‘Well, why aren’t you sleeping with her?’
Enzo glowered at her. ‘Don’t even go there.’
They went inside, and Enzo was surprised to see Michelle sitting uncomfortably on the edge of the clic-clac. Charlotte was in the rocker, reading, and Nicole was tap-tapping at Petty’s laptop. ‘Have you been here all day?’ Enzo found it hard to picture Michelle and Charlotte indulging in polite conversation.
‘No, I only came back about half-an-hour ago to find out what happened at Albi.’
A tiny smile flickered across Enzo’s lips as he remembered his conversation with Madame Durand. ‘They made me an official consultant on the investigation.’
Charlotte looked up from her book. ‘Are they paying you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘No, I thought not.’
‘Shhhhh!’ Nicole waved an irritable hand in their direction. ‘I can’t concentrate with all this chatter.’
Enzo crossed to the computer. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Right now I’m trying to get into Michelle’s dad’s webspace.’ She sighed her annoyance and looked up at her mentor. ‘But I wasted half the day trying to persuade Madame Lefevre to let me run a phone extension up from the estate office. There’s no Airport card in this computer. It’s not configured for Wi-Fi.’ She averted her eyes towards the screen again and added. ‘She wasn’t too pleased to discover we’d been tapping into their account.’
‘We?’ Enzo said, his voice rising in pitch with his indignation.
‘You said you were going to tell her.’ But before Enzo could respond, she added, ‘Anyway, I’m beginning to make progress. Finally.’
Michelle got up and approached the table. ‘What have you found?’
‘Your dad was using a free server while he was in France. It’s called Freesurf. Because he wasn’t working from a single, fixed line, he was just paying for the calls as he went. But the thing is, he got a hundred megs of webspace with the account.’
‘Was he using it?’ Enzo peered at the screen to try to see what she was doing.
‘Well, he’s got a piece of software called Fetch in his Applications folder, which would suggest that he was uploading stuff to the internet. Normally you would save your username and password within the programme to make it quicker and easier each time you wanted to connect. But he doesn’t seem to have done that.’
‘And you don’t know what username or password he was using?’
‘I found a username in his mailer. Seems to be the same one he used for everything-gil. petty. But all his passwords are encoded.’ She looked up at Michelle. ‘I don’t suppose you’d have any idea what he might have used as a password?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. We weren’t exactly on password exchanging terms.’
Nicole shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’ll be somewhere in amongst his keychains. I’ve just got to figure out how to get in there. I know there’s a way.’
‘Try fishface,’ Enzo said.
‘Fishface!’ Sophie laughed. ‘What kind of password’s that?’
Enzo glanced at Michelle and saw that she had paled. ‘Just try it,’ he said to Nicole, and he watched as she entered “gil. petty” and “fishface” into their respective fields and hit the return key. A new window opened up, full of folders they hadn’t seen before.
Nicole clapped her hands in delight. ‘We’re in!’ She scanned the screen with sparkling eyes. ‘Gaillac ratings. Articles for the October 2003 newsletter.’ She looked up at Enzo. ‘How on earth did you know his password?’
‘Lucky guess,’ Enzo said, and he looked at Michelle to see eyes filled with tears she was trying hard not to spill. In his peripheral vision, he was aware of Charlotte watching them.
But none of them had time to dwell on it. Nicole was opening folders one after the other. ‘All the vineyards he’d visited,’ she said. ‘They’re all here. Chateau Lastours. Domaine Sarrabelle. Chateau Saint-Michel. Domaine Vaysette. Chateau Lacroux. Chateau de Salettes.’ She glanced up at Michelle, then looked back at the list, and for a moment her heart seemed to stop. Domaine de la Croix Blanche. He’d tasted Fabien’s wines. But Fabien had told her that he’d turned Petty away.
‘What is it?’ Enzo said.
‘Nothing.’ She moved quickly on. ‘There are subfiles with a Word document for each wine and each rating. Looks like he’d been to fifteen or twenty vineyards, tasted nearly a hundred wines. He did a lot of tasting in just a week.’
‘ Sommeliers and wine critics’ll do that,’ Bertrand said. ‘I did a wine-tasting stage in Toulouse, and all the training was about identifying tastes and smells fast. Sniffing twice only, and keeping the wine in your mouth for as short a time as possible. That way you can taste a lot of wine without ruining your palate.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know that I was very good at it. Our prof was a former French sommelier of the year. He could pick out and identify every flavour in even the most complex wines.’
Everyone turned at the sound of a cork popping, and Sophie stood holding an open bottle of red wine. ‘Speaking of which, it’s time for aperos don’t you think?’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Papa?’
‘What is it?’ Bertrand said.
She looked at the label. ‘Chateau Clement Termes. Memoire rouge.’
Enzo gave her a sour look. ‘You have the most unerring instinct, Sophie, for picking the most expensive wines.’
Sophie grinned. ‘I have good taste, that’s all. Must have got it from my mother.’ She started pouring glasses.
Enzo displaced Nicole from her seat in front of the computer. ‘Move.’
‘Aw, Monsieur Macleod, you always get to do the good stuff.’ She moved away from the table to take a glass from Sophie’s outstretched hand, and sipped at it sulkily, in search of consolation. She brightened immediately. ‘This is very good.’
‘It ought to be. It cost enough.’
‘Oh, don’t be so Scottish, Papa.’
Enzo glowered at his daughter, then turned to scan the screen and open a folder entitled Articles, October 2003. There were several documents. Wines of Gaillac. History. Cepages. GM Yeast. Editorial. The unfinished content of a newsletter that was never published. Something drew him to the document entitled GM Yeast and he clicked on it. It was an article written for The Wine Critic by an American professor of genetics, revealing for the first time the widespread use of genetically modified yeast in the production of Californian wines. None of it made much sense to Enzo: ‘The yeast ML01 was modified using a shuttle vector containing a chromosome integration cassette with genes for malolactic enzyme, malate transporter (permease), regulatory genes and a sequence directing homologous recombination at a chromosomal locus.’ He wasn’t sure Petty’s subscribers would have made much sense of it either.
He turned to the document entitled, Editorial, and ran his eye down the text, leaping from sentence to sentence with a growing sense of disbelief: ‘The Food and Drug Administration in the United States alone reviews and approves GM microbes such as yeasts used in food products. But international faith in the FDA is fast eroding because approvals are frequently influenced by political pressure, and the approval of wine yeast leaves fundamental questions to be answered. It is certainly premature to market GM wine yeast, and since the wines produced using GM yeast are not labelled in the marketplace, it is only prudent to avoid all US wines.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ He looked up to find the others staring at him.
‘What is it?’ Michelle looked alarmed.
Enzo could still scarcely believe it. ‘In his October newsletter, the one he never published, your father was going to launch a campaign to boycott American wines.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of widespread use of genetically modified yeasts that the consumer wasn’t being told about. Yeasts approved in June 2003 by the FDA following tests that he claims were…’ he searched for the quote, ‘based on faith rather than science.’ He stared at Michelle and shook his head. ‘This is dynamite. A man of your father’s influence. If he had published this stuff, it could have caused catastrophic damage to the California wine industry.’
Charlotte pushed herself back in her rocking chair. ‘And provided a motive for any number of people to want to see him dead.’
Sophie sipped her wine thoughtfully. ‘But if it was never published, and he kept all his notes hidden on the
