Mayhem in Margaux by Jean-Pierre Alaux, Noël Balen

too much, but now you’re not saying enough. Please get to the point.”
    “Shit, I might as well tell you. We have new information that leads me to believe that Cazevielle didn’t sabotage the car. You have to promise that you’ll keep this to yourself. Besides me and my close colleagues, you’ll be the only one to know.”
    “You do me great honor, Inspector,” the winemaker muttered, forcing himself to sound polite.
    “Spare me your sarcasm, Mr. Cooker. I got a phone call from our forensics team last night. They wanted to talk with me in person. I went to the garage, and they were standing around the Porsche, waiting for me. With the evidence charred, the chassis twisted, and the parts blackened, finding clues had been hard. But finally one of them noticed something abnormal about the steering. A connection from the pump to the rotary valve was loose.”
    “You mean someone also tried to sabotage the power steering?”
    “Forensics is sure of it. It couldn’t have come loose in the accident. You need the right tool and a good strong turn for that to happen.”
    “Rinetti didn’t stand a chance,” Benjamin said.
    “And your daughter escaped all the more miraculously. Rinetti had absolutely no control of the car.”
    “But why are you so sure the steward didn’t sabotage the car?”
    “Because you have to know how to work on a car, and we checked, the steward is hardly a mechanic. The person who did this had to be an expert, and he had to act quickly. The car was parked in an outbuilding very close to the château. People were in and out of that building all the time. He had to lift the car with a jack, put a wedge under a tire to keep it from moving, and then slide under the chassis to carry out his dirty work before doing it all over again in reverse: lower the car, take the jack out, and remove the wedge. And he had to get out of that building without being seen. I haven’t even mentioned the clippers he used to cut the brake-fluid hose.”
    “Clippers?”
    “Yes, we found a pair with the Bahco insignia on the blade. Evidently, it’s not a harvesting pruner, but rather a big pair of shears used for cutting the vines. There’s no doubt about that, either.”
    “But I’m still not entirely convinced that Cazevielle’s in the clear.”
    “As I said, the man’s clueless when it comes to mechanics. We went through his car’s service record with a fine-tooth comb and talked to his mechanic. Cazevielle wouldn’t be able to find his dipstick if a gun were pressed to his head, believe me. What’s more, he has an elbow problem, a tennis elbow that gives him chronic pain. He has trouble loosening an ordinary screw.”
    Benjamin said nothing. He had too many questions. Barbaroux’s inside information only muddled things.
    “I don’t think this wine is all that great,” the inspector said, polishing off the glass.
    “You haven’t had any trouble getting it down, though. What’s wrong with it?”
    Benjamin emptied his glass of mineral water in one swallow and poured himself a mouthful of Pauillac. He took a sip, rolled the wine under his tongue and spit it into the glass.
    “It’s a bit corked. Not all that much, but still…”
    “Oh, okay, that’s why. That slight taste of dirty cassock. I thought it smelled like an old priest.”
    Benjamin couldn’t help laughing. He called the waiter to explain that the bottle was defective. Looking profoundly embarrassed, the waiter hurried away and promptly returned with another bottle.
    “And since we’re talking shop, what do you think of those screw tops we’re seeing on more bottles these days? Do you think corks are on the way out?”
    “I always try not to have an opinion, only doubts.”
    “A doubt is an opinion of sorts,” the inspector said. He sounded a bit sly.
    The winemaker considered Barbaroux’s comment a moment and then said, “According to studies, two to three percent of the nearly eight hundred million bottles produced in