“There’s one more thing.” Bruno twirled his empty glass, wondering how best to put this. “You’d better start thinking about what to do if and when he’s cleared and released. It wouldn’t be a good idea to keep him in a local school. It would be difficult, with the gossip and the relatives of the old man. You should think about sending him to stay with a relative or to boarding school; maybe send him abroad where he can make a fresh start and put all this behind him. Perhaps you could even suggest that he go into the military for a while. It did me no harm, and it would be the kind of clean break the boy will need.”
“It did me no harm either, although I just did three years as a medical orderly in West Africa, enough to save me a year of medical school. But I don’t think the boy is cut out for that kind of life, that kind of discipline. Maybe that’s the problem,” said the doctor with a sigh. “Still, he respects the military. In the cell today he asked us how anyone could think he would kill someone who’d won a Croix de Guerre. But getting him out of here when all this is done is a good thought, Bruno. Thanks for the advice.”
As the doctor drove off, Bruno was already wondering how on earth Robert had known about the Croix de Guerre…
13
Less than an hour later, with the sun sinking fast and the heat easing so that he had donned a T-shirt, Bruno was watering the garden when he heard another vehicle lumbering up the road. He emptied the watering can and turned to see Isabelle in her unmarked car. She got out, waved and opened the rear door to bring out a supermarket bag.
“Hi, Bruno. I came to invite you to supper, unless you have plans.”
“It looks like you made the plans already, Isabelle,” he said, coming forward to push the enthusiastic Gigi out of the way and kiss the young woman on both cheeks. She was looking distinctly appealing in her jeans and red polo shirt, with a brown leather jacket slung loosely over her shoulders. She stood just a fraction below his height.
“Pâté, steak, baguette and cheese,” she said, standing back to brandish her bag. “That’s what J-J said you liked to eat. And wine, of course. What a wonderful dog—is this the great hunting dog J-J told me about?”
“J-J asked you to come?” She was not the first woman to come here alone bearing food, but she was the first to descend on him uninvited, and his immediate instinct was to approach this unexpected visit as if she were here as a professional colleague. “Not exactly,” said Isabelle, down on her knees and making much of the eager Gigi, who liked women. “Can basset hounds really hunt wild boar?”
“That’s what they were bred for, by Saint Hubert himself, according to legend. They aren’t fast but they can run all day and never tire, so they exhaust the boar. Then one hound goes in from each side and grabs a foreleg and pulls and the boar just sprawls flat, immobilized until the hunter comes. But I use this one mainly to hunt bécasse. He’s good with game birds; he has a very gentle mouth.”
“J-J said I should brief you on the day’s developments,” she said, prizing herself free from the dog’s attentions. “He left me in charge at St. Denis, but all the action has moved to Périgueux. I got bored and so I thought I’d pay you a visit. It just happened I remembered that J-J told me what you liked to eat. As if I couldn’t guess.”
“Well, I’m curious to know the latest and you’re more than welcome. And congratulations on finding the house.”
“Oh, that was easy,” she said. “I just asked the woman in the Maison de la Presse when I went to pick up Le Monde. They ran a small piece about a racist murder in the Périgord, with the Front National involved. Half of the Paris press corps will be down here by Monday.”
The whole of St. Denis would know by now that Bruno had a new lady friend. Some might even be staking out the bottom of the road to see if she left at a decent hour. He resolved privately that she would.
“He’s called Gigi,” said Bruno, as his dog signaled complete devotion by rolling onto his back and baring his tummy to be scratched.
“Short for Gitan. J-J told me. He’s a great fan of yours and he told me all about you on our first drive down here. He didn’t explain why you gave a male dog a girl’s name.”
“How else do you shorten Gitan into a nickname? And Gigi is the sort of sound dogs recognize easily even when you whisper. That’s important for a hunting dog.”
“I suppose J-J wouldn’t know that,” she said. “He’s not a country type.”
“He’s a good man and a fine detective,” said Bruno. “Hand me that bag and come and sit down. What would you like to drink?”
“A petit Ricard for me, lots of water, please, and then can you show me round? J-J said you’d been in the engineers in the Army and you built the whole place yourself.”
She was trying very hard to please, thought Bruno, but he smiled and invited her through the main door and into the living room, where he had built a large fireplace. They went into the kitchen and he made the drinks while she leaned against the high counter where he normally sat when he ate alone. He poured some Ricard into two tall glasses, tossed in an ice cube and filled the glasses from a jug of cold water from the refrigerator. He handed one to Isabelle, raised his glass in salute, sipped and turned to work.
He unwrapped the beefsteaks she had brought and made a swift marinade of red wine, mustard, garlic and salt and pepper. Then he hammered the steaks with the flat of a cleaver until they were the thinness he liked, and put them in the marinade.
“Your own water?” she asked.
“We put an electric pump in the well. My friends from the town built this place more than I did—the plumbing, electricity, foundations, all the real work. I was just the unskilled labor. Come on, there’s not much more to see.”
He showed her the small utility room by the door, where he kept the washing machine and an old sink, his boots and coats, fishing gear and his shotgun. The ammunition was locked away. She hung her leather jacket on a spare hook and he showed her the big bedroom he had added on and a smaller spare room that he used as a study. He watched her make a fast appraisal of the double bed with its plain white sheets and duvet, the bedside reading lamp and the shelf of books. A copy of Le Soleil d’Austerlitz, one of Max Gallo’s histories of Napoleon, lay half open by the bed, and she moved closer to look at the other books. She ran a finger gently down the spine of his copy of Baudelaire’s poems and turned to raise a speculative eyebrow at him. He half smiled, half shrugged, but said nothing. She turned to him again after studying a print of le Douanier Rousseau’s Soir de Carnaval that hung on the wall opposite the bed. He bit his lip when he saw her looking at the framed photographs he kept on the chest of drawers. There were a couple of happy scenes of tennis-club dinners, one of him scoring a try at a rugby game and a group photo of men in uniform around an armored car, Bruno and Captain Félix Mangin with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Then, inevitably, she focused on the photograph of Bruno, in uniform and laughing, lounging on an anonymous riverbank with a happy Katarina, pushing her long, fair hair back from her dark eyes. It was the only picture he had of her.
Isabelle said nothing. She brushed past him to look into the spartan bathroom.
“You’re very neat,” she said. “It’s almost too clean for a bachelor.”
“That’s only because you caught me on cleaning day” he said with a smile, relieved that the inspection was over.
“Where does Gigi sleep?”
“Outside. He’s a hunting dog and supposed to be a watchdog.”
“What’s that hole in the ceiling?”
“My next project, when I get around to it. I’m going to put a staircase and a couple of windows in the roof, and make an extra bedroom or two up there.”
“Where’s your TV?” she said.
“I only have a radio. Come and see the outside and I’ll get the fire going for the steak.”
She admired the workshop he had made at one end of the barn, all the tools hanging neatly on a Peg-Board on the wall, and the jars of pâté and preserves standing i
n military ranks on the shelves. He showed her the chicken run, where a couple of geese had joined the descendants of Joe’s original gift. She made a point of counting the number of tomato plants and the rows of vegetables.
“Do you eat all that in a year?”
“A lot of it, and we have dinners and lunches down at the tennis club. Any extra I can always give away. I put some into cans for the winter.”
He picked up a stack of dried branches from last year’s grapevine and stacked them in the brick barbecue, then he shook a bag of wood charcoal onto the top, thrust a sheet of old newspaper underneath and lit it. Back in the kitchen, he put plates, glasses and cutlery on a tray and opened the bottle of wine Isabelle had brought, a decent Cru Bourgeois from the Médoc. He opened the jar of venison pâté she had brought, put it on a plate with some cornichons and arranged a wedge of Brie on a wooden board.
“Let’s eat outside,” he said, taking the tray. “If you pick a lettuce from the garden you can make the salad while I do the steak, but we have time to enjoy our drinks before the barbecue is ready.”
“There’s no sign of a woman here,” Isabelle remarked, when they had sat down at the green plastic table on his terrace and were watching Gigi licking his lips in anticipation. The dog knew what it meant when the barbecue was lit.
“Not at the moment,” said Bruno.
“No woman, no TV, no pictures on your walls except photos of sports teams. No family photos, no pictures of adoring girlfriends, except that one when you were in the Army. Your house is impeccable—and impersonal—and your books are mostly nonfiction. I would have to say that you are a very self-controlled and organized man.”
“You haven’t seen the inside of my van,” he said with a smile.
“That’s your public life, your work. This home is the private Bruno, and very anonymous it is, except for the books. That’s quite a library, the sign of an educated man.”
“I’m not an educated man,” he said. “I left school at sixteen.”
“And went into the Army youth battalion,” she said. “Yes, I know. And then into the combat engineers, and you did paratroop training and were promoted. You served in some special operations in Africa before you went to Bosnia and won a medal for hauling some wounded men from a burning armored car. They wanted to make you an officer but you refused. And then you were shot by a sniper when you were trying to stop some Serb paramilitaries from burning a Bosnian village, and they flew you back to France for treatment.”
“So. You read my Army file.” Of course, she couldn’t know what the official files left out. She did not seem to have made the connection between the names of his captain in Bosnia, Félix Mangin, who wrote that approving report, and the mayor of St. Denis. He wondered if she was curious that the report didn’t mention why Bruno had tried to save that particular Bosnian village.
Félix had been with him when they first found the decrepit motel that the Serbs had turned into a brothel for their troops, and had rescued the Bosnian women who had been forced to service them. They had relocated the women into what was supposed to be a safe house in a secure Bosnian village and brought in Médecins Sans Frontières to care for them. They had used their own money to buy the women new clothes and decent soaps and cosmetics. The official files made no mention of that.
“J-J got hold of your dossier on the day after the arrests at Lalinde when we realized that this was going to blow up into a political matter. It was routine, the kind of standard background check we’d do on anybody involved in something as sensitive as this. He showed it to me. I was impressed. I just hope my superiors write equally good things about me in my performance reviews.” She smiled. “I even saw your magazine subscriptions, your surprisingly poor scores on the Gendarmerie pistol range given that your Army file rated you as a marksman. And your savings account is in better shape than mine.”
“I don’t have much to spend my salary on,” he said, as if that might explain something.
“You’re rich in friends and reputation, from what I see,” she said, and finished her Ricard. “I’m not here as a cop, Bruno, and I’m not probing.” She remained silent for a few moments. “Sorry, I am probing,” she said. “I’m curious about the woman in the photo.”
He rubbed the back of his neck but said nothing. She picked up the wine and poured herself a glass, twirled it and sniffed.
“This is the wine J-J ordered when he took me to lunch my first day when I was posted down here,” she said. He nodded, still with half of his Ricard to finish.
“And what did J-J tell you to brief me about?” he asked, determined to shift the conversation back onto safe ground.
“He hasn’t got very far. No fingerprints and no forensics that put the boy or the girl anywhere inside Hamid’s cottage, nor any of the other young fascists we found at her house. They both deny knowing him or ever visiting him. So all we have so far is the drugs and the politics, and while we can convict the girl on the drugs, I’m not sure about the boy, since he was tied up. A lawyer can say that makes him noncomplicit, and since he’s under eighteen he counts as a juvenile.”
“That sex looked pretty consensual to me,” said Bruno.
“Yes,” she said briskly. “I suppose it was, but that was the sex, which is not illegal, even for juveniles, and it’s not evidence of drug use. We may have to release him. If it had been up to me, I’d have put pressure on the boy through the girl. I feel sure they had some involvement in the murder, even though there’s no forensic evidence.”
Bruno glanced behind him at the embers. Not ready yet. He finished his Ricard and Isabelle poured him a glass of Médoc.
“There’s one new development, from that patch of mud on the path that leads to the cottage,” she said. “We took casts of the tire prints, and there’s one set that could match Jacqueline’s car—except they’re Michelins, and they match thousands of cars.”
“Yes, and the path leads to several houses.”
“True. And some ambitious young magistrate arrives from Paris on Monday to take over the case, at which point we simply become the investigators following the leads he chooses. My friends in Paris say there’s some political jockeying over who gets the job. J-J stays in charge of the case, probably because there’s so little evidence. If we were close to proving anything, some Paris brigadier would have been down to take the credit.” She gave a short laugh and shrugged. “I’ll go make the salad.”
He rose to turn on the terrace light and Isabelle came back from the vegetable patch with a perfect young lettuce. In the kitchen he pointed her to the olive oil and the wine vinegar. He put a pot of water on to boil and began to peel and slice some potatoes, then he flattened some cloves of garlic, took a frying pan and splashed in some oil. When the water boiled, he tipped in the sliced potatoes, aware that she was watching, and turned over his egg timer, a miniature hourglass, to blanch them for three minutes.
“When the timer goes, drain them, dry them on a paper towel and fry them in the oil for a few minutes with the crushed garlic. Add salt and pepper and bring it all out,” he said. “Thanks. I’ll go and do the steaks.”
The embers were just right, a fine gray ash over the fierce red. He put the grill close to the coals, arranged the steaks, and then under his breath sang “The Marseillaise,” which he knew from long practice took him exactly forty-five seconds. He turned the steaks, dribbled some of the marinade on top of the charred side, and sang it again. Then he turned the steaks for ten seconds, pouring on more of the marinade, and then another ten seconds. Now he took them off the coals and put them on the plates he’d left to warm on the bricks that formed the side of the grill. Soon Isabelle appeared, the frying pan in one hand and the salad in the other, and he brought the steaks to the table.
“You waited,” she said. “Another man would have come in to see that I was doing it his way.”
Bruno didn’t quite know what to say to that so he shrugged, handed her a plate and said, “Bon appétit.” She shared out the
potatoes and left the salad in the bowl. That scored points with Bruno. He liked to soak up the juices from the meat in his potatoes rather than mix them with the oil and vinegar of the salad.
“The potatoes are perfect,” he said.
“So is the steak.”
“There’s one thing that nags at me,” said Bruno. “I saw Richard’s father, and somehow the kid knew that Hamid had won the Croix de Guerre. Now, unless you or J-J told him that during the questioning, I don’t know how he would have known about it if he hadn’t seen it on the wall or been in the cottage. Were you in on all the interrogation sessions?”
“No. J-J did that in Périgueux. But the sessions are all on tape, so we can check. I don’t think J-J would have tripped up like that. Is it something he could have heard at school from one of Hamid’s relatives?”
“Possibly, but as I told you, he didn’t get on too well with them. There was that fight in the playground.”
“Too long ago to mean much, don’t you think?” He watched with approval as she wiped the juices from her plate with a piece of bread and then helped herself to salad and cheese. “That steak was just right.”
“Yes, well, the credit is all yours for bringing dinner, and the wine. Thank you.” He helped himself to some salad. “The boy’s father says he’s absolutely sure Richard didn’t do it.”
“What a surprise!” she said. “Don’t you have a candle, Bruno? With this electric light, I won’t be able to see the stars, and they must be brilliant here.”
“I know the boy, too, and I think the father may be right.” Bruno went inside and brought out a small oil lamp. He took off the glass case, lit the wick, replaced the glass and only then turned off the terrace light.
“That would mean we have no suspect at all,” she said. “And the press and politicians baying at our heels.”
“And the public. Hang on a moment,” he said. He went into the house for a sweater, and came back with her leather jacket and his mobile phone. “In case you get cold,” he said, giving her the jacket and thumbing in a number.
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