A Taste for Vengeance

by Martin Walker

  J-J sat to his right and Yves from the forensics team to his left. Bruno had expected to be at the distant foot of the table, below various detective inspectors, but J-J pointed to the vacant seat beside him. Bruno took his seat, noting that only he and Prunier were in uniform. There were pots of coffee, cups, glasses with fruit juice and bottles of mineral water on the table, and the coffee smelled a great deal better than the usual brew he had been served here in the past. Prunier was evidently launching some long-overdue improvements, Bruno thought with approval. He poured himself a cup and sipped.

  “This case is obviously our priority,” Prunier began. “Two foreign nationals are dead so the British and Irish police are both counting on us to resolve this. We can’t have any mistakes. I know this looks like a murder-suicide involving two lovers, but I don’t want us making any assumptions. Let’s double-check everything. The procureur will be appointing a magistrate at some point today or at the latest tomorrow, so let’s see how far we can get while this is still entirely in police hands.”

  Prunier gestured to J-J to start the briefing. Despite their having found the passports, French law still needed formal identification of the two bodies, J-J began. British and Irish police had run the fingerprints of the two dead people through their criminal records and found no matches. They were still waiting for a response from the Interpol fingerprint records. The murder weapon had been found by a metal detector in the undergrowth near McBride’s body, a knife that J-J said should be recognizable from its length and the handle, which looked as if it had been made from a series of wooden rings. It lay before J-J in a clear plastic evidence bag, and he picked it up to show it around, its slim blade almost twenty centimeters long.

  Bruno raised a hand. “I recognize it. That’s a British commando knife, called a Fairbairn-Sykes after the two men who designed it during World War Two. The blade was long so it could kill through a heavy military greatcoat. They’re still widely used by Special Forces throughout NATO. Along with the scar from a bullet wound, that adds to the suggestion that McBride had a military background.”

  J-J made a note on the pad in front of him and continued. “We’re still waiting to hear from the Irish police about McBride. The British police sent a patrol car to the Felder address but there was no reply. Neighbors said Monsieur Felder had not been home for some time and Madame Monika Felder, the murdered woman, traveled a lot. Apparently the Felders valued their privacy and the neighbors barely knew them. The British police entered the house, found a family address book and were trying to contact Felder’s two adult children.

  “We did better with door-to-door inquiries,” J-J went on, explaining that they had learned McBride sold his wine to the cooperative through a tenant who tended his vines. He had a little more than four hectares of vines, usually producing around thirty thousand liters a year. McBride and the tenant shared the money and got around ten thousand euros each. The tenant, a neighbor, had reported that McBride spoke decent French and described him as “correct rather than friendly,” a man who kept to himself and who traveled for weeks at a time.

  McBride had lived alone and had few visitors but sometimes went to local rugby matches. Being a European citizen, he had the right to live and work in France and didn’t need a carnet de séjour. He paid French taxes, declaring an income of thirty-eight thousand euros last year from his grapes and private investments. He’d bought his farmhouse with its land shortly after the financial crisis, when prices slumped. There was no mortgage on the property. He had a local doctor whom he saw once a year and who said he was in excellent health. The medical file said McBride had been born on March 17, 1965.

  “When the doctor asked about the scar of a bullet wound, McBride said he’d been in the Irish army and had been wounded when serving with United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon,” J-J said. “He had nearly two hundred euros in cash in his wallet and debit cards for three bank accounts, one in Dublin, another with HSBC in London and one here with Crédit Agricole, where he had a savings account with over twenty thousand euros. We hope to have details of the other accounts later today. He had a French driver’s license, clean except for three points for speeding.

  “We’re still waiting for the pathologist’s report after the autopsies, but it looks pretty clear that Madame Felder was killed by a knife thrust to the heart while in the shower, probably by this commando knife. We’re awaiting confirmation from blood tests. McBride died by hanging, apparently by his own hand. There’s no immediate evidence of anyone else being involved.”

  The two dead people seemed to have shared a dinner at McBride’s home on the evening after they were seen on the train that afternoon. The dishes had all been placed in the dishwasher and there were remains of bread, salad, cheese rinds and steaks in the black garbage bag under the sink.

  “We’ll see if the pathologist confirms that,” J-J went on. “There was an almost empty bottle of vintage champagne in the bedroom and an empty bottle of Château Haut-Brion, 2005, on the kitchen counter. That costs around seven hundred euros a bottle.”

  J-J looked up. “Like the wine in his cellar, that’s a whole lot better than the stuff he grew himself. Beside the Haut-Brion was a half-empty bottle of Scotch malt whisky called Camas an Staca from Jura, thirty years old, and when we looked it up we found that it costs about six hundred euros a bottle. It had apparently been opened after the meal. The little metallic cover over the cork was found on top of the food remains in the bin. I wish I could afford to drink like that.

  “We don’t know what happened after the meal, although we now know they had sex at some point. We found a pharmacist’s bottle of Viagra in a drawer in the bedside table. We found only one glass with whisky in it, so either the two of them were drinking from it or McBride drank it alone. The autopsy should tell us how drunk he was. His tastes in wine and whisky were very expensive by comparison with his apparent income.”

  “Anything else?” Prunier asked, looking around the table.

  With a grateful glance at Bruno, J-J read out the single paragraph that Bruno had handed him in J-J’s office before the meeting began.

  “Chief of Police Courrèges did some internet research. According to his Wikipedia entry, Monsieur Felder—the husband of the dead woman—was the director of British military intelligence until 1992, when he left to start a very successful private security company. He’s rich and he’s thirty years older than his wife, the late Monika, who was a German citizen when she married him shortly after Felder divorced his first wife. He had two children by his first marriage, who presumably stand to inherit their father’s very considerable wealth, now that Monika is dead.”

  J-J looked up again. “We’ve asked the British and Irish authorities to help us contact next of kin. There’s no reply from Felder’s home number so we’ve asked the British police to check with his company. They have offices all over the world, but not in Paris.”

  “Did you go through the police liaison office with Scotland Yard or the consulate in Bordeaux?” Prunier asked.

  “Both, but what little information we have came through the liaison office. Somebody from the Irish embassy in Paris is supposed to be calling me back later this morning. And we’ve already had some calls from the British press. So far, we’ve said nothing that wasn’t in last night’s incident report, which is how I’d like to keep it.”

  “Let’s speed this up,” said Prunier. “Get an English-speaking officer to call this company of Felder’s this morning and say we want him or somebody who knew his wife well to get here as soon as possible to make a formal identification of the body. Is she here or in Bergerac?”

  “Bergerac, it was closer. McBride’s body was also taken to the morgue there.”

  “Talk with the banks and the tax office again,” Prunier said. “I want to know exactly where his money came from, whether there were any significant transfers or changes in his bank accounts. What about
the computer hard drive he tried to destroy?”

  “Nothing useful left of it, sir,” said Yves. “But he was a subscriber to Orange so we’re trying to get something from them about his internet history. We can’t find the SIM cards from his and Monika’s cell phones, and forensics are sifting the ashes to see if they were also put into the fire. We have her number so we’ve asked the British police to see what their telecom people can find. Destroying the hard drive is very unusual. If it weren’t for the apparent suicide, I’d say this looked like a professional hit. So we’ll be looking closely to see if we can confirm whether McBride really hanged himself or whether he might have had help. Given the amount of alcohol he seems to have drunk, I’m surprised that he could have climbed up that stepladder on his own.”

  “Thank you, messieurs,” Prunier said. “Despite the media interest, I don’t think we need to add anything to the statement we issued last night. I’ll suggest that any further press statement should come from whichever magistrate the procureur will assign to this case. And I don’t want any off-the-record chats with any friends in the media.”

  As the meeting broke up, Prunier signaled to Bruno to follow him into his office, overlooking the roundabout on rue Gambetta. He stood behind the big desk and scratched his head as if trying to work out what to say.

  “We have to thank you, Bruno. J-J says you started this inquiry, looking for this woman who failed to turn up on time for a cooking course,” he said. “I’m sorry it had to happen as you took on this new job, but unless you particularly want to stay involved, I think it’s in your own best interest to get back and start making a success of the Vézère Valley. It’s a big job and these first days taking charge of your new team are important.”

  Bruno nodded, torn between knowing Prunier was right and his own interest in the case, triggered by that moment of sudden kinship he had felt when he realized that McBride, too, had been a combat soldier. He was grateful that Prunier had not appealed to their friendship to help ease Bruno out of the inquiry and back to his real job.

  “You’re showing me the door the moment you start serving decent coffee,” Bruno said, smiling.

  Prunier laughed. “You aren’t missing much at this stage. This case is now a matter of waiting for the pathologist and the forensics report. After that we have to wait for the procureur to decide upon a magistrate to lead the inquiry. So if you want to come back to join it once you’ve got your new team settled in, we’ll keep a seat warm for you. And the coffee.”

  Chapter 6

  Bruno left the police building and headed for place Bugeaud, where he had parked. As he waited at the corner for the traffic lights to change he saw a young woman standing at an open passenger door of a car and shouting angrily at a man sitting in the driver’s seat. Bruno could only see her back as she climbed into the car, a handkerchief to her face and her shoulders rocking as if weeping.

  The light changed and people standing beside him began to cross the street. He followed suit, taking his eyes off the couple in the car. It was only when they drove past him that Bruno saw the young woman was Paulette, looking different with her hair down. He was accustomed to seeing her on a sports field, when she wore it in a tight bun. He craned his neck to spot the vehicle’s registration number. His eye was distracted by a Green Party sticker, but he caught the first two letters, C and V, and then the digits 9 and perhaps 7. It had been a red Renault Clio, not very new. He scribbled down as much of the number as he had seen before the car was blocked by other vehicles and was obscured in traffic.

  It was no surprise that Paulette was in the city, Bruno thought. Like most students from St. Denis, she was at the lycée five days a week, staying in the attached dormitory Monday through Thursday nights and returning home on weekends. But who had her companion been and was he the father? Certainly it looked more like a fraught argument than just a lovers’ tiff.

  Bruno knew the mind registered things it had seen even briefly and he tried to use the tricks he’d learned at the police academy to trigger visual memory by singling out specific images, gestures and items of clothing. The man sitting in the car had been at the wheel and leaning across to the passenger door. He’d had one arm on the wheel and the other had been outstretched and beckoning, as if trying to coax Paulette to enter. He was wearing a leather jacket with a cotton scarf looped fashionably around his neck. He was slim, clean-shaven and wearing glasses, but the features wouldn’t come together. Bruno suspected he’d recognize the man if he saw him again. He could have been a fellow student, and it was the kind of car a student might drive, or possibly a very young teacher with little money.

  Bruno climbed into his van and prepared to head back to St. Denis. The nine o’clock news was on the radio, followed by local news and announcements. The second item was a report that the British press had named Monika Felder as the woman found dead in Lalinde at McBride’s home. Prunier and J-J would not be happy, but the London newspaper had cited British police sources, so there was not much they could do.

  The last item was a reference to a charity drive at the lycée Bertran de Born, which triggered the memory that this was the school Paulette attended. Bruno drove to it and weaved his way slowly around the parking area, looking for a red Renault Clio without success. He drove to the student dormitory, where the car park was so small he could see quickly that there was no red vehicle inside. He then drove to the two other lycées in the city but again drew blanks.

  He shrugged. It was time to get back to St. Denis. He could always ask for a search of the registration list, but officially he would need an operational reason for that. In the past, he had asked J-J or the gendarmes to do so as a favor, but he wanted to keep Paulette’s problem to himself while he could. Once her parents knew of her pregnancy, they would probably call in the priest and the whole affair would become even more complicated. Bruno decided he should try to arrange to see Paulette in the course of this week while she was in Périgueux and get an idea of what she was planning to do. He would take Florence along since she knew the girl as well as or even better than Bruno did and it might be easier for Paulette to talk to a woman.

  * * *

  —

  Fifty minutes later and still in uniform, Bruno was standing in front of Jean-François’s stall in the St. Denis market, explaining to Pamela’s clients why he usually bought his ducks and geese from his friends at the Lac Noir farm. Knowing the limits of Bruno’s makeshift English, Pamela had insisted on rehearsing what he would say. He pulled an evidence glove onto his right hand and pressed his thumb into the plump, golden flesh of a raw duck liver.

  “See the indentation? Now I lift my thumb and the flesh comes back,” he said. “That shows the foie is fresh and good. And it is not too big, meaning the duck has not been stuffed too much.”

  Pamela had already explained to them that ducks and geese stuffed themselves to store in their livers the energy required for their long migration flights. As a result, their livers quite naturally swelled to three times their usual size and more. The kind of factory force feeding still used in some Eastern European countries to swell the livers up to eight and nine times normal size was banned here, where the birds roamed free.

  “The important thing about the duck is that we eat all of it except the feathers,” Bruno went on. “And we can use those for cushions and for wonderful featherbeds. This duck can give us five separate meals.” He held up separately a liver, a magret or breast, the legs and then the aiguillettes, the two long, thin strips of the sweetest meat that ran down each side of the duck’s breastbone. Finally he held up a carcasse from which all the other items he’d mentioned had been removed.

  “And this we use to make a soup, or a bouillon, a stock. Nothing is wasted, and this afternoon I will show you how to make each one. Au revoir, messieurs, dames. Et bon appétit.”

  He turned and moved briskly away toward his office in the mairie, keen to avoid Kath
leen. At the Lac Noir stall, she had been eyeing him with that relentless, predatory look reporters develop when chasing a story. He knew it only too well from Philippe Delaron.

  Bruno had been told that Pamela’s clients were buying their own lunch of pâté, cheese, bread and the first of the new strawberries, and he was not expected to rejoin them at the riding school until around four in the afternoon. He’d already arranged for Louis and Juliette to meet him for a picnic lunch on the grounds of the château of Puymartin, which was equidistant from him in St. Denis and Louis in Montignac. Bruno preferred the casual atmosphere of a picnic meeting rather than something more formal in an office.

  He started going swiftly through the paperwork, more and more of which was coming to his computer screen rather than by post. But the pile of mail on his desk was still daunting, with a large folio-size parcel balanced on top. He opened it to find two classic expressions of the French bureaucratic art: a workbook for each of his new subordinates, Juliette at Les Eyzies and Louis in Montignac.

  For each week of the year there was a white sheet, and beneath it was a blue one, a green one and a pink one, each with its own sheaf of carbon paper. One copy was for the préfecture, the second for Bruno’s files and the other two for the regional council and for the mairies of Juliette and Louis respectively. The first set of columns was headed by the day of the week, with blanks to be filled in for hours worked, the second for nature of activity, the third for fines issued and so on. There were other columns for training courses completed, work in support of the Police Nationale, liaison with the gendarmes, time spent giving road safety and other classes at schools. Bruno ignored the other columns, gave a shrug of despair at his nation’s love of administrative complexity, and put both books on the windowsill. He would leave such ridiculous paperwork to the office aide who was being assigned to him. He put his head around the door to ask the mayor’s secretary if she could check with the préfecture about when his aide was supposed to arrive.