‘I’m looking for Gendarme Roussel.’
The gendarme cocked his head suspiciously. ‘And you would be…?’
‘Enzo Macleod. I’m a forensic specialist consulting on the Petty case.’
The police officer eyed him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Park up here and follow me.’
Enzo pulled his car into a tight space between two rows of vines and followed the gendarme up the slope. At the end of the track, where the land rose steeply to the woods, a small knot of people stood talking and smoking. There was a cluster of police vehicles, blue and orange lights flashing out of sync, and unmarked cars pulled up at odd angles, abandoned for the final climb on foot.
‘Monsieur Macleod!’ Nicole detached herself from the group and hurried towards him.
‘Nicole, what are you doing here? How did you know about all this?’
‘She just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.’
Enzo had barely noticed the young man in the baseball cap who had followed behind her. He eyed Enzo with obvious dislike, the reflected light of police headlamps cutting deep shadows into a fleshy face. He was a big man, a powerful presence in the dark. He sucked at a cigarette and the shadows that masked his face glowed red in its light.
Nicole cleared her throat uncomfortably. ‘Monsieur Macleod, this is Fabien Marre. He’s the owner of La Croix Blanche.’
‘My family owns the vignoble,’ Fabien corrected her. ‘I make the wine.’
Enzo looked again at the young man, then back at Nicole. ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘She’s staying here, monsieur.’
Fabien Marre’s insistence in answering for her was beginning to irritate Enzo. ‘I’m not asking you.’
Nicole was almost beside herself with embarrassment. ‘I didn’t know when I took the room, Monsieur Macleod, honestly. I mean, I’d read all the stuff about Petty, but La Croix Blanche is a pretty common name. I didn’t realise until…well, until I’d blown your cover.’
Enzo sighed. He could imagine exactly how it had happened. Nicole, he knew, enjoyed the sound of her own voice.
‘So you needn’t bother turning up for the vendange tomorrow,’ Fabien said. ‘And you can tell Laurent de Bonneval that we’ll be having words.’
Enzo realised there was no point in recriminations. And, in any case, everything had changed now. He looked at Nicole. ‘You said they’d found another body.’
‘Up there in the woods.’ Nicole pointed vaguely towards where they could see flashlights pricking the dark and the shadows of officers moving among the trees. ‘There’s a source up there. La Source de la Croix. Apparently it’s been a rendezvous for young lovers for centuries.’ She glanced at Fabien, almost as if looking for his permission. But he just shrugged. She turned back to Enzo. ‘A young couple came banging on the door of the house at La Croix Blanche just after midnight. She was hysterical. By the time I’d got into my dressing gown and slippers and gone down to see what all the noise was about, Fabien and his mother were there, and the girl was in floods of tears. Her boyfriend could hardly stop shaking.’
‘What had happened?’
‘They’d gone up to the source to…well, you know, do whatever it is young couples do in places like that.’ Nicole had grown up on a farm. Animals had sex. People had sex. She’d never really drawn the distinction. But now, discussing it in the presence of Enzo and Fabien, she was suddenly self-conscious. ‘Anyway, they heard someone moving about in the woods, and they thought it was a Peeping Tom. The boy got angry and went after him. That’s when he found the body.’
‘So you called the police?’
‘Not right away. Fabien wanted to see for himself.’
Enzo looked at the young winemaker. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not going to go calling the police out on a wild goosechase on the say-so of a couple of kids.’
‘And I went with him.’
Anger flashed in Enzo’s eyes. ‘You took Nicole?’
Fabien shrugged dismissively. ‘You know her better than me, monsieur. Have you ever tried saying no to her?’
Enzo glanced at Nicole with irritation and silently conceded the point.
‘It was horrible, Monsieur Macleod. I mean, I read all the descriptions people gave of Petty’s body when they found it. But nothing prepares you for the real thing.’
Enzo flicked at a look at Fabien. ‘So you trampled all over the crime scene before you called the police.’
‘So?’
‘So if they find your traces there, then there’s a perfectly logical reason for it.’
Nicole frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t there be?’
Enzo didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on Fabien. ‘You were there when they found Petty.’
‘I was.’
It was with a shock that Nicole suddenly realised where this was heading. ‘Monsieur Macleod! You can’t possibly think…’
But Fabien talked over her, his voice low and steady and filled with a latent anger. ‘I never made a secret of the fact that I didn’t like Petty, monsieur. Nothing personal. But there are those of us who produce the wine, and there are others who leech off it. Those who produce nothing but fancy words, impose their tastes and fill their pockets. They’ve never broken their backs during all the hours and weeks and months of pruning or lost a crop to the vagaries of the weather. So if you want to know what I think, I think whoever killed Petty deserves a medal.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘But it wasn’t me.’
Nicole turned to look at him, shocked by the intensity of his words and silenced by their virulence.
Enzo said, ‘Murder is never to be congratulated, Monsieur Marre.’ He paused for a moment’s reflection. ‘But it’s an interesting coincidence, don’t you think, that both bodies should turn up on your land?’
Fabien dropped his cigarette and ground it into the stones with the toe of his boot, refusing to meet Enzo’s eyes.
Enzo gave Nicole a look that would have wilted flowers, and turned back towards the waiting gendarme. ‘Where’s Roussel?’
‘Straight up to the treeline, monsieur.’
Roussel was on his way down as Enzo climbed up. They met halfway, and the investigator shone his flashlight in Enzo’s face. ‘How the hell did you get up here?’
‘I told them I was a forensic expert consulting on the Petty case.’
Roussel glared at him. ‘I could have you arrested for that.’
‘Why? It’s true. I am consulting on the Petty case-for his daughter.’
Enzo couldn’t see his expression beyond the glare of his flashlight, but he could feel the intensity of Roussel’s gaze before he heard his lips part in a smile. Roussel turned off the lamp, and as Enzo’s eyes adjusted he saw a weary amusement in the palest of faces. ‘You’re a character, Monsieur Macleod. Un vrai personnage. I’ll give you that.’
‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’
‘Maybe because I have.’ He drew a deep, tremulous breath, and wiped a thin film of perspiration away from his forehead with the back of a hand that Enzo noticed was shaking.
‘You know the victim?’
‘I spoke to you about him just a couple of days ago. One of my missing persons. The one I was at school with.’
Enzo remembered the file on Roussel’s desk and his glib assertion that people went missing all the time. ‘So there was something sinister about his disappearance after all?’
Roussel gave him a darting look. He did not miss the echo of his own words. ‘He’s not pleasant to look at, monsieur. Submerged in wine probably since the day he went missing. But there’s only enough alcohol in red wine to inhibit decay, not prevent it entirely.’
Enzo said, ‘When Admiral Lord Nelson was killed by you people at Trafalgar, they shipped him back to Gibraltar in a barrel of wine. There they changed the wine for brandy, and sent the body back to Britain for burial.
