The Crowded Grave bop-4

by Martin Walker

  “Just that small bag?” He wished he could have driven her all the way to Bordeaux.

  “I have clothes at Mother’s house. Are you sure you can take care of the horses?”

  “Fabiola will help,” he said. “Don’t worry about things here. Have you had any more news about your mother?”

  “Yes, from my aunt, who saw her and said that it’s her left side that’s affected. But she recognized my aunt. She just can’t speak much, but the doctor says that should come back in time.” She was twisting the black leather gloves in her hands as she stared through the windshield. “Will we be in time for the train?”

  “Comfortably,” he said, but pressed the accelerator a little harder, glad that his new police car had a bigger engine than the old one. “Have you eaten?” he asked.

  “Fabiola made me eat an omelette and an apple and drink some tea. She put a sandwich and a bottle of water in my bag. I’ll be fine.” She looked at her watch again. “I’m worried about the train.”

  “If I have to, I’ll put the siren on.” He tried to make light of it.

  “This is the time I should be processing all the bookings for the gites this summer,” she fretted. “I’ll go broke if I can’t get them all settled and the deposits in the bank.”

  “There are bound to be Internet places in Edinburgh where you can deal with that. I can check your mail and deposit checks at the bank,” Bruno said, looking both ways before turning onto the busy main road toward Le Buisson. He understood that she was saying these things as a way to make a mental list of things to be done, an effort to impose control over her life again after the shock of the news about her mother. She needed reassurance.

  “These things can all be resolved. Right now, your concern is your mother, so don’t worry about anything having to do with St. Denis. We can take care of things here. I can send you reports by e-mail.”

  “I can’t leave it all to you, Bruno,” she said, rummaging in her handbag to check that she had her passport and the printout of her boarding pass. “You have more than enough on your plate as it is, and now this dynamite and the corpse at the dig and the foie gras and Horst disappearing… Oh God, this is all happening at the worst possible time. And now there’s Charles.”

  Bruno hated taking his eyes off the road when he was driving, but he looked quickly across at her, not sure what she meant.

  “It means I’ll have to see my ex-husband again,” she said, her voice flat and almost dull. She was looking fixedly at the road ahead, not meeting Bruno’s eye. “He stayed very close to Mummy even after the divorce, and she always thought the world of him. She was furious when I left him, barely spoke to me for ages. He still visits her from time to time.”

  “That’s to be expected,” he said, not sure why she was telling him this. Pamela had always spoken of her mother with great affection, even though Bruno had sometimes wondered why she never came to visit her daughter in France. “An illness in the family, it brings people together.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that knowing I’ll see him will bring back all the things I disliked about marriage, not just him but the institution, the way it forces people into roles.” She paused, and then said almost to herself, “I hate depending on people, or their depending on me.”

  Bruno wondered whether she was talking about their relationship, rather than her former husband. She was still twisting her gloves in her hands, her knuckles white. He slowed at the last bend before the stop sign and the turn onto the bridge over the Dordogne. Some small drops of rain spattered his windshield.

  “I don’t know why I’m talking about this,” she said. “The thought of seeing him again just adds to all the pressure, I suppose. And my mother will be so pleased to see him, probably more than she will to see me. I’m the daughter who let her down, with no grandchildren and a failed marriage.”

  “It’s a difficult time for you,” he said. Pamela had always made it clear that she had no desire to settle down and was determined never to have children. They had never talked seriously about it, but it was something that Bruno knew placed a limit on their relationship. He sometimes asked himself if it had been a mistake to break his traditional rule of never starting an affair with someone who lived in St. Denis.

  “He’ll probably expect to stay at the house when he comes up, and I’ll have to be polite to him,” she said, her voice cold. “God, I hate that kind of acting.”

  Perhaps unconsciously, Bruno thought, she had timed her last remark to end just as he turned the final bend that led to the train station. They still had a few minutes before the train left.

  “Just think about your mother. She’s the only thing that matters now.” He brought the car to a halt outside the station. “Would it help if I came to Scotland?”

  “No, absolutely not. That would just make everything much more complicated and it’s much more help to me that you’ll be living at my place and looking after the horses. But it’s sweet of you to offer. I know this is a busy time for you, but I don’t want you to start living on pizzas and sandwiches.”

  He laughed. “You know me better than that.”

  “Fabiola will keep an eye on you. She said she’ll invite you around for meals.”

  He opened the door, climbed out and walked quickly round to help her out with her carry-on bag, then held open the station door for her. “Have you got your train ticket?”

  “I’ll get one onboard-no, don’t wait for me.”

  He ignored her, went to the ticket counter and greeted Jean-Michel who played for St. Denis and whose nose was still swollen from his encounter with Teddy at the rugby practice. He bought her an open return, exchanged a joke about Jean-Michel’s bruises, punched Pamela’s ticket in the required yellow box and led the way across the rails to the platform for Bordeaux.

  “I have no idea how long I’ll have to stay,” she said as they walked over the wooden pathway across the rails that led to the far platform for the Bordeaux train. “I suppose it will depend on her recovery and whether she can continue to live alone.”

  “You could bring her over here. You have plenty of room.”

  “She’d hate it, being away from Edinburgh and her friends. She’s always wanted me to move back there.”

  Bruno hadn’t known that. He could see the train coming in the distance. They were the only people on the platform. He took her hand, still gripping the mangled gloves. He looked her in the eye, raised her hand to his lips and kissed the inside of her wrist. She looked back, her lip trembling.

  “I’ll miss you, but we’ll take care of everything here. Don’t worry. And if you need me…”

  “God, this is like a scene from Brief Encounter,” she said, looking behind her at the approaching train.

  “From what?” He spoke loudly over the squeal of the train’s brakes and the rumble of metal wheels.

  “It’s an old film that always makes me cry,” she said. “It’s very British, about a doomed love affair and a railway station. Only it had steam trains.”

  “I like steam trains,” he said, pressing the little green button on the gleaming blue and silver door that slid back with smooth, electronic grace. He put her suitcase aboard, turned back and took her in his arms to kiss her firmly on the lips and then lifted her onto the train as the guard blew his whistle. Her bronze-red hair spread out, tumbling over the white cashmere on her shoulders, and there were tears in her eyes. As he watched, one spilled over and rolled down onto her cheek.

  “Bon voyage, my beautiful Pamela, and I hope your mother is better soon, and don’t worry about the horses, or anything.”

  The train doors slid together leaving her standing behind them, one hand to her eye, the other raised in an uncertain gesture that might have been a farewell wave, or she might have been reaching to him through the glass. The train began to move and he stood immobile, watching it diminish down the track.

  “ Ca va, Bruno?” It was Jean-Michel. “Can I help you with something?”


  He shook his head. “A woman,” he said. “Saying good-bye.”

  Jean-Michel looked at him quizzically. “But that was your Mad Englishwoman. She lives here. She’ll be back.”

  “She’s not mad,” said Bruno, quietly. “And she’s from Scotland.” He crossed back over the rails to the ticket hall and out to his car in the parking lot.

  Bruno was putting down the phone after telling Clothilde there was still no news of Horst when the mayor called his name. Along with most of the rest of the employees of the mairie, the mayor was looking at the small TV set in the staff room beside the kitchen, and peering over the heads of others Bruno could see on the screen a shot of Gravelle’s wrecked showroom with a headline “War on Foie Gras?”

  The next image was the scrawled slogan on the wall of the factory, and then a short interview with a tongue-tied Arnaud Gravelle. A brief cheer went up as they saw their mairie on screen, and then a close-up of the mayor standing beside the old stone pillars of the market hall.

  “There’s no excuse for these attacks on innocent farmers and shopkeepers going about their normal and entirely legal duties,” the mayor was saying. “Foie gras is one of the glories of French cuisine and a pillar of our economy, and only crazy militants would resort to this kind of violence, bombing a quiet country town. We count on the police to bring these extremists to justice.”

  Another brief cheer greeted the mayor’s remarks, but then the TV reporter, standing on the bridge with the River Vezere flowing placidly behind him, said not all the local authorities agreed. And some maintained that foie gras was indeed cruel to animals. The image shifted again, to Annette, their new magistrate, standing on the steps of the gendarmerie. She looked calm, attractive and highly professional in a neat white blouse and trim blue jacket.

  “There have been other nonviolent attacks protesting against this cruelty to animals,” Annette said. “Two demonstrations have taken place against local duck farms, and on the second occasion the farmer fired his shotgun and we found blood at the scene. Perhaps in an understandable response to this violence, it seems an escalation has taken place. But I note that it was a bombing against property in which nobody was injured. As the investigating magistrate I take this very seriously, but I regret to say that the local authorities seem more concerned with protecting their foie gras industry than with seeing justice done.”

  “Do you mean that your investigations have been deliberately obstructed?” the interviewer asked. The staff room of the mairie was silent in shock.

  “I mean precisely that, and I will be filing a complaint to the proper authorities,” Annette said. “There are laws against cruelty to animals and I’m convinced that foie gras is not just cruel, it’s barbaric.”

  The camera cut away as the dozen or so people in the staff room erupted in jeers and booing.

  “If not a war on foie gras, it looks like a war over foie gras, here in St. Denis, in the Perigord, where a bomb destroyed a local factory producing the famed delicacy this morning,” said the reporter, signing off.

  “And now sports,” said the news announcer, and the mayor stepped forward, turned off the TV, ejected the videotape and turned to the staff.

  “This is a serious situation and I’ll be convening a full council meeting to discuss our response,” he told his staff. “All media questions, and any inquiries from the magistrate, will be referred directly to me until further notice. Bruno, please join me in my office.”

  “This is war,” said the mayor, once inside his office with the door closed. “What grounds might she have for complaint against us?”

  “Capitaine Duroc has made sure that she blames me for that demonstration when the farmers blockaded the gendarmerie,” Bruno said. “So now she thinks I organized it and she’s demanded my phone records to prove it.”

  “What will those records show?”

  “Nothing. No calls that morning. I said I was happy for her and Duroc to look at my phone logs.”

  “Good.” The mayor paused, then looked at Bruno quizzically. “I don’t want to pry into your emotional life, but is there anything personal that’s gone on between you two that would explain this vendetta? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, that sort of thing?”

  “No, not at all, though I gave her a parking ticket once,” he said with a grin. “She may try to blame me for the disappearance of the chief suspect, the Dutch student at the dig, who has apparently returned home to Holland. But since the magistrate has filed no charges against the girl and has just made it publicly clear that she is in sympathy with the allegations of cruelty against animals, she’s on weak ground. Remember, she used the word ‘barbaric’ about foie gras, a dish that is eaten in two-thirds of French households. When it comes to a battle for public opinion I don’t think she can win.”

  “Are you sure that’s the right terrain?”

  “No, that’s our last ditch,” Bruno said. “We have to do two things. First, we have to separate her from Duroc. And you don’t want to know, but I think I have a way to do that. Second, and this you do want to know because you’ll have to be part of it, we attack her credentials in this case.”

  “How do we do that?”

  Bruno explained that he’d already asked her, in front of Sergeant Jules, to recuse herself from the case on grounds of partiality. In view of what she’d just said on TV she’d have no choice. It was unfair to have a magistrate investigating an affair where her prejudice was so public.

  “Most people already think the magistrates are just a bunch of lefties,” said the mayor, nodding in agreement.

  “True, but we mustn’t say that,” Bruno insisted. “The last thing we want is to get all the magistrates rallying to her side in solidarity.”

  The mayor looked at him keenly, a half smile on his face. “You want us to speak more in sorrow than in anger.”

  “Precisely,” Bruno replied. “We love French justice, we want a magistrate. We just maintain we have a right to be investigated by a magistrate who hasn’t already told the French public that we’re a bunch of barbarians because we make a food that France loves.”

  “Meanwhile, we’d better get some allies standing with us. I’ll get the Societe des Gastronomes de France to complain to the justice minister,” said the mayor, his eyes lighting up. “We can ask the great chefs of France for their views on foie gras. I’ll get my old friends in the Senate to pass a resolution on foie gras as part of our national heritage. I’ll get all the other mayors in the Perigord to join us. The farmers’ union, the vignerons of Monbazillac and Sauternes, the deputes of the Assemblee Nationale-we’ll build a coalition, Bruno.”

  “And we have to make sure that no coalition rallies around her. Bring in Alphonse,” Bruno said. “He’s a Green, but he’s one of our own councillors and he likes his foie gras. We get him on our side and we split the Green movement. We have to think where she might get support, and work out how we can neutralize it in advance. We have to leave her with no allies but the extremists.”

  “Leave this to me,” the mayor said, rubbing his hands together with glee. “This is my specialty. This is politics.”

  21

  The Danish student was named Harald, and being short, plump and dark haired, he could hardly have looked less like Bruno’s mental image of a descendant of Vikings. But he spoke good French, his eyes were keen with intelligence and he was not lacking in self-confidence.

  “That guy’s not a native Danish speaker,” said Harald, settling back into the passenger seat of Clothilde’s car as she climbed in. She handed a wrapped brown-paper parcel that contained a shapely wrought-iron candlestick to Bruno, who was sitting in the backseat.

  “You’re sure?” Bruno asked. “This is really important.”

  “His Danish was okay, but he’d never fool another Dane. I’d say he was originally German, probably from Hamburg or somewhere,” said Harald, swiveling in his seat to look at Bruno. “What’s this about?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but the professor
has disappeared mysteriously. Jan was his closest friend in these parts, and now it seems there’s something suspicious about him. I’ll take this candlestick he wrapped and check his fingerprints, see if we can find out anything else. How much do I owe you for the candlestick, Clothilde?”

  “If it helps find Horst, consider it a gift,” she said, starting the car and heading back toward St. Denis. “This all seems a bit cloak-and-dagger, you hiding in the backseat.”

  “Better not to raise Jan’s suspicions,” said Bruno. “It seemed natural enough for you to bring along a young Danish student to meet the only other Dane in the district. Just so long as it didn’t make Jan think he was being checked out.”

  “No, I was pretty casual, just asking him what he liked about the area, why he’d stayed, if he missed going back to Denmark, that kind of thing,” said Harald, who had evidently enjoyed his brief foray into police work. “And I asked him if he knew who’d won the Danish soccer final-just friendly chitchat.”

  “Did he know?”

  “No. He said he sometimes got Politiken to keep up with the news, but he didn’t follow sports much. That surprised me a bit because he had a copy of L’Equipe in front of him when I saw him in a cafe early this morning. That’s your sports paper, isn’t it?”

  “It is, indeed,” Bruno said. “Could Jan’s accent come from being born on the border? He said everybody there spoke German as much as Danish.”

  “He’s right about that, but they’re still Danes. I had a girlfriend from down there once and visited her a few times. They speak Danish like me, and he doesn’t. I’m sure he’s not one of us.”

  “Anybody else there?”

  “Some young guy. We weren’t introduced, and he didn’t speak, but I was pretty sure he didn’t understand the Danish we were speaking.”

  “I’m not even sure he understood my French,” added Clothilde.

  Bruno nodded, remembering the young relative of Juanita he’d met at the smithy when he called, the one that Jan had said was learning the business. The name escaped him. When Clothilde dropped him at the mairie, Bruno took the wrapped candlestick in his own car to the chateau at Campagne. The workmen had been replaced by armed security guards who called up to Isabelle before letting him enter.