“What are you looking for?” Pamela called down to him from her seat on Primrose, her favorite horse. She pulled gently on the reins to stop Primrose from following Bruno. Primrose tried a tentative nibble on some of the new grape leaves, and Pamela turned her away.
“Nothing in particular,” Bruno replied. “Just the general condition of the grapes. They seem to be coming along.”
“When I first came here, all the rows of vines seemed to be neatly trimmed like soldiers on parade, and all the rows between them were weeded and bare,” she said. “It all looked much more tidy than the vineyards today.”
“That’s because we’re going organic, avoiding chemical fertilizers and sprays,” he said, looking up and grinning at her. An excellent horsewoman who had taught Bruno how to ride, she looked magnificent. “The vineyard may seem a little untidy, but organic wines are the future. The more life in the soil, the better the wine.”
Bruno remounted and they trotted over the low crest where Château Rock came into view, about three hundred meters away. The original medieval stone tower loomed over the two wings. One had been added in the seventeenth century and the other in the nineteenth. Oddly, the most recent structure looked to be the oldest part of the building, a mock medievalism on the outside and more modern comforts within being the fashion of the Third Empire. This was the wing where the Macraes put their guests and held their dinners and parties. Its broad terrace led to the swimming pool and tennis court. Beyond the court was the old barn, once used to dry tobacco. Now it housed the recording studio.
The family lived in the other, older wing, whose plumbing and bedrooms had been thoroughly modernized when Rod Macrae had first bought the place. This family wing opened onto a tidy but sprawling vegetable garden. Scaffolding had been erected, and the whole façade was evidently being overhauled and the windows repainted before the château went on sale. Bruno had expected to see at least one of the Macraes on the terrace, enjoying the evening sun over a glass of wine, but the place seemed deserted. Maybe they were out to dinner.
“There’s Félix with the rest of the horses,” Pamela said from behind him. Bruno turned away from the château to follow the direction of her finger to see the stableboy with a string of horses on a leading rein behind him. Pamela waved, nudged her heels in Primrose’s sides and set off at a brisk walk down the gentle slope to the hunters’ track below. Bruno gave Château Rock and the valley stretching below a final look and followed her to join the others.
Chapter 4
This wasn’t one of Bruno’s regular Monday evening dinners when he gathered with his friends at the riding school run by Pamela and Miranda. But the baron had been fishing half the morning and had called around to propose an impromptu supper of his catch. A bucket full of fresh trout stood beside the barbecue, which he and Jack Crimson, Miranda’s father, were stacking with dried vine twigs. From an upstairs bathroom window came the sound of children laughing and splashing and speaking the strange Anglo-French patois that Miranda’s two boys spoke together with the children of Florence, a local teacher.
Fabiola was on duty at the medical center until eight, but her partner, Gilles, had already arrived with a large bowl holding at least a kilo of fresh strawberries from their garden. He had some of the early season Gariguettes, but most of his offering were Charlottes and Bruno’s favorites, the small and intensely sweet and perfumed Mara des Bois. Gilles had embraced with enthusiasm the Périgord’s reputation for producing the finest strawberries in France. It was the only region in Europe to have its own trademark protection.
Balzac, Bruno’s basset hound, greeted his master’s return with his usual sonorous howl of welcome and trotted along at Hector’s heels until they reached the stables. Along with Félix, Bruno and Pamela rubbed down the horses, refilled their water troughs and mangers, changed in the pool house and had a refreshing dip in the swimming pool before rejoining the others. In the past, May had been too early for all but the most hardy to use the open-air pool. But Pamela had taken advantage of a new state program that subsidized solar panels and battery systems. With new panels now installed on all the roofs of the barns and stables, the riding school had energy to spare and sell back to the national grid and also to heat her swimming pool.
Jack had set the table on the terrace under the trellis of vines. Bruno looked to see whose wines Jack had bought on his latest foray into the Bergerac vineyards. His weekly research expeditions were now taking Jack to winemakers who were new to Bruno and his friends. So it was today. Bruno had heard of the sweet, golden Monbazillac wines of the Domaine de Pécoula, but he’d never tasted their dry white wines and looked forward to doing so.
Each one of them fell into a separate task without being asked, so accustomed were they to working together. Bruno took the bucket of trout into the stable and began to gut and clean them in the stable sink. Pamela had gone to the kitchen to slice lemons for the fish and to peel garlic and potatoes. Félix took the bucket of fish guts to the compost box. It had a sealable lid so the foxes couldn’t get inside. He buried the guts deep in the box and forked some grass cuttings on top.
“How is the new book going?” Bruno asked Gilles, who was preparing the strawberries he’d brought. They had first met during the siege of Sarajevo, when Gilles had been an eager young reporter for Libération and Bruno had been wearing the blue helmet of a United Nations peacekeeper. Gilles had left Paris Match to write books and freelance.
“It’s tough, when most people in France hardly know Ukraine is still a war zone. And most of the rest think Russians and Ukrainians are two different peoples, when half the Ukrainians have relatives living in Russia. Ukraine’s foreign minister was born and educated in Russia, and his father-in-law is the Russian general who seized Crimea. It’s complicated.”
“Politics usually are,” said Bruno. “But I thought you’d almost finished the book.”
“Me too, but events on the ground keep changing. I have to go back there for a week or two. I’m trying to arrange an interview with a guy called Stichkin, a judo friend of Putin when they were boys in St. Petersburg. Stichkin was born in Ukraine but counts himself as a patriotic Russian. He’s as rich as Croesus and I’m told he helped finance and organize the Russian takeover of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”
“Fabiola won’t like you going back,” Bruno said. He recalled Fabiola saying she’d first realized she was in love with Gilles when he was in Kiev covering the occupation of the Maidan by young Ukrainians protesting their pro-Russian president’s blocking of an association agreement with Europe. It had turned into a slaughter, with dozens of the protesters gunned down by mysterious snipers. For several frantic hours, Fabiola did not know whether Gilles had survived.
“She’s not happy about it, but she says she understands.”
“She says that because she loves you and knows that you want to get the story.”
“It’s more than a story, Bruno,” Gilles said sharply. “People here say Europe has known peace for seventy years, but it’s not true. You and I were in the Balkan wars in the nineties, and now we have the Ukraine war today. And all along the Mediterranean coast there are wars and revolts and refugees. Those Maidan shootings triggered everything,” he went on. “The Russian occupation of Crimea, the separatist war in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s first massive disinformation campaign on social media to try and put the blame on the protesters.”
“I remember the Russians leaking that recording they’d made of some high American diplomat saying ‘Fuck the EU’ to the U.S. ambassador in a phone call.”
“Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for Europe,” said Gilles, grinning now. “I remember thinking it was refreshing for people to hear how top officials really spoke to each other—and about each other. Anyway, I think we’d better join the others.”
Bruno had brought Pamela a dozen eggs from his chickens when he arrived to exercise the horses, and Mi
randa had hard-boiled them before rounding up the children for their bath. In the kitchen Bruno peeled the eggs, cut them in half and spooned out the solidified yolks. He chopped some allumettes, thin strips of smoked bacon, and fried them in their own fat while Pamela passed him some mayonnaise she’d made. He used a fork to crumble the hard egg yolks, added salt and pepper and two spoonfuls of Dijon mustard and then stirred in the bacon bits and the mayonnaise before spooning portions, the size of walnuts, into the halved egg whites. He set them out on a large plate and sprinkled a small amount of paprika onto the oeufs mimosa before taking them out to the terrace and putting the dish in the center of the table. He draped a dishcloth over the bowl to keep away any flies.
Félix came in with two new lettuces from the garden and a bowl of radishes, already washed in the stable sink. Jack placed the opened bottles of wine on the table with some jugs of water from the spring and then came a sound like a cattle stampede as the four children thundered down the stairs from their bath. They stood dutifully to be kissed by the adults and then dashed outside to find Balzac. A few moments later Florence and Miranda followed, their lipstick freshened and their hair tidy and not a trace of the sauna-like conditions and heaps of bubbles their children had enjoyed.
“I need a drink,” Miranda declared, and Bruno poured splashes of crème de cassis into half a dozen wineglasses, filled them with white wine and handed around the kir, their usual predinner aperitif.
“I have a message for you from the choirmaster, Bruno,” said Florence. “He needs to talk to you about the program for the summer concerts. We’re singing Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy for the Musique en Périgord concert, and he wants to know if that suits you for the open-air event as well.”
“I thought you were doing your standard program of Handel, Tchaikovsky and the Mozart piece, what is it, ‘Laudate Dominum’?” Bruno said, knowing how much Florence enjoyed singing the soprano role. “I think people like the old favorites.”
“I tend to agree, but you’d better discuss it with him. And now that the pool is warm enough, when do you plan to start teaching the children to swim? Remember, you promised them.”
They arranged to meet on Sunday morning when Bruno would join them for breakfast at eight.
Gilles’s phone rang out with the opening bars of the Piaf song “La Vie en Rose.” He answered, talked briefly, put his phone away and reported that Fabiola had a late patient and they should not wait. Bruno began sawing off slices from the big round tourte of bread, and the children were called to the table. The baron laid all but one trout on the barbecue and joined them, asking the youngsters if they recalled the lesson he’d given them on how to eat a fish while avoiding the bones. Their mouths full of fresh bread and oeufs mimosa, they nodded silently, and dinner was underway.
Bruno looked around the table at his friends. The baron he had known for more than a decade, since he’d first come to take up the job of policeman at St. Denis. They had met at the rugby club, again at the tennis club and then at the hunters’ club, three of the crucial associations that helped bind together the community of St. Denis.
Jack Crimson he had known slightly for some years, at first accepting his claim to have been a boring civil servant and diplomat enjoying his retirement in France. It was only in subsequent criminal cases, the first after Jack’s home was burgled, that Bruno had learned he had been more than just a diplomat. Crimson had retired after running Her Britannic Majesty’s Joint Intelligence Committee and had contacts with senior figures in security and intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic. One of them, to Bruno’s surprise, had turned out to be General Lannes, from the staff of France’s minister of the interior, who appeared from time to time in Bruno’s life when matters of state security erupted in the peaceful Périgord.
When he’d first met Pamela, she was known locally as “the Mad Englishwoman” who parked her horse in front of Fauquet’s café and did the crossword puzzle of the previous day’s Times over a croissant and coffee. She spoke unnervingly correct French and watered her horse in the river at the end of her morning rides, dressed English-style in riding coat and jodhpurs with her red-gold hair spilling out from beneath her riding cap. It was after Bruno had lost Isabelle, the woman he still thought of as the great passion of his life, that Bruno had come to know Pamela better and started their initially happy but later interrupted affair.
The interruption had been Pamela’s idea. She insisted he needed to find a woman who would, unlike her or Isabelle, settle down with him and raise a family. Bruno had agreed, wondering whether such a paragon would ever appear who combined maternal instincts with the fiery spirit and independence of Isabelle or Pamela. When such a perfect woman failed to appear, Pamela had welcomed him back to her bed but only at times of her choosing.
Bruno’s eyes lingered on the last of the grown-ups at the table, Florence, the single mother of the two toddlers Dora and Daniel, whom Bruno adored. He had met her as a downtrodden divorcée. She was working as a quality controller in a local truffle market for an odious boss who harassed her. Learning that she had a degree in chemistry, Bruno had helped her to find a job teaching environmental science at the St. Denis collège. Her confidence had soared since. Florence had launched the school’s computer club and been elected to the regional council of the teachers’ union. She was now on the mayor’s list for the next council elections, which would make her into one of Bruno’s bosses.
They had just begun to clear away the plates from the main course when a horn tooted and Fabiola’s Renault Twingo turned into the stable yard. She parked and walked briskly toward them declaring she was starving before kissing everyone and sitting down to devour the last two oeufs mimosa. The baron rose to put her trout on the still glowing embers of the grill, and Jack poured her a glass of white wine, which she finished in three gulps before holding out her glass for more.
“Sorry I’m late. One of the usual local hypochondriacs,” she said. “These oeufs are delicious, Bruno, and your wine, Jack. What were you all talking about?”
“Food, wine and horses,” Pamela replied. “The essentials of a healthy life.”
“So you haven’t heard the gossip about the Macraes at Château Rock?” Fabiola went on. “I’m told they’re getting a divorce and selling their home.”
“I was about to mention that to you, Pamela, just when Félix and the others showed up,” said Bruno.
“I wonder how much they’ll want for it,” Pamela asked.
It was remarkable, thought Bruno as the discussion went on, how fascinated people were by the price of properties that had nothing to do with them. As they were all leaving, he took Fabiola aside to ask her about Gelletreau signing Driant’s death certificate.
“Professional courtesy means that I can’t possibly comment, Bruno,” she said crisply. “Driant was not my patient, but it’s clear that he had heart problems. Gelletreau told me that the approval for the pacemaker he’d recommended finally came through on the day of the funeral. Why do you ask?”
She and Gilles were hovering by their car, poised to leave. Bruno explained briefly the concerns of Driant’s children and the unusual choice of the expensive new retirement home.
“The one near Sarlat?” Gilles asked. “I’ve been there. They have what they call a literary salon, but it’s really a book club. They invited me last month to talk about my last book and sign some copies. They gave me a great dinner. It’s an impressive place, feels like a stately home, beautifully restored, and the library where I spoke was well stocked.”
“I’ve heard of the place, too,” said Fabiola. “One of the doctors on their board came to see us with a glossy brochure. Apparently they were visiting all the doctors and clinics in the region, trying to drum up business by claiming they were the only place in the area offering full medical services. They even invited us to lunch there to take a look at the facilities. I think Gelletreau went.”
“He’s not known to turn down the offer of a free lunch,” Bruno said, grinning.
“Gelletreau may be getting on in years, but he’s not a bad doctor,” Fabiola replied in a no-nonsense voice. “In fact, he’s a very good doctor. He’s had a lot of experience, and he genuinely cares for his patients, checks with the pharmacies that they are taking what he prescribes. And he still makes house calls, which is more than you can say for a lot of doctors these days.”
“I’m not criticizing your colleague,” Bruno said, choosing his words with care. “Gelletreau is my doctor, and I have no complaints. But he tends to focus on the obvious—remember that case when he said it was a heart attack and you found out it was cyanide poisoning? That’s why I’m wondering how much of an examination he conducted before saying that Driant had died of a heart attack.”
“Come on, Bruno. An old man with heart trouble, on beta-blockers, about to get a pacemaker, what more do you expect?” she asked rhetorically. “There was nothing that sounded at all suspicious about the death, and from what I heard of the state of the body when Gelletreau found it, I’m not sure I’d have probed any deeper. As for the retirement home, maybe the old man was so concerned about his health that he decided he’d rather go to a place with on-site facilities to take care of him. That seems perfectly understandable to me.”
“I’m told Driant was a bit of a ladies’ man, and I found some pills in his bedside drawer that looked like Viagra. Could that have affected his heart?”
“Maybe. Who prescribed them?”
“No pharmacy label. They could have been mail order.”
The Shooting at Chateau Rock Page 4