Bruno had checked the map of the commune on the wall of his office to remind himself of the district that was just beginning to become familiar. There was no swimming pool there that he could recall. He phoned Géraldine, who ran the bar at the local tennis club and lived in that area. A disused farmhouse had been restored and turned into a gîte over the winter and a pool installed, she told him. It was mainly rented by British visitors, some of whom she’d persuaded to take out temporary membership at the club. Géraldine gave him directions which he traced on the map with his finger and then set off.
It took twenty minutes to get there, a pleasant drive along country lanes, fields of sunflowers giving way to grazing cows in the meadows and then to sheep as the road climbed and the grass thinned out. As he rounded the last bend on the dirt track that wound up the hill the scene appeared to be peaceful. The stone farmhouse had a new roof of red tiles and the gravel forecourt was so new and white it almost hurt the eyes.
The front door was closed and he strolled around to the rear, calling out ‘Y’a quelqu’un?’ Then his eye was caught by the trail of blood that ran over the terrace of flagstones and led to a swimming pool at the rear of the house. Shards of glass glittered in the sun from an overturned drinks trolley and at the pool steps he saw brownish swirls of blood hanging in the water. To the right of the pool was a white Range Rover with British plates, its windscreen starred and cracked and the headlamps smashed.
A voice challenged him in English. He turned to see a middle-aged man in very tight swimming trunks standing at the sliding glass doors that led into the house. He had blood on his chest, a swollen lip, two black eyes, and he was holding a pair of fire tongs. Bruno saluted, addressed him as Monsieur and said he’d had a phone call to say there had been trouble. Bruno remembered thinking he’d seen faces like that after a particularly tough rugby match. He’d asked if Monsieur needed driving to the medical clinic.
‘An argument. Private. Much drink,’ the man said in broken French. Bruno looked past him into the house where another middle-aged man was helping a naked youth to limp his way down the stairs from the upper floor. Despite the bloodied nose and battered features, Bruno thought he recognized the young man. At the sight of Bruno in uniform, the youth turned as if to climb back up the stairs again. Bruno gently took the fire tongs from the first man’s hands and stepped inside the house. The two men on the stairs had also been beaten, with red marks on their bodies as if they had been hit with sticks. The older man, blood trickling from his mouth and nose, winced as he stood upright. The buttocks and thighs of the young man flared an angry red.
A pair of jeans and a T-shirt lay on a chair by the glass doors, a wallet peeking from one of the pockets. Bruno took it out, opened it and saw that the young man had a French ID card, age eighteen, with a name he knew, Edouard Marty. Just a few weeks earlier, Edouard had been at the tennis club with schoolmates, celebrating their graduation from the lycée in Sarlat. Edouard was going on to university, planning to study architecture at Bordeaux.
‘What happened here, Edouard?’ Bruno had asked, and the middle-aged man helping Edouard put a hand on the boy’s shoulder as if to stop him turning to answer.
‘We were enjoying a quiet day by the pool when we were attacked by a bunch of thugs with pickaxe handles,’ the man said in good but accented French. His friend in swim trunks tried to interrupt but the one on the stairs was too angry to be silenced.
‘They wore stocking masks over their heads. They beat us up, smashed the cars and drove off with two of our friends. Two more of us have gone to the clinic. One has a broken arm.’
Beside him, Edouard sank to his knees on the stairs and lowered his head, his shoulders heaving with sobs.
After a brief but angry exchange between the two Englishmen in their own tongue, they refused even to give their names to Bruno. It didn’t matter; Bruno found registration papers in the Range Rover along with a copy of the rental agreement for the gîte. But it was clear that one had told the other to say nothing. Nobody had answered when Bruno asked if they had all been at the pool when the attack had come or whether some of them had been indoors. They wouldn’t even confirm how many attackers there had been, or if any of them had spoken. Edouard would not look at Bruno and remained silent throughout, shaking his head at Bruno’s offer to take him to the clinic, or to call his parents to take him home.
And there it had ended. Uncertain of the legal rights of foreigners, Bruno had felt powerless and frustrated. He had been alone; the Gendarmes had been too busy with a traffic accident to be able to send any support. When Bruno reached the medical centre, one Englishman had been treated for a fractured arm and a young Frenchman for a broken nose. The French youth had not shown his carte vitale, which would have qualified him for free treatment. Another Englishman in an Audi with smashed headlamps had paid the medical fees and driven them away.
When Bruno went back to the gîte the place was empty, the crumpled drinks trolley and broken glass tidied away. An envelope containing two thousand francs had been left on the kitchen counter, the words ‘for damages’ scrawled on the outside. Edouard called his parents that evening to say he was joining friends for a vacation in England. His parents were too embarrassed to answer Bruno’s questions in anything more than grudging monosyllables. Bruno had no statements, no formal complaints and no real basis for an inquiry, as the magistrate told him when declining to take up the case. What he should have done, Bruno now knew, was to seize the visitors’ passports and their car keys, confiscate Edouard’s ID card and say they could only have them back when they had made formal statements at his office.
Bruno knew that an injustice had been done. He had checked on the age of consent for homosexuals and established that Edouard and his English friends had committed no crime under French law. Edouard being gay had neither shocked nor offended him; he had been too long in the army to confuse anyone’s character with what they chose to do in bed. He could have let the matter drop, but Bruno had felt outraged that such deliberate violence could with impunity be inflicted on his territory.
He talked to several of Edouard’s friends and tried to track down the other young Frenchman who had been treated at the clinic. It turned out he had given a false name and address in Bergerac. After a few days, all he had were the names of the four Englishmen who had rented the gîte and those of two of Edouard’s schoolfriends who had decided to take a sudden camping holiday in Spain. One was the son of a local stonemason and the other the son of a dairy farmer, both of them tough-looking men in their late forties whom Bruno knew from the rugby club. They claimed to have been fishing and drinking together on the afternoon when the attack had taken place.
‘From what we hear, a bunch of foreigners were trying to turn some local kids into nancy boys,’ the stonemason had said when Bruno tracked him down to the house he was restoring. He would not meet Bruno’s eyes. ‘Seems to me it’s the foreigners you ought to be locking up.’ The other builders at the site had backed him up, muttering that there would have been more than a few bloody noses if they had known what was going on.
There was little more Bruno could do, but he called on Joe, his predecessor as the town’s policeman, and was shocked at his advice.
‘What’s the problem?’ Joe had asked. ‘A couple of English queens get taught a lesson. They won’t be messing around with any more of our young lads. It’s not the first time something like this has happened and it won’t be the last. I know there’s a lot of talk about community policing these days. Well, this is community justice and you interfere with that at your peril.’
He was equally shocked when his Mayor congratulated him briefly as they filed out at the end of a staff meeting at the Mairie. ‘Glad you managed to tidy up that mess without any fuss,’ the Mayor had said, with a reassuring squeeze of Bruno’s arm.
*
As he turned into the driveway that led to Pamela’s house, Bruno’s mood lifted when he saw her with Fabiola and his own riderless horse leaving the stables. He s
ounded his horn in a double peep, parked, and went up to take Pamela in his arms as she swung down from her mare. She kissed him squarely on the lips.
‘If you must stand me up at the airport and then turn up late for the horses, I suppose a murder is just about acceptable as an excuse,’ she said as she hugged him.
‘Murder be damned, it’s good to see you,’ he told her.
She put her hand to his cheek, kissed him again and turned. ‘We’re heading for the ridge. Catch us up. Or there’s no dinner for you.’
She slid from his arms and put her foot back into the stirrup to mount her horse. She tapped Bess’s sides with her heels and trotted away while Hector ambled across to nuzzle at Bruno’s chest, expecting his customary apple. Bruno stroked his horse’s neck and gave him his treat. In the stables he greeted his puppy Balzac and installed him in the binoculars case that he strapped around his chest. He donned his riding boots and helmet, changed his uniform jacket for a windcheater, mounted Hector and set out after the two women.
The day had been too busy for reflection about the reunion with Pamela. Theirs was an affectionate friendship, based on a common love of food and horses and convivial evenings that often enough ended in bed. But she had made it clear that she had no wish to deepen their relationship, nor to make it permanent. Bruno wasn’t at all sure what he wanted. He was comfortable in her company and content in their time together but there was the constant thought that he wanted something more. It was not as simple as saying that he wanted children and she did not, that he wanted to experience a full family life. Bruno knew that he also wanted passion in his life, and for all the delight he took in Pamela and the sensuality she could display and share in private, passion and emotional tumult were not what he knew with her.
That brought his thoughts back to Isabelle, mercurial and tantalizing, fierce in her ambition and her determination to carve a brilliant career. Sometimes moody, sometimes capable of a deep and embracing calm, she stirred him in ways that were so profound he felt himself exulting in the great gift of knowing her. But they each knew, however often fate and sexual need drew them back together, that there was no future for them; that she was as committed to the potential and power of Paris as he was locked in the deep peace of the Périgord.
Isabelle’s phone call had come as he was driving to Pamela’s to say that her train had just reached Bordeaux and she had rented a car to drive to her hotel in Périgueux. Might he join her for dinner? Or perhaps your Mad Englishwoman has returned, she had added, with a touch of something in her voice that was part frost and part mockery.
‘She’s not English and she’s not mad,’ he had replied, as he always did. The initial nickname the inhabitants of St Denis had given to Pamela had almost disappeared, except for Isabelle. It was one of the few things about her that he found tiresome; such a casual dismissal of another woman was beneath her.
‘I’ll see you at Crimson’s house tomorrow, or we could meet for coffee in St Denis and I’ll take you out there,’ he had said.
‘We’ve got the GPS address. See you there early tomorrow.’ And she had rung off, leaving him to speculate what she had meant by ‘We’ as he allowed Hector to pick up the pace and canter after the two women. Hector quickly narrowed the gap, treating Bruno to the delightful sight of his two friends bouncing in their saddles. Pamela looked especially magnificent, with her trim waist and that red-bronze hair flaring out behind like a fox’s tail.
Hearing the approach of his horse’s hoofs, Fabiola glanced back, waved, and pushed her mare to a canter and then all three of them launched into a gallop along the lower slope of the ridge. Bruno heard Pamela whooping with joy as she rounded the edge of the woods and sent rabbits scurrying and a flock of crows exploding noisily from the trees. Balzac gave one of his eager little barks, just deep enough to hold the promise of the full-throated bay of a mature hound. For the first time that day, Bruno felt at ease with the world.
His mood continued through the soothing chore of rubbing down and feeding the horses and the ceremony of Pamela’s return and the gifts she had brought. There was a bottle of Lagavulin for him, the magnificent scotch whisky that he had first tasted at Pamela’s table, a cashmere sweater for Fabiola and food for them all. She had picked up a leg of Scottish lamb, a whole smoked salmon and some Lanark Blue cheese made of ewe’s milk that could only be found in Scotland. The lamb had been roasting in the oven since Pamela’s return and the rich, luscious smell pervaded the kitchen.
Fabiola set the table and then went into the garden to pick the early strawberries and the first of the haricots verts. Bruno opened the wine he had brought, two treasures selected from his cellar to go with the food he was sure Pamela would be bringing. For the smoked salmon, he’d brought a Bergerac white from Château de la Vieille Bergerie. For the lamb, he had sacrificed one of his last remaining bottles of the Grand Millésime 2005 from Château de Tiregand. The wines of Bergerac, he believed, were one of France’s better-kept secrets. While half of him looked forward to the day when they took their place alongside the great vintages of Bordeaux, he also feared that he’d be less and less able to afford them.
The wines ready and the glasses polished, Bruno went out to the garden to dig up some potatoes. Back in the kitchen he washed and peeled them as Fabiola beside him topped and tailed the beans and Pamela began slicing the salmon at the big round kitchen table. Glancing up from the sink, Bruno could see Pamela’s swimming pool and a corner of her grass tennis court, whose lumps and dips persistently frustrated his attempts to roll them smooth. The vivid green of late spring covered the slope that rose to the woods and the ridge that looked down on St Denis.
‘Shall I collect some mint?’ he asked. Pamela had introduced him and Fabiola to the British custom of eating mint sauce with lamb. ‘Not today,’ she replied. ‘We’re trying something different, something a little magical.’
She laid the slices of salmon onto the plates, black pepper and fresh lemons beside them, and began to slice the big round loaf of Meyrals bread she had bought on the way back from Bergerac airport. Then she took from her bag a small dark jar and chanted in theatrical tones: ‘Rowan tree and red thread, keep all witches deep in dread.’
‘My mother used to say that every time we had rowan jelly,’ she said. ‘The rowan tree is meant to be good magic, you find it often in churchyards. We used to bring a bough of rowan indoors on Good Friday to keep away witches and the dark forces. And my father liked to squeeze a little rowan juice into his gin and tonic. Made into jelly, it goes well with lamb, so I brought some for you to try.’
The potatoes and the haricots were bubbling in their saucepans as Pamela put a meat thermometer into the lamb and pronounced it done. She left it on the stove top to rest, took off her apron and ushered them to table.
‘Welcome home,’ said Bruno, pouring out the white wine.
‘And welcome to you both,’ she said, clinking the glasses and giving the good news that her mother’s estate was now settled and her financial future looked reasonably secure. Her worst fears had not been realized; her mother had not left everything to the Battersea Dogs’ Home or some charity that rescued old donkeys. She would be able to stay in St Denis with her friends and her horses and never have to see her ex-husband again.
‘So this is a very good day,’ Pamela declared, and turned to Bruno. ‘And now I want to hear all about this murder.’
‘You mean that under English law someone can bequeath their property to anyone they like? In France it has to go to the family heirs.’
‘Yes, I know, it’s part of your Code Napoléon. But come on, let’s hear about the murder.’
The bare facts were easily told. But it was hard to describe the growing scepticism of Yveline the new Gendarme and J-J. Valentoux had gazed at them helplessly when they asked him to prove he had not killed Fullerton the previous day. The man was clearly in shock, still stunned by the sight of his friend so brutally killed and now aghast at the further stress of hostile questioni
ng. He had insisted that he’d been at home in his Paris apartment overlooking the Buttes Chaumont on the previous evening, reading the manuscript of a new play. He had no visitors, had seen nobody and so could not prove that he had not driven down to St Denis, murdered the Englishman, driven back to Paris and then returned in the morning to establish an alibi. He was taken to the Gendarmerie for questioning and detained overnight under garde à vue.
‘If it’s not him, we have nothing, no clue, no motive, no idea of a suspect,’ J-J said. Bruno replied that short of fingerprints or DNA evidence, they could not even be sure the dead man was Francis Fullerton. J-J had nonetheless asked Bruno to call the British consulate in Bordeaux while he sent a query to the British police through the usual informal channels.
‘Two gays, they have a quarrel, crime of passion,’ J-J sniffed. ‘That’s the working hypothesis, although I suppose whatever trendy young magistrate gets the case will say I’m prejudiced.’
‘Not if Yveline says it first,’ Bruno grinned. ‘Anyway, you are prejudiced. We both know that.’
‘That goes for most cops my age,’ J-J grumbled.
The only new piece of evidence came from the dead man’s trouser pocket; two paper receipts that Bruno had missed in his initial search. Fullerton had twice on the previous day filled his van with diesel, once in Calais and then from a station at the shopping centre outside Périgueux. J-J had sent a detective to check the tapes from the latter’s security camera. Since the receipt gave the time of purchase, it was a simple matter to wind back the tapes, and the man filling his van was wearing the same clothes as Fullerton and looked sufficiently like him for a preliminary identification. After filling his van, he had gone to the air pump to check his tyres and had opened the rear doors, revealing that the van had been full of furniture.
‘So that’s the second mystery, apart from the murder,’ Bruno said over the smoked salmon. ‘What happened to the furniture? Did he deliver it somewhere before he picked up the keys to the gîte or was it stolen by his attacker? And why did he arrive a day early? Valentoux seemed certain that they had arranged to meet today, and Fullerton had said he’d get an early train through the tunnel and planned to arrive here early afternoon today.’
The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6) Page 5