The Critic ef-2

by Peter May

  Gaillac was, after all, in the heart of rugby country. Catholicism came a poor third to the twin religions of wine and rugby.

  Enzo had stayed away from the gite for the rest of the day. It would, in any case, have been depressingly empty without Sophie and Bertrand, and Nicole and Michelle. And Braucol. Braucol was dead. The others he had sent away. His isolation was self-inflicted. He was treading treacherous water on his own until MacConchie e-mailed him the results of his sample analysis. He was pretty sure he would not sleep tonight.

  A large banner flapped in the wind at the far side of the stadium, Allez GAILLAC tes Supporters sont la, distracting him from his thoughts. He became aware of the players trooping off the field, to dressing rooms beneath the stand, steam issuing from hot showers, young men’s voices rising in laughter to ring around the tiles. The sun was beginning to dip, and the first golden pink was discernible on the far horizon.

  Enzo walked among the handful of cars in the huge parking lot to find his 2CV. Kids were playing basketball on the asphalt, voices shrieking in the late afternoon. Murders were being committed. Men dying, others gone missing. And still the world turned. As if none of it mattered. And in the context of time, and space, and history, Enzo thought, perhaps it really didn’t. All he knew was that it mattered to him.

  The southerly wind had died away again, and swung around to blow down from the northwest. Although the sky was still clear, Enzo could feel a chill in the air. The first breath of coming winter. The temperature would fall tonight. There might even be frost.

  Nicole’s car was parked opposite the chai at Chateau des Fleurs, and she was sitting waiting for him at the table on the terrasse of the gite. Another coming and going for Lefevre to complain about. ‘Monsieur Macleod, where on earth have you been?’

  ‘Nicole, I told you to go home.’

  She ignored him. ‘I’ve been waiting for you for ages.’

  He brought out his keys and unlocked the door. ‘You should have been back at the farm by now.’

  She followed him in. ‘Don’t you want to know why I’m not?’

  ‘No. I just want you to go.’

  ‘Monsieur Macleod, you’re a stubborn man!’

  ‘ I’m stubborn?’ He sat down at the computer and hit the space bar to waken it from sleep. ‘Nicole, whatever it is you’ve got to say, I don’t want to know. I want you to get into your car and drive.’

  ‘I’m not leaving till you know the truth about Fabien.’

  Which drew his eyes briefly from the computer screen. But a ting announcing that he had mail drew them back again. He opened up his mailer and saw that there was an e-mail in the box from MacConchie. He felt his heart-rate quicken and clicked on it.

  ‘It wasn’t Fabien who attacked you last night. He was at home with his mother. And that cut? He did it in the chai, on a broken bottle. His mother was there when it happened. It was her that dressed it.’ She glowered at him. His attention seemed fixed on the screen. ‘Are you listening to me?’

  He looked up. ‘It doesn’t matter how he cut himself, Nicole. It was Fabien Marre who killed Petty and Coste.’

  She shook her head in anger and frustration. ‘You’ve just got it in for him, haven’t you? Right from the very start.’ But there was a still centre to Enzo as he sat behind his computer looking steadfastly back at her. It scared her, and her voice tailed away. With less conviction she said, ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Because the multi-elemental profile of the soil we took from La Croix Blanche is the same as the sample of wine taken from Serge Coste’s stomach. It’s like a matching fingerprint, Nicole. There’s no doubt. The grapes that wine came from were grown on Fabien Marre’s vineyard.’

  For once there was no retort, no protest of innocence on Fabien’s behalf, no petted lip or metaphorical stamping of the foot. The blood drained from her face, and she was shocked to silence. And in that moment, he felt a sudden surge of pity for her. Whatever she felt she knew about Fabien, whatever she thought she had found in him, had been dashed on the rocks of science. All certainty shattered.

  His phone rang. It was still on the charger, and he saw that there had been several calls, all from the same number. The caller was ringing him again.

  ‘Enzo Macleod.’

  Her voice was taut with barely controlled tension. ‘Monsieur Macleod, I need your help.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Katy Roussel. David’s wife. I’m so scared for him, monsieur. They won’t believe me at the gendarmerie. They think we’ve had a row, and that he’s left me.’

  ‘How do you know that he hasn’t?’

  ‘Because I know. David’s the most loving man. Even if we had fallen out, he’d never leave his kids. He adores them…’ Her voice cracked, and he could tell that she was having trouble controlling it. ‘I know he thought highly of you, monsieur. He thought he’d failed in his investigation. That’s why he took time off. To bring his missing persons file home. He was spending nearly all his waking hours on it.’

  ‘And did he get anywhere with it?’

  ‘He thought he’d found something. A connection between Gil Petty and the others.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me. He was really secretive.’ He heard her breath trembling at the other end of the line. ‘Something’s happened to him. He wouldn’t go off like this, he just wouldn’t. Please, monsieur, please help me.’

  ‘Give me your address, Katy.’ He wrote it down as she gave him directions. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  He hung up and looked over the computer to see big tears rolling silently down Nicole’s face. He stood up and took her in his arms, and felt her shaking as he held her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Nicole. I really am.’ He disengaged and took her face in his hands, turning it up towards his. ‘Please. Go home.’

  III

  From the roundabout on the west side of Lisle sur Tarn, the single track road meandered through acres of flat farmland, tall cornstalks rattling in the cool northwesterly, red-turning leaves fluttering along row after row of vines. Everywhere you looked there were chateaux and chais. So much wine and not enough people to drink it. Even in France. Enzo had read somewhere that there was a worldwide glut, production increasing by fifteen percent a year. Everyone was overproducing, and not everyone would survive. He passed an a Vendre sign. Someone, perhaps, had got the message, and was selling up before the going got worse. Wine was a tough business to be in these days.

  The road divided, and he took the left fork, heading towards the distant hills and the dusky sky beyond it. The Roussel’s family home was a single-storey Roman-style brick villa hidden behind high hedges and a copse of protective trees. Pins parasols and tall, blue-green conifers. He drove through the gate into an overgrown yard and parked in front of a terraced veranda. Weeds poked up through the castine. There were swings and a children’s paddling pool. A punctured football nestled, squashed and useless, amongst the growth at the foot of the steps. Shredded netting hung from a basketball hoop above the garage doors. There was a seedy air to the place, of peeling paint and neglect. A husband too occupied with his job, a wife too busy with their children. Eyes that stop seeing.

  The interior, by contrast, was clean and tidy, almost spartan. The children were not anywhere in evidence. Staying with friends, perhaps. Katy Roussel offered no explanation. She was too distressed. An attractive woman gone to seed, like the house. It was the same neglect. She was overweight, but not fat. A once carefully styled haircut had been allowed to grow out, and was clumpy and unkempt. The roots were showing grey. She wore a voluminous shirt over black leggings, and Enzo wondered whether she might be disguising another pregnancy. But he was frightened to ask in case he was wrong. There was no trace of make-up, and her eyes were red from the shedding of tears.

  She shook his hand, and he noticed that the skin of hers was rough and dishwater red. ‘Thank you for coming, Monsieur Macleod. I think I’d have lost my mind if you had
n’t. I’ve no one else to turn to.’

  ‘When did he go missing?’

  ‘Three days ago. He’d brought those damned files home with him. He wasn’t supposed to. Nobody at the station knew what he was up to. He just shut himself in his study. Well, it’s a spare room, really. But it’s where we keep the computer. He was on the internet for hours, sitting up into the small hours every night. The day before he disappeared he told me he was going to the library in town. But not why.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, nothing. The next morning he said he was going out to the vineyards. That there was somebody he needed to talk to.’

  ‘He didn’t say who, or where?’

  She shook her head. ‘He said he would be back for lunch.’ She bit her lower lip so hard, Enzo saw blood oozing through her teeth. ‘He never appeared. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘You went to the gendarmerie. ’

  ‘The next day, yes. I was beside myself by then. But he was still officially on leave, so when I showed up looking for him, they jumped to all the wrong conclusions. His friends. I could see it in their faces. David takes leave for personal reasons, then his wife shows up looking for him. Of course, there’s been some kind of bust up, and he’s taken off. Maybe with another woman. They didn’t say as much, but that’s what they thought.’

  Enzo hesitated. ‘At the risk of repeating myself, you’re absolutely certain he hasn’t?’

  ‘I’d stake my life on it.’ And then, to underline her conviction. ‘I’d stake my children’s lives on it.’

  ‘Those files he was working on. Are they still here?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve had a look through the stuff, but I can’t make any sense of it.’

  ‘May I see?’

  ‘Of course.’

  And he followed her down a shadowed hallway.

  IV

  It was almost dark when Nicole drove into the yard at La Croix Blanche. She was dry-eyed and determined. But behind that determination, there was a disconcerting sense of apprehension. Her mouth was dry, and her heart-rate increased as she stepped out of the 4L. There wasn’t a light anywhere. Not in the chai nor in any of the sheds. Nor at the house. Security lamps that would normally have responded to the arrival of a vehicle remained stubbornly dark.

  She stood listening, but could only hear the tick of her radiator as it cooled in the falling temperature. The wind filled her flimsy jacket, and she shivered beneath her tee-shirt. She drew her hair from her face and fixed it behind her head with a rubber band and started up the path to the house.

  The front door was not locked, but the house beyond lay choked in a darkness that swallowed her voice when she called into it. The only response was silence. She tried the light switch, but there was no light, no reassurance. Apprehension now verged on fear. She had been determined to confront Fabien. There had to be some logical explanation. But something was wrong. Where was his mother? Why was everything dark?

  She retreated from the house, scared by its unnatural silence. On the far western horizon, the last light was dying in the sky. Fiery red fading to black. A flash of electric light drew her eye towards the chai. Double doors opened into blackness stabbed by the beam of a flashlight. There was someone moving around in there.

  She wrapped her courage around herself to stifle rational thought and started across the yard towards it, clinging to the memory of the night with Fabien at the source. He had been so gentle with her. So affectionate and loving. She just knew he wasn’t capable of murder.

  And then his conversation with Enzo at the foot of the stairs replayed itself in her mind:

  Anything happens to that girl…

  And you’ll what, old man?

  They’ll need DNA to identify your remains.

  And the night they found Serge Coste up in the woods, and Enzo and Fabien had their first confrontation: ‘If you want to know what I think, whoever killed Petty deserves a medal.’

  Conviction diminished with every step, to be replaced by fear and uncertainty. She stopped at the entrance to the chai. Double rows of stainless steel cuves disappeared into darkness. She hesitated. There was no sign of the flashlight now, or its owner. She called out in a feeble voice. ‘Hello? Is there someone there?’

  As at the house, she was greeted only by silence. And then a loud clunk came from somewhere deep within. From the pressoir, maybe, or the shed with the sunken tanks. It was followed by a dragging sound, and then a feeble blink of distant light from the adjoining shed. And then silence and darkness again.

  She moved cautiously into the chai, and felt herself consumed by the dark. The smell of fermenting wine carried on falling carbonic gas was almost suffocating. As she reached the opening between cuves that led to the next shed and the pressoir, she stopped to listen. There was no sound, no light, no hint of any human presence. But she knew there was someone there.

  A sudden light in her face blinded her, and she screamed. A startled, terrified scream that echoed back at her from every stainless steel surface. And almost as if triggered by the scream, unexpected light washed down from the roof, and Fabien stood no more than a foot in front of her, his flashlight still directed in her face. Fluorescent tubes buzzed and flickered all around the chai.

  ‘What in the name of God…?’ Dilated pupils had turned Fabien’s eyes even blacker than usual. He looked pale and startled.

  ‘Fabien, what are you doing here in the dark?’ Her own expression, she was sure, was as startled as his.

  ‘We had a power outage. There’s been no electricity for nearly an hour. Must have been the wind. A cable down somewhere. I’ve been checking temperatures in the cuves. If they’d got any warmer I’d have had to start up the generator.’ He looked around the chai. ‘But we’ve got power again now.’ He turned off his flashlight. ‘I thought you’d gone home, Nicole.’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  He frowned. ‘She made soup and took it over to Pappy’s.’ He gave her a long look. ‘Nicole, what’s going on?’

  With the light, a little of her confidence had returned. But she still needed reassurance. Her feet planted firmly on the concrete, she summoned all her courage and decided to confront him head on. ‘The wine those people drowned in. You know, Petty and Coste. It was made from grapes grown on your land, Fabien.’ She saw confusion furrow his brow. ‘How is that possible?’

  V

  The light from the desk lamp seemed unnaturally intense. Black letters swimming on white paper, until he could barely look at them. And from all of these papers that covered the desk, a blinding blizzard of conflicting information, some kind of awful sense was finally emerging from confusion.

  Roussel had been busy. There were photocopied extracts from historical documents he had found in the library. Pages marked up in several books on local history, whole paragraphs highlighted with diagonal orange lines. There were printouts from the internet. Genealogical searches, Roussel’s own family tree, several articles on the French Revolution, a piece downloaded from Wikipedia about something called The Great Fear.

  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 co
uldn’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.’