‘Kidnapping case a few years ago, we set up a similar tracking system for the plain-clothes guy who carried the ransom.’
‘And how did that turn out?’
‘The plain-clothes guy lived, took one bullet but got their pickup team. One of them led us to their safe house and the hostage team did the rest. We saved the kidnap victim.’
‘Don’t be so modest, chef,’ said Josette. ‘You were the one that took the bullet.’
‘And if I hadn’t been given the ankle holster, I’d be dead. Remember that.’ J-J looked at his watch. ‘Right, let’s run through the check-list. Radios, phones, tracker shoes, ankle gun, pen and notepad. Anything else?’
Josette checked her list. ‘A file for the documents he’s supposed to be carrying. Phone cards in case they need to use a call box.’ She looked at Bruno. ‘Don’t you need a leash for the dog?’
‘You’re not taking the dog along?’ J-J said.
‘I’ve got the leash in my back pocket. Paul Murcoing loves animals but was never allowed to have one as a kid. His aunt told me. This gives me an edge.’
J-J shook his head and rolled his eyes at Josette. ‘Let’s go.’
*
Bruno lay hunched and sweating under a blanket in the rear footwell of the Peugeot. Even with the passenger seat as far forward as it would go it was a squeeze, particularly with Balzac squirming on his chest. He had an open phone line with J-J as Crimson came back from the phone booth.
‘The next phone booth is at Campagne in fifteen minutes,’ he said, and drove back to the small roundabout by the Centenaire hotel and turned off on the Campagne road.
‘OK, we heard that,’ said J-J over the phone that Bruno held to his ear. ‘We’ll take the lower road past St Cirq so he won’t see you’re being followed. We can park at the place where they sell foie gras, we should still be in range.’
Another uncomfortable ride and then a further hot and stuffy wait until Crimson returned from the Campagne phone booth and reported: ‘He says I have to drive on to the next phone box, in Audrix, by the Mairie. I take a left on the road to Coux and then a right at the top of the hill. He must have scouted this all out carefully.’
‘Putain, he’ll see us coming up that long hill if we follow,’ said J-J. ‘Josette, get Jofflin to drive up from Coux, go past Audrix and then he can wait at that cheese shop just below the village. We’ll go the long way round through St Denis and use the parking lot at the big cave. And see if they can get a trace on the Audrix phone booth.’
Another drive up a long hill with endless bends until Bruno felt his right leg start to cramp. He braced it against the door and tried to bend himself double at the waist so he could straighten the leg. Realizing something was wrong, Balzac wriggled up Bruno’s trunk to lick his face and then found his way out from under the blanket. Audrix was one of the highest villages in the region, a good place for a watcher with binoculars to follow the progress of approaching cars.
‘Are you alright?’ Crimson asked.
‘Just a cramp, I’ll be fine.’
‘Sorry, we’re almost there. If I’d thought, I’d have rented a bigger car. By the way, I told Paul I have my dog with me. He asked what it was and I said a basset hound puppy. He laughed.’
At Audrix, the wait for Crimson to return was considerably longer and J-J told Bruno over the phone that he could not hear the mike. His voice was nervous and J-J kept asking what was the delay and why was Crimson not returning. Bruno replied that he had no answer. He could see nothing and it would be too risky for a head to suddenly appear from the rear seat of the Peugeot.
‘It’s probably taking time for Crimson to write down the directions,’ Bruno said into his phone. ‘It means we’re on the last lap. Wait, I hear footsteps. That’s probably Crimson coming back to the car.’
The driver’s door opened and Crimson spoke as he settled himself and attached the safety belt.
‘I’m to drive on down the hill, cross the railway line and then take the first road on the left, at a sign marked Tennis,’ he reported. ‘Are you hearing this alright, J-J?’
‘Yes, it’s faint but we can hear you. Speak the directions slowly and Bruno, could you hold the phone out from under the rug? We should be able to hear it better.’
Crimson repeated the directions. The terrain was all familiar and Bruno followed the route in his head. He’d visited the tennis club, had even played on its courts in tournaments, and he’d warmed up on that rugby field before playing against the local team. He knew the track to the motocross circuit, as part of a route he’d occasionally taken on horseback.
‘We’ll do the switch immediately you turn left at the sign for the tennis club,’ Bruno said. ‘There’s good cover there from hedges. Leave the engine running and wait for J-J.’
‘I heard all that,’ said J-J. ‘But be sure Crimson stays in hiding when he’s out of the car. I’m coming but I don’t want to be there immediately, it would look too suspicious. And the chopper’s on its way. I’ll hold it at Le Buisson until I hear from you.’
‘Turning now to the tennis club and stopping,’ said Crimson, and Bruno felt the weight shift as he left the car. ‘Good luck.’
29
Bruno clambered over the seats and behind the wheel, closed the door and drove on into the parking area. He turned off the engine, left the key in the ignition, picked up the file on the passenger seat and caught sight of himself in the mirror. His hair was a mess from being beneath the blanket so he ran his fingers through to straighten it. He climbed out of the Peugeot and freed Balzac to scurry around the car. The dog lifted his leg against a wheel, darted to the tennis-club building and sniffed around the door. When Bruno began to walk, certain that binoculars would be watching, Balzac followed.
The shoes he’d been given felt odd, as if one heel was higher than the other, presumably for the tracker. It was a warm day and the flak vest was already damp against his singlet from being beneath that damn blanket. Bruno checked his watch when he passed the small vineyard. He’d been walking five minutes. Another eight minutes took him to the railway crossing, where a pair of Alsatians barked at Balzac when he went up to their fence to make friends.
Bruno smiled wryly to himself as Balzac, looking puzzled at his harsh welcome, scuttled back to his master’s side. They continued to follow the route he’d been given. As he turned up the gravel path that led to the woods where the rendezvous would take place, Bruno wondered whether that might be an omen for his own reception. What might he expect from this encounter? He went through the traditional soldier’s catechism; he either secured his objective of persuading Paul to give himself up, in which case there were no worries, or he didn’t. If he failed, either he’d walk away free, in which case there were no worries, or he wouldn’t. If he did not walk away free, either he would not take a bullet, in which case, no worries. If he was shot, he’d either recover which meant no worries, or he wouldn’t, in which latter case he wouldn’t be able to worry.
The crude fatalism cheered him a little, but that was not the calculus that had sent him trudging up this winding slope in the hot sun. Bruno’s knowledge of Paul Murcoing had gone beyond the crude caricature of a violent gay psychopath who had butchered his lover. Bruno saw him as a human being, close to his sister and his grandfather, and as an accomplished artist who refused to do cheap sketches for cash and preferred more serious works. Paul possessed an easy charm that worked on women as well as men, and on dogs too, Bruno recalled. He had volunteered at a hospice for the dying. And just like his grandfather, he was obsessed with discovering the truth about the Neuvic train. Bruno could not make all this fit with the simplistic category of killer. Paul must know the game could not go on much longer and he had his sister to think of.
Up to Bruno’s left was a hill topped by a water tower and a mast for cellphones. Was that the flash of sunlight on binoculars he saw? It would be a perfect location to track Bruno as he walked to the rendezvous and keep watch for any suspicious cars. Ten more minutes took
him along the dirt track and Bruno started the climb through the woods to the enormous clearing which had been turned into a motocross circuit.
As he looked at the plunges and humps and muddied curves of the circuit, he felt certain that Paul would be using one of the motorbikes designed for such tracks. It would take him cross-country and through woods in a way that would laugh off any pursuit. Why hadn’t he thought of that and advised J-J to have some motards on standby? He checked his watch; it had taken him twenty-five minutes and he’d gone at least two kilometres, probably maximum range for the tracker. The trees would cut that even further.
Jofflin’s car would be the closer of the two. There was no other discreet place nearby for J-J to park and no proper roads, only dirt tracks that would challenge even his own Land Rover. This was an area Bruno knew. He’d hunted here, ridden over the land on horseback with Fabiola and Pamela and even come looking for mushrooms with the Baron. The nearest road in the other direction was three or four kilometres away and J-J’s car could not handle the rough forest tracks. Bruno would have to assume he was on his own.
He got to the concrete stand and waited, Crimson’s disposable phone in his hand. This would be the difficult moment, when Paul would be expecting the English accent that he already recognized and which Bruno could not possibly hope to impersonate.
The phone rang and he put it to his ear and began working his mouth as though saying ‘Hello’ again and again but keeping silent. He heard a male voice speaking English and carried on miming his response. He took the phone from his ear, looked at it, shook it, returned it to his ear and began once more miming his ‘Hello.’ Faking a bad connection was his only chance.
Across the clearing perhaps two hundred metres away he saw a flash of movement through the woods. Then he saw it again, further along through the trees, and realized it was someone on a mountain bike, wearing a cycling helmet and shorts. Very clever, he thought. Nobody could catch a mountain bike in these woods and they could avoid all the roads. And cyclists were so common that they could probably risk the Gendarme patrols, and go cross-country again if they had to.
There was a sound behind him and he turned to see another mountain bike, the rider in helmet, shorts and a long-sleeved cycling vest in green, coming slowly down the slope from the woods towards him. The cyclist stopped, perhaps thirty metres away, feet on the ground but poised to pedal swiftly away. From a waist pouch, the cyclist took an automatic pistol and pointed it at Bruno. It was big and flat, an automatic, probably the Browning.
No matter how good his training or how thoroughly he had tried to think through this moment, Bruno learned anew that there was nothing quite like the adrenalin shock of a gun being aimed at him. He told himself that the vest was designed to stop a nine-millimetre round and tried to repress the thought that an untrained shooter usually fired high and there was no vest to protect his head.
The file in one hand, the phone in the other, Bruno ignored the tremor in his legs and raised his hands above his head as Balzac wagged his tail and trotted up to the bike to sniff at the cyclist’s feet.
The second cyclist came out of the woods to Bruno’s right and paused, perhaps twenty metres away. He took off a small backpack and removed a slim black weapon, its magazine sticking out sideways from the barrel. Bruno recognized the Sten gun. After he’d learned that it was missing from Fuller-ton’s collection, Bruno had looked it up. Thirty-two rounds, nine-millimetre bullets, a tendency to rise when fired and very prone to jam. The cyclist held the butt in his right hand, finger on the trigger, and his left hand on the magazine. That meant he didn’t know the gun well. Holding it there meant pressure on the magazine which could alter the angle at which the bullets were fed into the chamber and cause a jam.
‘It’s not him,’ shouted the first cyclist, the one holding the automatic. It was a female voice. ‘I know this guy, he’s a cop from St Denis. It’s a trap.’
‘Bonjour Yvonne, bonjour Paul,’ Bruno said, his arms still high and his eyes fixed on the gun that threatened him. He was conscious that his voice was a notch or two higher than usual and there was a chill lump of fear in his belly. ‘I’ve come to ask you to give yourselves up before anybody gets hurt.’
‘Did you see any cars, anybody else following him?’ Paul asked his sister. His face was covered in a fashionable stubble. The sleeve of his cycling vest had ridden up enough for Bruno to see the beginning of the Maori warrior tattoo.
‘No, but it’s got to be a trap.’
‘The bikes are a good idea,’ said Bruno, straining to keep his voice calm even though his throat was dry. He settled back on his heels to stop the quivering in his legs. ‘Even if there were any cars, you can get away again. I’m hoping you won’t do that. There are no charges against Yvonne. Think of her future.’
‘Go back up the hill and keep watch,’ Paul told his sister. He pulled back the bolt to cock the Sten, holding it steady and aiming low. Bruno’s heart thumped as he realized that he was now one pull of the trigger away from all thirty-two rounds of the magazine hitting him in less than three seconds. ‘You expect me to believe that you came just to tell me to give up? Have you got the documents?’
As Yvonne stood on her pedals to cycle back up the hill, Balzac trotted across to Paul and made a friendly bark of greeting. Paul ignored him, not taking his eyes away from Bruno for a moment.
‘There are no documents, Paul. We cooked up that page as bait to get a chance to talk to you. I knew about your grandfather’s war record, about the Neuvic train, about his suspicions.’ The words came out in a rush and he knew that he was not sounding persuasive, even to himself.
‘They aren’t suspicions. He spent half his life trying to find out what happened to that money. What about the contents page you sent me from the archive? Was that faked too?’
‘Not entirely,’ he said, straining his ears for the sound of a helicopter or even a car engine for some indication that he was not alone facing a submachine gun. He had seen the way the bullets could stitch their way up a human body. ‘Most of the documents exist, they’re just not declassified yet. But I’m told they don’t provide much evidence for your theories. The British really didn’t know what happened to the Neuvic money.’
‘You’ll have heard that from Crimson, the guy the papers call the spymaster. So he’s in on this as well.’
Paul’s voice was even, not carrying any tone of anger or frustration. Bruno hoped he would stay this calm.
‘Crimson got involved when you burgled his house. But we got all the stuff back from Fullerton’s place in the Corrèze. We very nearly caught up with you both there.’
Paul nodded. ‘So what brings the St Denis policeman into this?’
‘Apart from the burglaries being on my turf, I was at your grandfather’s deathbed. He had one of the Neuvic banknotes in his hands as he died. I’m keeping his Resistance medal for you and the photos he had of himself in the Groupe Valmy.’
Bruno’s legs had stopped trembling and he felt the first glimmer of relief that this encounter was turning into a dialogue, just as the book on hostage negotiations said it should.
‘One of the photos was of the Neuvic operation. And after he died I found some photos of you and him together. I’ve got one in my shirt pocket. I thought you’d like to have it. Can I get it out and show you?’
‘Just keep your hands in the air. Does that mean you were the one who organized the funeral?’
Bruno nodded. ‘Your grandfather got a good send-off. Half the town was there with a military honour guard and we sang the Chant des Partisans. Did you get close enough to see anything of it?’
‘Not as close as I’d have liked. But I heard the music.’
‘I went to see your aunt, Joséphine.’
‘So I heard. You bought a couple of my pictures, got them cheap, just as you did with the Neuvic banknotes.’
‘I paid what I was asked.’
Paul considered that and nodded. He glanced down at Balzac, who was sni
ffing around his ankles. ‘That’s a nice basset, what’s his name?’
‘Balzac.’
Paul smiled, that same smile Bruno had seen in the surveillance photo at the printing shop. Bruno understood why the shop girl had been charmed.
‘Tell me, why did you bring Balzac?’
‘Because I know you like animals.’
Paul laughed. He looked calm and self-possessed, with none of the nervous stress Bruno had expected. Bruno found that at last he was able to swallow as his own tension began to ease.
‘You’re a strange kind of cop. What’s your name?’ ‘Bruno, Bruno Courrèges. I’m the town policeman at St Denis, as your sister said.’
‘Bruno, I’ve heard that name before. I seem to remember seeing something in the papers about pulling a Chinese kid out of a fire, and that thing in the big cave, was that you?’
Bruno nodded. Paul eyed him curiously.
‘How did you get on to me?’
‘A postman remembered the van and the France-Chauffage sign you faked, so I went to the sign shop, where they had a security camera. Then I took your picture to the Zone Industriel in Belvès and met one of your admirers, a woman called Nicolle. She recognized you from the photo. So then I had a name and we began to check known addresses and went to see your aunt and began looking for Yvonne.’
Paul laughed. ‘I haven’t thought of Nicolle in a while. So it was all because a postman saw the van. Would that have been somewhere near the place where Francis was killed?’
‘On the track to the house. He was leaving after delivering some post, you were heading towards it. I presume Francis was still alive then.’
‘Assume all you like.’ He paused and then cocked his head as if remembering something. ‘How long have you had this job?’
‘Ten years, and yes, I was the cop who came to investigate the attack on that holiday place ten years ago when you and Edouard Marty were beaten up with the older English guys. You were the one taken to the clinic with the broken nose where you gave a false name and address, and either Francis Fullerton drove or he was the one with the broken arm.’
The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6) Page 26