That must have been during the bar fight, thought Bruno. “Anything else?” he asked, scribbling quickly in his notebook as she took off her face mask and peeled off the surgical gloves.
“Yes, there’s something the forensics team should look at carefully. I think François is right about the boy having had sex, and rather rough sex at that. It could have been masturbation, or possibly sex under water, reducing the natural lubrication. But I think there was a partner because he has scratches on his buttocks.”
“Any sign of whether he died before Cresseil or after?” Bruno asked, remembering the mayor’s concern. “The lawyers will want to know for the inheritance.”
“They both died in the same time frame, but perhaps the Bergerac lab can narrow it down.” She turned to François. “You’re good,” she said. “Not many people would have noticed that inflammation. Did you have any medical training?”
“In the navy,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “I was an orderly. But I see a lot of bodies. Amazing what you can tell from them.”
“You’ll be a dead body yourself if you go on smoking like that,” she said. “But while you’re at it, pass me one. I haven’t had a Disque Bleu in years.”
30
Bruno sighed as he looked around the barn, which still stank of the wine that had splashed out when he’d heaved Max’s body from the vat. Alongside heaps of junk that looked as if it had been there since before the war, dusty shelves and dustier bottles were stacked along the back wall. Two members of the crime scene team, dressed in white coveralls, were poking gingerly through it.
“They’ll have their work cut out in here,” J-J said. “The forensics people in Bergerac are taking their time, but it looks as if they’ll agree with your doctor. Somebody hit that boy on the head, even if he did die from carbon whatever it was. So if it’s not murder, it’s at least aggravated manslaughter. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good excuse to get away from being at the beck and call of that brigadier. Murder trumps arson. Who are our suspects, beyond that American we saw Max fighting with? He’s got to be number one.”
Bruno shrugged. “We’ll want to talk to Jacqueline. That was the girl with him. She should know his movements, and if he was having sex not long before he died it was probably with her. We should also talk to Dominique, and then we’ll have to ask Alphonse what he knows about Max’s movements in the last few days and check the tires on his truck. Then there were those glasses in Cresseil’s kitchen. There may be fingerprints.”
“I know you think the boy could have been mixed up in that fire. And now Dominique comes up again. Could there be a connection, do you think?”
“Maybe, but there’s no evidence of that,” said Bruno. “I thought the leads would be coming from your écolo network in Bordeaux.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that. Where can we go that’s private?”
“Let’s walk in the garden.” Bruno guided J-J out past the forensics team and led the way past the house and the vegetable garden down toward the river before J-J spoke.
“There’s almost no sign on the écolo Web sites that anybody knew much about this research station. It doesn’t come up—no rumors, nothing except one posting by your Alphonse asking if anybody had information about it. Usually before there’s an attack or a demonstration, the Web sites will be full of information about the particular farm or company, like whipping up a campaign about it. Before they attacked that McDonald’s, the Web sites and the left-wing press and newsletters were all full of material. It was the same when they hit that experimental rapeseed crop down near Foix. But not this time. The fire came out of nowhere, and that’s odd.”
“So what does that mean, a lone arsonist, with no connection to the movement?”
“Did you ever read Sherlock Holmes?” J-J asked.
Bruno looked at him quizzically. Where had that come from? “Years ago at school. I saw an old film about him once. I remember that funny cap he wore and lots of London fog, and that he could identify hundreds of different kinds of cigars from their ashes.”
“There was a story about a dog that failed to bark in the night. The point was, he should have barked but he didn’t, so he probably knew the intruder. On this arson case, the usual dogs among all the activists didn’t bark at all, so I’m beginning to think this wasn’t the écolos but something else altogether, maybe someone with a grudge against that scientist who runs the research place.”
“Have you talked to the brigadier about this dog that didn’t bark?” Bruno asked.
“He’s the one that explained the strange silence of the écolos. You and me, we’re just the errand boys, the local help he expects to do the legwork for him. But his real interest in this case is using it to build up a database on all the écolo movements. He’s taking the opportunity to collect computer hard drives all over the region. That’s what they do in the RG. So we’re supposed to solve it on our own, because once he realized this wasn’t some big écolo conspiracy, his level of interest dropped right off.”
“So you want to start looking into local feuds around the research station? Nothing much comes to mind. That director you met, Petitbon, lives a very quiet life, except that he’s passionate about cycling.”
“Where else do we start to look?”
“There are some things I should check on, like when Max picked the grapes, and whether anybody has found Cresseil’s dog. I also have to see if my phone can be repaired. You’ll need someplace to work and set up a squad room. I’ll take care of that, but it can’t be till tomorrow.”
“That’s okay; I’ve got the mobile incident crew coming down now that we’ve got a suspicious death. I can work out of their new trailer. As soon as they get here, I’ll get the gendarmes to start bringing in the witnesses. We can set up here in the courtyard. I’d better stay here and wait for them, poke around a bit, see what’s in the house and the other outbuildings.”
“That reminds me,” said Bruno. “I haven’t seen Max’s motorcycle, some antique that he managed to get running again. It’s probably in that shed.”
Bruno looked around the outbuildings and the back of Cresseil’s house. He found an ancient SOMUA tractor that hadn’t been moved for decades, as well as a wooden dogcart that someone had sanded down and started to repaint, but no motorbike. There was little doubt where it had been, from the pool of oil on the floor of the small barn and cans of oil and tools on a bench beside it. There were some oil-stained rags and motorcycle magazines and a manual on a shelf above. And then a gap. Bruno pondered that gap, and on an impulse, hauled up an old crate, stood on it and looked at the gap on the wooden shelf. He saw a stain of regular shape, an oblong with rounded corners. It could be the shape of the bottom of a gasoline can. He pulled out his tape measure and scribbled down the dimensions and then looked at the slip of paper that marked a place in the manual’s oily pages. It was a receipt from Lespinasse’s garage for mélange, the oil-and-gas mix that old bikes require.
Armed with the dimensions of the oil stain traced onto a sheet of paper, Bruno parked his van at the Total garage on the road to Bergerac. Lespinasse’s sister was dealing with a tourist who had stopped to fill his tank. Most of the locals went to the pumps at the supermarket, where the price was three centimes less per liter, which saved more than a euro on a full tank. But Lespinasse had always made more as a mechanic than he ever had from selling gas, and his son Edouard had inherited his father’s skill with engines. Before he walked back to the large garage at the rear, where they kept the old Citroëns they loved to work on and restore, Bruno stopped in the small showroom attached to the office and looked at the bidons, the small gas cans. He saw two models in plastic and one in metal. He measured each of them, and the metal one was a perfect match.
With a tinny radio blaring out a call-in show on France-Inter, father and son were working on a stripped-down traction-avant, a classic Citroën that dated from the 1930s and had been the staple of the old policier films that Bruno loved. Les
pinasse was beneath the engine, and Edouard leaned perilously in from above, one foot on the running board and the other waving in the air to the sound of clanging metal and muffled curses. Rather than disturb them, Bruno looked around the cavernous space, at the array of bicycles they rented out to tourists, at the Renaults and Peugeots waiting for their inspections and maintenance. One of the commune trucks up high on the hydraulic lift bared its underparts to Bruno’s curious gaze. Beyond it three trail bikes stood in a row with their knobby tires and high mudguards, and at the end of the line, with a large and almost overflowing drip pan beneath its leaking engine, lurked Cresseil’s venerable bike.
A roared “Putain” came from under the old Citroën, and Lespinasse heaved himself from beneath the car, shaking a damaged hand and waving a large wrench in a vague greeting. “Ça va, Bruno?”
“Have you got a moment?” asked Bruno, shaking the forearm Lespinasse proffered rather than the oily hand. Edouard came forward to brush cheeks.
“Cresseil’s old bike. How long have you had that in here?”
“Well, it was Max’s, really. He and I worked on it to get it going again,” said Edouard, “but we couldn’t get the right parts. We tried making some different parts to fit, and it sort of ran but lost a lot of oil. We were going to put some new piston rings in, but I don’t suppose I’ll bother now that Max is dead. I can’t believe it, Bruno. We went all through school together.”
“Tragic, what happened. I never knew you could die that way. I really liked Max,” said his father. He turned to Edouard. “I suppose that old trail bike you lent him is still around Cresseil’s house somewhere. Don’t forget to get it back.”
“Max has been using a trail bike?” Bruno asked, suddenly alert.
“My old Kawasaki,” said Edouard. “It was a bit small for him, really, but when the old bike started dying he needed it to get around.”
“When did you first lend it to him?”
“Couple of weeks ago, the last time. But he used it whenever he wanted.”
“Can you remember exactly?”
“Well, that weekend before the fire, he and I were trying out that motocross course by the go-kart track on the way to Périgueux. He kept it after that. It was okay, all insured through the garage.”
“Did he buy his gas here?”
“Well,” said Edouard, with a nervous glance at his father. “We usually filled up together. I mean, he didn’t always pay, except for parts for the old bike. I didn’t charge for my time because it was after hours. He paid the full amount for everything else, though, for his helmet and the oil and that gasoline can he bought.”
“When did he buy that?”
“He bought the can when we started working on Cresseil’s old bike, ages ago. But he brought it back to fill it with gas the same weekend we tried the motocross course. He said he might need some more for himself because he wanted to try that other motocross place on the road to Sarlat. So he brought the can and filled it with ten liters. He paid for that, though. He did, Dad. Honest. It’s in the book.”
31
Sitting in the passenger seat of J-J’s car, with the retired postman from Coux in the backseat, Bruno tried not to listen to J-J’s curses as his big Peugeot bumped its way down the narrow lane to Alphonse’s commune. He was waiting for the look on J-J’s face when he first saw the geodesic dome and the house dug into the growing hillside. In the end, it was the postman who first spoke.
“This place has changed, and haven’t they done well?” he said. “I delivered mail here years ago when I had to take over this route during holidays. They used to tell me their plans but I never thought they’d stick it out.”
Bruno headed directly for the dome, the place he thought he was most likely to find Alphonse. J-J simply started blaring the horn. Goats began moving amiably in his direction, and a toddler appeared wearing a vest and waddled toward J-J with a large smile. Edouard’s trail bike, a helmet perched on the handlebars, was parked under a lean-to at the back of the dome. An old Renault flatbed truck was parked just beyond it, and even without a magnifying glass Bruno could see a trace of white paint on the side of a tire. He walked across and scraped a fleck of it into an evidence bag and then beckoned the postman to join him. J-J’s horn stopped, and he heard Alphonse shouting “In here” from somewhere inside the cheese barn.
“Does that bike resemble the one you saw at the phone booth?” Bruno asked the postman.
“Yes, it does. But they all look the same, those motocross bikes. It seems like the one, but nobody could be sure. But that’s the helmet, I’m sure of that. I never saw one like that before, with the built-in chin, but that’s what the guy was wearing who made the phone call. And it’s the same light color.”
“What about this?” asked Bruno. The key was in the ignition, so he turned it on and kick-started the engine into life, then revved it a few times before turning it off. “Does that sound familiar?”
“Yes, but they tend to sound the same, too. It’s the helmet that stuck in my mind.”
“Thank you for that, monsieur,” said J-J. “You’re free to wander around, or perhaps you’d like to wait at the car until we’re finished.”
Alphonse arrived just then, wiping his hands on a cloth and wearing the kind of brown woolly hat that Bruno recalled seeing on TV news shots of Afghan mujahideen. “What’s all this noise?” he wanted to know. His face broke into a half smile when he saw Bruno and the postman, and he hurried forward to shake hands. “Welcome, Bruno. I was going to call you. We’ll be having a ceremony for Max up here tomorrow evening, light a fire for him and drink to his memory. I’d like you to be there, and I know Max would have wanted that.”
The postman said, “I’m sorry for your trouble” and headed back to the car. Bruno waited until he was out of earshot before speaking again.
“Alphonse, this is going to be difficult. The postman is pretty sure that this was the bike and the helmet of the person who made the phone call from Coux about the fire. We know that Max bought a full can of gasoline that day. And I’m pretty sure that white paint on the tires of your truck is going to match the stuff that was sprayed on the research station. It was Max who burned down those crops.”
Alphonse looked at Bruno sternly, as if about to protest, but then his shoulders seemed to slump and he sighed and shrugged. “I think you’re probably right. But since he’s dead, poor Max, it hardly matters now.”
“Well, it means we can stop wasting police time looking for another arsonist,” said J-J. “It might mean we can put more resources into finding out who killed your boy.”
“What do you mean, killed?” Alphonse’s hands fell to his sides and the cloth fluttered to the ground. He turned to Bruno, dismay giving way to anger. “Bruno, you told me it was an accident, asphyxiation. What is this about him being killed?”
“We found a bruise and a gash under the hairline. It looks as if he fell, or he could have been hit, but as yet we don’t know when or how. The doctor still says the cause of death was asphyxiation. But tell me, Alphonse, why do you think it was Max who burned those crops?”
“From his computer. When that brigadier of yours took mine away, I had to use Max’s laptop to get on the Internet and keep up with our orders. Max had left it at Cresseil’s place, so the gendarmes missed it when they searched here. I told you, Bruno, that we sell more and more cheese on the Internet. Max set that up for us.”
I missed it too, thought Bruno. I should have known Max would have a laptop of his own. “So what was on his computer?”
“A poem he was writing about the fire, or maybe a song,” said Alphonse, half smiling at the memory. “There’s a lot more that’s encrypted, but the poem was up on the screen as a Word document. I can show you, if you like. It’s not finished, but it’s about how the fire cleansed the poison, but how hard it was to wash away the smell of the gas. There’s another big file on GMOs. I just put two and two together. I was planning to tell you when you came up tomorrow for his wake.
”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to take that computer as well,” J-J said. “And we could have saved a lot of time if you’d told us about this second computer when we first called you in.”
“But I didn’t read any of his stuff until this afternoon,” Alphonse snapped, more fiercely than Bruno had ever heard him. “I just used his laptop to log into our e-mail. Max was entitled to his privacy.”
“It’s a sad day, so we’ll just leave it at that,” said Bruno, laying a hand on J-J’s arm as the older policeman looked about to launch into an angry retort. “I’m sorry for your loss, Alphonse. You raised a fine boy, and we’ll miss him. If you could let us have that laptop, we’ll be off.”
“But I need it for the e-mail,” said Alphonse.
“I understand. Come into the mairie anytime and use mine in the office until we can get one of your computers back to you. Just type in ‘Bruno’ to start it up, and then my cell phone number is the password.”
“Don’t you need a court order or something to take it?”
“No, we don’t,” said Bruno calmly. “But the alternative is that I stay here until J-J comes back with a carload of gendarmes and a magistrate and then they’ll hunt through everything and tear up your houses and take lots of things away with them. Arson is a serious crime, Alphonse. Let’s not make this worse than it is.”
After a long moment, Alphonse sighed and nodded. He went into the dome and came back with the laptop. “You’re still welcome at the wake tomorrow, Bruno. Max thought the world of you.”
“And I thought the world of him. Thanks for the invitation; I’ll be there. Keep your spirits up, and call me on Max’s phone if you need anything. It’s the only one I’ve got, after the last one went into the wine vat with me when we pulled him out.”
Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard Page 19