The Critic

III

Enzo selected “send” from the toolbar, and a sound like a soft jet engine passed from one speaker to the other to signify the despatching of his e-mail into the ether. He put the laptop to sleep and folded down the lid. As he stood, he stared out from the pool of lamplight around the table to the reflected light on his whiteboard and those mysterious groupings of letters and numbers that made no sense. He glanced up towards the mezzanine and heard the gentle purr of heavy breathing. Sophie and Bertrand were asleep. He turned out the lamp and crossed the room in the dark to the open door and the candlelight on the terrace.

Charlotte looked round. ‘You want a glass?’

‘If there’s any left.’

‘There’s plenty.’ As he sat down she poured him a glass from a bottle of Chateau de Salettes Vin des Arts and refilled her own. ‘Who were you writing to?’

‘A guy called Al MacConchie. I was at university with him in Glasgow. He went off to the States about twenty-five years ago and is now a bigshot wine consultant in California.’

‘Wine? What was his major?’

‘At university?’ Enzo laughed. ‘Chemistry. He believed that the problems of the universe could be answered by chemical analysis. And statistics. Now he’s applying his philosophy to the making of alcoholic beverages.’

She turned eyes filled with curiosity in his direction, waiting for further explanation. But he just shrugged.

‘I need a favour from him.’ He was too weary to go into it now. He took a sip of the Vin des Arts. It was freshly acidic, with soft tannins, and filled his mouth with the taste of raspberries. ‘Nice wine. Must get a case of it.’

They sat for some minutes, sipping the fermented juice of red grapes and gazed out over silver grass wet with dew. The shadows cast by the chestnut trees were almost impenetrable.

Candlelight flickered over all the soft surfaces of Charlotte’s face as she turned it towards him. ‘There was another reason I came down here to see you.’

Something in her tone rang warning bells. He turned his head sharply. ‘What?’

She hesitated for a long moment, as if undecided. Then she said, ‘Enzo…Roger’s seeing Kirsty.’

He could not have said why this news filled him with such dark foreboding. Except that there was nothing about it that seemed right, or natural. Enzo was only just on speaking terms with his daughter after their years of estrangement. She was raw and vulnerable, and he knew instinctively that a relationship with Roger Raffin was wrong.

Raffin was an intelligent and successful Parisian journalist in his mid-thirties who had been motivated to write his book on France’s seven most notorious unsolved murders by the failure of police to find the killer of his own wife. When Enzo began his investigation into the first of those killings, he and Raffin had reached an arrangement on shared publication rights. At that time, Raffin had just ended an eighteen month affair with Charlotte, and the separation had been acrimonious.

‘I suppose that means he’s not jealous about you and me any more.’

‘He’s never stopped being jealous, Enzo. And him being with Kirsty doesn’t change anything.’

He looked at her very directly. ‘I know why I don’t like the idea of Kirsty and Roger. Why don’t you?’

‘Because I know him too well. He’s not right for her, Enzo. He’s…’ She looked away, and he could see the tension gathered all along the line of her jaw. She finished her thought with a shadow in her tone. ‘There’s something dark about Roger, Enzo. Something beyond touching. Something you wouldn’t want to touch, even if you could.’

It was a full five minutes after Charlotte left him to go to bed, and the light went off in the bedroom, that he turned at the sound of movement in the doorway.

Sophie stood there in the dark, barefoot in her nightdress, her hair a tangle, and he had a sudden memory of her as a little girl standing in the dark of his bedroom telling him about the monsters under her bed, and how she wanted to spend the night with him. And how he’d led her back to her own room, and shown her there was nothing under the bed, and tucked her in again. He’d had to read to her for nearly half an hour before she finally drifted away, her little hand still clutching his so tightly he’d had to pry her fingers gently free.

‘I thought you were sleeping.’

‘Couldn’t get to sleep for the monsters under my bed.’

He looked at her in astonishment. Had she read his mind? And then he realised that, of course, it was a shared memory. As vivid for her as for him. Something in the moment must have evoked the recollection for them both. He smiled and held out his hand. She took it and sat on his knee, tipping her shoulder into his chest and tucking her head up under his chin, just as she had always done as a child.

‘Don’t go interfering in Kirsty’s life,’ she said.

He tensed. ‘How…?’

‘Voices carry in the dark.’

He sighed. ‘He’s not right for her.’

‘That’s for her to decide.’

After a long moment, he said, ‘Do you see her?’

‘I’ve seen her a couple of times. Up in Paris.’

‘You never told me.’ The half-sisters had met for the first time only very recently, each regarding the other with deep suspicion, even jealousy.

‘I don’t tell you everything in my life.’

‘You used to.’

‘I’m not a child anymore.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘ You don’t tell me everything.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Why? I ask you about Charlotte and all I get is, “Don’t even go there.”’

She did such an accurate parody of his gruff Scottish voice that he couldn’t help but smile. Then, after a moment, ‘So you knew about Kirsty and Roger?’

‘It’s none of your business, Papa.’

He tipped his head down and kissed the top of her head.

‘I love you,’ she said.

‘I don’t have to tuck you in and read to you tonight, do I?’

She sat up grinning. ‘No, it’s alright. If there’re any monsters, Bertrand can get them.’

And as she padded off into the house he thought, with a pang of regret, about how the baton of responsibility for daughters as they grew up always got handed on from fathers to lovers.

But where Kirsty was concerned, despite Sophie’s warning, he did not want to pass that baton on to Roger Raffin.