‘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 gite in the fading evening.
Chateau 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 sleeveless 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 chateau.’ Then she paused. ‘So who’s in the bed, then?’
‘Charlotte.’
