The Critic Read online

  The thought of Petty took Enzo back to the day in the grande salle at Château des Fleurs when Pierric Lefèvre had dug out the American’s family records from the old archive. In a strange sort of way, that made Petty a local, too. Or, at least, his antecedents. But it made no sense, for it had been Petty’s first trip to Gaillac. His only connection to the place was historical.

  Enzo’s reflections were interrupted by a young waiter with dark, curly, gelled hair shaved close around the sides of his head. ‘Bonjour monsieur. Je vous écoute.’

  Enzo glanced up. ‘Un petit café, s’il vous plaît.’

  The waiter cocked his head. ‘You’re the guy that went off with Braucol.’ He grinned, shaking his head, some affectionate memory of the puppy dog coming back to him. ‘How is the little guy?’

  Enzo didn’t have the heart to tell him. ‘Doing good.’

  The waiter laughed. ‘He was a pain in the ass, you know. But I kind of miss him.’

  And as he went off to get the coffee, Enzo thought how he would miss him, too. He turned quickly to the envelope the adjutant had given him from the Police Scientifique in Toulouse, and drew out the preliminary report. He ran his eye down the text, nodding to himself as it confirmed what he had suspected. Petty’s DNA sample did not match the sample recovered from the speck of blood inside the glove. The chances were that if the blood in the glove did not belong to the killer himself, then it belonged to a relative. But if they got themselves a suspect, familial DNA matching could still secure a conviction. If they could find a suspect.

  He flipped over a page and felt sudden goosebumps rise up all across his shoulders. He felt his face sting as if he had just been slapped. He stood up as the waiter arrived with his coffee, and dropped a couple of coins on the table.

  ‘Give it to someone else.’

  II.

  She was sitting at the table where he had first seen her. She was reading, just as she had been then. But she greeted him somewhat differently. When his shadow fell across her book she looked up, irritation replaced immediately by a smile that broke like sunshine across her face. ‘You’re back. I’m so glad. I had a thought about my dad, and those vineyards he visited…’ She took off her sunglasses, green eyes flashing and stood up to kiss him.

  His recoil was almost imperceptible, but it was like a shutter dropping between them. Her smile was gone in an instant. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He dropped the buff envelope on the table and sat in the free chair opposite, leaving her to stand looking down at him. He glanced out across the shimmering green and red vines. The harvesters were out again after the rain to gather the last of this year’s récolte. Then he looked up to meet the concern in her eyes and remembered how attractive she was. Clasps held chestnut hair clear of her face. Her lips were pale in a lightly tanned face, and he remembered the feel of them against his. Soft, sensuous. And he recalled her mother’s words in Sacramento: ‘There have been a string of older men in her life, almost as if by making them love her she’s proving to herself that it wasn’t her fault that her father didn’t.’

  ‘Why have you been lying?’

  Her skin paled beneath her tan, and she sat down. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was small and uncertain.

  ‘Four years ago when your father came to Gaillac, you followed him here. You went to see him at the gîte.’

  But she wasn’t going to admit it easily. ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Familial DNA matching, Michelle. It was in my mind for quite another reason, even before I read the report.’

  Her self-confidence was evaporating as he looked at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Back in 2003, in the UK, a kid dropped a brick from a bridge on a motorway. It smashed through the windscreen of a car and killed the driver. Forensic scientists managed to salvage a sample of the kid’s DNA from the brick. The British have got the biggest DNA database in the world. More than three million people in it. The kid wasn’t one of them. But a relative was. They matched sixteen points out of twenty, and secured a conviction in March 2004. The world’s first conviction using familial searching.’

  He could see that she made no sense of this.

  ‘Michelle, when you went to see your father it was… how can I put this delicately? It was that time of the month. You left a used sanitary pad in a plastic bag in the trash can in the bathroom.’ He saw realisation breaking over her like an ocean wave. ‘For some reason, the police kept the contents of the bin as evidence. I sent the pad for DNA testing, along with those samples of your father’s that we found among his things. And guess what…’

  But he didn’t need to elucidate further. She shook her head despondently. ‘You don’t think I killed him?’

  He looked at her for a long time, searching those green eyes, trying to divine what complexity they masked. Then he sighed. ‘No. No, I don’t. But I know you lied, Michelle, then and now. And I want to know why.’

  He watched as tears bubbled up in her eyes, and she tried hard to control them. ‘I wanted to confront him. I wanted to make him meet my eye and tell me why. Why some goddamned bottle of fermented grape juice was more important to him than his own flesh and blood. But even then, even to my face, he wasn’t going to give any part of himself away. It was the same old blind he always drew on his emotions. He accused me of being like my mother. Possessive and territorial. He said that marrying her had been the biggest mistake of his life. And by implication, I was just an extension of that mistake. He couldn’t even see me as being a part of him, of belonging to him. I’d have given anything….’ She broke off, her voice cracking, and she clenched her fists on the table in front of her, fighting hard to control her emotions, to sublimate them again behind cool, green windows of obfuscation. And Enzo thought how like him she was. How for all her feigned affection, she hid everything real behind the same blind her father had always drawn.

  She rediscovered her control, and Enzo saw her expression harden. It was not attractive.

  ‘We just shouted at one another. And I stormed off. Then, when he went missing, it crossed my mind that maybe he’d killed himself. Because of me; because of our row.’ She laughed, a sad, bitter little laugh without humour. ‘But I should have known better. That might have meant he’d cared.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I never told anyone I’d been there. And when he turned up dead, murdered, it was twelve months too late. And wouldn’t have helped anyway.’

  She examined his face for a response, and whatever she saw there brought with it a look of resignation. Her eyes flickered away from his. It was as if she suspected that he had seen her truly for the first time, and that there was no longer any point in pretending with him. She gazed away across the valley, the hum of insects filling the air around them, the distant sounds of the harvesters carried on the warm vent d’autan.

  ‘So where does that leave us?’ she said.

  ‘There is no us, Michelle.’ And he was struck by the irony of the words that Charlotte had used so often with him. ‘It’s very flattering for a fifty-year-old guy like me to have some young girl half his age fawning over him, offering him sex, giving him back maybe just a little of his lost youth. But there’s no future in it for you. Go home. Get yourself a real life. Someone of your own generation. Forget your father. Sometimes people are just flawed.’ And his own daughter’s voice rang around his head: ‘I couldn’t believe that the man who didn’t care about leaving his seven-year-old daughter would turn up twenty years later telling her who she could and couldn’t see.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Even dads.’

  III.

  The road curved up around the edge of the hill, the land falling away to the left, a dramatic sweep of empty vines straddling the slope. Beyond, the vast flood plains of the Tarn shimmered away into a distant haze, the river snaking lazily through it, towns and villages in red brick dotted along its banks.

  Enzo’s 2CV strained against the gradient and then picked up speed as it reached the top o
f the hill. Suspension rocked and rolled through the narrow streets of a tiny stone village, before the road swooped down again towards the church on its distant promontory.

  A chalk-white track left the road to curl around the hillside, past the towering apse of the twelfth century Église de Verdal, depositing Enzo finally in the shade of the oaks that clustered around its ancient forecourt. He got out of the car and felt the wind whip warm in his face. The three bells in the church tower swayed in gentle acknowledgement of its rising strength. Vines dropped away on all sides, and from here the view to the south was an unbroken panorama. You could almost believe that on a clear day you might see all the way to the Mediterranean.

  He found himself looking down on the cluster of buildings that was Domaine de la Croix Blanche, perhaps a kilometre away, in the valley below. He could make out the chai, and the salle de dégustation, a group of red-roofed barns, and the Marre’s house on the far side of the yard.

  He turned away to look at the old church. The stained glass in tiny arched windows high up on the wall had somehow survived intact. Windows at ground level were all boarded up, wooden shutters bleached and rotten. Concrete rendering was crumbling to reveal golden stone walls beneath it. A sign on the door told randonneurs that the église was a stop on an historic walk, and that Lisle sur Tarn was ten kilometres away.

  Enzo had come here to escape from people, to breathe and to think, to try to focus on the myriad morceaux d’informations he had accumulated in the last two weeks. To see where they fit and how they related, to visualise in his mind’s eye the picture they might create if only he could make sense of them.

  But he was finding it hard to get Michelle out of his mind. The pain she felt at her perceived rejection, the lies she had told, her seemingly endless capacity for self-deception. And always that tinge of regret that he had not, in the end, slept with her, even if it would have left him with a bitter aftertaste of guilt. For a fleeting moment, he wondered what it was she had been going to tell him at Château de Salettes before he confronted her about her lies. But he knew he would never know.

  He walked down to the highest edge of the vineyard, closed his eyes and let the wind fill his mouth. It tugged at his shirt and his cargos, carrying to him the distant sound of a motor car. He opened his eyes and saw it following the road up from the river towards La Croix Blanche. Even from here he could tell that it was an old vehicle, a muted grey-green. One of those old French cars that just seem to go on forever. Like the Citröen 2CV, or the Renault 4L. And he felt a sudden stab of apprehension. He ran back to his car to retrieve a pair of binoculars from the parcel shelf, and returned to his vantage point on the edge of the hill. As he brought the vehicle into focus, it pulled up in the yard at La Croix Blanche and a familiar figure stepped out.

  ‘Shit!’ Enzo lowered his binoculars. What the hell was Nicole doing there?

  IV.

  Dust rose from the castine, quickly dispersing on the edge of the wind, as Enzo pulled his 2CV in behind Nicole’s 4L. Several vehicles sat around the yard. A tractor stood idling in the shade of a barn with a corrugated red tin roof. He could smell the fermenting juices of this year’s harvest coming from the chai. But there was no sign of life. Enzo started up the path towards the house, past an old stone bread oven. Apple trees were dropping ripe red apples in the grass. As he reached steps leading up to the front door, Fabien emerged from the cave below, dragging a coil of yellow plastic tubing.

  He stopped when he saw Enzo. ‘What the hell do you want?’

  ‘To see Nicole.’

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to see you.’

  ‘Well, why don’t we ask her?’ Enzo’s eyes dropped to the coil of yellow tubing, and he saw that Fabien’s right hand was heavily bandaged. Fresh white gauze wrapped around the thumb and palm. Blood had seeped through lint from the fleshy area at the base of the thumb and dried a dark brown. ‘What did you do to your hand?’

  Fabien seemed surprised by the question and looked down at the bandage. ‘I cut it.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘None of your damn business!’ He dropped the tubing and pushed past Enzo to start up the steps. ‘If you want to talk to Nicole, you’d better do it. Then get off my land.’

  Enzo followed him into the cool of the shuttered house, past the disapproving glare of Madame Marre, and up creaking stairs to the landing. Nicole turned in surprise as Fabien moved aside to let Enzo step into her bedroom doorway. The large suitcase that accompanied her everywhere lay open on the bed, the wardrobe doors stood ajar, and clothes were strewn over chairs and pillows. ‘What are you doing here, Monsieur Macleod?’

  ‘That’s just what I was going to ask you.’ He turned towards Fabien. ‘In private.’

  Fabien gave him a long, surly look, then headed back along the landing. Enzo heard him on the stairs, and closed the bedroom door behind him.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Monsieur Macleod! What’s all the drama about? When I got the call about my mother, I never even stopped to pack. I’m just back to collect my things.’

  ‘And to see Fabien?’

  She bristled. ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘Mine, too, Nicole.’

  She thrust defiant breasts at him. ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘I’m responsible for you being here at all. And Fabien Marre’s still very much in the frame for these killings.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Someone tried again to kill me last night.’

  Which took the wind out of her sails. Her voice shrank in size. ‘What happened?’

  So he told her, and it seemed to him that she was almost more upset about Braucol than about the attempt on his life.

  ‘It couldn’t have been Fabien.’ She was filled with self-righteous certainty.

  ‘Why not?’

  Her conviction crumbled just a little. ‘Because…because he’s not like that.’

  ‘And you know him so well.’ Enzo couldn’t hide his skepticism.

  ‘I’ve known him nearly two weeks, Monsieur Macleod!’ And after a moment, ‘And in ways you couldn’t possibly.’

  Enzo looked at her, shocked, uncertain what she meant, and afraid to ask. ‘Nicole, whoever it was that attacked me last night, I slashed him in the dark with my knife. Fabien’s got a badly cut hand. You must have seen the bandage.’

  Nicole wavered now towards reluctant uncertainty, but remained defiant. ‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

  And Enzo cursed inwardly. A simple DNA test on the bloodied piece of torn pocket would prove it one way or another. But for that to happen he would have to admit to the investigating gendarmes that he had withheld evidence from them. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Now. Please, Nicole. Until we know for sure who’s responsible for these killings, we’re all in danger.’ He flicked his head towards the bed and sighed at the sight of her enormous suitcase. He knew how heavy it would be. He had carried it often enough. ‘Finish packing, and I’ll take your case down to the car.’

  ‘I don’t need your help, thank you, Monsieur Macleod. I have someone else who’ll carry my suitcase these days.’ She returned to the packing of it, making it clear in tone and body language that their discussion was at an end.

  Enzo contained his frustration. She was a stubborn girl, filled with the certainty of ignorance. Her experience of the world was naïve and second-hand, selectively assembled from surfing the internet and watching TV. The things he knew, the things he had seen in his life, would be incomprehensible to her, shocking beyond belief. And yet, she would always know better.

  Fabien was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. Through the kitchen door, Enzo could see his mother hovering by the sink. He lowered his voice. ‘Anything happens to that girl…’

  ‘And what, old man?’

  Enzo squared up to him and saw Fabien almost wince in the face of his intensity. ‘They’ll need DNA to identify your remains.’

  ***

&n
bsp; Nicole stood silent, listening at the top of the stairs. Something in Enzo’s tone scared her more than any argument he could ever have made. Mr. Macleod was such a gentle big soul, she was both touched and shocked by his threat to Fabien. She drew back into the shadows as Enzo pushed past the young man and out of the front door. Fabien didn’t move. He remained standing in the downstairs hall for a long time after Enzo had gone. Perhaps he had been as shaken by Enzo’s words as Nicole. She moved forward now to try to catch a glimpse of him through banister uprights, and the floorboards creaked beneath her feet. Fabien turned a pale face towards her and caught her watching. There was nothing for it but to carry on down.

  As she reached the downstairs hall, Madame Marre appeared in the kitchen door behind her son. Fabien and Nicole looked at each other for several long moments. Then her eyes fell to his bandaged hand. ‘What did you do to your hand, Fabien?’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I.

  A glob of spittle transferred itself between upper and lower lip. His face was pale and angry. ‘I’m sorry, but I want you out of here, Monsieur Macleod. ASAP.’

  Paulette Lefèvre stood behind her husband pink-faced with embarrassment. But she said nothing. Lefèvre himself was puffed up with anger and indignation. He had just removed the bloodied swing from beneath the pigeonnier and put down sawdust to soak up any remaining blood from the damp earth below. They stood in a knot of confrontation outside the estate office.

  ‘There have been nothing but women coming and going at all hours of the day and night since you got here. You’ve vandalised the interior of my gîte by drilling holes in the wall for your precious whiteboard. And now this! Break-ins, the ritual slaughter of animals. Gendarmes crawling all over the estate.