“It’s out on the Rouffignac road, one of the turnoffs after that prehistoric burial site at La Ferrassie, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said, wondering how she knew that. She must have been making inquiries. “There’s a stone tower for electricity just opposite the turnoff. Drive up the road and turn left, and you’ll see my home.”
“That will be something to look forward to,” she said. “I’m spending the day calling on all the mayors from here to Montignac to try to persuade them to back the electric-car rally. Your mayor set it up. I’ll tell you how it went when I see you at seven.” She leaned forward to give him a quick kiss on the lips and then bent to stroke Balzac as Bruno tightened the saddle and swung himself onto Hector.
“You look very dashing on horseback,” she said and waved good-bye. He resisted the temptation to rear Hector up onto his hind legs and leap into a gallop and trotted sedately off with Balzac jogging along behind.
When Bruno got to the mairie, the mayor called him in to show him the fax from the brigadier requesting Bruno be given a temporary assignment to his staff. He signed it with his fountain pen and handed the fax to Bruno, telling him to file it with the earlier ones.
“What can you tell me about this operation he wants you for, Bruno?”
Bruno explained briefly and then described the failure of his efforts to help Sylvestre and Oudinot reach a settlement over the chartreuse.
“That wouldn’t be because you seem to have developed a friendship with Martine, would it?” the mayor said, a twinkle in his eye.
“News travels fast,” said Bruno.
“Madame Lespinasse was putting the cat out last night and saw your fond farewells. She told Fauquet at the café, and now it’s all over town.”
“Between you and me, Sylvestre is one of the targets of this money-laundering operation I’ve been hauled into. Not that I’ll be doing much, just helping with the surveillance. I think we’re still a long way from making any arrests. Knowing the brigadier, he’d rather monitor them and track down all their contacts as opposed to locking them up right away.”
“Is he coming down himself to run this show?”
“No, it’s a Eurojust operation, so Inspector Perrault will be taking charge.”
“You mean Isabelle? I hope that doesn’t cramp your style with Martine, whom I very much liked when she explained her plans for this electric-car rally. She’s a smart woman, probably another highflier like Isabelle. You do like to live dangerously, Bruno, when we’ve got all these fine young farmers’ daughters yearning to settle down with a solid man with a good job like you.”
“That’s why you are now happily settled down with a Franco-American historian with a professorship at the Sorbonne,” Bruno replied. “Jacqueline is hardly a farmer’s daughter.”
“Touché.” The mayor smiled. “But unlike you, I’m too old to interest them. What about Hugon? Any progress there?”
“An autopsy is being done with an eye on possible cyanide poisoning,” Bruno said. “We haven’t had the results yet, but Jean-Jacques is now involved. I’ve made the usual inquiries, but I’m having trouble identifying Hugon’s last big research job. Jean-Jacques is getting one of his experts to crack Hugon’s password and get into his computer.”
“Have you asked any of his friends at SHAP? You remember Doumergues, the retired history teacher from Sarlat, the one who gave us that monograph about the lost artworks of Rastignac? It might have been before your time. He was probably Hugon’s closest friend, and he called me the other day asking about the funeral. I suppose the autopsy will delay that. But you might want to give him a call and see if he knows what Hugon was up to. I must say Hugon being poisoned sounds very unlikely, unless it was his wife, of course.”
He gave Bruno the telephone number, and Bruno went back to his office to make the call. He explained that the police were still investigating whether Hugon’s death had been suspicious.
“Goodness, that doesn’t sound like Henri. And he was in fine form when I last saw him, like a dog on the trail of a good scent. He wouldn’t say much about the job he was doing, but he certainly picked my brains clean about Rastignac.”
“What did he want to know?” Bruno asked, aware that Young’s research about Rastignac had drawn a blank.
“You know about the paintings that disappeared: seven Cézannes, five Renoirs, four Manets, three Toulouse-Lautrecs, a Matisse and one of Van Gogh’s Arles paintings?”
“I thought they were destroyed when the Nazis burned the place?”
“Not according to the maid, who says she saw German soldiers loading tubes wrapped in tapestries into some trucks. She thought they were wrapping the paintings, the entire collection of the Bernheim family, who had a famous art gallery in Paris. The Bernheims thought the paintings would be safe with their friends the Lauwicks, the Anglo-American family who owned the château. But it wasn’t the paintings that Henri was interested in; it was their friends, particularly any English friends. The widow Lauwick’s daughter had married an Englishman named Fairweather, and they had lots of English friends, one of them a famous racing driver.”
“Would that have been Grover-Williams?” Bruno asked, sitting up in his chair in excitement.
“Yes, how on earth did you know that? And Henri asked me the same question. Young Jacques Lauwick, the son, worked at Vogue magazine and knew all the fashionable people of Paris, and Grover-Williams was part of that beau monde. He and his wife stayed at Rastignac before the war.”
“Did the Lauwicks have any connection to the Resistance or to any escape networks to help Allied pilots who’d been shot down?”
“Not that I know of, but if you have any names I can look up the copy I made of the château’s guest book.”
“A British naval officer named Pat O’Leary,” said Bruno, looking in his notebook. He heard a jolt as the phone on the other end of the line was placed on a desk or table, and he heard the squeak of a filing cabinet drawer and then the rustling of paper.
“No, nobody of that name,” Doumergues said when he returned to the phone.
“What about Robert Benoist?”
“The racing driver? Yes, he was there before the war with Grover-Williams.”
“Did you ever hear anything about a car being hidden at or near the château?”
“That’s what Henri asked me. No, I heard nothing about that, and I interviewed all the surviving people who had worked there during the war, before the Nazis burned the place down. They used phosphorus, you know, and the fire burned for five days. A terrible thing.”
Bruno carried on with his questions, but Doumergues knew no more. Bruno thanked him, promised to let him know when the date for Henri’s funeral was set and called the curator at the Centre Jean Moulin, the Resistance archives in Bordeaux, an expert whom he had consulted before. He asked what was known about an escape route known as PAT.
“It was named after Lieutenant Commander Pat O’Leary of the Royal Navy, but that was a ruse to disguise the founder’s real name,” the curator replied. “He was a Belgian army doctor named Albert Guérisse, and he got more than six hundred out across the Pyrenees before being arrested by the Gestapo. He was sent to the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace, but he survived the war. It was a dreadful place, where they gassed over eighty Jews just so they could obtain their skeletons for some awful anthropological museum that Himmler set up in Strasbourg to demonstrate the alleged inferiority of the Jewish race.”
Bruno shuddered but pressed on with his inquiry. “Do you know of any connection the Belgian doctor might have had to the château of Rastignac?”
“Not offhand, but if I look it up will you tell me the whole story next time you’re in Bordeaux?”
“Yes, and I’ll buy you lunch while I relate it,” Bruno replied. He put the phone down and called Jean-Jacques.
“I’m on my way to Hugon’s place now with my forensics team,” came the familiar cheery tones. “The widow is driving from Sarlat and wil
l meet us there. If you join us, we could have a walk in the garden and talk about this surveillance job.”
“There’s more than that to discuss,” said Bruno. “We may have a suspect, or at least someone we need to question. I’ve worked out who was Hugon’s mysterious last client, and he also happens to be the subject of our surveillance job.”
“I should be there in about half an hour,” said J-J and closed his phone.
Bruno had a few minutes before he would have to leave. As he was about to call his police friend Thomas in Alsace, he remembered something. He called up the photo of the famous Bugatti that Young had sent him and printed out two copies. One was for him, the other for the collection on Félix’s wall. Then he called Thomas, who started to thank him for a pleasant stay in St. Denis. Bruno interrupted him.
“Hang on, Thomas. This is urgent. We’re on a murder investigation, involving that researcher whose death took me away from the vintage-car show after the parade. You remember? It seems his last mystery client for a big research job was Sylvestre, which makes him our top suspect. We’ll be bringing him in for questioning. I need to know everything you can tell me about him—the gossip, the rumors, everything.”
“Mon Dieu, are you sure about this, Bruno? Sylvestre’s a big man around here, wealthiest family in town, a big employer at that garage of his.”
“If you want confirmation, I can get the head of detectives for our département to call you if you like. He’s leading the inquiry.”
“Merde, where do I begin? Well, I told you about the airfield, so you know where his family money came from. It must be twelve, thirteen years ago as a young man straight out of business school that he started this classic-car business. I think it began as a hobby, but he saw the possibilities and then opened his garage and began hiring top mechanics and buying up old cars to restore them.”
The boom in old cars hadn’t really taken off then, Thomas explained. Sylvestre’s big breakthrough came with two Mercedes from the 1930s that he found at an estate sale of some French general who had died. The cars were probably loot from the war. He got them cheap, fixed them up and the local paper reported that he got over a million for the pair of them at an auction in Germany. He went on from there, specializing in old Mercedes. He went all over Europe looking for them in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and then eastern Europe—places where the classic-car business was in its infancy. Then he opened his showroom in Abu Dhabi.
That had been in 2007, just before the financial crash. The next year, the rumor was that Sylvestre was in real trouble, all his money tied up in stock he couldn’t sell. He had to lay off some of his mechanics. The banks wouldn’t lend him any cash to tide him over. He tried to sell some of the family’s property holdings, but there were no buyers. Then Sylvestre suddenly obtained some financing, waited out the recession and when the oil price went up his Abu Dhabi business turned into a gold mine.
“He’s the last of his line, which makes him the most eligible bachelor in Alsace,” Thomas went on. “He lost his parents when he was in university. They were both on board that Concorde that crashed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. So now he owns all the land and property and the car business. He’s got thirty mechanics working for him, and his collection of old cars is said to be worth more than the shopping malls.”
“Any idea where he found the money when he needed it?” Bruno asked.
“Not for sure, but there were rumors about some big Arab investors he’d gotten to know in Abu Dhabi. I don’t know if it’s true or if he found a bank to bail him out. Sylvestre had a lot of contacts in the financial world from his time at business school, INSEAD, outside Paris.”
“What do you know about that Indian friend of his, Freddy? How long has he been around?”
“I think he was involved in the Abu Dhabi venture from the beginning. He’s here in Alsace from time to time, and some people think that he and Sylvestre are a couple, but Sylvestre’s always been a man for the ladies. A couple of years ago there was a story that he was getting married to one of those titled German girls, a gräfin or something with a ‘von’ in her name. One of those glossy celebrity magazines had some paparazzi photos of them together on a yacht in Monaco during the Grand Prix. I don’t know if anything came of it. I’ll ask Ingrid, she knows more about those things.”
“Thanks, Thomas. That’s very helpful, and I’ll be sure to keep you informed of where we’re going with this.”
“Please do; the mayor will need to know if it looks like our town’s leading citizen is about to get arrested. Meanwhile I’ll keep this under my hat. And I’ll call you after I talk to Ingrid.”
“Right, give her my best.”
Madame Hugon was standing in the front garden when Bruno pulled up in his car. J-J had not yet arrived. He got out to greet her, and she said, “I’ll miss this garden. I planted those roses and laid out the flower beds. But I can’t stay here after this. Suspicious circumstances! It’s the last thing I ever expected to hear about Henri, such a gentle man. We had our differences, but we were married a long time and got very used to one another.”
“I know, I’m sorry to cause you this extra trouble,” he said. “There may be nothing to it. You know how the police like to be sure.”
She nodded solemnly, and then J-J’s car arrived, the forensic van close behind, and J-J clambered out shouting, “We’ve driven past this damn place twice already, and if I hadn’t seen your police van we’d have gone past again.”
“Commissaire Jalipeau, this is Madame Hugon,” said Bruno.
“My apologies, madame, and my condolences. Forgive my little burst of temper. May we come in? We’d better dress up first.”
He handed Bruno a snowman, police slang for the white paper overalls that forensics rules required, and pulled one from the back of his car to squeeze into it, grumbling about its inadequate size. Bruno and the rest of the team put them on and donned hairnets.
“Do I have to wear one of those ridiculous things?” Madame Hugon asked. J-J replied that so long as she wasn’t going into the room they were interested in, she needn’t bother. Her own traces would be all over the house, anyway. Yves, the head of the forensics unit, led her to his van to get an oral swipe for DNA and to take her fingerprints.
She finally led them in, and Bruno noticed at once that the place had been cleaned, or at least the dirty crockery in the kitchen had been washed and put away, and there was a smell of cleaning fluid in the sitting room.
“Have you cleaned the study as well?” he asked.
“No, I couldn’t bring myself to go in there again,” she said. “It’s as he left it, or, rather, as you left it. I cleaned the rest of the place the other day after you were here.”
“Did you touch his clothes?”
“Yes, I bundled them all up into a couple of suitcases and took them to Action Catholique. I checked there was nothing in the pockets, of course. There were just some papers, a supermarket bill and some receipt from the post office.”
“What kind of receipt? Do you remember? It could be important,” J-J asked sharply.
“I’m not sure, but it looked like the kind of thing you get when you send something by registered post. Henri was always careful to do that when sending reports or papers to his clients.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I must have thrown it away, maybe threw it into the fireplace or the bin. I really don’t know. Do you need me anymore, or may I go back to the garden? It’s painful for me to be here.”
“Of course, madame,” J-J said. “Could you let us have your birth and wedding dates, please? We’ll try those for the computer password, otherwise we’ll have to resort to special measures.”
She wrote them down for him on a pad, added her husband’s army number from his military service and went back to the garden to sit on a wooden bench, a balled-up handkerchief in her hand.
“Poor woman,” said J-J. He stood in the doorway after Yves opened the study, put the laptop into a plastic
bag and handed it to one of his colleagues, who returned with it to the van. Bruno leafed through the mail that Madame Hugon had piled onto a hall table. There was an electricity bill, a couple of catalogs and a history magazine wrapped in clear plastic with Monsieur Hugon’s name in the address box.
“I’ll check the fireplace, you check the garbage,” J-J ordered, and Bruno took a large plastic sheet from the pile of evidence bags that Yves had put by the door and emptied the contents of the kitchen bin onto it. Mercifully, there was little but orange peel and a banana skin, coffee grounds and some screwed-up papers: a supermarket bill; a bill from a coffee shop in Sarlat; and a post office receipt for registered mail, sent by Monsieur Hugon to a Monsieur F. Iqbal, poste restante, Strasbourg central post office.
“Bingo,” Bruno called to Jean-Jacques, and the chief detective hurried into the kitchen at a speed that belied his bulk.
“What have you found?”
“Sylvestre’s business partner, Freddy, the Indian racing driver, was Hugon’s client, sure enough,” said Bruno, showing him the postal receipt. “I’m sure he and Sylvestre are in this together, and they hired Hugon to find out about the lost Bugatti. Who but Hugon’s client would take away all the research notes and notebooks about the job? And who but the killer would have come here to Hugon’s house to take them?”
“I thought you were supposed to have searched this place when you first came here,” said J-J.
“I just had suspicions at the time,” Bruno said defensively. But the suspicions had been his, so it was Bruno’s responsibility to make sure all the evidence was gathered. “You’re right, I’m sorry. I should have looked more carefully at the time. No excuses.”
“So now you want to arrest them?” J-J asked.
“We have to question them. This makes them our prime suspects.”
“Okay, I accept that. But we’re not sure it’s a murder yet, not until the Bordeaux lab confirms Fabiola’s theory about cyanide poisoning. I’m hoping to get something from them by the end of the day, but I’m told it’s a complex process, so it might be tomorrow.”
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