When Bernard Ardouin called to say he was finished with Fullerton’s brother, Bruno went to the gendarmerie to pick up Brian for the drive to Francis’s farm in the Corrèze.
“There’s nothing else for me to do,” Fullerton replied. “They can’t release the body until the identification is confirmed, and then I’ll have him cremated and take the ashes back to England. If you take the autoroute to Ussel, I think I’ll remember the way.”
Brian said he should make a call first, pulled a mobile phone from his briefcase and began dialing. Bruno called J-J to tell him of his plans and then called Isabelle to keep her in the picture. Finally he made a courtesy call to the police in Ussel to say he was coming onto their turf. When he finished, Brian Fullerton was looking at him, a perplexed expression on his face.
“That’s odd. I just called the number of the farm in Corrèze, wondering if my brother had left one of his messages about where to find the key. He had several different hiding places, each with its own letter. It was a sort of code he worked out with my kids when they spent a summer here, a family joke. But a woman answered, and when I gave my name and asked who she was, she slammed the phone down.”
“Merde,” said Bruno. Could it have been Yvonne? Was that where she and her brother were hiding out?
He called the Ussel police again and explained the situation. They knew where the house was and promised to send a car there.
13
A single policeman was waiting by his van in front of the farmhouse. It was similar to those around St. Denis except the stone was gray, not brown, and the shutters were painted bright red. One long, low barn was attached to a wing of the house, and a second, taller barn stood to one side. The garden was unkempt. Stalks of last year’s dead geraniums lay forlornly in pots, and there was jungle where the vegetable garden would have been. The trees planted to the north and west looked stunted, as though hunched against the wind. It would be cold here in winter, Bruno thought.
“By the time we got here, the birds had flown,” said the flic. He introduced himself as the town policeman from Neuvic, a name that startled Bruno. “I know, you keep thinking it’s the one in Dordogne. This is another Neuvic, best known for the lake. You can’t see it from here, but it’s just over that ridge to the south.”
Bruno introduced Fullerton as the new owner. “Have you been inside?” he asked.
“The main house was open, so I took a quick look around. The beds have been slept in, there are dirty dishes in the sink, and there’s a cashier’s ticket from Leclerc on the kitchen counter dated two days ago. I don’t know if anything’s been touched or stolen.”
Bruno took two sets of gloves from his van, donned one and gave the other to Fullerton, who’d been peering in through the windows. Nothing seemed different, he said. Bruno led the way into the house. It was an odd mixture. Some beautiful pieces of old furniture, an Empire clock atop an Empire table, two Louis XVI chairs, a large tapestry on the stone wall that Bruno thought might be an Aubusson were scattered like islands of good taste among cheap modern stuff that looked as if it came from IKEA. There were layers of grime on the red tile floor in the kitchen, and the stove was worse. Bruno noted empty bottles in a box and dirty glasses in the sink.
He knelt down to look at the bottles. In two of them, the dregs were still moist. One was a Château Kirwan 2005, and the other was Haut-Brion 2001. He checked his notebook. They could have come from Crimson’s cellar. In the dining room, some strips of wallpaper hung down forlornly, and a large brown damp patch covered part of the ceiling. His eye was drawn by an exquisite small oil painting of a young woman in eighteenth-century dress on a swing.
“School of Watteau, I believe,” said Brian. “Were it a real Watteau, it would be worth more than the whole place.”
Upstairs, the towels in the bathroom were damp, and the floor of the shower was still wet. In one bedroom they found female underclothes and a pair of tights; in the other, a pair of men’s dirty socks was balled beneath the bed. Both beds had been left unmade.
“Looks like they left in a hurry,” said Brian. “Maybe they were in a panic after I called.”
“Have you looked in the barns?” Bruno asked the flic. He said no, adding that they were locked. Bruno asked Brian if he remembered the codes for the keys.
“G for the geranium pot, L for the ladder, O for the orangerie, which is what we called the little glass lean-to at the back, R for the rake in the toolshed, I for the iron seat that came from an old tractor and A for that artichoke pot hanging on the wall.”
He lifted the terra-cotta artichoke from its hook to reveal a big iron key and a smaller one that looked like it fitted a Yale lock. Bruno and the flic followed him to the single-story barn. He used the big key to open a large, partly broken wooden door. Behind it lay a much more solid metal door, which he opened with the Yale. He flicked on an inside light, a fluorescent strip that flickered and buzzed before suddenly blazing into stark life.
Cases of wine were stacked against the far wall. In front of them were heaped rugs, rolled up and tied with lengths of orange plastic string. Alongside stood paintings wrapped loosely in canvas. Bruno went back to his van for the file of photos of Crimson’s possessions. The first painting he uncovered was a thickly painted scene from a window, dominated by a flapping curtain and overlooking a dismal garden with dirty brick houses in the background. It was marked in Crimson’s file as a Bratby, valued at eight thousand euros, and Bruno saw the artist’s signature in the bottom right corner. To make sure, he unwrapped the next canvas and unveiled two gloomy watercolors of beach scenes, beautifully framed. Each was recorded in Crimson’s photos and listed as a work by John Sell Cotman. They were valued at five thousand euros for the pair.
“No doubt about it, these are stolen goods,” he said, rising and showing the photos to the flic. “They were stolen from a house in my commune at the beginning of this week.”
“You mean my brother was up to his old tricks?” Brian asked.
“Not as far as these paintings were concerned. He was still in England when these were stolen,” Bruno said. “Let’s look in the other barn.”
It was locked, so in search of the keys Fullerton led them to the toolshed and the orangerie in vain before going to the back of the house, where an aluminum ladder lay propped lengthwise against a wall. He bent down at one end, slid a key from the hollow of one of the legs, and the three of them trooped to the large barn. This had two wide wooden doors, each about seven feet high. They were locked with a chain and a padlock. The key turned easily, and Bruno and Fullerton hauled the two doors open to reveal a tall white van. On its side were painted blue letters reading CHAUFFAGE-FRANCE with an address in the industrial zone of Belvès. Its rear doors were open, and the interior was stacked high with furniture, mainly tall wooden dressers, each protected from its neighbors by blankets.
“Bingo,” Bruno breathed to himself. On the floor of the van by the open doors were four heavy iron tubes, each about three feet long, held together by elasticized bands with hooks at each end.
“Any idea what these might be?” he asked Brian, pointing at the tubes. He wondered whether he might have found the murder weapon.
“Rollers,” said Fullerton, lighting the pipe he’d been filling. “It’s how they move heavy furniture, sliding them along on those rollers.”
More furniture was stored in the barn: large and small tables, more dressers, tall, glass-fronted bookshelves with ornate carved headings and sets of handsome dining chairs.
Bruno called Isabelle to tell her that he’d found at least some of Crimson’s belongings and that his suspicions had been confirmed of the link between the burglaries and the murder. He allowed himself a few moments to enjoy her praise, feeling like a schoolboy rushing home with a prize, and then called J-J to get the arts squad and forensics team to the Corrèze farmhouse.
“We’ve found the white van, and we may even have the murder weapon,” he went on. “It ties Murcoing with Fullerton, and
we may be able to clear up a whole host of burglaries into the bargain.”
“On my way,” snapped J-J, and Bruno turned to see Brian delving into one of the dressers in the back of the white van. He was wearing gloves, so he’d do no harm.
“Is it okay with you if I head off now?” asked the local flic, looking at his watch. “I was due off at two.”
“Sure,” said Bruno, shaking hands and thanking him. He promised to send a copy of his report to the Ussel station and to make sure Ussel got some of the credit once Murcoing was caught. He watched the police van disappear down the bumpy track.
“Can you give me a hand to move this furniture a bit? I think I recognize it,” Brian said from inside the van. “Just lean that dresser over to the left so I can get this drawer open.”
Bruno complied. Brian eased a white Apple laptop computer from the drawer.
“That’s where my brother always hid it when he was traveling,” said Brian. “Do you think I might get it back when you’re done with investigating what’s on it? I always lusted after one of these.”
“I thought you said you and your brother weren’t close,” Bruno said. “You seem to know a lot about his habits.”
“We made the effort to keep up. Like I told you, I even came out here with him once, just the two of us.”
“What about his mobile phone?” Bruno said. “We never found it. Just maybe that’s here too.” He sighed as he glanced at the mass of furniture to be looked through.
“No problem,” said Brian. He took out his own phone, thumbed through the address book and dialed a number. “If it’s here, we’ll hear the ‘money, money, money’ song from the musical Cabaret. That’s the ringtone he put on his phone.”
No sound came. Brian shrugged and took the laptop into the house. Bruno followed him into a room that was used as a study, with a desk and crammed bookshelves and an old-fashioned phone. As Bruno glanced around, Brian ducked under the desk and pulled at a power cord still attached to a converter plug.
“Francis always left a power cord here, in case he forgot one,” Brian explained. He plugged in the laptop and began muttering to himself as the screen opened and demanded a password. Suddenly he looked up and struck himself on the forehead. “Idiot!”
He turned to Bruno. “I forgot to look at the shrine. It’s that big cupboard. Is it open?”
He pointed to a giant, built-in corner cupboard. It had two double doors that stretched from floor to ceiling, nearly ten feet tall, in heavy age-darkened oak. Bruno tugged at the handles, but the doors were locked. Brian pulled the drawer completely out from the desk and from the back of it took a key that had been attached with heavy-duty metallic tape.
“This may come as a bit of a surprise,” said Brian, sounding apologetic as he inserted the key. “I should have mentioned it before.”
“Mon Dieu,” breathed Bruno as the doors opened and a rack of guns met his eye. There were two rifles, two old submachine guns, a revolver, a small mortar and an antique radio set, all grouped around a large framed photograph of a young man in a World War II British army uniform. He wore three white stripes on his sleeve. A smaller photo of a pretty young woman of the same era hung beside it. Draped above the portrait was a flag from the FFI, the French Forces of the Interior. Below it was a row of medals, two Nazi daggers and an old Wehrmacht helmet. Between them, very expensively framed, was a Banque de France banknote that Bruno recognized—the same design and denomination as the one he had seen gripped in the hands of Loïc Murcoing.
“Meet Grandpa,” said Brian. “That’s the shrine. And that photo of Grandpa is a much better likeness of Francis than that passport photo of him you asked me to identify. It was uncanny how closely they resembled each other.”
But what caught Bruno’s eye were the two empty slots in the display of guns, one shaped like a handgun and the other like a small machine pistol, with the velvet backdrop unfaded where they had been.
“I wonder where they’ve gone,” said Brian. “That was where the Sten gun used to be. And the other one was a Browning nine-millimeter. I’ll be sorry if we can’t find those.”
“Are these in working order?” Bruno asked.
“They still work, and he cleaned them regularly. We used to do some hunting with the rifles. I used the Lee Enfield, but Francis always used the French Lebel. We also tried some target shooting with the Browning that’s missing.”
“What can you tell me about this shrine and your grandpa?”
Their French grandmother was from this part of the Corrèze, Fullerton began. Their British grandfather had met and made her pregnant during the war and returned after the war to marry her. Sergeant Freddy, as he was known, had been a wireless operator with the Special Operations Executive, SOE, the British agency established to build and train resistance movements across Nazi-occupied Europe.
That was Sergeant Freddy in the large photo, and Grandmère Marie beside him. The medals included his Distinguished Conduct Medal, the oak leaf for his mention in dispatches and a series of the usual campaign awards. He had been dropped into France in March 1944 to operate the wireless communications that brought in the parachutages, the airdrops of arms and equipment from Britain that went to the Resistance. The radio in the shrine was a genuine British model B Mark II, a device as crude as it was weak, with a signal at best of only twenty watts and requiring at least sixty feet of aerial. Constantly on the move to evade the German radio-direction-finder trucks, the wireless operators suffered a terrifying attrition rate. If they tried to transmit from towns, the Germans turned off the electricity in substation after substation until they found the one that caused the radio to die. Then they surrounded the area and closed in. If an operator tried to transmit from the countryside, they needed a big battery, heavy, cumbersome and not easy to charge.
Sergeant Freddy was smart. He developed a system to charge a battery with parts from an old bicycle and never transmitted from the same place twice. He managed to evade the Germans until the complete liberation of the region in August 1944. But in June of that year many Resistance groups came out of hiding prematurely, believing that the D-day landings heralded imminent victory. They were slaughtered by German regular units. In Tulle, the nearest large town to the farmhouse, one hundred twenty of them were hanged in a single day, and one hundred fifty more were sent to Dachau, where most of them died. Sergeant Freddy was also lucky; the FFI flag was from the Maquis du Limousin unit that had helped him get away from Tulle.
The guns were all genuine from the period, and some of the individual weapons had been used by the Resistance. Francis had bought them over the years, from collectors, estate sales and auctions of family heirlooms. The Sten gun and the German Schmeisser had been obtained from what Brian described as “very unsavory sources,” which Bruno assumed to mean criminals.
“That banknote’s a new one on me. I never saw that before,” Brian said, leaning forward to study it more closely. “Would it be from the Neuvic train robbery?”
“I think almost certainly, yes. Any idea how your brother might have gotten hold of it?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. Francis was fascinated by that incident and read everything about it he could get his hands on. He even went around interviewing people. The nearest town to here is also called Neuvic, which kind of set him off. He spent a lot of time on it, often going to the Public Records Office in London. I know he was trying to find out if Freddy had been involved. He’d gotten hold of some account that confirmed Freddy had arranged some of the parachute drops that went to Groupe Valmy.”
Brian stood up, looked around the room and shook his head. “All those bookshelves, full of stuff Francis gathered, but he never managed to find one of the original banknotes before. I wonder where he got it?”
“Did your brother ever mention anyone called Murcoing?” Bruno asked. “Paul Murcoing, a young man, or an old résistant called Loïc, his grandfather and one of the original Groupe Valmy members?”
“No, but I’ll
bet you’ll find stuff about him in those files. Take a look in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet; that’s where he kept his photos. They’ll all be in alphabetic order.”
Bruno looked under M and found a file labeled MURCOING (VALMY). Inside it were three decent portraits of Loïc standing by a modern Neuvic road sign. There were also copies of the 1944 photos of the Groupe Valmy that Bruno had seen in the dead man’s box of treasures. But there was no file for Paul Murcoing.
Brian went back to the laptop, trying to guess passwords, while Bruno searched the rest of the house. He examined the contents of the freezer section of the fridge and the cisterns for the WCs, looked under tables and on the tops of bathroom cupboards. Finally, taking a last look around the bedroom where he’d found the dirty socks, his eye fell on a framed photo on one of the bedside tables. There were Paul and Francis, arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning for the camera while sitting at some café table in the sun. They were drinking what looked like Ricard, and between them two cigarettes smoldered on an ashtray marked DUBONNET.
“I found the password,” came Brian’s triumphant shout from below. “It was taped to the back of another drawer. He used Neuvic1944. He was obsessed with that damn train robbery.”
Bruno turned to go downstairs to see what the laptop might reveal, but his eye was caught by a second framed photo on the other bedside table. A moody portrait of Paul Murcoing half smiling, something deliberately seductive in his eyes, was inscribed: POUR MON TRÈS CHER FRANCIS, JE T’EMBRASSE, PAUL.
14
The village of Paunat was one of Bruno’s favorite places, a classic ensemble of old Périgord houses tumbling down a hillside to the stream and dominated by an imposing Benedictine abbey. Seated at a table for two on the terrace of the restaurant, Isabelle and Bruno kept glancing up to admire its floodlit wall as the twilight deepened. Once J-J and Bernard Ardouin had arrived at Francis’s farmhouse with the forensics team, Bruno had been able to leave and drive Brian back to his hotel. Isabelle had called to invite him to what she called a working dinner, saying she needed to get all the details before the brigadier arrived with Crimson next day.
The Resistance Man Page 12