Children of War: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 8)

by Martin Walker

  ‘The Mayor told me you said it was OK for me to run the story,’ Philippe began. ‘We were right behind Paris Match, but can you give me a quote?’

  Bruno fought to pull himself together and duty and habit kicked in. He pondered briefly and then said, ‘You can quote me saying we’re all glad to see Sami home and reunited with his family, but he’s been through a terrible ordeal. He has very serious medical and psychological problems that are being addressed by some of France’s best experts. Meanwhile he’s doing his best to help French and American officials to understand the trauma he went through.’

  ‘Has he been charged yet? Is he spilling the beans about the Taliban?’

  ‘That’s all I want to say for now, Philippe. But you were at school with him, so that should let you fill a page or two. Good luck.’

  Bruno closed his phone, aware of Nancy standing close to his side, almost close enough to touch. She was listening to her phone and answering briefly in English. She looked at him curiously, her mouth still slightly open and her lips glistening. He forced himself to tear his eyes from her. He felt rather than saw her nod at him before walking away out of earshot.

  Bruno closed his eyes and tried to think of what actions he’d neglected, what duties remained for him to do. He felt suddenly very hungry. He looked across at Pamela, expecting to see her still locked in conversation with the other women, but she was watching him, something like wariness in her eyes. He told himself to smile and went back to his table, where his plate of roast boar and mushroom sauce awaited along with a refilled wine glass.

  Annette, Yveline, Florence, Jacqueline and Fabiola were huddled over Annette’s mobile phone, reading with apparent approval the story Gilles had filed on the Paris Match website. Annette held the phone out to Pamela and she took it, almost reluctantly, and scrolled it down as Bruno began to eat.

  ‘Have you seen this already?’ Pamela asked him, briefly raising her eyes from the tiny screen. She was looking at him closely and he felt flushed. Bruno shook his head, washed down his first mouthful with a sip of red wine and made himself smile at her.

  ‘No, but I trust Gilles and I want to eat while this is still warm,’ he said.

  ‘Better eat while you have the chance,’ she replied and gestured at the other tables. The sound of conversation was fading and Bruno looked around to see knots of his friends and neighbours clustering around mobile phones. An image from some long-ago newsreel came into his mind, of people in vintage clothing huddled around old-fashioned radio sets as they listened to news of war being declared.

  Mauricette from the Hôtel St Denis and the manager of the Royal Hotel were leaving the courtyard, phones pressed to their ears. Mauricette changed course toward him.

  ‘You could have told me this was coming, Bruno,’ she said briskly. ‘We were going to take time off but France Deux TV has just booked the whole hotel. I’ve let the staff go and now we’ll have to work all night to get the rooms ready.’

  So it begins, Bruno thought, turning back to his plate as Mauricette stalked off to her car. Music began to play from loudspeakers Julien had rigged on the table where Stéphane had carved the boars. He recognized the tune, ‘Mon Amant de Saint-Jean’, and the singer. It was the original version by Lucienne Delyle, recorded sometime during the war before she had been eclipsed by the rising star of Edith Piaf. Bruno would always associate Delyle with ‘J’attendrai’, the song of the Frenchwomen of 1940, waiting through the long years of war for their men to come home from the PoW camps. A memory of Delyle’s face on an old record cover suddenly came into his head and he looked across the table at Nancy, struck by the resemblance that had eluded him.

  Fabiola had put her phone away and the women were ignoring the music and talking with quiet animation among themselves. Bruno caught the Mayor’s eye, raised his glass and they nodded to one another, each thinking of the intense global attention that was about to focus on St Denis.

  His plate empty and the courtyard starting to fill with dancers, he joined the women to ask Pamela to dance. Bruno had never quite mastered the swing, the dance that most French people seem to absorb effortlessly in their youth, and Pamela had never learned it. So they fell into their usual dance, not quite a foxtrot and not quite a waltz, but they circled the floor contentedly, enjoying the music and the pleasure of being in each other’s arms.

  ‘What were you all discussing so animatedly?’ he asked. ‘Was it about Sami?’

  ‘No,’ she said, glancing behind her to see if anyone could overhear and then speaking softly, close to his ear. ‘This is not for other ears. Nancy started asking Fabiola about Deutz. Then Annette and Jacqueline joined in. And you know Jacqueline, how direct she is. She asked Fabiola straight out if they’d had a relationship that ended badly.’

  ‘What did Fabiola say?’

  ‘She said she wants only to think about Gilles this evening,’ Pamela replied. ‘But I don’t think this is going to stop there.’

  20

  Beyond his love for the town and the life he had built in St Denis, there was another reason why Bruno knew he could never leave. He suspected he would be a terrible policeman in any other setting. Colleagues like J-J, the chief detective for the Département, liked to say that Bruno embodied a unique store of local knowledge, familiar with every family and house in his commune. Bruno sometimes suspected that was all he had, apart from basic common sense, a lot of good advice from his Mayor and a largely law-abiding and amiable population. And nothing could be more important for a policeman than knowing the territory he covered and the people he protected and served.

  Bruno stood in awe of the cops in great cities like Paris or Marseille, who dealt almost invariably with strangers. For Bruno, it was the reverse. Strangers were the rarity; mostly he dealt with people he’d known for years, youngsters whom he’d watched growing up. He’d danced with their mothers at their weddings, played rugby with their fathers, helped arrange the funerals of their grandparents and taught most of them how to pass a rugby ball and to volley at tennis.

  Bruno’s instinctive reaction whenever a problem arose was to ask himself whom he knew, a relative or neighbour or colleague, who could help him get to the heart of the matter. His idea of policing was based on knowing people, their backgrounds and concerns, sometimes their secrets. And so, squashing the twinge of guilt he felt at investigating a friend, on the morning after the vendange he rang the pathology lab in Bergerac, where one of the doctors had been at medical school with Fabiola. The two doctors were friendly without being close friends, ready to do favours for one another, but Bruno knew they seldom met.

  Bruno already knew Fabiola’s medical background, and a few moments on the Internet had been enough to find the professional biography of Pascal Deutz on the website of the prison service. Deutz had been a lecturer on the teaching staff at Marseille when Fabiola had been a student. It was no more than a suspicion, but Fabiola’s reaction to Deutz had triggered one of Bruno’s hunches.

  ‘Hi, I’m looking for your advice about our mutual friend Fabiola,’ Bruno began when the Bergerac doctor answered. He had prepared a plausible excuse, saying that her friends planned to throw her a surprise party next month but worried that it might be too close to the anniversary of the day of her climbing accident. They remembered Fabiola being really depressed around that time every year. Did her fellow medical student happen to remember when it was?

  ‘Sure, it was a big thing at medical school,’ came the innocent reply. ‘It was Toussaints, five years ago. I remember because I’d been away for a family event at my grandfather’s grave and when I got back everyone was talking about it. I don’t remember the details, but a piton broke or a belay failed. I remember reading about it.’

  ‘Reading?’ Bruno asked. ‘You mean it made the newspapers?’ On a pad he scribbled 31 October, Toussaints, All Saints’ Day, when old-fashioned French families still gathered at the family graves to commemorate the dead.

  ‘No, it was the report the mountaineering cl
ub had to make about the accident. It’s routine in the event of somebody having to go to hospital. I’m pretty sure it was a piton that failed. But as the senior guy and by far the most experienced climber, Deutz came in for a lot of criticism. He was really broken up about it because he and Fabiola had been very close all year until then. He told us at the club he blamed himself. I guess that was why he later transferred out of the school, but he’s doing very well now, I hear.’

  ‘Deputy head of the prison psychiatric service,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Not for long. I hear rumours of a professorship at Paris-Diderot.’

  ‘Well, we’ll be careful to avoid the last days of October.’

  ‘Sure thing, give Fabiola my best. Let me know what date you pick, it could be fun to come and surprise her.’

  Bruno went back to Deutz’s official biography and saw he’d transferred from the medical school staff five years earlier to join the prison service. Now he had a date. He then called the medical school, was put through to the security office and asked how he might get hold of a copy of the report of the mountaineering club into an accident on the relevant date. He was given the name of the current club president, but then heard that the club secretary, another security guard, had just walked in. Within ten minutes a copy of the report had been faxed to him.

  It was just one page of single-space typing, written by the club secretary of the day after interviewing Deutz and the two other students on the climb. There had been no interview with Mademoiselle Fabiola Stern, still in hospital after suffering concussion and a broken jaw and cheekbone. She had not been wearing a helmet, in defiance of club rules. Deutz accepted responsibility for that and for placing the piton that had failed and for allowing too long a belay on the rope. That meant that Mlle Stern had fallen much further than she should. Deutz had been praised by the other climbers for bringing the unconscious Mlle Stern down the mountain and to hospital. Deutz’s licence to lead climbs was suspended for a year, and he would need to retake the qualifying tests. Copies of the report had gone to the medical school director and to the Mountaineering Club de France.

  Bruno sat back, pondering. That was enough to account for a certain chill in relations between Fabiola and Deutz, but it was a far cry from the kind of sexual trauma that seemed to be at the source of Fabiola’s problem. Obviously he’d been barking up the wrong tree, adding two and two and getting five or even seven. So much for his hunch; he’d have to think again.

  But what had the Bergerac doctor meant when he said that Fabiola and Deutz had been very close? Bruno recalled Fabiola once telling him that when she was at medical school she’d had an affair with a man she called ‘a cute mountain climber’. The phrase had stuck in his head because it was an unusual way to describe a grown man. And he could hardly think of any word less fitted to Deutz, a rangy, muscular type with an assertive manner, always trying to dominate any encounter. But who could fathom the strange accidents of human chemistry that brought two people together?

  There was a phrase Bruno recalled from one of those sayings of the day that Sud Ouest sometimes printed alongside its horoscopes and crossword puzzles. It had come from La Rochefoucauld, a name he vaguely knew as some distinguished French writer of the past, but it had stuck with him: Love, as it exists in the world of today, is nothing but the contact of two skins and two fantasies.

  Instinctively, Bruno had disagreed, too much the romantic to accept such cold cynicism. But he understood how new lovers could construct fantasies of each other. Maybe a young woman, enjoying the thrills of mountaineering, could have seen a younger Deutz as ‘cute’. Or maybe Fabiola had plucked from the air a word to downgrade the importance of a relationship that had affected her more than she wished to reveal. Maybe she thought of Gilles as cute. But what mere male ever knew how women really thought of their lovers?

  He turned to the next item on his list of things to do, which was to track down the gynaecology professor Fabiola had talked to about her problem. He called the security team at the medical school again. Professor Rosalie Waldeck, now retired, had taught gynaecology and obstetrics. He took a note of the address in Villefranche du Périgord, a small town south of Bergerac, and her phone number.

  His phone rang, a Paris number. It was Yacov Kaufman.

  ‘I was just reading the news on my phone,’ he said. ‘Drama in St Denis.’

  ‘You’re telling me. What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s Maya, my great aunt. She’s flying into Paris from Israel today and I have to meet her at the airport and bring her straight down to St Denis. But I can’t get a hotel, the media seems to have booked every room around. Can you help?’

  ‘If all else fails, you can both stay at my place, but let me call a friend who has some empty gîtes. It will be cheaper than a hotel. How long will you stay and when will you arrive?’

  ‘I’m at the airport now,’ Yacov replied. ‘Her flight lands in a few minutes and I have David’s car here to bring her down. I wanted her to spend the night in Paris and rest a little but she insists on coming straight down to you. I imagine we’ll be with you late this afternoon and we’ll be there three or four days, maybe a week. She wants to see the region again and she wants to use my grandfather’s old car.’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  Bruno tried hotels he knew in Les Eyzies, Lalinde and Trémolat but there was not a room to be had. He called Pamela, who was delighted to rent her gîtes now that the English families had left. Bruno booked both, one for Yacov and one for Maya; he presumed a woman so wealthy would want her own bathroom. Pamela offered to feed them, if required. The media would probably have booked all the restaurants.

  ‘I’ll come with your new tenants later this afternoon,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry all this has come up but it was lovely dancing with you last night.’

  ‘It was quite an evening,’ she said coolly, and he could hear none of the usual affection in her voice before she hung up.

  Bruno paused, wondering whether she had observed that strange and powerful moment he had shared with Nancy at the vendange, before looking again at his phone to call Florence; her students would be a key part of the effort to persuade Maya that St Denis would make good use of the bequest.

  He was about to inform the Mayor before driving to the château to ask the medical team about Gaston’s condition when the Mayor came into Bruno’s office. He closed the door behind him and said, ‘Karim told me about getting his boy back. Did that have to do with this so-called gas explosion that the Gendarmes have sealed off?’

  ‘Officially, since you approved my secondment to the Brigadier’s staff, I can’t say,’ Bruno replied. ‘Between you and me, it was a suicide bomber who thought Sami and his family were still in Le Pavillon.’

  ‘Philippe Delaron has interviewed Karim about Pierre’s rescue. He’s good at putting two and two together.’

  ‘I can’t talk to him about it until this is over,’ Bruno said.

  ‘It’s not just Philippe. We’ve got half the Paris press corps heading for St Denis. Ask the Brigadier to call me when he has a moment.’

  ‘I’m heading for the château now. I’ll ask the Brigadier if he can release a statement, or at least nominate a press spokesman. Meanwhile, the Halévy woman is arriving here later today, staying at Pamela’s.’

  ‘We’ll make sure everything’s ready.’ At the door, the Mayor turned. ‘And however you got Karim’s boy back, well done.’

  On Bruno’s car radio, the news bulletin on Périgord Bleu identified the local château where ‘the French terrorist known as the Engineer’ was being held. But it then summarized Gilles’s report about Sami’s autism. That day’s edition of Sud Ouest carried photos that Philippe had unearthed of Sami as a schoolboy. Another story was headlined: ‘Was this the terrorist recruitment centre?’ with a photo of the Toulouse mosque and another of the telegenic Imam, Ghlamallah.

  ‘We’re winning,’ said the Brigadier, almost smugly, when Bruno was admitted to his office. A lar
ge TV screen had now been installed. ‘These days, the media is where battles are won and lost. Look at this.’

  The Brigadier worked his computer keyboard and the TV screen lit up and began playing extracts from American news programmes. One of the clips showed a man Bruno recognized, the White House spokesman, saying something about ‘extraordinary cooperation from our French allies’. The CNN clip carried a headline on the bottom of the screen: ‘Engineer – or victim?’

  ‘The Mayor of St Denis asked me to tell you he’d appreciate a call, or a press statement about the explosion at St Chamassy,’ Bruno said. ‘He thought appointing a press spokesman might help, with all the media gathering.’

  ‘There’s one coming down from the ministry, should be here soon. I’ll call your Mayor. Anything else?’

  ‘I asked the field hospital about Gaston. They said he’d been moved to the military hospital in Bordeaux but wouldn’t say anything about his condition.’

  ‘He’s badly burned, still concussed but they think they can save his eyesight. We’ve identified the terrorist from the mosque. He took one bullet in the shoulder joint and another in the bone. He’ll lose an arm, but he can talk.’

  ‘What happens to Sami now? Will it be life in a prison hospital?’

  ‘We’ll see. Now that the world knows he’s been cooperating with us he’ll have to be somewhere secure,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Those Mozart playlists may be the biggest breakthrough into the jihadist communications we’ve ever had.’

  Bruno nodded sadly. Jihadists had long memories; Sami’s life and the lives of his family would be in danger for years to come. They could never resume their normal lives in St Denis. Bruno had heard of the American witness protection system for useful informers who were given a new identity in a strange town, but a French-speaking Arab family suddenly arriving anywhere on earth with an autistic young man would soon be identified.