The Critic

by Peter May

  When he first sat down, Enzo hadn’t had the least idea where to begin. So he had started random reading, before the logic of Roussel’s researches had finally dawned on him, and he began retracing the gendarme’s footsteps in the order they had been taken. Now he just sat staring without seeing, words burning out in front of him. He knew now who had killed Petty, and why. And Coste. And probably Roussel. And all the others in the file. And he knew, too, that these were not the actions of a sane man.

  An absurd French wordplay entered his head, a jeu de mot that seemed somehow horribly apposite. Winemakers usually left a portion of the vineyard unharvested during the vendange. The grapes remained on the vine, sometimes until November, when withered and frosted, they were almost like raisins, super-concentrated with sugar. These were the grapes they used to make the vin doux, the sweet white wine that was drunk with foie gras. The late harvest was known as the vendange tardive, but Enzo couldn’t get it out of his head that what Roussel had discovered was a case of vengeance tardive. Belated revenge.

  ‘Can you make any sense of it?’ Katy Roussel’s voice crashed out of the darkness beyond the ring of light. He had almost forgotten she was there, and he was nearly overcome by his own sickening certainty that her husband was dead. But there was no way he could tell her that. And as long as there was no body, there was always hope.

  He turned to see concern burned into a face washed out by worry. ‘Do you know what The Great Fear was?’

  ‘I saw the article on the desk. But I didn’t read it. We got something about The Great Fear at school. It was part of the French Revolution, but I don’t really remember.’ Her confusion was clear in her eyes ‘Is it important?’

  Enzo nodded. ‘It’s where madness began, and is still feeding it.’

  She shook her head. ‘How?’

  ‘The Great Fear took place in July and August of 1789, right at the start of the French Revolution. There were rumours circulating among the peasantry that the nobles had hired bands of thugs to march on the villages and destroy their new harvest. In response, the peasants formed themselves into gangs and sacked the castles of the nobles, and burned all the documentation recording their feudal obligations.’ He turned towards the papers strewn across the desk. ‘What your husband discovered was the thing that linked Petty and the others in his missing persons file. That they were all descendants of a group of vigilantes who rampaged through Gaillac that summer more than two hundred years ago. A notorious gang who committed dreadful atrocities. They beat up the local nobility, sacked their estates, and in some cases set their homes on fire.’

  Her frustration bubbled over at Enzo, almost as if he was somehow responsible for it all. ‘I don’t understand. What are you saying? Why has David disappeared?’

  Enzo sought resolve in a deep breath. For he knew that his next words would amount to a pronouncement of death on the man she loved. ‘He was one of them, Katy. Directly descended from one of that group of vigilantes. Everyone knew who they were at the time. With Church and State records now widely available on the internet, it would have been a relatively easy matter to trace the lineage of each and every one of them.’

  ‘You mean someone’s been killing these men because of what their ancestors did? That’s insane!’

  ‘Madness takes many forms. Sometimes all you need is to give it an excuse.’ He drew one of the open books towards him and focused on a paragraph marked out in fluorescent orange. ‘It seems the gang went too far one night. Maybe they’d been drinking, whipped themselves up into some kind of crusading frenzy. But they marched on a château just outside of town, dragged its owner into the courtyard and beat him to death in front of his wife and children. Then they set the place on fire.’ He looked into the desolation in her eyes. ‘Nearly two hundred and twenty years later, someone’s been exacting a very belated revenge.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I.

  There was light somewhere in the chai. But Enzo could not pinpoint its source. It was some kind of nightlight. So dim that he could see only far enough to stop himself bumping into things. He heard wine fermenting in the cuves, bubbling and frothing and producing the carbonic gas that that he could smell all around him. Pungent, nearly overpowering. Rivers of it, unseen, washing around his feet, carried away by water running through drainage channels in the floor.

  He stumbled, nearing knocking into a makeshift table. Planks of wood raised on empty barrels, strewn with papers and charts. Empty bottles grouped together rattled, the chink of glass on glass echoing around the vast empty spaces of the winery. The air was so thick he could almost feel it on his skin, brushed soft by the hidden light.

  The dark shapes of cuves towered around him as he made his way towards the back of the chai. Again he stumbled, this time tripping over something on the floor, and he fell to his knees. His curses whispered off into the dark. He felt about the floor with his hands and found coils of rubber cable leading to a handheld inspection lamp with a wire mesh guard. It was what had caused him to fall. Enzo fumbled for the switch and turned it on. He had seen winery workers hanging these lamps down inside the cuves to check levels when juice was being pumped from one to the other.

  He looked around him, but the lamp didn’t throw its light very far. Outside its circle of illumination, it seemed even darker than before. But he could tell that he was still in the old brick-built chai, extended now to the west through huge sliding doors. Rows of abandoned resin tanks faded into the gloom. He stood up and raised the lamp above his head, realising for the first time that light would pass through the fibreglass. He could see that the nearest tank was more than three-quarters full, the level of the dark, red wine it contained clearly visible just below the rim. And he wondered why, if it was no longer used to ferment wine, it was nearly full. Perhaps these old tanks were simply used for storage. Or maybe their owner had found a more sinister use for them.

  At the end of the row, metal steps led up to a grilled walkway that gave access to the tops of the tanks. Enzo checked the length of his cable. There were metres of it coiling off into darkness. Holding the lamp ahead of him, he made his way along to the steps and climbed carefully up to the overhead catwalk. The old, rusted structure rattled and swayed in the dark. He felt it trembling beneath his heavy frame as he clung to the handrail and made cautious progress, just below the angle of the roof, towards the row of disused fibreglass tanks. Black pipes which had once fed cold water to cool fermenting wine ran level with his head.

  He stopped at the first tank. Its pulley system enabled a large, flat lid to be lowered in to the level of the wine, forcing oxygen out of the cuve. Enzo hung his lamp over the rail and pulled on a rope that lifted the lid clear of it. He held the rope, braced in position with one hand, and retrieved the inspection lamp with the other. He swung the lamp out over the tank, and peered down into its sharp, red limpidity. The pale upturned face of David Roussel stared back at him, eyes wide, suspended just below the surface.

  A startled cry escaped Enzo’s lips quite involuntarily, and he recoiled from the cuve letting go of the rope. The lid dropped back into place, expelling air with a loud whoosh. The inspection lamp fell from his hand and swung back and forth, suspended by its cable from the rail. Shadows lurched crazily about the chai. Enzo grabbed the cable and pulled the lamp back up with shaking hands. He remembered Roussel the day he had met him, arms folded across his chest, U2 playing on the computer, Lara Croft watching them from the wall. ‘People go missing all the time,’ he had said. He himself had been missing for only a short time compared to the others. And now he had transitioned from missing to murdered in the blink of an eye. Enzo was having difficulty controlling his breathing.

  He moved along to the next tank and hauled up the lid. The wizened face of a middle-aged man, his mouth gaping, gazed up at him from the wine, coruscating rouge shot through with reflected violet light. His arms were extended to either side, hands floating outstretched, legs fading off into dark, impenetr
able red. Enzo lowered the lid and moved to the next. Another face, a younger man this time, a strange, sightless appeal for help in eyes floating like clouds.

  Enzo let the lid drop back into place. There was one last tank, at the end of the row. As far as he knew, there was no one else missing, so there was no reason to expect that there might be another body. But something drew him on. Some sixth sense, a premonition that filled him, unaccountably, with a dreadful foreboding. He moved along the catwalk holding up the lamp, steadying himself with his free hand on the rail. He let it go to grab the rope hanging down from above and pulled hard to raise the lid. This time he secured it by tying the rope to the rail, before leaning forward to hold the inspection lamp over the tank.

  Her hair was fanned out all around her head like an aura, chestnut stained red. Her head was tipped back, the striking green of her eyes staring up at him, magnified by the wine. For a moment he thought he saw a rebuke in them. Why hadn’t he listened to her? She’d had something to tell him, and he hadn’t given her the chance. And then he realised that there was no rebuke there. Only his own guilt. And an enormous rush of pain and regret that rose in his throat to almost choke him. Poor, neglected, dead Michelle. The tears that pricked his eyes were held at bay only by the anger that threatened to overwhelm him. It took him several moments to control the urge to bellow his anguish at the top of his voice. And then it passed, leaving him weak and trembling.

  He had seen enough. It was time to go and get help. And right now, there was no way he could get out of there fast enough.

  He hurried back along the walkway. It swayed and rattled beneath him. When he reached the steps he turned to climb down backwards. But as he grasped the rail, the electric cable caught on something unseen, and the inspection lamp was pulled from his grasp. It went tumbling off into space. In as much time as it took him to look down, it struck the floor with a loud crack, and the lamp shattered. Darkness closed around him like a glove.

  ‘Shit!’ He heard his own whispered imprecation snuffed out like a flame.

  Anxious not to lose his footing, he moved slowly downwards, one careful step at a time, until he felt concrete solid and safe beneath his feet. There was more light now than he remembered. The dark shadows of cuves and bottling plant, of pumps and barrels, seemed less ill-defined. And he became aware of light bleeding faintly from an open door further down the shed. It was a strange, feeble, flickering light. But it washed around the chai in barely perceptible waves, and guided him to the door, which groaned softly as he pushed it open. He saw the red rail around the edge of the pit, the insulated necks of cuves set in cement, like so many ceramic chimney tops. He had been here before. Had made an almost fatal mistake. A misstep in ignorance, his life saved by a man who had killed without pity. Revenge for a murdered ancestor.

  He stepped into the room and saw a candle flickering on the top step of the stairs. It had only just been lit, molten wax not yet pooling in its holder. He peered down into the maintenance pit to the tiled floor below. There was no one there. No one living, at any rate. He moved along the rail to the top of the steps and peered beyond them into darkness. He could see a ladder leaning against the wall, pipes snaking around the concrete apron. The scrape of a shoe echoed in the gloom, and Laurent de Bonneval stepped into the candlelight. He looked down at Enzo from the apron two feet above, his face chiselled from gneiss, hard and expressionless.

  Enzo said, ‘Your wife told me I’d find you out here.’

  Bonneval fixed him with emotionless eyes. ‘You know, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A barely audible sigh. ‘He was going to ruin us, you know. He didn’t like our wines.’

  ‘He told you that?’ Enzo found it hard to believe.

  ‘Not at first. But I could tell. The little questions he asked after each barrel-tasting. His lack of conviction as he scribbled in his notebook.’ His pause was momentary. ‘I burned it afterwards.’

  ‘How did you know what he was going to write?’

  ‘Normally he wouldn’t have told me, I know that. But when I accused him of trying to finish off what his ancestor had started, he pretended not to know what I was talking about. Then when I confronted him he laughed and told me not to be ridiculous. He said if he was going to give my wines a poor rating it was because they were too thin, that they lacked the body and maturity that he expected of a good French wine.’ Bonneval shook his head. ‘No one should have that much power, Monsieur Macleod. One man’s taste determining another man’s fate.’ He drew a long breath, and Enzo wondered if he detected regret in it.

  ‘So you killed him.’

  ‘I couldn’t let him leave. Do you have any idea how much I have invested in this place? In its future? The future of my son? He would have destroyed my family all over again. Just like his forebearers did two hundred years ago.’

  ‘How long had you known about that?’

  ‘I discovered the details of the full, sordid story about ten years back. Old family diaries locked away in a bureau, in a room that had been shut up for decades. It was my grandfather who had gathered the records, pieced together the whole history. It was shocking, Monsieur Macleod. I was truly shocked.’

  Some unrecorded memory flickered across his face. ‘Petty gave me an excuse for taking my revenge. But when Coste showed up the following year, I knew it wasn’t going to be possible to stop there. The man had been working on a family tree and was looking for my help. It was only a matter of time before he found out the truth. Before people made a connection between me and Petty that went way beyond wine. I realised then that they all had to go.’

  He gazed off into some distant landscape that only he could see, a landscape stalked by the twin devils of madness and revenge.

  ‘Hubert de Bonneval was a great philanthropist. No one treated his workers better. He was a major contributor to the local community. He opened a brick factory to provide bricks for the enlargement of the château, and jobs for the people of Gaillac. He paid his grape pickers well at harvest time.’ The descendant of the murdered man breathed out in anger. ‘And they rewarded him by killing him in front of his own family. His son wrote about it decades later. Watching his father clubbed to death, his mother abused and beaten, his home robbed of everything valuable, and then set alight. You could feel his pain on the page, Monsieur Macleod. I wept when I read it.’

  Some courant d’air stirred the flame of the candle, and it dipped and dived and nearly went out. Almost as if the ghost of Hubert de Bonneval had drifted past, dragging cold air in his wake.

  But Laurent de Bonneval was only momentarily distracted. He focused dull, dark eyes on Enzo. ‘Fortunately, it was only the east wing that was destroyed by the fire, the original chai. Most of the château survived intact. But it damned near ruined my family. It took them two generations to get back on their feet, to rebuild and restore the château, to produce wine they could sell and recover their wealth. And Hubert’s murderers walked free, laden with the riches they had stolen.’

  ‘It’s a sad story, Monsieur de Bonneval,’ Enzo said. ‘But I don’t see how two hundred years later you can blame the actions of these men on their descendants.’

  ‘I didn’t. At least, not until Petty started trying to do it all over again…and I remembered my bible. Exodus chapter twenty, Verse Five. “I the Lord God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” There was justice in it.’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘Romans. Twelve. “Avenge not yourselves, but give place unto the wrath of God: for it is written, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”’

  A slight smile cracked the gneiss. ‘You know your bible, too, then Monsieur Macleod.’

  ‘I know that it is a dangerous tool in the hands of people who twist and corrupt its words to justify their own ends.’

  Sudden anger flared in the winemaker. ‘My ancestor was brutally murdered in cold blood, my family cast into the
wilderness. And because of a quirk of history, his killers escaped justice, and their descendants lived to profit from their sins. Comfortable little men leading comfortable little lives. Well-fed, well-mannered, well-meaning progeny of murderers! And here was Petty, like the ghost of his own ancestor, coming back to finish the job.’

  There was no reasoning, Enzo knew, with madness. He looked at the man and wondered when and where and how the balance had tipped that way. Bonneval had known the story of what had happened during the French revolution, and had chosen to sublimate whatever feelings it had wakened in him in the hope of receiving Petty’s blessing, and the financial rewards that would bring. And when it had become clear that this was not about to happen… ‘Why Michelle?’ Enzo closed his eyes and saw her face staring back at him from the wine, before anger forced them open to focus on the killer who stood in front of him. ‘What possible reason could you have for harming her?’

  ‘Because she figured it out. She came to see me this afternoon. You found his reviews, it seems. If Petty had come to taste my wines, why had he not reviewed them?’ And he seemed almost amused at the pain of realisation that he saw in Enzo’s face.

  Enzo’s voice seemed tiny in the dark. ‘Because yours was the last vineyard he visited. He never reviewed the wines of Château Saint-Michel because you killed him before he ever got the chance.’ How could he not have seen it? Why hadn’t he listened to Michelle instead of accusing her of lying? ‘She didn’t deserve this. None of them did. You’re deluded, Bonneval!’ He heard his own voice rising in anger.

  But Bonneval shook his head, and looked down into the pit. ‘The girl…well, there was a kind of poetic justice in that. She was Petty’s daughter, after all. But I did nothing. They took their own lives, monsieur. All of them. Through ignorance. Going down there to their deaths of their own free will. Stupid, unsuspecting men. And women.’ And Enzo realised now how Petty and Coste had sustained the contusions found during autopsy. Overcome by gas as they went down into the pit, they had fallen the rest of the way. Bonneval turned back to him. ‘And you people couldn’t even tell. I didn’t drown them. They filled their lungs with carbonic gas. The wine was just a convenient place to keep them until I could dispose of the bodies.’ He allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Petty may not have liked my wine. But he was damned well going to drink it for eternity.’