The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  Bruno took a deep breath and drove home to change out of the blue suit and black tie he’d worn for the funeral. He then headed for Hubert de Montignac’s wine cave in St Denis to buy a bottle for that evening’s dinner party. The event had been arranged by Pamela and Miranda to welcome home Jack Crimson and also Jacqueline, who was coming with the Mayor. The usual gang would also be there: Gilles and Fabiola along with Bruno’s friends: the Baron and Florence, the science teacher at the local collège.

  As always on Monday evenings, Florence’s twin infants would be coming and sleeping over with their playmates, Miranda’s two children. Bruno smiled to himself, thinking with pleasure of the moments when all four kids thundered down the stairs, fresh and sweet-smelling from their bathtime, racing out to the stables to find the dogs and say goodnight to the horses.

  Which wine should he take? The local wine store offered so much choice, with giant vats at one end selling wine in bulk for less than two euros a litre from a device that always reminded Bruno of a petrol pump. At the other end were the expensive bottles of Château Petrus, Cheval Blanc, Le Pin, Lafite and Latour that cost hundreds or even thousands of euros each. In between were separate stands for Bordeaux, for Burgundy, for sparkling and dessert wines. There was another stand for the wines of Bergerac and along one wall, an array of what Hubert boasted was the widest selection of single malt Scotch whiskies outside Scotland. There were more shelves for bottles of vintage cognac and Armagnac, a small library of books on wine, displays of glasses and decanters and a selection of local delicacies from foie gras and rillettes to fruit cordials.

  Hubert, the owner of this and a small chain of other such wine caves in the region, with two more in Paris, was more than just an old friend. He was also one of Bruno’s business partners, a fellow director of the town vineyard. Hubert knew that Bruno seldom spent more than ten euros on a bottle but Bruno said this was a special occasion and on Hubert’s advice paid twenty euros for a bottle of Château Belingard’s cuvée Ortus from 2016.

  ‘You should decant it a good hour before serving,’ said Hubert over a friendly glass of white wine from the town vineyard, and Bruno swore that he’d do so.

  He drove on to Pamela’s riding school where his basset hound, Balzac, recognized the sound of his elderly Land Rover. The young dog stopped his play with Pamela’s two sheepdogs, Beau and Bella, to give a long welcoming howl and race to greet his master. Bruno crouched down as his dog galloped towards him, his long ears flapping like a pair of furry wings and his tongue hanging out like some fat pink necktie. Bruno laughed at the sight, spread his arms wide and braced himself to receive thirty kilos of flying basset.

  ‘I’ve only been gone since this morning,’ Bruno protested as Balzac lathered his neck and jaw. Then Beau and Bella came up, rather more sedately, and Bruno set off past the chicken coop he’d helped to build and went to the stables to visit his horse, Hector. Bruno stroked his glossy neck and gave him a carrot he’d plucked from his garden and washed before leaving. All the ponies were gone, which meant Miranda was probably still out with the schoolgirls. Bruno could hear the sound of Pamela’s voice from the paddock, encouraging the novices to sit up straight and relax their hands as they trotted their horses around the circular fence.

  He waved to Pamela and leaned on the fence to observe the riders, checking his watch. He was a little early. He, Pamela and Fabiola had arranged to give the horses their evening ride in good time before dinner. Pamela called out that Jack was in the office so Bruno strolled across, greeted the Englishman and put the bottle of Ortus on the desk before embracing him.

  ‘Good to see you, Bruno, and you, Balzac,’ Crimson said, bending to fondle the dog’s long ears. ‘I missed you both when I was away. It’s such a pleasure to have dogs in my life again, and it’s wonderful for the grandchildren. Growing up with dogs and horses is a great thing for the young.’

  ‘We humans have been domesticating dogs around here for thousands of years so we’ve all sort of grown up together,’ said Bruno. ‘How was your trip to Washington?’

  ‘The politicians over there are almost as weird as ours in England,’ Crimson replied with a bitter laugh. ‘I suppose every country has the right to go completely crazy once in a while and it’s now the turn of us Anglo-Saxons. It’s good to be back in the Périgord and I’ll look forward to trying that bottle of Ortus. Hortus deorum quo ortus es – if I remember my Latin that’s “risen from the gardens of the gods”.’

  ‘How was the conference?’

  ‘Interesting but somewhat frustrating. It’s thirty years since the Berlin Wall came down but our American friends are still sitting on a treasure trove of Stasi intelligence files that scholars think should be more widely shared. Our friend Jacqueline was particularly outspoken, as you might imagine, but without success.’

  ‘I thought you British and the Americans had always shared intelligence under that famous special relationship you talk about,’ Bruno said.

  ‘We share a great deal, along with the Canadians and Australians, but not everything. And this stuff is still quite sensitive. The Americans say, quite rightly, that they distributed a great deal of this archive – it’s called the Rosenholz dossier – to the relevant NATO partners. Along with the Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians we’ve been allowed to examine anything that the CIA says concerns us.’

  ‘But not the French?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘No, not the French, nor the Italians and Spaniards. It’s partly fear of leaks but as you may know there’s an old feud between the CIA and French intelligence that goes back to De Gaulle’s time. Did you ever hear of a man called Philippe de Vosjoli, the only French intelligence man who ever defected to the United States?’

  Startled, Bruno raised his eyebrows and shook his head at the same time. This was news to him and the very thought of a French official ‘defecting’ to a NATO ally was extraordinary.

  ‘It’s all ancient history, back in the sixties, long before you were born, and it was all tied up with the Cuban missile crisis. De Vosjoli was the French intelligence liaison man at their Washington embassy with good contacts in Cuba and he got some of the intelligence that alerted the Americans to the missiles the Russians were installing. The Americans trusted him, and when de Vosjoli refused to obey orders to start spying on American nuclear technology, he was recalled to Paris. Fearing arrest or worse, he refused to go and the Americans gave him asylum,’ Jack said, reaching into a cupboard and bringing out a bottle of Bowmore and a couple of glasses.

  He poured them each two fingers, added a splash of still mineral water and handed one to Bruno, saying, ‘Cheers.’ The two men chinked glasses and sipped appreciatively.

  ‘This Rosenholz dossier was the master list of all Stasi intelligence agents. Truckloads of files of index cards were burned after the Berlin Wall fell but Erich Mielke, the minister in charge of the Stasi, ordered microfilm copies made and kept them in his office. He sent one set of copies to the KGB liaison centre in Karlshorst and a year later, after the Berlin Wall came down, a defecting Soviet filing clerk sold them to the CIA in Warsaw, allegedly for sixty-five thousand dollars – probably the best deal the Americans made since they bought Manhattan island. There’s a lot of disinformation about this. Another theory says some very senior Stasi officials bought themselves immunity with the files.’

  ‘And these were the lists of all the foreign spies the Stasi had recruited? All over the world?’

  ‘That’s right, but even more than that. Some two hundred and eighty thousand files in all, mostly East Germans. Something like fifty thousand West Germans were in the files but only about a thousand of them were serious agents. We investigated just over a hundred British citizens who were named in the files and nobody was ever prosecuted. Most of them were peace and anti-nuclear campaigners, well-meaning idealists whom the Stasi thought might be useful. Some of the stuff was clearly invented or exaggerated, probably so that the real St
asi agents could inflate their claims for expenses. The Stasi’s selection control was pitiful, always after quantity rather than quality. But some of the people recruited in Germany and Scandinavia and at NATO were very important indeed.’

  ‘And France?’ Bruno enquired, finishing his glass of Scotch and shaking his head when Jack offered a refill.

  ‘Who knows? The CIA isn’t telling. Back in 2003 they claim they gave the Germans the full archive – nearly four hundred compact disks. But some parts of it were deliberately not given to the Germans, for example the British material. The Germans have been nagging us for them but we took the view that releasing all this unattributed and sometimes invented stuff about idealistic – if naive – British citizens forty years ago would do more harm than good. Most of those people in the peace movement just wanted a dialogue across the Iron Curtain and to outlaw nuclear weapons.’

  ‘But if these files contain names of significant Stasi people in France, it must be in all our interests to expose them,’ Bruno began and then paused before continuing more slowly. ‘Is distribution not a political decision that an elected president should make rather than an intelligence agency? And what if the Americans know of these Frenchmen, some of them in important positions – they could blackmail them into spying for the Americans. What then?’

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Bruno. You can’t expect the Americans to share secret material with their allies one minute and then accuse them of blackmailing Frenchmen to spy on France the next. I see your point but even if the Americans gave the stuff to Paris, would we ever know if they’d given everything, or held the best stuff back? We don’t know that they’ve given us everything about Stasi operations in Britain. In fact, some of my old colleagues strongly suspect that there’s some stuff about Stasi operations with the IRA and gun-running via Libya that may be missing, probably to protect Irish-Americans who were involved.’

  A car door slammed in the small parking lot outside and through the window Bruno saw Fabiola and Gilles, already in their riding gear.

  ‘Time to ride the horses,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the drink, and the very illuminating conversation. See you at dinner. And do me a favour and decant the Ortus.’

  ‘I will indeed, and I’ve brought a bottle of David Fourtout’s red, as served at the Georges Cinq hotel in Paris,’ said Jack. ‘People tell me it’s the finest wine made in the Bergerac. And I’ve got a couple of bottles of Château Lestevenie brut chilling in the fridge and I’m sure you’d agree that’s among the best of our sparkling wines.’

  ‘Are we not fortunate that we have so many splendid wines that can compete for that title?’ Bruno said, grinning. ‘Yes, it may be the best of our white sparkling wines, but what about that lovely rosé brut from your friends at Château Feely?’

  ‘We must do a comparative tasting,’ Jack replied. ‘Enjoy your ride and make sure you’re back in time for the roast lamb. Jacqueline asked Miranda for it specially and I made the mint sauce – an English delicacy.’

  ‘Some French gourmets would suggest that’s a contradiction in terms,’ Bruno said, laughing as he left. ‘But don’t tell Pamela or Miranda that I said so.’

  5

  ‘We’ll only take our four horses out this evening, the other ones have been working all day,’ Pamela was saying to Fabiola and Gilles when Bruno entered the stable. He embraced each of them in turn and Pamela hugged him just a moment or so too long for mere friendship and gave him a roguish glance before turning to put the bridle onto Primrose’s head. It had been some weeks since Pamela had last invited him to her bed and Bruno had assumed that their liaison – he could hardly call it an affair – had reached its end. But now he wondered – perhaps as Pamela had intended that he should.

  ‘I thought we should head up the ridge for a gallop, blow all the cobwebs away and work up an appetite for dinner,’ Pamela announced briskly as they saddled up, a plan which Bruno welcomed.

  Although the heatwave continued, it was a perfect summer’s evening for a ride, a soft breeze helping the heat to fade from the day. Their shadows were beginning to lengthen as they trotted through the paddock and then walked the horses up the long slope to the ridge, the two sheepdogs loping on ahead. Balzac was loping along beside Hector who was pulling at the reins in his eagerness to run. Bruno saw Fabiola had the same problem, tightening the reins on the Andalusian she rode. Gilles brought up the rear. As always, he was riding the elderly mare, Victoria, although he was more and more comfortable on horseback and would soon be ready for a younger and less sedate horse.

  Pamela paused when she reached the ridge and the others gathered alongside, all looking down at the valley and across to the hill of Limeuil, where the Dordogne and Vézère rivers came together on their way down to Bordeaux and the sea. It was a view of which Bruno never tired, enjoying the way that the houses and red roofs of St Denis clambered up the hill to his right. They were matched perfectly by the way Limeuil’s houses did the same on the left, with the small chateau of la Vitrolle with its apple orchard and vineyards between them.

  ‘Are we all ready?’ asked Pamela, and nudged Primrose with her heels and loosened the reins to let her run.

  Beneath Bruno, Hector needed no urging and leaped forward after her, drawing alongside while still accelerating and then forging ahead. The Andalusian was at Bruno’s stirrup, and the echo of Balzac’s bay of joy at the prospect of a run was ringing in his ears. The two sheepdogs were silent, running easily at Pamela’s far side until the horses steadily drew ahead and Bruno felt his eyes narrow against the wind. It was exhilarating to be part of this racing unit of horse and man, moving in such perfect harmony as they sped along the two kilometres of the ridge.

  It seemed to end too soon as the belt of woodland approached and Hector, by now three lengths clear of the others, began to slow of his own accord. He knew this ridge and its boundaries as well as Bruno and slowed to a halt at the gap in the trees towards the bridle trail that led down to the village of Bigaroque. Bruno smiled inwardly as he prepared himself for Pamela’s inevitable teasing. Every time they came this way she liked to remind him that the history of the district was almost as much British as French. Pamela claimed that the village had been named by the English in the Middle Ages when they had controlled south-western France. Bigaroque, she argued, had been called Big Rock from the rocky outcrop that dominated the bend in the river that led to Le Buisson. Bruno even thought it might be true.

  They dismounted to walk their horses across the bridge, and then cantered through the valley, flanked by fields of maize planted too close together. Bruno tightened his lips at the thought of the quantities of fertilizer and underground water required by this form of intensive farming. It was one of the aspects of how Brussels ran Europe’s agriculture that infuriated him. He counted himself as a good European but there was a monstrous gap between the rhetoric of Brussels about the need to alleviate climate change, and the harsh reality of their policies on the ground. But soon after they dismounted again to cross the bridge at Limeuil, they were passing, on the far side of the river, the vineyards that were run by the town of St Denis. Here his mood eased at the knowledge that these grapes were now being farmed organically. They took the railway crossing that led to St Chamassy and then the trail back to Pamela’s riding school, which gave them one last brief gallop before it came into view.

  At the stables, they removed the bridles and saddles and rubbed down their horses before filling their water troughs and mangers, the dogs waiting by their own food bowls until they were fed. Pamela and Fabiola went indoors to shower and Gilles and Bruno stripped to the waist and sluiced themselves in the stable sink. They each kept towels and clean sweatshirts in the stables. With their hair still wet, they patted their horses goodnight and led the dogs to the main house. Gilles paused at Fabiola’s car to take from a coolbox a bottle of red wine from the vineyard of Court-les-Mûts, their special cuvée called des Pieds et des Mains wh
ose grapes were trodden by human feet in the traditional way. Bruno nodded his approval and then his phone vibrated. He saw it came from Claire at the kennels and answered at once.

  ‘Bonjour, Bruno,’ she said. ‘Carla is getting ready to go into labour sometime tonight. I think your Balzac will be a daddy by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That’s wonderful news,’ he said, laughing with joy as he spoke. ‘Is there anything I can do? Would you like me to come up to help?’

  ‘No, it’s me she’ll want alongside and it’s not her first litter. I checked with the stethoscope and all the pups are doing well. I think I heard nine little heartbeats. I imagine she’ll have them in the small hours so I’ll send you an email rather than wake you up.’

  ‘When can we come and see them?’

  ‘You can come anytime but I’d rather keep Balzac away for the first couple of weeks because Carla will get nervous. Some sires can be tricky. I’m sure Balzac will be well behaved but I want to keep Carla calm. And don’t worry, you still get first pick of the litter, and from the heartbeats she’ll have enough pups for you to have two.’

  ‘Just so long as they’re all right, and Carla, too, although you know I still prefer to think of her as Diane de Poitiers.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ she laughed. ‘Do you use her pedigree name because you’re a bit of a snob or do you have a thing for royal mistresses?’