With his spare arm, Bruno reached for her and drew her into a close embrace, little Balzac squirming to lick first Isabelle and then him and back again.
‘The dog is wonderful, and I’m very happy. So thank you,’ he said, trying to kiss a part of Isabelle’s face that was not covered by a tiny head and enormous ears. ‘I’ll give you a letter to take back to the Brigadier to thank him and you’ll let me have the address of the kennels. I hope this means you’ll be making regular maternal visits.’
‘Maternal?’ she said in mock horror, moving Balzac’s head to one side so that she could kiss him in return. ‘You’ve got the wrong girl, Bruno. That’s the last thing I have in mind.’
‘What’s on my mind right now is lunch,’ Bruno replied. ‘Ivan’s doing his soupe aux haricots, the one where he makes his stock with a pig’s tail.’
‘And I’m justifying my little trip down here with a visit to the Ecouteurs’ school, telling them our latest priorities,’ she said. ‘But that’s not until later this afternoon. And since the school director is an old chum of the Brigadier, I’m under orders to stay on for a reception and dinner afterwards.’
‘Am I supposed to know about that?’ There was a teasing note in his voice, disguising the disappointment he felt at her disappearance for the evening. But he was surprised that Isabelle was so open about her plans.
The Ecouteurs were the listeners, a secret arm of the French state that monitors phone calls and emails plucked from the airwaves. Massive computers selected certain messages containing pre-programmed trigger words that were then checked by human ears. Naturally, they listened in languages other than French. The English-language school for the Ecouteurs was located in a hideous nineteenth-century château up the valley, taking advantage of the many native English-speakers in the area. For the same reason, the German-language school for the Ecouteurs was in Alsace, the Italian in Nice and the Arabic schools were in Marseille, Toulon, Paris and Lille.
‘Since I’m hoping you’ll give me a lift there, it wouldn’t be much of a secret. Besides, the Brigadier has renewed your security clearance.’
‘Does that mean he’s planning to dragoon me into something again?’
She shrugged. ‘Are we going to stand here on the station platform all day or are you taking me and Balzac to lunch?’
‘Lunch,’ he replied.
‘Good, I’m dying for some good Périgord food again and I think we’ve given quite enough of a show to the lady behind the lace curtain.’ She waved gaily at the window.
Bruno turned to look and saw the curtain twitch as someone pulled quickly back. Damn! He’d forgotten that after they left the ticket office unmanned, the cash-starved rail system had sold off the station as a residence. News of their embraces, and of Bruno’s new dog, would be common knowledge by the time they finished lunch.
Isabelle plucked a thin black leather lead from her pocket, attached it to Balzac’s collar and limped off with her cane towards Bruno’s venerable Land-Rover, an inheritance from a dead hunting friend. Bruno picked up the dog case, Isabelle’s case and her laptop bag and followed on somewhat clumsily behind.
‘And over lunch, you can tell me about your local witches’ coven or Satanist cult or whatever it is,’ she said, settling herself in the passenger seat, the puppy in her lap, and turning to look at him with the gleam of mischief in her eye. Her voice sounded affectionate, Bruno thought, but suspected he was about to be teased.
‘I did enjoy reading Sud-Ouest on the internet yesterday,’ she said. ‘At least you can be relieved the Brigadier’s interest in your latest case is purely for his own amusement. However many enemies of the French state he tracks, he doesn’t yet include the Evil One among their number.’
‘Knowing your boss,’ said Bruno, ‘he could have Satan on the payroll already.’
12
As so often with Isabelle, Bruno felt he was swinging between elation and gloom as he turned off the main road to park outside the collège. He was despondent that Isabelle had said casually as he dropped her off that she would be spending the night at the hotel that had been booked for her by the Ecouteurs. On the other hand, she was staying for the weekend. Better still, she had jumped at the chance of accompanying him the next day on his visits to the possible launch sites for the punt. And her presence in St Denis had been sufficient to entice Commissaire Jean-Jacques Jalipeau, head of detectives for the region and known to all as J-J, to join them for the day. Isabelle had been J-J’s star Inspector and his favourite colleague until she was tempted away to Paris to join the staff of the Minister of the Interior.
It was not just the renewed presence of Isabelle in his life that explained the lump in Bruno’s throat. It was also the small bundle curled up asleep on the passenger seat beside him. Since Gigi’s death, he’d wondered whether any dog could ever replace him, but Bruno had already been surprised by the delight he found himself taking in the new puppy, even after a few hours. He’d almost forgotten the endearing clumsiness of young bassets and the way they tripped over their own long ears. It was impossible to look at one without smiling, and Bruno heard himself chuckle as he gently picked up the dozing dog.
Balzac, he thought, was an inspired choice for a name, a constant reminder that he should start reading the classic novels of his new dog’s namesake. He remembered the Mayor telling him soon after Bruno took office that all he would need to know about the politics and passions, the feuds and dynamics of St Denis, would be found in the pages of Balzac. He tucked his own warm and sleepy Balzac into the crook of his elbow as he went up the stairs to the science lab where Florence held her classes.
He had assumed there could be no better prop for a conversation with youngsters than the puppy, but the four boys had a guarded and almost shifty look as they lined up to greet him and shake his hand. Their defensiveness continued even when he put Balzac on the teacher’s bench before them, taking worried glances at one another from under lowered brows. At least Florence was instantly charmed, smiling indulgently as she took a paper towel to wipe a little dribble the puppy left as he ambled towards her.
Bruno knew all four boys through his tennis and rugby lessons. They were normal, healthy youngsters, still a year or two short of puberty. They had grown up in the countryside where they could roam free all day and where there were few dangers. Other than the tourists, everyone knew everyone else in St Denis, a town where people seldom bothered to lock their doors at night. Raised in a community where their parents would swiftly be told of any bad behaviour, the boys were polite to their elders and almost always cheerful and noisy with one another. Their subdued and troubled manner itself was for Bruno a clear signal that something was wrong.
‘I’m trying to find out who made a mess in Our Lady’s Chapel in the Gouffre, and I found some clues that I think will tell me who was responsible,’ Bruno told them.
He took out the evidence bags with the vodka bottle, the bubblegum wrapper and the strange cigarette end and laid them on the bench. He smoothed out the bag with the bubblegum so the trade mark could be clearly seen, and the boys began to fidget.
‘You know what fingerprints are, don’t you?’ he asked, glancing from one to the other.
‘It’s what you look for to find out who did something, the lines on people’s fingers that get left when they touch something,’ said Luc, Delaron’s nephew.
‘That’s right. Everybody on earth has different fingerprints, so if we find some on a clue, we know who it was.’ He paused, and smoothed out the bubblegum again. ‘The glass on that bottle or shiny paper like this is wonderful for showing fingerprints, so I’ll soon know who touched this. People have been sent to prison on the evidence of their fingerprints.’
‘I’ve seen it on TV,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It was an American show. I’m not allowed to watch Engrenages, my mum says I’m too young.’
‘Your mum is right, sometimes I wonder if I’m old enough to watch it,’ Bruno said, thinking of the hit TV series that always seemed to s
tart with a dead body in a rubbish dump or in the boot of a burned-out car. ‘What about you, Abdul?’ Bruno said, turning to Karim’s cousin’s son. The boy almost jumped out of his skin. ‘Do you know what DNA is?’
Abdul looked across at his teacher, who smiled at him encouragingly.
‘Genetics,’ the boy said.
‘That’s right. Whoever smoked this cigarette in this bag left some saliva on the filter. The saliva contains DNA so we can identify who it was. Did you know that?’
Abdul shook his head. Luc was swallowing hard and Mathieu, the youngest, was looking on the verge of tears. Jean-Paul, son of the manager of the cave, had gone white. Bruno did not feel at all proud of himself but he couldn’t see how else to go about his questioning. He looked up at Florence for reassurance and she nodded for him to continue.
‘I’m pretty sure I know which boys were in that cave, and when I take fingerprints or DNA I’ll be able to confirm it. But if I have to do that, I’ll have to bring in your parents and a magistrate and it all becomes very serious. Do you all understand that?’
The boys nodded.
‘Now, I’m just going to ask you, Jean-Paul, because you know where your family keeps all the keys, how did you get into the cave?’
Jean-Paul looked across at his friends, chewing his lip. At that moment, Balzac tottered across from sniffing Florence’s sleeve to stand in front of the boys. He looked at their faces and then slumped down, paws and ears outstretched, in front of Jean-Paul and looked up at the boy with big, sad eyes, his tail thumping the bench. The boy stretched out a hand to stroke him and Balzac licked it.
‘We keep a spare key under the stone by the stage door, just in case the musicians arrive early and we can’t find my dad,’ the boy said, his eyes on the puppy. ‘I used that.’
‘Did your dad know about this?’
‘I asked him to open it,’ said Luc, standing beside Jean-Paul. ‘It was doing a favour for Uncle Philippe.’
‘I was there, too,’ said Mathieu, almost proudly. ‘They said they didn’t want to leave me out.’
Bruno grinned at them. ‘At your age, I wouldn’t have wanted to be left out either. What did Uncle Philippe want you to do? Did he give you the black paint?’
‘He said it was washable and would soon clean off,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It was just to make a story, to get more people coming to the cave.’
‘And you were the one with your dad’s cigarettes, Abdul,’ Bruno said. ‘You know you’re too young to smoke. You’ll never play good football if you start smoking.’
‘Will you tell my dad?’ Abdul asked, evidently far more worried about his father’s reaction than about Bruno’s questions.
‘Why not tell me all of it, and you can start by telling me where you got the goat’s head,’ Bruno replied.
‘But we didn’t,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It was there already when we arrived and so was that funny painting on the wall. We had the candles and we’d already painted them, but we didn’t paint Our Lady. We went in with the candles and put them on the big stone and then we saw all the other stuff so we ran away.’
Bruno nodded, as if he understood, but this was suddenly becoming much more complicated. If the boys hadn’t done this, who had?
‘When did you have your cigarette, Abdul?’ he asked.
The boy looked across at his friends. They were all leaning forward now almost eagerly, clustering around the puppy who rolled happily between them. The shamefaced look on the boys’ faces when Bruno arrived had long since gone.
‘We all had a puff, when we crossed the lake, before we went into the chapel,’ said Luc. ‘Even Mathieu took a puff, although it was his first time.’
‘And what about the vodka bottle?’
‘Uncle Philippe gave it to us, but it was already empty,’ Luc answered.
‘And did he give you the candles, as well?’
Luc nodded.
‘So Uncle Philippe gave you the candles and the paint and the vodka bottle and asked you to put them in Our Lady’s Chapel,’ Bruno asked, keeping his voice as light and casual as he could. ‘But when you got there, you saw that Our Lady had already been painted black and the goat’s head was already there, and that funny painting on the wall. Is that how it happened?’
‘Will you have to tell Uncle Philippe I told you?’ Luc asked. ‘I don’t want to get him into trouble. It was just so he could do a story to get more tourists coming.’
‘I understand,’ Bruno said. He turned to Jean-Paul. ‘Did your dad know you were borrowing the keys?’
Jean-Paul looked at Luc and then at Abdul and Mathieu, and then looked down and mumbled, ‘I think so.’
‘Uncle Philippe said it was all arranged,’ Luc said.
‘Did he give you anything for doing it?’ Bruno asked, thinking that Delaron would have some explaining to do, to Bruno and to his editor back in Périgueux. A trick like this could probably put a very swift end to his embryonic career as a press photographer. ‘Or did he just buy you an ice cream and some bubblegum?’
‘He gave us five euros each.’
Usually Bruno had a soft spot for Delaron, a good-natured and cheeky young man who was evidently bored running the family’s camera shop and taking wedding photos and studio portraits. From the snaps of rugby matches and school prize days in St Denis, he’d turned himself into an accomplished news photographer. But this manufacturing of reality was outrageous. And it smelt like a plot, with Marcel the cave manager behind it and quite probably Bruno’s friend the Baron, in the interests of bringing more trade to the cave and to St Denis. Even as he felt his irritation build into anger, Bruno realized that exposing this little scheme would primarily hurt the four boys.
‘So what happened when you saw the goat’s head and that Our Lady was already painted?’ Bruno asked.
‘We didn’t see it at first, we just had a torch,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘But I know where the switches are, so when Mathieu bumped into the goat’s head I turned the light on, and then we saw everything else and that’s when we ran.’
‘You ran back to the boat? Then pedalled back to the other bank?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t tell you. There was already a boat on the shore by the chapel when we got there. We took our boat back but I’d put on the master switch by then so everything was lit. Then we left by the stage door and I turned off the master switch.’
‘And did you tell your dad?’
‘No, we were all too scared.’
Delaron was the one who should be in trouble, but the four boys would probably pay the worst price once their role was exposed. Had Delaron thought of that when he recruited his own nephew into the scheme? No doubt he assured the boy it was just a lark.
But if he couldn’t expose Delaron without exposing the boys, could he stop the newspaper from printing the false story? He’d need some powerful evidence to convince them to drop it, and without the boys he had no evidence at all, except his and Florence’s word. She was pensive as she glanced from one of her pupils to the next, all the time stroking Balzac and letting the puppy nibble at her fingers. Would she confirm to the newspaper that the story was false, if it meant bringing the boys’ role into the open? He rather doubted it, which was one of the things he admired about her.
‘I don’t want their names connected with this,’ Florence said once the boys had clattered their way downstairs.
‘I was thinking the same thing, even though if we keep quiet about this, it lets Delaron publish a lie.’
‘If you want me to swear to Delaron’s editor that I know the story to be false, I’ll explain why I know but I’m not prepared to reveal the boys’ names.’
The thought struck Bruno that he now had Delaron’s career in the palm of his hand. Even without the boys’ evidence, he could ensure that the newspaper would never employ him again. As he dismissed the thought, a sneaky little voice at the back of his head was suggesting it might be quite useful to have a hold on Delaron in the future.
‘After all,
the story’s not altogether false,’ Florence said. ‘I believe the boys when they said that somebody else had been there before them.’
‘Delaron can’t have been responsible for that, or he’d have had no need to send the boys in.’
‘So there is truth in what Delaron is peddling,’ Florence replied. ‘Somebody is playing Satanist games in the cave, just as they did with that woman in the boat.’
13
Bruno, intent on a serious talk on the ethics of journalism with Philippe Delaron, had left Balzac with Florence. She wanted to show the puppy to her own children. But his visit to Delaron’s camera shop was in vain. Delaron’s mother explained that her son had gone to Périgueux. Bruno took the back road over the hill, cutting across one of the great bends of the river to the home of Gaston Lemontin, no longer the deputy bank manager after signing his petition. Bruno found him in his garden with his wife, planting vegetables in the potager.
‘Time I did that myself,’ Bruno said. ‘I thought I might try some beetroot this year.’ He gazed down beyond the garden to the edge of the cliff and the impressive view along a stretch of the river to the far side of the valley. There was no other building in sight. No wonder Lemontin was prepared to take some risks to protect it.
‘You didn’t come here to talk about beetroot,’ said Lemontin. ‘You heard what happened at the bank?’
‘No, but I can guess. You’ve been transferred to Timbuktu.’
‘Not quite that far. I’ll be commuting up to Sarlat from Monday, and I get tomorrow off.’
Lemontin’s wife turned from the beanpoles she was placing and said, ‘I’ll never vote for that damn Mayor again.’
‘I thought this might happen,’ Lemontin said. ‘I know how these things work. It might even be a blessing in disguise. I’m going to be deputy manager to a man who’s close to retirement, so I could get promoted.’
‘I really came to pick your brains,’ Bruno said. ‘You said there was something fishy about this deal and I need to know if you’re right.’
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