“Very good,” he said, tasting it. “How many did you buy?”
“A mixed case, half whites, half reds. We can try the red with the fondue.”
“By the way, did you spend much time in the Arab world?” Bruno asked. “Something came up today, a woman fell to her death at Commarque while trying to paint some slogan on the wall.” He showed Jack the picture on his phone. “A colleague who’s good with computers could only find that combination of letters in Arabic.”
“Could be Arabic, but why write it in roman letters? E-mail that photo to me and I’ll send it to one of our old camels who might be able to help.”
“Camels?”
“It’s what we call diplomats who specialized in the Arab world.”
Jack’s voice rose in volume to compete with the thunder of children’s feet rushing down the stairs from their bath before racing away to the stables in search of Balzac. Their mothers had evidently spent a few moments in front of a mirror before descending, renewing their lipstick and brushing their hair.
“I don’t know how you both manage to look so good when you’ve just been playing sheriff to four little outlaws,” he told them, kissing each in turn.
“Easy,” said Florence. “We just told them if they weren’t good, we’d turn them over to you. Now, where are our glasses of wine?”
Crimson poured out two glasses, and Bruno handed them to Miranda and Florence, both blonde, but there the similarity ended. Miranda was plump, with a complexion so fresh and clear that she could only have come from England’s cool, damp climate. Florence was slim, and although she was roughly the same height as Miranda, she looked taller, with an erect posture and prominent cheekbones that gave her face a classic elegance.
Bruno remembered how he had first seen Florence, an overworked and underpaid single mother, after a difficult divorce, her hair uncared for and her clothes deliberately dowdy to fend off the unwanted advances of her employer. But now, widely respected as a teacher and in a job she loved, with a decent income and good friends, Florence was a different woman. She went shopping in Bordeaux with Pamela, which meant she dressed well. Pamela had also steered her to a good hairdresser, and along with Fabiola and Miranda they all went to a Pilates class and played tennis together regularly.
A generous woman, Pamela, thought Bruno, turning to offer her a glass. He saw that she was watching him quizzically, as though she had been reading his thoughts while he observed Florence and Miranda chatting together. He had not shared Pamela’s bed for half a year and more, but he smiled at her with genuine affection. Along with Katarina, the Bosnian schoolteacher who had died in the vicious little war in her country, and the enchanting Isabelle, who had given him the most glorious summer of his life, Pamela was one of the three women who had claimed his heart and shaped his life.
“You’re looking well,” he said. “Running a riding school agrees with you.”
“Word has flashed around that you have a new escort in tow, from Haiti, I hear,” she replied, amusement in her voice. Bruno knew his town well enough to work out the path the gossip had taken, from Dr. Gelletreau in the bistro to his colleague Fabiola and from Fabiola to Pamela. “Might you bring her here to dine with us one evening?”
“You’d be in for a treat if I did. She sings like an angel, jazz or classical. I’m hoping to book her for one of our riverside concerts this summer.”
Pamela raised an eyebrow and gave a cool smile but said nothing. “She’s a magistrate, now working at the justice ministry,” Bruno went on, somehow feeling the need to explain. “She’s here to research how the police and gendarmes might work better together. And she seems to know almost as much about computers as Florence.”
“You do have a way of surrounding yourself with interesting women, Bruno. It’s one of your most attractive traits,” Pamela said, putting a hand on his arm and calling them all to the table.
They sat watching while Fabiola added the shredded Gruyère and Emmentaler cheese to the simmering white wine and lemon juice, stirring steadily as the cheese melted. She sprinkled in some cornstarch and then a spoonful of mustard powder and a pinch of nutmeg. On a separate burner, she was boiling some cubes of potato and slices of carrot. The children liked to try different vegetables on the ends of their forks, dipping them into the fondue. Bruno went to the door to call the children as Fabiola spooned their fondue into a smaller pot, then added two glasses of kirsch to the separate fondue for the adults.
“I heard from the forensics team in Bergerac,” Fabiola said in the brief moment of peace before the children returned. “The dead woman had certainly been climbing with a cheap rope. They found more of the nylon strands in the flesh of her fingers. What’s more, she was about ten weeks pregnant.”
Chapter 9
The weekly market of St. Denis would soon be celebrating seven centuries since its foundation by royal charter, and as he gazed around the familiar stalls, Bruno wondered how different today’s wares might be from the offerings of those initial markets. Ducks and chickens, eggs and spices, fish, fruit and vegetables would have been sold just as they were today, he guessed, although there wouldn’t have been either tomatoes or potatoes in the centuries before Christopher Columbus set off to find the New World.
Certainly people would have been selling knives and plows, spades and other tools, and leather goods from coats to harnesses for horses and oxen. The village square would have housed a separate market for livestock, trading or auctioning cattle, pigs and sheep. Visiting merchants would have sold cloth and the occasional silk for the nobility. Just like today, wine stalls would have offered the same free glass to taste. Anyone making a sale would have taken only gold or silver in exchange; in those days there was no paper money and no credit. Bruno was certain that the original markets would have been patrolled by somebody like him, a town watchman to keep order, settle disputes and ensure that tolls and taxes were duly paid.
Walls would have surrounded the town, as lookouts watched for marauding bands of soldiers. The attackers could have been English or French; it would depend which particular king was supposed to hold St. Denis at the time. Flemish mercenaries and Genoese crossbowmen fought for both sides. There would be a call to arms, the closing of the town gates and an old soldier like Bruno to organize a hasty defense while someone on a fast horse was sent to seek help from the feudal lord, the Sieur de Limeuil, in his hilltop fortress downriver.
Today a bureaucrat from Paris was casting an eye over the market from the steps of the mairie. But in those days, the bureaucrat would not have been a young woman of Haitian origin whose taste in clothes had half the town staring. Today she was in bright red capri pants with a royal-blue shirt and a vast white scarf that seemed to be wound a dozen times around her head and tied in a generous loop around her neck. She looked more than ever like the French flag.
“Bonjour, Bruno; bonjour, Balzac,” she greeted them, looking extremely pleased with herself. “I think I tracked down your mystery woman.”
The interior ministry had heard back from the American State Department, whose facial recognition software had identified a score of possible candidates from its visa application photos. Bruno was impressed. But that was just the beginning, said Amélie. Her Facebook friends had done even better. She had a positive identification from a British friend in that country’s Stop the War movement who recognized the woman in the photo as a fellow activist in Israel’s Peace Now group. The Israeli woman had spoken at a conference in Geneva, and Amélie had tracked down a name.
“Your unknown woman is an Israeli named Leah Ben-Ari,” Amélie declared, a note of triumph in her voice.
For a moment, Bruno was too surprised to respond. He shook his head. “That’s amazing, Amélie,” he said sincerely. “Thank you. I can’t tell you how impressed I am.”
“All you have to do now is contact the Israeli consulate in Paris, send the photo and her name and ask them to follow up, check with next of kin and so on.”
“Yes, of cours
e. Have you had breakfast?”
“Not yet. I was waiting for another of those excellent croissants.”
Because of market day, Fauquet’s was more crowded than usual, but when Bruno held open the door, Amélie sailed in as if assuming that everyone would make way for her, and so they did. She greeted Fauquet and said she had come for another of the best croissants she had ever eaten. This ensured instant service, and a table by the window became miraculously free.
“You have to tell me what you think of my pain au chocolat and my brioche,” said Fauquet, placing a basket before her that was filled with his delicacies, along with two large coffees.
Amélie took a bite first of brioche, chewed thoughtfully and washed it down with coffee. Then she took a bite of a swirl of pastry stuffed with raisins, followed it with a taste of pain au chocolat and finally demolished her croissant. She finished the coffee, called for another cup and applauded a blushing Fauquet as he came from behind the counter again to serve her.
“You’re a master,” she said quietly, before polishing off the rest of the basket, leaving a few crumbs of brioche for Balzac. The café had fallen silent, watching her efficient dispatch of the pastries. Bruno suppressed a smile, knowing that she was doing it deliberately, to ensure that she would be known henceforth in St. Denis not as that bureaucrat from Paris but as the person who polished off Fauquet’s entire collection at a single sitting.
“What now?” she asked, licking crumbs from her fingers. “Are you going to call the Israeli consulate first?”
“No, I’ll inform J-J. That sort of liaison is his job. May I see the other photos from the Americans? Are they on your phone?”
She scrolled through them slowly, and each of them focused on one image that looked uncannily like the dead woman in the photo. She was French, Leah Wolinsky, born in Paris, age thirty-eight.
“Same first name,” said Amélie. “That’s interesting.”
“Could be a coincidence. Still, we’ll let J-J sort it out. Send all that to my e-mail, and I’ll forward it to him. I’d be grateful if you could put me in touch with this Facebook person who identified Leah. I need to ask her some questions. I’ll phone J-J from my office rather than broadcast it all over the café.”
They were about to leave when Bruno saw another of the regulars put the café’s copy of Sud Ouest back on the counter. He opened it to see a front-page headline, “Mystery Woman Death at Templar Château.” Beneath a color photo of the daubs on the castle wall, the paper asked, “Can You Identify This Mystery Graffiti?” A smaller headline beside Bruno’s photo of the dead woman’s face asked, “Was the Holy Grail Hidden in Commarque?”
The count was quoted on previous incursions by Templar enthusiasts, and there was a sidebar on the history of the château, including some vague reference to a local legend of ghosts, and another about the Templars. The only reference to Bruno was his request for any member of the public who recognized the dead woman to contact him. Bruno grinned and shook his head. Philippe had certainly gone to town on the story. It must have been a slow news day.
Beaming with satisfaction at the success of her research, Amélie perched on the old-fashioned radiator beneath the window in Bruno’s office while he called J-J.
“First time I’ve found a Paris bureaucrat doing something useful,” J-J grunted down the line. “What we need is some lead to the person who was with her. Still, it makes a nice change from all that Templar crap in the newspaper. I had the prefect calling this morning. It seems his wife read some novel about them and counts herself an expert. Perhaps I would be kind enough to keep her informed. Christ, I have enough trouble with her over that pedophilia case. She finds the whole idea of recovered memory to be fascinating. She’s probably trying to remember why she ever married that nuisance of a husband. Anyway, thanks for this. Have you had any calls yet from anyone local who recognizes this woman Leah?”
“Not so far. I’ve circulated the two names, Ben-Ari and Wolinsky, around the hotels and rental agencies. Do you want to talk to Amélie? She’s sitting right here.”
He handed over the phone, saw Amélie smile and then she said, “You’re very kind to say so, Monsieur le Commissaire. And yes, Bruno is taking good care of me. He’s even offered to cook me dinner this evening.”
She handed back the phone, and Bruno asked if the archaeologists could start work at Commarque, or was it still a crime scene? J-J said they had what they needed, and the work could go ahead.
“Will you keep an eye on things, Bruno?”
“I’ll drop by every day, but we might need some extra police presence if the Templar enthusiasts start turning up to watch.”
“Ask the gendarmes. We’ve got nobody to spare.”
J-J hung up, and Amélie called her Facebook friend in London, put her phone on speaker and said the French police had some questions about the person Leah might have been climbing with.
“I don’t know her that well,” came the reply. “But she was living with a Palestinian guy, a historian she called al-Husayni. She posted some photos of the two of them together in Ramallah. But I had no idea she was in France or if she was with him.”
Bruno introduced himself in his primitive English and asked, “Did she ever do alpinism?”
“He means mountain climbing,” Amélie interjected.
“I don’t know about mountaineering as such, but she liked hill walking. We went hiking together for a day in Switzerland after the peace conference we’d attended.”
“Did she ever talk about the Templars?”
“Not that I know. Why don’t I just go through all the Facebook posts I got from her and share them with you, Amélie? Then you’ll know as much as I do, and you can ask to contact her other Facebook friends and her contacts on WhatsApp. She used that more for messages. I know she worked as an archaeologist and historian, but her passion was politics and the peace movement. She’d been born in France and her family moved to Israel when she was a kid. But that’s all I know.”
“When you had the day in the mountains, were there other friends with you?” Bruno asked.
“Just one, an American girl, Jenny Shindler. She’s in one of those Jewish liberal groups that supports Peace Now. She’s always commenting on Leah’s posts. That’s really all I know, and I have to go. Call me this evening, Amélie, and tell me how you get on. I’m really sorry to hear she’s dead.”
Amélie ended the call and said, “I hope you don’t expect me to start right away. I’ll have to wait for her to share Leah’s Facebook posts with me.”
“You’ve been very helpful, and now you deserve a treat,” said Bruno. “Let me just call J-J to tell him about this boyfriend of Leah’s.”
Minutes later, Bruno was showing Amélie around the market and introducing her to his friends among the stallholders as he shopped for that evening’s dinner. He bought some cod from Armand the fishmonger, and then fresh milk, cheese and aillou from Stéphane’s cheese stall. He stopped to admire Marcel’s premium fruits and vegetables, where Amélie swooped with a cry of delight on a small basket of multicolored peppers.
“Scotch bonnet peppers,” she said, her eyes shining. “I can make you an épice.” She bought a handful of peppers, some spring onions and a fat lump of ginger.
“I’ve got the parsley, thyme and garlic you said you’d also need,” said Bruno. “Is the ginger your mother’s secret ingredient?”
“Not telling.”
After buying the rest of what he’d need for dinner, Bruno led her down the rue de Paris to Léopold’s stall, where he was selling leather belts and sandals, wallets, T-shirts and bolts of African cloth from his native Senegal.
“Well, beautiful sister,” Léopold welcomed her just as Bruno’s phone began to vibrate. “Where might you be from?”
Bruno turned away to answer and heard Horst’s voice, with many more voices in the background, asking him to get to Commarque as soon as he could to deal with the crowds.
“That damn newspaper story has b
rought dozens of people, and we’ve got to get them out of the way to place the sensors for the seismic survey,” Horst said. “You’ll need stakes, tape and a lot of gendarmes. Can you help, Bruno? Otherwise this whole project is going to be stalled.”
Bruno called his colleagues from Les Eyzies and Montignac to ask if they could help. Then he alerted Yveline, with a request for help from her gendarmes. Finally he deposited his food purchases in the refrigerator of the mairie. Ten minutes later, armed with rolls of crime scene tape and some temporary plastic fencing from the public works warehouse, he and Amélie headed for Commarque, followed by Sergeant Jules and three gendarmes in their van.
Chapter 10
The scene at Commarque was chaotic. The path down from the parking lot was partly blocked by carelessly parked cars, and crowds of people were milling around at the base of the cliff. They were gazing up at the château and clambering over the large seismic machine, ignoring Horst and the count, who were pleading with them to get back. Bruno drove into the middle of the crowd, his siren blaring, and waited until Sergeant Jules and his men lined up. He told Amélie to stay inside, pulled a bullhorn from the back of his van, clambered onto the roof and announced that in exactly five minutes he would put a parking ticket with the maximum fine of a hundred euros on every car that was not properly parked in the lot at the top of the hill.
At that, the crowd rushed back to their cars and started a new round of chaos as they began sounding their horns and vying for space on the narrow path. But at least this chaos was away from the château, and the gendarmes were able to close off the access road with the fencing and crime scene tape. Sergeant Jules and his gendarmes remained, and Bruno’s two colleagues were sent up through the château to watch the gate on the upper road. Amélie climbed out of Bruno’s van, looking dubiously at the rugged, muddy ground and then at her white shoes. Bruno opened the rear of the van, allowing Balzac to jump out, took out the spare rubber boots and handed them to Amélie.
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