A Taste for Vengeance

by Martin Walker

  Above the huge fireplace and on one wall hung hunting trophies—the skull of a mountain goat with formidably curved horns flanked by the antlers of several deer Bruno didn’t recognize but thought might be African. Bookshelves lined one wall, filled more with DVDs and CDs than with books. Two sofas faced each other on either side of the fireplace with a coffee table between them; on it stood an ashtray and English newspapers and magazines.

  Against one wall an antique wooden cabinet held a tray of bottles, a large TV set and a stereo. Above them were photographs of a man in safari jacket and dark glasses, holding a heavy bolt-action rifle, smiling proudly. In one he stood with his foot on the head of a dead rhinoceros, in another beside an elephant whose tusks had been bloodily removed. A third photo showed the same man, flanked by two Africans in khaki overalls, standing above a dead lion with a different, modern rifle in his hand.

  Bruno shook his head in distaste. This was not hunting as he knew it, to put food on the table. It could even be illegal, although he vaguely recalled that some countries sold to rich hunters the right to hunt and kill elderly beasts. A fourth photo showed the same man bare-chested on a sunny beach, holding the same rifle. Clustered in a vaguely familiar background were Africans towing ashore an inflatable boat, which had a very large outboard motor.

  The wall with the photos was flanked by two doors. One opened into a big and well-equipped kitchen with room for a dining table that would probably seat eight people; it looked homemade and sturdy, and Bruno recalled the circular saw in the barn. Perhaps McBride had made it himself. The other door led into a cloakroom, which included a toilet, a sink and a separate area with a washing machine and dryer. In one corner of the living room was a handsome old curving staircase that led upstairs. A door in the other corner was open and Bruno could see an unmade king-size bed, its sheets and duvet thrown back.

  “Through here,” said Quatremer, walking past the bed and pointing to a doorway into the adjoining bathroom.

  A woman’s bra and panties lay on the floor beside the bed, a pair of shoes tumbled beside them, and a blue silk dress had been tossed onto a chair. A small carry-on suitcase lay open beside the chair. At the foot of the bed were a man’s shoes and socks, jeans and shirt. J-J paused to study the scene and pointed to the sheets.

  “Don’t touch that bed. We’ll need to know if they had sex,” he said and went into the bathroom.

  The naked body of a woman with blond hair lay sprawled in the shower cubicle, her head turned away so only a part of the side of her face could be seen. There was very little blood from the visible stab wound underneath her left breast. Somebody, presumably her killer, had turned off the shower. Her body was cold and still stiff, the flesh livid where it lay against the floor. She had evidently been dead for some time.

  “Is this the missing woman?” J-J asked.

  Bruno bent over the body and used his pen to lift the blond hair, then nodded. She was still beautiful, even in death. According to her passport details, she was in her late forties but her body seemed like that of a younger woman.

  “That’s Monika Felder,” he said, the sadness in his voice evident even to himself. “It’s the same face as the photo she sent to Pamela and the one from the Police aux Frontières camera at Bordeaux.”

  There was no facial rictus, the snarl that Bruno recalled was one of the first signs of rigor mortis as the small muscles of the face contracted. That they had now relaxed again suggested she had been dead for more than twenty-four hours. He would have to look up his notes from the police academy to be sure.

  “What do you make of the stab wound, Bruno?”

  “Looks to me like a stiletto, a long and narrow blade,” Bruno said. “That’s why there’s so little blood. Whoever used it knew what he or she was doing, where best to place it.”

  “Where’s the weapon? We need to find it.”

  There was no sign of a knife in the bathroom, only male toiletries in the cupboard, the usual razor, comb and toothbrush in a glass beside the washbasin. Beside it was a woman’s toiletries bag, already open, and a transparent plastic bag containing liquids and gels, the kind that has to be taken out for security at airports.

  “Sir, there’s a woman’s handbag and an open laptop in the kitchen,” said Juliette, peeking around the door to the bathroom. Then she saw the body, put her hand to her mouth and exclaimed, “Oh, dear Mother of God.”

  “Is there no sign of this McBride?” J-J asked Quatremer.

  “Not in the house, sir. I looked upstairs, two bedrooms, each with their own bathroom. They look like guest rooms, beds not made, with bedding neatly piled on them. The car in the barn is registered to him. I haven’t gone around the farmland. It’s mainly vineyards and orchard, some woodland, about eight hectares in all, according to the cadastre at the mairie.”

  “So this McBride was what, a farmer, a winemaker?” J-J asked. “There’s no sign of a chai, no second barn for wine vats and bottling.”

  “That’s not uncommon around here,” said Quatremer. “This is still in the area of the Bergerac appellation but there are hardly any named domains and not many winemakers. Mostly they grow grapes for the wine cooperative and some of them rent out their land to professional growers. But there’s what looks like a very well-stocked wine cellar down some steps through the door in the kitchen. There’s a barred door at the bottom of the stairs, still locked.”

  “Right,” said J-J, pulling out his phone and looking at Quatremer, whose turf this was. “While I’m calling the crime scene guys and the forensics team from Bergerac, perhaps you and Bruno could have a good look round the rest of the property.”

  “He’s a hunter,” said Bruno. “He should have a gun cabinet. We’d better check for that.”

  “It’s near the washer and dryer and it’s not locked,” said Quatremer. “I’ll show you.”

  The washing machine and dryer dominated one wall and on the other were hooks for outdoor clothes and a tall metal cabinet, its door closed. Bruno, still wearing evidence gloves, opened it. Inside was a rack to hold four guns, only three places filled. He recognized a Lee Enfield .303, probably the best bolt-action infantry rifle ever made and still used in shooting competitions. Beside it was an old double-action shotgun, the metalwork beautifully scrolled. He looked closer and saw a small rose engraved behind the barrels.

  “Mon Dieu,” he said to Quatremer. “This one’s a Purdey, English-made, twenty thousand euros at the very least.”

  There was another shotgun, side-by-side barrels, with L’ARQUEBUSIER engraved on the stock, which Bruno recognized from his subscription to the monthly Le Chasseur Français. It was made in Bordeaux by Tony Gicquel, one of the finest gunsmiths in France, and cost about seven thousand euros. On a shelf below were some boxes of ammunition, the British .303 caliber and various shotgun shells, birdshot, buckshot and slugs. When Bruno pulled out the boxes to examine them a single loose cartridge rolled free, a big one. He brought it close to his eye to examine it and saw BMG stamped into the rim. That made it a Browning half-inch caliber, or 12.7 millimeters, which these days meant a long-range sniper’s rifle. There was no gun to go with it.

  The gun case was screwed into the wall at chest height, convenient for reaching into. Below was a chest of drawers with gun-cleaning equipment, gun catalogs and hunting magazines. Leafing through them Bruno found a newspaper clipping from the Toronto Globe, about a Canadian sniper team that had used a McMillan TAC-50 rifle to kill two enemy combatants in Afghanistan’s Shah-i-Kot Valley at ranges of almost twenty-four hundred meters. Bruno’s eyes widened in surprise. In the army, he had been impressed by snipers who could hit their target at a thousand or even fifteen hundred meters. Twenty-four hundred meters was almost unbelievable. He tried to imagine it, a distance at which a human being could barely be seen with the naked eye and that would probably take him ten minutes to run. The clipping was attached with a paper cli
p to a warranty from McMillan Firearms Manufacturing in Phoenix, Arizona.

  “J-J, come look at this,” he called. “He’s got a bullet for a 12.7-millimeter sniper’s rifle, a press clipping about a very special rifle that could fire it and this guarantee from the manufacturer. It would make a good elephant gun and we know from the photos that McBride hunted them. It might even be the gun in the hunting photos. So where is the gun now?”

  “Merde, a killer at two thousand meters? That’s just what we need. I’ll check into it, see if it’s registered. Meanwhile, go and look around to see if there’s any trace of the owner.”

  J-J turned to Juliette. “And you, mademoiselle, please go door-to-door among the neighbors and find out what you can about McBride and whether they heard or saw anything unusual over the past couple of days. Country folk tend to keep their eyes open so ask if they saw any visitors or strangers or unfamiliar cars.”

  Bruno and Quatremer removed their bootees and walked around the side of the house, passing a small swimming pool that was still covered with its winter bâche, and a rear terrace flanked by four upright posts that held a well-pruned trellis of young vines, just coming into bud. It would be a pleasantly shaded spot in summer.

  “Do you want to check the pool first while I look over the land?” Bruno asked. Quatremer nodded, went to the side of the pool and bent to untie the fastenings that held down the cover.

  Were it not for the circumstances, Bruno would have enjoyed the walk up and down the rows of vines and then through an orchard of apple and pear trees. By the time he reached the woodland, Quatremer had joined him, saying the pool had been empty except for the usual log floating on the surface to prevent it freezing over.

  The vineyard was on a gentle uphill slope, which grew steeper as the woods began. Mature walnut and chestnut trees were interspersed with hemlocks, sycamores and some young oaks but Bruno saw no sign of the darkened earth that might have signaled the presence of truffles. They followed tracks of heavy vehicles to an area where the wood had been clear-cut, low stumps remaining, and at one side neat piles of branches and thinner logs. A metal horse that would hold the branches for cutting stood beside a trailer, which was already half-filled with trimmed logs that looked as if they would fit the big cheminée at the house.

  At the far side of the cleared woodland Bruno saw what looked like a path. He headed toward it, leaving Quatremer to scour the other side of the log pile. He tramped through the tree stumps, careful where he placed his feet among the thick and tangled layers of twigs and small branches, wishing Balzac were with him. The undergrowth looked perfect for the wily bécasse that Bruno liked to hunt, thinking them the best eating of the game birds.

  There was a well-trodden footpath in the opening between the chestnut trees and he followed it through a belt of mature woodland. It opened into another clearing, where he was pleased to find rows of beehives. Bruno had often wondered whether beekeeping was a hobby he might one day take up. Something caught his eye, a quick flash of metal. At the far side of the clearing below a great chestnut just starting to bud lay a fallen stepladder. He moved closer, marveling at the size of it, at least four meters high, one of the specialist ladders used in orchards where pickers sought the highest fruit. But what would the pickers want from a chestnut tree at this time of year?

  It was only then that Bruno looked up. A moccasin dangled from a foot a few inches above his head. The other foot was bare. He was suddenly aware of a stink of shit and the buzzing of flies. An almost naked man was dangling above him.

  The man was hanging from a high and sturdy branch, an item of clothing drooping from one shoulder. Bruno moved closer, careful not to tread in the mess beneath the man’s feet where his bowels had emptied. The body was stone cold but he called out to Quatremer anyway and used his phone to dial 15 for the SAMU emergency medical service. He then erected the stepladder and clambered up to see how the man was attached. He’d never used such a tall stepladder and felt perilously far from the ground. By accident, he brushed against the body, and the garment, a blue flannel dressing gown, slipped from the hanging man’s arm.

  Bruno felt his gorge rise as he saw that the fingers appeared to have been put through a mincer, the ends bloodied and some of the nails gone. The man must have clawed at the rope, trying to loosen it as he died. Bruno knew that even suicides did that. He climbed higher, sickened by the number of beetles and other insects crawling around the body, clustering at the ears and nose. Something, he presumed birds, had already been at the man’s eyes. The rope around his neck had bitten so deeply into the flesh that Bruno could only see the knot of the noose emerging from torn and swollen flesh beneath the man’s ear. Could this be the man in the hunting photos? Bruno had no idea.

  “Putain,” said Quatremer, panting from his run to join Bruno and looking up at the horror of the red and swollen face, the lolling tongue, the smears down one leg from the emptied bowels. “His own mother wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “Call J-J and get him up here,” Bruno said. “No point trying to cut him down. The poor guy’s been dead for hours.”

  “He didn’t go quickly, did he?” said Quatremer, dialing his phone. “Won’t be easy to identify.”

  As Bruno climbed down, he heard Quatremer asking for Commissaire Jalipeau and realized he was calling police headquarters in Périgueux and that he probably didn’t have J-J’s cell phone number. Bruno used his own phone, and J-J answered at once.

  “We’ve found another body, a male, looks like he hanged himself,” Bruno said. “Come up through the vineyard and orchard to the clear-cut woodland and you’ll see an opening on the left with a pathway. We’re in the clearing after the beehives. I called the urgences but there’s not much point. He’s cold as the grave.”

  “Stay there,” J-J said. “I’ll come on up as soon as the urgences arrive. The handbag belonged to Monika Felder. Her passport’s in it along with a purse. It still has pounds and euros and credit cards inside so it doesn’t look like a robbery. The scene of crime team is pulling up outside and forensics aren’t far behind. And we found what looks like a suicide note in the printer. Send that cop from Lalinde back down here. Presumably he can find someone local who can tell us if the dead man is McBride, maybe the local bank manager or someone from the wine co-op.”

  “Right.” Bruno ended the call, told Quatremer what J-J wanted and watched him set off. Bruno was still wearing evidence gloves so he reached into the two side pockets of the crumpled dressing gown. He found a couple of paper tissues, a pack of Dunhill cigarettes and a Bic lighter. He looked around the straggling grass beneath the trees, seeing the indentations made by the legs of the stepladder and the second moccasin but not much more. Perhaps forensics could make something of the scene.

  The man had been in good shape, not much fat on him and he was well muscled. Beyond the ravaged and bloodied fingers, his hands looked roughened, not with manual work but, like Bruno’s hands, showing signs of gardening and chopping wood. There was a small, puckered scar high up on the chest beneath the shoulder and Bruno knew at once what it was. He had a similar scar on his own hip that had been made by a high-velocity bullet from a Serbian sniper in the hills above Sarajevo. On the side of the dead man’s left leg, swollen with the blood that had been drawn down by gravity, were a series of small indentations and old scars of the kind made by shrapnel from a grenade or a mine.

  Bruno assumed at once that the man had been a soldier like him, a combat veteran. He wondered where he had got the wounds. Presuming the body would prove to be McBride, who had spoken English on the train; he had probably been in the British forces. Bruno knew they had most recently seen combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly in Bosnia or Kosovo.

  He took out his phone again and called his friend Jack Crimson, a retired British diplomat and former intelligence officer who lived nearby. His daughter, Miranda, had moved to the Périgord with her two childr
en after a messy divorce and was now Pamela’s partner in the riding school and the cooking classes. Jack knew most of the British people in the area and was likely to know of any old soldiers. He also spent a lot of his time visiting the local vineyards.

  “Hi, Jack, Bruno here.”

  “Ah, congratulations, my dear fellow, both on your promotion and on the medal. I was in the crowd at your parade with Miranda and the children. I must say you French people do these events very well.”

  “Thanks, Jack, but this is business. I’m at a small farmhouse and vineyard north of Lalinde, owned by one of your countrymen, McBride. He’s probably an ex-soldier. Do you know him?”

  “It doesn’t ring a bell. There are thousands of Brits around here and I don’t know them all. What’s up? Is this chap McBride in trouble?”

  “He’s dead, if it’s him. Looks like he hanged himself, and there’s a dead British woman in his bathroom, the one who never turned up for the cooking class. She was stabbed, a single strike to the heart. You’ll keep this to yourself, Jack, and for God’s sake don’t tell Pamela or Miranda. Let me handle that. Could you ask a few of your friends in Lalinde? They might know a fellow Brit.”

  “I’ll do that, but why do you say he’s an ex-soldier?”

  “There’s a long-healed bullet scar on his chest and an exit wound scar on his back, both small, so I’d say a high-velocity bullet, probably military. And there are smaller scars on one leg, as if he was clipped by a grenade, maybe a mortar.”

  “I could try calling our military records office. Do you have a full name and date of birth, any other details?”

  “Patrick James McBride,” Bruno replied, quickly opening his notebook. “That’s all I have. Bullet scar in right shoulder, looks to be in his forties, maybe early fifties.”