shorthand. More for himself than anything else.’
‘Did your father speak another language?’ Bertrand glanced towards Michelle.
‘French. Some Spanish. I don’t think he was particularly fluent in either.’
Sophie looked up at the board. ‘oh, nm, ky, ks is not French. It’s not like any kind of Spanish I’ve ever seen either.’
‘No, but it’s a good thought,’ Enzo said. ‘What’s another language, except another set of words for the same thing? A French-English dictionary, for example, is just two lists of corresponding words, one of which is alphabetical.’
‘I see what you mean.’ Michelle lifted her glass and sipped pensively. ‘So you think my dad just made a list of the terms he uses to describe wines, and set them against another list of some kind.’
‘A poem, maybe?’ Sophie chipped in. ‘The first and last letters of each word.’
‘I doubt it.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘Too complicated. It would have to be something he could remember quite easily, without reference to something written.’ He caught Sophie glaring at him and felt a stab of guilt at having dismissed her so easily. ‘But it’s a good thought.’
The damage, however, had been done. Sophie confined her frustration to a single, audible tut. She turned back to the computer and the chatter of the keyboard reflected her annoyance as she typed another search into Google. Her eyebrows shot up in sudden surprise and she looked at Michelle. ‘Did you know your dad’s website’s still up on the net?’
Michelle shrugged. ‘There wouldn’t have been anyone to remove it. I guess there are probably thousands of websites out there belonging to dead people.’
Bertrand stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘There. What’s that?’
Sophie peered at the screen. ‘It’s a link to something called a taste wheel. What the hell’s a taste wheel?’
Michelle said, ‘It’s a wheel divided into flavour segments. Just a graphic representation of tastes and smells. It was the department of enology at UC Davis that first came up with the concept. My dad published his own version of it in a book he wrote about wine tasting.’
Sophie clicked the mouse and waited a moment. ‘And he put it right up here on his website.’
Enzo eased himself out of the rocker and rounded the table to have a look. The wheel was divided into multicoloured segments. An inner wheel was separated into the ten perceived categories of taste and smell, the largest of which was Fruit. It then ranged through Sweet, Wood, Spice, Savoury, Herbal, Floral, Nutty, Mineral, and Dairy, which was the smallest. Each category was allotted a different colour, subdivided through the outer wheel into individual flavours represented by tonal variations of that colour. Fruit was split into red and green and went from apple, pear, and lemon, through to prune, fig, and jam. Spice was pink and included tobacco, smoke, and liquorice; while Dairy, which was yellow, comprised only butter and cream. In all, there were sixty-four flavours.
Enzo shook his head and marvelled at the smells and flavours people were able to discern in wine. Ground coffee. Leather. Cut grass. Toast. Stones. And yet, they were all things he had perceived himself in one wine or another over the years. Violets, cherries, grilled nuts. Some were appealing, others less so. Earth, green pepper, petrol. He screwed up his face at the very thought.
Bertrand said, ‘Look, he also lists the words he used to describe the sensual qualities of wine in the mouth.’ He pointed to an alphabetical list of seventeen words below the wheel. They went from Astringent, describing mouth-puckering tannins, through Firm, Heavy and Sharp, to Thin, representing a lack of flavour and body.
‘Okay,’ Enzo said, ‘print all that out for me.’ He felt a frisson of excitement. Things were starting to fall into place. ‘This gives us pretty much his full flavour vocabulary, describing what he smelled in a wine, tasted in a wine, and how it felt in his mouth. These are almost certainly what he created the codes for.’
‘As well as his ratings,’ Sophie said.
Bertrand nodded. ‘A through to F and 1 through to 5.’
‘Which means…’ Enzo did a quick mental calculation. ‘…we’re looking for a total of ninety-two codes.’ He lifted the pages from the printer as it fed them out through the inkjet and crossed to the whiteboard. He wiped off Petty’s coded rating for the Sarrabelle Syrah and started listing the flavours in columns, beginning with Fruit. Then he moved on to the one-word sensual descriptions, and finally the ratings. It took him nearly ten minutes, and the others watched in silence as his marker pen squeaked its way across the shiny white surface. ‘Okay.’ Enzo stood back and looked at the lists before picking up the notes they had made at old Domenech’s house the night before.
He scrutinised his scribbles, frowning in concentration. His writing had become less and less legible as the night wore on.
‘There,’ he said at last. ‘The 2001 Petrus Pommerol that we had. Domenech agreed with Petty’s published description of a wine with strong hints of liquorice and vanilla.’ He ran a finger down through his notes, stopping and tapping near the foot of the page. ‘Now, when he tasted the three Gaillac reds that we only have the coded notes for, he discerned vanilla and liquorice in the Sarrabelle Syrah, and vanilla in the Cuvee Lea.’ He held out a hand towards Bertrand. ‘Give me the printouts.’
Bertrand handed him the coded reviews of the three wines they had taken to Cordes en Ciel, and Enzo pinned them to the wall beside the board. He stood scanning them studiously before exasperation exploded in a breath from pursed lips. ‘Trouble is, there are too many repeating codes. There are codes unique to each one, but there are several. We have no way of knowing which one might be liquorice. And of the ones that repeat, which one might be vanilla.’ He slumped into the rocker and let his notes fall into his lap. ‘Shit! The sample’s too small. We’d need to go on tasting wines until we found a unique flavour to match a unique code, or multiple codes that repeated so often that we could be sure of the match.’
Sophie cocked an eyebrow and grinned. ‘Well, I’m all for tasting more wines.’
But Enzo was adamant. ‘No. It’s not the way.’ He glanced semi-apologetically at Bertrand. ‘It was a good idea, but it’s not how we’re going to break the code.’
‘Well how are we going to break it?’ Sophie cocked her head at her father.
‘ We are not going to do anything. You are going to leave me in peace to think about it.’ He cast a rueful look at Michelle. ‘All of you.’
Sophie stood up. ‘Well, there’s no point in arguing with him. When my Papa makes up his mind about something, that’s it.’ She took Bertrand’s hand. ‘Come on, let’s go to town and find a cafe.’ She flounced out with Bertrand in tow. Enzo saw that the rain was still falling from the heavens.
He sighed and turned to Michelle. ‘You can stay if you want.’
But Michelle shook her head. ‘No. You need to think. I understand that.’
‘I’m sorry about Sophie.’
‘I understand that, too. Maybe if I was her, I’d feel the same way.’ She got up from the stairs and crossed the room to plant a gentle kiss on Enzo’s forehead. He smelled her perfume and felt her warmth, and for a moment was tempted to forget about codes and killers and take her through to the bedroom. But the thought that someone else might be about to go missing, that someone else was in danger of suffering the same fate as Petty and Coste, and probably the others in Roussel’s file, weighed on his conscience, and he knew that Michelle would have to wait. He gave her hand a squeeze, and felt a rush of regret as she went out onto the terrasse to recover her umbrella and brave the rain.
He got up and crossed to the wine rack and took out a bottle of Chateau Lacroux 2001 Vignes de Castellan. He uncorked it and poured himself an inch of it before swirling the deep, rich red around inside the glass. The wine was at perfect room temperature and gave off the distinctive Gaillac aromas of the duras and braucol grapes. Which made him think of the puppy for the first time in hours, and he looked in vain around the room before spotting him curled up fast asleep under the table. Enzo smiled. Daughters and dogs, he thought. Endless trouble. But always worth it. He took a mouthful of wine. Red fruits, a hint of black cherry, liquorice.
He carried the bottle over to the rocking chair, sat down, and filled his glass. As he sipped at the wine, he gazed at all the flavours he had written up on the board, until they blurred and swam in front of his eyes. He refilled his glass and turned his attention to the coded reviews: ky, ms and nj. wjc. gf+ amp;lbj+++ jmo, zt amp;nm, with a little nj giving way to ky, la amp;ma
The letters were always in groups of two or three. Some of them made words, like la and ma. Others made no sense at all. jmo or hh.
