The Critic Read online

  ‘I doubt it.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘Too complicated. It would have to be something he could remember quite easily, without reference to something written.’ He caught Sophie glaring at him and felt a stab of guilt at having dismissed her so easily. ‘But it’s a good thought.’

  The damage, however, had been done. Sophie confined her frustration to a single, audible tut. She turned back to the computer and the chatter of the keyboard reflected her annoyance as she typed another search into Google. Her eyebrows shot up in sudden surprise and she looked at Michelle. ‘Did you know your dad’s website’s still up on the net?’

  Michelle shrugged. ‘There wouldn’t have been anyone to remove it. I guess there are probably thousands of websites out there belonging to dead people.’

  Bertrand stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘There. What’s that?’

  Sophie peered at the screen. ‘It’s a link to something called a taste wheel. What the hell’s a taste wheel?’

  Michelle said, ‘It’s a wheel divided into flavour segments. Just a graphic representation of tastes and smells. It was the department of enology at UC Davis that first came up with the concept. My dad published his own version of it in a book he wrote about wine tasting.’

  Sophie clicked the mouse and waited a moment. ‘And he put it right up here on his website.’

  Enzo eased himself out of the rocker and rounded the table to have a look. The wheel was divided into multicoloured segments. An inner wheel was separated into the ten perceived categories of taste and smell, the largest of which was Fruit. It then ranged through Sweet, Wood, Spice, Savoury, Herbal, Floral, Nutty, Mineral, and Dairy, which was the smallest. Each category was allotted a different colour, subdivided through the outer wheel into individual flavours represented by tonal variations of that colour. Fruit was split into red and green and went from apple, pear, and lemon, through to prune, fig, and jam. Spice was pink and included tobacco, smoke, and liquorice; while Dairy, which was yellow, comprised only butter and cream. In all, there were sixty-four flavours.

  Enzo shook his head and marvelled at the smells and flavours people were able to discern in wine. Ground coffee. Leather. Cut grass. Toast. Stones. And yet, they were all things he had perceived himself in one wine or another over the years. Violets, cherries, grilled nuts. Some were appealing, others less so. Earth, green pepper, petrol. He screwed up his face at the very thought.

  Bertrand said, ‘Look, he also lists the words he used to describe the sensual qualities of wine in the mouth.’ He pointed to an alphabetical list of seventeen words below the wheel. They went from Astringent, describing mouth-puckering tannins, through Firm, Heavy and Sharp, to Thin, representing a lack of flavour and body.

  ‘Okay,’ Enzo said, ‘print all that out for me.’ He felt a frisson of excitement. Things were starting to fall into place. ‘This gives us pretty much his full flavour vocabulary, describing what he smelled in a wine, tasted in a wine, and how it felt in his mouth. These are almost certainly what he created the codes for.’

  ‘As well as his ratings,’ Sophie said.

  Bertrand nodded. ‘A through to F and 1 through to 5.’

  ‘Which means…’ Enzo did a quick mental calculation. ‘…we’re looking for a total of ninety-two codes.’ He lifted the pages from the printer as it fed them out through the inkjet and crossed to the whiteboard. He wiped off Petty’s coded rating for the Sarrabelle Syrah and started listing the flavours in columns, beginning with Fruit. Then he moved on to the one-word sensual descriptions, and finally the ratings. It took him nearly ten minutes, and the others watched in silence as his marker pen squeaked its way across the shiny white surface. ‘Okay.’ Enzo stood back and looked at the lists before picking up the notes they had made at old Domenech’s house the night before.

  He scrutinised his scribbles, frowning in concentration. His writing had become less and less legible as the night wore on.

  ‘There,’ he said at last. ‘The 2001 Petrus Pommerol that we had. Domenech agreed with Petty’s published description of a wine with strong hints of liquorice and vanilla.’ He ran a finger down through his notes, stopping and tapping near the foot of the page. ‘Now, when he tasted the three Gaillac reds that we only have the coded notes for, he discerned vanilla and liquorice in the Sarrabelle Syrah, and vanilla in the Cuvée Léa.’ He held out a hand towards Bertrand. ‘Give me the printouts.’

  Bertrand handed him the coded reviews of the three wines they had taken to Cordes en Ciel, and Enzo pinned them to the wall beside the board. He stood scanning them studiously before exasperation exploded in a breath from pursed lips. ‘Trouble is, there are too many repeating codes. There are codes unique to each one, but there are several. We have no way of knowing which one might be liquorice. And of the ones that repeat, which one might be vanilla.’ He slumped into the rocker and let his notes fall into his lap. ‘Shit! The sample’s too small. We’d need to go on tasting wines until we found a unique flavour to match a unique code, or multiple codes that repeated so often that we could be sure of the match.’

  Sophie cocked an eyebrow and grinned. ‘Well, I’m all for tasting more wines.’

  But Enzo was adamant. ‘No. It’s not the way.’ He glanced semi-apologetically at Bertrand. ‘It was a good idea, but it’s not how we’re going to break the code.’

  ‘Well how are we going to break it?’ Sophie cocked her head at her father.

  ‘We are not going to do anything. You are going to leave me in peace to think about it.’ He cast a rueful look at Michelle. ‘All of you.’

  Sophie stood up. ‘Well, there’s no point in arguing with him. When my Papa makes up his mind about something, that’s it.’ She took Bertrand’s hand. ‘Come on, let’s go to town and find a café.’ She flounced out with Bertrand in tow. Enzo saw that the rain was still falling from the heavens.

  He sighed and turned to Michelle. ‘You can stay if you want.’

  But Michelle shook her head. ‘No. You need to think. I understand that.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Sophie.’

  ‘I understand that, too. Maybe if I was her, I’d feel the same way.’ She got up from the stairs and crossed the room to plant a gentle kiss on Enzo’s forehead. He smelled her perfume and felt her warmth, and for a moment was tempted to forget about codes and killers and take her through to the bedroom. But the thought that someone else might be about to go missing, that someone else was in danger of suffering the same fate as Petty and Coste, and probably the others in Roussel’s file, weighed on his conscience, and he knew that Michelle would have to wait. He gave her hand a squeeze, and felt a rush of regret as she went out onto the terrasse to recover her umbrella and brave the rain.

  He got up and crossed to the wine rack and took out a bottle of Château Lacroux 2001 Vignes de Castellan. He uncorked it and poured himself an inch of it before swirling the deep, rich red around inside the glass. The wine was at perfect room temperature and gave off the distinctive Gaillac aromas of the duras and braucol grapes. Which made him think of the puppy for the first time in hours, and he looked in vain around the room before spotting him curled up fast asleep under the table. Enzo smiled. Daughters and dogs, he thought. Endless trouble. But always worth it. He took a mouthful of wine. Red fruits, a hint of black cherry, liquorice.

  He carried the bottle over to the rocking chair, sat down, and filled his glass. As he sipped at the wine, he gazed at all the flavours he had written up on the board, until they blurred and swam in front of his eyes. He refilled his glass and turned his attention to the coded reviews:

  ky, ms and nj. wjc. gf+&lbj+++

  jmo, zt&nm, with a little nj

  giving way to ky, la&ma

  The letters were always in groups of two or three. Some of them made words, like la and ma. Others made no sense at all. jmo or hh.

  He drank some more wine and closed his eyes. But the codes were still there, etched by light on his retinas. There had to be a simple logic to
it. He thought back to his own allusion to the French-English dictionary. Two lists of corresponding words, one of which was in alphabetical order. And something began to chip away at his consciousness from somewhere below the surface. Something nagging, insistent, like a woodpecker drilling holes in trees. His head hurt at the thought, and he wondered irrationally, if woodpeckers ever got headaches. He felt his glass slip in his hand, and he put it down on the floor before he dropped it. There was something there. Something just beyond reach. Something that someone had said. Something right in front of his eyes. A key to unlocking the code. But he was so, so very sleepy.

  ***

  He was a long way down. It was very dark here, and strange creatures floated through the murk, skulking in the shadows, bulbous eyes staring at him through fronds that waved about in the eddies and currents of cold, cold water. There was a tug on his line, and he realised that there was very little oxygen left. He could hear a voice, from somewhere very far above, calling him back to the surface. He had found something down here, and he wanted to tell them. But he knew he mustn’t make his ascent too quickly, or he would lose it.

  He pushed off towards the voice, mud and sand rising all around him. He tipped his head back and saw the light and heard the voice again, and found himself rising at an alarming rate. Too fast. He broke the surface gasping for breath.

  ‘Papa!’ Sophie glared at him. ‘You’ve been drinking.’

  Enzo frowned. ‘Only a couple of glasses.’

  The door opened from the terrasse, and Michelle came in. Sophie turned to look at her. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I waited in the car until I saw you coming back.’

  ‘Well, the great mind here, who wanted us to leave him alone so that he could concentrate, drank some wine and fell asleep. That’s what old men do, you know. Fall asleep in chairs.’ She flashed Michelle a very purposeful look, just in case she’d missed the point.

  ‘What time is it?’ Enzo ignored his daughter’s barb.

  Bertrand looked at his watch. ‘Nearly six. You’ve been out for a couple of hours, Monsieur Macleod.’

  Enzo stood up stiffly and focused on the whiteboard; then he ripped one of the coded reviews from the wall and blinked at it, trying to remember. And then he did. He turned to find three faces looking at him expectantly, and he smiled and waved the piece of paper in the air. ‘It’s quite simple, really.’

  ‘What is?’ Sophie took the review from him and looked at it.

  ‘The code.’

  ‘You broke it? In your sleep?’

  ‘Maybe I was asleep, maybe I wasn’t.’ He turned towards the whiteboard and lifted his marker pen. The others watched, filled with sudden curiosity, as he wrote up l, b and j, then turned back to them. A smile split his face. ‘What do these letters mean to anyone.’ They all looked blankly at the board. ‘Okay. Let’s capitalise them. It makes a big difference.’ He wrote up LBJ. ‘Come on. You’ve got to see it.’ Still nothing. ‘Okay, maybe you were too young. But in the sixties, during the Vietnam war, these were initials on everybody’s lips.’ He said them out loud. ‘LBJ.’

  Which was when the penny dropped for Michelle. ‘Lyndon B. Johnston. He was sworn in as President after the assassination of Kennedy.’

  ‘Good girl.’ He turned back to the board and wrote up WJC.

  Now Michelle couldn’t keep the smile off her face. ‘William Jefferson Clinton. They’re all Presidents of the United States!’

  But Enzo waved a finger of admonishment. ‘Not all of them. There haven’t been ninety-two Presidents.’ He held open palms out towards her. ‘You told me yourself the other night, Michelle. Your dad’s party-piece when he was a kid.’

  Realisation dawned on her like sunlight breaking through dark cloud. ‘States!’ she said. ‘Presidents and States.’

  Enzo wrote up KY.

  ‘Kentucky.’

  Then NJ.

  ‘New Jersey.’

  He beamed at them. ‘The most common of all codes. Ones that get used by millions of people every day. Post codes. It’s so simple. His parents made him commit to memory all the States and all the Presidents when he was just a kid. He wasn’t ever going to forget them. So every flavour on the wheel got assigned to one of them.’

  ‘In what order?’ Sophie said.

  Enzo shrugged. ‘The States would be alphabetical, the Presidents chronological. All we have to do is figure out where on the taste wheel he started.’

  Sophie said, ‘We need a list of States and Presidents.’ And she rounded the table to the computer and tapped a quick search into Google. A smile spread across her face. ‘Fifty States, and forty-three Presidents. Actually, forty-two, because one of them served twice. Isn’t the internet a wonderful thing?’ She clicked a couple of times with her mouse, then hit the print button, and the printer started spewing out a list of US States and American Presidents.

  Michelle was looking at the coded scores given to the three wines they had tasted, then glanced up at Enzo’s whiteboard. ‘This doesn’t match, Enzo.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if the A to F and the 1 to 5, were the last things to be coded, then you would expect them all to be recent Presidents. But they’re not. Look.’ She pointed to the score her father had awarded the Château Lastours 2001 Cuvée Special. ‘ALI and CA. That’s got to be Abraham Lincoln and Chester Arthur.’

  ‘We’ve got them the wrong way round, that’s why.’ Everyone turned to look at Bertrand. ‘Look at the sensory descriptions of the wine in the mouth. WJC. LBJ. GF.’

  ‘Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnston, Gerald Ford,’ Michelle said. ‘All right down at the most recent end of the list.’

  ‘So we work backwards through the sensory descriptions,’ Enzo said. ‘Starting with George W. Bush.’ He wrote up GWB against Thin.

  Sophie said, ‘How did Gil Petty describe Thin again?’ She pulled up the page of Petty’s flavour and sensory listings, then burst out laughing. ‘Lacking flavour and body.’ She scrolled up the list. ‘And his father? GHWB? Simple. A sound, drinkable wine of no great distinction. Two Bush presidencies summed up to perfection.’ She looked at Michelle, grinning. ‘Do you think you’re father matched these on purpose?’

  ‘I doubt it somehow. More like happy coincidence.’

  ‘What about Clinton?’ Bertrand said. ‘What’s his sensory adjective.’

  Sophie put the two together from the separate lists and could hardly speak for laughing. When, finally, she managed to control herself, she said, ‘William Jefferson Clinton comes under the category of Smooth.’ Which brought a spontaneous eruption of laughter from around the room. Braucol woke up and started barking.

  ‘Maybe your father had a secret sense of humour after all,’ Enzo said. He took the printout of Presidents and States and, starting from the bottom of the board, worked his way back through the list of sensory descriptions, ratings and flavours, putting initials against each. ‘Some of these Presidents had the same initials as States, or each other, so it looks like he’s added the second letter of the surname to distinguish them.’

  As he reached the tastes that he had copied down from the flavour wheel, Sophie said, ‘How do you know where he started listing the flavours?’

  ‘I don’t. But let’s assume that, like me, he started with the biggest grouping, Fruit. We’ll assign the initials to the order in which I’ve written them down, then see how they match up with our own tastings.’

  It took several more minutes for him to finish writing State postal codes against flavours, finishing with AL against Apple. He riffled through a confusion of papers to retrieve his notes from the Domenech tastings.

  ‘Okay, so oak would be NM. We tasted that in the Lastours and the Sarrabelle.’ He checked the two coded reviews and found NM in the taste lines of both. ‘So far so good. We also found vanilla in both the Cuvée Léa and the Sarrabelle Syrah. Which means we should find NJ in their taste lines.’ He checked. ‘And there th
ey are.’

  ‘And liquorice?’ Bertrand said. ‘We found that in the Syrah, too.’

  Enzo looked at the board. ‘Liquorice is OH.’ He checked it against the review. ‘And there it is.’ He looked up, beaming his satisfaction. ‘By George, I think we’ve got it!’ He pulled the review of the Château Lastours Cuvée Special 2001 off the wall and held it up in front of him, so that he could switch focus between the whiteboard and the paper. His cellphone began to ring. ‘Get that will, you Sophie? I want to translate this.’

  Sophie took his phone out on to the terrasse, and Enzo began to translate the coded review in front of him.

  ‘Colour—dark red with brick tones. Nose—smoky oak with wild fruit, following up with strong crushed strawberries. Mouth—soft tannins, velvety and round. Long finish. Longevity—five to eight years. Score—B1.’ He looked at Michelle. ‘No doubt he made it a little more colourful when he wrote it up for the newsletter, but that’s his basic description of the wine.’ He picked up the review of the Sarrabelle Syrah. ‘And it looks like he found his Holy Grail here in Gaillac. He’s given the Syrah an A1.’

  Sophie came back in and shut the door gently behind her. Enzo saw immediately that she had paled.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She took a tremulous breath, trying to hold back her emotion. ‘Oh, just, you know…We’re here, having a laugh, drinking wine cracking codes…’ She shook her head. ‘That was Nicole. Her mother’s funeral’s the day after tomorrow.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  I.

  Rain wept from a dark sky, steady and slow. Black umbrellas jostled for space above the heads of mourners. Grass turned to mud underfoot, splashing black shoes which had been polished to a shine just that morning. The marble slab that covered the family tomb had been slid to one side by red-faced professionals with ropes. Fetid air rose from the concrete hole below. There were other coffins down there. Nicole’s grandparents. Nicole watched as coffinbearers, straining arms and faces, lowered her mother into blackness. One day her father would join his wife. And Nicole would join them both when her turn came. It was salutary for a young girl, looking down into the gaping darkness of eternity, to know that this was where her future lay.