The Critic Read online

  He indulged in that pleasure once more and eyed Enzo with watery eyes. ‘When I was a boy, we had a contract with the railway, and we sent barrels of a wine called vin bourru every year to Paris where it was drunk in all the bars. It was white, and cloudy and sweet, and still fermenting. Maybe only three percent alcohol. But then after the war, the Europeans told us we couldn’t guarantee the consistency, so effectively it was banned.’ He grinned wickedly. ‘You want to taste it?’

  ‘You’re still making it?’

  ‘No, not really. But the white wines in our cuves have just begun their fermentation. And that’s the very stuff we would have sent by rail to Paris. A little taste of history, monsieur.’

  No one paid any attention to them as old Josse led Enzo through the chai clutching a couple of fresh glasses. He stopped at one of the cuves and peered myopically at the handwritten label attached to the tap, then muttered his satisfaction. ‘Loin de l’oeil.’ He opened up the tap and poured them each a half glass. The wine, still in its very early stages of fermentation, was indeed very cloudy, almost yellow. ‘Try it.’ He handed Enzo his glass.

  It fizzed on the tongue, sweet and sharp and yeasty, and still warm from the fermentation.

  ‘I love to have a glass or two at harvest time.’ The old man’s eyes sparkled with mischief. ‘It always feels like raising two fingers to the damned Europeans. They might be able to stop us selling it, but they can’t stop us drinking it.’

  The taste of it lingered in Enzo’s mouth as they walked back along the drive to his car. He shook the old man’s hand, and was about to get behind the wheel, when he had a thought. He stopped with one foot already in the car. ‘You said that an application to become a chevalier had to be accompanied by a full CV, nothing left out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you still have Petty’s application and CV?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I suppose the police must have asked to see them at the time?’

  ‘No. The police were only interested in the gown and the hat and gloves and whose they might have been.’

  Enzo was almost afraid to ask. ‘Would you let me see them?’

  Old Josse grinned. ‘Monsieur, we have drunk the vin bourru together. Of course you can see them.’

  II.

  Enzo followed Paulette Lefèvre up the broad stone staircase, sunlight spilling through arrow-slit windows to fall in zigzags across the steps of the old château. The swing of her hips was emphasised by the fullness of her calf-length skirt. There was something innately sexual and provocative in it. He wondered if she was aware of it and decided she probably was. In his experience, women were almost always aware of the signals they sent out. Her heels clicked sharply on the stone flags of the first floor landing, then she turned right, through a huge, studded, wooden door, into a vast salon filled with a clutter of old furniture and cardboard boxes. Some of the pieces were covered with dust sheets. An old rocking horse, its paint eroded by time and history, stood in front of an enormous, moulded cheminée, the centrepiece of which was a faded fresco in the process of restoration. Motes of dust hung in the shafts of sunlight squinting in through small windows. Pierric Lefèvre looked up from a long, wooden table littered with papers and maps and ancient books with curling yellowed pages. He was riffling through an old ledger of some kind, mottled and stained by centuries of damp.

  ‘I’ve been going through all this stuff ever since you called. We found most of it, you know, in an old armoire in the east turret when we first bought the place. God knows how it survived.’

  Enzo had seen the photographs downstairs in the great dining hall. Pictures Pierric had taken showing the restoration of the Château des Fleurs at all its stages. But it was the earliest photographs which were the most dramatic. There had been no floorboards on the first or second floors, and it had been possible to stand in the dining hall and look straight up twenty-five metres to see torn pieces of sky through the roof.

  He approached the table, and Pierric turned the age-brittled tome towards him so that he could see it. ‘I think I’ve found what you want. It’s a kind of employment ledger, listing the estate workers, where they lived, how much they were paid.’ He flipped carefully back a couple of pages, and ran his finger down a list of names written in a flamboyant, old-fashioned French script. The ink had faded considerably and was in danger of being lost in the fog of discolouring paper. ‘There.’ He stabbed his finger at an entry. ‘Georges Petit, estate manager. Lived with his family right across the way there in what is now the gîte. Right up until 1789, when his employment was terminated.’

  Enzo peered at the final entry, which was dated August 12, 1789. It said simply, Émigré. Emigrated.

  ‘Probably to the New World,’ Pierric said. ‘A lot of people left France for the Americas at the start of the French Revolution.’

  Paulette was regarding Enzo with considerable curiosity. ‘How did you know?’

  Enzo took a photocopied wad of papers from his bag. ‘Gil Petty’s curriculum vitae, as presented to the Ordre de la Dive Bouteille, to whom he was obliged to reveal all. He took that requirement literally, it seems. Because in it he disclosed that his interest in Gaillac was not just wine-related. His roots were here. His family had emigrated to the United States, he thought early in the nineteenth century. The name Petty is just a corruption of Petit. His ancestor was Georges Petit who lived, as your ledger attests, in the very gîte Petty rented when he came here four years ago. For him it was a voyage of discovery. A man in search of his history. Gil Petty was coming home. Although I doubt if he realised for one moment that he was coming home to die.’

  Chapter Six

  I.

  Nicole looked up apprehensively from the laptop computer as Enzo came in. He was, she thought, looking very pleased with himself. For most of the last couple of hours she had been framing in her mind how to tell him that she’d blown his cover at La Croix Blanche and making herself ill at the thought. So it was with some relief that she decided, given his mood, that this was not the moment. ‘You look like the cat that got the cream,’ she said.

  But he walked straight past the table where she’d set up the computer and took out a marker pen to write Petit up on his board, right below Gil Petty’s name. Then he turned towards her. ‘What does that mean to you?’

  She shrugged and frowned her confusion. ‘Petit. Small.’

  ‘Yes, but what else?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘It’s a name, Nicole. Petty’s family name. Petit corrupted to Petty when they emigrated to the United States during the French Revolution.’

  Understanding dawned. ‘So he was really French?’

  ‘His ancestors were. And they lived in this very house. I always wondered why he’d rented this place. Now we know.’

  ‘Wow!’ She thought for a moment. ‘So how does that help us?’

  Enzo’s smile lost a little of its shine. He turned and looked at the board. ‘I’m not sure. But it’s information, Nicole. Something we know now that we didn’t know before. It’s what you learn about the application of forensic science to the examination of a crime scene. Every microscopic speck of evidence is important in piecing together a complete picture of what happened. But this is important, I think. It’s something no one else seems to have known.’

  He inclined his head towards the computer.

  ‘Are we connected to the internet?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘How? Did the Lefèvres give us a telephone line?’

  Nicole made a show of examining something on the screen. ‘No.’ Her response was too casual.

  Enzo frowned. ‘Then how are we connected?’

  ‘They’ve got wi-fi downstairs in the estate office. It’s not password-protected. So I just sort of…tapped into it. They’ll never know.’

  ‘That’s stealing, Nicole.’

  ‘No, it’s not. We haven’t taken anythin
g from them. They’ve still got their own access.’

  ‘We’ll have to tell them.’

  She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ She started tapping at the keyboard.

  ‘Did you get yourself a place to stay?’

  She kept her eyes fixed on the screen. ‘Uh-huh.’

  He waited for her to tell him, but she just kept typing. ‘Well, where?’

  ‘On a farm. Just up the road. Hardly any distance.’ Then she added quickly, ‘I’ve been doing some research on Petty. There’s still a lot of stuff out there on the internet about him. He really was the number one wine critic, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He had more power to determine people’s tastes in wine, and the price of it, than any one man should ever have.’ Enzo spoke with feeling. There were too many good wines out there that would always be beyond his means.

  Nicole poked a finger at the screen. ‘I found an article here that says his recommendation of one of the Bordeaux vintages in the nineteen-eighties sent prices skyrocketing four hundred percent in three years!’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘That was the irony. When Petty first started publishing his newsletter, with detailed tasting notes and wine ratings, he wanted to be the consumers’ champion. To tell them what wines were good and what weren’t. Trouble was, he became so influential, that when he gave a wine a good score, the price of it soared way beyond the pocket of the ordinary consumer. He almost single-handedly turned the drinking of good wine into an elitist pursuit for the wealthy.’

  Nicole scrolled down her screen. ‘It says here that eighty percent of wine sold in the US is bought by only twelve percent of the population.’

  Enzo shrugged. ‘I rest my case.’

  Nicole looked at him, forgetting for the moment her debacle at La Croix Blanche. ‘That Michelle Petty…’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘It seems they didn’t talk, she and her papa.’

  ‘No, they didn’t.’ But Enzo didn’t want to discuss it with Nicole. It was all just a little too close to home for comfort. He changed the subject. ‘Let’s take a look at how he rated the wines he tasted.’

  Nicole brightened. ‘I was reading about that earlier.’ She went into her browser’s history and pulled up a previous page. ‘He didn’t go for the hundred-point scale that other critics like Robert Parker or the Wine Spectator use.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It seems he thought that the difference between, say, a ninety-five and a ninety-six, would be so tiny, and so subjective, that it really didn’t mean anything at all. That’s why he grouped his ratings in fives, which he categorised by letters of the alphabet. “A” at the top end, “F” at the bottom. So that an “A” would be like ninety-five to a hundred, “B” would be ninety to ninety-five.’

  ‘Which means it was the hundred point scale by any other name.’

  ‘Except that it allowed room for personal interpretation. One man’s meat, and all that. And…’ she held up one finger as she scrolled down the page, ‘he gave each wine a value rating, which Parker doesn’t do—1 to 5, with 1 being the best value, and 5 being pretty damned expensive. That way, an A5 would be a great wine that cost a fortune.’

  ‘And an A1?’

  Nicole grinned. ‘The Holy Grail. He never awarded an A1, although apparently he was convinced that it was out there, and that one day he’d find it.’

  Enzo eased himself into a wicker rocking chair facing the table and winced as bruised and overstretched muscles from the night before reminded him that he was not as young as he used to be. ‘So do these numbers represent actual prices?’

  ‘Broadly, yes. The best rating, a 1, would be anything up to twenty-five dollars, scaling up to a 5, which was anything over three hundred. But most of his A wines were rated 3 or higher, which takes them up over seventy-five dollars.’

  Enzo marvelled at the prices some people would pay for a bottle of wine. Twenty-five dollars to him would be seriously expensive. Most of the wines he bought were around five or six euros. He rubbed his fingers gently over the scab on his head wound and mused out loud: ‘Petty was used to rating top wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy, Champagne and Chablis. How could he possibly have applied that kind of value scale to the wines he was tasting here? I’ve never seen a Gaillac that cost more than twenty-five dollars. Most of them are under ten euros.’

  Nicole said, ‘My papa gets his wine en vrac, in a big plastic container. It costs one-and-a-half euros a litre.’

  He looked at her and realised that where she came from, there would be something obscene about paying twenty-five dollars for a bottle of wine, never mind a hundred. The budget to feed the family was probably under fifty euros a week. Her father was hardly able to bear the cost of sending her to university. Enzo knew, because he had seen it, that Nicole shared a miserable bed-sit in Toulouse with three other students, and her father could barely even manage that.

  They heard a car pulling into the gravel parking area beyond the pigeonnier, and Enzo got up to look out of the window. ‘It’s Michelle Petty. She must have got her father’s things.’ He watched for a moment, as she lifted a large suitcase out of the trunk, and a smaller bag, like a soft briefcase. She was wearing jeans and sneakers and a tee-shirt today, hair freed from its clasp and cascading over square shoulders. As she lifted the case and turned towards the cottage, braced to take the weight of the bags, he thought how attractive she was. Not at all like her father. And he remembered, from somewhere amongst all the notes he had read, that her mother had been a contestant on the beauty queen circuit in the States before meeting Petty at a party and marrying in haste. Only to repent at leisure. He turned to Nicole. ‘You’d better go.’

  Her disappointment was palpable. ‘Why? I’d like to see what she’s got, too.’

  ‘Another time, Nicole. She’s pretty fragile right now.’

  Nicole raised a skeptical eyebrow. ‘And it wouldn’t have anything at all to do with the fact that she’s young and attractive.’

  ‘Nicole.’ Enzo’s warning tone was clear.

  ‘Alright, alright.’ She held up her hands. ‘I’m out of here.’

  II.

  Enzo watched as Michelle crouched to unzip her dead father’s suitcase and throw back the lid. She stood up then, and looked down at the case lying open in front of her on the clic-clac. Neatly folded clothes, a toilet bag, shoes in a plastic carrier, unopened packs of socks held to the inside of the lid by a strap. And silent tears filled her eyes, teetering briefly on the lower lid, before tumbling down cheeks flushed with sudden colour. She sucked in a deep, tremulous breath. ‘Oh, my God. There’s still the smell of him in his clothes.’ She wiped away hot tears with the backs of her hands. ‘I don’t know what it was. Aftershave, hair-cream. But I remember that smell from when I was a little girl, and he would sit me on his knee in the big armchair to watch TV. It was so him. Like a signature. When I came in from school I would know if he was home by the scent of him in the hall.’ She turned to look at Enzo, eyes shining with tears of contradiction, happy memories fighting for ascendancy with sad ones.

  He put a hand of comfort on her arm and was taken by surprise when she slipped her arms around his waist and pushed her face into his shoulder, clinging to him, pressing herself into all his curves, stifled sobs vibrating against his chest. Years of denial given sudden release to mourn. He held her for what seemed an inordinately long time before she finally released herself to stand back, self-conscious and embarrassed by a moment of emotional weakness she had never, perhaps, suspected was even possible.

  ‘Sorry.’ She couldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘We can do this later, if you like.’

  ‘No!’ A sudden fiery determination lit her from within. ‘Let’s get it over.’

  And so they went through the suitcase, item by item. Shirts, pullovers, pants, underwear. Everything seemed clean, freshly pressed, and Enzo wondered what had happened to Petty’s dirty laundry. He had, after all, been at the
gîte for over a week before he went missing.

  He seemed to have only one pair of shoes, although perhaps he had been wearing another when they found the body. There was a pair of threadbare old slippers in a plastic bag at the bottom of the case.

  In the toilet bag there was a half-empty tube of toothpaste for sensitive teeth and a soft toothbrush. Michelle opened a bottle of aftershave moisturising cream. She sniffed, pressing her lips together to contain some emotion that welled up inside, then screwed the lid back on. ‘That’s it. That’s what he wore. I never knew before.’

  There was a small pressurised container of shaving foam, a razor in a waterproof black bag, and a plastic box of fresh shaving heads. Enzo carefully examined the head which had been in use. There was a gluey dust of finely cut whiskers clogged between the blades, with the possibility that there could be dried blood in there from tiny nicks made while shaving. He set it aside. Michelle looked at him, the question in her eyes, but she didn’t ask it.

  There were some medicines. A nearly empty pack of Hedex, paracetamol painkillers. Hemorrhoid cream and suppositories. Ranitidine tablets for a duodenal ulcer. A glycerine-based dry-skin product called Cuticura. A man suffering from the ailments of middle-age.

  Michelle picked up the skin cream. ‘He had psoriasis. Not all the time. Bouts of it. I can remember his elbows breaking out, and sometimes he would have patches of dry skin on his face.’

  All the symptoms of a man under stress. Psoriasis, headaches, acidity. Even hemorrhoids could be aggravated by stress. This was not a man at ease with himself or the world.

  Michelle removed a plastic comb from the bottom of the bag, and Enzo took it from her, holding it up to the light. There were still hairs caught in the roots of the teeth. Short, black-dyed hairs. Enzo took it through to the bathroom, laid out a piece of white toilet paper beside the sink, and carefully teased out a few of those precious hairs. He became aware of Michelle’s shadow at his shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’