The Critic

Chapter Six
I

Nicole looked up apprehensively from the laptop computer as Enzo came in. He was, she thought, looking very pleased with himself. For most of the last couple of hours she had been framing in her mind how to tell him that she’d blown his cover at La Croix Blanche and making herself ill at the thought. So it was with some relief that she decided, given his mood, that this was not the moment. ‘You look like the cat that got the cream,’ she said.

But he walked straight past the table where she’d set up the computer and took out a marker pen to write Petit up on his board, right below Gil Petty’s name. Then he turned towards her. ‘What does that mean to you?’

She shrugged and frowned her confusion. ‘ Petit. Small.’

‘Yes, but what else?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘It’s a name, Nicole. Petty’s family name. Petit corrupted to Petty when they emigrated to the United States during the French Revolution.’

Understanding dawned. ‘So he was really French?’

‘His ancestors were. And they lived in this very house. I always wondered why he’d rented this place. Now we know.’

‘Wow!’ She thought for a moment. ‘So how does that help us?’

Enzo’s smile lost a little of its shine. He turned and looked at the board. ‘I’m not sure. But it’s information, Nicole. Something we know now that we didn’t know before. It’s what you learn about the application of forensic science to the examination of a crime scene. Every microscopic speck of evidence is important in piecing together a complete picture of what happened. But this is important, I think. It’s something no one else seems to have known.’

He inclined his head towards the computer.

‘Are we connected to the internet?’

‘Yup.’

‘How? Did the Lefevres give us a telephone line?’

Nicole made a show of examining something on the screen. ‘No.’ Her response was too casual.

Enzo frowned. ‘Then how are we connected?’

‘They’ve got wi-fi downstairs in the estate office. It’s not password-protected. So I just sort of…tapped into it. They’ll never know.’

‘That’s stealing, Nicole.’

‘No, it’s not. We haven’t taken anything from them. They’ve still got their own access.’

‘We’ll have to tell them.’

She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ She started tapping at the keyboard.

‘Did you get yourself a place to stay?’

She kept her eyes fixed on the screen. ‘Uh-huh.’

He waited for her to tell him, but she just kept typing. ‘Well, where?’

‘On a farm. Just up the road. Hardly any distance.’ Then she added quickly, ‘I’ve been doing some research on Petty. There’s still a lot of stuff out there on the internet about him. He really was the number one wine critic, wasn’t he?’

‘He had more power to determine people’s tastes in wine, and the price of it, than any one man should ever have.’ Enzo spoke with feeling. There were too many good wines out there that would always be beyond his means.

Nicole poked a finger at the screen. ‘I found an article here that says his recommendation of one of the Bordeaux vintages in the nineteen-eighties sent prices skyrocketing four hundred percent in three years!’

Enzo shook his head. ‘That was the irony. When Petty first started publishing his newsletter, with detailed tasting notes and wine ratings, he wanted to be the consumers’ champion. To tell them what wines were good and what weren’t. Trouble was, he became so influential, that when he gave a wine a good score, the price of it soared way beyond the pocket of the ordinary consumer. He almost single-handedly turned the drinking of good wine into an elitist pursuit for the wealthy.’

Nicole scrolled down her screen. ‘It says here that eighty percent of wine sold in the US is bought by only twelve percent of the population.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘I rest my case.’

Nicole looked at him, forgetting for the moment her debacle at La Croix Blanche. ‘That Michelle Petty…’

‘What about her?’

‘It seems they didn’t talk, she and her papa.’

‘No, they didn’t.’ But Enzo didn’t want to discuss it with Nicole. It was all just a little too close to home for comfort. He changed the subject. ‘Let’s take a look at how he rated the wines he tasted.’

Nicole brightened. ‘I was reading about that earlier.’ She went into her browser’s history and pulled up a previous page. ‘He didn’t go for the hundred-point scale that other critics like Robert Parker or the Wine Spectator use.’

‘Why not?’

‘It seems he thought that the difference between, say, a ninety-five and a ninety-six, would be so tiny, and so subjective, that it really didn’t mean anything at all. That’s why he grouped his ratings in fives, which he categorised by letters of the alphabet. “A” at the top end, “F” at the bottom. So that an “A” would be like ninety-five to a hundred, “B” would be ninety to ninety-five.’

‘Which means it was the hundred point scale by any other name.’

‘Except that it allowed room for personal interpretation. One man’s meat, and all that. And…’ she held up one finger as she scrolled down the page, ‘he gave each wine a value rating, which Parker doesn’t do-1 to 5, with 1 being the best value, and 5 being pretty damned expensive. That way, an A5 would be a great wine that cost a fortune.’

‘And an A1?’

Nicole grinned. ‘The Holy Grail. He never awarded an A1, although apparently he was convinced that it was out there, and that one day he’d find it.’

Enzo eased himself into a wicker rocking chair facing the table and winced as bruised and overstretched muscles from the night before reminded him that he was not as young as he used to be. ‘So do these numbers represent actual prices?’

‘Broadly, yes. The best rating, a 1, would be anything up to twenty-five dollars, scaling up to a 5, which was anything over three hundred. But most of his A wines were rated 3 or higher, which takes them up over seventy-five dollars.’

Enzo marvelled at the prices some people would pay for a bottle of wine. Twenty-five dollars to him would be seriously expensive. Most of the wines he bought were around five or six euros. He rubbed his fingers gently over the scab on his head wound and mused out loud: ‘Petty was used to rating top wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy, Champagne and Chablis. How could he possibly have applied that kind of value scale to the wines he was tasting here? I’ve never seen a Gaillac that cost more than twenty-five dollars. Most of them are under ten euros.’

Nicole said, ‘My papa gets his wine en vrac, in a big plastic container. It costs one-and-a-half euros a litre.’

He looked at her and realised that where she came from, there would be something obscene about paying twenty-five dollars for a bottle of wine, never mind a hundred. The budget to feed the family was probably under fifty euros a week. Her father was hardly able to bear the cost of sending her to university. Enzo knew, because he had seen it, that Nicole shared a miserable bed-sit in Toulouse with three other students, and her father could barely even manage that.

They heard a car pulling into the gravel parking area beyond the pigeonnier, and Enzo got up to look out of the window. ‘It’s Michelle Petty. She must have got her father’s things.’ He watched for a moment, as she lifted a large suitcase out of the trunk, and a smaller bag, like a soft briefcase. She was wearing jeans and sneakers and a tee-shirt today, hair freed from its clasp and cascading over square shoulders. As she lifted the case and turned towards the cottage, braced to take the weight of the bags, he thought how attractive she was. Not at all like her father. And he remembered, from somewhere amongst all the notes he had read, that her mother had been a contestant on the beauty queen circuit in the States before meeting Petty at a party and marrying in haste. Only to repent at leisure. He turned to Nicole. ‘You’d better go.’

Her disappointment was palpable. ‘Why? I’d like to see what she’s got, too.’

‘Another time, Nicole. She’s pretty fragile right now.’

Nicole raised a skeptical eyebrow. ‘And it wouldn’t have anything at all to do with the fact that she’s young and attractive.’

‘Nicole.’ Enzo’s warning tone was clear.

‘Alright, alright.’ She held up her hands. ‘I’m out of here.’