The Critic

V

The light from the desk lamp seemed unnaturally intense. Black letters swimming on white paper, until he could barely look at them. And from all of these papers that covered the desk, a blinding blizzard of conflicting information, some kind of awful sense was finally emerging from confusion.

Roussel had been busy. There were photocopied extracts from historical documents he had found in the library. Pages marked up in several books on local history, whole paragraphs highlighted with diagonal orange lines. There were printouts from the internet. Genealogical searches, Roussel’s own family tree, several articles on the French Revolution, a piece downloaded from Wikipedia about something called The Great Fear.

When he first sat down, Enzo hadn’t had the least idea where to begin. So he had started random reading, before the logic of Roussel’s researches had finally dawned on him, and he began retracing the gendarme’s footsteps in the order they had been taken. Now he just sat staring without seeing, words burning out in front of him. He knew now who had killed Petty, and why. And Coste. And probably Roussel. And all the others in the file. And he knew, too, that these were not the actions of a sane man.

An absurd French wordplay entered his head, a jeu de mot that seemed somehow horribly apposite. Winemakers usually left a portion of the vineyard unharvested during the vendange. The grapes remained on the vine, sometimes until November, when withered and frosted, they were almost like raisins, super-concentrated with sugar. These were the grapes they used to make the vin doux, the sweet white wine that was drunk with foie gras. The late harvest was known as the vendange tardive, but Enzo couldn’t get it out of his head that what Roussel had discovered was a case of vengeance tardive. Belated revenge.

‘Can you make any sense of it?’ Katy Roussel’s voice crashed out of the darkness beyond the ring of light. He had almost forgotten she was there, and he was nearly overcome by his own sickening certainty that her husband was dead. But there was no way he could tell her that. And as long as there was no body, there was always hope.

He turned to see concern burned into a face washed out by worry. ‘Do you know what The Great Fear was?’

‘I saw the article on the desk. But I didn’t read it. We got something about The Great Fear at school. It was part of the French Revolution, but I don’t really remember.’ Her confusion was clear in her eyes ‘Is it important?’

Enzo nodded. ‘It’s where madness began, and is still feeding it.’

She shook her head. ‘How?’

‘ The Great Fear took place in July and August of 1789, right at the start of the French Revolution. There were rumours circulating among the peasantry that the nobles had hired bands of thugs to march on the villages and destroy their new harvest. In response, the peasants formed themselves into gangs and sacked the castles of the nobles, and burned all the documentation recording their feudal obligations.’ He turned towards the papers strewn across the desk. ‘What your husband discovered was the thing that linked Petty and the others in his missing persons file. That they were all descendants of a group of vigilantes who rampaged through Gaillac that summer more than two hundred years ago. A notorious gang who committed dreadful atrocities. They beat up the local nobility, sacked their estates, and in some cases set their homes on fire.’

Her frustration bubbled over at Enzo, almost as if he was somehow responsible for it all. ‘I don’t understand. What are you saying? Why has David disappeared?’

Enzo sought resolve in a deep breath. For he knew that his next words would amount to a pronouncement of death on the man she loved. ‘He was one of them, Katy. Directly descended from one of that group of vigilantes. Everyone knew who they were at the time. With Church and State records now widely available on the internet, it would have been a relatively easy matter to trace the lineage of each and every one of them.’

‘You mean someone’s been killing these men because of what their ancestors did? That’s insane!’

‘Madness takes many forms. Sometimes all you need is to give it an excuse.’ He drew one of the open books towards him and focused on a paragraph marked out in fluorescent orange. ‘It seems the gang went too far one night. Maybe they’d been drinking, whipped themselves up into some kind of crusading frenzy. But they marched on a chateau just outside of town, dragged its owner into the courtyard and beat him to death in front of his wife and children. Then they set the place on fire.’ He looked into the desolation in her eyes. ‘Nearly two hundred and twenty years later, someone’s been exacting a very belated revenge.’