The Resistance Man

by Martin Walker

  “With Francis Fullerton dead, the question now is what happens to his shares. Presumably that’ll be in his will,” Bruno said, reaching for his hat. “I have to go and see Ardouin, the juge, and then relate all this to J-J.” He bent down and kissed her. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’re as brainy as you are beautiful?”

  “Never in quite this context, with me lying in bed and a man who ought to be much more grateful just about to don his hat and leave me to languish.”

  He kissed her again. “Close your eyes and think of justice.”

  When Bruno returned to his home with Balzac he saw no sign of Isabelle or a rental car. Balzac scooted from the back of the Land Rover and around the side of the house to the chicken coop, where Isabelle was sitting on a tree stump in the late afternoon sun, watching the birds and smoking. She stomped out her cigarette just before Balzac leaped onto her lap and used his back legs to pedal his way up to lick her neck. Holding the puppy in both hands, she rose and offered Bruno the cheek Balzac was not monopolizing to be kissed.

  “You walked here?” She was dressed like a hiker in walking boots and jacket and somehow still managed to look chic. A light rucksack was on the ground beside her.

  “I parked at the hunters’ blind on the far side of the ridge and walked the trail. You should be impressed that I remembered the way.”

  “Why the discretion?”

  She gave a slow smile. “I could say I was thinking about your reputation or maybe I just wanted to take a gentle walk through the woods to see how my leg had recovered.” She took a paper-wrapped bottle from the rucksack and passed it to him. “But I’m also bringing a message from the brigadier along with this peace offering. He says you passed the test.”

  Did the brigadier never stop playing games? He opened the tissue paper and found a bottle of Balvenie. “It didn’t seem like a test to me.”

  “I know, he put me through a similar interview. The mood in Paris is poisonous right now with the election so close, people worried for their jobs, lots of documents being shredded, files being sanitized. It’s hard to know who to trust.”

  “That’s the life you chose, Isabelle.”

  She nodded. “It’s what I thought I wanted, what I still want, if only it weren’t so damn political all the time. It’s like living in Machiavelli’s kitchen. Anyway, it looks like I could be getting that European job. I’m on a short list of three, and I’m the only candidate who speaks English and has experience of international liaison. I go up to The Hague for the formal interview on Friday morning. You ever been to Holland?”

  Bruno shook his head.

  She gestured to his house. “I see you finally put the windows in the roof. Will you show me?” She picked up Balzac to carry him with her.

  Bruno led the way inside, remembering how he had talked of his plan as they had lain in bed, sharing that special territory of new lovers as they spoke of plans and dreams and explored possible futures together. Always practical, Isabelle had said he’d have to knock down walls to install stairs. So Bruno was proud of the solution he’d found, to put the staircase into the small room he’d used as a study, fitting his desk and books beneath the stairs and not taking space from his sitting room. When she climbed the stairs ahead of him, her limp was still noticeable.

  “It’s great, Bruno,” she said, putting Balzac down to explore as she looked into the smaller room to the left and the much larger room to the right and then poked her head into the small shower room he’d inserted between them. The rooms were still empty of furniture. She looked again into the smaller room.

  “The children’s room you always planned,” she said. Her voice was flat.

  “That depends if there’s more than one, then they get the big room, or maybe both of them.”

  “Aren’t you planning to move up here yourself?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “There’s the painting to finish, blinds and curtains to choose. And I like that bedroom downstairs.” He did not have to add that it was the bedroom that they had shared.

  “How will you get the beds up that staircase?”

  “I just have to get the mattresses up. The beds I can build myself.”

  She walked to the window, opened it and looked out at the view across the steadily rising ridges, fields and woodlands with not another house or road in sight. Then she turned, leaned with her back against the windowsill and looked carefully around the big room as if furnishing it in her mind. He wondered if she was thinking of what might have been, but she pushed herself off from the windowsill, flashed him a determined smile and headed down the stairs, speaking over her shoulder.

  “I’ve got something for you as well.”

  Balzac was too small to get down the stairs without tripping over his ears, so Bruno scooped him up and followed her. Outside, she went back to her rucksack and pulled out a stiff cardboard envelope and handed it to him.

  “We were interested in her too, not just Crimson,” she explained as Bruno pulled out a grainy surveillance photo of Jacqueline taken at a hotel entrance. She was with a tall and slender man with a thick head of flowing white hair, a man instantly recognizable to anyone who read French newspapers. The next photo showed the two of them embracing in the shadows of an entrance courtyard to what looked like a very plush apartment building.

  “That’s your boss,” Bruno said, finally realizing why anything to do with Jacqueline could set off alarm bells in Paris.

  “That was before he became a minister, five or six years ago, when he was still mayor of Orléans and she was teaching at the Sorbonne. The building is where he kept a discreet pied-à-terre on a fancy street behind the Parc Monceau.”

  “Did the RG get photos like this of everybody?” he asked. The Renseignements Généraux had been famous for their voluminous files on left-wing parties, but he wasn’t very surprised that they had been keeping an eye on fast-rising politicians of all stripes.

  Isabelle shrugged. “Who knows if they were watching her or him? Does it matter? They both turn out to be people of interest, particularly now.”

  Bruno was trying to work out the political implications. “So now the minister is worried that Jacqueline’s book might rebound on him, and he would be blamed if his party loses the election?”

  “That’s why he needs to find someone else to take the rap. That’s one of the first laws of politics,” Isabelle said. “And if the blame somehow falls onto the Americans or the British and their shadowy secret services trying to manipulate our elections, not to mention our foreign policies…”

  She took the cardboard folder and the photos back from Bruno. “I’d better go. Will you walk back to the car with me, you and Balzac?”

  He printed some names on a page of his notebook and gave it to her, explaining the results of the Web search at Companies House. “We need to see a copy of the will Francis Fullerton made in England. J-J is trying to get it through the usual channels. If you can find out faster it would help. And I’d like to hear if anything is known about these people, directors of this Arch-Inter Company.”

  “I thought you already had your suspect, Paul Murcoing. Or are you following one of your hunches?”

  “Never leave potentially useful information unchecked—isn’t that what you used to tell me?” Bruno asked.

  Isabelle shouldered her rucksack and began to walk around the chicken coop to pick up the track into the woods. Bruno saw her grimace, her limp apparent. He took her arm and turned her around and steered her toward his Land Rover.

  “I’m getting a bit pressed for time,” he lied. “I’d better drive you back to your car.”

  She gave him a sharp look but agreed, saying, “I’ve got something to tell you, and it might be easier to tell you in the car when I don’t have to look you in the eye.”

  “If you want to tell me that it’s all over between you and me, I’ve been expecting it,” he said, carefully keeping his voice neutral. “We’ve both known long enough that there’s no future for us. You’re no
t coming back to Périgord, even if you are giving up your career in Paris.”

  To get to her car by road would mean driving two long sides of a triangle, so he was taking the shortcut along the bridle path. It meant driving slowly but they would still be there in a fraction of the time, and this was not a conversation that he wanted to prolong.

  “We’ve lived with that,” she said. “This is something else.” She paused, and they drove on in silence, Balzac resting quietly on her lap, content just to lie there and feel her hand stroking his back.

  “I don’t really know how to begin, because I know that as soon as I say this it really is over between us.” Her voice didn’t sound like Isabelle’s at all, none of that energy and eagerness he knew so well. “There’ll be no more surprise reunions, no more fantasies of having you for a weekend in Paris. It’s final. You’ll never want to speak to me again.”

  He rounded a bend and saw her car parked by the hunters’ shack, perhaps a hundred yards ahead. He had a sudden presentiment of what she might be about to say and felt a great hollowness begin to gather somewhere deep in his gut.

  “I have done something unforgivable,” she said as he drew up beside her car. Her head was bowed, and she seemed to be speaking to Balzac more than to him, or perhaps making her farewell to the puppy she had always called “ours.”

  “It was that night before the summit, the night before Gigi was shot, when we were together.”

  Bruno was sure of it now. Her voice seemed to be coming from a long distance away. He wasn’t sure that he could speak.

  “I got pregnant and I didn’t tell you.” He heard her open the car door and felt her place Balzac gently on his lap, but he couldn’t turn his head to look at her. “I had the abortion and never told you. I think I knew that you’d talk me out of it, or you’d try, and that was a conversation I couldn’t face.”

  Her hand touched his cheek, and he felt the vehicle shift as her weight left it. “I know what this means to you. I’m sorry, Bruno.”

  He sat immobile, stunned, barely registering the way she limped to her car without looking back, unlocked it, climbed stiffly in and drove away. It was Balzac who brought him back to reality, clambering up the steering wheel to get close enough to lick Bruno’s chin before tumbling back onto his lap.

  24

  “Why did you race off like that? I said I was sorry, that I knew it wasn’t your fault. Pamela told me all about it, and she’s as good as new.” Fabiola was breathing hard as she brought her mare to a halt beside Bruno.

  “It’s nothing to do with you. It’s me,” he replied. “Something happened today, so I thought a fast gallop might clear my head. I’m the one who should apologize.”

  Even during the ride, Hector racing beneath him faster than they had ever gone together, the finality of Isabelle’s revelation still stunned him. There had been a new life, and now there was not. It would have been kinder of Isabelle never to have told him, but that was not her way.

  Fabiola eyed him curiously. “So if it’s not me you’re angry with, let’s not take it out on the horses. Can we go back more slowly? Victoria’s too old for a ride like that, and I don’t think Balzac enjoyed it.”

  Bruno looked down to where the puppy was huddled as deep inside the binoculars case as he could go, staring up at Bruno with wide eyes. He was being selfish, Bruno chided himself, and foolish to think that he could escape dealing with this by pushing his horse and his own horsemanship to their limit. He turned Hector and began to walk him back along the ridge, Fabiola falling in alongside but wise enough not to speak. He knew that some unpleasant nights lay ahead of him, but that was for the future. He had a job to do, a murderer to hunt down, a suspicion to pursue and friends like Fabiola to whom he owed more than this surly silence. At that moment, duty itself vibrated for his attention from the phone at his belt. He answered and heard J-J’s voice.

  “We found the plates for the stolen camper. Some Dutch tourist realized his own vehicle had suddenly grown French plates, the ones we were looking for. It looks like Paul put the Dutch plates on his own camper.”

  “Where was this?”

  “A campsite just outside Hendaye, down by the border. Maybe he got into Spain. Or that’s what he wants us to think. Still, we’ve alerted the Spanish police.”

  “Have you gotten anywhere on Francis Fullerton’s will yet?”

  “We have the one with the notaire in Ussel. It’s boilerplate. All his French property goes to his nearest family, which means his brother and sister. He cites the Corrèze farm and a bank account. We’re still waiting for the British will. And we’re having trouble with Fullerton’s computer. A lot of stuff had been deleted, and the files written over, so it’s not so straightforward to dig stuff out from the hard drive. We’ll have to send it to the specialists in Paris, and that costs a fortune. This job’s breaking my budget as it is. And we heard back from the phone trackers. Valentoux’s story about that disposable phone he bought holds up. It was switched on in Calais on the morning Fullerton was killed, and the cell-phone towers tracked it all the way down to St. Denis. It looks like it was with him all the time, and it hasn’t been switched on since.”

  “Murcoing could have taken it when he killed Fullerton and switched SIM cards,” said Bruno. “What about this guy in Bordeaux, Édouard? I asked the juge if I could go and interview him, but he said he wanted the art squad brought in. Have they been in touch with you?”

  “Yes, two of their guys are going through Fullerton’s photos and the Arch-Inter customs forms; that also goes on my budget. There won’t be anything left for my salary at this rate.”

  Bruno hung up and turned to Fabiola. “Do you have plans for dinner, or shall I make us an omelette?”

  “I’ve got plans, I’m afraid, but thanks.” She colored a little and changed the subject. “Whatever it is that’s on your mind, you know I’ll help if I can.”

  “I know. If you’re in a rush, I can rub the horses down.” He carefully didn’t ask where she was going.

  She looked at her watch. “Thanks, that would help.” As soon as they reached the stable, she darted into Pamela’s house, taking off her riding jacket as she ran.

  That gave Bruno time to do something that had been on his mind. Once the horses were settled and fed, he climbed into his Land Rover and took the road to the end of the commune, to the vacation rental cottage he remembered from his first year as the policeman of St. Denis. He knew his district so well by now that he could have found it blindfolded. Rather than dwell on Isabelle’s decision, he turned on Radio Périgord for the news, none of which concerned him, except for the final item.

  “Police are still searching for Paul Murcoing, said to be the chief suspect in the St. Denis murder case of Englishman Francis Fullerton. Juge d’Instruction Bernard Ardouin refused to comment on reports that Murcoing was believed to have fled to Spain. And finally, who was Paul Revere, and why is his coffeepot said to be worth as much as a hundred thousand euros? Coming up next, on Radio…”

  Bruno switched off the radio as the gîte came into view, looking a great deal more weathered than when he had last seen it. The roof tiles had turned to the soft red color that was so characteristic of the region, and the gravel of the drive had turned gray. One gable end was now green with ivy and some badly pruned roses straggled around the door. A Volvo with Dutch license plates was parked at the side of the place and a child’s bike lay on its side on the bumpy lawn. In the ten years—no, eleven—since he had been here, hundreds of vacationers must have lived and eaten and swum and sunbathed on the property, overlaying that day when he had walked to the rear and seen blood on the tiles and those wisps of blood hanging like red smoke in the water.

  Balzac had clambered forward from the back of the Land Rover and over the hand brake to sit in the passenger footwell. Bruno scooped him up and put him in his lap. Maybe at last he was on the way to finding some resolution of that case that had haunted him. But as he sat there, thoughts of what Isabelle had d
one flooded over him. He tried to understand it from Isabelle’s point of view as well as his own. He argued to himself that it was Isabelle’s life, her body, her future, and that she alone was entitled to make the decision. The baby that had been aborted was the promise of new life, but for Isabelle it must have seemed like an almost mortal threat to the life she had planned for herself.

  But couldn’t she have had the child and given it to him to raise? He’d have found nurses, babysitters, taken it to the crèche and the infants’ school, taught it to fish and to cook, to know the woods and the ways of dogs and horses. Why had she never even given him the chance to make that suggestion? Did not a father have some rights over the future, over the life and death of his child? Isabelle knew he did; it was why she had admitted that what she had done was unforgivable.

  He understood that Isabelle must have thought it through. She was aware of the physical changes that would come as the pregnancy progressed. She understood what the impact on her psyche would be as the hormonal shifts brought forth the maternal instincts that would wrench at her whole being when it came time to part with her child. Even if she gave the child to Bruno and returned to Paris or to Holland to resume her career, there would have been the guilt as her child grew up without her. She must have looked ahead to desperate Christmases and birthdays, brief reunions and heartrending farewells, and decided against that course. Unlike him, she was trapped by the iron laws of biology.

  He was aware that tears were running down his face and onto Balzac, and now he saw that a man had come out of the gîte ahead and was staring curiously at him. He put on his cap and climbed out of the vehicle so that the tourist could see his uniform.

  “Tout va bien?” Bruno called. “All okay? Just making a routine check. Sorry if I bothered you.”

  The Dutchman nodded and waved back. Bruno returned to his seat, noticed that the engine was still running, turned his car and drove away, heading automatically to St. Denis but not sure if he was in any mood to go home and spend the evening alone.