Extraordinary People

I

Enzo retreated to the apartment like the wounded stag that he was. The young buck had given him quite a mauling. There was still no one there when he got back. He picked his way into the séjour which seemed, if anything, even more cluttered. There were empty cola cans lying around, and pizza crusts in carryout boxes. The air was stale, and the heat stifling. He opened the French windows, only to be hit by a wall of even hotter air. Which was when he noticed that his whiteboard had been cleared of its first set of clues, and a new set of images fixed around its edges. A crude drawing of two skeletal arms; a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne; a photograph of a crucifix with the date April 1st written beside it; a picture of a dog tag with Utopique handwritten across it; a diagram of a dog’s skeleton with one of its front legs circled in red; a photograph of a lapel pin, complete with two men on a single horse and the inscription, sigilum militum xpisti. And someone had already begun trying to decipher them. There were words written up and circled, with arrows criss-crossing the board.

‘Oh, you’re back.’ Enzo turned to find Nicole standing in the doorway grinning at him. He hadn’t heard her come in. Her long hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, and her breasts seemed more prominent than usual in a tight-fitting tee-shirt. Its V-neck exposed a substantial amount of cleavage. Enzo tried not to let his eyes be drawn by it. ‘I didn’t know when you’d be, so I started without you,’ she said.

‘So I see.’ She brushed past him and sat herself at the computer, hitting the spacebar to wake it up. ‘Where did you get the images?’

‘On the internet.’

Enzo looked at the board and frowned. ‘Why the skeleton of a dog?’

‘Ah.’ Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Remember the bone that was in the trunk? The one that didn’t seem to go with the arms? It’s a shinbone from a dog’s foreleg.’

Enzo was astonished. ‘How do you know that?’

‘A boy I was at school with is studying zoology at Limoges. It was his professor who was called in by the Toulouse police to try to identify the bone.’ She grinned again, pleased with herself. ‘Word gets around.’

But Enzo was distracted from her self-congratulation by an odd, acrid smell that he noticed wafting into the room for the first time. He screwed up his face. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That smell.’

‘Ah…’ Nicole said. ‘That’ll be the ducklings.’

‘Ducklings?’

‘I put them in the bath. I didn’t know where else they should go.’

Enzo looked at her in disbelief. He turned and stalked out into the hall and threw open the bathroom door. The stink hit him like a blow from a baseball bat. Half a dozen tiny ducklings had settled themselves in the bottom of the bath, which was covered with a mixture of grain and shit. ‘Dear God! Is this some kind of a joke?’

Nicole had followed him out, and stretched on tiptoe to look at them over his shoulder. ‘They’re a gift from my father. By way of an apology for the other night.’ She sniffed several times. ‘You get used to the smell.’

Enzo looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I can’t keep ducks in my apartment. They can’t stay here.’

Nicole shrugged. ‘You must know someone with a garden. My papa says he’ll slaughter them for you when they’re big enough.’ She turned away into the hall, irritated by the interruption to her flow of explanation. ‘Do you want to know how far I’ve got with these clues or not?’

Enzo raised his eyes to the heavens and closed the door on the problem. He’d worry about the ducklings later.

He followed her back into the séjour.

Nicole settled herself in front of the computer again and said, ‘You’ll see I’ve written dog up there, and circled it and drawn arrows to it from the dog’s skeleton and the dog tag.’

Enzo looked at the board, still distracted by the smell, and nodded. ‘You’d better tell me why.’

‘Well, it was the guy from the police scientifique who said it — about the disk with Utopique engraved on it. A name tag for a dog, he said it looked like. And it did. Just the sort of thing you would attach to your dog’s collar. And if it is a name tag, then it’s reasonable to assume that Utopique is the name of a dog. We know that the extraneous bone was a dog’s shinbone, so it just seemed kind of obvious that both these clues were pointing towards a dog.’

‘Called Utopique.’

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s possible,’ Enzo conceded. He couldn’t argue with the logic. ‘Go on.’

Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Okay. The champagne. Moët et Chandon, Dom Perignon 1990. You have to figure that they didn’t choose a 1990 vintage by accident. I’ve no idea why, but the date’s got to be important.’

‘Agreed,’ Enzo said. ‘Which is probably why it was in a box, wrapped and protected by the wood wool, so the label would be kept safe from the damp.’

Nicole nodded and moved on. ‘You’ll see I’ve written Poisson d’Avril below the date April 1st, beside the crucifix.’

‘April Fool’s Day, we called it in Scotland,’ Enzo said.

Nicole chided him. ‘Don’t you remember when Sophie was little, kids sticking paper fish on each other’s backs?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Well, it probably happened at school. It’s what you do on April 1st in France. You try and stick a paper fish on other kids’ backs without them knowing. Which is why we call it Poisson d’Avril.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Enzo confessed. He smiled. ‘Maybe it’s a red herring.’

Nicole frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A red herring. Something that misdirects you from the truth. Isn’t there a French equivalent?’

Nicole looked at him as if he were mad. ‘I don’t think so, Monsieur Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, I searched the internet for things that might have happened on April 1st. And guess what? Another Napoléonic connection. Napoléon Bonaparte married Marie Louise of Austria on April 1st, 1810.’

Enzo looked at the board where Nicole had written and circled Napoléon and drawn an arrow to it from the crucifix. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. ‘But what’s the connection with the crucifix? It seems to me that the date and the crucifix are inseparable, and that whatever they point to should have a relevance to both.’ He took a cloth and wiped off the circle and the arrow. ‘Let’s just keep that in mind, and maybe we’ll come back to it.’

‘Oh, okay.’ Nicole was momentarily crestfallen. And then she brightened up. ‘But here’s the real breakthrough. The lapel pin. Sigilum militum xpisti. Do you know what that means?’

‘The seal of the army of Christ,’ Enzo said without hesitation.

It was as if he had stuck a pin in her. She was instantly deflated. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I studied Latin at school.’

‘I suppose you also know what it is, then?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

She brightened up again. ‘Two men on a single horse bearing shields, encircled by the words sigilum militum xpisti, is the chosen seal of the Knights Templar.’ Her fingers spidered across the keyboard and she read from the screen. ‘The seal was introduced to the Order in 1168 by its Grand Master in France, Bertrand de Blanchfort.’

Enzo breathed a small jet of air through clenched teeth. Bertrand! It seemed there was no escaping him.

Nicole continued, ‘It is said that fifty years earlier, when the founding Christian knights took a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience at Jerusalem, they could only afford one horse between two of them. And the depiction of two knights astride a single mount also recalls the passage in the book of Matthew, where Christ says, Wherever two or more of you are gathered in My name, there am I, in the midst of you.’

‘Well that seems pretty conclusive,’ Enzo said. ‘Well found.’ And he picked up a marker pen and wrote up Knights Templar, and circled it and drew an arrow to it from the lapel pin. ‘I wonder if we can connect April 1st in some way with the Knights Templar. Maybe it’s an important date in the history of the Order.’

‘That’s a thought.’ Nicole called up Google and began a search. But after nearly fifteen minutes, she had found nothing that linked the date with the Order. She grinned to cover her disappointment. ‘Another “red herring.”’

‘What about trying to link the date with the crucifix?’ Enzo felt that he was clutching at straws now. But anything was worth a try.

Nicole tapped in crucifix and April 1st, and initiated a search. After a moment she let out a tiny yelp of excitement. Enzo crossed the room to take a look. There were three hundred and seventy-eight results. But halfway down the first page of ten was a link headed, THE FIRST MIRACLE OF FATIMA—1385, and below it an extract from the page it would take them to—He died in his cell clutching a crucifix on April 1st, 1431. Nicole clicked on the link and brought up a lengthy document detailing the canonisation of the Blessed Nuno, whom it described as the last great mediaeval knight. But their initial interest was short lived as they read through a dull account of the man’s life and death. A Portuguese knight, widowed in 1422, he had given away all his worldly wealth and joined a Carmelite monastery in Lisbon. There did not appear to be any connection with the Knights Templar, or with France.

Enzo blew his frustration through pursed lips. ‘April 1st, April 1st, April 1st.’ He repeated it over and over under his breath as he made his way across the room to the open windows. He stood holding the rail and looking out over the treetops in the square. ‘What other significance might April 1st have in the French calendar?’ No sooner had the words left his mouth than he checked himself. ‘Calendar,’ he said. ‘What Saints day falls on April 1st?’

Nicole made a quick internet search. ‘Saint Hugues.’ She looked towards him. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

Enzo turned back into the room. ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Try a search of Saint Hugues and see what we come up with.’

As Nicole tapped at the keyboard she said, ‘You know, whoever put these clues together ten years ago wouldn’t have had the help of the internet.’

It wasn’t something Enzo had considered before. ‘No, of course they wouldn’t. The internet was still in its infancy in those days.’

‘And most of the stuff we’re digging up wouldn’t even have been on it then.’

‘You’re right.’ Enzo realised that Gaillard’s killers could never, in their wildest dreams, have imagined that ten years on, the information which, then, would have taken days, weeks, even months to find, could be accessed in seconds on the internet.

‘Oh, my God,’ Nicole said suddenly. ‘This is the only problem with the net.’ She was gazing forlornly at the screen. ‘Information overload. There are six thousand, four hundred and forty links to pages containing mentions of Saint Hugues. There seem to be lots of Saint Hugues too. Saint Hugues de Cluny…de Grenoble…de Chartreuse…Do you want me to go on?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘I need a drink.’

Nicole looked at her watch. ‘It’s too early, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘Nicole, it’s never too early.’ Enzo picked his way through to the dining room and opened a fresh bottle of whisky from the drinks cabinet. ‘Do you want something?’

‘A diet Coke. There are bottles in the fridge.’

He poured himself a large measure and took her a bottle of diet Coke. After removing a pizza carryout box from his recliner, he settled himself in the chair. ‘I see you’ve been eating well.’

‘I’m not much of a cook, Monsieur Macleod. My dad really wanted a boy, so I know more about ploughing and shearing and milking than I do about cooking.’

Enzo took a long sip from his glass and closed his eyes as the whisky burned down inside him. Immediately, he sat upright again. ‘We’re missing something here. None of these clues stands alone. I mean, they always connect in some way with one or more of the others.’ He took another slug of whisky and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes again to try to concentrate. ‘April 1st already has a religious connotation because it’s engraved on the back of a crucifix. So maybe we’re not looking for Saint Hugues. Just Hugues.’

‘So?’

‘So why don’t we try combining Hugues with one of the other clues?’

‘What, like with the Knights Templar?’

‘That, or…Dom Perignon. Or even just champagne.’

Nicole shrugged and typed in Hugues and champagne and hit the return key. Enzo watched her face closely as her eyes flickered back and forth across the screen. Suddenly they lit up, and she threw her arms in the air. ‘Monsieur Macleod, you’re a genius!’

And the word genius was like a finger poking at an open wound. She told me there was no point in even trying to compete with her genius of a father, Bertrand had told him.

‘There are links all over the place to an Hugues de Champagne. And you’re not going to believe this — to the Knights Templar as well.’

Enzo stood up. ‘How? What’s the connection?’

‘Wait a minute….’ Her fingers danced across the keyboard, and he went to stand behind her so that he could see what she was pulling up on screen. It was a page headed, HUGUES DE CHAMPAGNE 1074–1125. Enzo leaned over to read it. Several paragraphs detailed his parentage, his childhood, his marriage, and then his first trip to Palestine in the year 1104. His first marriage in 1093 to Constance, the daughter of King Philip the First of France, was annulled in his absence, and when he returned three years later he was remarried to a young girl called Elisabeth de Varais. Evidently it didn’t take quite as long for the shine to wear off the second union, for seven years later he took off again for Palestine, this time in the company of his vassal, Hugues de Payens, along with Geoffrey de St. Omer, Hugues d’Hautvillers, and five others. There, in Jerusalem, in 1118, they established the Order of the Knights of the Temple, and Champagne’s vassal Hugues de Payens became its first Grand Master.

‘What a lot of Hugues there were in those days,’ Nicole said.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Enzo whispered into the afternoon heat. And he nearly danced across the room to the whiteboard. ‘Hugues de Champagne.’ He wrote it up on the board and circled it. Then he drew extravagant arrows to the name from the crucifix, the lapel pin, the champagne bottle, and the Knights Templar. He stood breathing heavily, gazing at it, and took another gulp of whisky.

Nicole was regarding it with something less than conviction. ‘And?’ she asked, finally.

‘And what?’

‘Just and.’

He looked at the board again, and his enthusiasm began to wane. ‘Okay, so I don’t see any tie-up with the dog.’

‘And what about the date on the champagne bottle? And why specifically Moët et Chandon and Dom Perignon?’

Enzo sat on a pile of books and emptied his glass with less enthusiasm than he had filled it. ‘I don’t know. Maybe there’s something on the label. Maybe we need to get a bottle of that vintage to see.’ He sighed. What a roller-coaster ride this was. ‘What does it say about the 1990 on the net?’

Nicole had anticipated the question and was already pulling up search results. ‘It’s nearly all wine-sellers,’ she said. ‘Oh, wait a minute, here’s a magazine piece….’ She tapped some more, then read, ‘Dom Perignon was launched in 1921 by Moët et Chandon as their top of the line champagne. It is a single vineyard wine, made only from grapes grown in that one vineyard, and only made in certain years when the harvest is exceptional. It is renowned for its colour and flavour and the longevity of its finish.’ She looked up. ‘Between 1978 and 1993, the 1990 vintage gets the third highest points rating. Hmmm. Wouldn’t mind a glass of that. I like champagne.’

They heard the door from the landing open and then Sophie’s exclamation, ‘Oh, my God, what’s that smell?’ There was the sound of another door opening, and then a shriek even more shrill than the first. Sophie appeared in the doorway, her eyes full of astonishment and repugnance. ‘Papa, there are ducks in the bath!’

‘I know,’ Enzo said wearily.

‘Well, what are they doing there?’

‘Shitting and eating,’ he said. But it was not a conversation he wanted to pursue. ‘I’m going out for some air.’ He crossed the room, stopping briefly in the doorway to give Sophie a peck on the cheek.

‘But what are they for?’ she called after him.

‘Roasting,’ he shouted back.

He was halfway down the stairs when she called again. ‘Where’s Bertrand’s metal detector?’

‘Ask Bertrand!’

II

It was a relief to escape the apartment, and the head-banging process of trying to decipher the clues. Enzo felt as if he was beginning to understand the thought processes of Gaillard’s killers, to get inside their heads. And it was not a pleasant place to be.

The town was crammed with tourists and with paysannes who had come in from the country for the morning market in the Cathedral square. The market was over now, the square once more fulfilling its regular function of car park. But people had stayed on to eat in the restaurants and shop in La Halle, and to idle the day away in pavement cafés, drinking coffee and watching the world go by. This week, the town was filled to bursting point for the annual blues festival. Enzo pushed through the crowds and into La Halle, and made his way to the wine merchant’s stand.

Michel was a ruddy-faced man with a fuzz of wiry, steel-coloured hair. He smoked Voltigeur cigars, and his silver moustache was tinted nicotine yellow. But he knew his wines. He shook Enzo’s hand warmly.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve finished that Gaillac already?’

Enzo laughed. ‘My God, Michel, if I’d drunk it that fast I’d have drowned in it. I’ve still got two cases left.’ Enzo preferred the softer, rounder tones of the Gaillac wines to the sharp tannins of the Cahors vintages. ‘It’s champagne I’m looking for today.’

Michel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Champagne?’ He issued some staccato nasal farts that Enzo supposed indicated mirth. ‘Something to celebrate?’

‘Just life.’

‘What would you like? I can offer you a toasty little Veuve Clicquot. Yellow Label. Not too expensive.’

‘I’m looking for a Moët et Chandon, Dom Perignon 1990.’

Michel’s jaw fell. ‘Merde alors! You’re kidding!’

‘You don’t have any?’

Michel laughed. ‘I certainly do not.’ He held up a finger. ‘But wait.’ He turned to his computer, flickering behind the counter, and tapped away at the keyboard, staring intently at the screen. ‘Here we are. Dom Perignon. 1990.’ He made a moue with his lips and blew a jet of air through them. ‘A rare wine these days, my friend. Robert Parker described the 1990 vintage as “brilliant.”’ He grinned at Enzo. ‘It’s a sad state of affairs when it takes an American to tell us how good or bad our wines are.’ He tapped some more. ‘Ah-ha! Got you!’ He looked up triumphantly. ‘I can get you a bottle.’

‘Today?’

Michel gave a very gallic shrug of the shoulders and pouted pensively. ‘About two hours?’

‘Ideal.’

‘Come and get it before we close up.’

‘Thanks, Michel.’ Enzo turned away.

‘Don’t you want to know how much it is?’

Enzo stopped in the arched gateway leading to the street. ‘I suppose I should. How much is it?’

‘Well, normally, it would be a hundred and fifty.’

Enzo nearly choked. ‘Euros?’

Michel nodded and smiled. ‘But, well, given the special circumstances….’ He thought for a minute, and Enzo reflected warmly on just how much he loved it here. People knew you. People did you favours. ‘I’m going to have to charge a hundred and ninety.’

After two hours and several beers at Le Forum, Enzo returned to the apartment clutching his bottle of Moët et Chandon. He was in mellower mood, in spite of his wallet being nearly two hundred euros lighter. All the windows were wide open, and Sophie was on her hands and knees in the bathroom scrubbing the bath with disinfectant. There was no sign of either Nicole or the ducklings. The smell had all but gone.

‘Where’s Nicole?’

‘Gone.’ Sophie kept her head down, still scrubbing.

‘Gone where?’

‘Home.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I told her the ducks couldn’t stay here and that she would have to take them back to her father.’

Enzo flapped his arms in exasperation. ‘Sophie, they were a gift. I don’t want to offend him.’

Sophie looked up and shook her head. ‘There are times I think I’ll never understand you, Papa. We’re talking about a man who broke into our apartment and beat you up. And you’re worried about offending him?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘That was a misunderstanding.’

Sophie spotted the bottle of champagne. ‘What’s the occasion?’

‘There isn’t one.’

She followed him through to the séjour, peeling off her rubber gloves. ‘Well, you don’t just go buying champagne for no reason.’

‘I got it for the label.’

‘What?’

He placed the bottle on the table and searched through the drawers of his writing bureau until he found what he was looking for. A large magnifying glass. ‘This is the make and year of champagne they found in the trunk in Toulouse.’ He started examining the label through the magnifying glass. ‘I can’t figure out why they chose this particular marque or vintage. There has to be something on the label.’

It was a classically shaped sloping-shouldered bottle in dark green glass. There was a gold stamp on the black foil around the cage and cork. It said, simply, Cuvée Dom Perignon. The label was in the shape of a three-pointed shield, greenish ochre in colour Across the top of the label was the legend Moët et Chandon à Épernay — Fondée en 1745. Beneath it, Champagne — Cuvée Dom Perignon — Vintage 1990. Beneath that was a five-pointed star, and the alcoholic content. 12.5 % VOL. At the very foot of the label, Enzo’s glass magnified 75cl and Brut. He hissed his exasperation.

‘Well? What revelations on the label?’

Enzo flicked a look of annoyance over the top of his magnifying glass, and then peered through it again. ‘Wait a minute. There’s something written around the edge of it.’ He read out, ‘Élaboré par Moët & Chandon à Épernay, France — Muselet ÉPARNIX.’

‘Illuminating.’

Enzo turned the bottle around to look at the label on the back. There was nothing but the Cuvée Dom Perignon logo, a couple of recycling symbols, and a bar code. He banged the bottle down on the table. ‘Putain!’ A complete waste of money.

‘Papa!’ Sophie was mock shocked. ‘That’s terrible language.’

Enzo picked up his satchel and his jacket. ‘I’m going to get drunk.’

III

He hadn’t really meant to get drunk. It had been more an expression of his disgust than a statement of intent. But after a pizza at the Lampara, he had fallen into bad company at the Forum, and his words had taken on more prescience than he intended. It was one in the morning by the time he made his way unsteadily back to the apartment. His meal and a night’s drinking had cost a fraction of what he’d wasted on the bottle of Moët et Chandon. But that was of little comfort.

The apartment was in darkness when he opened the door into the hall, confident that tonight he would not trip over Bertrand’s metal detector. He did, however, manage to stumble over a pile of books in the séjour and almost went sprawling. He banged into the table and knocked over his bottle of Dom Perignon. It rolled away across the tabletop with a strangely hollow ring. He grabbed the bottle, and although the glass was heavy, it was not as heavy as it should have been. He carried it across the room and switched on the light. The foil wrapping had been torn off, the wire cage unwound and the cork removed. The bottle was empty. Enzo stared at it in disbelief. He looked across the room and saw the discarded cage and cork on the table, and two empty glasses. Anger fizzed up inside him. ‘Sophie!’ His voice resounded through the silence of the apartment. He stood breathing hard, listening for a response. But there was none. Perhaps she was still out. ‘Sophie!’ He stamped through the hall and threw open her bedroom door. Moonlight spilled through the window across the bed, and two frightened faces peered back at him from beneath the sheets. A night’s drinking at Le Forum left him momentarily confused, and briefly he thought he was seeing double. Until a diamond nose-stud twinkled in the moonlight. ‘Bertrand!’ The boy was in bed with his daughter. In his own house. He couldn’t believe it. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he spluttered.

‘Papa, I can explain.’

‘No, you can’t.’ He pointed a finger at Bertrand. ‘You. Get out!’

‘Yes, sir.’ Bertrand slipped, stark naked, from the bed, hunched modestly to conceal his embarrassment. He struggled to pull on his shorts and tee-shirt, hopping from one foot to the other.

‘You drank my champagne!’ Enzo wasn’t sure which made him angrier — finding Bertrand in bed with Sophie, or knowing that they had drunk his Moët et Chandon.

Sophie was sitting up, clutching the sheet to her neck. ‘You said you only bought it for the label.’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘You did!’

‘Have you any idea how much that bottle cost?’

Bertrand was trying to undo the buckles on his sandals. ‘Probably about a hundred and fifty euros.’

Enzo swung blazing eyes in the unfortunate young man’s direction. ‘And you still drank it?’

‘Papa, it was my fault. I thought you were only interested in the label. And it didn’t go to waste, honestly.’

‘Oh, didn’t it?’

‘No, we really did have something to celebrate.’ She glanced at Bertrand, who prepared himself for an explosion. ‘Bertrand asked me to marry him.’

A black cloud descended on Enzo, and he felt a strange stillness. ‘Over my dead body.’ He turned a steady gaze in Bertrand’s direction. ‘I thought I told you to get out.’

Bertrand shook his head in despair. There was no point in arguing. ‘Yeah, okay, I’m going.’ A sullen calm had overtaken him.

‘Papa-a-a,’ Sophie wailed.

Bertrand brushed past her father and into the hall, sandals dangling from his hand. He muttered something as he went.

Enzo turned on him. ‘What was that?’

Bertrand swivelled to face him. ‘Why would anyone in their right mind pay a hundred and fifty euros just for a label?’

‘A hundred and ninety,’ Enzo corrected him.

‘Then you were robbed.’

Enzo glared at him, inflamed by the knowledge that he was probably right. ‘It’s an important clue in trying to solve a man’s murder.’

‘This Jacques Gaillard thing?’

‘Yes. Only, I can’t figure out what it is.’

‘What’s to figure about a bottle of champagne?’

‘The vintage. It has to have been chosen for a reason.’

‘1990?’

‘Yes.’

Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘When, exactly, was Gaillard murdered?’

‘In 1996.’

The young man shrugged. ‘Well, there’s your connection.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The 1990 Dom Perignon wasn’t released until 1996.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Before I went to CREPS, I trained as a wine waiter for a year.’

‘And that makes you an expert?’

‘No. But I do know a bit about wine.’

Enzo’s frown deepened. ‘Next you’ll be telling me the significance of Dom Perignon.’

‘In relation to the murder of Jacques Gaillard, no.’ Bertrand was standing his ground defiantly. ‘But I do know that he was born Pierre something, sometime in the mid seventeenth century, and that he became a Benedictine monk before he was twenty. He was less than thirty when he was appointed cellar master at the Abbey of Hautvillers. I know that some people have credited him with inventing champagne, but actually sparkling wine was being produced a century earlier by monks in the south of France. I also know he was supposed to have been blind, allegedly heightening his sense of taste. But that’s another myth. The truth is, he was just a damned good winemaker. He introduced blending to the Champagne region, and was the first person to successfully contain local sparkling wine in reinforced glass bottles with Spanish corks.’

Enzo looked at him in amazement. Sophie shuffled into the hall from the bedroom, the sheet wrapped around her. ‘I didn’t know you knew all that stuff,’ she said.

‘I can show you his tomb, if you want.’

Enzo scowled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘On the internet. There’s a site where you can make a three hundred and sixty degrees tour of the church where he’s buried.’

Enzo had forgotten his anger. Through a fugg of drink and fatigue, a strange clarity was starting to emerge. ‘Okay, show me.’

The three of them trundled through to the séjour, and Bertrand seated himself at the computer. ‘I can’t remember the URL, but I’ll find it.’ He made a quick search. ‘Here we are.’ He clicked on a link and up came a site about Dom Perignon, with another link that took them to a pop-up photograph of his tomb — an engraved black slab set in a stone-flagged floor. Beneath it were arrows pointing up and down, right and left. By pointing the mouse at the arrows it was possible to make the image move. Bertrand panned up from the tomb to an altar behind a black-painted rail, and three stained-glass windows beyond that. It was possible to pan all the way up to the roof. By pointing at the left arrow, he swung them along a wood-panelled wall down the side of the church to rows of benches leading to the back. A massive, old-fashioned chandelier hung from the beams overhead. Bertrand kept the cursor over the left arrow, and they went through three hundred and sixty degrees, returning to the altar where they’d begun.

Enzo had never seen anything like it. Sunlight fell in through the stained glass and lay across the floor in geometric patterns. There was a sense of being there, of being able to look in any direction, to focus on anything you wanted. Enzo shook his head in awe. ‘That’s extraordinary. How do they do that?’

‘Six pictures taken with a very wide-angled lens, then somehow they get stitched together to give you the panorama,’ Bertrand said.

Sophie slipped her arm through her father’s, and snuggled up close to him. ‘Am I forgiven, Papa?’

But Enzo was distracted. ‘No,’ he growled. And to Bertrand, ‘What church is this?’

‘It’s the abbey at Hautvillers, just outside Épernay in the Champagne region.’

‘Hautvillers.’ When Bertrand had spoken of the abbey a few minutes earlier, it had lodged somewhere in the back of Enzo’s consciousness, ringing tiny alarm bells that he wasn’t hearing until now — the second mention of it.

‘It’s the home of Moët et Chandon,’ Bertrand added.

But Enzo was remembering something else. ‘Here, let me in.’ He moved Bertrand out of the chair and sat himself in front of the computer. He pulled down the History menu and began searching back through all the sites Nicole had visited earlier, stopping only when he found the link that took him back to the page on Hugues de Champagne. All the time he kept hearing Nicole’s voice. What a lot of Hugues there were in those days. He ran his eye down the page. ‘Putain con!’

‘Papa, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’ Enzo was grinning stupidly. ‘Nothing at all.’ He jumped up and clambered over piles of books to the whiteboard, and then he turned, marker pen in hand, for all the world as if he were lecturing a class at Paul Sabatier. ‘Hugues de Champagne went back to Palestine in the year 1114 in the company of eight other knights. One of them was his vassal, Hugues de Payens, who went on to become the first Grand Master of the Knights Templar. Another was Geoffrey de St. Omer. But here’s the thing….’ Sophie and Bertrand had no idea what he was talking about. ‘There was another Hugues. Hugues d’Hautvillers.’ His face was shining. ‘Don’t you see?’ But they didn’t. He turned to the board and wrote up Hautvillers and drew a circle around it, and then arrows to it from almost everywhere else. ‘Everything leads to Hautvillers. The champagne, Dom Perignon, the crucifix and St. Hugues, the lapel pin and the Knights Templar. Everything.’ He frowned. ‘Except for the dog. But I’ll work that out when I get there.’

‘Where?’ Sophie asked. ‘When you get where?’

‘Hautvillers,’ Enzo said triumphantly. ‘First thing in the morning.’