The Critic ef-2

by Peter May

  ‘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 Cuvee Lea.’ 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 cafe.’ 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 Chateau 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+ amp;lbj+++ jmo, zt amp;nm, with a little nj giving way to ky, la amp;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 Chateau Lastours 2001 Cuvee 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 Cuvee Lea and the Sarrabelle Syrah. Which means we should find NJ in their taste lines.’ He checked. ‘And there they 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 Chateau Lastours Cuvee 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.

  The sight of her mother disappearing into the dark brought fresh tears to eyes that had fought to stay dry, and she felt the comfort of Fabien’s arm as it slid around her shoulder. She looked up and saw Enzo standing at the other side of the tomb, his mouth set in a grim line, his eyes full of sadness. She knew that Scotsmen often wore their kilts to weddings. She’d had no idea that they wore them to funerals, too. And she was moved that Enzo had taken the trouble. He made a striking figure with his white shirt and black tie, black dress jacket, and the eight metres of pleated tartan wool that made up his kilt. Silver trim on a black leather sporran gleamed dully in what little light the sky let through. There were small, thoughtful touches, too. The black flashes on either side of long, dark socks that stretched over sturdy calves and folded down below the knee. Black shoes laced up above the ankles. His black hair, pulled back in its habitual ponytail and held by a black ribbon. But it seemed greyer somehow, its white flash less disti
nctive.

  And then it was over, mourners drifting away from the graveside, among the tombs and headstones of this tiny cimetiere in the shadow of the hills. Past the old stone chapel with its faded stained-glass windows, out on to the narrow road that wound through the jumble of mediaeval houses gathered around this final resting place. Acorns fallen from a towering oak beyond the wall crunched underfoot, the only sound to break the shuffling silence as they left.

  Nicole took her father’s arm as they walked towards the car. He was a big man reduced by loss, stooped and defeated. He looked awkward and uncomfortable in a suit that didn’t fit him, that would not button shut across a belly that had expanded since last he wore it.

  Enzo stood back and watched father and daughter with an ache in his heart. Sadness for them, discordant memories for him. He became aware of someone stopping at his side and turned his head to find himself looking into Fabien Marre’s cautious black eyes. Anger displaced melancholy. He kept his voice low. ‘I thought I told you to stay away from Nicole.’

  ‘And I’m supposed to listen to a man in a skirt?’

  If they had not been at a funeral Enzo would have taken him down with a swift left hook. In his imagination, at least. He contained his anger by making and unmaking fists at his side, then shoved his hands into his jacket pockets to keep them under control. He thought about all the hours they had spent decoding Petty’s Gaillac ratings. Enzo had been keen to read what Petty had written about Laurent de Bonneval’s Cuvee Special, since he had tasted it himself. But it hadn’t been among the coded reviews downloaded from the server. The wines of La Croix Blanche, however, had. He said, ‘We decoded Petty’s reviews of your wines.’ And saw Fabien tense.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Don’t you want to know how he rated them?’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what Petty thought.’