“This is the best place in the region for croissants,” Bruno told Amélie. “Soon you’ll be a regular customer, just like all the rest of us.” He spoke too loudly for Fauquet to ignore him.
Suitably mollified, Fauquet put a complimentary chocolate biscuit onto each saucer and gave Amélie a croissant from the basket on the counter. “On the house,” he said. “Just so you know Bruno is right about my baking. You going to be here long?”
The interviewing technique of the veteran café owner would put most policemen to shame. Before the croissant was finished, Fauquet had learned Amélie’s name, her origins, her education, her current job and that her father was a teacher in Lyon. She had two elder brothers, one an engineer working at Air France and the other in the Ministry of Pensions, which established her in Fauquet’s eyes as a respectable young woman from the professional classes, and thus a suitable if somewhat unusual adornment to his establishment. There was only one black resident of St. Denis—Léopold from Senegal, whose market stall did a good trade in African cloths and belts, carvings and bead necklaces. Bruno was particularly fond of Léopold’s two sons, stalwarts of the collège rugby team and formidable tennis doubles partners.
Bruno steered Amélie out to the terrace where they could enjoy the spring sunshine and Bruno could set his ground rules away from Fauquet’s ears.
“I started at seven this morning, with a callout to an unknown woman who died falling from climbing a château wall. I’d just returned when the mayor called me in to meet you,” he began.
“Why was she doing that?” Amélie asked.
Bruno shrugged. “It was the middle of the night. She might have been drunk. My first job is to identify her, which could take some time.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Possibly, but it’s certainly suspicious. Someone else was at the scene but disappeared before we got there. I’ll take you there now, if you like; it’s on the way to colleagues I need to see in Les Eyzies and Montignac. We may have to go door-to-door to show photos of her. First, I’ll call on the gendarmes to brief them. I can introduce you at the same time.”
He passed over to her one of the printouts from his phone and a copy of Fabiola’s death certificate, and then went into the café to leave another printout with Fauquet. One of his customers might know the woman.
“The gendarmes are giving us trouble on this ministry project I’m on,” Amélie said on his return. “They don’t want our team monitoring them at all. They say we have no jurisdiction and even if they wanted to cooperate it would make their work more difficult.”
“Have you tried seeing it from their point of view?” Bruno asked. “I have to say that it will be difficult doing some of my usual work with you alongside me, starting with seeing my confidential informants. And then there are people who are friendly and who offer me coffee and cakes or a glass of wine and who talk frankly about things they know but who would hate to be considered as informants in any sense. If I took you along, I could lose those contacts, and they make up the heart of police work here where it’s all about knowing everybody.”
“I don’t want to make things tough, but I do have to do this job properly,” Amélie replied, with a hesitant smile. “I suppose I don’t need to put down names and addresses of confidential informants, or even to get close enough to listen.”
“If I were to ask you from time to time, and told you what I was doing, could you stay in the van, out of sight?”
She looked unhappy at the thought of this, so he asked, “Do you have your terms of reference, some form of letter saying exactly what is expected of you?”
She pulled from her bag a transparent folder. The papers inside had the familiar red, white and blue diagonal stripes of the justice ministry across the top corner. The relevant letter of instruction told her “to accompany the officer throughout the working period and keep a detailed and timed record of the officer’s work and movements, while staying as close as reasonable or possible without obstructing the policeman in the course of his duty.”
Noting that phrase “throughout the working period” Bruno realized that he could operate in his usual way without Amélie outside the formal thirty-five-hour week he was supposed to work. But he pointed to the last phrase about “obstructing the policeman.”
“As I read it, that means I can reasonably ask you to stay in the van. I’ll try not to do that too often. And now, let’s go say hello to the gendarmes, but I’ll stop on the way at a company that rents out gîtes to tourists and give them a photo to show their staff. They may recognize the dead woman.”
“I put her photo on Instagram and on Facebook while you were in the café, asking if anyone knew her,” Amélie said casually. “That may help. I hardly ever use it these days, but I’ve got over fifteen hundred Facebook friends, and I asked all of them to share the photo, so that will be thousands of eyeballs for you. Even more on Instagram.”
“You did what?” Bruno sat up in surprise. “I appreciate that you were trying to help, but you should have asked me first. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to put a dead woman’s face all over social media. What if a family member finds out that way? It would be quite a shock.”
She shrugged. “Too late now, it’s done. And I presume the priority is to identify her as soon as we can.” She paused, looking at him coolly. “Or are you just covering your resentment at not thinking of it yourself?”
“I’d hope I’m more professional than that,” he retorted, his tone crisp, and he realized he was glaring at her. He forced himself to soften his expression, aware that this was a professional relationship and he’d better make it work or the next two weeks would be miserable.
“The fact is I’m not very familiar with social media,” he said. “We’re not exactly at the forefront of the information age here in the Périgord. E-mails and searching the web are about my limit. Let’s hope your idea works.”
She surprised him with a quick grin that didn’t reach her eyes. “And let’s hope her nearest and dearest don’t see it first. I can see that you might be right about that.”
“And maybe it will work and we’ll save a lot of time,” he replied, hoping some kind of truce had been established.
“I couldn’t find you on Twitter,” she went on, not even looking at him, her face bent down over the screen of her phone as she tapped in some note or message. “And while the mairie has a Facebook page, the only reference it has to you is your phone number.”
She put her phone into her bag and looked up at him. “That’s not good enough, Bruno. I hope you understand the importance of social media in the future of policing. It’s the way most young people communicate these days. I think my report had better recommend that we set up courses for you rural policemen on how to use it.”
Bruno nodded politely, his heart sinking at the prospect. “Let’s see how your Facebook inquiry works out.”
Chapter 6
Traditionally the gendarmes of France had lived in military-style barracks. Founded after the French Revolution, the gendarmes were deployed almost as an army of occupation in rural areas, where the Church and the old ways remained strong, and distrust of the Revolution was fierce and sometimes violent. Gendarmes came under the orders of the Ministry of Defense and were a paramilitary force. They were never assigned to their home areas and retained a distinct separation from the communities they policed. Although a modest building, the St. Denis gendarmerie looked as if it had been designed to withstand a siege, and as with most such police posts, the yard and parking area behind it had long been sealed off from the public.
So Amélie expressed surprise to see the gates to the inside yard open and some young civilians playing a game of basketball with shirtsleeved gendarmes. She was even more surprised that the front door was wide open and the hallway decorated with colorful kids’ paintings from the local grade school. Balzac trotted in behind them as if he owned the place.
“Not your usual gendarmerie,” she said, sounding as thou
gh she approved.
“And not your usual commander,” Bruno replied. “Her name is Yveline and I think you’ll like her. She was on the last Olympics field hockey team and she’s well liked, even by the old guard among the gendarmes who were horrified at the thought of being led by a woman. Firm but fair, they say.”
Sergeant Jules was at his desk, the very image of the old guard gendarme, big and burly with a craggy face that seemed to say he had seen it all twice before and wasn’t much enjoying seeing it again. His grim exterior concealed a kindly nature and an affection for St. Denis that almost matched his devotion to the town’s hunting club. Under some of the more rigid commanders of the past, Bruno had only been able to retain relations with the gendarmes by going through Jules. But the old sergeant was Yveline’s greatest fan, and in return she had turned a blind eye to his skill at evading the regional headquarters’ attempts to reassign him to another district.
He greeted Bruno and Balzac cheerily, but his eyes widened when Bruno introduced Amélie as a colleague from the justice ministry in Paris, here to pay a courtesy call on the commandant. Jules glanced with dismay at the paintings, which would doubtless strike any Parisian bureaucrat as too messy and informal for the authority of the gendarmerie de la République!
“We got permission from the general in Périgueux, a special exhibition,” he stammered as Amélie stretched out a hand to him.
“I like it,” she said. “It makes a nice change from those boring public-service posters you usually see in these places. And it’s good to see your guys playing basketball outside.”
Yveline came out with a welcoming smile and led them into her office where a pot of coffee awaited them, more of the kids’ paintings on her wall. Balzac greeted her as an old friend.
“The mayor called to let me know you were on the way, and I’d like to add my own welcome,” Yveline said. “As you know, our leaders in Paris have decided not to cooperate formally with your project, but that won’t stop us helping as far as we can. I think it’s a great idea, and Bruno is a very suitable subject for your work. We work closely with him and depend heavily on his local knowledge and friendships, something that we haven’t always been good at.”
“Perhaps at some point I could have a very informal and off-the-record chat with you about how you see the future of police-gendarme relations. You seem to have a rather refreshing approach,” said Amélie.
“Maybe we could do it over dinner one evening at my place,” said Bruno, remembering what the mayor had said about the need to win over Amélie and knowing that a good meal always helped cement relations.
“That’s a good idea,” said Yveline. “Bruno’s a good cook, so we’ll be in for a treat.”
Amélie’s face broke into a smile. “And if I’m with you, Yveline, perhaps we may be able to drink a little more wine than the regulations usually recommend.”
“Maybe not if Yveline is driving,” said Bruno, grinning. “I could pick you up at the hotel and then get the pair of you a taxi for the run back to town. We’d better not start this project with any embarrassments. How about tomorrow night at seven?”
In the hallway Philippe Delaron was photographing the display of paintings under Sergeant Jules’s beady eye. Still focusing his camera, the Sud Ouest reporter spoke without taking his eye from his viewfinder. “Hi again, Bruno. Jules told me you were here. I sent in the photo from the château, and the picture desk likes the idea of asking the readers to solve the puzzle. Can you give me anything more on this dead woman, Bruno? Any idea yet who she is?”
Philippe turned and looked almost as surprised as Sergeant Jules had been to see Amélie.
“Well, hello,” he said, sticking out his hand and giving her a smile of practiced charm that had secured him girlfriends in most of the villages up and down the valley. “And who might you be, mademoiselle?” Automatically, he raised his camera to take a snapshot, a trick that Philippe had found usually worked with girls before.
Bruno put his hand in front of the lens. “None of your business, Philippe,” he said genially. A photo in Sud Ouest of Amélie visiting the gendarmerie might prove uncomfortable for Yveline. Philippe took it in good cheer; he and Bruno went back a long way. “And we have nothing new on the dead woman, which is why we’re asking you to run the photo in tomorrow’s edition.”
“It’s already up on our website,” said Philippe.
“But the only people who read that are you and your competitors, and very occasionally me.”
“So you’re not Bruno’s new girlfriend and you’re obviously not under arrest, which means that you must be something official.” Philippe was smiling at Amélie in his engaging way. “I’m Philippe, photographer and news reporter for Sud Ouest, a newspaper with a bigger circulation than Le Monde. And we’re much more readable. Are you going to be in town long?”
“Stop it, Philippe,” said Bruno. Amélie remained silent, her face expressionless. She seemed thoroughly unimpressed by Philippe’s chatty attempts at charm, however well they might work on the maidens of the Vézère Valley. Good for her, thought Bruno. “This is police business. I’m taking her to the place where the dead woman was found.”
“No point, nothing to see. I’ve just been there, and J-J’s boys had already taken her off to the morgue, and the count was closeted with J-J. I got a quote from the guy in the kiosk selling tickets. So, the usual routine, Bruno, let me know what you can, when you can.” He turned to Amélie and gave her a rather-more-sincere smile. “Don’t let Bruno frighten you. He’s got a heart of gold, really. He even kept me out of jail.” He waved and disappeared.
“You seem to have a special relationship with the local press, even though he does overplay the role of the eager young newshound,” she said as Bruno led the way up the rue de Paris, Balzac at their heels. He’d intended to show her the old streets of St. Denis, the medieval houses and fountain. But Amélie had something else in mind.
“What was it that Philippe said about your keeping him out of jail?”
“I’d rather not arrest people if there’s a better solution.”
“Tell me the story, just for my own interest,” she said.
“It was nearly ten years ago, not too long after I arrived in St. Denis,” Bruno explained. “Philippe was in his last year at school, and along with three friends he’d stolen the car of an elderly British resident to go joyriding. They were going too fast, crashed it on a corner, abandoned the car and fled, wiping their fingerprints from the steering wheel, gearshift and door handles. They thought they were being very clever.
“I’d kept an eye on Philippe as a young screwup and managed to get some prints from the lever that adjusted the seat. I went to see the Englishman, then to see Lespinasse at the local garage, and finally I called on Pascal the insurance agent. All this was before I went to the Delaron house to inform Philippe and his parents that he was in deep trouble and that I’d be taking him to the gendarmerie to be fingerprinted.”
“I thought you said you didn’t like to arrest people,” Amélie interrupted.
“The story doesn’t end there,” he replied. “The fingerprints matched, and Philippe was led down to the cells and left to stew while I had a beer in the nearby café with Sergeant Jules. Then I went down to Philippe’s cell and asked who the other boys were. Philippe said nothing. So I named two of Philippe’s usual cronies, one now a sous-chef at an up-and-coming restaurant in Bordeaux and the other who now works for a balloon ride business that’s very popular with the tourists. The third name I kept in reserve. Philippe refused to confirm their names, which I thought decent of him.”
“So he had not been formally arrested at this point,” Amélie said. “That means you didn’t have the right to take his fingerprints.”
“Right, and that’s why I said that I’d offer him a choice,” Bruno went on. “I could call the procureur and let the law take its course. As for the alternative, the Englishman liked his woodstoves. With the current price of firewood he was prepared
to forgive Philippe if he and his pals came in person to apologize, supplied him a winter’s worth of chopped firewood and undertook to wash and polish his car regularly for the foreseeable future. The insurance agent was prepared to forgo damages if the four joyriders over the coming year reimbursed his company the cost of the insurance payout. The garagiste, Lespinasse, was prepared to charge much less than his usual rate for the repair, since he and I both suspected that Lespinasse’s nephew Maurice had been the fourth youngster in the car.
“So four fundamentally decent if mischievous youngsters had learned their lesson and been kept out of the criminal justice system. It was a solution that not only gave me pleasure,” Bruno continued. “It also made me a number of friends, including Lespinasse, Pascal the insurer and the kindly English math teacher who had retired in St. Denis.”
“But that’s exactly what a sensible cop ought to do,” said Amélie. “Young boys are always full of piss and vinegar, but detention just makes them worse. Unfortunately that kind of a solution isn’t available for most of the young kids picked up these days for smoking weed or shoplifting. Can I use that in my report as an example of local police solutions? I won’t use your name.”
“I suppose so. Philippe talks of it often enough,” Bruno said. “You realize that it’s almost impossible for a gendarme to do something like that. They just don’t have the flexibility.”
“How do you mean?”
“The gendarmes have been given targets for so many arrests, so many fines and traffic tickets issued. It’s crazy. You don’t judge a cop by how many people he puts in jail. I’d rather judge them by the ones they keep out.”
“I agree,” Amélie said, “but for that to work you need cops who know the local people. Now you know why I picked St. Denis for my research project.”
He stopped in his tracks. “No, I don’t know why you picked us. You didn’t know that story.”
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