by Peter May
The reflected headlights of a vehicle in the yard swept across her ceiling, and she heard a car door slam shut. Fabien had not been home when she got back to the house, and she had received only a chilly greeting from Madame Marre.
She slipped out from between the covers and pulled her curtains aside in time to see Fabien, caught in the full glare of security lamps outside the house, striding across the yard and into the chai. After a moment, lights flickered on in the shed, and fluorescent light fell out into the night. Nicole made a very fast decision, and turned quickly to pull on her jeans and drag a warm, hooded sweatshirt over her head. She slipped into her training shoes and opened the door to the hall. A night-light cast the faintest glow down its length. She listened for a moment and, hearing nothing, closed the door behind her and made her way carefully towards the stairs. The top step creaked loudly and she froze, listening intently for any indication that the formidable Madame Marre might have heard her. But all that broke the silence of the house was the heavy tick, tick of an antique grandfather clock in the downstairs hall.
She hurried down the remaining stairs and out of the front door to the garden. There she stopped and breathed the cool night air and was relieved to be out of the house. The lights were still on in the chai. Away to her left, agricultural machinery sat in the brooding shadow of a long, open shed with a rust-red tin roof. At the far end of the old farmyard, beyond the chai, was the shed where the wines of La Croix Blanche were ageing in new oak barrels. Its door stood open, and a wedge of light lay like a carpet in the approach to the entrance.
As she ran across the yard, the security lights came on, and she felt very exposed. She jogged down the length of the chai, stopping only to gather her breath as she approached the shed where the barrels were stored. The lights went off again behind her, and she approached the open door with a great deal of nervous apprehension. She paused in the doorway and peered inside. Rows of barrels, stacked two high, ran off towards the back of the shed. The central strip of each barrel was stained pink between the cooper’s bands of steel. Darker rivulets, like blood, ran down their bellies from cork bungs. The wine was still fermenting, and the smell of it in the air was thick enough to cut.
There was no sound, and no sign of Fabien. She stepped inside and saw an opening off to her left leading to another room filled with yet more barrels. There was an electric pump on the floor, and silver tubing coiled around it like a giant snake.
‘What the hell are you doing here!’ The sound of Fabien’s voice startled her, and she turned in a panic, clutching her chest. He was standing in the doorway, wearing his ubiquitous baseball cap, glowering at her out of the darkness.
‘I was looking for you.’
‘This is no place for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s dangerous.’
Nicole almost laughed. ‘Dangerous? Wine? Only if you drink too much of it.’
But he didn’t laugh with her. He grabbed her hand and pulled her out into the yard. ‘Come with me.’
Nicole followed reluctantly, although in truth, she had very little choice. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see.’
He took her through the chai, where pumps were thundering in the still of the night to transfer freshly fermenting grape juice from one cuve to another. Past rows of brand new stainless steel tanks, and old resin containers from Fabien’s father’s time, to a large room through the back. There, the tops of sunken cuves rose fifty centimetres from the concrete floor. Fabien let go of her hand and knelt down at the nearest of them, and carefully removed the lid.
‘Kneel down.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do what I tell you.’
Scared now, Nicole did what she was told and knelt down beside him.
‘Take a sniff in there.’
She looked down into the cuve and saw the yellow-white frothing grape juice in full fermentation.
‘Go on, smell it.’
With great apprehension she leaned over to smell the fermenting juice and felt her head snap back so suddenly that she was startled into calling out. She had recoiled from a smell and a sensation so extreme, that she’d had no control over her response to it. It had been entirely involuntary. She gasped, ‘What in the name of God was that?’
He cocked an eyebrow at her as if to underline his earlier warning. ‘Carbonic gas. A by-product of fermentation. It’s not poisonous, but it’ll kill you in the blink of an eye.’ He took a cigarette lighter from his pocket, lit the flame, and then lowered it slowly into the neck of the cuve. As he did so, the flame detached itself from the lighter, but continued to burn until the separation between the two was nearly ten centimetres and it was finally extinguished. ‘No oxygen, you see.’ He stood up and offered her his hand to help her to her feet.
She got up, and they stood for what seemed like a very long time, still holding hands, until he was overcome by self-consciousness and took his back. She desperately wanted to ask him about Petty, about his reviews of La Croix Blanche wines, but the words wouldn’t come. And the longer they stood in silence, the more tense they both became. She started to be aware, for the first time, of how dark his eyes were, how long his lashes. And almost as if he knew what was in her mind, he averted his black eyes.
He said, ‘About twenty years ago there was a lake somewhere in Africa that released cubic tons of the stuff into the atmosphere.’
She was taken aback by his sudden digression. ‘Cubic tons of what?’
‘Carbonic gas. The lake was in an old volcanic crater, and the gas must have come up from the volcano below. Probably over hundreds of years. It dissolves in water, you see.’ He pointed to the grille-covered channels that ran through the concrete floor of the chai. ‘We flush water through those gutters to collect and take away carbonic gas from the fermentation. It’s heavier than air, so it sinks to the floor and dissolves in the water.’
Nicole followed the line of the gutter out into the yard.
‘Anyway the gas must just have been lying on the lake bed. Then, during a storm of some kind, there was a huge amount of rainfall, and they think that cold rainwater dropped to the bottom of the lake, displacing the carbonic gas and forcing it to the surface.’ He shook his head, visualising it. ‘Must have looked like the water was boiling. Except that it was the middle of the night, so no one would have seen it.’
Nicole was wide-eyed, imagining the scene as Fabien described it. ‘So what happened?’
‘The lake was way above sea level. So because the gas is heavier than air, it just ran down the valleys, engulfing all the villages in its path. Most of the villagers were asleep in bed. Thousands died from asphyxiation.’
‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’ Nicole was still wide-eyed, transfixed by the horror of his story, impressed by the breadth of his knowledge. It was not what she would have expected of a farmer’s boy who made wine.
He fixed her again with his dark eyes. ‘That’s why you don’t ever come in here on your own. Understand?’
She nodded mutely.
As they crossed the yard towards the house he said, ‘So why were you looking for me?’
She was glad he couldn’t see her face. She was not a good liar. ‘It’s just…you weren’t there when I got back tonight.’
‘There were cops crawling about the place all day. I got behind with things.’
As they passed beyond the security sensors, the lights went out, and Nicole saw the wash of moonlight over the hills that rose out of the river valley to the north, the silhouette of the old church starkly outlined against a jewelled jet sky.
‘Is it still in use?’ she asked.
He followed her eyeline. ‘No, it’s all boarded up. Which is a shame. It’s a beautiful old building.’
‘Why did they build a church way up there, anyway?’
‘It used to serve the castle. Then the castle was destroyed during the Albigeoise Crusades against the heretics of Cathar.’ He looked at her. ‘You know who the Cathars we
re?’
She shook her head with a growing sense of inadequacy. She was the university student, after all. Surely these were things she should know? ‘I know they call this Cathar country. But I don’t know why.’
‘The Cathars were a religious sect in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They combined Christian and Gnostic elements. The thing that the Roman Catholic church regarded as heretical was their belief that the resurrection was a rebirth, rather than the physical raising of a dead body from the grave. So the Cathars were slaughtered in their thousands and driven out of towns and villages all over southwest France.’
‘How do you know all this?’ She gazed at him in wonder.
He shrugged. ‘I read a lot. It’s interesting. Though it was the legend of the source that first caught my imagination. Forbidden love. A Cathar princess from the castle, and the son of a Roman Catholic knight who was intent on destroying the heretics. They met secretly at the source, up there in the woods, until the night the crusaders marched on the castle and destroyed it. Both their fathers died in the battle, but according to the legend the young couple escaped to the north, where they married and raised a family.’
‘And lived happily ever after?’
‘Who knows? Does anyone?’ She saw the moonlight catch the crinkles around his eyes as he smiled. ‘But the source became regarded as a place where star-crossed lovers could change their luck. All the kids around here go up there at some time.’
‘Did you ever go up there with someone?’
‘Once. A long time ago.’
‘It didn’t change your luck, then?’
‘Oh, yes it did. I had a narrow escape. She’s married now with four kids and makes the poor man’s life hell.’
They both laughed. But their voices seemed inordinately loud in the quiet of the early morning, and they quickly stifled their mirth.
They stood for a minute or more staring up at the church, which seemed to shimmer in a haze of warm, silvered air, before walking back in silence to the house. And it was with a slight chill of apprehension that Nicole realised it would take someone with very specific local knowledge to know that a body left up by the source would be discovered sooner rather than later.
III
Enzo selected “send” from the toolbar, and a sound like a soft jet engine passed from one speaker to the other to signify the despatching of his e-mail into the ether. He put the laptop to sleep and folded down the lid. As he stood, he stared out from the pool of lamplight around the table to the reflected light on his whiteboard and those mysterious groupings of letters and numbers that made no sense. He glanced up towards the mezzanine and heard the gentle purr of heavy breathing. Sophie and Bertrand were asleep. He turned out the lamp and crossed the room in the dark to the open door and the candlelight on the terrace.
Charlotte looked round. ‘You want a glass?’
‘If there’s any left.’
‘There’s plenty.’ As he sat down she poured him a glass from a bottle of Chateau de Salettes Vin des Arts and refilled her own. ‘Who were you writing to?’
‘A guy called Al MacConchie. I was at university with him in Glasgow. He went off to the States about twenty-five years ago and is now a bigshot wine consultant in California.’
‘Wine? What was his major?’
‘At university?’ Enzo laughed. ‘Chemistry. He believed that the problems of the universe could be answered by chemical analysis. And statistics. Now he’s applying his philosophy to the making of alcoholic beverages.’
She turned eyes filled with curiosity in his direction, waiting for further explanation. But he just shrugged.
‘I need a favour from him.’ He was too weary to go into it now. He took a sip of the Vin des Arts. It was freshly acidic, with soft tannins, and filled his mouth with the taste of raspberries. ‘Nice wine. Must get a case of it.’
They sat for some minutes, sipping the fermented juice of red grapes and gazed out over silver grass wet with dew. The shadows cast by the chestnut trees were almost impenetrable.
Candlelight flickered over all the soft surfaces of Charlotte’s face as she turned it towards him. ‘There was another reason I came down here to see you.’
Something in her tone rang warning bells. He turned his head sharply. ‘What?’
She hesitated for a long moment, as if undecided. Then she said, ‘Enzo…Roger’s seeing Kirsty.’
He could not have said why this news filled him with such dark foreboding. Except that there was nothing about it that seemed right, or natural. Enzo was only just on speaking terms with his daughter after their years of estrangement. She was raw and vulnerable, and he knew instinctively that a relationship with Roger Raffin was wrong.
Raffin was an intelligent and successful Parisian journalist in his mid-thirties who had been motivated to write his book on France’s seven most notorious unsolved murders by the failure of police to find the killer of his own wife. When Enzo began his investigation into the first of those killings, he and Raffin had reached an arrangement on shared publication rights. At that time, Raffin had just ended an eighteen month affair with Charlotte, and the separation had been acrimonious.
‘I suppose that means he’s not jealous about you and me any more.’
‘He’s never stopped being jealous, Enzo. And him being with Kirsty doesn’t change anything.’
He looked at her very directly. ‘I know why I don’t like the idea of Kirsty and Roger. Why don’t you?’
‘Because I know him too well. He’s not right for her, Enzo. He’s…’ She looked away, and he could see the tension gathered all along the line of her jaw. She finished her thought with a shadow in her tone. ‘There’s something dark about Roger, Enzo. Something beyond touching. Something you wouldn’t want to touch, even if you could.’
It was a full five minutes after Charlotte left him to go to bed, and the light went off in the bedroom, that he turned at the sound of movement in the doorway.
Sophie stood there in the dark, barefoot in her nightdress, her hair a tangle, and he had a sudden memory of her as a little girl standing in the dark of his bedroom telling him about the monsters under her bed, and how she wanted to spend the night with him. And how he’d led her back to her own room, and shown her there was nothing under the bed, and tucked her in again. He’d had to read to her for nearly half an hour before she finally drifted away, her little hand still clutching his so tightly he’d had to pry her fingers gently free.
‘I thought you were sleeping.’
‘Couldn’t get to sleep for the monsters under my bed.’
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 kne
w 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 gite. 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 Chateau 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 gite, 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.’
