Enzo flipped up the window, and the gendarme leaned in, shining a flashlight in his face. ‘You can’t come up here.’

  ‘I’m looking for Gendarme Roussel.’

  The gendarme cocked his head suspiciously. ‘And you would be…?’

  ‘Enzo Macleod. I’m a forensic specialist consulting on the Petty case.’

  The police officer eyed him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Park up here and follow me.’

  Enzo pulled his car into a tight space between two rows of vines and followed the gendarme up the slope. At the end of the track, where the land rose steeply to the woods, a small knot of people stood talking and smoking. There was a cluster of police vehicles, blue and orange lights flashing out of sync, and unmarked cars pulled up at odd angles, abandoned for the final climb on foot.

  ‘Monsieur Macleod!’ Nicole detached herself from the group and hurried towards him.

  ‘Nicole, what are you doing here? How did you know about all this?’

  ‘She just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.’

  Enzo had barely noticed the young man in the baseball cap who had followed behind her. He eyed Enzo with obvious dislike, the reflected light of police headlamps cutting deep shadows into a fleshy face. He was a big man, a powerful presence in the dark. He sucked at a cigarette and the shadows that masked his face glowed red in its light.

  Nicole cleared her throat uncomfortably. ‘Monsieur Macleod, this is Fabien Marre. He’s the owner of La Croix Blanche.’

  ‘My family owns the vignoble,’ Fabien corrected her. ‘I make the wine.’

 
; Enzo looked again at the young man, then back at Nicole. ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘She’s staying here, monsieur.’

  Fabien Marre’s insistence in answering for her was beginning to irritate Enzo. ‘I’m not asking you.’

  Nicole was almost beside herself with embarrassment. ‘I didn’t know when I took the room, Monsieur Macleod, honestly. I mean, I’d read all the stuff about Petty, but La Croix Blanche is a pretty common name. I didn’t realise until…well, until I’d blown your cover.’

  Enzo sighed. He could imagine exactly how it had happened. Nicole, he knew, enjoyed the sound of her own voice.

  ‘So you needn’t bother turning up for the vendange tomorrow,’ Fabien said. ‘And you can tell Laurent de Bonneval that we’ll be having words.’

  Enzo realised there was no point in recriminations. And, in any case, everything had changed now. He looked at Nicole. ‘You said they’d found another body.’

  ‘Up there in the woods.’ Nicole pointed vaguely towards where they could see flashlights pricking the dark and the shadows of officers moving among the trees. ‘There’s a source up there. La Source de la Croix. Apparently it’s been a rendezvous for young lovers for centuries.’ She glanced at Fabien, almost as if looking for his permission. But he just shrugged. She turned back to Enzo. ‘A young couple came banging on the door of the house at La Croix Blanche just after midnight. She was hysterical. By the time I’d got into my dressing gown and slippers and gone down to see what all the noise was about, Fabien and his mother were there, and the girl was in floods of tears. Her boyfriend could hardly stop shaking.’

  ‘What had happened?’

  ‘They’d gone up to the source to…well, you know, do whatever it is young couples do in places like that.’ Nicole had grown up on a farm. Animals had sex. People had sex. She’d never really drawn the distinction. But now, discussing it in the presence of Enzo and Fabien, she was suddenly self-conscious. ‘Anyway, they heard someone moving about in the woods, and they thought it was a Peeping Tom. The boy got angry and went after him. That’s when he found the body.’

  ‘So you called the police?’

  ‘Not right away. Fabien wanted to see for himself.’

  Enzo looked at the young winemaker. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not going to go calling the police out on a wild goosechase on the say-so of a couple of kids.’

  ‘And I went with him.’

  Anger flashed in Enzo’s eyes. ‘You took Nicole?’

  Fabien shrugged dismissively. ‘You know her better than me, monsieur. Have you ever tried saying no to her?’

  Enzo glanced at Nicole with irritation and silently conceded the point.

  ‘It was horrible, Monsieur Macleod. I mean, I read all the descriptions people gave of Petty’s body when they found it. But nothing prepares you for the real thing.’

  Enzo flicked at a look at Fabien. ‘So you trampled all over the crime scene before you called the police.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if they find your traces there, then there’s a perfectly logical reason for it.’

  Nicole frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t there be?’

  Enzo didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on Fabien. ‘You were there when they found Petty.’

  ‘I was.’

  It was with a shock that Nicole suddenly realised where this was heading. ‘Monsieur Macleod! You can’t possibly think…’

  But Fabien talked over her, his voice low and steady and filled with a latent anger. ‘I never made a secret of the fact that I didn’t like Petty, monsieur. Nothing personal. But there are those of us who produce the wine, and there are others who leech off it. Those who produce nothing but fancy words, impose their tastes and fill their pockets. They’ve never broken their backs during all the hours and weeks and months of pruning or lost a crop to the vagaries of the weather. So if you want to know what I think, I think whoever killed Petty deserves a medal.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘But it wasn’t me.’

  Nicole turned to look at him, shocked by the intensity of his words and silenced by their virulence.

  Enzo said, ‘Murder is never to be congratulated, Monsieur Marre.’ He paused for a moment’s reflection. ‘But it’s an interesting coincidence, don’t you think, that both bodies should turn up on your land?’

  Fabien dropped his cigarette and ground it into the stones with the toe of his boot, refusing to meet Enzo’s eyes.

  Enzo gave Nicole a look that would have wilted flowers, and turned back towards the waiting gendarme. ‘Where’s Roussel?’

  ‘Straight up to the treeline, monsieur.’

  Roussel was on his way down as Enzo climbed up. They met halfway, and the investigator shone his flashlight in Enzo’s face. ‘How the hell did you get up here?’

  ‘I told them I was a forensic expert consulting on the Petty case.’

  Roussel glared at him. ‘I could have you arrested for that.’

  ‘Why? It’s true. I am consulting on the Petty case-for his daughter.’

  Enzo couldn’t see his expression beyond the glare of his flashlight, but he could feel the intensity of Roussel’s gaze before he heard his lips part in a smile. Roussel turned off the lamp, and as Enzo’s eyes adjusted he saw a weary amusement in the palest of faces. ‘You’re a character, Monsieur Macleod. Un vrai personnage. I’ll give you that.’

  ‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

  ‘Maybe because I have.’ He drew a deep, tremulous breath, and wiped a thin film of perspiration away from his forehead with the back of a hand that Enzo noticed was shaking.

  ‘You know the victim?’

  ‘I spoke to you about him just a couple of days ago. One of my missing persons. The one I was at school with.’

  Enzo remembered the file on Roussel’s desk and his glib assertion that people went missing all the time. ‘So there was something sinister about his disappearance after all?’

  Roussel gave him a darting look. He did not miss the echo of his own words. ‘He’s not pleasant to look at, monsieur. Submerged in wine probably since the day he went missing. But there’s only enough alcohol in red wine to inhibit decay, not prevent it entirely.’

  Enzo said, ‘When Admiral Lord Nelson was killed by you people at Trafalgar, they shipped him back to Gibraltar in a barrel of wine. There they changed the wine for brandy, and sent the body back to Britain for burial. It’s how they preserved bodies for the long trip home in colonial days.’ He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. ‘Legend has it that in Nelson’s case, the barrel was nearly empty by the time the ship made port.’

  Roussel pulled a face. ‘Thank you for that thought, monsieur. It makes me feel so much better.’

  Enzo nodded towards the woods. ‘Who’s up there?’

  ‘Two gendarmes and an adjutant from the STIC.’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘Which is what?’

  ‘ Section Technique d’investigation Criminelle. The Police Scientifique from Albi. Officially known as the IRCGN these days. And a police photographer.’

  ‘Can I have a look?’

  ‘No.’ Roussel was emphatic. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all.’

  ‘You’ve seen my qualifications, Gendarme Roussel. You know that crime scene analysis is one of my specialities.’

  ‘I know that I’d get shot if I let you anywhere near it. We have our own people, Macleod.’

  ‘Just a glimpse. That’s all.’

  Roussel looked at him long and hard-although perhaps it was through him, rather than at him-as he engaged in some inner dialogue, a silent argument with himself. Then he delved into the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a couple of plastic shoe covers. ‘Put these on. And touch nothing. This is strictly unofficial.’

  The source was dry, moss-covered stones carefully built around the opening of an underground spring from which water would bubble when the water table was high and tumble down the hillside to irrigate the vines. It was only three or four metres inside the treeline,
a path trodden through tangling saplings and briars. Enzo could not imagine what possessed young people to come here. If sex was the object of the exercise, he could think of many more appropriate places.

  Almost as if reading his mind, Roussel said, ‘It’s the romance of the legend that draws the kids. I don’t know the whole story, but needless to say it involves young lovers meeting in secret, defying families and fate. There was a chateau here in the woods at one time, but it was destroyed during the Albi crusades. The cellars and foundations still exist somewhere, pretty much buried by the centuries. The old church that served it is still up there on the hill looking out over the valley.’

  He turned towards a path freshly beaten through the undergrowth.

  ‘This is the way the boy went when he heard the killer and thought it was a Peeping Tom.’

  ‘What exactly did he hear?’

  ‘Someone moving through the undergrowth, he said. Making quite a noise, apparently.’

  ‘Did he see anyone?’

  ‘Not until he stumbled across the body.’

  They followed his path through the trees, a chaos of decaying wood matted with moss, fresh saplings, broken branches, trunks choked by ivy leaning one against the other. Leaves wet with condensation slapped their faces. In the distance, light shone through the mesh of vegetation, splintered and fragmented, hanging in the mist that now rose from the rotting forest bed beneath their feet.

  Lamps powered by battery were raised on unsteady stands to throw light across a clearing where someone had broken the ground with a shovel, scraping fresh, rich earth to one side in a shallow pile that was peppered with fallen leaves. The outline of what looked like a grave was clearly marked out, but it was no more than a few centimetres deep. The clearing was delineated on the south side by the gnarled trunk of a huge chestnut tree that must have been three hundred years old. It was long dead, its twin trunks collapsed and rotten. One of them had fallen across the clearing at an angle, creating something like an arch, a natural entrance, old branches propping it up, like so many crumbling columns, to prevent complete collapse. It looked as if the tree might have received its fatal blow from a lightning strike, which had split the central trunk in two, creating a deep, natural cradle about two metres from the ground. It was this cradle that held the body, purple and shrivelled, naked legs dangling like withered sticks, arms stretched out on either side as if to hold it upright. The head was canted forward, grotesque in the harsh lamplight. There were no eyes, just deep, dark shadows, thin lips stretched back across red-stained teeth in a ghastly grimace. Black hair was smeared across the forehead. There was an odd stench of alcohol and decay in the air.