skin stretched over taut muscles, and Enzo suffered a moment of irrational jealousy. It was a long time since women had cast such lascivious eyes in his direction. If ever. He had certainly never had a body like that.
Bertrand was clutching an old, well-thumbed copy of Gil Petty’s newsletter which had been among Enzo’s papers. There was a spontaneous exchange of compulsory bonjours before he waved the copy of The Wine Critic at Enzo. ‘I’ve had an idea about how to crack the code.’
Enzo eyed him skeptically. A well-developed body often reflected a less well-developed brain. But Bertrand had surprised him before.
‘I’ve been looking at his old reviews, and they all follow the same pattern.’ He reached the foot of the stairs and crossed to the whiteboard.
A sleepy-looking Sophie emerged from the mezzanine above him and looked down into the room, sweeping the hair out of her face. ‘What’s all the noise?’
But Bertrand ignored her. He pointed to the first line of the coded review, which was not in fact coded at all. “Tile red.” ‘Okay, he starts with the colour. That’s clear. Then he sticks his nose in the glass and describes what he smells.’ He stabbed a finger at the second line-“oh amp; nm. ky, ks amp; la”. ‘So these groupings of letters must represent the smells he’s going to describe when he writes up his review. Strawberry, oak, vanilla, whatever they might be.’
Enzo shuffled patiently, stifling a mild irritation. All of this seemed rather obvious, and had occurred to him almost immediately the night before. He couldn’t see how it helped.
‘The next line represents the taste, or the texture of the wine in his mouth, and then the finish.’ He ran his finger down to the next line- 5–8. ‘That’s not code at all. He’s just telling us how many years the wine can be laid down for. Then the last line, of course, is his rating. Which, I guess, was the thing he was most concerned about keeping secret.’
Enzo tried not to sound patronising. ‘I had thought through most of this already, Bertrand. What’s your point?’
The young man didn’t seem in the least dismayed. He beamed. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? All we have to do is get a bottle of the wine he’s describing and taste it for ourselves. If we can identify the smells and the flavours, and then cross-reference them to other reviews and taste those wines, we should be able to figure out what some of these codes represent.’
Enzo glanced towards Charlotte and saw the tiny smile playing about her lips. She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he found himself revising his opinion of Bertrand yet again. It wasn’t a bad idea. If they could identify even two, or three, of those flavours or smells, and relate them to Petty’s code, then it would give them a starting point for breaking it.
‘Neat, huh?’ Sophie beamed down at them from the mezzanine, basking proudly in the reflected glory of her petit ami.
‘There’s just one drawback.’ Everyone turned towards Nicole, and she blushed. ‘I mean, Monsieur Macleod’s an experienced drinker of wine. Everyone knows that.’ Enzo glared at her. ‘But Bertrand’s the only experienced taster among us.’
‘Not a problem.’ Sophie padded down the stairs and lifted a flyer from the selection of leaflets and tourist guides that Madame Lefevre had left in the gite for her locataires. ‘I was just looking at this last night. They run daily wine-tasting courses at the Maison du Vin in Gaillac. It’s just a couple of hours. We could all do it. It would be fun.’
II
The table was covered in clear plastic, then white butcher’s paper. With fastidious care, Enzo laid out the red cape on the paper. It smelled of damp earth and stale alcohol and death, and its black trim was marred by a fine cast of green mould. The three-pointed red hat was bashed and stained. There were still hairs clinging to the interior of its black headband. Enzo wondered if they had belonged to Petty, or to its original owner.
He looked around to find Roussel watching him, plastic evidence sacks piled on the chairs beside him. Space at the gendarmerie was at a premium, and so the police officer had acquired a room at the town’s medical laboratoire for Enzo to examine the evidence from the Petty case. He had been to Albi early that morning to collect everything from the parquet.
‘Were there any notebooks found amongst Petty’s things at the gite?’
Roussel shook his head. ‘No. I thought that was odd at the time. Because everyone said he took notes when he was tasting. Always in a small, moleskin notebook. But there was nothing.’
Enzo thought about it. Petty’s murderer must have taken it. Or destroyed it. Why? Might there have been something incriminating in it? They could only speculate. He turned his attention back to the hat. ‘Was there any attempt to establish if this was Petty’s hair?’
Roussel nodded. ‘There was Petty’s hair and hair from at least two other people. Unidentified.’ He stooped to lift a hefty document from his leather briefcase, and handed it to Enzo. ‘That’s the report from the lab in Toulouse.’
Enzo took it, and glanced at the policeman. He looked terrible. There were penumbrous shadows beneath his eyes. He seemed tired, and drawn, diminished somehow, almost as if he had lost weight overnight. And Enzo was certain that he could smell stale alcohol on his breath. ‘You okay?’
Roussel eyed him for a long time. ‘Not really.’
Enzo waited for him to elaborate.
Roussel couldn’t hold his gaze. He sighed. ‘I loved this job, you know. Gave me a position in society. Big shot cop in a small town. I had such self-confidence. In my own ability. In my own instincts. I coped with everything, from burglary to arson, road deaths to domestics. I knew how to deal with people, how to work the system. I had respect on the street.’ He shook his head. ‘Then Petty comes into my life. Celebrity wine critic. Disappears into thin air. I can’t find him. Then he turns up dead. I can’t find his killer. I get big pressure from upstairs. They appoint people over my head. I start to lose confidence.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘Then you show up. A real pro. And I begin to look like what I am. Big fish in a little pool. Small time cop in a dusty country town.’ His eyes became glazed, faraway thoughts making them cloudy, like cataracts. ‘You take one look at a missing person’s file and see what I never saw in four years.’
‘Only because you had no reason to look.’
Roussel shook his head sharply. ‘No. That’s just an excuse. I should have seen it. If I had, then maybe poor old Serge would never have gone missing. Maybe he and his wife would have agreed, finally, on adoption. They might have had a kid by now. Instead, he’s all hacked up in a refrigerator in the morgue, because I never saw a connection.’
Enzo realised there was nothing he could say to ameliorate Roussel’s pain. He was inflicting it upon himself, self-castigation for his own perceived failures, when perhaps the failure was systemic rather than personal.
He crossed the room to the countertop where Roussel had laid out the police photographs taken of Petty at the scene of his discovery. The colours of the cape and of Petty’s wine-stained skin, seemed more lurid, caught in the flash of the camera, the night a black backdrop to the grotesque arrangement of corpse and cape. Although he had been tied by the wrists to a stout wooden cross driven into the ground, the image of Petty was not at all like a crucifixion-more like a scarecrow prominently placed in a newly seeded field to frighten the birds. The shrivelled face beneath the pointed hat seemed almost comical, like a Halloween mask.
Enzo followed the outstretched arms, draped in long, red sleeves, to white gloves dragged on to hands that were too big for them. He paused and looked carefully at the gloves. The thumbs had not even made it into them; the glove fingers were empty. The gloves were no more than dressing, there for effect, and to reflect the detail of the costume worn by the l’Ordre de la Dive Bouteille.
He turned to Roussel. ‘Do we have the gloves there, too?’
Roussel nodded and removed them from one of the sacks. Enzo took them in his own latex-gloved hands and turned them over, examining them in great detail. They were dirty, as if perhaps they had never been washed, and purple stained from the wine. So Petty had been taken fresh from his liquid preservative, still wet when his killer had dressed him. What trouble to go to, every minute spent dressing the body and transferring it to the vineyard
