‘I haven’t seen it but I think I know what it’s about.’
‘The Brigadier knows you’re behind it. And there’s a rumour that there’s something coming in Le Monde.’
‘I don’t understand why he thinks I’m involved. Gilles talked directly to Jacqueline Morgan. Her book is finished and she’s looking for publicity. I know she’s written something for Le Monde but it’s up to them to decide what to do with it.’
‘Don’t be coy, Bruno, not with me. And I don’t care whether her story runs or not, but there are aspects of this that you don’t know. Can we meet?’
‘Did the Brigadier tell you about the difference of opinion between him and me at our last meeting?’
‘Yes, and that’s partly what I want to talk about.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in Périgueux. It needs to be discreet, so can I come to your place?’
Bruno checked his watch. ‘Alright, let’s say five this afternoon.’
They rang off and he went back to Pamela, who greeted him with a question. ‘Are you absolutely certain that your corpse is the man you think it is? The head has been destroyed so how did the brother identify him?’
‘They’re doing a DNA test and the usual fingerprints. He’d served a prison term, so they’re on file. We’d have used dental records but as you said, the head was smashed.’
‘But right now you’re assuming that your dead man is who you think he is and not the brother. Am I right? What if your corpse is the brother and the man you think is the brother is in fact the crooked antiques dealer and also the murderer?’
Pamela had been doing too many crossword puzzles, he thought. ‘If it’s the crooked antiques dealer who’s alive, why would he have led me to his hoard of stolen goods? And he must assume that we’ll check the fingerprints. That’s routine.’
‘Who was it called you?’
‘It was about Gilles. His piece on Jacqueline’s nuclear secrets is on the Paris Match website.’
‘Are you trying to avoid telling me that your caller was the person you refer to as my favourite French policewoman?’
He nodded, feeling guilty and reminding himself that he should never underestimate Pamela’s powers of perception.
‘Will this Paris Match story mean trouble for you?’ she asked.
‘Maybe, I don’t know. As long as the Mayor stays in office, there’s not much they can do, beyond taking my special phone away, and I wouldn’t mind that at all. Life was a lot simpler before the Brigadier had me on speed dial.’
‘Presumably Isabelle wants to see you about it.’
He nodded again and warily scanned her face. She looked neither cross nor suspicious, simply thoughtful.
‘Have you looked into this Arch-Inter group you mentioned? If they have offices in California they must be a big operation. Wouldn’t they have to fill in some kind of customs form if they ship goods overseas?’
‘Not within Europe. Fullerton could bring in and take back vanloads of antiques to Italy or England with no problem. For Russia, he’d need a customs declaration, and for America they’d have to go by container, so there’d be records. The art squad can handle all that, they do it all the time.’
‘Pass me my laptop. Fabiola brought it.’ She asked him to plug it into the wall socket and inserted the little plug that connected to the Internet through the cellphone system. While she booted up, he took the opportunity to visit the men’s room, his uniform provoking the usual range of curious and worried glances.
‘This Arch-Inter firm is pretty big in the States,’ she said when he returned, gesturing for him to look over her shoulder. ‘That’s quite a showroom they have in Santa Monica and they’re promising regular new deliveries of English and European antiques. Hmm, I wonder …’
She typed in a Google search for Companies House, London, accessed the website for the register of British companies and typed in Arch-Inter. Up came the name and a number. She tapped twice on the number and up came a list of documents filed by the company, each of which could be downloaded for one pound.
‘We don’t even need to pay. Here are the names of new directors added to the board. Surprise, surprise, look who we find.’
Over her shoulder he read the names of the new directors, Paul Murcoing, Brian Fullerton and Edouard Marty, all added on the same date three years earlier. Francis Fullerton had been a director since the company was formed in 1996. There was another English-sounding name, Alan McAllister, which Bruno recognized from the California branch of Arch-Inter.
‘The plot thickens,’ she said, sitting back and looking extraordinarily pleased with herself.
‘You should be doing my job.’
‘Too easy,’ she replied with a grin. ‘And you might want to check whether Murcoing had a company credit card. If it’s attached to a British bank he could have access to money that your systems aren’t tracking.’
‘Mon Dieu, we never thought of that …’ He wondered how Pamela knew about such matters and then remembered her account of spending hours with lawyers and accountants, sorting out her mother’s estate.
‘Now you need to get your juge d’instruction to check the annual reports to see just how much money the company is making,’ she went on. ‘Above all he needs to check the share register and find out how many shares each director owns. That’s how you can tell who’s really in charge.’
‘With Fullerton dead, the question now is what happens to his shares. Presumably that’ll be in his will,’ Bruno said, reaching for his hat. ‘I have to go and see Ardouin, the juge, and then relate all this to J-J.’ He bent down and kissed her. ‘Did anybody ever tell you that you’re as brainy as you’re beautiful?’
‘Never in quite this context, with me lying in bed and a man who ought to be much more grateful just about to don his hat and leave me to languish.’
He kissed her again. ‘Close your eyes and think of justice.’
*
Delayed by his meeting with the juge and the need to brief J-J on the startling news that Paul Murcoing had been a director of Arch-Inter, Bruno collected Balzac and then drove to his home. He saw no sign of Isabelle’s rental car when he pulled onto his land. But seeming to know she was there, Balzac scooted from the back of the Land Rover and round the side of the house to the chicken coop where Isabelle was sitting on a tree stump in the late afternoon sun, watching the birds and smoking. She tossed her cigarette aside as Balzac leaped onto her lap and used his back legs to pedal his way up to lick her neck. Holding the puppy in both hands, she rose and offered the cheek Balzac was not monopolizing to be kissed.
‘You walked here?’ She was dressed like a hiker in walking boots and windcheater and somehow still managed to look chic. A light rucksack was on the ground beside her.
‘I parked at the hunter’s hide on the far side of the ridge and walked the trail. You should be impressed that I remembered the way.’
‘Why the discretion?’
She gave a slow smile. ‘I could say I was thinking about your reputation or maybe I just fancied a gentle walk through the woods to see how my leg had recovered.’ She took a paper-wrapped bottle from the rucksack and passed it to him. ‘But I’m also bringing a message from the Brigadier along with this peace offering. He says you passed the test.’
Did the Brigadier never stop playing games? He opened the tissue paper and found a bottle of Balvenie, the Brigadier’s favourite scotch. ‘It didn’t seem like a test to me.’
‘I know, he put me through a similar interview. The mood in Paris is poisonous right now with the election so close, people worried for their jobs, lots of documents being shredded, files being sanitized. It’s hard to know who to trust.’
‘That’s the life you chose, Isabelle.’
She nodded. ‘It’s what I thought I wanted, what I still want, if only it weren’t so damn political all the time. It’s like living in Machiavelli’s kitchen. Anyway, it looks like I could be getting that European job. I’m on a short
list of three and I’m the only candidate who speaks English and has experience of international liaison. I go up to The Hague for the formal interview on Friday morning. You ever been to Holland?’
Bruno shook his head. He knew there were discount flights from the airports at Bordeaux and Bergerac.
She gestured to his house. ‘I see you finally put the windows in the roof. Will you show me?’ She picked up Balzac to carry him with her.
Bruno led the way inside, remembering how he had talked of his plan as they had lain in bed together, sharing that special territory of new lovers as they spoke of plans and dreams and explored possible futures together. Always practical, Isabelle had said he’d have to knock down walls to install stairs. So Bruno was shyly proud of the solution he’d found, to put the staircase into the small room he’d used as a study, fitting his desk and books beneath the stairs and not taking space from his sitting room. He was a little nervous of her reaction. When she climbed the stairs ahead of him, her limp was still noticeable.
‘It’s great, Bruno,’ she said, putting Balzac down to explore as she looked into the smaller room to the left and the much larger room to the right and then poked her head into the small shower room he’d inserted between them. They were still empty of furniture. She looked again into the smaller room.
‘The children’s room you always planned,’ she said. Her voice was flat.
‘That depends if there’s more than one, then they get the big room, or maybe both of them.’
‘Aren’t you planning to move up here yourself?’
‘Not yet, at least,’ he said. ‘There’s the painting to finish, blinds and curtains to choose. And I like that bedroom downstairs.’ He did not have to add that it was the bedroom that they had shared.
‘How will you get the beds up that staircase?’
‘I just have to get the mattresses up. The beds I can build myself.’
She walked across to the window, opened it and looked out at the view across the steadily rising ridges, fields and woodlands and not another house or road in sight. Then she turned, leaned against the sill and looked carefully around the big room as if furnishing it in her mind. He wondered if she was thinking of what might have been, but she pushed herself off from the windowsill, flashed him a determined smile and headed down the stairs, speaking over her shoulder.
‘I’ve got something for you as well.’
Balzac was too small to get down the stairs without tripping over his ears so Bruno scooped him up and followed her. Outside, she went back to her rucksack and pulled out a stiff cardboard envelope and handed it to him.
‘It was her we were interested in, not just Crimson,’ she explained as Bruno pulled out a grainy surveillance photo of Jacqueline taken at a hotel entrance. She was with a tall and slender man with a thick head of flowing white hair, a man instantly recognizable to anyone who read French newspapers. The next photo showed the two of them embracing in the shadows of an entrance courtyard to what looked like a very plush apartment building.
‘That’s your boss,’ Bruno said, finally realizing why anything to do with Jacqueline could set off alarm bells in Paris.
‘That was before he became a minister, five or six years ago when he was still mayor of Orléans and she was teaching at the Sorbonne. The building is where he kept a discreet pied-à-terre on a fancy street behind the Parc Monceau.’
‘Did the RG get photos like this of everybody?’ he asked. The Renseignements Généraux had been famous for their voluminous files on the left-wing parties, but he wasn’t so very surprised that they had been keeping an eye on fast-rising politicians of all stripes.
Isabelle shrugged. ‘Who knows if they were watching her or him? Does it matter? They both turn out to be people of interest, particularly now.’
Bruno was trying to work out the political implications. ‘So now your Minister is worried that Jacqueline’s book might rebound on him and he takes the blame if they lose the election?’
‘That’s why he needs to find someone else to take the rap. That’s one of the first laws of politics,’ Isabelle replied. ‘And if the blame somehow falls onto the Americans or the British and their shadowy secret services trying to manipulate our elections and blacken the names of our patriotic politicians … I don’t need to spell out the rest, do I?’
She took the cardboard folder and the photos back from Bruno. ‘You understand that I can’t leave these with you. I’d better go. Will you walk back to the car with me, you and Balzac?’
He printed some names on a page of his notebook and gave it to her, explaining the results of the web search at Companies House. ‘We need to see a copy of the will Fullerton made in England. J-J is trying to get them through the usual channels. If you can find out faster through your Scotland Yard connection, it may help. And I’d like to hear if anything is known about these people, directors of this Arch-Inter company.’
‘I thought you already had your suspect, this Paul Murcoing who’s one of the directors. Or are you following one of your hunches?’
‘Never leave potentially useful information unchecked – isn’t that what you used to tell me?’
She shouldered her rucksack and began to walk around his chicken coop to pick up the track into the woods. Bruno saw her grimace and her limp was suddenly more apparent. He caught her up, took her arm and turned her round and steered her towards his Land Rover.
‘I’m getting a bit pressed for time,’ he lied. ‘I’d better drive you back to your car.’
She gave him a sharp look but agreed, saying: ‘I’ve something to tell you, and it might be easier to tell you in the car when I don’t have to look you in the eye.’
‘If you want to tell me that it’s all over between you and me, I’ve been expecting it,’ he said, carefully keeping his voice neutral. ‘We’ve both known long enough that there’s no future for us. You’re not coming back to Périgord, even if you give up the career in Paris.’
To get to her car by road would mean driving two long sides of a triangle, so he was taking the short cut along the bridle way and the hunters’ track. It meant driving slowly but they would still be there in a fraction of the time and this was not a conversation that he wanted to prolong.
‘We’ve lived with that,’ she said. ‘This is something else.’ She paused and they drove on in silence, Balzac resting quietly on her lap, quite content just to lie there and feel her hand stroking his back.
‘I don’t really know how to begin, because I know that as soon as I say this it really is over between us.’ Her voice didn’t sound like Isabelle at all, none of that energy and eagerness he knew so well. ‘There’ll be no more surprise reunions, no more fantasies of having you for a weekend in Paris. It’s final. You’ll never want to speak to me again.’
He rounded a bend and saw her car parked by the hunters’ shack, perhaps a hundred metres ahead. He had a sudden presentiment of what she might be about to say and felt a great hollowness begin to gather somewhere deep in his gut.
‘I have done something unforgivable,’ she said as he drew up beside her car. Her head was bowed and she seemed to be speaking to Balzac more than to him, or perhaps making her farewell to the puppy she had always called ‘ours’.
‘It was that night before the summit, the night before Gigi was shot, when we were together.’
Bruno was sure of it now. Her voice seemed to be coming from a long distance away. He wasn’t sure that he could speak.
‘I got pregnant and I didn’t tell you.’ He heard her open the car door and felt her place Balzac gently on his lap but he couldn’t turn his head to look at her. ‘I had the abortion and never told you. I think I knew that you’d talk me out of it, or you’d try, and that was a conversation I couldn’t face.’
Her hand touched his cheek and he felt the vehicle shift as her weight left it. ‘I know what this means to you. I’m sorry, Bruno.’
He sat immobile, stunned, barely registering the way she limped to her car without lo
oking back, unlocked it, climbed stiffly in and drove away. It was Balzac who brought him back to reality, clambering up the steering wheel to get close enough to lick Bruno’s chin before tumbling back onto his lap.
24
‘Why did you race off like that? I said I was sorry, that I knew it wasn’t your fault. Pamela told me all about it.’ Fabiola was breathing hard as she brought her mare to a halt beside Bruno.
‘It’s nothing to do with you. It’s me,’ he replied. ‘I had a bit of a shock today so I felt a need to clear my head with a gallop. I’m the one who should apologize.’
‘What shock? Pamela’s fine, as good as new.’
‘It’s not that. Forget it.’
Even during the ride, Hector racing beneath him faster than they had ever gone together, the finality of Isabelle’s revelation still stunned him. There had been a new life and now there was not. It was not just the wind of his reckless ride that was blurring Bruno’s eyes. It would have been kinder of Isabelle never to have told him, but that was not her way.
Fabiola eyed him curiously. ‘So if it’s not me you’re angry with, let’s not take it out on the horses. Can we go back more slowly? Victoria’s too old for a ride like that and I don’t think Balzac enjoyed it.’
Bruno looked down to where the puppy was huddled up as deep inside the binoculars case as he could go, staring up at Bruno with wide eyes. He was being selfish, Bruno chided himself, and foolish to think that he could escape dealing with this by pushing his horse and his own horsemanship to their limit. He turned Hector and began to walk him back along the forest ride, Fabiola falling in alongside but too wise to speak. He knew that some unpleasant nights lay ahead of him, failing to sleep or waking in the small hours and thinking of the way Isabelle had looked at the extra rooms he had built into his house and what the sight and reality of them would have done to her.
But that was for the future. He had a job to do, a murderer to hunt down, a suspicion to pursue and friends like Fabiola to whom he owed more than this surly silence. At that moment, duty itself vibrated for his attention from the phone at his belt. He answered and heard J-J’s voice.
The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6) Page 21