without pity. Revenge for a murdered ancestor.
He stepped into the room and saw a candle flickering on the top step of the stairs. It had only just been lit, molten wax not yet pooling in its holder. He peered down into the maintenance pit to the tiled floor below. There was no one there. No one living, at any rate. He moved along the rail to the top of the steps and peered beyond them into darkness. He could see a ladder leaning against the wall, pipes snaking around the concrete apron. The scrape of a shoe echoed in the gloom, and Laurent de Bonneval stepped into the candlelight. He looked down at Enzo from the apron two feet above, his face chiselled from gneiss, hard and expressionless.
Enzo said, ‘Your wife told me I’d find you out here.’
Bonneval fixed him with emotionless eyes. ‘You know, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
A barely audible sigh. ‘He was going to ruin us, you know. He didn’t like our wines.’
‘He told you that?’ Enzo found it hard to believe.
‘Not at first. But I could tell. The little questions he asked after each barrel-tasting. His lack of conviction as he scribbled in his notebook.’ His pause was momentary. ‘I burned it afterwards.’
‘How did you know what he was going to write?’
‘Normally he wouldn’t have told me, I know that. But when I accused him of trying to finish off what his ancestor had started, he pretended not to know what I was talking about. Then when I confronted him he laughed and told me not to be ridiculous. He said if he was going to give my wines a poor rating it was because they were too thin, that they lacked the body and maturity that he expected of a good French wine.’ Bonneval shook his head. ‘No one should have that much power, Monsieur Macleod. One man’s taste determining another man’s fate.’ He drew a long breath, and Enzo wondered if he detected regret in it.
‘So you killed him.’
‘I couldn’t let him leave. Do you have any idea how much I have invested in this place? In its future? The future of my son? He would have destroyed my family all over again. Just like his forebearers did two hundred years ago.’
‘How long had you known about that?’
‘I discovered the details of the full, sordid story about ten years back. Old family diaries locked away in a bureau, in a room that had been shut up for decades. It was my grandfather who had gathered the records, pieced together the whole history. It was shocking, Monsieur Macleod. I was truly shocked.’
Some unrecorded memory flickered across his face. ‘Petty gave me an excuse for taking my revenge. But when Coste showed up the following year, I knew it wasn’t going to be possible to stop there. The man had been working on a family tree and was looking for my help. It was only a matter of time before he found out the truth. Before people made a connection between me and Petty that went way beyond wine. I realised then that they all had to go.’
He gazed off into some distant landscape that only he could see, a landscape stalked by the twin devils of madness and revenge.
‘Hubert de Bonneval was a great philanthropist. No one treated his workers better. He was a major contributor to the local community. He opened a brick factory to provide bricks for the enlargement of the chateau, and jobs for the people of Gaillac. He paid his grape pickers well at harvest time.’ The descendant of the murdered man breathed out in anger. ‘And they rewarded him by killing him in front of his own family. His son wrote about it decades later. Watching his father clubbed to death, his mother abused and beaten, his home robbed of everything valuable, and then set alight. You could feel his pain on the page, Monsieur Macleod. I wept when I read it.’
Some courant d’air stirred the flame of the candle, and it dipped and dived and nearly went out. Almost as if the ghost of Hubert de Bonneval had drifted past, dragging cold air in his wake.
But Laurent de Bonneval was only momentarily distracted. He focused dull, dark eyes on Enzo. ‘Fortunately, it was only the east wing that was destroyed by the fire, the original chai. Most of the chateau survived intact. But it damned near ruined my family. It took them two generations to get back on their feet, to rebuild and restore the chateau, to produce wine they could sell and recover their wealth. And Hubert’s murderers walked free, laden with the riches they had stolen.’
‘It’s a sad story, Monsieur de Bonneval,’ Enzo said. ‘But I don’t see how two hundred years later you can blame the actions of these men on their descendants.’
‘I didn’t. At least, not until Petty started trying to do it all over again…and I remembered my bible. Exodus chapter twenty, Verse Five. “I the Lord God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” There was justice in it.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘ Romans. Twelve. “Avenge not yourselves, but give place unto the wrath of God: for it is written, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”’
A slight smile cracked the gneiss. ‘You know your bible, too, then Monsieur Macleod.’
‘I know that it is a dangerous tool in the hands of people who twist and corrupt its words to justify their own ends.’
Sudden anger flared in the winemaker. ‘My ancestor was brutally murdered in cold blood, my family cast into the wilderness. And because of a quirk of history, his killers escaped justice, and their descendants lived to profit from their sins. Comfortable little men leading comfortable little lives. Well-fed, well-mannered, well-meaning progeny of murderers! And here was Petty, like the ghost of his own ancestor, coming back to finish the job.’
There was no reasoning, Enzo knew, with madness. He looked at the man and wondered when and where and how the balance had tipped that way. Bonneval had known the story of what had happened during the French revolution, and had chosen to sublimate whatever feelings it had wakened in him in the hope of receiving Petty’s blessing, and the financial rewards that would bring. And when it had become clear that this was not about to happen… ‘Why Michelle?’ Enzo closed his eyes and saw her face staring back at him from the wine, before anger forced them open to focus on the killer who stood in front of him. ‘What possible reason could you have for harming her?’
‘Because she figured it out. She came to see me this afternoon. You found his reviews, it seems. If Petty had come to taste my wines, why had he not reviewed them?’ And he seemed almost amused at the pain of realisation that he saw in Enzo’s face.
Enzo’s voice seemed tiny in the dark. ‘Because yours was the last vineyard he visited. He never reviewed the wines of Chateau Saint-Michel because you killed him before he ever got the chance.’ How could he not have seen it? Why hadn’t he listened to Michelle instead of accusing her of lying? ‘She didn’t deserve this. None of them did. You’re deluded, Bonneval!’ He heard his own voice rising in anger.
But Bonneval shook his head, and looked down into the pit. ‘The girl…well, there was a kind of poetic justice in that. She was Petty’s daughter, after all. But I did nothing. They took their own lives, monsieur. All of them. Through ignorance. Going down there to their deaths of their own free will. Stupid, unsuspecting men. And women.’ And Enzo realised now how Petty and Coste had sustained the contusions found during autopsy. Overcome by gas as they went down into the pit, they had fallen the rest of the way. Bonneval turned back to him. ‘And you people couldn’t even tell. I didn’t drown them. They filled their lungs with carbonic gas. The wine was just a convenient place to keep them until I could dispose of the bodies.’ He allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Petty may not have liked my wine. But he was damned well going to drink it for eternity.’
‘Why in God’s name did you present him to the world like that? All dressed up and staked out like a scarecrow?’
There was a wry smile on his lips. ‘My father’s old gown and hat from l’ Ordre de la Dive Bouteille. It was rather appropriate, wasn’t it?’
Enzo shook his head. ‘Until then, nobody even knew Petty was dead.’
‘But that was just the point. Nobody knew. And people needed to know. That justice had been done. To understand that their sins will always find them out.’
He seemed to have forgotten that the real reason he’d done it was because Petty hadn’t liked his wine. ‘But you certainly didn’t want anyone to know that it was you who’d been the instrument of that justice.’
Bonneval smiled. ‘No. No one ever needed to know that.’
‘ I know.’
He nodded. ‘And so did Roussel. His timing was perfect. He was the last one. It was his turn. But, like both him and Michelle Petty, I don’t think you’ll be sharing it with anyone else, monsieur.’ He turned to the wall and unhooked a rope that strained up into darkness.
