A Taste for Vengeance

by Martin Walker

  Bruno looked down at Balzac, who had been sitting looking up at his master but now rose to wag his tail as if aware he was being discussed.

  “Now we make the foie gras. You see we have two. Here on the left is the one we bought in the market today and this second one in the white terrine dish is a liver I prepared earlier, from which I already removed the veins. What I will now do to the fresh liver is what we did earlier to the one in the terrine dish.”

  He showed them how to remove the veins from the liver and then poured a tablespoon of cognac into a second, empty terrine dish. He sprinkled a generous pinch of salt, some black pepper and a smaller pinch of quatre-épices, which he knew from Pamela was called allspice by the British. Then he added half of the liver, sprinkled another pinch of salt, more pepper and the allspice before putting the remaining half of the liver on top. He sprinkled another pinch of salt, some pepper and another tablespoon of cognac.

  “We leave this one in the fridge overnight,” he said, covering the dish with foil and reaching for the one already prepared.

  “You can experiment with the alcohol. We have tried it with good Scotch whisky, which is excellent, or champagne, which was a bit disappointing. Armagnac works very well and so does Monbazillac, our local dessert wine, and since we tend to drink a glass of chilled Monbazillac with our foie gras, it makes a happy addition.

  “We call this method, which is the most common way of making foie gras these days, mi-cuit, which means half-cooked,” he went on, covering the foie with some greaseproof paper, which he moistened with tap water before putting the top on the terrine dish. “The oven is now at a hundred degrees centigrade. Earlier I placed in there a large dish half-filled with boiling water, into which I now put the terrine dish. This is an indirect way of cooking which we call a bain-marie. I now turn the heat down very low, to ninety degrees, and leave the foie for twenty minutes. We remove it from the oven, let it cool and pour out any excess fat.”

  While the bain-marie simmered, Bruno took one of the magrets of duck, laid it fat side down and, using the flat of the knife, began gently to remove the thin, white membranes, explaining that if they were left on the breast, it would curl up in the cooking. Then he turned it fat side up, scored a crisscross pattern deep into the fat with a sharp knife, showing that his knife had gone through the fat, and sliced about a centimeter into the flesh. He seasoned it on both sides with sea salt and black pepper and invited one of the two middle-aged men in the group to do the same with the other magret.

  “The secret of cooking magret is to use a searing hot and dry pan to release much of the fat,” he went on. “Then turn it over and reduce the heat so you have slow cooking on the flesh, but the fat from the breast seeps down into the flesh as it cooks. You can also do this in the oven but I like the control that I get from watching it cook. Now twenty minutes have passed and I need to take the foie from the bain-marie.”

  He did so, then took a sheet of cardboard, trimming it with scissors to the exact size of the terrine dish. He removed the lid and put the cardboard sheet on top of the greaseproof paper that covered the foie gras. Then he pressed down before pouring out the excess fat again. He put two tins of tomatoes on top to maintain the pressure and returned it to the fridge.

  “You see that I saved the excess fat,” he said. “After I leave the foie overnight in the fridge, I will melt this extra fat and pour it over the foie to seal it. We can then keep it in the fridge for a week. Always remember you need a hot knife when you slice it before serving.”

  While the magret cooked, Bruno got the two older women to slice some fingerling potatoes and bring them to the boil. Then he asked one of the two wives of the middle-aged men to peel and slice four cloves of garlic, while the other squeezed the juice from two oranges, peeled another and carefully separated the orange segments. Miranda had drummed into him the need for the pupils to participate and Pamela had rehearsed his English script until he sounded reasonably fluent.

  “You want the potatoes parboiled, not fully cooked, so I let them simmer for about five minutes, then take them out to dry them on paper towels,” he said, inviting Kathleen to do so.

  “Now pour off the excess fat from the duck into a separate frying pan,” he told her. “Add the potatoes and the garlic and let them cook over a low heat.”

  She handled the tasks with a kind of careful competence that suggested she might have had more professional training in cooking than Bruno. All the pupils seemed to know their way around a kitchen and Bruno found himself wondering, not for the first time, why the reputation of British food was so bad in France.

  “Now watch how I prepare the sauce,” he announced.

  He put the two magrets onto a warm plate and poured the squeezed orange juice into the pan that had held the magrets to deglaze it, then added two tablespoons of sugar, the orange segments and a glass of Cointreau and left it on a medium heat to reduce. He carefully turned the potatoes, then put the aiguillettes onto his chopping board and showed his rapt audience how to remove the tendons with the flat of his knife.

  “When I buy my aiguillettes from Jean-François in the market or from a good butcher, he does this for me. But if you buy them from a supermarket you have to learn to do this for yourself.”

  He then asked each of the pupils in turn to tackle two aiguillettes, which most of them managed well. Kathleen had clearly done this before. Bruno seasoned the meat and put them into separate frying pans to cook with some of the duck fat, and then asked each of the men to deglaze the pans with a splash of white wine. Bruno removed the aiguillettes, added two spoonfuls of honey and another two of old-fashioned mustard containing seeds, and invited the two husbands to mix them into a sauce. The orange sauce had reduced sufficiently so he put the two magrets back into the pan and began to serve the potatoes, then the aiguillettes with the honey-mustard sauce and finally the magrets, which he sliced before adding the orange sauce.

  “Now taste these dishes and bon appétit,” he said, handing out forks and pouring them each a glass of Pierre Desmartis’s Cuvée Quercus, a Bergerac dry white wine with the body to enhance the duck and to offset the sweetness of the orange sauce.

  They all perched on stools around the counter to eat, and Bruno tore apart a long loaf of bread, twice the size of the usual baguette, so they could wipe up the juices. He took from the fridge a chilled bottle of Monbazillac to go with the foie gras he had prepared and also opened a bottle of Château Lestevenie. This was an elegant red made from Cabernet Franc and Merlot grapes by an English couple whose wines Bruno rated among the finest in Bergerac. Bruno knew that Pamela’s customers around the table would be visiting the vineyard.

  As the wine flowed and the students dipped into the foie gras and the aiguillettes, the slices of magret and the potatoes, Bruno was quickly on first-name terms with them all. The two older women, Vera and Alice, lived in a town near London and had been teachers at the same school before retiring the previous year. They said they had been attracted by the idea of a cooking course at a riding school even though neither of them rode. But they had enjoyed walking through the stables and looking at the horses and were hoping to watch some of the children whom Pamela was teaching to ride.

  Was this their first cooking course? he asked.

  No, they had been on a weekend course at an English country house, but each had felt it wasn’t long enough, and since their husbands liked going off on golf vacations together they had decided to treat themselves to this one after reading about it in a magazine. They were pleasant women, complimenting Bruno’s limited English and evidently enjoying the food and the wine.

  When Kathleen confessed that she had been on several cooking courses, Bruno suggested she might like to try her hand at making tourain, the traditional soup of the Périgord. He asked her to peel a whole head of garlic and slice each of its cloves thinly and then to fry them gently in duck fat in a deep casserole and spri
nkle onto them a tablespoon of flour. Meanwhile Bruno put a liter and a half of water on to boil and poured in a cupful of the duck stock they had made earlier. He asked Kathleen to separate the whites from the yolks of four eggs, which she did with a practiced hand.

  Bruno poured the boiling water onto the now golden garlic slices, added salt and pepper and let it simmer for ten minutes before adding the whites of the eggs. Then he asked Kathleen to mix the egg yolks with a teaspoon of walnut vinegar, telling her that he normally used verjus, the juice from green grapes before they ripened. He stirred a tablespoon of duck stock into the egg yolks and vinegar and poured it into the casserole.

  “Now take a slotted spoon to remove the egg whites from the pot, and chop them up into tiny pieces before putting them back,” he said. “At this point, around here we thicken the soup with stale bread but you might prefer vermicelli.”

  Pamela had asked him not to add chunks of stale country bread to the soup, claiming the British preferred to have their bread separately. Instead, he quickly chopped some bread into cubes and fried them in duck fat to make croutons.

  Pamela came in briefly to share a glass of wine and a bowl of soup. After a moment she tapped her spoon against the side of her wineglass and said that they should know that the egg in the tourain and all the eggs they would be eating that week came from Bruno’s hens. Bruno raised a hand.

  “What about chabrol? It is a custom our guests should know about.”

  He poured a third of a glass of red wine into the last of his soup and swirled it around before raising the bowl to his lips and drinking it down.

  “Qu’ei lou chabrol que ravicolo, qu’ei lou pu grand dous medecis,” he intoned, explaining he had spoken in the local patois of the region, still spoken by some of the older residents. “It is the chabrol that brings you strength, and that is the best medicine.”

  “Do you speak it?” Alice asked, pouring some of the wine into her own bowl to follow his example. Several of the other guests did the same. He noticed that Kathleen gave the chabrol a token sip, grimaced and then returned her plate to the table.

  “A little, and I understand it quite well,” he answered. “It would be sad to see such an old language die.”

  “It sounds like Italian,” said one of the men at the other end of the table.

  “The locals say it is rather like the Catalan they speak in Spain,” said Pamela, clearing the plates.

  “If you’re a policeman, does that make you a gendarme?” asked the prettier of the two wives at the end of the table. Her dark hair was piled into a loose bun and she wore no makeup and a man’s blue denim shirt.

  “No, madame. The gendarmes are with the Ministry of Defense. The police are under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. I’m a simple country policeman and my boss is the mayor.”

  As Bruno said it, aware of Kathleen’s sardonic glance, he wished it were still true. He turned to her. “You didn’t like the chabrol?”

  “It seems like a waste of good wine,” she replied, rising from the table. “But I liked the soup and now I’m full. I probably had more than my fair share of those lovely aiguillettes. It’s unusual to have soup at the end of my meal but very filling.”

  At the door, she turned to Bruno. “Would you have a minute for me? My newspaper has been onto me again.”

  Bruno nodded politely to the rest of the table, gave a shrug to Pamela and joined Kathleen in the garden. She was already lighting a cigarette.

  “You understand there’s nothing I can tell you,” he began. “This is not my case.”

  “Look, please don’t treat me as hostile,” she began. “I’m not a news reporter. I simply happened to be on the spot and I’m not the kind of person who would threaten to write something bad about this cooking course to make you cooperate. Anyway, this is no longer my story. The paper’s Paris correspondent came down by fast train to take over. I’ve sent a short sidebar story on the cooking school and the food of the Dordogne region to accompany the full-page spread about Monika being stabbed to death. It seems her husband is some kind of tycoon, quite well known in England. Obviously I’d be grateful if you could tell me something more about this man McBride, who hanged himself, but I imagine our official crime reporter will get that from Scotland Yard.”

  “I haven’t treated you as hostile,” he said politely, recalling J-J’s warning about the British press but keeping the skepticism from his voice. He wondered how she had learned that Monika had been stabbed and McBride hanged. At least she did not know that McBride’s identity was fake. “I did my best to help you yesterday.”

  “Yes, thank you. But do you have any idea what Madame Felder was doing at McBride’s house? Were they having an affair?”

  “How should I know?” Bruno replied. “As I said, this is not my case.”

  “From what I hear, it sounds like a love nest,” Kathleen said. “Wasn’t she naked when she was found, dead in the shower?”

  Bruno shook his head, raised his eyebrows and shrugged, trying to appear a picture of innocence and ignorance as he wondered who might have told her that.

  “I’m told you were there at the house in Lalinde where Monika was found,” Kathleen went on. “A man from Sud Ouest caught you on camera along with your colleague from Lalinde.”

  “I can’t help you,” Bruno said, feeling it was a pathetic response even as he spoke.

  “So you keep saying. I’m glad to say that French journalists have been much more helpful. And the urgences people were even more outspoken than the police. One of them recognized you when they were called to McBride’s body and said you were the one who found him hanging in the woods.”

  There was nothing Bruno could say so he retreated into official jargon. “You will realize that the police have different responsibilities.”

  “And so do the media,” she retorted, stubbing out her cigarette before looking up and smiling at him as if convinced she had got the better of the exchange. “I enjoyed watching you cook. Will you be giving any more lessons this week?”

  “No, I’ve done my session, but I think all of us, cooks and clients, will get together for a glass of wine at the end of the course.”

  “Until then, but one word of advice. Duck à l’orange is a very dated dish for the British. It was popular for our parents’ generation but now it’s seen as old-fashioned. You might want to try something different, like a sour cherry sauce or a reduction of blackcurrants. But the aiguillettes were great.”

  “Thank you, I’ll remember that. But I still like canard à l’orange.”

  “Me too, it’s a classic. But food is more and more about fashion these days. Since you’re doing this professionally, you’ll need to remember that, don’t you think?”

  As she went back into the barn, Bruno checked his messages. Isabelle had sent a reply to his query about the origin of her suggestion that he should run an internet search on Felder.

  “Felder’s a friend of the brigadier. They were on the EU security advisory group together,” she had sent.

  Prunier had left a message asking him to call back and giving his mobile number. Bruno called and found him reaching his home.

  “On the strong recommendation of our friend the brigadier we’ll need you back on the murder team,” Prunier said. “It seems he knew the Felders, even had dinner at their place outside London. And he said you should be sure to talk to Jack Crimson, who also knows Felder quite well.”

  “I already have,” Bruno replied. “He’s looking into it.”

  “Very good, see you tomorrow morning.”

  Chapter 8

  Prunier, wearing civilian clothes, took his place at the head of the table again the next morning at the stroke of eight o’clock. Bruno was the only one present in uniform. The coffee was fresh and Bruno had remembered to give some of Fauquet’s homemade chocolates to Prunier’s secretary,
a cheerful woman with photographs of her grandchildren on her desk. Prunier signaled to J-J to go ahead, and the big chief detective loosened his collar button and tie and ran through the familiar list. McBride was not the dead man’s real name but his partner in the wine business had identified the body as the man he’d known as McBride. Monsieur Felder was in a Houston hospital, too ill to speak, and the British police as well as Felder’s company were trying to contact his two children by his first marriage.

  “They are our obvious suspects since after the death of Monika Felder they stand to inherit,” said J-J. “Once we are in touch, we need to look over them very carefully, double-check all alibis.

  “And now we have the surprising results of the autopsy. For Monika, cause of death is straightforward. She was killed by a single knife thrust to the heart. There was evidence that she had sex not long before death, and although precise amounts of alcohol are hard to measure postmortem, she was drunk when she died, certainly unfit to drive. Her last meal had been a steak in pepper sauce that was cooked in McBride’s kitchen. The surprise is that both she and McBride had ingested a drug called GHB, for gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.

  “It’s a date-rape drug, but was popular in dance clubs, known as Liquid E for ecstasy, or as Juice,” J-J went on. “It’s used clinically to treat narcolepsy and alcoholism, but it is also known to increase libido and athletic performance. In larger quantities it can cause loss of consciousness, and in conjunction with a lot of alcohol it can be dangerous, in extreme cases even lethal.”

  J-J looked up with that cheerful half grin that Bruno knew well; it meant he was about to tell a joke.

  “You might say a little bit turns you on, but too much can turn you off—forever.” J-J looked around as if expecting chuckles. None came, and the few discreet grins did not last long in the face of Prunier’s stony expression.

  “Any pills found?” Prunier asked. “And do we know how much they took?”

  “No pills or containers were found and no traces on any glasses or plates. The lab is still trying to estimate how much they took but they say it’s often found in powdered form. It tends to have a strong, salty flavor, so as a date-rape drug it’s usually added to a cocktail or to spicy food to disguise the taste. Maybe that’s why they had steak au poivre. The lab is certain, though, that McBride was still alive when he died of asphyxiation while hanging. He—or someone—had made a noose but it was in the wrong place to break his neck.”