The Body in the Castle Well

by Martin Walker

She leaned back, looked out of the window and replied in a voice that sounded deliberately bored. “You may be a village policeman, but you are also a public official. I represent a bereaved parent who is entitled to learn at first hand the circumstances of his daughter’s death. You can contact me through Mr. Abraham Muller’s office at the Muller Investment Trust in New York.”

  “If you can show me some evidence of your role, madame, you will have my full cooperation,” Bruno said politely and remained standing. “Otherwise, I’ll have to refer you to the official police spokesman in Périgueux, where you will find the officer who is formally in charge of this matter, Commissaire Jalipeau. I suspect that he, too, will expect some proper identification.”

  She glowered at him and remained seated. Bruno began to count to five, at which point he would open the door and escort them out.

  “Perhaps this will help,” said Porter as he took from his wallet another business card and pushed it across to Bruno. It identified Madame de Breille as a vice president of Hexagon Trust with an address on avenue d’Iéna in Paris, with fixed and mobile-phone numbers and an e-mail. “It’s the card she gave to me when she met me at Charles de Gaulle Airport this morning.”

  Bruno sat down and beamed at him. “If you can vouch for Madame de Breille, Professor, then of course she’s welcome to stay while I answer your questions. How can I help you?”

  The woman opened her bag, removed an elegant notebook in black leather and a fat Montblanc pen that Bruno suspected cost more than his weekly pay. She also pulled out a new-looking smartphone and tapped on it.

  “Are you recording, madame?” Bruno asked.

  “You have any objections?”

  “It’s not only polite to ask permission before recording, madame, it’s legally required. Unauthorized recording without consent is illegal under Articles 221 and 226 of the French Penal Code and can lead to a fine of up to forty-five thousand euros or a year in prison, depending on the circumstances. I do not give my consent to be recorded. I see you have a pen and paper. You are entitled to take notes.”

  “This is ridiculous,” she said.

  “Madame, either you turn off your phone or this meeting is over. It’s up to you.”

  She turned off the phone.

  “We seem to have got off on the wrong foot,” Porter said. “I’m sorry about that. Could you please tell me what happened to Claudia, step-by-step.”

  Bruno explained the events of the Sunday evening lecture and his search for Claudia on Monday morning, the role of the pompiers and the arrival of Fabiola and J-J and the passing of information to the legal attaché at the American embassy.

  “Why was Monsieur Muller not informed?” the woman asked.

  “The next of kin in Claudia’s passport was listed as her mother. That was the only reference we had to go on, apart from her supervisor at the Louvre, whom I also informed. Madame Muller has already been briefed by the commissaire for the départe—”

  “Her father is entitled to the same briefing,” Madame de Breille interrupted, speaking over Bruno.

  Bruno took a deep breath and told himself to stay calm. “That’s a matter for Commissaire Jalipeau.”

  “When will Claudia’s body be released?” Porter asked.

  “When the procureur’s office decides whether this was a tragic accident or whether others might have been responsible, possibly through negligence. When I arrived at the scene, the well had not been secured as the building regulations require.”

  “Will there be an autopsy?”

  “An autopsy has already taken place.” Bruno described the drugs found in her body. Porter shook his head sadly.

  “A question for you, Professor,” Bruno asked. “Did Claudia share with you any of her concerns about Monsieur de Bourdeille’s attributions?”

  “Yes, she did, suggesting that at least three times the attribution hinged on archive material which Claudia thought was unsafe.”

  “Unsafe? You mean forged?”

  “No, just that a scholar would be unwise to rely on it as evidence. Claudia found three examples of copies from archives that she could not trace in the original archives. I intend to pursue this and replicate her research, as her father has asked me to do.”

  “Madame de Breille, since your company, Hexagon Trust, billed Claudia fifty thousand dollars for research into Monsieur Bourdeille, I trust you will be sharing this information with the professor,” Bruno said.

  Madame de Breille remained silent while Porter stared at her, his mouth open in surprise.

  “You didn’t tell me any of this,” Porter exclaimed. She rolled her eyes again, ignoring him.

  “Really?” asked Bruno, suppressing a smile and starting to enjoy the open hostility that had developed between his two visitors. “Didn’t she tell you Claudia was negotiating to buy Bourdeille’s house and his art collection?”

  “This is outrageous,” Porter said angrily, standing up. “I can’t work under these conditions. I need to talk with Abe Muller right now. Alone.”

  He pushed his chair back and stomped toward the door. Before opening it, he paused and turned to thank Bruno for his time. “I hope we can arrange to meet, just the two of us.”

  “At your service, Professor,” Bruno replied, standing as Porter disappeared. He looked down at Madame de Breille. To his surprise, for the first time she was smiling.

  “That went well,” she said. She leaned back in her chair and extended her arm to push the door closed and then leaned forward on the table to face him.

  “He won’t go far. I’ve got the car keys and he doesn’t even know which hotel we’re in. Now the amateur is out of the way and it’s just us two professionals. I presume you’ve read the report we did on Bourdeille. I’ve already seen the autopsy report, don’t ask how. It’s ambivalent as to whether she fell while drugged or was given a little help on her way. What do you think?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Bruno replied and remained standing. “I’m just the garde champêtre, remember.”

  “We can be very generous to our friends, Lieutenant.”

  Noting that she knew his official rank, Bruno walked around the table to the door. “Why don’t you let yourself out while I report to the mayor what sounds to me like attempted bribery.”

  “That won’t stick and you know it. It’s not attempted bribery, but it might be recruitment. Think whether you want to stay forever in this dreary little provincial town with so many empty shops that it’s visibly dying on its feet. You have the card I gave Porter, so you know where to reach me. I’ll be staying at the Vieux Logis in Trémolat.”

  She put away her notebook, picked up her bag and walked serenely from the council chamber, pausing at the elevator to smile and flutter an eyelid in what might have been a wink. “By the way, Bruno, regards from our mutual friend in Paris, Yacov Kaufman. He tells me he’d very much look forward to working with you again.”

  In his office, Bruno called the law office in Paris where Yacov worked, at least nominally. The switchboard said he was out at a meeting, and his mobile phone was turned off, so Bruno texted him asking for a callback. They had become friends when Yacov was acting as a lawyer for his grandmother, who as a girl during the war had been sheltered from the Nazis by people from St. Denis. In commemoration, she had turned the remote farm where she and her brother had been hidden into a camp for Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. Yacov had made no secret of having served in the Israeli military, but it was only in the course of another operation in which Yacov had been wounded that Bruno learned that his friend worked closely with Mossad.

  That made Madame de Breille all the more interesting. Since she had evidently seen the autopsy report, or at least its conclusions, she had police contacts either through her employers or of her own. Bruno had realized that she had set out to provoke a confrontation that would lead to Porter
stalking out. Was that piece of theater necessary if all she wanted was a private word with Bruno? He thought not. If she knew Yacov, she might know through him that Bruno had his own contacts in the French security services.

  Bruno called J-J to brief him on Professor Porter, Hexagon and de Breille and enjoyed J-J’s snorts of anger and disbelief that punctuated Bruno’s report. In closing, he asked if J-J could arrange for Yves to send him the e-mail exchanges between Professor Porter and Claudia that were on her computer. Then Bruno printed out the Hexagon report about Bourdeille on his own computer and went to see the mayor, suggesting that it was time to send Claire on another errand in the archives. Once she had left her desk outside the mayor’s office, Bruno explained what the American professor had said about Bourdeille and suggested the mayor read the report.

  “Do you think a scandal is brewing that would make it unwise for us to accept Bourdeille’s bequest?” the mayor asked.

  “Not necessarily, since the Louvre still holds him in great esteem. But we might want to delay reaching a deal with Bourdeille while all this plays out. And we have no idea what Professor Porter’s research will reveal. I’ll try to find out the details of Claudia’s concerns about Bourdeille’s attributions.”

  “I assume the implication is that Paul Juin forged some archive documents which helped make Bourdeille’s career and his fortune,” the mayor replied. “In that case, why would Claudia want to buy his home and his collection?”

  “Maybe she just wanted to bring the price down.”

  The mayor shook his head. “If that were so, she’d have kept it to herself rather than alert her professor. I agree that we should go slowly, but we also need to learn as much as we can about all this before taking a decision.”

  “You still want to go ahead with Bourdeille’s plan?”

  “I’m not sure. Even without the prospect of a scandal, we’re a town council, not a gallery owner. Tourism is our key industry, and properly managed it could be a valuable attraction. I’d prefer us to set up an autonomous association, Les Amis de la Renaissance or something of the kind, with its own board of local worthies and artists and maybe somebody from the Louvre and the Périgueux museum.”

  “Have you talked to anyone on the council about this?”

  “Not yet, Bruno. Once word gets out, there’ll be a price to pay if we are seen to be rejecting such a princely gift.”

  Bruno smiled inwardly. The mayor was a politician and was thinking of the political fallout that might affect him.

  “What if Porter confirms Claudia’s suspicions?”

  “We’ll leave that to the experts from the Louvre. But you know human nature, Bruno. The publicity that would follow such a scandal would make Bourdeille’s collection a much more popular attraction. By the way, is he really a descendant of the original de Bourdeille? That alone could bring in the crowds.”

  Bruno shook his head. “I know he claimed to be a member of the family, and there’s a town and castle named after them, but I’m not sure why the name is so important.”

  “Pierre de Bourdeille was one of the great men of the Périgord, Bruno,” the mayor said, leaning back. Bruno smiled to himself, knowing that the mayor was seldom happier than when sharing his vast stock of historical knowledge.

  “De Bourdeille was at the heart of the great drama of the sixteenth century, the civil war between Catholics and Protestants. He was the younger son of a noble family who became a soldier, perhaps a soldier of fortune,” the mayor went on. “He was a courtier, the man selected to escort Mary, Queen of Scots, back to her homeland to assume the throne. And he was an inveterate gossip who scribbled down much of what we know of the court life of sixteenth-century France. He was also abbot of Brantôme, who in the religious wars persuaded his old comrades in arms who happened to be Protestants to spare the great abbey they planned to loot and destroy. On top of all that, he was a pioneering pornographer.”

  “Mon Dieu, I had no idea,” said Bruno, suspecting that the mayor had barely started. Once launched on a historical lecture, he could go on for hours. At least this one sounded interesting.

  “He wrote The Gallant Ladies of the Court, a work that took romantic indiscretion to sublime heights, describing the charms and attributes of the maids of honor around Queen Catherine de’ Medici in the most intimate—I might even say gynecological—detail. And he makes it clear that he wrote from personal knowledge. The term ‘hotbed’ might even have been invented for life at the royal court.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes, in my youth, in the restricted section of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the old one named after Richelieu, before Mitterrand put up that monstrosity that bears his name. It was one of the books that Rousseau said should be read with one hand, which makes me think that old fraud never perused it. It’s far too clinical to be exciting.”

  At this point, Bruno’s mobile phone vibrated. He looked at the screen and saw it was Yacov. “I need to answer this. It’s Yacov Kaufman from Paris.”

  “Give him my regards,” said the mayor, waving his dismissal.

  Chapter 19

  As Bruno left, he saw that Claire had returned and was standing close to the door, one hand in the open filing cabinet as if searching for something. It was her usual eavesdropping pose. He hit his button to answer the phone.

  “Yacov, thanks for returning my call. I just had a meeting with a formidable woman called Madame de Breille from Hexagon who says she knows you. Is that so?”

  “Yes, and ‘formidable’ is the word. We often work with Hexagon in doing due diligence reports for clients, and she’s the dynamo in their Paris office. She started out in the douanes, investigating customs fraud, and was then put on a task force the finance ministry set up to investigate the collapse of Crédit Lyonnais and the fuss over their payments to Bernard Tapie over the sale of Adidas. She was hired by Hexagon when they opened their Paris office.”

  “She’s down here claiming to represent Abraham Muller.”

  “He’s the head of Muller Investment Trust. We’ve done a lot of work with his venture capital operations in Europe and Israel. Madame de Breille told me about the death of his daughter, and since she knew I’d spent time in the Périgord, she asked for some contacts. I gave her your name. Is there a problem?”

  “No, I was just checking. How’s your arm?”

  “I’m doing a lot of physiotherapy and it’s getting better, but it will never be a hundred percent. That AK-47 bullet did a lot of damage. I’ll be seeing you this summer when I bring a scout troop down to the camp.”

  “I’ll look forward to it. And you know Amélie is coming down as well? I’ve lined up some concerts for her.”

  “That’s great, but we’re not seeing that much of one another these days. We’re still friends but no longer lovers. I was probably too long in the hospital. C’est la vie.”

  Bruno made a sympathetic grunt, thinking how difficult it was for male friends to talk with each other about their love affairs or their feelings, at least unless they were face-to-face with a glass in their hand and one bottle already empty on the table between them. He groped for some way to change the subject.

  “Another thing before you go,” he asked. “Could you ask your physiotherapist if she knows of anyone who could act as a guide in Paris for someone in a wheelchair?”

  “Will do, but have you tried the tourist office of Parisinfo.com? You’ll probably find something helpful.”

  Ten minutes later, Bruno called Bourdeille to give him the name and number of a young woman who had passed the two-year course and the challenging test to be a licensed Paris guide and specialized in guiding disabled people. She could be hired by the day and had planned her own tours for people restricted to wheelchairs.

  “She’ll even meet your train at Montparnasse with a suitable vehicle, arrange a wheelchair-access hotel and restaura
nts, book opera and theater tickets,” Bruno said. “It sounds perfect for you.”

  “This is very kind of you, Bruno. I don’t know what to say, but the idea excites me a great deal. Thank you, I’ll call this woman today. But I hope the mayor arranges this meeting with lawyers and doctors before I leave.”

  “I understand; the mayor is working on it.”

  “One more thing I remember. Claudia told me she had met a falconer, a young man who trained hawks. She visited Lascaux with him. I’d love to see him at work. Out here on the balcony I watch the hawks all day, the most graceful things in all creation. Do you know where he’s based?”

  “He’s at Château des Milandes, not even thirty minutes from where you are if you take that taxi you used this morning. You may not be able to get around the château itself, but the hawks and owls are kept in the garden, and you should be able to manage that. The man’s name is Laurent Darrignac. Tell him you were a friend of Claudia. He liked her a lot, and in fact he was at the lecture in Limeuil, the last night anyone saw her alive.” He gave Bourdeille the phone number, ended the call and saw from his list of incoming e-mails that Yves had sent a large file.

  Bruno took a deep breath and began going through the long e-mail correspondence that dated back over a year, when Porter had first begun supervising Claudia’s thesis. Bruno scrolled down until Claudia had reached Paris, enthused about the Louvre and the city, and reported what she was reading. She described what she was seeing as she went around the Renaissance châteaux of the Loire and complained how much more remote and impersonal was her French supervisor, Madame Massenet, than the teachers she had known back home. There was an e-mail full of her shock at learning how many of the treasures of the Louvre came from Napoléon’s looting of the churches and palaces of Europe. She quoted Napoléon’s boast, “ ‘We will now have all that is beautiful in Italy except for a few objects in Turin and Naples.’ ”

  Then Claudia started to write about Bourdeille and his stellar reputation at the Louvre, the new research systems he had pioneered. She cited his discovery of a long-lost Velázquez on the wall of an English stately home, a painting that had been acquired in mysterious circumstances by a Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars. Bourdeille had tracked down the ship’s log and palace inventories to argue persuasively that it had been part of the treasure of the royal family of Naples when they were being evacuated from Napoléon’s clutches.