The Critic

II

Enzo watched as Michelle crouched to unzip her dead father’s suitcase and throw back the lid. She stood up then, and looked down at the case lying open in front of her on the clic-clac. Neatly folded clothes, a toilet bag, shoes in a plastic carrier, unopened packs of socks held to the inside of the lid by a strap. And silent tears filled her eyes, teetering briefly on the lower lid, before tumbling down cheeks flushed with sudden colour. She sucked in a deep, tremulous breath. ‘Oh, my God. There’s still the smell of him in his clothes.’ She wiped away hot tears with the backs of her hands. ‘I don’t know what it was. Aftershave, hair-cream. But I remember that smell from when I was a little girl, and he would sit me on his knee in the big armchair to watch TV. It was so him. Like a signature. When I came in from school I would know if he was home by the scent of him in the hall.’ She turned to look at Enzo, eyes shining with tears of contradiction, happy memories fighting for ascendancy with sad ones.

He put a hand of comfort on her arm and was taken by surprise when she slipped her arms around his waist and pushed her face into his shoulder, clinging to him, pressing herself into all his curves, stifled sobs vibrating against his chest. Years of denial given sudden release to mourn. He held her for what seemed an inordinately long time before she finally released herself to stand back, self-conscious and embarrassed by a moment of emotional weakness she had never, perhaps, suspected was even possible.

‘Sorry.’ She couldn’t meet his eye.

‘We can do this later, if you like.’

‘No!’ A sudden fiery determination lit her from within. ‘Let’s get it over.’

And so they went through the suitcase, item by item. Shirts, pullovers, pants, underwear. Everything seemed clean, freshly pressed, and Enzo wondered what had happened to Petty’s dirty laundry. He had, after all, been at the gite for over a week before he went missing.

He seemed to have only one pair of shoes, although perhaps he had been wearing another when they found the body. There was a pair of threadbare old slippers in a plastic bag at the bottom of the case.

In the toilet bag there was a half-empty tube of toothpaste for sensitive teeth and a soft toothbrush. Michelle opened a bottle of aftershave moisturising cream. She sniffed, pressing her lips together to contain some emotion that welled up inside, then screwed the lid back on. ‘That’s it. That’s what he wore. I never knew before.’

There was a small pressurised container of shaving foam, a razor in a waterproof black bag, and a plastic box of fresh shaving heads. Enzo carefully examined the head which had been in use. There was a gluey dust of finely cut whiskers clogged between the blades, with the possibility that there could be dried blood in there from tiny nicks made while shaving. He set it aside. Michelle looked at him, the question in her eyes, but she didn’t ask it.

There were some medicines. A nearly empty pack of Hedex, paracetamol painkillers. Hemorrhoid cream and suppositories. Ranitidine tablets for a duodenal ulcer. A glycerine-based dry-skin product called Cuticura. A man suffering from the ailments of middle-age.

Michelle picked up the skin cream. ‘He had psoriasis. Not all the time. Bouts of it. I can remember his elbows breaking out, and sometimes he would have patches of dry skin on his face.’

All the symptoms of a man under stress. Psoriasis, headaches, acidity. Even hemorrhoids could be aggravated by stress. This was not a man at ease with himself or the world.

Michelle removed a plastic comb from the bottom of the bag, and Enzo took it from her, holding it up to the light. There were still hairs caught in the roots of the teeth. Short, black-dyed hairs. Enzo took it through to the bathroom, laid out a piece of white toilet paper beside the sink, and carefully teased out a few of those precious hairs. He became aware of Michelle’s shadow at his shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Between these and the razor, we should be able to get a sample of his DNA.’

‘Is that important?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘It might be. But it’s better to have it than not.’

‘Won’t the police already have done that?’

Enzo found it hard to resist a small, cynical smile. ‘I doubt it. Things might have improved in the last four years. But at the time your father went missing, the French police were about twenty years behind the British and Americans in the use of DNA technology. There was no DNA database in France before the year 2000. There are only a hundred thousand names in it today. Compare that to the British, with a similar population, who have the DNA fingerprints of more than three million offenders.’

‘It’s weird.’ In the mirror, Enzo saw her biting her lower lip. ‘He’s been dead for four years, and yet you can still extract the living essence of him from a hair.’

‘Maybe.’ Enzo carefully wrapped the hair in the toilet tissue and slipped it into a clear plastic ziplock bag. ‘We’ll see. What’s in the other bag?’

‘His laptop computer. But the battery will be dead.’ They went back through to the sejour.

‘If there’s a power cable, we should still be able to fire it up.’

The laptop was a white G3 Macintosh Powerbook, the top model of its day. It was in a padded black nylon case, along with various cables, an instruction manual, and a book that Petty had clearly been reading. There was a bookmark at page 220. The book was called A Superior Mystery, by American writer Carl Brookins. Enzo turned it over and read the back cover. It was about a Seattle PR executive and his wife sailing amongst the Apostle Islands of Northern Wisconsin to solve old and new murders.

‘My father loved to sail,’ Michelle said. ‘But for him it was a solitary thing. A one-man dinghy out on Lake Washington. He was a member of the local club in Sacramento. I would have loved to go sailing with him, but he wasn’t interested in taking out a family membership.’ Enzo heard the bitterness in her voice, and he looked up to see her fighting back more tears.

He returned to the bag and took out the power cable and unravelled it. It had an American plug on it, with a French adapter. He hooked it up to the computer and plugged it in, then opened up the laptop. He hit the power button, and they held their breaths for a moment before the computer’s start-up chorus issued through tiny speakers, and the screen flickered and lit up to begin loading its system software.

‘The police must have looked at all this,’ Michelle said.

‘I should think so.’

‘So what are you hoping to find?’

‘I don’t know. Something they’ve missed.’ The desktop appeared, along with the finder window, giving access to all of Petty’s files. ‘He must have kept his ratings on here.’

‘Are they important?’

Enzo turned to her. ‘Michelle, your father could make or break a winemaker by how he rated his wine. Those ratings could very well provide a motive for his murder.’

Enzo went into the documents file and found dozens of folders. And folders within folders within folders. Petty’s whole working life was here. Wines he had tasted and rated going back to the mideighties. Articles he had written for his newsletter, The Wine Critic. Pieces he had done for the various newspaper columns he somehow managed to feed on a weekly basis. There were schedules for wine tastings in France, the US, Italy, and Spain, dating from the early nineties. Files imported and re-imported from previous computers, previous lives.

Enzo scratched his head. ‘Jeez. It could take weeks to go through all this stuff.’

‘I’ll bet the French police didn’t. It’s all in English, for a start.’

‘They probably concentrated on finding his Gaillac ratings.’

‘Well, where are they?’ She scanned the screen.

But Enzo could only shake his head. There seemed to be no folder containing work in progress. ‘They’re not here. Unless they’re somehow hidden on the hard disk. Although I’m pretty sure the Police Scientifique would have had an expert take a look at that.’

‘Knowing Dad, he’d have some way of hiding them. He was good at hiding stuff. His emotions, mostly.’ She paused. ‘He was obsessed by secrecy, you know. When his newsletter came out each month, wines that got high ratings could double in price overnight. Anyone who knew in advance what those ratings were could make a killing. Buy cheap, sell expensive. He even wrote a punitive secrecy clause into the contract with his printer.’

‘Well, wherever he kept them, they don’t seem to be on his computer. There weren’t any notebooks or diaries among his things?’

She shook her head.

He thought about it for a moment. ‘Surely he made notes when he was tasting. The police must have kept them as evidence.’ He pulled up the navigation bar from the bottom of the screen and clicked on the mailer. ‘Let’s have a look at his e-mails.’

Petty had organised his e-mail correspondence with the same meticulous care with which he had filed his back catalogue of wine ratings. There were thirty or forty folders containing two-way correspondence with wineries and negociants, journalists, printers, publishers. A huge file of several thousand e-mails under “Miscellaneous.” Nothing personal. Except for a single folder above “Miscellaneous” that was labelled “Michelle.”

Enzo glanced round as she leaned over his shoulder to peer at the screen. She had seen it, too. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Open it.’

He clicked on the folder, and they found themselves staring at an empty screen. Nothing. The folder was empty. He could feel her tension. ‘Did you ever correspond by e-mail?’

‘Never.’

‘So why did he have a folder with your name on it?’

She shook her head, at a complete loss. ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe he always meant to write. Don’t they say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?’

‘Or maybe he was waiting for you to write to him.’

‘Hell would have frozen over first.’

Enzo was shocked by the vitriol in her tone. He turned to look at her, but she moved back out of his field of vision. ‘Why should I run to him? He was the one who never had time for me.’

He thought for several long moments. ‘You know, sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and make the first move. If you love someone, you have to tell them today. Because they might not be here tomorrow.’

She looked at him curiously, forgetting for a moment her own selfish obsessions. ‘That came from the heart. Personal experience?’

He glanced at his watch and looked out through the window to see the light dying in the east. ‘Maybe we should eat,’ he said. ‘I know a place.’