‘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.’