Vintage (40 page)

Axel slid a fifty-Euro note across to the barman. He stood up, keeping eye contact with the woman the whole time. She knew what he wanted. As he left the hotel, she followed him. This is becoming a habit, thought Axel.

F
or a girl with a past like Kelly Elson’s, the appearance of a police car always spelled trouble. It put a shiver down her spine. She couldn’t help feeling guilty when she saw that blue and yellow livery. And so her first thought, when she saw the squad car pull into the courtyard at Froggy Bottom, was that they were coming for her.

Perhaps someone had complained about the noise from the last Froggy Bottom Fandango, even though the nearest house was a mile away. Or perhaps they were going to arrest her and Guy for making illegal hooch—was there some kind of special license she needed to be a wine-maker, she wondered. She hoped Guy was on the case. The last thing Kelly expected was that the two police officers getting out of the car would ask whether she had time to see them. As she stood at her front door, Kelly almost had her wrists out for the handcuffs.

She said she did have time.

“Then perhaps we better come inside,” said the female officer. “Put the kettle on, eh?” she added with a sorry sort of smile.

“What’s the matter? Is it my mum?” Kelly asked, feeling panic rise. Did Marina need bailing out?

“No. It’s not your mum. But it is bad news, I’m afraid.”

Kelly sat down. She couldn’t think whom the bad news might pertain to. Apart from her mother, she had no family that she knew of. Guy was fine. He was in the winery.
Hilarian had called just that morning with news of his post-
Vinifera
party hangover.

“I believe that you knew Ms. Gina Busiri.”

Knew? In that single, past-tense word, Kelly heard the full story.

“Is she dead?”

The male officer nodded. “I’m sorry. I know she was your friend.”

“She was my best friend,” said Kelly.

“We know,” said the female officer. “That’s why we’re here. We need to know who you think she might have been with when she died.”

“Where did you find her?”

The female officer insisted on making Kelly a cup of tea before she gave her the blow by blow. At the same time, her colleague went out to the winery and asked Guy if he would mind coming and sitting in the kitchen while Kelly heard the worst. Guy downed tools at once.

“Her body was found about four weeks ago. In the Marne. That’s a river in France.”

“I know,” said Kelly. “It runs through Champagne.”

“She’d been dead for a couple of days, we think. The French police guessed that she was English from her Marks & Spencer’s tights. She was identified from police records. Fingerprints.”

Kelly nodded. She remembered the day that she and Gina had been arrested for shoplifting.

“Her brother confirmed the identification. He put us on to you. We need to know why you think she might have been in France. Who she might have been seeing.”

“We fell out. I haven’t spoken to her for a while.”

“Was she visiting a friend, do you think? Or a client? Was she on the game, Kelly?” the female detective asked. “It’s important that we know.”

Kelly bit her lip. It was strange. She still felt as though,
in trying to help the police piece Gina’s last moments together, she would be betraying her.

“I don’t think she was meeting a boyfriend,” Kelly admitted at last. “I think she was meeting a client.”

It was a harrowing afternoon. Guy, Kelly and the police officers sat at the kitchen table and went through the details of Gina’s life as Kelly knew them. Kelly covered her eyes with her hands as she recalled the early days of her friendship with Gina. She described their first meeting with an older girl at the hotel who told them exactly how she managed to buy Gucci shoes on a chambermaid’s wages and encouraged them to follow suit.

“So, you worked as a prostitute too,” said the female detective.

Kelly kept her eyes firmly on the table as she confirmed the worst. She didn’t dare meet Guy’s eye after that.

The male detective then brought out an envelope full of photographs. He handed them to Kelly one by one and asked her to say when she saw one she recognized. They were mostly police mug shots. Men who looked as though they would kill their own grandmothers for a fiver. Kelly didn’t recognize any of them. In some small way, she was relieved she didn’t, though she knew it wouldn’t help Gina.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know any of them.”

“Don’t worry,” said the female detective, squeezing Kelly’s hand. “We will find out who killed your friend.”

After the police left, Kelly and Guy went back to the kitchen table. Guy put the kettle on at once. He’d become almost English in his reaction to disaster. Kelly gratefully accepted another cup of tea, though she couldn’t face the
biscuits he also put in front of her—the remains of a packet of Hob Nobs, Gina’s favorite.

“I can’t believe she’s dead,” said Kelly. “It doesn’t feel right. I mean, I feel like I’d know if she wasn’t alive anymore. Perhaps they got the wrong girl.”

Guy squeezed Kelly’s shoulder but she knew he couldn’t offer her any reassurance on that count. Gina’s brother had identified the body. The fingerprints and dental records also matched up.

“I encouraged her to go on the game,” said Kelly. “It’s my fault.”

“She made her own choices,” said Guy.

“It wasn’t just for the money. She wanted to make something of herself. She was saving up so she could go to college.”

“I know.”

“She could have got a loan instead. I should have encouraged her to do that.”

“Yeah,” said Guy. “But that was up to her. Do you want more tea?”

“Open a bottle of wine.”

Guy frowned.

“Please. Just one between the two of us. I’m not going to drown my sorrows. I just want to make them shut up a bit.”

“What do you want? Red or white.”

“Petrus,” said Kelly. “Gina liked that.”

Guy went into the cellar and brought out a bottle from 1982. Having decided that Kelly could be trusted, Hilarian had returned some of Dougal’s bottles to the cellar to make room in his own, though this particular Petrus was the one bottle that Hilarian had told them should be drunk in his absence only if nuclear war had been declared.

Kelly sobbed when she saw the label.

“I told Gina we would open this when we both got our degrees,” she said.

“Shall we open something else?”

“No,” said Kelly.

Guy got two glasses out of the cupboard and made sure they were properly clean before he poured out the first sip.

“To Gina,” said Guy.

“To Gina,” Kelly choked.

That evening, Kelly told Guy more about herself than she had ever done before. She told him about growing up with her mother. She told him her hazy memories of Dougal and of living in the cottage tied to the big house in Norfolk. She remembered playing on the grass and walking on the fabulous beaches, but then she was uprooted and moved with her mother to South London, where, if you could find any at all, the grass was full of broken glass and dog shit.

She told him about the men who had drifted through her mother’s life. None of them were what you would call “gentlemen.” A couple of them used to smack Kelly’s mother about. One of them even put her in hospital. He smashed her cheekbone. It was hard for Kelly to concentrate on doing well at school when there was so much to worry about at home.

“I didn’t know what to do. I tried to protect Mum but she kept going back to them.”

“There wasn’t anything you could do,” said Guy. “She was supposed to be protecting you.”

“Perhaps she just couldn’t.”

Kelly hadn’t told anyone but Gina the full story of her life. And now Gina was gone. She hadn’t spoken to her mother since she had arrived to stay at Froggy Bottom. She had never felt so alone. Especially now she was sure
that she was going to lose Guy too. How could he not see her differently after that day’s revelations?

“Can I sleep with you?” Kelly asked suddenly.

Guy was taken aback. “With me?”

“Just tonight. In your flat. I don’t think I can be here on my own. Everywhere I look I keep thinking of Gina and the times she was here too.”

“OK,” said Guy. “Fetch what you need. Let’s go across the courtyard.”

They lay down on the bed fully clothed. Kelly rolled into the side of Guy’s body and laid her head on his chest. Guy kissed the top of her head. Moments later, she was fast asleep.

Guy lay awake for a few more hours, holding Kelly in his arms. That day’s revelation about her past had, as she suspected, been a huge shock to him. And he hated himself for the way he’d felt himself begin to react. So bourgeois. His first instinct was disgust. But it was so fleeting. Kelly had come to mean so much to him. She’d been young and unsupported. Her early life sounded like a nightmare. Kelly’s life was the result of generations of pain. But she was trying to be different. She was different. She was his Kelly. And he loved her.

PART

M
adeleine, it’s Piers Mackesy.”

The sound of his perfectly modulated English voice never failed to make Madeleine smile. Almost two years after she turned down his advances in London, Mackesy still continued to prove a particularly helpful contact, putting Madeleine in touch with many hotels and restaurants across France that she might not otherwise have thought of approaching with her champagne. It seemed there wasn’t anyone he didn’t know.

“I’m coming to France,” he said now. “And I’d like to visit Champagne Arsenault and see how Clos Des Larmes is coming on.”

Madeleine could think of nothing she would like better.

Piers Mackesy drove to Champagne in the red Aston Martin DB4 that Madeleine remembered from her childhood. When it drew up to the gates of Champagne Arsenault, she was taken right back to the days when she and Georges would race into the courtyard at the sound of the engine’s growl. Piers climbed out looking even more like James Bond than his father. Madeleine felt her heart do a little flip at the sight of him but quickly quashed it before she reached him and allowed him a very chaste kiss on the cheek.

Although the nature of their relationship was still flirtatious and the strength of her attraction to him as he stepped out of the car was surprising to her, Madeleine would not let it go further than lighthearted banter. Wine industry gossip was that Mrs. Mackesy was more than happy to spend most of her time in a different country than her husband. They had no children and she’d recently accepted a consultancy position in the fine art department of an auction house in New York. Meanwhile, Mackesy cut a swathe through London. But he had never hinted at marital discord and the ring remained. Perhaps he was just too classy to use the “wife doesn’t understand me” line. Perhaps he was happy with the status quo.

They lunched beneath the rose arbor in the garden. Mackesy was entertaining as ever, full of wine world scandal that made Madeleine alternately laugh and sigh. After lunch, she showed him around the winery, and then they climbed down into the caves, where she proudly showed him her Clos Des Larmes, lying in the silent, chilly chalk cellars like a thousand green glass pupae waiting to become butterflies.