The Critic

by Peter May

  In the end, Garapin kept them waiting nearly twenty minutes. They didn’t speak much during that time, sitting staring at charts on the walls, diagrams of human organs, musculoskeletal structures, a multicoloured plan of the brain. Attending an autopsy always left Enzo feeling vulnerable. It was a very human response. Pathologists were somehow inured to it, able to separate the living from the dead. Enzo couldn’t do that. It was invariably himself that he saw cut open on the table. A glimpse of the future, an acknowledgement of the inevitable.

  Garapin smelled of shower gel and shampoo, but beneath the perfume, there lingered still the stench of death. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you that unless toxicology comes up with something unexpected, I’m going to attribute cause of death to drowning. Not because I can prove that he drowned, but that given all other factors, it’s the most likely explanation.’ He dropped into his chair and sighed, intent, it seemed, on trying to convince himself. ‘Drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion, you see. There really is no specific pathognomonic or diagnostic sign. If you eliminate all other causes, and given the wine absorbed by his lungs, you’re left with drowning.’

  Enzo thought about it. It did seem like the only logical conclusion, but he was still concerned by the unexplained injuries, and whether they were inflicted before or after death. ‘I suppose it’s impossible to say how he came by those contusions.’

  ‘Impossible,’ Garapin agreed.

  ‘What about the sample of wine retrieved from the stomach?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He didn’t drink that.’

  ‘No, I think it seeped in there over time.’

  ‘So it’s the same wine he drowned in. The same wine he’s been preserved in for the past year.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable assumption.’

  ‘So a chemical analysis of the wine from the stomach could match it to the wine he’d been kept in.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Roussel was a better colour now. ‘We don’t know what wine he was kept in. There’s probably a thousand red wines, maybe more, produced in Gaillac. You couldn’t do a comparison with them all.’

  ‘We could start with the wines of La Croix Blanche.’

  Roussel scowled. ‘You think Fabien did this? He’d have to be insane to dump the bodies in his own back yard.’ And Enzo remembered Charlotte’s words, ‘I’d say that you were dealing with someone suffering from a serious personality disorder—which means it won’t be a simple matter to find reason in his motive.’

  Garapin interrupted. ‘In any case, it’s a moot point. The sample we have has been contaminated by stomach acid and tissue decay. We could never make a comparison accurate enough to stand up in court.’

  Enzo nodded, conceding the point, then had a sudden thought. ‘Its multi-elemental composition won’t have changed, though.’

  This time it was Garapin who conceded. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘What the hell’s a multi-elemental composition when it’s at home?’ Roussel looked from one to the other, seriously out of his depth, and aware of it.

  Enzo said, ‘The minerals and elements that the grapes have absorbed from the soil while still on the vine. They would create a kind of identifiable fingerprint that would be passed on to the wine.’ He was excited by the thought. ‘There’s been a lot of work done on this in recent years to try to prevent fraud in the wine industry. To stop crooks trying to pass off cheap plonk as Bordeaux or Burgundy. People get fooled by the label, you know. Even experienced wine tasters can be conditioned by what they read on the bottle.’ He turned to Garapin. ‘You’ve got a sizeable sample there. Could you keep me some?’

  Garapin leaned back lazily in his chair. ‘What are you going to do. Sniff and taste it and tell us the grape and the vintage?’

  ‘No, but I know a man who might be able to tell us exactly where it came from.’

  ***

  As they crossed the car park, Roussel said, ‘I’m sorry to be thick about this, but you’re going to have to explain to me how you can take a sample of wine and tell where the grapes were grown.’

  Enzo opened the door of the gendarme’s car and leaned on the top of it. ‘Each grape contains a unique and distinctive pattern of trace elements. These are absorbed by the grape through the movement of elements from rock, to soil, to grape, influenced of course by the solubility of inorganic compounds in the soil. But the point is, the multi-elemental pattern of a wine will reflect the geochemistry of its provenance soil—that is, the soil that it’s grown in. It will match it as accurately as a fingerprint.’

  The light of understanding began to dawn for the gendarme. ‘So you take a sample of soil, compare it to the wine, and if the fingerprint matches then that’s where the grape was grown.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘How would we know what soil samples to use?’

  ‘We don’t. We’ll have to take samples from all the vineyards that Petty visited. Discreetly, of course.’

  ‘And this guy you know will do the analysis?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Will he come here?’

  ‘I doubt it. He’s in California.’

  ‘So you’ll send them to him.’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘No. That could take weeks. And if there’s a fifth victim marked up on our killer’s list, then we don’t have weeks. We might only have days—if that.’

  ‘What’ll we do, then?’

  ‘We won’t do anything, Gendarme Roussel. If my friend agrees to do it at all, I’ll take the samples to him myself.’

  Chapter Eleven

  I.

  The smell of crushed, fermenting grapes was carried from the chai on the pungent edge of invisible carbonic gas escaping from the cuves. It filled the air with the heady scent of autumn wine, and reached Enzo on a light breeze as he walked across the grass towards his gîte in the fading evening.

  Château des Fleurs seemed larger in silhouette against the setting sun, more substantial and imposing. Lights shone out from the cottage, casting shadows towards him from the terrasse. It had been a long day, and he had been away for hours.

  A figure stood up from the table on the terrace and ran down the steps towards him. A slight figure, bursting with energy, hair streaming back through warm air. ‘Papa!’ She threw her arms around his neck and nearly knocked him over. She peppered his face and neck with kisses, then buried her head in his chest.

  And his weariness was lifted by a surge of love and affection. ‘Hey!’ He put his arms around her and held her to him. ‘Sophie, what are you doing here?’ And even to his own ears his voice sounded strange, speaking English with a native Scottish accent that had remained unchanged across all the years. When they were alone together, he and Sophie always spoke English, and he loved to hear the soft, whisky accent he had given her, a legacy of a homeland she had never known. She could hardly have been more French. It was her culture, and her language, and she was a constant reminder to him of her mother. She looked like her. The same black eyes, the same infectious smile. Only the faint silver stripe that ran back through dark hair from her forehead betrayed the genetic link with her father.

  She pulled away and pouted at him. ‘Are you not pleased to see me?’

  He grabbed her and nearly squeezed the breath from her lungs. ‘Of course I’m pleased to see you. I’m just surprised to see you.’

  ‘We thought we would come and help?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and Bertrand. He’s got someone looking after the gym for a week. He’s a real wine expert, you know.’

  ‘Sophie, a year as a trainee wine waiter doesn’t make you an expert.’ He put an arm around her waist and they climbed the steps together.

  ‘Bet he knows more than you.’

  As they reached the terrace Bertrand stepped out from the lit interior. Enzo could see his diamond nose-stud catching the light, and the ring through his eyebrow. He was still gelling his hair into spikes, and wore a sleev
eless tee-shirt to show off the muscles cultivated during hours of patient weight-lifting at the gymnasium he ran in Cahors. He was not tall, but was very nearly perfectly formed. Enzo sighed inwardly. He had been forced by events to concede that there was more to Bertrand than he had given him credit for. But he was not what Enzo would have wished for his little girl. She was barely twenty. Bertrand was nearly twenty-seven. And worse, he was sleeping with her.

  Bertrand shook his hand. ‘Monsieur Macleod.’

  ‘Bertrand.’ And Enzo had a sudden thought. ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘Here,’ Sophie said.

  ‘You can’t. There’s only one bed, and a clic-clac that’s killing my back.’

  ‘And two bunk beds up in the mezzanine.’

  Enzo groaned inwardly. This was getting ridiculous. Four of them in a house with one bedroom and one bathroom. And he had yet to sleep in the bed. But, ‘cosy,’ was all he said.

  Sophie missed his tone. ‘Yeah, it’s a great cottage. And a fabulous château.’ Then she paused. ‘So who’s in the bed, then?’

  ‘Charlotte.’

  ‘Well, why aren’t you sleeping with her?’

  Enzo glowered at her. ‘Don’t even go there.’

  They went inside, and Enzo was surprised to see Michelle sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the clic-clac. Charlotte was in the rocker, reading, and Nicole was tap-tapping at Petty’s laptop. ‘Have you been here all day?’ Enzo found it hard to picture Michelle and Charlotte indulging in polite conversation.

  ‘No, I only came back about half-an-hour ago to find out what happened at Albi.’

  A tiny smile flickered across Enzo’s lips as he remembered his conversation with Madame Durand. ‘They made me an official consultant on the investigation.’

  Charlotte looked up from her book. ‘Are they paying you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘No, I thought not.’

  ‘Shhhhh!’ Nicole waved an irritable hand in their direction. ‘I can’t concentrate with all this chatter.’

  Enzo crossed to the computer. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Right now I’m trying to get into Michelle’s dad’s webspace.’ She sighed her annoyance and looked up at her mentor. ‘But I wasted half the day trying to persuade Madame Lefèvre to let me run a phone extension up from the estate office. There’s no Airport card in this computer. It’s not configured for Wi-Fi.’ She averted her eyes towards the screen again and added. ‘She wasn’t too pleased to discover we’d been tapping into their account.’

  ‘We?’ Enzo said, his voice rising in pitch with his indignation.

  ‘You said you were going to tell her.’ But before Enzo could respond, she added, ‘Anyway, I’m beginning to make progress. Finally.’

  Michelle got up and approached the table. ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Your dad was using a free server while he was in France. It’s called Freesurf. Because he wasn’t working from a single, fixed line, he was just paying for the calls as he went. But the thing is, he got a hundred megs of webspace with the account.’

  ‘Was he using it?’ Enzo peered at the screen to try to see what she was doing.

  ‘Well, he’s got a piece of software called Fetch in his Applications folder, which would suggest that he was uploading stuff to the internet. Normally you would save your username and password within the programme to make it quicker and easier each time you wanted to connect. But he doesn’t seem to have done that.’

  ‘And you don’t know what username or password he was using?’

  ‘I found a username in his mailer. Seems to be the same one he used for everything—gil.petty. But all his passwords are encoded.’ She looked up at Michelle. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what he might have used as a password?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. We weren’t exactly on password exchanging terms.’

  Nicole shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’ll be somewhere in amongst his keychains. I’ve just got to figure out how to get in there. I know there’s a way.’

  ‘Try fishface,’ Enzo said.

  ‘Fishface!’ Sophie laughed. ‘What kind of password’s that?’

  Enzo glanced at Michelle and saw that she had paled. ‘Just try it,’ he said to Nicole, and he watched as she entered “gil.petty” and “fishface” into their respective fields and hit the return key. A new window opened up, full of folders they hadn’t seen before.

  Nicole clapped her hands in delight. ‘We’re in!’ She scanned the screen with sparkling eyes. ‘Gaillac ratings. Articles for the October 2003 newsletter.’ She looked up at Enzo. ‘How on earth did you know his password?’

  ‘Lucky guess,’ Enzo said, and he looked at Michelle to see eyes filled with tears she was trying hard not to spill. In his peripheral vision, he was aware of Charlotte watching them.

  But none of them had time to dwell on it. Nicole was opening folders one after the other. ‘All the vineyards he’d visited,’ she said. ‘They’re all here. Château Lastours. Domaine Sarrabelle. Château Saint-Michel. Domaine Vaysette. Château Lacroux. Château de Salettes.’ She glanced up at Michelle, then looked back at the list, and for a moment her heart seemed to stop. Domaine de la Croix Blanche. He’d tasted Fabien’s wines. But Fabien had told her that he’d turned Petty away.

  ‘What is it?’ Enzo said.

  ‘Nothing.’ She moved quickly on. ‘There are subfiles with a Word document for each wine and each rating. Looks like he’d been to fifteen or twenty vineyards, tasted nearly a hundred wines. He did a lot of tasting in just a week.’

  ‘Sommeliers and wine critics’ll do that,’ Bertrand said. ‘I did a wine-tasting stage in Toulouse, and all the training was about identifying tastes and smells fast. Sniffing twice only, and keeping the wine in your mouth for as short a time as possible. That way you can taste a lot of wine without ruining your palate.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know that I was very good at it. Our prof was a former French sommelier of the year. He could pick out and identify every flavour in even the most complex wines.’

  Everyone turned at the sound of a cork popping, and Sophie stood holding an open bottle of red wine. ‘Speaking of which, it’s time for aperos don’t you think?’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Papa?’

  ‘What is it?’ Bertrand said.

  She looked at the label. ‘Château Clement Termes. Mémoire rouge.’

  Enzo gave her a sour look. ‘You have the most unerring instinct, Sophie, for picking the most expensive wines.’

  Sophie grinned. ‘I have good taste, that’s all. Must have got it from my mother.’ She started pouring glasses.

  Enzo displaced Nicole from her seat in front of the computer. ‘Move.’

  ‘Aw, Monsieur Macleod, you always get to do the good stuff.’ She moved away from the table to take a glass from Sophie’s outstretched hand, and sipped at it sulkily, in search of consolation. She brightened immediately. ‘This is very good.’

  ‘It ought to be. It cost enough.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so Scottish, Papa.’

  Enzo glowered at his daughter, then turned to scan the screen and open a folder entitled Articles, October 2003. There were several documents. Wines of Gaillac. History. Cépages. GM Yeast. Editorial. The unfinished content of a newsletter that was never published. Something drew him to the document entitled GM Yeast and he clicked on it. It was an article written for The Wine Critic by an American professor of genetics, revealing for the first time the widespread use of genetically modified yeast in the production of Californian wines. None of it made much sense to Enzo: ‘The yeast ML01 was modified using a shuttle vector containing a chromosome integration cassette with genes for malolactic enzyme, malate transporter (permease), regulatory genes and a sequence directing homologous recombination at a chromosomal locus.’ He wasn’t sure Petty’s subscribers would have made much sense of it either.

  He turned to the document entitled,
Editorial, and ran his eye down the text, leaping from sentence to sentence with a growing sense of disbelief: ‘The Food and Drug Administration in the United States alone reviews and approves GM microbes such as yeasts used in food products. But international faith in the FDA is fast eroding because approvals are frequently influenced by political pressure, and the approval of wine yeast leaves fundamental questions to be answered. It is certainly premature to market GM wine yeast, and since the wines produced using GM yeast are not labelled in the marketplace, it is only prudent to avoid all US wines.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ He looked up to find the others staring at him.

  ‘What is it?’ Michelle looked alarmed.

  Enzo could still scarcely believe it. ‘In his October newsletter, the one he never published, your father was going to launch a campaign to boycott American wines.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of widespread use of genetically modified yeasts that the consumer wasn’t being told about. Yeasts approved in June 2003 by the FDA following tests that he claims were…’ he searched for the quote, ‘based on faith rather than science.’ He stared at Michelle and shook his head. ‘This is dynamite. A man of your father’s influence. If he had published this stuff, it could have caused catastrophic damage to the California wine industry.’

  Charlotte pushed herself back in her rocking chair. ‘And provided a motive for any number of people to want to see him dead.’

  Sophie sipped her wine thoughtfully. ‘But if it was never published, and he kept all his notes hidden on the internet, who would have known about it?’

  ‘If we knew the answer to that,’ Enzo said, ‘we might be a lot closer to knowing who killed him.’

  It was Nicole who spotted the flaw in the logic. ‘But whoever killed Gil Petty, also killed the man we found last night, right?’

  Enzo nodded, the memory of the autopsy still only too fresh in his mind. ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘But you said this morning there didn’t appear to be any connection between them. Has that changed?’