An Enemy in the Village

Also by Martin Walker

The Dordogne Mysteries

Death in the Dordogne

(previously published as Bruno, Chief of Police)

Dark Vineyard

Black Diamond

The Crowded Grave

The Devil’s Cave

The Resistance Man

Death Undercover

(previously published as Children of War)

The Dying Season

Fatal Pursuit

The Templars’ Last Secret

A Taste for Vengeance

The Body in the Castle Well

A Shooting at Chateau Rock

The Coldest Case

To Kill a Troubadour

A Chateau Under Siege

A Grave in the Woods

Short Stories

Bruno’s Challenge & Other Stories

Martin Walker

An Enemy in the Village

THE DORDOGNE MYSTERIES

This ebook published in 2025 by

Quercus Editions Ltd

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An Hachette UK company

The authorised representative in the EEA is Hachette Ireland,

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Copyright © 2025 Walker & Watson Ltd.

Map © 2022 Nicola Howell Hawley

The moral right of Martin Walker to be

identified as the author of this work has been

asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any

information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library

EB ISBN 978 1 52942 835 3

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

businesses, organizations, places and events are

either the product of the author’s imagination

or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or

locales is entirely coincidental.

Ebook by CC Book Production

www.quercusbooks.co.uk

To my dear friends Julien and Caline Montfort,

wine merchants who share their love and knowledge

of wine and who conceived and brought to life

my treasured Cuvée Bruno.

Map

The Perigord region of France is the setting for the Dordogne Mysteries. The map is hand drawn and illustrates towns, villages and other landmarks across the region, from Bergerac airport in the south-west corner of the map, to the Lascaux caves and Cap Blanc rock shelter in the north-east. The Dordogne River runs horizontally across the map, and the village of St Denis, where Bruno lives, is at the centre of the illustration. The map is bordered by drawings of food including baguettes, coffee, croissants, cheese and vegetables.

Contents

An Enemy in the Village

Also by Martin Walker

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Map

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

1

Bruno Courrèges, chief of police of the small French town of St Denis and of much of the valley of the River Vézère, liked to think of himself as un homme moyen sensuel: a man of conventional appetites, perhaps a little more sentimental than most. His feelings were easily stirred by children, puppies and damsels in distress, but also by good food and wine and the ever-beguiling landscape of the Périgord and its seasons. In this, he knew he was fortunate. The climate of his region was usually sensible, in that each of the four seasons had its moment and seldom overstayed its welcome.

He enjoyed a brisk chill in December, especially those rare years when sufficient snow fell for the children to go sledging down the slopes towards the river. Still, Bruno thought that by mid-February winter was starting to outstay its welcome. He took pleasure in the changes, delighting in the usually reliable arrival of springtime in March, and of summer in May and of autumn as September began to give way to October. But the recent extremes of the weather, with tempests and heatwaves, forest fires and floods, together with the alarm among his friends in the vineyards at the bizarrely premature ripening of the Merlot grapes in August, had begun to alarm him. Bruno had been persuaded that climate change and global warming had moved from the newspapers and international conferences and were now invading his home turf.

On this wintry morning, with the sun just peeking over the eastern hills to redden the layers of plump clouds and turn the frost-covered fields into a beguiling pink, Bruno slowed his police van to a crawl. He felt compelled to admire the unusual palette of seasonal colours as he drove along the ridge that overlooked the Vézère valley. His basset hound, Balzac, seemed equally impressed, sitting up in the passenger seat to stare into the glowing landscape below. As Bruno approached a lay-by that boasted a particularly spectacular view, his policeman’s instinct nagged at him.

Unusually for the time of day, the scenic overview was already occupied. The Peugeot 508 saloon’s number plate carried the digits 24, which identified it as a local car, registered in the department of the Dordogne. His curiosity piqued, he pulled up behind the mystery vehicle and turned off his engine. ‘Balzac, stay,’ he told the basset. ‘I’ll be back in a second.’

Approaching the Peugeot Bruno saw a figure slumped over the steering wheel and knew he’d been right to stop. Automatically, he checked the doors, glad that he was wearing driving gloves on such a frosty morning. The driver’s door was locked and so were the two rear doors, but unexpectedly the front passenger door yielded to his grip. He opened the door and leant in, and was met by the usual smell of recent death, stale urine and voided bowels. He pulled back his left glove, just enough to check with the back of his hand that the cheek of the woman slumped over the steering wheel was ice-cold. Evidently, she had been dead for some hours. Had he stumbled across a suicide, or had a killer exited the vehicle using the door he’d just opened?

He lifted her arm by the sleeve and it scarcely budged, an indicator that rigor mortis had already set in, making the time of death at least three hours earlier, if not more. Bruno got out his phone to report his find to the gendarmerie, and to request the presence of Dr Gelletreau, the medical examiner, to certify what he knew to be – but could not legally confirm was – a death. While waiting for an answer he touched the car’s bonnet and found it to be stone cold, which brought some small relief – a warm engine and a cold body would be a suspicious combination indeed.

Phone call made, Bruno swapped his driving gloves for a pair of evidence ones and opened the door again. The dead woman was neatly dressed in a dark wool trouser suit, and a grey polo neck sweater. Her shoulder-length fair hair was remarkably tidy and her face very cold. Her mouth was hanging slackly open, revealing perfect, or perhaps expensive, teeth.

An empty plastic container of pills from a pharmacist in Sarlat was on the floor of the passenger footwell. On the passenger seat lay an almost empty bottle of water, a Chanel handbag and a cardboard folder with three sealed envelopes inside. The first was addressed to Maître Rebecca Weil, whom Bruno knew to be a respected lawyer in Sarlat. Beneath the name was written a phone number and the words, ‘Please contact her first’. On the cover of the second was the name Mademoiselle Laura Segret, with the words ‘Périgord Concierge’ below and a local phone number. The third was addressed to ‘My husband, Dominic’, with a mobile phone number. On a single sheet of expensive notepaper, headed ‘La Conciergerie du Périgord’ with an address in Sarlat, was written, ‘My apologies to those who find my body and have to deal with the mess I leave here.’ It was signed ‘Monique Duhamel’.

Bruno used his own phone to call the lawyer, but since it was not yet eight in the morning there was no reply. He then called the conciergerie and the answering machine asked him to call back after the office opened at nine. At his third call a high-pitched male voice answered. Bruno asked if he was speaking to a Monsieur Dominic. When the voice said yes, Bruno introduced himself and asked if Monsieur Dominic was alone.

‘No, I’m having breakfast with my family before going to a funeral,’ came the reply, in perfect French but with an Alsatian accent. He was taken aback, however, by the reply. The body in front of him was in no way ready for burial, so Bruno resigned himself to the bearing of additional bad news on what he presumed was an already challenging morning.

‘Is Monique Duhamel your wife, monsieur?’ Bruno asked, feeling he was making a mess of this conversation.

‘Yes, but she’s at home while I’m in Strasbourg at this funeral. You say you’re a policeman? I assume you’re calling for a reason?’

‘I’m at the scene of what seems to be a suicide, monsieur, of a woman in her forties who I believe to be your wife. She was found in a Peugeot saloon, and in the car there is an envelope addressed to you with your mobile number.’ He gave the car registration number, then paused before adding, ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news.’

The phone seemed to be dropped and after some confusion a woman’s voice came on the line, asking who he was. Bruno explained his role and his presence at the scene of a suicide by a woman who appeared to be Monique Duhamel, and who had been dead for several hours. ‘And might I ask who you are, madame?’

‘I’m Sabine, Dominic’s sister, or rather foster sister. We’re here for the funeral today of Rudi, our foster father. Are you sure the dead woman is Monique?’

‘We can’t be sure until we get a positive identification from a close friend or family member, but I have checked the handbag in the car and it appears to contain her ID and credit cards. I’m sorry, but from the photo on the ID it looks to be her. The car was parked in a remote place, and there was an empty bottle of pills beside the body, envelopes for her husband and lawyer, and a note of apology for causing trouble. From first appearances, it looks very much like a suicide.’

‘Understood. What happens now? We’re at our father’s funeral. My brother can’t get back to the Périgord until very late tonight or first thing tomorrow.’

‘There will have to be an autopsy to be sure of the cause of death, and then we can have the body taken to a funeral parlour of your brother’s choice. But we really need a visual identification today if at all possible. Does your brother know of any close friends or work colleagues who could do this?’

‘Wait a moment.’ Bruno heard muttering before she came back to say that Monique was good friends with a local magistrate called Annette Meraillon. Bruno might know her as a star rally driver.

‘I know Annette well,’ Bruno replied cheerfully before remembering himself and dropping his voice to a suitable timbre for mourning. ‘I’ll call her as soon as we’re done.’

‘My brother will drive down as soon as he can after the funeral but it will take some time,’ Sabine said. ‘Our father was the stonemason at the cathedral here and that’s where the service is being held.’

Bruno gave her his phone and email and asked if her brother had any preference over the future of Monique’s car, which was currently parked at a scenic overlook. ‘We can have it moved to the local gendarmerie in St Denis.’

‘Okay,’ the sister said. ‘The gendarmerie is fine. But Dominic is in shock, as I’m sure you can imagine.’ There was a sharp intake of breath down the line. ‘Losing your wife on the day of your dad’s funeral, you can hardly imagine.’ A pause. ‘And only a week after she lost her baby.’

‘I’m deeply sorry to be the bearer of yet more bad news,’ said Bruno. ‘It’s probable your brother won’t be in any shape to drive down straight after the funeral, so please don’t let him rush off. Tomorrow will be fine. He has my number. You and I should stay in touch, so please text me your phone and email.’

He took down Sabine’s details and the name of Monique’s gynaecologist, but was startled when Sabine said that the dead woman’s usual doctor was Fabiola Stern, of the medical centre in Bruno’s home town of St Denis.

‘Fabiola is known to me,’ Bruno said, wondering why the dead woman had chosen a general practitioner who lived at least thirty minutes from her home. ‘I’ll call her now.’

He called the gendarmerie to inform them that Dr Gelletreau’s services would no longer be required, and as soon as that was done he found Fabiola’s number in his list of recent calls. Bruno reached Fabiola as she was arriving at the clinic, and asked her to delay her first appointment, as he required her presence to confirm a death.

‘I have questions about one of your patients, a Monique Duhamel,’ he said. ‘There’s not been a formal identification yet, nor a death certificate, but I believe she’s the suicide I just found. I had summoned Gelletreau, as he’s on the duty roster, but given that she’s a patient of yours we can kill two birds with one stone if you come up here.’

Fabiola gasped. ‘Not Monique? Give me the address, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Mon Dieu.’

A little under twenty minutes later Bruno was gratefully accepting a cup of takeaway coffee from Fabiola, who had kindly brought along two sad-looking but much appreciated specimens obtained from a machine at a petrol station along her route. Handing both to Bruno, she slipped on a pair of disposable gloves before sliding into the passenger seat of the Peugeot. ‘It’s Monique, that I can confirm.’

Fabiola applied a stethoscope to her former friend’s chest and, after making a small incision, used an uncomfortably long thermometer to take a reading of the liver. Bruno suppressed a shudder, noticing and touched by the care she took to be gentle, treating Monique’s body with the same respect she would have done were it still living. Fabiola listened to the stethoscope and glanced at the thermometer then pulled a pad from her bag and wrote out the death certificate.

‘Dead for six hours and more, no obvious signs of injury. I’ve authorized a post-mortem to determine whether or not those sleeping pills were the cause of death,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Monique’s been depressed and not sleeping since the miscarriage, but I didn’t think she was suicidal. But I only saw her once after she lost the baby last week, as she was still under the gynaecologist’s care.’

‘And do you have any reason to doubt it might be suicide? The passenger door was unlocked when I found the car.’

Fabiola shook her head. ‘There are no signs of a struggle, no injuries. But you’d have to ask the coroner when they do the autopsy, because with the tools I have and the confined space we’re working in I can’t do much more than confirm the death and estimate a time. But if you’re asking me off the record? Someone in a suicidal state of mind is hardly going to be worried about locking doors, even with a Chanel handbag on the seat beside them. I don’t think you’re worried about much at that point, to be honest.’

Bruno showed Fabiola the bottle of pills he’d found in the passenger footwell, Zolpidem. Fabiola grunted that it wasn’t what she would have prescribed, and then asked, ‘Can you pass me the bottle, or is it evidence? I’d like to know the dose on the label, and how many pills were in the bottle?’

‘Probably safest not to.’ He examined the label. ‘Twelve point five milligrams, thirty-six in the bottle,’ he replied.

‘Merde, that’s strong. And too many pills for depression after a miscarriage.’ She shook her head. ‘She was old for a first pregnancy, forty-two, I think. I’d advised her against it, but she was childless and determined for one last try. There’s only so much you can do for some patients. Merde, merde, merde.’ Bruno watched as Fabiola worried the rim of her paper cup with her thumb.

‘She was on her own,’ Bruno said. ‘Her husband had to go up to Strasbourg for his father’s funeral. He’s still there, back tomorrow. How did you know her, or how did she come to know of you?’

‘Our Pilates group, after we got the new gym,’ Fabiola said. ‘She joined last year with Annette and seemed delighted that was an all-female thing. She wasn’t happy with the male doctors in Sarlat; she often came to class with a moan to get off her chest. Then when we became friends, she badgered me to become her doctor until I agreed. She’s quite a persuasive woman, or at least she was. I suppose she had to be in her business.’

‘What did she do?’ Bruno asked.

‘She was a notaire, third or fourth generation in the family business,’ Fabiola replied. ‘But then she reinvented herself when she saw that there was a new market opportunity opening up. She’d been dealing with all these wealthy British, Dutch, Swiss and German couples buying charming little chateaux and manor houses for their retirement but only using them for a few weeks in summer. They’ve already bought up Minorca, Tuscany, Corfu, the Algarve and now they are settling here in our own little Périgord. So Monique decided to set herself up as a super-concierge, taking care of their chateaux and the pools and gardens for a fee, and then renting them out when the owners weren’t there and taking a fat commission along the way.’ Fabiola gave a short laugh. ‘Maybe you and I should have thought of that, Bruno.’

After Fabiola left for the clinic, Bruno got out his mobile for the first of what he knew would be many calls. He reached Annette at home as she was about to go into the shower, gave her the news, and told her that he would be reachable on his mobile when she had a moment to talk.

Soon after Fabiola left, an ambulance arrived to take the dead woman to the mortuary at the hospital in Sarlat. As the ambulance pulled away Sergeant Jules drove up in his police van. Another gendarme was with him, a young recruit in his early twenties.

Bruno recognized the new gendarme, a fair-haired and burly young man, by sight. Judging from its fit and quality, the recruit seemed to be wearing a tailor-made uniform which almost disguised his tendency to plumpness. Of the four newest recruits at the gendarmerie only the young woman had joined the town’s tennis club, while the three young men had opted instead to take a weekly seminar with a lawyer in Périgueux on legal issues and practice, which Bruno thought unusual.

The young gendarme had brought with him a flattened cardboard box, which he placed on the driver’s seat of Monique’s car to protect his own trousers, and with an arrogant glance at Bruno, drove the Peugeot away to the police pound, Jules a few minutes behind him in the van.

Bruno had just waved Jules off when his mobile vibrated. It was Annette. Bruno explained about the post-mortem and the husband’s presence at a family funeral in Strasbourg, then related what Fabiola had said.

‘I know you and the dead woman were friends,’ Bruno said, gently. ‘When did you last meet?’

‘At the weekend; we had brunch at my place yesterday morning, just the two of us, catching up,’ Annette said. ‘I was rocked when she told me what had happened – it was the first I’d heard about the miscarriage. She seemed more quiet than depressed, like she was still working out how to come to terms with it all.’

‘Whatever she was feeling, she was clearly well organized,’ said Bruno. ‘On the seat beside her she left envelopes for her husband, a colleague at the concierge called Laura, and Maître Weil; I presume that’s her lawyer. There’s also a note apologizing to the people who have to clear up after the mess she left, which was thoughtful of her. I never saw one of those before at a suicide.’

‘Until we can be reasonably sure it was suicide, Bruno, you’d better bring all those envelopes to me, along with the bottle of pills you mentioned, the death certificate, a note of what’s in the car and anything else you think relevant.’

2

The traffic was busy through Les Eyzies and heavier still once Bruno reached Sarlat. He took the ring road around the heart of the old town to reach the sub-préfecture, the building that housed the representatives of the French state, where he could leave his van in the car park. Once parked, he took out a folder with official notepaper and wrote a brief statement of where, when and how the death had occurred, adding that Monique’s car was now at the gendarmerie in St Denis and the body in the Sarlat morgue. He signed it and attached Fabiola’s death certificate. Then he set off on foot with Balzac down the Boulevard Henri Arlet to the Place de la Grande Rigaudie, heading for the region’s legal office, the Tribunal de Proximité, and the office of his friend Annette. Once in her office he kissed her on both cheeks and handed her the declaration of death, Monique’s three sealed envelopes, her handbag and the pill bottle wrapped in an evidence bag. He was given a signed receipt and accepted a coffee from Annette’s private espresso machine before she bent down to give Balzac his own special welcome.

‘I can take over at this point, check with the hospital on the post-mortem and with the prescribing doctor,’ she said, once Balzac had been given his treat and she and Bruno were both settled with a coffee. Her machine, more stylish than practical, only made one cup at a time. ‘Taking things at face value, it appears to be a straightforward suicide of a depressed woman after a miscarriage when her husband had to be out of town. It’s not the first time I’ve seen one death in a family swiftly followed by another, and sadly I don’t think it will be the last. Her husband is coming back tomorrow, you said?’

Without pausing for breath or a response she shook her head and continued. ‘Mon Dieu, there are times I hate being a magistrate. The words come almost automatically from my tongue and yet say nothing of what I feel. She was Monique, not just a corpse, but a woman I could be indiscreet and laugh with, go shopping and lunching and drink a glass too much with . . .’

‘I know you were friends with her,’ Bruno said. ‘Did you know her husband?’

‘A bit, from the book club at the library and a dinner every now and then. He’s a quiet type, amiable enough, obviously intelligent and a good ten years younger than Monique. She told me once he was a perfect listener, always paid attention and never interrupted. From what I saw he invariably left most of the talking to Monique, and she was never at a loss for words! But whatever his qualities, I can’t say we ever really gelled.’ She shrugged. ‘You know what it’s like with couples, often you’re closer to one half.’

‘He’s from Strasbourg,’ said Bruno. ‘The funeral was for his foster father, and I spoke on the phone with his sister, or maybe foster sister. I gather the father was something to do with the cathedral, a stone mason.’

‘A very senior stone mason,’ said Annette, admiration in her voice. ‘Responsible for the cathedral that was for four or five centuries the tallest building in Europe. The fifteenth-century architect, Ensingen, had the same name as the foster father and that was the name Dominic and his sister took.’

‘Was it the same family, through all those centuries?’ Bruno was intrigued.

Annette answered with a shrug and then explained that the foster father’s family had played no part in Dominic’s ancestry. But his background was strange enough.

‘Monique told me the story,’ she said. ‘Dominic was abandoned under a pew in the cathedral at just a few days old. There was a note left with the baby. This would have been the summer of 1990, and the note said the child had been conceived in Berlin on the night the Berlin Wall came down, to a German father and a French mother. Monique’s take was that her husband was the first of the new Europeans, born in Strasbourg on the Rhine, pivot of the new Europe where France and Germany met.’

‘That’s bizarre,’ laughed Bruno. ‘Did Dominic take it seriously?’

‘I’m not sure. Dominic was there at the table when Monique told the story, quietly nodding and then looking around at the guests for a moment before shrugging and laughing it off. But one thing I’m sure of is that Monique took it seriously. She thought it was really something, to have that history. Another time, when Dominic wasn’t present, she told me that he was constantly ill as a child; I believe it was asthma which he grew out of. But it was the reason why nobody ever wanted to adopt him. That’s rare – white boys are usually the first to be snapped up in the orphanages. He was ten when he was taken into the stonemason’s foster family, so he’d been through a grim childhood, a rotten school and bullied by the other kids.’

‘So now he’d be in his thirties,’ said Bruno, who’d been doing the sums in his head. ‘And from what you say his wife would’ve been a good ten years older than him?’

‘He looks even younger, almost boyish,’ she replied. ‘I teased Monique about it once, called him her toyboy. She laughed it off, but I could see she didn’t like it, that it stung her somehow.’ A pause. ‘She was a good friend to me, I’ll miss her.’

‘Of course.’ He indicated the three envelopes. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little odd that she wanted her lawyer to be informed before her husband?’

‘I imagine it was because of the inheritance,’ Annette replied, using a paper knife to unseal each of the three envelopes. She quickly glanced through the letters before she spoke.

‘It was suicide, sure enough,’ she said. ‘And Monique wanted the lawyer informed first because she wants to ensure that Laura and her business partners get the company, not her husband.’

‘Is there big money involved?’

‘Monique was rather well-off. She owned the Sarlat house with the family’s notary business, then the concierge operation she started, plus a country house near the river at Castel-Merle. She was an only child, no children of her own. Normally everything would go to her husband, but I think she made special arrangements with her lawyer, Rebecca Weil. And Monique was very close to Laura, her partner in the concierge business, who’s also in our Pilates group. They founded and ran the business together, built it up from nothing and it’s a real gold mine. She told me it pulls in more than half a million a year.’

‘Mon Dieu, I’m in the wrong business,’ said Bruno, not really meaning it. But he knew this meant that the death would probably be treated with more official attention than a typical suicide. There were not many people in the département who earned that kind of money. Annette put the three letters through the copier, making sure of the paper trail before returning to her chair with the copies, which she put in a file, and the originals, which she returned to Bruno in their envelopes. ‘Explain to the recipients that these were opened by the magistrate, and in the presence of a police official, and that as they were found at the scene of a crime they formed part of our investigation and copies are being kept on file.’

‘What did Fabiola say?’ Annette asked.

‘That Monique was put on anti-depressants and given some sleeping tablets after her miscarriage, and that she had been alone since her husband left to attend his father’s funeral. So she had the means, motive and opportunity,’ Bruno said. ‘But that doesn’t explain why she chose that spot to do it, much closer to St Denis than to Sarlat.’

‘Maybe it meant something to her? You would probably need someone who knew her longer than I did to get to the bottom of it. It could be the scene of some youthful romance, a first kiss or lost love, but I’m just guessing,’ Annette said, and then paused, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I’ll really miss Monique, and although it sounds flippant I’ll also miss her Christmas parties. I suppose Laura and her team will organize them instead, so long as Dominic lets them use the country house. That’s where Monique held her events, all her foreign clients were invited along with her team. It’s a charming chartreuse on that long hill above Castel-Merle with a view over the valley towards St Leon. There’s one long wing with an enormous room that’s perfect for crowds and has a great view.’

‘I think I might have seen the house from the turn-off to Sergeac,’ said Bruno.

‘Almost certainly. She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Do you have any reason to doubt that this is anything more than a tragic suicide?’

‘Not that I can see at first glance. Had it crossed your mind that she might be more depressed than she was letting on?’

Annette shook her head no, picking up the third letter. ‘I suppose all her friends will feel guilty. How can you not when something like this happens?’

‘You can’t keep watch on someone forever. This tragedy is not your fault, and I’m sure Monique found great comfort in her friendships.’ Bruno paused. ‘If this becomes a legal row, will you have to recuse yourself?’

‘Maybe; that will depend on the procureur, but this is a small town and Monique knew him, too. She went to school here, Bruno, and she employs a lot of people, so she’s well-known. The Mayor was hoping to get her onto his team for the council elections, but she deliberately steered clear of party politics.’

‘Everybody knows everybody else,’ said Bruno. ‘Sounds just like St Denis.’

‘You tend to trust people you’ve known since childhood, but don’t forget I’m new here,’ Annette said. ‘So I have had to earn that trust, which is fair enough. And that also holds good for Dominic, Monique’s husband. Widower now, I suppose.’

‘Is he trusted locally?’ Bruno asked, thinking that in his experience the instincts of a restricted community about some new arrival, whether a small town or a squad of troops, tended to be sound.

‘He’s not distrusted,’ Annette said thoughtfully. ‘And if he isn’t much liked, he’s accepted, but that’s mainly because of Monique. No problems or scandals in his work, and he’s been here three years so he’s evidently competent. He’s well-mannered, polite . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

‘But . . .’ said Bruno. ‘It sounds very much like you want to say “but” before you continue.’

‘Yes, I do, so I shall. But . . . he has no particular friends, never seems to share a drink after work, never goes to watch the rugby team or take a p’tit apéro while watching the matches at the tennis club, doesn’t volunteer to dress up as Père Noël . . .’

‘You mean he doesn’t make an effort to fit in?’

‘That’s exactly it,’ she said. ‘You weren’t born and raised in St Denis, but you know everybody, volunteer for everything, teach the kids to play tennis and rugby, go to all the town dances and waltz with all the old ladies . . .’

‘But I enjoy all that,’ he protested.

‘And it shows,’ she said. ‘That’s the point. You make it clear you like your neighbours in St Denis and you’re always there for them.’

‘That’s what life is all about.’

‘Well, that’s you, Bruno. But Dominic’s problem, and it was becoming Monique’s problem as well, was that he did none of that. He didn’t seem to know or care that it mattered. He was polite to her friends but didn’t even try to fit in.’

‘So how did he spend his spare time?’ Bruno asked.

Annette rolled her eyes. ‘Monique said he read a lot, listened to music and juggled his investments.’ She shrugged.

‘I’d better get on. Would you please stamp and sign those envelopes so the recipients will know they were opened legally?’

‘Of course,’ she said, pulling the stamp from her drawer. ‘In return you could leave Balzac with me while you visit Becca Weil and Laura – you know how I enjoy having him around. I can’t wait for him to have more puppies, and remember, I’m top of the waiting list.’

‘Noted.’ He grinned. ‘But before I see this lawyer, Maître Weil, could you tell me – is there anything in the letters that might make me question the suicide verdict?’

‘That’s what I was looking for. Quite the reverse, in fact. She says in each of them that she’d decided she couldn’t bear the idea of growing old without having had children.’ Annette glanced again at the letters and looked up at Bruno.

‘I may be reading too much into it, but the tone of this letter to her husband is different – full of despair yet more formal than her notes to Laura and the lawyer. Maybe it’s because she was writing to two women friends from whom she had few secrets? But the one to her husband seems almost official by comparison.’ Annette handed Bruno the letter. ‘See what you think.’

I believe you are aware of my very deep sadness at the loss of the baby, made all the deeper by the knowledge that this was my last chance to become a mother. Perhaps inevitably, given the differences in age, sex and background between us, you may not be aware of the utter despair that now grips me. Why put off the moment to acknowledge that without the prospect of a child my life in any profound sense is already terminated? It is therefore pointless to go on. But I wish to reassure you that my decision to bequeath the conciergerie to my female colleagues is neither snub nor reproach to you, but a reflection of my deep love for them, the nearest to a family that I have. They built the business with me, while you entered my life after it was already flourishing, so you must agree that you played no role in it. I am sorry that our marriage was not a success, resulting in neither children nor contentment, but I thank you for your efforts to make it work, even if only in ways that suited you. I can thank you for the mood of calm that constantly surrounds you. I had always hoped I might some day come to share it, might even believe in it. Alas not. Regards, Monique.

Mon Dieu, thought Bruno. If a woman I lived with sent me such a letter I’d shoot myself. How could one live with a woman and yet not know the depth of her despair?

‘You’ll find Rebecca Weil at home, just round the corner,’ said Annette. ‘I like her. She’s a dear. She prefers to see you there rather than at her office. At present I can’t see any problems emerging over Monique’s cause of death, but I’ll keep you informed.’

3

Maître Rebecca Weil had red eyes and a crumpled tissue in her hand when she greeted Bruno at the door to her apartment in a fine old building on the rue Fénelon. She welcomed him in and hit him with a tsunami of chatter before the door was closed behind him.

‘You’re lucky to catch me at home,’ she began. ‘I’m usually in court on weekdays. But I’d much rather welcome you to my home than have you suffer my office. I understand we have a mutual friend in Annette?’ Bruno made to answer, but the wave surged on. ‘She just rang to let me know you were on your way. I remember you, of course – I saw you playing against my son in a doubles match not long ago. You beat him.’

She steered Bruno into her kitchen where an old-fashioned Italian coffee pot was bubbling ominously on the stove. She turned off the heat just in time, opened the oven door to bring out two croissants, then sat him down facing her at the kitchen table. She looked to be in her fifties, he decided. ‘I presume Monique’s suicide meant you missed breakfast,’ she said. ‘And where’s that photogenic dog of yours who’s always in the newspaper?’

Bruno laughed, the first time he’d broken his silence since crossing the threshold. ‘I missed breakfast this morning, so thank you, and Annette wanted to look after my basset for a bit. She’s known Balzac since he was a puppy. This is more than kind of you.’ He handed her the letter with her name on. ‘You’ll see Annette’s stamp to show that she opened and read it, so that her boss could formally announce the death to be a suicide. I’m here because Monique left written instructions that you should be called first, before either her husband or her colleagues at work. Why do you think she did that?’

‘To ensure that the process of inheritance goes swiftly and precisely according to her wishes,’ she said. ‘That’s the least I can do in her memory. I suppose we all feel guilty when a good friend commits suicide. I hadn’t realized that Monique was quite so seriously depressed, and I should have done. I knew how very much she wanted that baby. I suppose we always wonder what we might have done, might have said . . .’

Bruno nodded, having no idea what he could possibly say that would make any difference.

‘Maître Weil—’

She interrupted. ‘Please call me Becca. I’d much rather just call you Bruno.’

‘Very well, Becca. Why might the inheritance not go according to Monique’s wishes?’

‘Because some of my esteemed colleagues in the law are ruthless scumbags who will seek to extract large sums from Monique’s estate by challenging her will in the name of her husband, her extended family and anyone else who can concoct some kind of claim,’ she said, then took a large bite from her croissant. ‘Mmm . . . delicious.’ Bruno smiled and nodded at her as he enjoyed his own.

She sipped her coffee and went on: ‘She was very agitated when we last discussed her estate planning, insisted that I took the precaution of getting her signing of the will witnessed by the second- and third-best lawyers in the département.’ Bruno suppressed a small smile at the implication that she herself was the best. ‘One of them is a past chairman of the tribunal, and I have an appointment with him this afternoon to begin process, so I think all should proceed according to her wishes. She instructed me to take every possible precaution to make it unimpeachable.’

‘And you didn’t see that as suspicious, out of character?’

Becca shook her head. ‘Not with a business of her size that wasn’t going to be left to the family, no. Monique always was a passionate defender of her employees.’

Bruno explained about Monique’s husband being in Strasbourg, and why. ‘He’s expected back tomorrow, probably in the evening.’ He paused. ‘Given what you say about possible challenges to the will, might the timing of her suicide be significant?’

‘Aha! A suspicious mind. Very good,’ said the lawyer, a glint appearing in her still-red eyes. ‘I have no idea whether it is significant or not, but I imagine Monique’s husband will find his grief eased by his good fortune in inheriting a lifetime lease on the penthouse apartment in that fine old house on Avenue Gambetta.’

‘But not the concierge business? And what of the country house near Sergeac?’

‘The country house is locked into a family trust, and if she has no children of her own it goes to a cousin. All Monique’s shares in the conciergerie go to her partners and staff in the business, to help assure its continuing success.’

‘Annette suggested it was making half a million a year.’

‘Perhaps rather more this year; they have some new clients and a more efficient tax structure. Of course, that’s not all profit. Monique and Laura and the other managers have to pay their own salaries out of that.

‘They have become quite a significant local employer, since they now manage more than thirty properties and offer auxiliary services,’ she said. ‘There are over a dozen gardeners and apprentices, full-time cleaners, plus part-timers brought in for the usual change-over on Saturdays. They offer extra services, like pool maintenance and solar installation, car hire, catering and events. They even act as an insurance brokerage for health care, accidents and any property damage.’

The properties were all upmarket, she went on, typically at least six bedrooms. Several of the chateaux could host as many as thirty guests. That meant they could charge up to thirty thousand euros a week in season.

‘Add in the cheaper rentals for the rest of the year and you’re looking at a total income of more than seven million,’ she said. ‘Once staff costs, property and other taxes are accounted for, plus the conciergerie costs, the remainder is shared with the owners, the conciergerie taking their cut. Owners know that their property is being constantly maintained, and collect up to fifty thousand a year. And almost all that remains after taxes are paid is spent locally. Seven million a year brought in, and almost every centime stays here in the Périgord.’

‘And Monique planned and managed the whole thing?’ Bruno asked, shaking his head in admiration.

‘Yes, starting nearly twenty years ago. I was her lawyer from the beginning. She saw the potential long before I did, not just in the money but the local jobs too, all of them above minimum wage, even the cleaners. She even has a special dental service for the Americans, who can get crowns and cosmetic care for a fraction of what they pay back home. So that’s a growth market for January and February.’

Bruno shook his head in admiration. ‘She deserves a medal,’ he said, before remembering the sad, shrunken body he’d seen in the car that morning. ‘She deserves a great deal better from this region than the wretched, lonely way she died.’

‘Indeed so,’ said Becca. ‘And we shall make sure her will gets carried out, just as she wanted.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the coffee and croissant.’ He watched the lawyer take Monique’s letter from the envelope and scan the contents before pursing her lips and taking a deep breath. She then folded the letter and returned it to the envelope.

‘Do you have any idea why she chose that spot by St Cirq?’ he asked. ‘It’s a bit off the beaten track for someone from Sarlat. Did she have some connection to the area?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Do you know of any close friends, the type who might know youthful secrets, perhaps an old schoolmate?’

‘Not offhand.’ Becca shook her head thoughtfully before raising a finger. ‘Wait, maybe there’s someone I recall, a schoolfriend who was the sister of her first big love affair. The family lived somewhere beyond Les Eyzies. The schoolfriend went to Sciences-Po, and then spent some time at the World Bank in America and then came back to Paris and went into some big international consultancy. Monique would stay with her whenever she went to Paris. Check for a frequently dialled Paris number in her phone book and that will probably be her.’

Bruno scribbled a note to himself and then asked, ‘Will the conciergerie continue to be so well-run without her?’

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘Monique set it up with great care, and she had a lot of confidence in her team. You’ll like Laura, the first staffer Monique hired and her first business partner. Laura was born and raised here, but with an English mother. I like her a lot. She’s quite an athlete, played basketball for her university and coached the girls’ team when she was teaching languages at the lycée here. There’s also a separate management board, which includes a friend of yours, Romain, the deputy Mayor here in Sarlat.’

‘He’s a good man,’ said Bruno, nodding. ‘Before I go, do you see any threats to this system Monique set up? Are any of the owners looking to get a larger portion of the cake?’

‘I don’t think so, and I know most of them from the Christmas party Monique hosted every year. If there is a threat, I suppose it could come from the husband over the will, but I think I’ve taken care of that. Monique wanted me to sit on the board but I said no, thinking that could create a potential conflict of interest.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘All along, she told me she was praying that she’d get pregnant and have a child to inherit what she’d built. She’d known my Adam since he was born, and she’d look at him sometimes with a kind of yearning that nearly broke my heart.’

‘Where’s Adam now?’ Bruno asked, trying to remember an eager young opponent across the net at a match against Sarlat.

‘Warsaw, where his father’s family originally came from. He’s doing an exchange year at a business school there, on a European scholarship. The teaching is in English as well as Polish.’ There was a touch of pride in her voice. ‘When Adam was in the lycée he spent a summer with the concierge team servicing the swimming pools and made enough money to go to London for three weeks, staying with my cousins.’

‘You must miss him.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s why you have them, so they can grow up and leave to have lives of their own. If you’re lucky, you get to know your grandchildren.’ She rose to see him out. ‘I’ll let you know if any problems arise with the will. And thanks for coming round, doing more than your duty. I’d heard good things about you from Annette, so it’s nice to finally meet.’

‘It’s my job and I’m glad to help. And you’re a friend of Annette, so it’s been good to meet you. Thanks again for that very welcome breakfast,’ he said, giving a half-wave, half-salute as he left.

4

Bruno strolled down to Sarlat’s main square, where Mairie employees were already erecting Christmas lights and a giant tree. He took the shortcut through the rue des Consuls to the Place de la Liberté, past which the notary, founded by Monique’s ancestors almost a hundred and fifty years ago, was based. The notaires had the first floor, while an estate agency had the ground floor with big windows to display the properties available for sale. They were all imposing, even grandiose. To one side was a separate entrance with the choice of stairs or a small elevator for the notary and the conciergerie. Bruno took the stairs to the office on the third floor where he found a woman in the open doorway with her back towards him. She was talking to someone inside while kneeling to tape a large sign to the door that said the office was closed in mourning.

‘Sorry to disturb you, but I’m looking for someone called Laura.’

‘That’s me,’ said the woman with the sign, not turning round as she used her teeth to tear a strip from the roll of adhesive tape. Her voice was blurred by her efforts to tear the tape. ‘But we’re closed today for the death of a colleague.’

‘I know, I’m the policeman dealing with Monique’s death,’ he said. ‘I have a letter for you that was left beside her body.’

‘Ah, sorry,’ she almost grunted as the piece of tape came free and she stuck the sign to the door. She turned round, gave him a polite smile and a word of thanks and guided him into the reception room. ‘This is Geraldine,’ she said, gesturing to a young woman who sat behind a reception desk. ‘And I’m Laura Segret. I help run this place and it’s going to be ten times tougher without Monique. Are you the policeman who found her?’

‘I am.’ Bruno handed her the envelope and drew her attention to Annette’s official stamp and explained why it had been opened. He took the opportunity to study her as she pulled out the accompanying letter, scanned it quickly and then seemed to return to the beginning and read it carefully. Laura was in her mid-thirties, he guessed, maybe a little older, but with the sort of ageless clear complexion that came from generations of ancestors growing up in British mists and fog.

While she digested the letter, he glanced around the room, nodding politely to the young woman at the reception desk. She was young enough to be a recent school-leaver, and despite the grown-up working clothes she looked familiar. He tried to imagine her as a schoolgirl and, remembering that Laura had called her Geraldine, the penny dropped.

‘You’re Geraldine from the Sarlat tennis tournament,’ he said, and stepped to the desk to shake her hand. ‘You and your big brother took the first set from us in the semi-finals of the mixed doubles. How time flies! Now you’ve left school and have a job. Enjoying it?’

‘Very much, Bruno, and thanks for asking. How’s that Englishwoman who runs a riding stable, the one who was your partner?’

‘Pamela? She’s fine, thanks, and I’ll tell her you asked after her, but she’d want me to remind you that she’s from Scotland.’

‘I’m sorry, you must think me very rude.’ Laura looked up from the letter. ‘Can we offer you some coffee?’

‘I already had coffee with the magistrate, thanks, and then another a few minutes ago with Maître Weil.’

‘A sad occasion, but it’s good to meet you since we have a lot of friends in common,’ she said, giving him a practised smile ‘Annette the magistrate and Romain the deputy Mayor, here in Sarlat. Then of course you know Philippe Delaron of Sud Ouest, Clothilde from the museum and I think you also knew René, the old head of the Castenet family from Sergeac.’

‘He was probably the last of the great amateur archaeologists, God rest his soul,’ Bruno said, smiling at the memory. ‘He was the one who showed me the power of the spear-thrower, the technology that he claimed gave humans the edge over all animals. He defied me to throw a spear through one of those thick straw targets he had and of course I failed. Then he showed me how to do it. He was already over eighty at the time.’

She nodded as he finished, then told Geraldine to take the rest of the day off and steered Bruno down a corridor, pausing at a closed door.

‘Are you the policeman from St Denis with the basset hound?’ she asked, and as he nodded agreement she went on, ‘Was that where Monique died? St Denis? It seems some way from her usual haunts.’

‘Yes, I found her on a quiet road near St Cirq with a view of the Vézère and across the valley to Campagne. I’ve been hoping that you might be able to tell me if the place had any special significance for her.’

‘We have a couple of clients around there, but I honestly have no idea,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Maybe you should ask her old school friends. But the reason I asked about your dog is that you’ll find a surprise in this room.’ She opened the door and almost pushed him in.

Belly up on the floor on the spot where wintry sunlight fell through the window was a young female basset, white except for some light brown patches on her sides and rump. Her ears and face were brown, but a white stripe ran from her muzzle to separate the eyes and continued to the top of her skull and down to her back.

‘Aren’t you lovely?’ Bruno murmured as he sank to his knees and let the dog come to him.

She must have recognized the scent of Balzac on Bruno’s hands and clothes, and having let her nose control the enquiry for a good ten seconds, she raised two magnificent eyes to study him before rubbing the side of her face along his leg.

‘She’s what, about two, maybe a little more?’ he asked Laura, scratching at that spot just behind the dog’s ear that would send Balzac into an ecstatic trance.

‘Two years and six months, and her formal name is Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Franceuil . . .’

‘Better known as George Sand,’ said Bruno, glancing up at Laura and smiling at her look of surprise that a country policeman would know such things

‘Chapeau,’ she said. ‘Good for you.’

‘I came across her work by chance. You remember that fuss a few years ago about whether her remains should be placed in the Pantheon? That was when I took one of her books out of the library, simple curiosity.’

Bruno got the impression that Laura was trying to distract herself from her friend’s death with light patter and forced jollity, talk of dogs and books being easier to manage than facing the shock of Monique’s suicide. The smile on her face never quite reached her eyes, and there was a choked quality to her speech.

‘I became intrigued by Sand when we had to read her novel Mauprat at my lycée,’ she said. ‘The brutish man civilized by the beautiful, intelligent woman.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Bruno asked. ‘I’m sorry, that sounded very different in my head.’ He grimaced. ‘Have you ever considered breeding your George Sand? Might my Balzac be an option?’

‘You’d have to convince my mother. She runs the kennels, so she controls the genetics. It will depend on his breeding.’

For the first time since entering, Bruno raised his head from the hound and looked around. It was a pleasant room with a desk, bookshelves and filing cabinets as well as a dining table large enough for six hardback chairs that was probably used for meetings. The wall between the windows displayed a portrait of a pretty but rather solemn schoolgirl and the longest wall was covered with row upon row of framed photographs of chateaux and gentilhommières.

‘Are those the places you rent out for their owners?’ he asked, gesturing at the photos. ‘Maître Weil told me a bit about the business.’

‘Yes, they are, although there are a couple of new ones not yet up there. And that’s a portrait of Monique as a girl,’ she said, pointing at the wall. ‘Would you like a chair?’ Laura pulled out one for herself and took a seat at the long table.

Bruno lifted a velvety ear, then got up from the enchanting George Sand and joined Laura at the table. ‘Annette, the magistrate, mentioned that the letters make it clear that Monique had planned to take her own life. Does that surprise you?’

‘I couldn’t possibly say, I’m still trying to absorb it. She was a remarkable woman and I’ll miss her a lot, and not just because she was central to this whole business that we’ve built up. She was a very dear friend to me, a mentor . . .’ Laura’s voice broke off and she paused before going on. ‘I’m not the only one who’ll miss her. She loomed very large in the lives of all the women here and to the staff in the field, an inspiration to us all. It must be a very grim time for Dominic, losing his wife and his father, two deaths in the same week.’ She paused again before asking how Monique had killed herself.

Bruno explained, adding that he thought she had not suffered, and then asked if Laura was surprised by the farewell letter.

‘No, the future of the firm was something we had talked about. Monique had discussed it several times with me and the rest of the team, and with Becca Weil. She thought it would be unfair for Dominic to inherit any of the success of the conciergerie business in which he’d played no part and showed no interest. Indeed, he even begrudged Monique the time she spent with us rather than on him. So I certainly agreed with Monique’s plan, and so do all the team. Not that it will be easy to continue without her vision and her leadership. She made everybody feel really involved.’

‘So her suicide came as a complete surprise?’ Bruno asked.

‘Yes, a huge shock, despite the miscarriage.’

‘All of her close friends have said the same,’ Bruno mused. ‘It strikes me as odd that none of you felt there was particular reason to worry about her. Was she really so good at masking her distress? Or was there perhaps anyone she might have confided in? I hear she was close to an old school friend who now lives in Paris.’

‘Yes, Ghislaine, a finance expert who works in consulting. She comes down once a year to hold conferences in one of our biggest chateaux, and because it’s out of season she gets the team from the Vieux Logis to do the catering. Monique would always stay with her when she went to Paris, a very fancy apartment on the Rue du Bac.’ As she spoke, Laura pulled out her phone, checked the list of contacts and then read out to him a Paris number for Ghislaine Cardaillac.

‘Will you keep your base here in Sarlat?’ Bruno asked, scribbling down the number. ‘It may be a problem, if Monique’s husband is not happy at being excluded.’

‘Monique was very clear about the marriage being based on the separation of his and her estates, so Dominic has no involvement in our business,’ she said briskly. ‘It could even be argued that it pre-dated Monique. Her grandfather, Louis, began the expansion back in the 1950s when he helped his sister to start an estate agency as a separate business. She brought in an old school friend who married Louis and became Monique’s grandmother.’

‘How did you get involved?’

‘I was teaching languages at the lycée here and Monique would ask me to translate for German or English clients. We became friends, and when she started the conciergerie I was the first to be hired, years before Dominic turned up. The conciergerie was already a thriving business with four other employees, and Becca Weil as our lawyer, long before Monique met and married Dominic.’

Her tone suggested to Bruno that there was no love lost there.

‘What happens now?’ he asked.

‘It was Monique who wanted to stay here. The rest of us all want to move out of Sarlat, lovely old town though it is. This place is so packed in the season that parking is impossible, and our clients have trouble coming to us. I’ve been saying for ages that we should be near the airport at Bergerac, or at least somewhere with rail access to Paris and Bordeaux. Monique was a Sarlat girl, born and bred, but the rest of us live scattered around the area, and I think we’ll be moving somewhere more convenient.’

Laura explained that the team now comprised four women in Sarlat, two in a separate office in Bergerac and two more in Périgueux to deal with the growing number of clients in the rest of the département for whom they provided concierge services. They had used the government’s green subsidies to install solar panels and heat pumps in all the properties they ran.

‘Monique’s breakthrough was to realize that one of the most attractive selling points we had was insurance,’ Laura said, learning forward and speaking earnestly. ‘Without our service, which ensures that these chateaux and estates are inhabited almost year-round, most of our clients would be looking at a hundred thousand euros annually in insurance costs alone, more even. With our system of almost permanent occupation, along with gardeners and housekeepers and swimming pool maintenance, insurance comes down dramatically to around ten thousand a year. It also helps that there’s no oil nor gas needed for heating.’

‘What’s in it for the ordinary folk, the French people who have to get up early in the morning?’ Bruno asked.

‘I’m glad you asked,’ said Laura, with a sigh that sounded like relief. ‘This is the bit I really like.’

She began to count the benefits on her fingers. Fourteen full-time jobs for gardeners, and each gardener had two apprentices who were learning their trade while spending one or two days a week at trade school to win the brevet, the professional qualification that was the equivalent of a degree. Thirty full-time jobs for housekeepers plus part-time cleaning jobs for women who prefer shorter hours. ‘And we’ve opened a free crèche and nursery school for young mothers to leave their kids in safety while earning fifteen euros an hour cleaning – they won’t earn that as part-timers anywhere else,’ Laura said. ‘And we pay their social insurance.

‘Above all, we’ve helped all of these people, gardeners and cleaners and the plumbers and electricians that we have on call, to take advantage of the new rules for auto-entrepreneurs, with simplified tax and social insurance systems, and tax relief on their cars,’ she said. ‘Plus they have free accommodation. We’re pumping over seven million euros a year into the local economy.’

‘Well, I’m very happy about that,’ said Bruno. ‘But I was startled when your lawyer told me that you were making a profit of over half a million a year.’

‘That’s before we pay ourselves,’ Laura said, bridling. ‘That is, the eight of us who run the business. We pay ourselves less than we pay the gardeners, and any money left over goes into a retirement fund. We’ve set up a scheme with a local builder and an architect to convert disused tobacco barns into housing. I think you know one of them, the home of Flavie, the singer with Les Troubadours. We also organize various events, particularly weddings but also truffle hunts, wine tours and tastings, cooking classes – whatever the customers want.’

‘I’m surprised I haven’t read or heard about your operation before.’

‘We don’t advertise here in France, and mainly work with travel agents in the UK, Holland, Germany, North America and now China and Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘It was all Monique’s idea. She thought it was tragic that so many of the small chateaux were falling into ruin since nobody wanted to buy them and the old owners could hardly afford to run them. So she dreamed up this brilliant way of keeping the places alive and lived in.’

‘With more than a thousand chateaux in the Périgord it sounds like the sky’s the limit,’ said Bruno. ‘How big do you plan to get?’

‘I’m not sure we could manage any more,’ said Laura. ‘There are only eight of us to manage all these places, so each one of us is juggling four properties. Frankly, it’s a relief when the owners take over in July and August.’

‘I can see that,’ Bruno laughed. ‘But it must be really satisfying, putting these glorious old buildings to new use, creating all these jobs.’

‘Yes, of course it makes us feel good – except when we’re too tired, or when we get sick of dealing with the bureaucrats. Still, we have some good allies who can help, which reminds me of our mutual friend, Romain. He’s a huge help, and it was partly through him that I first met you, although I bet you’ve forgotten.’

‘That’s hard to believe,’ said Bruno, embarrassed. ‘I really don’t recall . . .’

‘I was a whore at the time, if that helps trigger your memory.’

She began to laugh as Bruno gaped at her, speechless.

‘I’m teasing you. I was a tavern wench when you were at the re-enactment of the liberation of Sarlat, playing the role of one of the women of easy virtue on the arm of a drunken English soldier.’

He began to laugh then and confessed that he remembered the scene, adding, ‘You must have been disguised in very heavy make-up.’

‘I wanted to be sure that even my mother wouldn’t recognize me.’

‘I can imagine!’ Bruno laughed. ‘Now, I’d better go back to collect my dog from the magistrate’s office.’ He thanked her for her time, privately wondering when he might see her again.

‘May we come with you?’ Laura asked, as though she’d read his mind. ‘I’d like to meet Balzac and so would George Sand, then I’d better go home and catch up on the housekeeping.’

The meeting of the two basset hounds went well, with a great deal of polite sniffing at one another, and Laura welcomed Bruno’s suggestion that she and George Sand might like to join him and Balzac for a walk on the next Sunday. Laura then took some photos of Balzac on her phone to send to her mother, which Bruno read as a hopeful sign, and he promised to forward her the details of Balzac’s imposing pedigree.

‘It sounds as though our dogs are very much more grandly born than either one of us peasants,’ she said, and leaned forward for the exchange of a bise on each cheek. Not for the first time, Bruno was grateful for this delightful French custom.

He drove back to St Denis, smiling to himself and wondering already what would be a perfect second date if Sunday went well. He began thinking of menus, which always put him in a good mood, despite the physiotherapy session which now loomed menacingly ahead.

5

Bruno pulled into the parking lot in front of the St Denis medical centre with five minutes to spare before his appointment with the physiotherapist. Her office on the lowest floor, reached by a separate entrance, had only recently been reopened after being inundated by the autumn’s dramatic floods.

Two men had died when their car had been swept away by the raging River Vézère, but a woman and her child had been saved by Bruno and several volunteers. That rescue had inflicted a renewed wrenching of his shoulder which had undone much of the healing achieved since he’d been shot in the summer. That first injury had required three weeks in hospital followed by six weeks in a convalescent home. This second injury had required four days in hospital, three weeks in a convalescent home and three physio sessions each week now that he was back at work. He had been told that his shoulder would never recover fully. He was barred from playing rugby and, for the foreseeable future, was resigned to a feeble form of tennis imposed by serving underarm.

‘You’re coming along quite well,’ said Nicole, as Bruno lay on his back on a floor mat, his arms outstretched behind his head as he tried to lower them to touch the ground with the backs of his hands. ‘Now sit up slowly and bend forward at the waist to try and touch your toes, and again, and again,’ came that voice, which seemed all the more heartless for its soothing tones of goodwill. ‘And now lie back again, arms stretched straight up, and now lower them behind your head again to touch the floor. A bit more effort and reach for that floor. And again, Bruno, you’re almost there. Come on, we both know you can do better than that.’

There were few things in life more infuriating than being told he could do better by a young slip of a girl whom he’d taught to play tennis. And now, on the basis of a couple of diplomas and a white coat, Nicole had the authority to humiliate him, to push his reluctant limbs a centimetre or two further than they were able to go. Worse, she had the effrontery to tell him that he wasn’t trying hard enough. He had suffered similar critiques hiding behind insincere phrases of encouragement at the convalescent home.

‘Almost there,’ she said. Then she returned to the torment, making him sit up only to be ordered to lean forward once more, bending at the waist and stretching out his arms so he could touch his toes. He almost succeeded.

‘There, that wasn’t too hard, was it?’ Nicole said brightly. ‘You’re coming along very well, and I can tell you’re keeping up your morning runs. Another three or four sessions and we’ll have you touching your toes again. And before you ask, no, you’re not ready to start weight training. We want your tendons and your skeletal structure pulling their full weight, not letting your pumped-up muscles do the work. That’s the mistake you men always make. Now, off you go to the swimming pool, twenty lengths and a shower and you’ll feel like a new man.’

Resisting the urge to say that he preferred the old one, Bruno thanked Nicole politely and drove to the town pool. The old open-air pool that was open only from the first of May through September had been enhanced with a covered, all-weather pool. This new addition opened at six each morning and was very popular with the early birds until nine, when it was reserved for the next four hours for the aqua aerobics classes, which seemed to involve women of a certain age performing stately dances in the shallow end to vintage disco music. Three lanes were roped off for those instructed to swim laps, like Bruno. He did his duty, and at three minutes before one, feeling indeed like a new man, he entered the familiar Mairie. He was greeted with a cheery wave from the receptionist, who was engrossed in a conversation on her phone but gestured him towards the Mayor’s door. He was expected to go straight in.

‘Ah, Bruno, I gather this suicide you found this morning is not one of ours,’ the Mayor said.

‘No, Monsieur le Maire. Monique Duhamel worked in Sarlat as a notaire and inherited a grand family home in Sergeac, but also founded a very upscale lettings agency which includes two properties that are near us. She has about thirty places all across the département, and employs at least a dozen around here: gardeners, builders, housekeepers.’

‘Why have we not heard of her before, and why would such an enterprising woman want to kill herself?’

Bruno explained about the miscarriage and her husband’s absence at a funeral and described the team of women that had been recruited to run the company. He saved the best for last.

‘They’re considering moving out of Sarlat since it’s so crowded and impossible for their clients to park. So they are thinking of somewhere nearer Bergerac airport – but we may have an outside shot at enticing them here,’ Bruno explained. ‘It’s possible there may be difficulties with the will, which leaves the company to Monique’s all-female staff rather than to her husband. But I’m told the marriage took place under the separation of properties. And she continued to use her maiden name rather than take her husband’s.’

‘Who will now make the decision where to move?’ The mayor got to his feet, and Bruno moved to follow.

‘The woman who seems likely to take the helm is Mademoiselle Laura Segret, who worked with Monique from the start,’ Bruno replied. ‘She has a French father, a vet who lives just outside Bordeaux, and was born there. Her English mother runs a kennel and raises basset hounds. Laura has a young lady basset, a true princess. I have never seen a more beautiful hound.’

‘Does Balzac share your admiration?’ the Mayor asked, leading the way down the ancient spiral staircase with its deep grooves worn by generations of feet.

‘I believe so, although he is too much the gentleman to impose himself at the first encounter,’ Bruno replied, falling in step beside the Mayor once they emerged onto the square. ‘Laura and I are going to walk the dogs together on Sunday to see how relations progress, and maybe share a light brunch.’

‘Despite my affection for our American friends, I have a horror of that word.’

‘But Monsieur le Maire, the word perfectly describes the meal.’

‘And do the attractions of Mademoiselle Segret match those of her basset hound?’ the Mayor asked after a grunt, as they paused before crossing the road to enter the Rue de Paris.

‘She’s an interesting woman,’ said Bruno, ignoring the Mayor’s implication, as they walked toward Ivan’s restaurant, pausing every few steps to shake hands with some acquaintance. ‘She’s obviously intelligent, businesslike and I heard from a mutual acquaintance that she was also a basketball player of some renown.’

‘Well then,’ said the Mayor, pausing before opening Ivan’s door, ‘it sounds, my dear Bruno, as though you may at last be doomed.’

‘But we’ve only just met!’

‘So?’ asked the Mayor, winking at him.

They followed Ivan to their table, nodding greetings to the other customers, most of whom they knew well. Ivan guided them to a corner between the bar and the corridor that led to the outside yard that Ivan called his beer garden, and which was only open in summer. It was the closest to privacy that Ivan could offer, and the table was set for two.

‘A small carafe of the new house white, the one with Floreal. Bruno hasn’t tried it yet,’ the Mayor said to Ivan as he and Bruno took their seats.

‘We only planted it in the spring,’ said Bruno. ‘It can’t be ready this soon.’

‘It could be if we wanted to copy the Beaujolais and make a Périgord Nouveau, and come to think of it, that’s not a bad idea. Still, this isn’t ours,’ the Mayor replied. ‘We got this from that chum of yours, Patrick Barde at Château le Raz. Like you, he says the appellation contrôlée system has become too restricted when we need to explore new varieties to cope with climate change. He was an early adopter, and he’s using it in a blend with Sauvignon. He’s let us have enough to try it ourselves at the town vineyard. Hubert and I agree with you that Patrick makes some of the best IGP wines in the region, so I thought we’d try his way.’

‘This is pretty good, lots of fruit and fresh on the palate,’ said Bruno after sipping. ‘A bit of grapefruit in the nose with a hint of something more woody, maybe a bit like boxwood but it’s pleasantly fresh and dry. I think I prefer it to that Viognier we were trying.’

‘Good, not just because I agree with you, but it also gives us about ten to fifteen per cent more yield per hectare than the Viognier,’ the Mayor said. ‘And there’s less alcohol in the Floreal than the Viognier.’

Bruno nodded. Too many French drivers still believed in the old rule that they could drink two glasses of wine and still pass a breathalyser test. That had been true when most French wines were 13 per cent or less, but with climate change boosting the alcohol level of Merlot as high as 15 per cent, two glasses could be breaking the law.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ the Mayor said. ‘I ordered the light lunch – Jacqueline’s orders. She says I’ve put on weight while she’s been teaching in Paris, and with Christmas coming . . .’

‘Fine by me. I’ve spent the last few months convalescing and I’m feeling heavy in my skin.’

‘Yet you have a horse and a dog to keep you exercising . . .’ the Mayor grumbled.

‘Plus a rather less sedentary profession,’ said Bruno, grinning in sympathy before he went on. ‘This idea of Ivan’s light lunch is new to me.’

‘He began with what he called his summer menu and now there’s this version for winter. You can have soup, salad and dessert, or soup and main course, or main course and dessert.’

‘A real Périgord soup can contain as many calories as a Parisian banquet,’ Bruno noted. ‘What’s the plat du jour?’

‘Poached chicken with ceps and lentils braised in the poaching liquid, full of nutrients and free from butter,’ sighed the Mayor. ‘And the desserts are ice cream, apple tart, or an apple and mixed berry compote. I shall have the soup, salad and compote, just in case you want to demand a pay raise and threaten to tell Jacqueline.’

‘What’s on your mind?’ Bruno knew that the Mayor did not need to invite him to lunch to discuss anything to do with the town, and expected this would be something different. So he was surprised when the Mayor said it was concern over the main street.

‘You may not have heard, but Pascal is shutting his shop after Christmas even though he has no buyer in sight. He’ll probably sell the whole building after turning it into separate apartments. The shops on the rue de Paris are closing down faster than I can find replacements.’

‘Are you surprised? We’ve got all the big stores on the outskirts of town. We’re lucky to still have a real butcher and three bakers, plus a choice of places to sit and eat or drink. It’s a shame to lose the hunters’ shop, but we’re doing better than the other small towns around here.’

‘We’re not doing better than St Cyprien,’ said the Mayor. ‘They’ve got two antiques shops, a bookstore, that fashionable traiteur who’s a friend of yours, the yoghurt factory and that very fancy new hotel, and worst of all their Sunday market is becoming a serious rival.’

‘How can they be a rival when their market is Sunday and we are on Tuesday and Saturday?’ Bruno countered. ‘And Sylvain the traiteur is a cousin of our cheesemaker, Stéphane, so of course they coordinate. We aren’t rivals here. And if they have their new hotel, we have the new Domaine de la Barde and the gymnasium at the collège and the new indoor pool. But I agree that it would be good to have a decent antiques shop here.’ He paused. ‘What I’d most like to see is a second-hand bookstore, the kind of place where you can just browse for hours.’

‘We have the bookstore in that alley that’s part of the big supermarket,’ the Mayor said. ‘But maybe that’s something we could do with an empty shop front. I think we might get some volunteers to run it, retired people, and not just the ones in the old folks’ home. It could be a way for them to keep active, meet people.’

‘It’s the kind of activity Fabiola would happily recommend to her retired patients,’ said Bruno.

‘We’d need to look at the books that we get donated,’ the Mayor said. ‘Some might be valuable, or rare, or of special local interest. I’d happily volunteer to help look through new donations, and so would several others – you included, I presume.’

‘You’re right, and don’t forget this new option for school students, extra credit for voluntary work,’ said Bruno, as Ivan presented a plate of poached chicken and lentils glossy with what looked to be a rich and fatty stock, not poaching liquid at all.

‘Don’t thank me, it’s Marta,’ Ivan grunted. ‘She raised the chickens herself.’

‘It’s perfect,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m very grateful.’

‘You realize we can only do this bookstore plan if the vacant shop belongs to the town,’ the Mayor said, once Ivan left to deal with another table. ‘A private owner would happily sell the place to any buyer who comes along.’

‘Was it not you who once assured me that there are few rights so absolute as those of a French mayor in possession of a solid majority in council?’ Bruno asked calmly.

‘ . . .except for the rights of private property,’ the Mayor added.

‘So if the owner of the property whose business is not doing well decides he should sell the place or convert it into flats, there’s not much the council can do. But it could impose delays to investigate other possibilities, or demand a survey to prove that the building is structurally sound, or perhaps to revalue the property for tax purposes. Best of all, you could declare it to be so historic that it merits an opinion from Bâtiments de France, which can take considerable time to arrange.’

‘It seems I have trained you well.’ The Mayor raised his glass in a mock toast. ‘We can make sure that no hasty decisions are taken that we might later come to regret,’ he said, sitting back and taking a sip of his wine. Then he carefully replaced his glass and crossed his hands on the table before leaning forward to demand, ‘What do you know about Xavier’s problem?’

‘I wasn’t aware that he had one, except that old story about Renault thinking the family garage too small and remote to continue as an official showroom, which will probably dent his income if it ever comes to pass,’ Bruno said. ‘But he’ll still be part of one of the wealthiest families in St Denis.’

‘So you don’t know that the marriage is in trouble and that Xavier seems to have moved out of the family home?’

‘No, it’s news to me. Is this recent?’ He’d been away over the weekend with the town’s junior rugby team at a regional tournament.

‘Xavier was in Bordeaux last week for a three-day course on how the local Mairies should adapt to new recycling legislation. He came home, and two days later his wife was waiting for him at the front door with an overnight bag, greeted him with a hefty right hook, and sent him packing. What do you make of that?’

‘I’d hate to speculate,’ said Bruno, frowning. ‘But if a husband has a few days away and his wife then has reason to throw him out, a rather unsavoury explanation comes to mind.’

‘My thoughts exactly,’ said the Mayor.

‘Mirabelle has always been a woman of spirit, in a good sense, not just in wanting to get her own way,’ Bruno went on, recalling the enthusiastic girl she had been when joining his tennis class. ‘She can be ruthless on the tennis court and she still keeps a watchful eye on the family timber business even while she’s devoted to those two children. I never heard of the marriage being in trouble before.’

‘Nor me,’ the Mayor replied. ‘But this has obvious implications for two of our main employers, so find out what you can.’

‘Where is Xavier staying?’ Bruno asked.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t want to make a big thing of it. I assume his dad would know.’

‘If our suspicions are correct, his dad would be even more furious with Xavier than Mirabelle,’ said Bruno. ‘And if the old man doesn’t know that Xavier has moved out of the family home, he’ll be in a real rage. I can see why you’d prefer me to find out rather than do it yourself.’ He rolled his eyes and gave a wry smile.

‘Ah, my dear Bruno, after all these years working together, you can read me like a book. It’s very reassuring to know that my subtle hints will not be misunderstood. I’m having the compote for dessert. What about you?’

6

After lunch, Bruno was about to call the Paris number for Ghislaine Cardaillac, Monique’s old school friend, when he paused. The surname nagged at him. It seemed familiar but elusive. Then the image of a chateau came into his head, and he muttered to himself, ‘Milandes!’ He recalled the story of the young wife of the old warrior of the great fortress of Castelnaud. Claude de Cardaillac, a bride at the end of the fifteenth century, had managed to persuade her elderly husband to build something less warlike and more comfortable for her, in the modern style becoming known from Italy’s Renaissance. The result was the charming Château des Milandes, and he had heard that the Cardaillac family had prospered, or at least survived, down the centuries.

He called the Mayor and asked if there were any branches of the family still around St Denis. Indeed, he was told, there was a small chateau up on the hills around La Peyrière, on the way to Les Eyzies, that had belonged to a cadet branch. But it had changed hands a decade and more ago, the Mayor went on. Why was Bruno asking?

‘Trying to track down a childhood friend of this morning’s suicide,’ Bruno said. ‘I was wondering why she chose to take her life up there around La Peyrière, and I think you may have given me the answer.’

Bruno ended the call and then dialled Mademoiselle Cardaillac, reaching a recorded message, a woman’s voice asking him to state his business. He gave his name, rank and number, suggesting she call the Mairie of St Denis to verify his identity, and explained that he needed to talk urgently with Mlle Cardaillac on police business. Wondering how long it would take for his call to be returned, Bruno set off for the scenic overlook where Monique had been found, to look for a small chateau. He was curious, since he recalled no such building in a district he thought he knew well.

He had barely reached the outskirts of town when his call was returned, and a voice that spoke a classic, educated French without the brisk condescension of a true Parisian said, ‘Monsieur le chef de police, you have a very handsome basset hound.’

‘Bonjour, madame, and how do you know that?’

‘From Google, which offers several photos of you in past issues of Sud Ouest. But to be serious, you said you needed to speak with me? Your message sounded urgent.’

Bruno felt wrong-footed by the woman’s opening gambit, and chose to take refuge in the conventions of procedure.

‘Am I correct in thinking that you are Ghislaine Cardaillac, a friend of Monique from your school days?’ he asked. ‘And that you lived outside St Denis near La Peyrière?’

‘Correct on all counts.’

‘I have to convey the sad news that Monique is dead, in an apparent suicide. Her car was found this morning parked in a scenic overlook near La Peyrière. I hoped to ask you why she might have chosen such a place.’

Bruno heard a choking sound down the phone, more sob than cough, and then a series of slow inhales. ‘I am very sorry to hear it, but not as surprised as I might have been after the miscarriage. It devastated her, along with the realization that she would never have a child.’ There was a long silence punctuated by a series of deep breaths. ‘Did she leave any message for me?’ she asked, finally.

‘None that I found, madame.’

‘I am mademoiselle, but no matter. Please, call me Ghislaine. She’ll probably have written me a letter; she usually did when she was deciding something. You say it was suicide?’

‘We currently have no reason to believe otherwise.’

‘Were there any letters that she left?’

‘Yes, three: to her business partner, her lawyer, and her husband.’

‘So if there was no letter to me, why did you call?’

‘I was told you and she were very close and that she always stayed with you in Paris.’

‘That’s true enough. Did anyone mention my brother and what happened to him?’

‘No, only that she was thought to have known him when they were young.’

‘I suppose someone who didn’t know the full story could put it that way,’ she said, and paused before continuing. ‘Monique and I became close friends at the lycée in Sarlat, and she and I would spend weekends together, either with her family at Sergeac or at our place near Les Eyzies. One day she was staying with us when my big brother came down for the summer after getting his Master’s at the London School of Economics. Monique and my brother had not met since our first year at the lycée.’

Her voice seemed to change as she said this. She spoke more slowly, more softly, the effect of memories triggered.

‘I remember it so well,’ she went on. ‘Raoul was four years older, handsome and charming, and it was the first time that I realized that Monique had grown into a lovely young woman. We had a grass court and she and I were playing tennis when Raoul came by on horseback. He stopped to watch but Monique was so intent on her service she hadn’t noticed. She served and then came in to volley my return into the corner and Raoul called out, “Bravo.” You could hear the admiration in his voice. She turned to see who was shouting and that was it. Poof! The magical moment, the ball bouncing away unnoticed into the back of the court, the horse suddenly rearing up its head, Monique magnificent in the triumph of her volley. For each of them it hit at once. Like a missile landing perfectly on target.’

‘Love at first sight,’ exclaimed Bruno, the romantic in him enchanted by the tale.

‘You can imagine the rest,’ said Ghislaine, suddenly sounding tired down the phone. ‘Young love. Two families of excellent standing with two chateaux. Delighted that their young had shown such good taste to choose a mate from within their own ranks. But of course Monique must first finish her studies and Raoul must get launched on what was bound to be a brilliant career. A suitable post was found in a New York investment firm. He flew to JFK on the last day of August, started work on September the first. He was on the eightieth floor of one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Centre. You know what happened next. Monique could never escape the image of the death of her lover, constantly replayed.’

‘Mon Dieu!’ Bruno exclaimed, appalled. ‘They had, what, only two months together?’

‘Fifty-five days. In some ways, Monique never got over it. The worst of it was the waiting; it took weeks to confirm his death, and that he’d been on one of the floors that was hit directly, in the North Tower that was hit first. We could only hope that his death was instant, not that any of us could ever be sure.’ Ghislaine paused and then her voice became matter-of-fact. ‘Do you know when or where the funeral will be held?’

Confused, still captivated by her tale of young love blighted by a tragedy that had become almost too public in its impact, Bruno struggled to change focus and answer her question.

‘Not yet. I presume her husband will decide, but he won’t arrive until late tomorrow.’ Bruno explained about the funeral in Strasbourg.

‘I know she hated cremations, and I know she had a fancy—’ Her voice broke off. ‘My parents died in a car crash, and they were buried in the family plot in the cemetery of St Denis, where I presume I’ll be laid to rest myself. But there were no remains of my brother. My parents had the usual mementoes of his childhood, locks of hair and milk teeth, so when they died I put those in the casket and had them all buried together. Monique said to me at the time that the casket was the nearest she would ever get to him again and perhaps she, too, could be buried there.’

‘I’ll let her husband know that, and perhaps see if Father Sentout might officiate.’

‘If you could let me know the date, I’ll arrange to come down,’ she said, almost brightly, as if making an effort to sound unaffected. ‘I shall look forward to meeting you.’

‘Before you go, your family’s chateau – did it have a name?’ Bruno asked.

‘Not anymore,’ she said, and Bruno wondered whether the non-answer was intentional or the mark of a distracted speaker. ‘When my parents died, I got rid of it. Far too much trouble and upkeep while I was in Washington and after that in Paris almost all year. I put it in Monique’s hands, the tiny chateau that launched what became her successful business.’

‘As his sister, his death must have had a powerful effect on you as well,’ Bruno said.

‘Yes, a cautionary tale on the dangers of a grande passion. It cured me for life of any such romantic dream.’ She said it almost lightly, as if it were a well-worn anecdote.

‘I thought it might have brought you and Monique closer together,’ Bruno suggested.

‘Perhaps it did, a shared grief prolonging the friendship of schoolgirls into something more lasting,’ she said. ‘Not that I would ever suggest that my loss of a brother was to be compared to hers of a soulmate, a future husband, father of the children she never raised.’

As she went on, Bruno heard an edge to her voice, perhaps a hint of self-mockery to suggest that however solemn she might sound, she would never take herself quite so seriously. Bruno realized with a shock of surprise that he had heard this exact same tone in the voice of another woman. And as the image of Isabelle came into his head, he was even more surprised to realize that it had been days, even a week and more, since he had last thought of her. Could she at long last be losing her potent grip on his thoughts and emotions?

Bruno had known Isabelle first as a local policewoman, one of the star investigators on the team of his friend Jean-Jacques Jalipeau, chief detective of the département and known to all as J-J. The love affair Bruno and Isabelle had enjoyed that first magical summer had lingered on despite her move to the staff of the Interior Minister in Paris, then to Eurojust in the Hague, and then back to Paris. Each move had come with a jump in rank and her brilliant career meant she was now spoken of as possibly the first woman chief of France’s internal security directorate. Their on-again, off-again love affair had endured these shifts of location. Even more, it had survived her decision to abort a pregnancy without telling Bruno that she was carrying his child.

‘Are you still there?’ demanded a voice in his ear, startling him back into the phone call with Ghislaine.

‘Sorry, my phone suddenly lost signal,’ he replied, trying to remember what Ghislaine had been saying. ‘The last I heard was your saying how deeply Monique’s life had been overshadowed by the death of your brother.’

‘Yes, and I had gone on to ask whether you could let me know in good time about funeral plans so I could arrange to come down and get a hotel and so on.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure you’d like to meet some of Monique’s friends and colleagues, people she was close to.’

‘Sure, just let me know when to show up, and thanks, Bruno.’ She ended the call, without giving Bruno any idea of where her family chateau might be located.

He was on the outskirts of town, beyond the medical lab and the veterinary surgery, and before the junction that led to the town’s unmanned train station. He drove on and turned left just before the railway crossing, following the road that gave onto the floodplain of the Vézère river to Les Eyzies. Where the road took a sudden bend to skirt around a solitary house, Bruno took a narrow lane to the left that climbed to the hills that loomed over St Denis. He came to a junction that he recognized, leading straight on to the heights of La Peyrière, from where he could turn left to Petit Paris and back to St Denis. To the right was the Grotte du Sorcier, the magician’s cave where he had first kissed Isabelle. He raised his hand in sad salute to what he now knew was a lost love, and for once did not feel that sudden lurch in his gut. Before he could analyse how he felt about its absence he noticed to the left a narrow lane. It was flanked by trees, now naked in winter, and he was struck by the way their bare branches almost intertwined overhead.

He followed the lane downhill and saw through the gaps between the trees an overgrown grass tennis court. Then, after a sharp turn, a charming ancient house came into view. It was a chartreuse rather than a chateau, smaller and with no hint of fortification. The only unusual feature was that the right-hand side of the building was flanked by a small, round tower with a conical roof like a witch’s hat. Bruno guessed from the upper row of windows that it would have no more than four or five bedrooms at the front and perhaps the same at the rear. There was a modest portico on columns above the double doors of the entrance, and three windows on each side, all closed with pale blue shutters. Off to one side was a building which had probably once been the stables. The chartreuse was protected by a low stone wall, topped with iron railings, and the front garden seemed to be lawns and shrubbery with some fruit trees to each side that needed pruning. There was no sign of life, nor of the full-time gardeners Laura had mentioned, but then no garden looked its best in mid-winter.

Bruno wondered how renters would find the place, unless escorted there or given a detailed map. He took a quick photo with his phone and sent it to Ghislaine’s number with a query whether this had been her family home. He climbed out of his van, walked around to the side of the chartreuse and saw an old barn with an open door, tyre marks on the floor showing it was evidently in regular use as a garage but was currently empty. Smoke was coming from a chimney at the rear and, as he peeked in at the back door, he saw a kitchen with dishes stacked in a drying rack by the sink, condiments and a half-empty bottle of wine on a table, and a wood-fired stove. The housekeeper was evidently in residence but had presumably gone shopping or on a social call. Bruno ambled to his van and drove back to town.

7

Bruno went next to the sports bar opposite the old gendarmerie. It sold excellent draft beer and decent wine, served good pizzas and salad, and the big TV screen was permanently tuned to the Eurosport channel. It was the obvious refuge for an errant husband who had been thrown out of the family home by a furious wife and it was run by two veteran rugby players whom Bruno knew well.

‘Bonjour, Serge. I’m looking for Xavier,’ he said, shaking hands with the retired prop forward manning the bar. Like most such players Serge was not just burly, but seemed almost as broad as he was tall, with the usual broken nose and massive forearms.

‘Haven’t seen him yet today, but you’ll probably find him at his sister’s place opposite the tennis club,’ came the reply. ‘I hope Xavier gets things sorted out at home – he’s not a happy lad. Last night I even confiscated his car keys and made him walk back, and that’s not like him at all. He’s not usually a heavy drinker.’

‘Do you know what it’s all about?’ Bruno asked.

‘Trouble at home is all he says, but it doesn’t take a genius to work it out. Xavier gets home from Bordeaux and the wife has asked the neighbour to look after her kids for a couple of hours, waits for him to come back from the Mairie, slugs him on the nose and throws him out. Have you not seen Xavier’s face?’

Bruno sighed and shook his head, thanked the barman and turned to leave.

‘Christ knows how she learned to hit the poor bastard like that, but I’d hate to have it happen to me,’ the barman called after him.

Bruno stopped and turned. ‘It’s probably my fault. She was in my tennis class, and we worked hard on getting serious power behind her swing.’

With Serge’s guffaws still ringing in his ears Bruno drove to the tennis club car park and then rang the doorbell of Xavier’s sister’s home. Melissa came to the door looking tired and drained, a baby in her arms and a toddler clinging to her skirts, but she raised a grin for her old tennis teacher and presented her cheeks for the customary bise. Bruno complied and hugged her, told her she looked wonderful, kissed the baby and picked up the toddler to give him a hug too.

‘You’ll find my idiot brother in the garden shed,’ she said. ‘He’s got a sleeping bag and one of those canvas loungers we sunbathe on in summer. Probably more than he deserves.’

‘Have you talked to Mirabelle about all this?’ Bruno asked. He knew that Mirabelle and Melissa had been best friends and tennis partners at school, and Melissa had been bridesmaid at her brother’s wedding. The women were close friends, taking their kids to the playground together.

‘Of course I have, and she did the right thing to throw him out, unfaithful idiot that he is. You heard about the receipts she found from his business trip?’ Melissa spat on the ground at Bruno’s feet. ‘Champagne and oysters for two at the fanciest bistro in town. Then she checked the bank statements and saw he’d spent the same every night he was away.’

‘You’re right, he’s both an idiot and a cretin,’ said Bruno. ‘I just hope that this separation is not going to be permanent. There are few things worse for the children than an angry break-up and divorce. Do you know what Mirabelle has in mind?’

‘She hasn’t mentioned the D word, and she knows her kids miss their dad already, but she doesn’t know what to do. She hasn’t had a single word from Xavier, not a letter or even a card to say he’s sorry. I keep telling him he can’t leave her hanging like this, but when did he ever listen?’

Melissa pulled up her apron to wipe away a tear before it ran down her cheek. ‘He’s an utter idiot but he’s my brother. But Mirabelle’s my best friend and he’s betrayed both her and those kids. Merde, Bruno, what can you do when you love someone who does something that stupid? Please try and do what you can to get them back together. There’s a small chance he’ll listen to you – he knows you speak for all of us.’

Bruno handed her a clean handkerchief, and when she had dabbed her eyes and blown her nose, she put it into her pocket, saying she’d wash it before handing it back.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said. ‘And if I can’t talk some sense into your brother, I’ll send for the Mayor.’

Bruno walked around to the rear garden and knocked on the door of the shed, announcing his name and opening the door. Xavier was sitting on the lounger. No book or newspaper was in his hands, no sign at all that he was engaged in the wider world. He was unwashed, unshaven, and his clothes were a mess. But most striking of all was the poor bastard’s face. Xavier’s nose was grossly swollen and red. The bruises that half-closed each eye were no longer purple but were fading to sickly greens and yellows. Had Bruno not recalled the power of Mirabelle’s backhand, he would never have believed a woman could inflict such damage.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Xavier grunted, the swollen lip adding a lisp to his voice. ‘I might have expected it. You or the Mayor, anyway.’

‘We were waiting for you to go and see Mirabelle and your children, to tell her you’re sorry or at least write her a note.’

‘She threw me out.’

‘And I don’t blame her, nor does the Mayor. Nor would any man with the sense he was born with. You are about as in the wrong as any man can be. Mirabelle’s a fine woman, an excellent mother to your children and she’s entitled to hear you say that you are very, very sorry.’

‘Of course I’m sorry, but she just pushed me out of my own home with a toiletry bag, then slammed and locked the door.’

‘She was right to do so,’ Bruno said. ‘You not only betrayed her trust, you betrayed your children. The man who pledged himself to her till death do you part, then you turn out to be nothing more than a pathetic apology for a husband. On top of that, you can’t even summon the balls to go and tell her you’re sorry?’

‘She won’t listen. She’ll just throw me out again.’

‘And so what if she does? You don’t know that, and it’s a risk you have to take if you want to see your kids again this side of a court case.’

‘She can’t do that!’

‘She most certainly can, and she’d be in the right. Most of your friends will say the same. Getting so pissed down in the bar that they take your car keys away is not the right way to spend your time, not if you want to clean up the mess you’ve made.’ Bruno paused. ‘You do want to clean up this mess, don’t you?’

Xavier nodded glumly, a slight wince hinting at the remains of last night’s hangover.

‘The next few hours are going to determine the rest of your life, Xavier. Do you understand that? They are going to decide whether you have any scrap of respect left in this town, whether you see your kids again, whether your father and your sister ever talk to you again, whether there is any future for you in St Denis, because you can kiss goodbye to being deputy Mayor. You won’t be elected to anything.’

‘I suppose that comes from the Mayor. Or are you making it up?’

Bruno rolled his eyes. ‘If the Mayor heard any of this whining self-pity he’d have thrown you out of town already and told you never to come back. As of now, we might just be able to save your marriage.’

‘I suppose you’ve got a plan,’ Xavier said, in a tone somewhere between a hope and a sneer.

‘I’ve got an idea, but you’re going to have to start by coming back home with me and having a shower and a shave, borrowing some clean clothes and then going to church so Father Sentout can hear your confession,’ Bruno said. ‘Or have you forgotten that your wife is a devout Christian who sings in the choir, goes to church every Sunday and sends the kids to Sunday school? And then, instead of spending your money in bars, you’re going to the florist to buy the best bouquet they have in stock, and you are going to walk to your house, ring the doorbell, tell her you’re very sorry and ask for forgiveness. Make sure Father Sentout stands behind you to let your wife know that you’ve been to confession, and he’s given you absolution.’

There was a long pause, then Xavier said, ‘That might just work.’ He got to his feet. ‘Why not use the shower here?’

‘Because your sister won’t have you in her house,’ Bruno said, his voice as cold as he could make it.

‘All my clothes are back at the house,’ Xavier said. ‘And Mirabelle won’t let me in.’

‘She’s probably wondering who or what you might drag in with you,’ Bruno said as he held the shed door open. ‘Come on, I haven’t got all day.’

Bruno saw Melissa peering from an upstairs window as he pushed Xavier into the back of his police van and drove off. She’d probably be calling Mirabelle to pass on the news.

‘Why did you put me in the back like this?’ Xavier grumbled.

‘Because you stink,’ said Bruno, opening his own window, and the two men drove on in silence.

Once home, Bruno showed Xavier to the bathroom, handed him a towel and pulled from his wardrobe a clean shirt, an old pair of jeans, a thick sweater and an ancient duffel coat. He added his oldest clean T-shirt, socks and underpants and then called both Father Sentout and the Mayor.

Father Sentout was waiting at the door of the church when Bruno’s Land Rover pulled up outside. Scoured clean on the outside by Bruno’s bathroom, Xavier climbed down from the passenger’s seat and marched into the church, seemingly resolved to be similarly cleansed spiritually.

‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned,’ Xavier almost barked as he took his seat in the confessional cabin. At this point, Bruno turned away and went quietly to the church door.

‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I absolve you,’ the priest intoned after telling Xavier his penance. Bruno held open the church doors so that Xavier and his confessor could cross the road to the florist, where a sumptuous bouquet had been hastily assembled.

Xavier marched to the cash desk, handed over his credit card, and with a bunch of his wife’s favourite crimson roses in one hand led the way along the rue Gambetta and up the slope to the Place du Temple. The name was all that remained of the town’s Protestant church which had stood until demolished on the orders of Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century. At the far end of the small square, Xavier turned right up the hill lined with semi-detached houses built for the expected baby boom after the slaughter of the Great War. He paused and looked behind him, to be sure that Father Sentout was still there.

Xavier marched to the door, rang the bell for a good ten seconds, then stepped back as the door opened and Mirabelle stood upon the threshold. Bruno spotted some flickering curtains out of the corner of his eye, a sure sign that the village gossips were paying attention to the soap opera at their doorsteps.

She looked magnificent, haughty and regal, her ramrod bearing putting any sergeant major to shame. She wore no lipstick, but her eyes looked enormous, and Bruno gave an audible intake of breath at the sight of her; something about Mirabelle’s countenance brought Medusa to mind, and for a moment he feared petrification. There was no sign of the children.

‘I come straight from church, where I have made my confession to Almighty God and been absolved,’ Xavier declared. ‘But now I make it to you, Mirabelle, my beloved, and ask you to forgive the unforgivable and give me the chance to make up for my grievous sin against you, my dear wife, our children and our marriage.’

With that, Xavier dropped his head to his chest and stood there, awaiting his wife’s verdict. But it did not come, and the silence lengthened. At the house closest to the warring couple, one old madame had opened her curtain fully, face pressed to the glass, and Bruno half-wondered if she might be taking notes.

After what felt like a very uncomfortable pause to Bruno – far worse for Xavier, he imagined – Mirabelle’s eyes lifted from her husband’s bowed head to Father Sentout, and then to Bruno. She held the door open and stood beside it, staring grimly at Xavier, his roses and his bouquet.

‘Get in.’

Xavier shuffled forward, over the doorstep and into the house. His wife stayed outside for a long moment, looking at Bruno and the priest.

‘Merci, messieurs,’ she said. ‘Your kindness will not be forgotten.’ With that, she attempted a smile and marched into the house, quietly closing the door behind her. Silence.

8

The wintry dusk was falling so fast that Bruno knew he would be too late to join Pamela for the evening ride. Gilles was in Ukraine for Paris Match and Fabiola would not be riding since her surgery went on until seven. It was a weekday, so Felix would be staying at the lycée in Périgueux until Friday evening. Miranda would be supervising the younger riders in the paddock, so Pamela might well be alone, taking all the horses – including Bruno’s own Hector – on a leading rein. He knew that he would be counted on to make dinner, since Pamela had already invited Fabiola and the Baron, along with Bruno’s cousin Alain and his new wife, Rosalie.

Bruno drove home to collect two large jars of confit de canard, the duck legs sealed in fat that had been for centuries a proud staple of the local cuisine. He had always wondered why it had taken so long for the magret de canard, the breast of duck, to become popular. Local lore claimed the dish had been virtually unknown until 1959 when chef André Daguin, of the Hôtel de France of Auch, near Toulouse, found himself out of beefsteaks. Rather than disappoint the customer, he took a duck breast, scored the skin with a series of slashes of his knife, rubbed in coarse salt and black pepper and proceeded to treat it like a steak. One of the great dishes was born, and Daguin was rewarded with a Michelin rosette.

Bruno was not entirely convinced by this popular legend. Was he supposed to believe that the magret was simply discarded until the 1950s? The peasants of south-western France were seldom rich enough to let the breasts go to waste. He knew that the aiguillettes, the long, thin strips of tender and succulent meat beneath the breasts of the duck, were especially cherished by lovers of good food. To Bruno, the idea that people who had been brought up eating the breasts of chicken would have ignored those of ducks defied belief. And it was true that it was easier to store several duck legs in a jar of confit where they would last for months and improve over time. Yet so widespread was the current fashion for magret de canard that most local duck farmers had a surplus of legs, along with hearts and gizzards, for which Bruno was deeply grateful to the gods of fine food.

Every autumn he bought duck legs by the dozen, mixed some chopped bay leaves and thyme into sea salt, rubbed the result into the legs, and then left the salted legs in a covered dish overnight. The next morning, in a deep pan, he would spoon in enough duck fat to cover all the legs he’d prepared and simmer them over a low heat for two and a half hours. Once the legs and fat had cooled sufficiently, he would put as many legs into a sterilized jar as he could fit. Then he would strain the melted fat through a sieve to cover the legs, seal the jars and put them into a big pot of boiling water for thirty minutes to be fully sterilized. Finally, he secreted them into a dark corner of his pantry until ready to be eaten.

Six people for dinner, and he, Alain, Rosalie and Pamela would certainly want two legs each, but Fabiola usually wanted only one and the Baron’s appetite was not what it had been. That meant ten legs, or one of the larger jars. He had a kilo jar of petits pois in his pantry, and he went out to the garden to dig up a potato plant from the middle of the rows, the one where he had grown fingerlings, the waxy ones just right for the meal he planned. There were other rows for the varieties like russets he would make into mashed potatoes and for the Yukon Golds he liked to use in stews. But the pommes de terre Sarladaises were special, so he also picked a large bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley and a fat head of garlic. He put these into his van and then went out to the row of young white oaks he had planted on the advice of the Baron more than a decade ago.

‘Search, Balzac, search,’ he said, tapping at the ground near a tree that was usually good for an early truffle or two before Christmas. Balzac dutifully trotted up and sniffed eagerly around the oak but found nothing and moved on to the next. At the third tree, the basset hound began to paw at the ground. Bruno eased him to one side and used his trowel to dig down just a finger or two more than a hand’s width, and pulled out a small and knobbly black truffle, perfect for the dish he had planned. He brushed off the soil, congratulated his dog and then used his heel to press the earth back into place, while Balzac celebrated in his usual fashion by giving the tree a token watering.

The Baron was bringing some of his own smoked trout to begin the meal and Pamela always had lemons from her cherished tree to go with the fish. She had also promised to make her special walnut tart for dessert, so Bruno took a bottle of his own vin de noix to go with it. The Baron was also bringing some red wine, probably his favourite Pécharmant, and Bruno had a bottle of Château des Eyssards to accompany the fish. He would be interested to see what wine Alain would bring, since he was not very familiar with his cousin’s tastes. Alain had spent almost all his adult life in the air force as an electronics technician and it was only recently that he had taken retirement after twenty-five years of service. The two men had then resumed the friendship they had developed in childhood, when Bruno’s aunt had realized that by taking Bruno from the orphanage and into her family, she would qualify for the generous extra allowances reserved in France for a famille nombreuse, with four children or more under the same roof.

Alain was now married to Rosalie, whom he had met when they were both serving in the air force, and the two of them were embarked on new careers teaching construction skills in the local college. They were neighbours of Florence in the subsidized apartments that were attached to the college to help attract teachers to work in rural areas. So many of the youngsters, whether doctors, dentists or even unskilled workers, were attracted to life in a big city, and cheap housing was one way to try and keep them in the countryside.

Bruno loaded food, wine, and his dog into his venerable Land Rover and set off on the familiar route to the riding school, not surprised to find the stables all empty. Pamela believed in keeping the horses well exercised, morning and evening. Balzac sniffed his way around the empty stalls and then headed hopefully for the kennels where his friends the sheepdogs slept. Bruno left the dog to his explorations, refilled the water casks and checked on the hay troughs in the horse stalls. He always left it to Pamela to decide how much alfalfa to add to the hay, for her older horses needed its extra protein. He knew she liked to have it ready, so he half-filled a bucket with pressed alfalfa cubes and then added water for the cubes to soak themselves loose, before letting himself into Pamela’s kitchen, which he knew almost as well as his own.

He put his white wine in the fridge and began setting the table. He then turned on the radio, tuned as always to the local France Bleu Périgord, for the evening news at six. He heard of more Russian threats against Ukraine, worries about rising petrol prices, talk of trouble in the Middle East. It was one of those evenings when he wondered why it was called news when it was all depressingly familiar.

Bruno expected the others to arrive sometime around six thirty for the usual p’tit apéro, with Fabiola joining them soon after the clinic closed at seven. Pamela and Fabiola would have their usual gin and tonic, while he, Alain and the Baron enjoyed one of Pamela’s special single malt Scotch whiskies. Rosalie usually made a single glass of white wine last from her arrival and through dinner for the rest of the evening. Knowing his friends, they would want to hear about the drama with Xavier and his wife, but Bruno was more interested to hear what more Fabiola could tell him about Monique.

Pamela, who was closer to Monique in age, had also been in the Pilates class and might know more. She and Fabiola may even, through Monique, have come across Ghislaine. He wondered if she still owned the small chateau and had let Monique rent it out, or whether, as the Mayor half-remembered, she had sold it and built a new life in Paris. Maybe Ghislaine had sold it to Monique, the first sale that had launched a much greater business.

Bruno shrugged. The matter was effectively out of his hands, a question of inheritance for the magistrates and lawyers of Sarlat to sort out with Dominic, Laura and the other members of the company Monique had founded. To be honest with himself, Bruno knew, he should admit that he was rather less interested in the inheritance of the dead Monique than in the very much alive Laura.

He was struck by the thought that once again he found himself attracted to a woman from the British Isles, like Pamela, although Laura was only British on her mother’s side. Should matters proceed with Laura, and there was no knowing that they would, he would need to be not just honest with Pamela but also kind. Despite his occasional passionate reunion with Isabelle, he was not the kind of man to be comfortable seeing two women at once. And Pamela deserved no less. She had broken off their affair once before because, she had said, while she enjoyed their liaison there was no future in it, and she would rather have Bruno as a lifelong friend than as a temporary lover. She had no intention of ever living permanently with any man ever again. Besides, she insisted she was too old to have children, even if she wanted to. And she very firmly did not, and never had.

Bruno, who had long since come to terms with the fact that he was a hopeless optimist where affairs of the heart were concerned, had never taken her remarks entirely at face value. Words had many meanings, he had learned, and that whatever might be wholly true today could evolve to allow for different circumstances tomorrow. Anyway, his next encounter with Laura might be a disaster, leaving not just Bruno but even poor Balzac in the lurch. He very much hoped not, so much so that he was startled by how much he was looking forward to seeing Laura again. And that was with a modicum of self-awareness regarding his tendency to build castles in the air then attempt to inhabit them. He sighed.

Bruno pondered this, wondering at the workings of his subconscious mind, and suddenly the reality struck him. It was all part of the same day, the discovery that morning of Monique’s suicide, and her letter describing her pain at the thought of never being able to give birth to a child and become a mother. And that was the trigger. He might not be a woman, whose fertile years ended with menopause, but Bruno too was starting to feel his age – he too had read the studies demonstrating that male fertility also declines in mid-life, with older fathers more likely to sire children with learning and development issues. There was less and less time ahead for him to be a father who could raise his own healthy children and see them on into adulthood and hope to have enough time to witness the arrival of their children, the next generation.

Any children that he might have from now on would be young teenagers, certainly still in school, when he reached the usual retirement age of sixty. Time for Bruno no longer stretched unendingly ahead, as once it had. Monique, he thought, had triggered these thoughts, and the sadness of miscarriage that had led to her suicide, which in turn had come as a warning to him. A warning, yes, but it was also, he told himself, an encouragement, a reminder that for him, too, time would be running out.

At that precise moment, the wall clock gave a pronounced click as the big hand reached six thirty, and with that trigger Bruno turned his thoughts to the timing of the meal. Fabiola would want to wind down with a drink after a day at the clinic, so they would probably not start to eat until seven thirty at the earliest. That meant that he should time his duck legs to be ready soon after eight, so he could start both duck and potatoes at seven thirty.

Bruno heard the sound of hooves in the yard and went out to help Pamela lead the horses into the stables, to take off her saddle and all the bridles and help prepare the evening feed. Balzac had trotted out to greet the returning horses and stayed close to his big friend, Hector, who bent his head down to nuzzle the dog and then lifted it to repeat the gesture against Bruno as he slipped the blanket over his horse’s back.

‘A good ride. They’re a well-behaved lot, gave me no trouble,’ Pamela said. ‘What dreadful crime kept you?’

Bruno explained about Xavier’s behaviour, the visit to the confessional of Father Sentout and the flowers.

‘And this marital guidance is part of your regular duties as a police officer and guardian of the peace?’ she asked, her raised eyebrow audible in her voice.

‘Not really, but I’ve known Mirabelle since she was a girl, and she has those lovely kids . . .’ He broke off.

‘I assume the Mayor took you to lunch and suggested that you take care of the problem in your inimitable way, as he so often does when things are tricky,’ Pamela said. ‘I like the old man, but he’s always careful to keep his nose clean while steering you into the firing line.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Bruno said. ‘Xavier may not be a close friend but he’s a colleague and part of the team.’

‘Ah yes, I forget; that old saying about taking one for the team,’ Pamela said with a sniff. She was standing in the doorway of the stables, hands on her hips and looking cross. ‘Funny that it’s always you who takes the blame. And the bullets. I hope you don’t think that Xavier is going to be in any way grateful to you.’

‘I don’t expect gratitude . . .’ Bruno protested.

‘You saved his marriage, but you made him look like a fool whether or not he agreed to his part in the charade. I imagine you didn’t give him much choice in the matter?’ Pamela turned to look at him with eyebrows raised. ‘You may have managed to soften the humiliation that Xavier’s wife was feeling after being betrayed, although I can’t say I’m at all confident there. Worse, neighbours spotted you with Father Sentout and the flowers so Xavier’s humiliation is public property now. I could say quite right too, but right isn’t always wise. Xavier may never forgive you for that, mark my words.’

‘You’re exaggerating,’ Bruno said, and gave her a fond peck on the cheek as he steered her across the stable yard towards the house. ‘And there’s confit de canard to look forward to and I can tell you about poor Monique, a brilliant businesswoman from Sarlat who committed suicide near here last night, just this side of St Cirq. You might know her from Pilates? She was one of Fabiola’s patients.’

‘Indeed, I did know Monique through Pilates, and I liked her, but I can’t say I thought much of the creep she was married to. None of us ever understood what she saw in him. She’d have been better off with one of those suntanned young gardeners she hired.’ Pamela’s chuckle was more lascivious than Bruno had known she was capable of.

He laughed, and held the kitchen door open for her, saying that the Pilates class seemed to have taken the place of the old washing trough as the gathering place for the women of the town, and adding that the Baron should arrive soon.

‘Oh, lucky me,’ she retorted, elbowing Bruno in the tummy as she went past. ‘Not just you but the Baron, too. What bliss for us poor females. And now, excuse me, sire, there’s a walnut tart I have to make.’

As she spoke, Bruno saw with relief that Alain and Rosalie were driving into the courtyard, with the Baron’s stately old Citroën following behind. Greetings and embraces were exchanged, wine bottles placed on the kitchen table, and the Baron announced he’d heard only a second-hand account of Xavier’s confession and demanded a full version from Bruno, which Pamela kept interrupting with mocking comments and Rosalie saying that Xavier had got off far too lightly. Alain opened the bottle he’d brought, a sparkling wine from the town vineyard, and began pouring everyone a glass that became a deep pink kir with the addition of crème de cassis.

Bruno gave a short and only slightly self-aggrandizing account of Xavier’s confession, the flowers and the apology, the way that Mirabelle’s honour was publicly restored with all due dignity, and how Father Sentout had done his duty with aplomb. And at that point, the Baron echoed a remark that Pamela had made earlier.

‘Xavier will come to blame you, Bruno, rather than thank you, and he’ll never forgive you for that public blow to his dignity. I’ve known that young man since he was born, and there’s always been something sly about him, something you know but can’t quite put your finger on. That’s how he seemed to me, anyway. At least he’s no longer in line to be our next mayor. Not a woman in St Denis will vote for him, not his wife nor his sister, and I’m not even sure about his mother.’

‘You sound very certain about that,’ said Rosalie.

‘I’ve lived here a long time, seen all the changes, the women going out to work rather than staying home at the farm,’ the Baron said. ‘They’re all much more sure of themselves and prepared to speak out these days.’

‘About time, too,’ said Pamela.

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ said the Baron, and headlamps flashed across the yard as Fabiola drove in. Moments later, a glass in her hand and her eyes fixed on Bruno, Fabiola too wanted to hear about what had occurred between Bruno, Xavier and Father Sentout.

‘But first,’ she demanded, ‘I’d like to know what happened to the bottle of Zolpidem pills that Monique took?’

Bruno told her that he’d given it to Annette at the magistrature but that the bottle had been empty.

‘So we don’t know if Zolpidem was really what that bottle contained?’

9

It was market day in St Denis and a few minutes before eight Bruno, fresh from his morning run and shower, parked his police van in the yard of the gendarmerie, put the leash onto Balzac and set forth to begin his usual patrol. He greeted the stallholders and the early customers with a handshake or a friendly embrace and tried – largely unsuccessfully – to stop them all from giving his dog a second breakfast. He began by making the circuit of the old parade ground in front of the gendarmerie, now a large parking lot except on market days where there were Christmas decorations on sale alongside stalls of wood carvings, leather goods and second-hand clothes. Then he strolled up the rue de Paris, greeting the stallholders on each side of the street. There were stalls selling herbs next door to racks of T-shirts and cheap sweaters, followed by the ones he could never understand, selling different kinds of holders or cases for mobile phones. Then came the fancy soaps and artisanal honeys, the saucissons and jars of pâté, and the man selling home-made organic loudspeakers. These were hollow stretches of wood into which a groove had been carved for a mobile phone to fit and play surprisingly loud music. Then came the novelties, such as a magic new formula for cleaning the burn marks from old pots, pans and ancient cooking utensils inherited from grandma to make them look clean and new again.

After the stall selling second-hand books stood the church. The doors were open and the sound of loud voices singing came from within. That was odd. This was not a Sunday. On market days there were usually three or four people at early mass. Today there must have been a dozen or more people inside, Xavier and his family prominent among them. Bruno quickly retired to leave them to it before Father Sentout called him to join in.

He ducked behind a hardware stall where a vendor was trying to sell some wondrous new product to make your age-darkened floor tiles glisten like new. Then he walked on briskly past Ivan’s restaurant to the junction and headed across to Fauquet’s cafe behind the Mairie, where Fauquet nodded a greeting and put a coffee and a croissant on the counter before returning to his conversation with the rest of the bar. A massive cliff wall had collapsed onto a busy road near Excideuil and all were agreed on the miraculous fact that nobody had been hurt. A photograph of the rockfall was on the cover of Sud Ouest, and Bruno skimmed the story until Balzac gave a little bark of delight. Bruno turned to see Balzac’s daughter, a lovely young basset hound named Gabrielle d’Estrées, come from a table at the back of the cafe, with her owner, Captain Yveline Grenache of the gendarmes. Gabrielle bounded up to her father and rubbed her face against his neck, and Balzac responded in the same way.

Yveline presented her cheeks for the usual bise between friends, guided him to an empty table in the corner out of earshot of the bar, and said, ‘I just realized that our greeting is rather like theirs. Do you think we got it from the dogs, or did they learn it from us?’

‘Given that they had to learn to do it without having lips to kiss with, I suspect they must have learned it from us,’ said Bruno. ‘I wonder if English dogs do it, since their owners shake hands rather than give the bise, although Pamela tells me the English are increasingly adopting our custom.’

‘I don’t think English dogs shake paws in greeting,’ said Yveline. ‘Nor do I think humans sniff each other’s bottoms when they meet, so I’m not at all sure about your theory of dogs learning from humans. Putting that to one side, I didn’t know you’d become a recruiting sergeant for Father Sentout. I heard about what’s been going on with Xavier and your part in it. Then I spotted him going into church this morning with Mirabelle. That’s a turn-up for the books.’

‘It won’t do him any harm,’ said Bruno. ‘But I suspect it may not do him much good either.’

‘The real question on everyone’s lips, however, is not whether Xavier’s marriage survives, but who will take his place as our dear Mayor’s chosen successor,’ Yveline said, with a grin that on any other woman Bruno might have described as cheeky. ‘Bets are being taken, which is why everyone at the bar started talking about the rockfall when you turned up.’ Yveline paused meaningfully. ‘Guess who’s the current favourite.’

‘Oh no,’ said Bruno, as he caught her meaning. ‘Not a chance, it wouldn’t be legal. You can’t be an employee of the Mairie as the policier municipale and then be Mayor.’

‘So, resign as a cop. Then run to be Mayor.’

‘Remember I wasn’t born here or go to school here, so I didn’t grow up knowing everybody. I don’t have a large extended family to vote for me – even if I wanted the job, which I don’t, or if I thought I could do the job decently, which I also doubt.’

‘Spoken like a true candidate,’ she said, still grinning. ‘Maybe I should have a little flutter on you. Sergeant Jules is running the book and he has you at even money.’

‘That’s illegal,’ said Bruno, with a bark of laughter. ‘You ought to lock him up, set an example.’

‘I can’t. The general in Périgueux asked me to keep an eye on the odds for him.’

‘Are you serious?’ Bruno asked, his face going suddenly solemn as he realized she wasn’t joking. ‘This is crazy.’

‘I don’t know how you intend to stop it, but you’ll have an uphill struggle with all the rumours out there. People are saying that you saved Mirabelle’s face to make sure of the women’s vote, though I think you had their vote when you got the Mayor to make a big event of the young German girls in that wartime grave.’

‘I didn’t get the Mayor to do anything,’ he protested. ‘If you think that I could, you don’t know the Mayor.’

‘You say that, but the florist says you were behind it, and Father Sentout says you planned the whole thing. We all know that was you, Bruno, and all credit to the Mayor for listening to you.’

‘But the Mayor is going to run again,’ Bruno said. ‘I know he was in the dumps when his wife died, but then he took up with Jacqueline and she’s taken years off him, years and a good five kilos. He’s a happy man again, full of bounce but with all his old contacts and cunning. He’s the best mayor St Denis could hope to have.’

‘Okay, so you have five or six more years as chief of police, he steps down and you’re only in your early fifties and you run as his candidate. You’d walk it. I’m not even sure anybody would bother to run against you.’

‘But I don’t have any party affiliation, nor do I have an extended family here in the commune . . .’ he protested.

‘All the better. If you have one big family behind you then another big family will hate you for it,’ she said, leaning forward to add urgency to her voice. ‘You don’t have any family enemies, Bruno, and since you’re not known to be on the Left or the Right you don’t have any political enemies. And you taught all their kids to play rugby and tennis, you hunt with their dads and you helped their mums across the road and danced with all the grannies at the Christmas parties. Forget what I learned at police college – most of what I know about policing I learned from you. And most of what you need to know about politics you’ve already learned from the Mayor.’

She sat back and grinned. ‘Enough of that. I’d better get on.’

‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Time for another patrol.’ He put some coins on the table. ‘Do you want to join me or are you heading back to the gendarmerie?’

‘I have a couple of errands to run,’ she said. ‘Just wondered whether you might be free to come round for dinner later this week. I’ve been feeling guilty, dining at your house so often. Is Thursday evening good for you?’

‘That would be a pleasure, and since you’re always so generous with the wine you bring—’

‘Please don’t bring anything,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘Sorry, but I’d like to surprise you.’

‘As you wish, Yveline. A bientôt.’ He rose, nodded, and headed out to stroll through the columns that supported the Mairie and created a dozen or so places where the market stalls could be sheltered from rain. Custom decreed that they were therefore reserved for local stallholders, usually women with small market gardens or home-made dishes. He greeted them each by name and trotted down the steps and along the quay and riverbank until he came to the old watermill, where the small Ladouch stream ran into the Vézère. He climbed up the slope and crossed the road by the fire station, recalling the long night of the flood. Bruno knew he would never again underestimate the river’s power.

He took the narrow wooden bridge over the stream, then skirted the side of the church, now empty, and the rows of market stalls, thinning after the morning rush. This time he entered the Mairie and took the stairs up to his old office where Colette Cantagnac, who had made herself indispensable to the Mayor, the staff employees’ union and to Bruno, now ruled. She also did all of Bruno’s paperwork, took perfect messages and dealt efficiently with minor matters, which meant that Bruno no longer felt the need for a physical office with a desk, chair and filing cabinet. To a degree he never would have thought possible, she had liberated him to the point that his mobile phone had now become his office. If any emergency arose she could text him.

‘Bonjour, Colette,’ he said, giving her the bise on each cheek as she rose. ‘I got your message. What can I do for you?’

‘You have some papers to sign in the Mayor’s office,’ she said. ‘It’s about that pay problem for those occasions when you were seconded to the RG,’ she said, using the old name, Renseignements Généraux. What she meant was that Bruno had on several occasions been seconded to the new internal security department, which was answerable to the Ministry of the Interior, and where Bruno came under the orders of General Lannes. As a veteran bureaucrat and elected official of the staff association of Mairie employees, Colette Cantagnac had been looking into the long-ignored question of Bruno’s pay during these secondments. The Mayor reckoned that the town’s budget should reclaim Bruno’s pay for those periods, and the Interior Ministry should recompense them appropriately.

This was where Colette’s genius for official rules and regulations came into play. She learned that on such deployments, Bruno should be paid not his town police salary, but his salary as chief of police for the Vézère valley. That rank was recognized by French army bureaucracy as being the equivalent of a captain in the French army, but by the French police bureaucracy as the equivalent of a commissaire. And a police commissaire was seen as the equivalent of an army major. That was one problem, which Colette resolved by saying that Bruno’s years of military service made him a long-serving captain, whose pay was almost equivalent to that of a new major. The second problem was that to give Bruno his back pay all at once would thrust him into a complicated and costly new tax bracket.

Colette’s solution was that Bruno would be compensated at his usual police pay but from his back pay a cash sum would be used to finance the construction of a new tasting room for the town vineyard, and Bruno would be suitably compensated with shares in the vineyard. In these early years it was making no profit and thus the share price was low, attracting no tax. By the time it was in profit, Bruno would probably be retired and thus on a lower tax rate. The tasting room would be built by Bruno’s cousin, Alain, who would lead a learning-by-doing project of the construction class he taught at the local college.

‘I’m not sure I wholly understand all this,’ Bruno said, once inside the Mayor’s office. ‘I presume I get some formal document saying that all this is legal.’

‘The agreement is authorized and signed by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Cour des Comptes, France’s senior court of audit, and by me for the town council and the vineyard,’ said the Mayor, handing Bruno a very formal-looking document and a share certificate. ‘I believe future historians will marvel at the bureaucratic genius displayed by Mademoiselle Cantagnac in devising this most elegant solution.’

‘How much would it have been in cash, had that been legal?’ Bruno asked.

‘Over 30,000 euros, which would have put you into a very embarrassing tax situation,’ said Colette. ‘I’m also applying for an ex gratia bonus for being shot in the shoulder while on duty, but that’s still under negotiation.’

‘I hope you realize that the amount of bureaucratic time spent on this negotiation, which included one of the hierarchs of the Cour des Comptes, probably far exceeds the sums in question,’ the Mayor said.

‘Well, thank you, both of you, and to General Lannes and the Cour des Comptes,’ said Bruno.

‘Might I have the share certificate back, please?’ the Mayor asked.

Bruno complied but also asked why.

‘We’re saving your tax situation again,’ said Cantagnac. ‘You are making a cost-free loan of these shares to the board of the town vineyard, until such time as you retire from current employment and your tax status changes.’

‘And as a member of the tasting committee you are entitled to a considerable number of bottles every year,’ the Mayor added.

‘But I’m already a member of the tasting committee,’ Bruno replied.

‘You must learn, my dear Bruno, not to get too bogged down in details,’ said the Mayor. ‘Is it not time for another patrol of the market?’

10

This was not Bruno’s last patrol of the day, but it served to remind the market folk that they were meant to start closing up soon after the Mairie clock struck noon, and that meant they were to leave their spot tidy and ensure that all discarded cabbage leaves, wrapping papers and litter had been cleared. He had just reached the church when his phone rang; the name on the screen was not immediately familiar but he knew the voice. It was Sabine in Strasbourg, Dominic’s foster sister to whom he’d spoken the previous morning.

‘Dominic asked me to let you know he left this morning soon after nine and he should be back in the Périgord by six or so this evening. He would be grateful if you could come to his office and let him know what’s going on,’ she said. ‘I’ve emailed you the address and phone number.’

‘Thanks for the call, but the matter is out of my hands,’ Bruno said. ‘I gave all the paperwork, including a letter from Monique to Dominic, to the Sarlat magistrate, Annette Meraillon. We expect a formal verdict of suicide in the next day or so, which will permit the funeral to go ahead on Friday or the weekend, as your brother prefers.’ He softened his tone. ‘I trust the funeral of your foster father went off suitably? I realize it must be tough on Dominic, two funerals in the same week.’

‘I’m not sure Dominic reacts to things in the way that most people do,’ Sabine said after a short pause. ‘You may not know that he had very bad asthma when he came to us from the orphanage. It made him frail and kept him off sports, so he was always set apart from other kids. You may have heard the same from other people down there by now.’

Surprised but intrigued, Bruno thought it best to continue the conversation. ‘No, I heard nothing, just that Dominic was quite a private person, not too demonstrative, not many friends. But I’m grateful for your help. Might you be coming down for the funeral?’

‘I never met this wife, and I’m pretty sure he won’t invite me to her funeral. He and I have never really got on,’ she said. ‘I suspect he only came up here for the reading of the will, to see what was in it for him.’

‘And was there anything in it for him?’ Bruno asked, noting the acid tone in her voice.

‘Not a bean. Everything went to Mum, the widow, and she can’t stand the sight of Dominic.’

‘You don’t sound too fond of him either,’ said Bruno. ‘But it’s not easy, spending your formative years in an orphanage.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ Sabine replied. ‘I spent the first five years of my life in one before I was fostered.’

‘Me too, the first six years,’ said Bruno, feeling a spark of sympathy. ‘Then my aunt found out that she could get extra famille nombreuse money if she took me in.’

‘Lucky you,’ she said, with a bitter chuckle. ‘And I was lucky, getting adopted by the Estringens, but it didn’t work so well with Dominic. Anyway, please do keep me informed of developments, because I can assure you Dominic most certainly will not.’

She ended the call. Bruno stood looking uncertainly at the phone in his hand and saved the number. Quickening his step, he headed for the gendarmerie, recalling that with Xavier’s problem he had not given Monique’s car a thorough search the previous day. He stopped at the front desk to get the keys from Sergeant Jules, who made a wry comment about Bruno the marriage mender.

‘I gather Xavier went to mass this morning. My wife saw them there. She said she wouldn’t trust Xavier as far as she could throw him.’

Bruno considered this, then said, ‘And your wife, Jules, is a woman of impressive strength who could probably hurl Xavier a considerable distance.’

‘The further the better, if you ask me. I never did like the little sod, always stuck up because his daddy was the big car dealer. He’s just not made to be satisfied with his lot, never was.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Bruno, making his voice sound more neutral than he felt. He took the keys from Sergeant Jules, put on a pair of evidence gloves and went off to search Monique’s Peugeot.

Bruno unlocked and opened the doors and boot of the car, which still smelled faintly of the death overlaid by a hint of tobacco smoke. Interesting. It hadn’t been there the previous day. Had Monique been a smoker? Bruno thought not, with no smell of tobacco and no stubs in the car. He called Annette to check and she confirmed Monique had never smoked. Perhaps the gendarme who drove it here was a smoker. It would need to be checked and the officer in question informed that their habit could not impinge on good policework.

Bruno began by lifting the floor mats, front and rear, and those from the boot. There were traces of white powder along the edge of the mat in the front passenger footwell, and Bruno made a note to have the scene-of-crime investigators analyse the powder – it looked too fine to be the crushed remnants of whatever pills had been in the bottle, and he strongly suspected it was cocaine, or some other recreational narcotic. He then bent down and peered beneath the front seats, checked the door pockets and opened the glove compartment to find the usual car litter of maps, a drift of tourist brochures, tissues, a plastic rain hood and a pair of gloves.

In the driver’s door pocket he found a small notebook which recorded the date of every trip to the garage, the amount and cost of fuel bought and the mileage. Most people claiming tax deductions on motoring expenses used a similar system. The car had been refuelled the previous week with sixty-two litres of petrol at a cost of one hundred euros, and the entry noted 10,254 kilometres on the clock. There were now 10,310 kilometres but the fuel level was showing much less than a quarter full. It would not take most of a tank to drive the car less than sixty kilometres. It was less than forty kilometres from Sarlat to the place where Monique took her own life.

There was some cigarette ash on the floor by the clutch pedal, and on the passenger seat, which meant that the ash was either suspicious or a sign of incompetence on the part of the gendarme who had driven the vehicle from the crime scene to the police pound. He turned on the radio and found a raucous rock station. He didn’t know Monique but somehow it didn’t sound like her taste.

Bruno ran his fingers along the slides that moved the front seats forward and back and his fingers touched something. He pulled out an empty, half-crushed blister pack of the kind used for prescription medication. He put it in an evidence bag, sealed, signed and dated it. Then he went in to get Jules to witness the find and confirm the name of the gendarme – who turned out to be new to the job – who had driven the car back. He also asked him to check whether the guy had used the radio and to arrange a fingerprint check on the radio buttons. Above all, he wanted to know if the gendarme was the kind of guy who would siphon out fuel from a suicide’s car? Would he even have had the time, given the anti-theft baffle?

‘There’s less than a quarter of a tank left and it was filled last week,’ Bruno said. ‘The amount of petrol bought, and the costs and date are in a notebook in the door panel. It doesn’t add up. And the gendarme didn’t wear gloves either. He left his fingerprints all over the place and smoked in the car, leaving ash everywhere. He also changed radio channels so we can’t identify other possible fingerprints on the controls. I don’t care how new he is on the job, that’s simply unprofessional. And did you spot these traces of powder in the passenger footwell? We’ll have to get it analysed. Can I leave it in your hands?’

Sergeant Jules grunted something indecipherable. Bruno clapped him on the shoulder and gave him a receipt with the number of the evidence bag. Then he stepped out to the square and phoned Annette, told her about the pill packet he’d found. It could be Zolpidem from the same batch that Monique was thought to have taken, but given that one was a bottle and the other a blister pack that seemed unlikely. And he wanted to know when he should expect to see the results of the post-mortem requested by Fabiola to check the drugs in the body. Had they requested a full spectrum analysis of her blood and organs, or was the autopsy a standard one?

‘There were no grounds to request anything other than a standard autopsy, given the suicide notes and her recent medical history,’ Annette said. ‘I’ll call the lab and see if we can get a result by the time you get here, or we could meet at the lab if you like. You sound a bit concerned about this, Bruno.’

‘I just want to know what the second pill packet was that I found in the car. Was it from the same batch as the ones we think Monique took?’ he said. ‘If not, can we identify it as something prescribed by her doctor?’

‘That sounds suspect. Bring it in as soon as you can; I’m in my office.’

As he was putting his phone away, he heard a familiar voice say, rather hesitantly, ‘Bruno?’ He turned to see Yveline, in uniform but looking flustered, which was not at all like her. She gave him a rather grim smile, before saying, ‘I’d like a brief word. We’ve got a new gendarme and I’m very concerned about him. There are things I think you need to know. Could we talk in private?’

Without commenting on the coincidence of his own concerns about a young gendarme, Bruno followed as she led him along the path that led to the Domaine de la Barde, now being restored by its new owners.

‘Roland Villon is a real problem,’ she began, speaking quietly although there was no one to overhear. ‘I was asked to take him on by an old boss, who said the guy needed careful watching, which would be easier in a small unit like mine. So far, we’ve had two women complaining of indecent assaults during a routine stop, and they complained not to me but to the Police Nationale, so your friend J-J is making enquiries. There’s also talk of cash being taken to let drivers off from taking a breathalyser test. And Jules told me just now you think he was siphoning petrol and may have screwed up attempts to get fingerprints from the victim’s car. And there was something about a white powder? If you ask me, he and his low-rent flashy car fit the profile of a recreational cocaine user, although I’ve not seen any evidence of that myself.’

‘So interrogate him about the petrol theft and take a swab of his hands and that is your excuse to search his quarters,’ Bruno said firmly. ‘If you find petrol there or anything else suspicious, suspend him and I can arrest him. In the meantime, I’ll ask J-J about his enquiry into the assaults, and if he wants me to arrange an identification parade with the women. But Villon wouldn’t have been alone on the breathalyser patrol. Who was his partner, and do you suspect them?’

‘That’s part of the problem. There’s only a rumour about that, and there are three possibles who might have been with him – Jean-Luc, François and Claire, whom I don’t even begin to suspect. She can’t stand him.’

‘Between Jean-Luc and François, what do your instincts say?’

‘These are colleagues, Bruno. I can’t work on instincts. I was wondering if you had heard any gossip.’

‘Nothing yet, but I can make discreet enquiries. We can leave that for the minute,’ Bruno said. ‘You may have a bad apple in Roland Villon but we need to be completely sure before we accuse a fellow officer. Get the swab done on his hands, and test it for both petrol and narcotics, and then search his room. We’ve not had any recent drug busts that would justify traces of cocaine on his skin, so if you do find anything it will certainly be from personal exposure, not professional. While you do that, I’ll have a word with J-J about the women and their allegations. If you like, I can get the Sarlat magistrates to send you a formal complaint about his careless treatment of a potentially suspicious car.’

‘Talk to J-J first – I need to know what he’s planning to do. To be honest, Bruno, I’m in a real bind. This Villon is the nephew of a very powerful general at headquarters in Paris, which is why my old boss handled him with kid gloves and warned me to do the same. He said it would be easier down here, but it isn’t, and one or two of the others are more than a bit intimidated by him. I’m starting to worry about this bad apple infecting the whole team.’

‘A bent cop is bad for everybody,’ Bruno said. ‘I’ll see if J-J says anything, but if your senior officer has real influence then J-J is likely to handle things himself, which may help. And if you need to discuss this with me again, only do so in person or get yourself a phone that can’t be traced to you. Just in case.’

‘Merde, Bruno. We’re supposed to be the good guys and now we have to sneak around.’

‘You have your career to think of. Get those swabs done and I’ll talk to J-J. And let’s walk back separately. I’ll stop by and say hello to Monsieur Birch, if he’s there.’

Ten minutes later, Bruno was shaking hands with the red-headed Englishman who had bought the run-down property from the bankruptcy court and who was now taking photographs of windows, pediments, doorsteps and other details of the old Domaine, still a handsome building after many years of neglect.

‘Anna and I couldn’t hope for a better Christmas present than for the sale finally to come through,’ Tim said. ‘The Mayor must really have pushed things at lightning speed.’

‘After your volunteer work on the night of the flood, you shouldn’t be surprised,’ Bruno replied. ‘You have a lot of work ahead of you, so if I can recommend good craftspeople, just let me know. Do you have babysitters? I was hoping to get you over for dinner one evening. Just check with your wife when would be a good evening for you both.’

‘That would be grand,’ Tim said.

Bruno wished him au’voir and walked on past what would one day be the Birch family’s tennis court. When out of earshot, he called J-J’s cell.

‘I thought I might be hearing from you, or from Yveline,’ replied J-J, who held the rank of commissaire as chief of detectives for the département. He and Bruno were old friends and trusted one another.

‘There were no independent witnesses,’ J-J said. ‘But since one of the women making the complaint is secretary to the diocesan council and bishop, and the other is on the staff of the executive council for the whole Dordogne, their testimony carries a great deal of weight. Each of them picked out the photograph of the gendarme we are planning to arrest, once the formalities are concluded.’

The formalities were what worried Bruno. Neither the gendarmes nor the Police Nationale wanted a public row. There had been too many ‘wars between the police’ in the past, and nobody wanted to return to those days. Prunier, head of the Police Nationale in the region, would need a great deal of diplomacy to deal with one of the gendarmes’ top generals in Paris about the fate of his nephew. The general would probably seek a deal under which Roland would quietly resign without fuss, or be shifted across to the military and posted overseas. Prunier, on the other hand, would be under pressure from female cops and from the politicians to prove that sexual harassment was treated as a serious crime.

Under French law, however, it would not be up to the police, but the procureur de la République, the public prosecutor, to press charges. Prunier might seek to hand the matter over to the gendarmes to deal with internally. That was how such difficult disputes had often been handled in the past, but Bruno could imagine the public outcry if Prunier tried such a ploy now. The media would crucify him; the female lobby would see to that. Bruno pondered what he would do in Prunier’s shoes, and concluded he’d have no choice but to let the prosecution go ahead. In court, the testimony of the second cop who had been on patrol alongside Roland would be crucial, Bruno thought. In that context, perhaps, he might even be useful.

‘Have you been able to interview the two gendarmes yet?’

‘That’s what Prunier is discussing,’ J-J said. ‘He has my report, which says there is a serious case from two reliable women, and I have asked to detain the two gendarmes for questioning under garde à vue, holding them overnight with the expectation that the prosecutor will file charges.’

‘Is Commissaire Gouppilleau involved?’ Bruno asked, referring to the senior female officer on the Police Nationale in Périgueux, a woman he had worked with before and admired.

‘She interviewed each of the women and took their separate statements. She made it very clear to me and to Prunier that she demands and firmly expects a prosecution,’ J-J said. ‘In fact, what she told me was that she would see that bastard hauled into court even if she had to go into the gendarmerie and drag him out herself by his balls.’

‘Sounds just like her,’ said Bruno, not bothering to conceal the admiration in his voice for a senior officer who had her uniforms carefully altered and wore spectacularly fashionable shoes around all the police stations. Only out on the streets was her footwear ever comfortable. Bruno let the silence build before asking, ‘So how do you think this plays out?’

‘It’s between his career and trying to play nice with the gendarmes,’ J-J said. ‘Prunier will move to cover his own ass, as our American friends might put it, and make it clear he expects the procureur to press charges, which is also the right thing to do and what every woman on the force expects. My job will be to leak, very carefully, that my boss knows that he has done the decent thing, with great regrets about the implications of this for his dear friends and colleagues in the gendarmes. But the interests of the law and public must come first.’

J-J paused. ‘If you should happen to run into our friend Philippe Delaron of Sud Ouest, or one of those radio women you know on France Bleu, it might be useful to let them know what I’ve just told you, from a source close to Prunier.’

‘Understood,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m just wondering how many other women this bastard has harassed, or worse, women without the contacts or credentials to get taken seriously when they file a complaint. And I doubt he was operating alone.’

‘I’m ahead of you, Bruno. I have already sent a policewoman to go around the local massage parlours and I await her report. And Gabrielle Teyssier is trying to infiltrate some of the online message boards sex workers use to warn each other of dangerous clients, but she’s not found a way in. I’ll appreciate any help you can give us in our enquiries.’

11

As soon as Bruno closed his cell it vibrated again. This time it was Sergeant Jules, using his personal phone. The message read: ‘My shift’s over. Meet me behind the bank. No helmet, civilian jacket.’

This was unusual, but Bruno had great faith in Jules, so left his kepi behind, slipped on a waterproof jacket and strolled across the bridge to where Jules sat waiting behind the bank, his engine running. As soon as Bruno climbed into the passenger seat, Jules drove off through the caravan park.

‘A bit cloak and dagger, Jules,’ said Bruno.

‘I’ll explain in a bit,’ Jules replied, focused on the twisting road as he drove up the hill to Audrix, down to Campagne and heading back towards St Denis.

‘Okay,’ he began. ‘The new gendarmerie is behind schedule, but because they are merging St Cyprien with us and extending our patch down south of Belvès, they already boosted our numbers, so the new gendarmes needed somewhere to live. We rented a house for them behind the bus station, one of the places that nearly got flooded. The three new lads each have a room and share a kitchen and a big yard with a barn where Jean-Luc and François keep their bikes and the general’s bastard nephew has a snazzy little sports car, one of those flashy but useless ones hairdressers like.’

‘I can see why he likes the idea of free petrol,’ said Bruno.

‘Yveline asked me to swab his hands for traces, but we’d have to launch a formal enquiry for that, so I thought we’d just take a little stroll and see if we run into any nosy neighbours.’

‘Who owns the place?’ Bruno asked.

‘My wife’s cousin,’ Jules replied. ‘She’ll meet us there. Our three young gendarmes are on a familiarization tour around St Cyprien, now that the staff are merging. We won’t be disturbed.’

The owner, Natalie, was built on the same heroic proportions as Jules and his wife, and her lips were clenched tightly together as she stood with meaty hands on even meatier hips, glaring in cold anger at the mess in her kitchen made by three young bachelors.

‘I want them out,’ she snapped at Jules. ‘I don’t care how much rent the gendarmerie is paying, I won’t have my place turned into a pigsty. Immaculate it was when they moved in. Immaculate.’

Bruno had seen worse, but not often. Usually after an artillery barrage. The sink and draining boards were piled high with dirty dishes and the floor needed scraping as well as scrubbing. The stove looked as though human sacrifices had been recently performed on it. The windows had never been opened nor washed and there was a general smell of rustic rot that made Bruno think Natalie had been admirably precise when she had referred to a pigsty. After a quick glance around he backed out of the kitchen and went across the yard to the old barn that the three lads used as a garage. There were two racing bikes leaning against one wall, one ancient moped and a glossy Mazda Miata with its hood up, tyres so bald as to be illegal, presumably belonging to Roland Villon.

What caught Bruno’s eye, however, were the three battered jerrycans that looked as if they might have seen service in World War Two. They had once been green but each could contain twenty litres of fuel. Bruno remembered that until 1942, when the Allies had learned to copy this German invention, these robust cans had helped explain the superiority of German logistics in the war’s early years. The French, British and Russians had lost many tanks and trucks for lack of petrol because they didn’t have these indestructible cans. The Americans, however, quickly copied the German product. Bruno had two the same at home. He tapped each of the cans with a knuckle – all were full to the brim. Better still, each carried a chalk mark he recognized. He knew exactly where they came from. Coiled up on the ground beside the cans was a very fine hose that would almost certainly test positive for the same fuel that remained in Monique’s tank, Bruno supposed.

‘My deepest sympathies and regrets, Madame,’ he said. ‘We won’t let these young devils get away with this, will we, Jules? And now we’ve another call to make. Come, Jules.’

Leaving Natalie frowning grimly behind them, Bruno directed Jules towards the small industrial estate of St Denis, alongside the railway line on the north–south route from Périgueux to Agen, with connections to Paris, Marseille and Italy. The estate contained timber yards, companies making and maintaining swimming pools, and warehouses for everything from sewage pipes to tree trimmers and vineyard vats. There were even small factories making doors, windows and prefabricated garages. It was also home to the new dechetterie, a state of the art refuse-and-recycling centre, a pioneering venture in this part of France whose presence was a tribute to the Mayor’s political skills. There were special containers for paper and cardboard, for all kinds of glass, for metal cans, and for whatever forms of organic refuse were not given to the chickens, ducks, goats and livestock kept by many of the inhabitants.

Bruno’s objective, however, lay a little further on. He asked Jules to stop the car and wait, having explained his plan. He walked on to a vast site that was identified by a massive sign announcing the arrival of LES RECUPERAPTEURS. Cynics might suggest that this was but a fancy new name for the town’s traditional junkyard. But the squad of young volunteers who ran the place were convinced that they were the beating heart of the recycling revolution that would yet save the planet from its wasteful ways.

On the forecourt were ancient bicycles and bidets, lawnmowers and loungers, wine presses and water closets, along with an elderly table around which the volunteers sat on a variety of chairs drinking endless cups of coffee or mint tea. Beyond the forecourt stood a large warehouse inside which were stacked used clothes for men, women, children and babies; furniture both ancient and modern; light fittings, crockery, cookware and kitchen utensils. The walls were covered with prints and paintings, many of them home-made. There were antique stereo systems, tape recorders, ancient desktop computers, video players and vast collections of VHS video tapes.

Bruno made a point of calling every two weeks or so, enjoying some herbal tea and a gossip with the volunteers. He enjoyed their camaraderie, their easy-going company and their common conviction that they were doing their bit to save the planet. Before leaving, he would always browse the large book section to see if there was anything that caught his interest, including the occasional book in English that was not too difficult for him to read. He had learned that one of the best ways to improve his English was to pick up English-language versions of the comic books of Asterix the Gaul and his friend Obelix and their dog, Idéfix – Dogmatix in the English editions, a glory of translation. But this time, he had another purpose.

‘I remember buying a couple of jerrycans here, a year or so ago,’ he said. ‘Do you have any in at the moment?’

‘We did have three,’ said one of the volunteers, Valérie, rolling herself a cigarette with practised twirls of her thumbs. ‘But we sold them just after we opened yesterday morning, to that new gendarme who thinks he’s God’s gift to women. Silly sod didn’t even try to bargain. He was in a helluva hurry, and with what he obviously thought was a very fancy set of wheels.’ A derisive laugh followed. ‘You could have had them for a euro each, but he paid ten for the three.’ She shook her head. ‘Were you after more cans, Bruno,’ she went on, ‘or are you asking for police reasons?’

‘If any more jerrycans come in, I’d be grateful if you could put them to one side for me,’ said Bruno. ‘Apart from that, have you any new English-language Asterix books?’

‘Yes. Astérix and the Picts,’ she said. ‘I put it on the shelf under the counter for you. Help yourself.’

He thanked her, went to collect the book, handed her a five euro note and waved away the change, thanking them all and wishing them well, before walking out to the access road to rejoin Jules.

‘We’ve got the bastard,’ Bruno said, as he climbed into the car. ‘He paid ten euros for three jerrycans yesterday, sometime just after they opened. That fits with the time you turned up with him and then he drove Monique’s car back, so that he’d have seen that the tank was almost full. He knew the owner was dead so he saw the chance to get a hundred euros’ worth of fuel and stopped off to buy the cans.’

‘Cunning little bastard,’ said Jules, with a wistful, almost envious tone in his voice. After a moment, he added, ‘Almost wish I’d thought of it myself. It’s not as though the dead woman’s going to miss it.’

‘Could you call Yveline?’ Bruno asked. ‘She needs to know about this, and we’d better work out whether I call the magistrates to file the charge against him or you do. I don’t mind if you and Yveline want to keep it in the family.’

‘I was thinking about that,’ Jules replied. ‘Might put a big black mark on Yveline’s career with that uncle of his in Paris. And if I do it, they might take a closer look at my length of service and push me into retirement.’

‘What’s so bad about that?’ Bruno asked.

‘The wife doesn’t want me hanging around, under her feet all day,’ Jules replied. ‘She’d probably divorce me just to get a bit of peace.’

‘You don’t want to give up, do you?’

‘No, Bruno, I don’t. But here we are, back at the office, and this is your case. So either you go in and tell Yveline or you file a written report that will have to go to the magistrates in Sarlat and to our headquarters in Périgueux. Which is it to be?’

‘Yveline first,’ Bruno said. ‘She’s the chain of command and needs to be told. And she may be able to deal with this internally.’

‘Not with the other business hanging over the stupid bastard. Trying it on with the bishop’s secretary. You couldn’t make it up.’

As he opened the van door, about to step out, Bruno’s phone vibrated. It was Philippe Delaron, local newshound. Bruno rolled his eyes and sat back in the car seat, facing Jules.

‘Philippe, I presume this is a business call.’

‘Yes, but it’s for Jules as much as for you, Bruno, and I just saw you go past in his car,’ Philippe said. ‘I had a call from Natalie, his wife’s cousin, about demanding the eviction of her three young gendarme tenants. She invited me round to take some photos and it does look like a bomb hit the place, so we’ll probably make it a page lead in tomorrow’s paper.’

‘Give me five minutes to brief Yveline,’ Bruno replied. ‘Then she can decide if she’s going to talk to you or refer you to the press office to give their usual no comment.’

‘Merde,’ said Jules once Bruno closed his phone. ‘I didn’t think she’d bring the media into this.’

‘You can’t blame Natalie. It’s one way to ensure the place gets cleaned up and repainted. Let’s go give Yveline the bad news. Theft of petrol from a vehicle in police custody plus leaving the place like a pigsty. If it was down to me, I’d make them spend all night cleaning up and their next days off repainting the place.’

‘And if any kind of special job needs a professional to put it right, they should use their own wages to pay for it,’ said Jules. ‘I don’t care who his bloody uncle is.’ Then he paused. ‘But my career is just about over and I was never planning on going higher than sergeant. Yveline’s career has barely begun and she could go all the way.’ He paused again and then glanced at Bruno. ‘So long as she makes no powerful enemies.’

‘Which this might do, you mean?’ Bruno asked. ‘Starting with young Roland’s uncle in Paris? That depends on who the general thinks is to blame – Yveline as local commander, or J-J and the Police Nationale, where there is a very strong-willed female commissaire who is not going to let this be hushed up. I’ll file my report on the theft of petrol to the magistrates in Sarlat, with one copy to J-J and another to Yveline.’

‘And I’ll suggest to Yveline that she tells the three young lads to work through the night cleaning up the house,’ said Sergeant Jules. ‘That could get us some decent publicity if we invite Philippe Delaron to take some pics of them washing windows and scrubbing floors.’

That was exactly what Yveline decided the three young gendarmes should do, and if Philippe Delaron chose to take photographs of the clean-up, so be it. Once his other two housemates had left the room, she formally notified Roland that the charge against him for theft of petrol had been sent to the Sarlat magistrates with a copy to the gendarme general commanding the Périgueux HQ.

Bruno had barely walked halfway back to the Mairie before Annette called to ask why a fuss was being made about a tankful of petrol.

‘It was Monique’s car,’ Bruno explained. ‘The gendarme driving it back to the gendarmerie saw the tank was full and stopped off to buy jerrycans and siphon the petrol out. We’re also waiting the results of some tests for traces of what I think to be cocaine in the vehicle, and I hardly think that sounds like something Monique will have been involved with. Have you heard anything on the grapevine about a young gendarme behaving badly?’

There was a pause before Annette replied, ‘Oh, you mean the business with Célestine, the lawyer who works for the executive council? The case J-J was working on? Now I think I understand why you’re making a fuss about a few litres of gasoline.’

Bruno knew that Annette was a friend and tennis partner of Josette, a policewoman who was J-J’s aide and driver, and Josette would certainly know about the women being harassed by a gendarme. Bruno had learned that the informal communications system among women in the law was perhaps more important than the official chain of command.

‘You know Célestine?’ Bruno asked, making it sound as if he knew her. He didn’t, but Bruno knew that Annette was a member of the women’s committee of the Socialist party, the centre-left group that had a majority on the département council. It was a near-certainty that Annette would know her.

‘Yes, of course, but she only said that she’d filed a complaint. And there was another woman involved. Something to do with the church. Yes, that’s it – she works for the bishop,’ Annette said. ‘Did you hear anything about a problem with some powerful relative of the gendarme involved?’

‘Yes, a general at the HQ in Paris. It’s the same young gendarme in the petrol theft.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘Well, in that case we’d better make sure this petrol business gets immediate attention. Leave it with me. And I’ll look forward to seeing you in Sarlat tonight.’

‘Have I forgotten something?’ Bruno asked. ‘What’s happening?’

‘You’re supposed to join us at Monique’s place. Dominic is on his way back from Strasbourg and is expecting to see us all at the apartment, you included.’

‘But I’m no longer involved. I gave my statement and assumed that would be the end of it. A suicide, three separate notes – did you check for fingerprints on the folds?’

‘Too busy, sorry, but I can let you have the lab report if you turn up. I think you should, if only for courtesy. Becca Weil and Laura both said they were looking forward to seeing you again, as am I. We were planning to go on to dinner at l’Octroi, which I know you like for the traditional Périgord menu, and it would be lovely for you to join us. My treat, since I’ve eaten your food more times than I can count. And bring Balzac. I miss him, and I hear Laura thinks he’s lovely.’

Bruno had been planning a simple omelette from his own hens and a winter salad of butternut squash, parsnips, spinach and red onions, made from his garden. He would have followed that with some of Stéphane’s Tomme d’Audrix cheese and a glass or two of wine from the town vineyard, while reading local author Sophie Marvaud’s new thriller set deep in the region’s prehistoric past, Meutre chez les Magdalénians.

But Annette was a friend, and he looked forward to seeing Rebecca Weil and Laura again, and he was curious about Dominic, to whom he had not spoken since the aborted phone call the morning of Monique’s death. He should at the very least convey his condolences.

‘Who could resist such a dinner?’ he said. ‘The three most interesting women in Sarlat, and the mysterious Dominic. I’ll be there.’

12

Bruno parked opposite the cemetery and then walked down the slope of the rue Gaubert, Balzac on a leash. As he came to the Plaza Hotel he saw Laura with her own basset on the other side of the road. He smiled and waved as he and his dog crossed to meet them, Balzac wagging his tail with evident enthusiasm. Laura, wearing a stylish waxed overcoat that almost reached her ankles, waved back and her hound turned to watch the two males, human and canine, approach. She had a front paw elegantly raised, as though she expected Balzac to bow and kiss her hand. Bruno noted that her tail was wagging, a slow and stately rhythm.

‘Bonsoir,’ Laura said, presenting a cheek. ‘Annette said you’d agreed to come, I’m so glad. And it’s good to see Balzac again. I checked to see if George Sand and Balzac had been friends in real life since I knew they were contemporaries. I found that she’d said of Balzac that he had “a serene soul with a smile in it”. Sounds like a good omen, and my mother says that your Balzac’s genes are very grand and entirely worthy of my basset.’

‘Excellent news!’ Bruno said. ‘I hadn’t known that Balzac and Sand were on such good terms. I know she was good friends with Flaubert and with Victor Hugo.’

‘And with Dumas,’ Laura said. ‘They collaborated extensively, and she called his boy her spiritual son.’

‘In that case,’ said Bruno, ‘if Balzac and your Mademoiselle Sand produce a litter, we could name the first son d’Artagnan, in honour of Dumas.’

‘And we have the names of all three musketeers for the boys,’ she replied, grinning. Then she gave a mock-frown. ‘But after Queen Anne, Constance and Milady I run out of names for girls.’

‘There’s a Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo,’ he said.

‘Mercedes, yes! That’s a wonderful name for a basset,’ she agreed. ‘Let’s take the dogs up to the roof terrace. And remember, this event is just to welcome Dominic back, say how sorry we are for his loss and show some solidarity. No business, and no talk about the will.’

The elevator would have been intimate for only two humans. Add two bassets and it was impossible, so Bruno took the stairs. By the time he reached the top floor Laura had taken the dogs to the terrace and hung up her coat. She escorted him into a large living room that ran the length of the building. Rebecca and Annette came forward to greet him and Laura began to introduce him to various colleagues, all of them women except the senior gardener. The remaining man, barely the same height as Laura and looking to be in his late twenties, had to be Dominic. He came forward to shake Bruno’s hand and ask what he would like to drink. Bruno took a glass of wine, and said, ‘Please accept my condolences. It’s kind of you to do this – it must have been a long and tiring drive.’

‘It wasn’t too bad. There wasn’t much traffic and I listened to Brahms,’ said Dominic. ‘Thank you for taking care of matters yesterday. Is that your basset hound, on the terrace with Laura’s dog?’

‘Yes, he’s called Balzac.’

‘Easy to remember, which makes a nice change from Laura’s creature,’ said Dominic. ‘I assume you know everybody here?’

‘No, I know Annette well, but I only met Rebecca and Laura yesterday and don’t know her colleagues at all.’

Dominic made no response to this. He eyed Bruno coolly as he made polite conversation about the pleasant room and how splendid the views of the old town must be in daylight, until Dominic turned to greet another arrival and Bruno sidled away to join Annette and Becca Weil who were huddled together.

‘I really have no idea why I’m here,’ he said.

‘To make sure Dominic doesn’t start demanding to know exactly what’s in the will, of course,’ said Becca. ‘That’s for after the funeral, in the solemn privacy of my chambers, with a couple of sturdy ushers on hand to ensure everything stays civilized.’

‘I thought you told me they were married under separation of wealth,’ Bruno said.

‘Yes, but that seldom stops aggrieved spouses from complaining that they’ve been cheated out of their inheritance by some unscrupulous lawyer.’

‘What do you do then?’

‘Advise them to hire a lawyer of their own,’ Becca replied with a smile. ‘It will make no difference, but it’s good for business. Abraham Lincoln once said that in his early days as a solitary lawyer in town he almost starved. But then a second lawyer arrived and they both prospered.’

Bruno was introduced to the other women who had worked with Monique, including two each from the Périgueux and Bergerac offices. He asked them if their territory included St Denis and they said not and told him to ask Laura, who looked after most of the properties to the west of Sarlat. She seemed to have disappeared, so he made small talk until she came out of the kitchen with a tray of nuts and cocktail snacks.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Dominic, a proprietary tone in his voice. Laura’s expression stiffened and she put the tray down on a table with a sharp clatter that stilled all other conversation.

‘Dominic, you know perfectly well that Monique did not like being addressed that way and nor do I,’ she said firmly. With that she turned her back on him and found herself facing the bewildered gardener. She flashed him a brilliant smile and asked what she should be planting at this time of year. Bruno felt like applauding.

‘Winter greens and lamb’s lettuce,’ the old man stammered. ‘And broad beans.’

‘Sorry, Laura,’ Dominic said loudly. ‘I’ve been in Strasbourg where all the family speaks like that. I fell back into the habit.’

‘That’s okay,’ she replied, almost tossing the words over her shoulder.

The buzz of conversation resumed, and Dominic began talking to some other of Laura’s colleagues.

‘Laura’s right, of course,’ the woman from Bergerac said to Bruno. ‘Monique hated it when Dominic started talking as though she was a little dormouse of a housewife.’ She threw Bruno a challenging look.

He smiled at her and changed the subject.

‘It may be a little out of your area,’ he said, ‘over in Saussignac, but do you know Château de Fayolle? I find it charming, and they make good wine. My name is Bruno, by the way.’

‘I’m Nadine, and I know who you are from Sud Ouest. Fayolle is not one of ours, sadly; it’s a working vineyard where the wine has to come first and that really doesn’t fit with what we offer. But it’s a lovely old place – I love the lunches they do in summer with that glorious view over the lake. What brings you here this evening?’

‘I was the policeman who found Monique’s body yesterday morning. Monique had left letters for Laura and Becca Weil which I delivered—’ He broke off. ‘That reminds me. Excuse me a moment.’

Bruno walked across to Annette. ‘Have you given Dominic his letter yet?’

‘No, there wasn’t time. Becca and I got here just before you and he’d only been in the place for a few minutes, barely long enough to have a wash. I thought I’d give it to him when we leave.’

‘The sooner the better, I suggest,’ Bruno said. ‘I can take care of it if that’s easier for you.’

‘Well, you were the one who found them. Why not?’ She pulled from her shoulder bag an envelope and gave it to him.

Bruno thanked her and went to join Dominic who was standing at the table where Laura had placed her tray. ‘Could I have a moment?’ he asked. ‘Monique left you a letter, which we had to read and check for fingerprints. That’s why it’s been opened. Perhaps we should go into another room?’

Dominic led the way into the kitchen and said, ‘Call me Dom, by the way. My Strasbourg family always did because it’s the German word for a cathedral, which is where my foster father worked. Just a joke.’ He held out his hand for the envelope, opened it and started to read.

‘I’ll leave you to read it in private, monsieur,’ Bruno said, preferring to keep things formal.

‘No, no,’ Dominic replied. ‘After all, I assume you’ve already read it, for police reasons.’

‘I have. The letter makes pretty clear her intention to commit suicide, but we still have to clear up a couple of formalities. The post-mortem, checks on the pills she took, the usual issues.’

‘Where was she found? I asked Sabine, but her answer didn’t make sense to me,’ Dominic asked, folding the letter to return it to its envelope.

‘Near St Cirq, at a well-known beauty spot overlooking the valley, between St Denis and Les Eyzies. I gather she knew the area well from an old school friend who lived near there? It probably brought back childhood memories.’

‘She wouldn’t have seen much to remember in the dark,’ Dominic replied, his voice flat. ‘You called me in Strasbourg not long before eight yesterday morning, when it was barely daylight. When do you think she got there, to that place?’

‘We don’t know for sure,’ said Bruno. ‘It could have been any time the previous day, the Sunday. Nobody at the conciergerie heard from her all day. You may have been the last person to speak to her when you left for Strasbourg. We know from her phone that on Saturday afternoon she called Becca Weil. Your wife had been dead for six to eight hours when I found her yesterday morning.’

For a moment, Dominic stood staring into the middle distance. Then he turned, looked Bruno in the eye and said, almost aggressively, ‘Have you read the other letters as well, or was it only mine that required your special attention?’

‘You mean those to Laura and Maître Weil? Yes.’

‘Laura, is it? Already? You move fast, Monsieur Bruno.’

Bruno stared silently at him, just raising an eyebrow, until Dominic took a deep breath and muttered, ‘Sorry, I’m not myself.’

‘I understand, monsieur. We should have the post-mortem results by late tomorrow, after which the body will almost certainly be authorized for burial by the magistrates,’ Bruno said.

‘So that’s it, monsieur le policier, it’s all done and dusted, clean and tidy. But there’s been no serious enquiry as to whether it really was a suicide, or whether there’s somebody who had a great deal to gain from her death? You’ve read her letter so you’ll know it wasn’t me that would benefit.’

‘Monsieur, there is currently no evidence of anything but suicide, after her miscarriage and subsequent depression, and the mode of death is also classic suicide. It is not easy to force somebody to swallow a lot of pills.’

‘But couldn’t somebody have forged those letters, and perhaps collaborated with someone else to forge the will? That’s theoretically possible, is it not? Worth a moment of your time to investigate, perhaps?’

‘It is not my decision, monsieur, but that of the investigating magistrate and the public prosecutor,’ Bruno said patiently. ‘You are at liberty to ask them to make further enquiries if you have any evidence that points to anything other than suicide.’

‘That’s very convenient,’ Dominic said. ‘The person who stands to gain most, who is also the person who could have forged those letters, is close friends with the lawyer who arranged the will and with the investigating magistrate. Does it not make you think?’

‘If you have any evidence to support such a theory, you should contact Chief of Police Messager here in Sarlat. This is not my jurisdiction, even if I believed it,’ Bruno said. ‘Maître Weil will be in touch about the reading of the will.’

‘That involves only me, I presume, or at least, me and the lawyer,’ Dominic said, sounding reasonable again. The man’s moods were mercurial.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Bruno said, looking him in the eye. ‘That’s not my department and none of my business.’

‘And yet you are very friendly with Annette, the magistrate, with Weil the lawyer, and with Laura, the business partner. That’s very interesting.’

‘I met the lawyer and Laura for the first time yesterday, monsieur, in the course of my duties. That is all.’

Bruno turned, paused only to tell Annette why he was leaving and went to the balcony to fetch Balzac, who was sprawled comfortably on his side, facing George Sand, their back legs tucked into one another. He paused, smiling, when he heard movement behind him, and turned to see Laura looking indulgently at the two bassets.

‘Going so soon?’

‘Our host made some unpleasant insinuations about my friendly relations with you, Becca and Annette. It came right after he read his wife’s letter where she made it clear the business goes to you and the other women who built it up. So I took my leave. The only question is whether I take Balzac home or we meet at l’Octroi as planned.’

‘Why don’t you take both dogs down? I’ll follow with Annette and Becca and we’ll see you at the restaurant? I think everybody else has had enough, anyway.’

Bruno put leashes on the two dogs and led them out to the hall, putting his head round the door of the sitting room to wave goodbye. There was no sign of Dominic. He took the lift down with the dogs and began walking slowly to the bistro. It made a point of offering traditional Périgord food, perfect for a wintry night. They made a very good sauce Rouilleuse, he recalled, which went wonderfully with fish but he wondered whether it might work with chicken. They also made a very good walnut tart, and he remembered their aiguillettes of duck in a raspberry vinegar, such a tart and bright change from the way he liked to cook them with honey and mustard, sweet and comforting.

He turned to watch for the arrival of the others and was surprised to see that all the women at the party had decided to leave together, and were trailing down the road. It was a weekday evening so the place wasn’t full, but he still wondered if there’d be room. In the event, only five stayed to dine and the two women from Périgueux went off to their cars.

One of the women asked about the unusual name of the restaurant. He explained that it was named for a mediaeval tax. Whatever was brought into town for sale at the market, food or goods, had to pay a small entry tax, l’Octroi. The restaurant was on the site of the place where the tax was charged, although Bruno wasn’t sure if it was the original building.

When they were all seated, Laura said, ‘I told the others why you thought it best to leave, Bruno. I don’t know if you were watching, but I thought Dominic drank nearly as much as the rest of us combined.’

‘Did he often drink too much or was this evening a rare event?’

‘I don’t recall ever seeing him the worse for drink before this,’ said Becca. ‘And Monique never even hinted at anything about his drinking.’

‘He can’t really have thought that Monique would leave him the whole business when he never contributed anything to it,’ said Annette.

‘I drew up the marriage contract,’ said Becca. ‘It had full separation of goods, which meant he could expect nothing that Monique had owned before the marriage, including the company and the building. He has the right to live in the marital home, which is listed as the apartment we just left, and he has a ten per cent share in the notary business while he works there full-time. That’s it. No share in the estate agency nor in the concierge business. The country house is owned by a family trust, so it stays in the family. I made that marriage contract as tight as a gnat’s ass, as my long-ago American boyfriend used to say. But that’s another story. Anyway, he agreed to that contract and he signed it, so he’s known all along he was not going to inherit her wealth.’

‘Unless he thought he could change her mind, over time, or perhaps by helping her become a mother,’ suggested Annette.

‘So why did he suddenly become so hostile to me once he’d read Monique’s letter?’ Bruno asked.

‘Maybe just to see how you’d react. He seems to enjoy playing those kinds of games,’ said Laura. ‘I’m surprised he didn’t go on to say that I and all the other women in the company obviously had a financial interest in bumping her off.’

‘The letters were all typed,’ said Annette. ‘So where is Monique’s laptop? In her office or at home?’

‘At home here in Sarlat or at the country house,’ said Becca. ‘I presume she ran it through the office printer, so there should be a record in its memory. Laura, maybe you should go back and check whether the laptop is in Monique’s office and see what the printer can tell us.’

‘It can wait till morning,’ Laura said. ‘The office is locked.’

‘Yes, but Dominic will have Monique’s keys so he can come and go as he wishes,’ Becca said. ‘And he seems to be in a suspicious mood.’

‘Merde, there’s nothing to suspect and nothing to find,’ said Laura. ‘It’s just a will that hasn’t been changed in years. It can wait till morning and I’m hungry for some solid food, probably the duck.’

As she spoke a waitress came to take their orders. One by one, they all ordered the menu of the day; onion soup, followed by the aiguillettes of duck with raspberry vinegar that Bruno had remembered, with pommes de terre Sarladaises, followed by the cheese board and a caramel mousse. A carafe of the house red wine seemed fitting.

‘What’s to stop him from writing a new will and forging Monique’s signature?’ asked a younger woman from the Sarlat office whose name escaped Bruno.

‘If a will hasn’t been properly filed, recorded and witnessed in accordance with the law, the courts aren’t likely to accept it unless there’s very good reason to do so, and I don’t believe there is,’ said Becca. ‘There are no direct heirs, i.e. children who are being cheated out of their inheritance. And the marriage contract specifically says that Dominic played no role and has no investment nor interest in the company.’

‘And even at the time of the marriage Monique was no longer the majority shareholder,’ said Laura.

‘Not that such considerations have ever stopped a ruthless lawyer,’ said Becca, with a beaming smile.

‘You should know,’ Annette laughed, as the steaming tureen of soup was laid on the table and wafts of garlic rose to enrich the atmosphere.

13

The next morning Bruno rose with dread in his heart, gearing himself to face a radio interview the Mayor had arranged. But his ordeal would not begin until ten in Périgueux, and it was now just before seven, with a brightness glowing in the sky to the east. He put on his tracksuit and running shoes and set off along the familiar ridge with Balzac racing to keep up. The air was cold on his face and hands but he knew his blood would soon warm. He began punching the air with his fists, working his shoulders, and when he reached the peak of the ridge he began jumping up and down as he waited for Balzac to catch up. As he trotted back, he felt as warm as toast and happily jumped into his shower as soon as he turned the tap on, knowing the water would run cold for perhaps thirty seconds before it flowed hot.

Twenty minutes later he was sitting on his horse and walking out of the stables with Pamela and Miranda, each of them with two more horses on leading reins. His cousin, Alain, and Rosalie followed on the slowest horses as they learned to ride. In Rosalie’s case, it was easy. She had been raised on a farm in Normandy and had learned as a child, but that had been over twenty years ago. So she was taking it slowly and keeping Alain company since he had never ridden before coming to St Denis.

Bruno smiled as he turned and saw the twin plumes of mist coming from the horses’ nostrils as their breath rushed out into the chill air. It would be one of those magical mornings where the river would be steaming once they reached the ridge from which they could look down onto the valley and the bridge. It was a sight Bruno always enjoyed, the slightly warmer temperature of the river reacting against the colder air, sending up the mist that made the bridge and the tops of trees float weightlessly above. The sight took his mind off the impending ordeal in the Périgueux studio of France Bleu radio, where he was to spend an hour answering listeners’ questions about the life of a country policeman.

It had been the Mayor’s idea, to promote the commune of St Denis and the way its custodian of law and order answered to the Mayor and town council, rather than to the more familiar hierarchies of the gendarmes or the Police Nationale. Most of Bruno’s predecessors had been gardes champetres, rural guards, whose main job was to stop poachers. They had been founded in 1791, shortly after the French Revolution, to replace the servants of the landed aristocracy as the upholders of law in the countryside. But in 1958 when De Gaulle was returned to power, in came a new constitution and a range of modernizing reforms, which included replacing the old rural guards with local police.

But Bruno was more than just a town policeman. He had been promoted to chief of police of the Vézère valley, from Limeuil where the Vézère flowed into the larger Dordogne, all the way to Montignac in the north. This gave him a nominal authority on police matters over his municipal police colleagues in Les Eyzies and Montignac, which Bruno tried to exercise as lightly as he could. Privately he thought the whole structure to be flawed and almost unworkable, since he knew the Mayors of those towns were just as jealous of their authority as the Mayor of St Denis. He suspected that his Mayor wanted this interview to reinforce Bruno’s authority up and down the river.

He would do his best, but he thought it a vain hope. Politics being politics, mayors being mayors and budgets being budgets, Bruno knew that his Mayor was engaged in a constant jockeying for funds and powers in the various committees alongside his rivals. The Mayor of Les Eyzies came armed with the prestige of the National Museum of Prehistory and most of the prehistoric caves in the region. The Mayor of Montignac was draped in the splendour of Lascaux, the greatest prehistoric cave of them all with its incomparable cave paintings and the multimillion budget for the high-tech museum to show them off. The Mayor of St Denis, by contrast, had his wits, a good rugby team, the town vineyard, and a renowned market that had just celebrated its seven hundredth anniversary.

He had previously met and liked Marie-Do, the host of the morning show. She was a woman of formidable talents, able to conduct compelling and informative interviews with politicians, cooks, wine makers, cave explorers, sporting heroes and heroines, archaeologists, pop stars and children. Could she make anything interesting out of an hour with a village copper? He very much doubted it.

‘You know we’ll all be listening and rooting for you, Bruno,’ called Pamela, from somewhere behind him. Lost in his own thoughts, he’d wandered on ahead, forgetting that the horses on a leading rein behind him would block the trail for the others. He quickly steered Hector to one side with a gentle pressure from his knee and the other horses dutifully followed so that Pamela could come up alongside.

‘I suppose you’re a bit nervous about this interview,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. Marie-Do has done hundreds of these things. She’ll see you through.’

‘Yes, but it’s not just her, there are call-ins from the public. Some guy I tackled a bit too hard on the rugby field maybe, or someone I did for drunken driving or a parking ticket . . .’

‘Stop it, Bruno. You don’t give parking tickets and you leave driving offences to the gendarmes. Of course, there could be people you beat at tennis, or those tourists whose camping car you had towed into the gendarmerie when they parked and blocked the road.’

‘That was to save them from being beaten to death on the spot by our friends and neighbours.’

‘And have you picked your favourite book and favourite song? She always asks for those.’

‘I was asked for one song by a man and one by a woman, so Françoise Hardy’s “Tous les garçons et les filles”, and Jacques Brel’s “Chanson des Vieux Amants”. And the book is Jean-Pierre Babelon’s biography of Henri IV.’

‘Your favourite king – no surprise there.’

‘The only French king to be immortalized in a dish, to give us poule au pot Henri Quatre. And it’s actually two dishes in one, because your first course is the cooking liquid as a soup, then the chicken and vegetables as the main.’

‘Are you sure he actually said he wanted every French family to have a poule au pot every Sunday? It always sounded made up to me.’

‘He said it to the Duke of Savoy. “If the good Lord keeps me alive, I will ensure that there will be no labourer in my realm who does not have the means to have a chicken in his pot every Sunday.” Or something like that. I asked Father Sentout to help me find the source and it was a Jesuit classical scholar, Jean Hardouin, citing letters of the Duke of Savoy.’

The conversation had taken them down the bridle path and to the turning into Pamela’s paddock and the stables. Once they’d dismounted Pamela told him not to bother putting the horses in their stalls as she’d see to it and he’d better not be late, adding the promise that she would be listening to the show. She reached up to give him a kiss for luck, calling after him as he turned away to his Land Rover, ‘Don’t worry, Bruno – it’s only the honour of St Denis at stake.’

He was halfway to Périgueux when his phone vibrated. He saw it was the Mayor and debated with himself whether to answer. On the third ring, he thought he’d better.

‘Whatever you do or say, absolutely no politics,’ said the Mayor. ‘Good luck. The whole Mairie will be listening, and most of St Denis, including the schools. But don’t for a moment think you’re under any pressure, Bruno.’

‘Thank you, Monsieur le Maire, but I’d better ring off,’ said Bruno, thinking the Mayor was in one of those moods where he might start spouting about Bruno facing the loss of life or limb for France in many a foreign field. ‘The traffic is getting tricky. Au’voir.’

He pulled into the off-lane that led into the radio station’s parking lot beneath the building. Had he forgotten the name of the historian whose book he wanted to cite? Babelon! By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept, he reminded himself. That’s how he’d remember. And if Marie-Do insisted, he could sing the Jacques Brel and the Françoise Hardy. As he walked into the empty elevator, he suddenly realized he’d neglected to read that morning’s Sud Ouest for any likely local news. The elevator doors opened and he was in the main entrance hall. He gave his name and asked the smiling young receptionist if he could scan her copy of the paper. She looked outraged.

‘Don’t you remember me, Bruno? You taught me to play backhand,’ she announced, rising and coming round her desk to give him a hug.

‘Dorothée!’ he almost sang out. ‘What a lovely surprise! How is that twin brother of yours, still at university?’

‘Yes, in his third year, still playing rugby and I’ll tell him you asked after him. But didn’t you know me on sight?’

‘I was in such a dither, a bit nervous, and then realized I hadn’t even looked at the paper. Any news I should know about?’

‘Nothing special and you’re in good time. I’ll just tell Marie-Do you’re here and in the meantime, you might check out page five. The paper’s on my desk. There’s a story about gendarmes having to clean up a house they’d left in a mess, and that sounded like you.’

‘It was me.’ He reached for the paper as the girl disappeared. He read that the landlady had been mollified by the promise that the clean-up efforts would continue through the night. The threat of eviction had been repealed. Given Bruno’s opinion of the young gendarme whose uncle was a general, he was not altogether pleased at this reprieve. Dorothée re-emerged to escort him back to the studio to be greeted by Marie-Do and offered coffee. He was placed in front of a microphone opposite her and listened to the news bulletin on the hour while Marie-Do spoke quietly on a separate mic to her producer in another room.

‘Bruno Courrèges,’ she began. ‘A big France Bleu welcome for the chief of municipal police for the Vézère valley; former senior sergeant in the combat engineers, awarded the Croix de Guerre for pulling trapped soldiers from a burning armoured car while under fire; shot again earlier this year in the shoulder by Russian gangsters in a mysterious incident around which rumours swirl; keen hunter and horse rider; and also tennis and rugby coach for the kids in St Denis, and I know you to be an excellent cook. And you are just about inseparable from your delightful basset hound, named Balzac. Dear Bruno, how on earth do you find the time for all this?’

‘Good morning, Marie-Do, and the answer is, I wish I knew,’ Bruno replied. ‘It all fits into the day somehow, just as you manage to squeeze the news, the weather, the sports results, the recipe of the day, a joke and a horoscope into your brief time on air. I suppose time doesn’t matter that much when you’re having fun.’

Marie-Do winked at him, the sound engineer gave him a thumbs up, and Bruno breathed a sigh of relief at clearing the first hurdle. The second was tougher.

‘I didn’t know you were an orphan, abandoned at a church while you were still a babe in arms,’ Marie-Do said. ‘You spent six years in a church orphanage until your mother’s sister in Bergerac was able to take you in and raise you with her own children. Has that experience marked you, Bruno? Is that why you are still unmarried even though you take enormous pleasure in being the sports teacher to all the kids of St Denis?’

Bruno plastered a smile on his face that felt more like a grimace. ‘Two of the things in the world that give me the greatest pleasure are sports and watching kids blossom into interesting and capable adults. It’s great that our programme runs all the year round as we have rugby in the winter and tennis in the summer. I think it really helps everybody in the valley that the children grow up knowing me as Bruno, and not as some anonymous authority figure with a gun and a uniform.’

‘So this makes up for being a child abandoned by the mother you never subsequently met, with no idea who your father was?’

‘I don’t know, Marie-Do, but I think I’ve known kids who had a tougher, more gruelling childhood than I did, even if they did have their parents around. But I can tell you what I recall as the worst moment of my childhood – it was in the orphanage, where I had made a special friend of the dog in the kitchen. And one day the priest told us that animals have no souls so we would find none of them in heaven. It broke my heart at the time.’

At that point, there was a station break, a brief weather report that said the cold spell would go on, and they were back on air. Marie-Do at once asked about the structure of the Police Municipale: how they worked with the gendarmes, who had traditionally been under the Ministry of Defence, and the Police Nationale, who came under the Interior Ministry.

‘I’m under the authority of the elected Mayor and council of St Denis, and respect the authority of all the other mayors in the valley,’ Bruno said. ‘It sounds complex but it works, because it means that the detectives in the Police Nationale and the gendarmes both have access to our local knowledge and can benefit from the trust that we’ve built up by being a permanent part of our community.’

‘I have heard, Bruno, that you don’t just help raise all the kids through sports, but you dance with all the mothers when their daughters get married, you stand godfather to half the kids, and that at the funerals you carry the coffins of the grandfathers, most of whom you knew through the hunting clubs.’

‘We are members of a living community, so I think we in the local police tend to be well known, and therefore perhaps trusted rather more than the detectives and gendarmes who come in from outside.’

‘I see what you mean, but it all sounds a bit macho, Bruno, rugby and hunting, a man’s world.’

‘I wouldn’t say that to a certain local girl if I were you, you know the one I’m talking about. She won a silver medal playing rugby for France at the Tokyo Olympics.’

‘I stand corrected, Bruno, but we have a caller on the line who wants to raise a different point about some of your connections to the community. The floor is yours, caller.’

‘Bonjour, my name is Georges Luchan, from Nontron. I’m a retired teacher and member of the Greens, and I want to know why, with your position of trust and your admirable work with children, do you still spend time slaughtering helpless animals?’

‘Partly, sir, it’s because I have come to believe that most hunters are in their way just as green as you, but in a different way. We certainly know more about animals because we study their ways, and we know that any balanced ecology needs predators to keep that balance. You know yourself that in France we were getting so overrun with deer, with more than two hundred people killed in automobile collisions with deer and wild boar, that the government had to raise the traditional limits on how many we could hunt to get the numbers back under control.

‘The fact is, monsieur, that we hunters have a problem,’ Bruno went on. ‘Back in 1970 there were two million French people with hunting licences. We are now down to one million, and we have far more work to do because your policies mean we have to deal with a population explosion among deer and wild boar. For example, back in 1970 we shot 200,000 roe deer per year. Last year we shot, with a great deal of official urging, three times as many – that’s the scale of the challenge. You Greens campaigned hard for the restrictions on hunters that led to this population increase, and that meant baby deer starving to death because there was too much competition for the available food. Your good intentions had very grim results.’

‘Next caller,’ announced Marie-Do.

‘Hello, I’m Gabrielle from Bergerac,’ came a childish voice. ‘And I want to know why you eat foie gras when it means the poor ducks and geese have to be force-fed and stuffed.’

‘Bonjour, Gabrielle, I eat foie gras because I like it and the ducks and geese don’t have to be stuffed. More and more farmers are producing foie gras by letting the birds eat freely, as much as they want, without force feeding. The point is that ducks and geese are migrating birds, and to make their long flights up to Scandinavia or south to west Africa, the birds need lots of energy. They store it in their livers, which routinely swell to three or four times their normal size in migrating season. If you don’t like that system don’t blame me. It was le bon Dieu or Mother Nature who invented it.’

And so it went on, with requests for Bruno and the other local cops to police the rubbish collection points and stopping people from dumping old fridges in the woods. But every second question came from somebody declaring themselves to be green, or vegan. The youngest asked in a piping voice how Bruno could kill his own chickens.

But then came a familiar voice from St Denis. It was Alphonse, the elderly hippy who had started a commune in the hills above the town nearly fifty years ago, lived in a geodesic dome, and made the best goats’ cheese in the valley. Despite his long hair and multicoloured clothing, Alphonse had become a respected citizen, regularly re-elected to the council for his good sense and kindly ways.

‘Bruno, I’m glad to be able to talk to you because we’ve known each other for twelve years and more. So when some of your questioners accuse you of being a Green-hating, meat-eating, blood-lapping barbarian, in the pay of Big Oil, I’m happy to tell them you live one of the greenest lives I know. You grow your own vegetables and fruit, raise your own ducks and chickens, even your own truffles. You make your own vin de noix, and you’re a popular man at our local old people’s home because you and your hunter friends are the ones who bring them what they really want to eat, that lovely venison.’

‘Thank you, Alphonse, it’s good to hear your voice, and I think I’m right in saying you were the first Green candidate ever elected to a municipal council in the Périgord.’

‘That’s right, Bruno, I was an elected Green councillor before we even had a proper Green party here.’

The last caller asked if it was true that Bruno still went to the traditional pig killings on the farms.

‘No, but only because it has been declared illegal, after the abattoir companies hired expensive lobbyists in Brussels to get themselves the monopoly across Europe for slaughtering all livestock. I have not been to an illegal pig killing,’ Bruno said. ‘In my experience – and in my work I have had to visit many abattoirs – the farmers did a much cleaner and more humane job. It’s just an extra cost the farmers have to pay, and that means so do we.’

The hour came to an end with the chimes announcing the next news bulletin, and once they were off-air Marie-Do said, ‘Somebody planned that. You were ambushed and I’m sorry. We just didn’t expect the Greens to be so well organized, even getting the children to be word-perfect, which doesn’t often happen.’

Bruno smiled at her. ‘It’s fine, Marie-Do, I’m not complaining. They were reasonable questions and they listened politely to my replies and gave me a fair hearing. I’m not sure how many of your usual listeners stayed on once they realized that a well-organized Green campaign was under way. I wholly agree with about eighty per cent of what they stand for, but when it comes to hunting, or the pressures on farmers, I know what I’m talking about and they don’t.’

Dorothée gave him a congratulatory hug when Bruno emerged from the studio and handed him a USB stick with the audio file of his interview.

‘I don’t think it was my finest hour, but thanks,’ Bruno said, thinking privately he’d never replay it.

‘In a way it was,’ she said. ‘You kept your cool, you stayed polite and courteous and you answered everything in what seemed to me to be a reasonable way,’ she said. ‘I think of myself as Green, but I like foie gras and although I eat meat and chickens and fish, I really don’t like abattoirs. The brother of a school friend worked in one near Sarlat and had to stop. He couldn’t stand it.’

At that point the producer came into the lobby, saying he was glad he’d caught Bruno before he left the station because he wanted to apologize for Bruno being put through what he called an inquisition.

‘The Greens just flooded the station with calls to make sure they got through and blocked other callers,’ he said. ‘They obviously planned to ambush you but I think you held them off pretty well.’

‘Really?’ said Bruno. ‘I never thought of the Greens as being quite that organized. But if you get a call from a friend of mine on Sud Ouest would you tell him what happened? That they mounted a deliberate campaign to block your switchboard and put me in a pillory? It’s hardly what you expect from people who believe in free speech and democracy.’

‘I’d be glad to,’ said the producer. ‘We had eight studio lines open and our switchboard guy tells me they didn’t just block that lot, they jammed all the other phone lines coming into the station. They must have had thirty or so people lined up to do it.’

‘We’d better look at the Greens of Périgord with new respect,’ said Bruno. ‘This took careful planning and military-style discipline. I take my hat off to them, even though I feel like I’ve been used as a political punchbag for the past hour.’

‘Hold that thought,’ said the producer, pulling out a small recorder from a pouch at his waist. ‘That’s just the kind of soundbite the media loves. Now, tell me again.’

Bruno repeated what he’d said almost word for word and the producer said, ‘Perfect. We’ll get that on air right away. I think this time we might just get our retaliation in first.’

14

Back in his car, checking the calls and emails he might have missed while on air, Bruno saw one from J-J’s private number, and called him back.

‘Well done, you stayed calm and polite, you had the facts and won a victory on points,’ said J-J. ‘But what was the radio station doing letting only the Green calls in?’

‘The producer at the station was quite angry about it, reckoning they had organized a massive phone attack blocking all the lines into the station. He said he’s going to make a complaint about it on air. But I never thought of you as a media critic, so thanks for the call.’

‘That’s not why I’m calling,’ J-J said. ‘We need to meet for a quiet word. Are you still at the radio station? And driving your Land Rover?’

Intrigued, Bruno answered yes to both questions.

‘Give me five minutes and I’ll join you.’

In less time than that, J-J’s car nosed into the car park. He left his driver to take it back and walked towards Bruno’s vehicle, glanced around and then climbed into the passenger seat.

‘Sorry about this, but things are moving fast on this case of the well-connected young gendarme,’ J-J began. ‘Your old rugby chum and my boss, Prunier, was at some official dinner last night, and a senior member of the département’s executive council took him to one side and asked when the police were going to take up the disturbing case of a gendarme molesting a young woman on his staff. The politician said he was under – and I quote – “intolerable pressure” from other women on the council and on his staff.’

Bruno was about to speak but J-J raised a hand, palm forward, to silence him.

‘Wait, Bruno, because while I was digesting this, by some strange coincidence I got an anonymous phone call from someone who tells me you’ve got Gendarme Villon bang to rights on another count altogether. I was told about theft of petrol from a vehicle in police custody, interference in evidence in a possible homicide, behaviour unbecoming to a gendarme, blah-blah-blah. So this morning we got a search warrant and hit the place the gendarmes were renting, where we found several Ziploc baggies of cocaine in Villon’s room. The amounts indicate personal use, not dealing, but it was enough to bring him in. Roland Villon is now under garde à vue in our cells in Périgueux, and we are not stopping there.’

‘Good to hear this,’ said Bruno. ‘The story about abusive behaviour is spreading. I heard about it from Annette, the magistrate in Sarlat.’

‘Remember I told you that we had a female detective asking around the massage parlours?’ said J-J. ‘We’re now looking at several other possible cases because three other women picked his face out from a range of photos. And guess who Villon has hired as his lawyer? Somehow, little Roland is well enough plugged into the network of our less scrupulous lawyers to have hired the lowest of the bottom-feeders, Poincevin himself. I think you’ve had a run-in with him before.’

‘Yes, in those nasty gang wars between the Chinese and the Viets,’ said Bruno. ‘Poincevin was on a fat retainer with the Chinese, ready to turn up and get their boys out on bail. So what does this mean?’

‘Well, it could get nasty, and since the gendarmes won’t want a stand-up fight with the Police Nationale, there’s always the possibility that my chiefs might agree to a compromise and make this about you. It depends how far Roland’s uncle is prepared to go to defend his nephew, especially now that we can throw class-A drugs into the mix. Given the amount of dirt that we can throw at Villon, and the politics surrounding the women’s issue, that would be a very high-risk gamble for the uncle. But you’d better understand, Bruno, that you might become the fall guy in this battle of cops against gendarmes.’

‘How do you mean? I’m not in the wrong here.’

‘I know, mon cher, but in the higher interest of good relations between the Interior Ministry and the Defence Ministry, you might find yourself somehow pushed into the wrong. Believe me, Bruno, this is serious.’

‘What do you advise?’

‘First of all, make sure of your allies; the Mayor, for sure, and his old friends in the Senate. But particularly make sure the women are on your side: Annette and Yveline, of course, and Amélie, that jazz-singing woman who was in the Justice Ministry. And then there’s dear Isabelle, who’s like a daughter to me and much more to you. Let them all know what this is about. And tell Isabelle to call me on the non-official number I used to reach you.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Not at all,’ J-J said. ‘The key thing is that you find some non-traceable way to print out an anonymous letter to the Minister of Defence, spelling out in detail what Roland has been up to and you sign it from “the angry women of Périgord” or something like that. You send it to the Minister, and at the bottom of the letter you note copies have been sent to Le Monde, Le Canard Enchaîne, the New York Times and the Financial Times of London. If you really want to drive them nuts, add that a copy is being sent to the President’s adjoint judiciaire at the Elyseé. That will get the Minister’s special attention. Make sure you use gloves when you touch the paper and the envelope. And you take a second copy of the letter and send it to the Minister of the Interior.’

‘Mon Dieu, J-J, have we come to this? That an honest cop has to resort to anonymous letters to get some justice?’

J-J shrugged, opened the car door and turned to leave, then stopped himself and said, ‘You play with big boys, you’d better learn to play by big boys’ rules, Bruno.’ He clambered out and paused before closing the door. ‘Look, Bruno, you know I’m on your side when it comes to hunting. But you ought to know that the opinion polls say that two-thirds of French people say they don’t feel safe in the countryside in the hunting season. And nearly eighty per cent want hunting to be banned on Sundays so they can take a walk in the countryside without being shot. We French have come a long way from our peasant roots.’

Bruno drove back to St Denis knowing that J-J was right. French opinion was turning against hunters, mainly because France was no longer a rural country. Before World War Two, half the population lived in the countryside, most of them in farming families. These days, eighty-four per cent lived in urban areas and only sixteen per cent in rural districts, and those in the countryside were disproportionately old. The population of St Denis had recently been rising again after generations of decline, mainly due to retired people from the north and east of France moving to Périgord and the south-west where the weather was kinder and the house prices lower. Parisians found it hard to believe but a two-bedroom modern house with full insulation on the outskirts of St Denis could be bought for 100,000 euros.

He smiled at the thought of the admirable way many of these newcomers tried to adapt to rural life. Francine, a widow whose husband had been a hunting friend, had a couple of years ago started offering lessons to the newcomers in how to raise their own chickens, what to feed them, how to pluck and prepare them for the oven. Bruno had sometimes thought that on his own retirement he could start a small business offering help to such new arrivals in planning and maintaining a vegetable garden. But one of his burly friends in the town’s current rugby team, whom Bruno had trained in the sport for many years, had started his own such business and was doing well.

Stop it, Bruno! he said to himself, knowing he was letting his mind wander when he should be thinking about J-J’s warning. He had a private phone that he normally used for personal matters, but that could easily be traced. He pulled into the tennis club and greeted Bernadette, a former pupil who was now one of the club’s teenage stars. Without asking, he opened the drawer of the reception desk to borrow the club phone, which he used to call Isabelle’s discreet personal phone. He left a message, giving her the number J-J had given him.

‘Sounds like you’re arranging a romantic assignation, Bruno,’ she said, with a worldly air.

‘If only, ma belle, but you know my heart remains with you  . . . and all my other talented athletes,’ he said, giving her a wave as he left. He went first to the Mairie, waved away congratulations on his radio interview, and repeated to the Mayor what J-J had said. The Mayor scribbled down some details about Roland Villon and his victims and promised to raise the issue with some old friends in the Senate. On the Mayor’s advice, Bruno then went to his former office and told the same story to Colette Cantagnac, his administrative aide and a woman of sharp intelligence and great experience in the ranks of public service.

‘I think J-J is right to suggest that the staff at ministerial level might find it easiest to blame you,’ Colette said. ‘He’s also right that an anonymous letter to a minister which claims to be copied to Le Canard and Le Monde, let alone the international press, is certain to get serious attention. And then when some of the Mayor’s old colleagues in the Senate raise the same matter . . . Have you talked to Annette?’

‘Yes, and she was already familiar with the matter since she knows one of the women involved through the Socialist Party.’

‘You mean Célestine,’ said Colette. ‘I’d better make a few calls to some colleagues in Paris. And leave the anonymous letters to me, Bruno. I know just how to draft them. I’ll prepare something and let you see it before I have them posted from Périgueux, or maybe from Cahors.’

Not for the first time, Bruno marvelled at the underground network of female officials in Paris and the regions, often working at jobs far beneath their competence and skills, who helped discreetly to keep the French ship of state afloat and to fend off collisions. He had never guessed at its extent until Colette arrived in St Denis, but he supposed it was not very different from the way he and other sergeants in the French army had kept in discreet but constant touch, ensuring their officers did not get them all into too much trouble.

It was a strange world, he thought, in which many human activities reminded him of a swan, floating serenely through the water while below the surface its legs paddled furiously. He assumed that the average salary of himself, Colette, the Mayor, Isabelle, J-J, various council staff in Périgueux and magistrates like Annette was probably between fifteen and thirty euros an hour. Then the lawyers who would inevitably get involved would demand at least three hundred an hour for their services. This squalid little escapade of Gendarme Villon would end up costing the French taxpayer tens of thousands of euros.

And it wasn’t over. He walked out through the square and down the steps to the quayside where it was quiet and used his burner phone to call Amélie – magistrate, youth worker, jazz singer and former ministerial aide in the Justice Ministry when the centre left had been in power. He knew that she still had a wide range of contacts among the permanent staff of the Ministry. He explained that he was acting on the advice of J-J. He’d barely begun when she interrupted.

‘Is this about this problem with Célestine, the gendarme who thought he was God’s gift to women who didn’t want to be breathalysed?’ she asked.

‘Ah, you know?’

‘Of course I do, I was at law school with Célestine and then we did a Young Socialists’ summer camp on Ile de Ré. And she was there at Château des Milandes when I did my Josephine Baker concert, didn’t you meet her? She’s a great friend of Annette’s as well. What’s the latest?’

Bruno explained about the gendarme’s uncle and J-J’s fear that Bruno could end up being the victim.

‘We won’t let them get away with that,’ she replied firmly. ‘I know the people at Justice who do the liaising with the gendarmes so I think we can start a little rumour about nepotism and then drop a word in the ear of a friendly journalist. I’ll see what Isabelle says. I’ve got a gig this weekend at the Caveau de la Huchette and she’s planning to come along so I’ll see her there.’

‘What are you singing?’

‘It’s a tribute to Dinah Washington, Queen of the Blues, so I’ll be doing “Baby Get Lost” and “I Wanna Be Loved”, and I’ve always wanted to sing her “Big Long Slidin’ Thing”, a non-stop double entendre about having an affair with a trombonist.’

‘This Saturday?’ Bruno said, wondering if there was any way he could slip away for the weekend. But he knew he’d better stay focused on this business.

‘Next time I see you, I’ll sing it, but it’ll probably lose a bit in translation. Maybe you should get Pamela to help out. How is she, by the way? Give her my best, and don’t worry about this gendarme business. We’ve got your back, Bruno.’

‘Good to hear, take care of yourself, have a great concert, and thanks, Amélie. Big hugs.’

Bruno closed his phone and looked up, startled to see he’d walked the whole length of the quayside and was almost at the aquarium. He turned and strode quickly back, wondering if he should go to the riding school to collect Balzac, or check in with Yveline and Sergeant Jules. He trotted up the steps to the Mairie and saw Philippe Delaron climbing out of his car and waving, saying Bruno was just the man he’d come to see.

‘It’s about Georges Luchan, the Green guy who was on the radio with you this morning. He’s the one getting the blame for trying to rig the programme by swamping the station with calls. He’s now claiming that you lied on air when you said you hadn’t been to a pig killing. And he’s sent out an official press release to announce that he’s going on Channel Three this evening to show the film that proves you a liar.’

‘He’d better watch his step,’ said Bruno, suddenly feeling a spurt of anger. ‘I said I hadn’t been to any illegal pig killing since slaughtering on the farm was banned. And that’s true, because Stéphane and I were asked to make a film at his farm for the national folklore museum, re-enacting the traditional event, because it was always a big moment on the farm, with all the neighbours coming to help. They wanted us to do it in the traditional way, and so we did.’

‘So you don’t think it’s an issue that you’ve been to a killing but said you hadn’t?’

‘I said I hadn’t been to an illegal killing. But this was legal, with special permission from the Agriculture Ministry, and the local land agent was on hand to make sure we did everything by the book, just as the museum wanted. The land agent is the man in charge of enforcing the rules on farms.’

‘What happened to this film? Can you still see it?’

‘At the folklore museum, certainly. It’s one of those films they show about the crafts of the past in that little cinema they have. I have an old DVD of it at home somewhere, if you know anybody who still has a DVD player. We all dressed up as best we could in nineteenth-century gear, the women and little girls in long dresses, me in gaiters and boots and a leather waistcoat, and the make-up artists gave me a fine set of side-whiskers.’

‘Why the fancy dress?’ Philippe asked.

‘Not fancy dress, it was costume. The folklore museum likes to recreate the old ways whenever they can. I was delighted to be asked but I think it was Stéphane who arranged it. Anyway, we’d better tell Channel Three to drop the idea since it wasn’t at all illegal.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘The museum can, and I recall something on the DVD about the film being made for historical purposes with the approval and participation of the Agriculture Ministry.’

‘So you have no regrets?’

‘About making the film? Not at all. I’m proud of playing a role,’ he said. ‘But I certainly have regrets about the banning of killings on the farm, the way it had always been done, until those bureaucrats in Brussels left it all to nice, modern, hygienic slaughterhouses to enjoy their monopoly. Except that far too many of them are not hygienic and not even very clean, but I doubt if the Brussels bureaucrats have ever seen the inside of a slaughterhouse. They neither know nor care. The old farmers were much more hygienic.’

‘Maybe you’d better get in touch with the museum,’ said Philippe. ‘Just to be sure they’ll back you up. Or take that DVD of yours along to the TV studio. That way they would have to listen to you.’

‘Okay, but in the meantime why don’t you call Stéphane? He’s in the film, too. But the real story is that the Greens swamped the radio station with calls. So much for the Greens believing in a full and free discussion.’

‘Well, you put them on the defensive this morning because you knew what you were talking about and that embarrassed them,’ said Philippe. ‘Now they want revenge and think they can get it by proving you lied to the children.’

Bruno glared at him, and Philippe stood his ground and gazed back steadily at Bruno, notebook and pen at the ready. ‘Well, did you?’ he asked.

At that moment Bruno’s phone vibrated. Keeping his eyes fixed on Philippe’s face, he answered it with his name and rank.

‘Bruno,’ came the Mayor’s familiar voice. ‘The planned joint inspection of the work on the new gendarmerie has been put forward a little. The gendarme general finds himself available and we’ll see you there at the site, as soon as you can join us.’

‘I’ll be right there, Monsieur le Maire. I’m just assuring Philippe Delaron that we had official permission to re-enact a traditional farmhouse killing of a pig when the national folklore museum asked us to make the video for them. You’ll remember because you were in the video, too, playing the role of the barber who came with a cut-throat razor to shave off the bristles.’

‘I remember it well,’ Bruno,’ came the reply loud enough for the reporter to hear. ‘In fact, I still have the brush that we made from those bristles and use it every day that I shave.’

‘I’ll be right there.’ Bruno closed his phone, glared at Philippe and said briskly, ‘Just for the record, Philippe, any more questions?’

15

The old gendarmerie in St Denis had been built in the 1950s and at the time was intended to suggest modernism. Behind it was the associated apartment block, four storeys high, built on the understanding that the modern gendarme would be a family man, no longer prepared to tolerate the nineteenth-century military-style barracks that had been their traditional quarters. This apartment block would now be transferred to the town to house low-income families, as the new, much larger gendarmerie rose on the outskirts of town. Today’s gendarmes were to be provided with modest but well-appointed family houses.

‘Ah, Bruno, always a pleasure.’ General Maurice Mouleydier, in charge of gendarmes in the département of the Dordogne, reached out to shake Bruno’s hand. Tall and slim with a pencil-thin moustache, his hair greying at the temples, the general always reminded Bruno of some film star from old movies whose name he could never recall. His officers were wary of his reputation for politicking, but his men liked him and seemed to believe that he liked them. Bruno was not so sure, and he noticed with surprise that the general was alone and appeared to have driven himself from Périgueux, which was unusual.

The Mayor, however, had brought Colette Cantagnac along with him.

‘The construction delays have been overcome and we’re confident that your men will be able to move in this spring, maybe even in time for Easter,’ said the Mayor.

‘I certainly hope so, but this makes matters difficult for us,’ said the general. ‘These delays have been very disappointing, particularly the unfortunate business with the sewage system.’

‘You hired those contractors against our advice,’ the Mayor replied. ‘We’d looked into it and their track record wasn’t reassuring.’

Bruno, at the Mayor’s request, had spent some hours looking into the family links between the general’s wife and the contractors the general had wanted.

Mouleydier ploughed on, ignoring the Mayor’s comment. ‘You assured us,’ he said, ‘that my gendarmes would be fully installed in time for the new year, and that’s clearly no longer possible. You must realize that this presents us with a problem; for example, this embarrassing business of these three gendarmes having to rent private rooms. We may have to rethink the plan to close St Cyprien and enlarge the gendarmerie here in St Denis.’

‘Your contractors were to blame for the delays,’ said the Mayor flatly, staring fixedly at the general. ‘And it is on the record that we warned you not to hire them, that they had a poor reputation.’

‘Well, perhaps, but that has yet to be determined,’ the general replied. ‘But as you know, some of my colleagues in Paris thought that we should perhaps put the new regional headquarters south of the river, in Belvès rather than St Denis.’

Bruno had an uncomfortable feeling that the colleague in Paris was likely to be the uncle of Roland Villon and that Villon was a part of this discussion even though his name had not been mentioned.

‘I brought the original contract along for reference,’ said Colette Cantagnac. ‘It says clearly in Appendix Two that the target date for completion is June the first, next year, nearly six months away. It also says in Appendix Three that local contractors shall only be hired with my consent, and only with that consent is St Denis liable for any failings of said contractors. So it’s clear that we are not liable.’

‘Well, you know what lawyers are like,’ said the general. ‘We ordinary people understand that it’s better to get along without them, with a clear understanding of things that are in the common interest. You have an interest in keeping the gendarmerie in St Denis. We have an interest in having good relations with you, in a town where my gendarmes feel welcome and appreciated by the locals.’

‘Quite right, sir,’ said Bruno. ‘And what a good relationship it has been over these many years. Sergeant Jules is just one of three or four gendarmes who’ve found a wife here in St Denis. You’re almost family. And we are indeed fortunate that the vast majority of your gendarmes have been exemplary in their behaviour here.’

Bruno was not going to say plainly what all of them knew, that the issue here was Villon and that the general back in Paris, his uncle, wanted to threaten St Denis with the loss of the gendarmerie, which would be a serious economic blow to the town.

‘You know, it’s interesting that the contract to which you refer was drawn up by a lawyer who is an old political friend of mine, and indeed the chap who inherited my seat in the Senate after I served my term,’ said the Mayor. At the sound of the word ‘Senate’ the general’s eyes narrowed. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to give my old friend a call and see if the Senator agrees with your interpretation of the contract that he himself wrote?’

‘We need not call in the Senator just yet,’ said Colette, in her most matronly voice. ‘There’s a very good young lawyer who works as an advisor to the executive council. You know who I mean, Bruno, her name is Célestine.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ said Bruno, thinking this was starting to feel like a game of power. The general had raised the stakes with a subtle threat to move the new gendarmerie elsewhere. The Mayor had met the bet with the hint that he would call in his Senate friends. Colette had raised the stakes by bringing in the executive council, and now Bruno raised them again.

‘Why not bring in the bishop, too?’ he asked, with mock innocence. ‘There are a lot of wise heads on the diocese council.’

The gendarme general looked at them with a faint but puzzled smile, as though not sure what point they were trying to make.

‘Are you aware, mon général, that Gendarme Roland Villon has this morning been arrested and charged with sexual assault by the Police Nationale and is now under garde à vue in Périgueux? That we found bags of cocaine for personal use in his quarters?’ Bruno asked. ‘Perhaps your office has not yet been formally informed? I presume he would have contacted his colleagues to ensure that he had the advice and support of a good lawyer.’

The general’s jaw dropped. Evidently this came as a most unpleasant surprise to him.

‘This is not a matter for joking, monsieur le chef de police,’ he said stiffly.

‘It is not a joke, sir. I heard this from Commissaire Jalipeau himself,’ Bruno said. ‘The arrest was made this morning.’

‘But Jalipeau did not think to consult me, or to inform the captain in charge in St Denis of the arrest of one of her gendarmes? This is outrageous!’

‘I believe this is the day off for our commandante of gendarmes, sir,’ said Colette. ‘She may not be aware of it.’

‘Did Jalipeau not inform anybody? This is extraordinary,’ the general exclaimed. ‘It breaches every rule and tradition of etiquette among the forces of law and order. Excuse me, messieurs-dame.’ He turned away, pulling a phone from his pocket and jabbing at its screen, muttering ‘merde’ under his breath and calling a number. When it was answered, he said, ‘Prunier, is that you?’

The reply was inaudible, but it was evidently not the commander of the Police Nationale in Périgueux.

‘Where is he?’ the general went on. ‘I don’t care if he’s in a conference, I need to talk to him immediately.’ Another pause. ‘Very well, tell him as soon as he comes back that I’m awaiting his call on a matter of utmost urgency.’

The call over, the general stared at his screen. ‘Can any of you explain how I might have received over two dozen missed calls this morning?’

‘Sir, your phone,’ said Bruno. ‘It is the same model as mine, a French government issue. I have the same experience of it neither vibrating nor ringing. There is a mechanism which silences both the ring and the vibrations; it kicks in, after you have reduced the call volume several times. Unless you happen to be looking at the screen when it rings, you wouldn’t know when someone is calling you. That may have been the problem this morning.’

‘Quelle connerie de merde,’ the general snapped. ‘How do I fix it?’

‘Go into Settings, select Sound and Vibrations, and turn up the volume for both calls and notifications. Then it will ring, unless you select Vibrate.’

‘Oh, mon petit Jesus,’ the general almost wailed. ‘What an idiot system.’ He stood, evidently fuming with anger, his back ramrod-straight as he gazed at the ranks of almost-completed houses of the new gendarmerie whose future was now evidently in doubt. The screen of his phone glowed brightly to indicate an incoming call, and this time the device both rang and vibrated.

‘Prunier, I am told by Chief of Police Courrèges in St Denis that your Commissaire Jalipeau has this morning arrested one of my gendarmes. I’ve been out of reach all morning, update me.’

There was a pause as the general listened. ‘Two charges of what?’ Another pause and the general’s face turning slowly white. ‘You’re saying this involved a young woman who works for the bishop?’ There came a rather longer pause and the face began turning pink and then darkening to red. ‘And another young woman who’s the clerk to the executive council?’ Another pause. ‘Right, I’ll drive back up to see you at once, if you please.’

The general turned on his heel to face Bruno, Colette and the Mayor, saying grimly, ‘Now I understand your unpleasant references to the bishop and the council. You will excuse me, Monsieur le Maire.’

‘If I may add a brief word before you go, General,’ broke in the Mayor. ‘Please make sure you check the penalty clauses on our contract with a lawyer before taking any rash decisions. If you abandon this new gendarmerie, we will keep all the houses and you will have a gigantic hole in your budget, and that would never do. But of course, I look forward to a long and happy relationship with your gendarmes here in St Denis.’

Once the general had gone, the Mayor murmured, as if thinking aloud, ‘Why on earth would a general drive himself?’

‘And do so in an unmarked and anonymous car that I’m pretty sure is not his own?’ asked Bruno. ‘It looks like the kind of car they use to shadow people.’

‘Or to avoid people,’ said Colette. ‘I hear that he has a petite amie somewhere in the region. But let’s not get side-tracked, messieurs. I know you think the contract is solid, but could the gendarmes really renege on the new gendarmérie in St Denis? Countless jobs here depend on it.’

‘But not yours! You’ve made yourself indispensable to St Denis, taking on Xavier’s administrative duties while he’s on indefinite leave in addition to everything else you do around here.’ Bruno looked around. ‘I think it’s safe to say Xavier’s political dreams are over; no woman in town is likely to cast their vote for him in future, so somebody will have to do his job in the long-term. You’d be just right for it, if you’re looking to spread your wings.’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ said the Mayor. ‘And traditionally a deputy Mayor has always been an elected member of the council. In any event, Xavier remains an elected councillor until the next election.’

At that point, Bruno’s phone vibrated, and he heard the Baron’s voice, asking, ‘Can you turn on the radio? There’s a discussion all about you on the lunchtime call-in show, starring that bastard Louis, the retired cop from Montignac. I’m taping it anyway.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘That you got his dog killed, the one he liked to claim was the best hunting dog in the valley.’

‘Does he say the dog was shot by Arab terrorists?’

‘Of course not, Bruno. This is Louis. And I’m trying to listen.’ He ended the call.

‘Who’s this Louis?’ asked Colette.

‘Now retired, the former municipal cop in Montignac who always thought he should have been made chief of police for the valley because he was older than me.’

‘Wiser counsels prevailed,’ said the Mayor. ‘I’ll get the radio station to send us a tape so we can listen to the whole thing.’

‘I suppose this is the fallout from that fuss about the Greens blocking the lines into the station to embarrass you,’ said Colette. ‘Maybe we should rally some supporters of our own, maybe the hunting clubs, or some of the kids from your tennis classes, better still the girls’ rugby squad. And we’d better get you some support online, Bruno. That’s the real battleground these days, not the airwaves. I’ll get the computer club onto it.’

She pulled out her phone and began talking. Bruno and the Mayor looked at one another, each of them startled at the way Colette seemed so familiar with the relentless advance of technology into the politics and public life of a small village in deepest France.

‘I’ll get onto the old folks’ home,’ said the Mayor as he pulled out his own phone, evidently eager to join this multimedia campaign.

Bruno went to his car and turned on the radio to listen to Louis’s grumbles, just in time to hear the voice of Marie-Do, saying, ‘Next caller, please.’

Then came a familiar voice, as his colleague Juliette, the cop from Les Eyzies, declared, ‘You do talk a lot of rubbish, Louis. Your dog was shot by Arab terrorists in the course of a highly dangerous operation, an operation which succeeded thanks to Bruno. Moreover, it was not a case of Bruno taking a job that should have been yours. Bruno saved you from being fired for drinking too often on the job.’

‘Hello, caller, could you identify yourself, please?’ Marie-Do asked. But by then, Juliette had gone and another voice, a man this time, came on the line, saying, ‘I’m from Montignac, Louis, and I’m not sure that I ever saw you entirely sober when you were on duty except when you had a hangover. Or when you were hunting. So tell me, as a fellow hunter, why are you agreeing with those ignorant Greens and joining their attack on Bruno?’

‘I’m not criticizing Bruno’s hunting skills, but he’s from Bergerac originally and these city boys don’t really understand our life here in the countryside,’ Louis said. ‘And all that time Bruno spent in the army turned him into a real military spit ‘n’ polish type and we’re not like that here in the Vézère valley.’

‘You do talk rubbish,’ the caller said. ‘It’s not spit ‘n’ polish types who win the Croix de Guerre, as Bruno did. Nor drunks, Louis. And as someone who lives in Montignac, I have to say I’m very glad that you’ve retired.’

‘Next caller, please.’

‘I’m a hunter but I also consider myself a Green and like most hunters in the valley I have a lot of respect for Chief of Police Bruno. It’s no accident that the number of hunting accidents hereabouts has fallen dramatically. It’s because people like Bruno made their fellow hunters take the training, and the exams, very seriously indeed.’

‘I’m calling from the retirement home in St Denis, where we all think the world of Bruno, who spends his spare time teaching the local youngsters to play tennis in summer and rugby in winter. I wish I’d been able to play rugby when I was a girl. And from what I hear about you, Louis, from my cousin who lives in Montignac, you spent half your working time and all your time off in bars and drinking, unless you were out hunting. I’d rather have Bruno’s kind of policing than yours.’

Bruno smiled as he shook his head in appreciation. He had recognized the voice of Mireille, a retired school teacher of formidable size and a very gifted pastry cook whose fruit pies were famous in St Denis. In fact, she’d probably interrupted her baking of tarts for the old folk’s Christmas party for all the village children. And that reminded Bruno that he’d better check the condition of the Father Christmas costume he was expected to wear.

16

Bruno was still listening to Louis on the radio, becoming less and less coherent as he was mocked by his questioners – he’d even started to feel sorry for the retired cop as he drove into St Denis. He parked a discreet distance from the gendarmerie and went into the residential block to ring Yveline’s bell with a short-long-short, trusting that she’d recognize the Morse code for SOS.

‘We just had a visit from your general,’ he began when she opened the door to welcome him in. ‘He was threatening to cancel the contract to move into the enlarged gendarmerie, and that was before he learned that J-J had arrested your new gendarme, Roland Villon. He’s now racing up to Périgueux to beard J-J’s boss in the police commissariat and I don’t think this will end well. Is your job in trouble?’

‘Bonjour to you too, mon cher,’ Yveline replied, with something more like a wry grin than her usual smile. She said Bruno was just in time to join her in a late lunch, and he saw from the seas of wrapping paper, rolls of sticky tape and scissors that she was spending her day off wrapping Christmas presents. Whoops, he thought to himself, that was something he’d neglected to even think about.

‘Is my job at risk? The answer is that I don’t know, Bruno, not these days,’ she said. ‘Ten, twenty years ago Villon’s crimes would have been hushed up and I’d have been eased out to Corsica or the wilds of the Massif Central. But twenty years ago I’d never have been a capitaine at all, far less at this young age with a highly visible and powerful woman commissaire in the police HQ in Périgueux who, I am reliably told, left Prunier no option but to let J-J go ahead with the arrest.’

‘Twenty years ago, Célestine wouldn’t have been in such a powerful position in local government at such a young age,’ Bruno said. ‘And the diocese council wouldn’t have been run by a young woman. But this is now and the rules are different, even if we aren’t sure how different they are in places like the top of the Gendarmerie Nationale.’

‘I’m not sure about that either,’ she said. ‘But a lot of gendarmes would say that if a young gendarme goes wrong, his commander is to blame. I may even at times have said something like that myself.’ She steered him into the kitchen. ‘I’ll set the table and put out the salad I’ve made with winter lettuce and I’ll let you make one of your lovely omelettes. There are some of your eggs and garlic and Stéphane’s cheese in the fridge, next to the jar of vinaigrette. Can you put that next to the salad before I forget?’

Once the table was set she came to watch as he grated the cheese and chopped some fat heads of garlic very fine. He put her largest pan on the heat with a spoonful of duck fat and a little butter, threw in the garlic and used a fork to whip four eggs into froth, added a generous spoonful of water, some salt and pepper and whipped them again. Once the fat was about to spit, he swirled the shredded garlic around it again, poured in the eggs and used his left wrist to turn the pan this way and that while his spatula kept lifting the edges of the eggs to let the uncooked liquid run onto the hot metal of the pan. Then he added the grated cheese from a Tomme d’Audrix, whipped over half the omelette to cover the cheese, let it rest and then flipped it to give the merest hint of brown to the other side and then halved and served it, half an omelette each.

‘Why does mine fall apart while yours looks like it’s been professionally wrapped?’ she asked, pouring him a glass of red wine from the town vineyard.

‘Practice,’ he said. ‘Bon appetit. But let’s think of your position. It’s a pity Gilles is still in Ukraine – it’s the kind of story he would handle well. As things stand, maybe you should have a word with Annette who knows the law in this area.’

‘The law is one thing,’ she said grimly. ‘The top tier of the gendarmerie is something else entirely. The one thing they fear is not being in control, and getting ambushed like that makes them feel dreadfully exposed.’

‘That’s exactly what happened to J-J and Prunier,’ said Bruno. ‘Ten, twenty years ago they could have reached a deal with your general, but with powerful and media-savvy women in their own ranks they can’t get away with that any more.’

‘We gendarmes have not yet progressed quite that far,’ she replied, and then paused before going on. ‘Do you think they’ll keep Roland in jail until the trial, or will he be allowed out on probation?’

‘Call Annette and ask her.’

Her voice amplified by speakerphone, Annette said it would depend partly on her boss, the grandly titled procureur de la République, the public prosecutor. But since he was a civilian official, close to the executive council where Célestine worked, she suspected he’d want a quick trial and keep the gendarme in custody, especially in light of the drug possession charges he now faced.

‘That way the prosecutor makes friends on three fronts,’ she explained. ‘He makes friends with the executive council; with women in the legal system; and with women at large. Even with the church. That’s four fronts. He makes one enemy, the gendarme general, the uncle, but he might lose his job if he tries too hard to protect the nephew. That’s how my boss will think.’

‘And if the gendarme general stays in office, my career is over,’ Yveline said glumly.

‘Not if we have reporters lined up demanding the general comment on the claim that he’s taking his revenge on you,’ said Annette. ‘And we know just the woman who’d be prepared to say that publicly – a highly respected Sorbonne professor with an international reputation who has several times had essays on Le Monde’s op-ed pages, and just happens to be your Mayor’s lady friend.’

‘Jacqueline, of course,’ said Bruno.

‘Of course, this will mean that in future every gendarme in France will be on the lookout for your van, Bruno. You know the mob mentality, bringing down one is an attack on them all,’ Annette went on. ‘You’ll never be able to drink and drive again.’

‘If that’s what it takes, I’ll be his chauffeuse,’ said Yveline, laughing in relief.

‘Any word yet on Monique’s funeral?’ Bruno said, as Annette seemed about to end the call.

‘The post-mortem said suicide by those sleeping pills she’d taken and there was no sign of any other pill,’ Annette replied. ‘The blister pack you found in her car was some anti-allergy medi cine she’d been taking in the summer when the pollen count was high. And so, taking into account the letters she left behind, the procureur has signed off on suicide as cause of death. That means her next of kin, Dominic, is now free to plan whatever funeral he sees fit. No word yet on what or when that will be.’

‘And what happens to my gendarme, Roland Villon?’ Yveline asked.

‘Above my pay grade, but from what I hear, it’s an open-and-shut case for the two women we know about, and now we’ve heard of several more women coming forward. The drug possession charges are enough to scupper his career, although the amounts are too small for any jail time on that count. Got to go, we can talk later, or when I see you at your dinner tomorrow, Yveline.’

Yveline closed the phone and gave him a rueful grin. ‘Annette was supposed to be your surprise at dinner tomorrow.’

‘What a kind thought,’ said Bruno, as she handed him back his phone, which at once began to vibrate. Another call was waiting, and he answered, seeing from the screen that it was Julien from the town vineyard.

‘Bonjour, Julien. What’s up?’

‘Bruno, you know Maurice Galantin, who writes about wine for La Croix? You met him at a tasting last year. He just wrote me a rather disturbing letter.’

Julien went on to say that when Galantin left their cellars the other day after an early tasting, he was stopped on the way back to town by two young gendarmes and ordered to blow into a breathalyser. Or if he preferred not to, the gendarmes said he could go on his way for two hundred euros in cash. Galantin said he would not take a breathalyser but would wait for the arrival of a doctor who would take a blood test that would prove he had not swallowed a drop of alcohol. As a wine writer, he told them, he sipped, tasted and then spat. After a brief discussion, he was waved on. He noted that there were no identifying numbers on their uniforms, so he wondered if they were genuine. But he had a good memory and was prepared to come back for an identification parade and was sure he could pick them out. They were both in their early twenties, one slim and dark-haired and the other burly and fair-haired, and the latter was wearing an expensive watch that Galantin recognized as a Rolex, or at least a very convincing copy.

‘That’s outrageous, Julien,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m here with Yveline, their boss, and she heard all that and looks very angry indeed. Could I drop by the vineyard and pick up the letter? Don’t let anybody else handle it. And then Yveline will accept Monsieur Galantin’s kind offer to attend an identity parade.’

‘There’s a PS,’ said Julien. ‘He gave his driving licence to the dark-haired one when he was stopped and was careful to pick it up by the edges when he got it back. He put it in a plastic envelope in case the gendarme’s fingerprints were still on it.’

‘Better still,’ said Bruno. ‘Do you have a phone number for him?’

Julien read out the number and Bruno thanked Julien and then called the number. It began to ring just as Yveline said, ‘Roland is the only fair-haired one and he does wear a very expensive-looking watch. It’s enough to convince even the most old-fashioned gendarme who suspects that women make these things up. A solid citizen who writes for La Croix is going to be very, very hard to deny.’

The phone call was answered and Bruno gave his name and rank and explained what he’d just heard from Julien at the town vineyard. Was Monsieur Galantin still prepared to identify these two men in gendarme uniform?

‘Very much so, and I have my driving licence in its plastic sheath so the fingerprints should still be there. I’m tasting in the Bergerac vineyards for the next couple of days so I can easily come wherever you need me to be.’

‘I’ll fix it and call you back,’ said Bruno. ‘And thank you for being a good citizen.’

He rang off, looked at Yveline, and said, ‘Are you sure you want to go ahead with this, surrendering your own gendarmes to a Police Nationale line-up? A lot of gendarmes won’t like it.’

‘Tough,’ she said. ‘I can’t have crooks on my team. This is my responsibility. Let me call J-J myself.’

Thirty minutes later, after confirming the meeting with Galantin, Yveline and a dark-haired young gendarme were in her car with Bruno in the rear seat, heading towards the commissariat de police in Périgueux. Yveline did not introduce Bruno to him, but later at a junction she asked if the road was clear and used his name: Jean-Luc.

J-J met them in the basement car park, nodding his approval when he saw that Jean-Luc was in civilian clothes. Yveline carried his cahier officiel, which contained a sheaf of paper with his complete fingerprints. Galantin had arrived just a few moments earlier, so it took less than five minutes for ten youngish men, all in civvies, to be assembled in a line-up. Roland Villon was brought up from the cells. Ignoring his fellow gendarme, he chose to stand at one end of the line, taking position number twelve.

Galantin had been briefed by J-J, and shook hands with Bruno who recalled having once met him at the town vineyard, then went into the line-up room. The gendarme called Jean-Luc had chosen position number two. Galantin took his time, pausing at each place to examine the face, to stand a little back and to the side so he could see each in half-profile.

He nodded at J-J to indicate that he was done. J-J must have briefed him not to identify anybody at this stage. He led him into a wide room, where Galantin said firmly, ‘Numbers two and twelve,’ and gave J-J the envelope with his driving licence.

One of the aides from the technical unit was on hand. Wearing gloves, he used tweezers to slide the licence from its plastic sheath, dusted it with fingerprint powder, shook it clean, then placed the licence in a small black box and closed the lid. There was a brief flash of light at the edges of the box, and then a piece of paper came from a slot bearing the prints that had been on the licence. The technician compared it with the young gendarme’s prints in the cahier officiel and confirmed it was the same man.

Roland Villon had already been taken back to his cell, but the other eleven men were waiting. J-J went into the room where the ID parade had been held, summoned Jean-Luc to him and told the others they were free to go.

‘You are under arrest for falsely demanding money with menaces while wearing official uniform,’ J-J said. ‘Your superior officer is here and she will arrange a lawyer to represent you, but for the moment you are in custody and your status as a gendarme and officer of the law is hereby suspended. Do you have anything to say before you are taken down to the cells?’

Jean-Luc gazed helplessly at Yveline, then at J-J and back at Yveline whose face was blank and sombre. He swallowed once, then twice, and said, ‘It was him, Roland, his idea. He sneered at us if we didn’t join in. Everybody does it, Roland said. I recognized the wine man from the vineyard, the one who defied us to try. Roland said they’d all be over the limit when they came out from tasting.’

‘If you wish to make a statement, it may go easier for you,’ J-J said. ‘You can give it to me or to your superior officer, as you like. Or you may want to wait for the advice of a lawyer. Up to you.’

‘I’ll tell you everything I know,’ Jean-Luc said. ‘I felt in my bones this would happen. It’s actually a relief of sorts. Do you know about what Roland did with the women we stopped?’

‘That’s what got you into trouble,’ said J-J. ‘You picked a woman who works for the bishop and another who works for the politicians who run this département. You couldn’t have picked two worse victims if you tried. Was it always you on patrol with Villon?’

‘If you don’t know, I’m saying nothing,’ said Jean-Luc. It was a brief show of spirit, but Bruno bet that it wouldn’t last, not once the cell door closed behind him.

‘Up to you, but you won’t get another offer,’ said J-J. ‘And if we don’t get it from you, we’ll get it from that other lad you shared that rented house with. What was his name, François? We’ve got a car heading down to St Denis to pick him up and I expect he’ll tell us everything you don’t. Either you help us now or take your chances with the cells, the lawyer and the court,’ he went on. ‘You’re looking at six years, minimum. You’ll discover that disgraced gendarmes aren’t popular in prisons. Still, a good-looking youngster like you can probably find some big, hunky protector to keep you alive, if you’re very nice to him.’

Five minutes later, having said he did not require the services of a duty lawyer, Jean-Luc was sitting in an interview room with a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. A tape recorder whirred gently in the background as the young gendarme recounted to J-J the various crimes of Villon and his partner François.

‘I blame myself,’ said Yveline, as she and Bruno drove back to St Denis. ‘I knew it was a disaster, sending those young recruits off from the gendarmerie to live in a rented house without proper supervision. But the general insisted that he wanted the new recruits to know the area before we all moved into the new gendarmerie. I should have put my foot down firmly, put my job on the line if necessary, and said no, even if we had to order some of the veterans off into rentals. Those three were an unsupervised disaster waiting to happen.’

‘Did you keep copies of the memos you sent, urging that? And copies of the general’s replies?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘In that case, can we find some way to let the general understand that you have lots of ammunition in writing for any disciplinary action he might want to bring?’ Bruno said. ‘Our Mayor might be one option, or perhaps my executive assistant, Colette. She knows more about what she calls office jiu-jitsu than you or I ever will. And from what I know of your rules, you now have more than a platoon’s worth of gendarmes, so you’re supposed to have a junior officer to help out, as well as another sergeant to back up Jules.’

‘We don’t have sergeants in the gendarmes,’ she said wearily. ‘A senior warrant officer is known as a maréchal des logis and he has three stripes on his epaulettes, which is why you and everybody else all call him Sergeant Jules. If I have my way I’ll get him promoted to adjutant-chef or even major. But you’re right about the station rules. We’ve been understaffed in senior ranks for months. All I have is Jules.’

‘Would you object if I call around to find out the staffing elsewhere in the département?’ Bruno asked. ‘I think you’re doing more with fewer staff than other units, and that may be deliberate, to put pressure on you.’

‘I’m used to that,’ she said with a bitter laugh. ‘I think it’s easier than that. The problem is you, Bruno. There’s not much crime in St Denis, nor up and down the valley now, thanks to you. We have more people in the valley than in the whole of Périgueux, but only about one third of their reported crimes. That’s why I’ve been undermanned and underfunded.’

‘Am I supposed to be sorry?’ he asked, grinning.

As Yveline’s car reached the outskirts of St Denis, Bruno’s phone vibrated. It was Annette, saying she was meeting Célestine for drinks and dinner at Petit Saïgon in Sarlat at seven. Would Bruno like to join them?

17

The restaurant was on the same street as the building where Bruno had first met Laura and her basset, and the penthouse where he’d been the previous evening. As he walked down the street with Balzac beside him, the building was dark except for the top floor, and Bruno wondered what Dominic might be doing. The man was a mystery, a type he’d not encountered before, seemingly mild-mannered but swift to anger, and always watchful, as if ready to suspect the worst of those around him.

He must have had a grim time growing up in that orphanage in Strasbourg, Bruno reflected, where he’d been one of the few white boys. Bruno’s boyhood had been very different. He could not recall any black boys at his own orphanage, and only one Arab who was an excellent soccer player and therefore popular. On instinct Bruno didn’t much like Dominic but didn’t want to judge the man when he knew so little about him. There was an old blues number that came into his head, about walking a mile in the other guy’s shoes. Bruno’s childhood had not been wonderful, but it had probably been a cakewalk compared to what Dominic had gone through. With a French mother and a German father, neither of whom wanted him, Dominic must have asked himself if he could ever be at home anywhere.

Bruno recalled the cold and distant tone of that extract from Monique’s farewell letter to her husband. Reading it, Dominic must have felt a sense of inadequacy, of having failed the one woman who had opened her heart and home to him, until she sent him that final, grim screed. And Dominic must have known that Bruno and Annette had each been required by their roles to read the letter. Others would probably have read it, too, staff members in the procurator’s office, the local police perhaps, and there would doubtless have been gossip spreading around the social circle that Dominic had shared with Monique.

Bruno turned his thoughts to Célestine, the woman he was about to meet. She was already building an impressive political career, which meant that Bruno could probably expect to be dealing with her for the rest of his active life. Cops and politicians might not always like nor trust one another, but most of them understood the need to find some common ground. They were, after all, supposed to be engaged in the same business: serving the people, the public order and the common good. That, at least, was the principle, and most of the politicians he’d known, in St Denis and the region, seemed to abide by it, more or less. He hoped Célestine would be the same.

Annette was already drinking white wine at the table with another woman who must be Célestine. He hung up his overcoat, revealing the civilian sports jacket he preferred to wear when off duty. He kissed Annette fondly and then shook hands with Célestine. He was struck by her expressive eyes. There was character in her face, he thought, a certain directness in her look and strength in her jaw. She was wearing what he’d come to think of as a kind of female corporate uniform, a dark blue trouser suit with a cream silk blouse.

‘A pleasure to meet you, mademoiselle,’ he said, bowing his head a little before adding, ‘and I regret the difficult time you’ve been through.’

‘An occupational hazard for women, monsieur, but thank you,’ she said. Her voice was low-pitched but feminine. ‘I have read stories about you in Sud Ouest which Annette here tells me do not begin to do you justice. And this is your famous basset,’ she added, bending down to caress Balzac who turned at once from his enthusiastic reunion with Annette to greet a new friend. ‘He looks far too amiable to be a hunting dog. But I’ve read that basset hounds can hunt wild boars. Is that true?’

‘Yes, but this one focuses more on finding lost children and black truffles, and collecting the delicious bécasse that I like to hunt,’ he replied.

‘If you get invited to Bruno’s table, count yourself fortunate because he is a very good cook. But if his bécasse are on the menu, be warned,’ said Annette. ‘It is not enough to eat the bird. You’ll be expected to pick up the head by its long beak and then bite through the thin skull to crunch your way through the brains.’ She shuddered. ‘Some traditions are best left in the past.’

‘Mais bien sur!’, said Célestine. ‘My father was a hunter and a serious lover of food, and when he and his fellow club members trapped ortolans, they would fatten them up and then throw them alive into a vat of Armagnac to drown and marinade, before being roasted. They were then eaten from the claws and legs up, devouring everything but the beak. The hunter’s head was covered in a large napkin while the dish was enjoyed, which my father insisted was to retain the succulent scent of the bird. My mother, by contrast, claimed that it was to hide the hunter’s face and identity from God. She refused the napkin, saying it would ruin her hair.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’ Bruno asked.

‘I’ve never tried them – it was declared illegal before I was born, not that it ever stopped President Mitterrand.’ She paused, then said, ‘I heard you defend hunting on the radio this morning and scribbled down the figures you cited of the population explosion among wild boar and deer. I checked them and found you were right. Should we bring back wolves and other predators?’

‘We may have to. Unless the scientists can find a humane way to limit the numbers. But although bringing back wolves can work in a protected area like a national park, I wouldn’t want to see them at large where humans live.’

‘You said on the radio that you had a lot of sympathy for the Greens. Do you ever vote for them?’

‘I always cast one vote for Alphonse, our own first Green on the council,’ he said. ‘Beyond that, I’m afraid that I suspect there are two tribes, urban Greens and rural Greens, and they seldom speak the same language, which is very sad.’

Bruno turned to Annette, who had chosen the place and asked what she recommended on the menu.

‘Phở, which is a traditional soup served at breakfast, is always a good place to start if you’re not familiar with Vietnamese food. I’ll have bún chả Hà Nội, chargrilled pork patties in a fish sauce-laced pork broth, fatty and rich, which became famous when President Obama was photographed eating it with an American chef and food writer. I also recommend bún riêu, which is a vermicelli noodle soup packed with crab meat, minced pork, tomatoes and greens, zingy and vibrant,’ Annette said.

‘The Obama one for me, please,’ said Bruno. ‘And whatever else you think I should eat, and I’ll have a glass of that white wine you’re having.’

‘I gather you’re the man I have to thank for bringing my attacker, that gendarme, to justice,’ Célestine said.

‘No thanks needed. He’s already been charged with one count of theft, another of demanding money with menaces, and the assault case against you has now been widened to include several other women. And have you heard they found cocaine in his quarters?’

‘Idiot. But never mind the drugs, why did it take so long to arrest him after my own testimony and that of the woman on the diocesan council?’

‘I don’t know the details of your case, but I imagine it was partly because the place where you were stopped wasn’t listed on the patrol schedule of any gendarme unit in the region. He was wearing no identification beyond a uniform shirt, and the number of his motorbike had been obscured, so his identity was unclear. And relations between the gendarmes and the Police Nationale are not always as friendly as we might like.’

‘Should they not be improved, or perhaps the two police forces might be amalgamated?’

‘Relations should be improved, certainly. Fused into one body, I’m not so sure. Since the days of Napoleon our politicians have been wary of putting all policing powers into one organization, just as they usually like to separate their domestic intelligence agency from the international one. It’s the old tradition of divide and rule. But tell me about your work. Do you work for the party or the local government?’

‘Both, in that I’m a party member, but now paid by the département and if my party lost control, I’d be expected to resign. My job is to run two task forces; one on the future of public transport in what is a largely rural département, and the other on ways to recruit doctors and dentists when most of them want to head to the big cities as soon as they’re qualified. We need to examine possible policies, try to assess how and if they would work, what they would cost, whether they’d been tried elsewhere and so on. I’m supposed to do that without allowing my politics to influence my recommendations, which isn’t easy.’

‘Good luck with finding the doctors.’ He looked at Annette. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard Fabiola complaining about the shortage of all kinds of medical staff, including nurses. Do you want to stay in that role, Célestine, or eventually stand for election?’

‘I’ll be on the party list for the next département election, and hope I’ll be on the list for the national and European elections. I’m a passionate European. That’s where I want to make my career.’

‘How did you first get interested in politics?’ he asked. ‘Was your family political?’

‘Not very, although they always voted. My grandfather was the militant, one of the children of ’68. I was radicalized partly by him and his stories, but also I was outraged by Sarkozy and his conviction for bribing a judge to cover up illegal donations and then the campaign funds scandal. It all made French politics seem so squalid. How about you, Bruno? Are you political?’

‘I usually vote one way for the President and the other for the parliamentary elections, but it’s difficult now with Macron taking up most of the centre ground, so the left and right each became more hardline. Local elections are easier, where you can vote for a person rather than some symbol on TV.’

‘Annette tells me you don’t have a TV. Is that true?’

‘Yes, although I have a radio and a laptop. But I prefer reading books, being in my garden or walking my dog—’

‘And cooking,’ Annette interrupted. The women laughed affectionately, but Bruno fancied he noticed a shift in atmosphere behind the mirth, Annette giving her friend a meaningful look.

‘I’m surprised that you haven’t asked me what happened with the gendarme,’ Celestine said. ‘Aren’t you curious?’

‘Of course, but it’s not my job to pry, and if you want to tell me I’m certain you will. Whatever he did, it must have been awful.’

‘It was bad enough. He opened my car door and groped painfully at my breasts, bruising them and tearing my bra. Then he opened his fly buttons and made it clear what he wanted me to do. I said “Never,” started the car and drove away fast, and was as relieved as I was surprised that he didn’t follow. I drove straight to the commissariat and told a senior woman cop whom I knew exactly what had happened. She had my breasts photographed then, and again later when the bruises were more prominent.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Bruno said. ‘That sounds dreadful.’

Celestine shrugged, and Bruno inferred it had been far worse than that. ‘The cop who helped you? Was it Gouppilleau?’

‘You know her?’

‘Yes, we worked together on a similar case,’ Bruno said.

It turned out they had a number of friends in common, from her tennis club in Périgueux to Marie-Do at the radio station. She poured more wine for Annette and was about to do the same for Bruno but he put a hand over his glass.

‘Let’s not tempt fate,’ he said, smiling. ‘I have to drive back and this is no time to start dodging the gendarmes.’

‘I’m on foot, since I’m staying the night with Annette before some political meetings here tomorrow, trying to judge whether people are ready for a coalition of all the left.’

‘Including the Communists and Mélenchon?’ he asked,

‘It would hardly be a coalition without them, but a lot of people have strong reservations.’

‘Including me,’ said Annette. ‘How about you, Bruno?’

‘I’m not very political but I don’t like the hard left and can’t stand the hard right,’ he said.

‘That’s less an answer than an evasion,’ Célestine said. ‘This is just between us and I’m curious. Give me an idea of what you really think.’

He shrugged. ‘I’d probably be a Gaullist if the old man were still with us, and I’d like to bring back national service. It need not be in the military, but in hospitals, schools, community work. I think it’s good for young people of every social class and ethnic group to learn to mix and train together, yes, and share foxholes, too,’ he said. ‘And I don’t like the way the internet is starting to replace our newspapers, with their traditional belief in the free press. I think the national debt has been allowed to get out of hand and our world is becoming dangerous again so we need to get more serious about defence. Billionaires should pay more taxes. That’s about it.’

‘Nothing about immigration?’ Célestine asked.

‘Some of the hardest-working people I know are the immigrants in our market in St Denis; the Vietnamese, the Senegalese, and one of our best teachers is an Arab from Algeria. The deputy head of our fire brigade is a Tunisian. You ought to see our under-twelves rugby team, it’s like a miniature United Nations.’

‘You’re not typical, then,’ she replied. ‘For every answer I hear like that, Bruno, I hear three or four others about drug dealers, unemployed scroungers, rapists, anti-Semites, bullies of their own women . . .’

‘Okay, you asked for it,’ he said with a shrug and a half-smile. Then his voice became more serious. ‘Most of the women I know, like you and Annette, and Annette’s friends in St Denis, Pamela and Fabiola and Yveline and Jacqueline, all clever well-educated women, have not a single child between them. If women like you aren’t having babies, then we need immigrants or the country grinds to a halt.’

A silence fell, then each of the two women spoke at once. Annette retorting, ‘What about you, Bruno, you have no kids that I know of.’ And Célestine was saying, ‘This planet is already overpopulated . . .’

They both stopped speaking, and into the silence Bruno spoke quietly.

‘A woman I loved was carrying a child of mine and had it aborted without my knowledge, and told me only when it was over,’ he said. ‘It was the saddest moment of my life. I’d have happily raised the child myself if I’d been given the option. But I wasn’t and here I am, childless. There’s no law that says life has to be fair.’

A silence fell, heavy as stone, and endured as the waitress came to start clearing away the plates and asking with bright, professional geniality, if they had enjoyed their meal. They answered automatically and, chastened, she withdrew into the kitchen but Bruno saw that she continued to watch them.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I really didn’t mean to put a damper on this very pleasant evening.’

‘It was my fault,’ said Célestine. ‘I pressed you and got rather more honesty than I’d expected.’

At that moment, Bruno became aware of a man who had entered the restaurant some time earlier and taken a chair in a corner, details Bruno had noted almost subconsciously. The stranger had then studied the menu for an inordinate amount of time while holding it close to his eyes with one hand. This was odd behaviour but Bruno didn’t react until a second glance caught the glint of something reflecting the light from a wall lamp. At which point Bruno realized that the stranger was taking photos of their table with a mobile phone, almost – but not quite – hidden by the menu.

He rose quickly, went to the table, snatched away the menu with one hand and seized the phone with the other, pushing the man back into his seat. He half-registered two small knobs sticking out from the sides of the phone.

‘Call the police, Annette,’ he said. ‘We’re being spied on.’

With that, he slipped the phone into his pocket and used his arms and hips together to slam the table hard against the man’s belly, trapping him on the cushioned banquette that ran along the wall. Keeping the weight of his body against the table, Bruno looked at the phone, saw it was still in camera mode and that the man had been filming him, Annette and Célestine at their meal.

‘Give me that back,’ snarled the man, unable to touch Bruno or reach the phone. By this time, Bruno had his police ID card ready to show to the alarmed waiters. They quickly backed away.

‘Célestine,’ he said, ‘please take the phone, note the film he’s been taking of us and see what else it shows.’ He handed it to her and she began exploring the device with Annette.

‘He’s a private detective, Raoul Condorcet,’ she said. ‘He has a landline starting with 0553 so he’s local, and there are emails from the notorious Poincevin.’ She was scrolling through, then looked up at Bruno. ‘He’s getting thirty euros an hour to watch what I do and note whom I see, up to fifty per hour for over eight hours in any one day.’

‘Check some of the older photos,’ Bruno suggested, keeping his eyes fixed on Condorcet. ‘Annette, are the cops on their way?’

‘Messager lives just up the hill and is coming himself,’ Annette replied, referring to the town’s chief of police, with an equivalent rank to Bruno and at sixty-two, close to retirement.

‘You can’t keep me here,’ panted Condorcet. The edge of the table jammed between his ribcage and his hips was keeping him short of breath. Other diners began taking photos of the odd scene of a man trapped by a table while two women went through the phone he’d been using to spy on them.

‘I’m not keeping you here,’ said Bruno amiably. ‘The table is. And we’re just waiting for the chief of police of Sarlat to tell us if this spying on us is legal. The magistrate who is dining with us thinks you don’t have the right to film or record us without our permission, which you did not seek and were not granted.’

‘This is a public place,’ Condorcet protested.

‘Under French law, even in a public place permission is required if your photo is taken when you are isolated and recognizable,’ Annette said, as Messager came through the door in plain clothes, a uniformed young policeman at his heels. ‘The courts have upheld a limited right to privacy in a restaurant, since you may claim to be renting a table for a specific time.’

‘Bonsoir, Annette, Célestine et Bruno,’ said Messager. ‘Is this the man you claim was spying on you?’

‘Bonsoir, monsieur le chef de police,’ she said. ‘He was taking photos and recordings, using one of these new directional microphones, without permission. Just listen.’

‘We’ll do that at the station, madame,’ said Messager. ‘Bruno, good to see you doing another kind turn, helping this gentlemen rise from his table. Let’s sort this out at the station.’ Then he paused, examining the man more closely.

‘Very unexpected seeing you here, Condorcet,’ he said, almost amiably. ‘You may not remember me, just one cop among many at Périgueux, but I remember you, our civilian tech wizard when we were learning to deal with camera phones and computers. So, you did your thirty years, got the pension and now you’re a private dick.’ The chief’s raised eyebrow was far more cutting than any comment would have been.

Annette insisted on settling the bill, saying she was always eating at Bruno’s house. At the police station, Messager took statements, confiscated the phone pending a confirmation of Annette’s interpretation of the privacy laws, and released Condorcet while temporarily keeping his official ID as a private detective.

‘Not seen one of these directional microphones before,’ said Messager when Annette showed him how the two small microphones could be plugged into one of several sockets on each side of the phone. She then played back some of the conversation Bruno and Célestine had been having over dinner. Bruno texted J-J, asking if he knew that the Police Nationale’s former tech specialist was now using his skills working for Poincevin, J-J’s least favourite lawyer.

18

Bruno was woken up at six, the winter sky still black, by Marie-Do from France Bleu. She was polite enough to apologize for the disturbance before informing him that the online web-paper of the old Front National in the Périgord was leading its new edition with a big attack on him.

He shook himself awake. He could never recall the new name that had sought to clean up the image of the old organization – Ralliement National or Rassemblement, something like that. The founders, led by the old man who had been deliberately outrageous about Hitler’s gas chambers being ‘a detail of history’, had been replaced by a smoother, younger and less provocative generation, but the old stalwarts were still there to complain about the black and brown youngsters who were now in Bruno’s junior rugby and tennis teams. They grumbled that Momu, the atheist mathematics teacher who spoke better French than Bruno, was still in charge of roasting the lamb at every town feast.

‘Why? What are they saying?’

‘They say that you prefer to choose black or Arab kids for the rugby and tennis teams instead of French boys and girls, and that you brought immigrants like Leopold from Senegal onto the sports committee, while pretending to be a French patriot.’

Bruno sighed and sat up in bed. ‘Marie-Do, why are you asking me this bullshit? We’ve known one another for years. Why take questions like this seriously?’

‘Because of the dozens of letters that come into my station manager when I don’t take them seriously. He hates it too – he’s Jewish and his wife’s Moroccan. You know that we’re obliged to reflect a wide range of views in the community and when the extreme right starts to win twenty or thirty per cent of the vote, we have to take them seriously.’

‘You may have to,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’

‘That’s a pathetic answer, Bruno. You and what you stand for are being attacked. Are you going to stand up for yourself or not?’

‘What have they said, exactly?’

She read out again the passage with which he’d been awoken.

‘Okay, are you recording? Then here goes. I want every child that is raised in St Denis and the Vézère valley to learn and enjoy sports, playing, watching and supporting. I’m delighted that last year with teams of talented kids representing our increasingly multicultural community, we won the under-twelves and the over-twelves championships in rugby and tennis and were runners-up in basketball. The colours we believe in are the red, white and blue of the Tricolor, which has always stood for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.’

‘Lovely, Bruno, and many thanks and now you may go back to sleep and forget that a third of your neighbours tell pollsters they are ready and willing to vote for the far-right. Bye now.’

Bruno sighed, looked down and saw Balzac watching him from his little hutch in the corner of the bedroom. His basset hound slept in his outdoor kennel from springtime until late autumn, but when the nights grew cold he was welcome indoors. At first Bruno had simply put a large cushion in the corner covered by a blanket, but Giselle at the vet’s surgery had told him dogs felt more secure if they were enclosed when sleeping, almost as in a cave. So Bruno had made a movable lean-to shelter where his dog slept the night through, sometimes even longer than Bruno.

He rose, put on a tracksuit and running shoes, and went to the kitchen to open the door and look east. There was no sign of sunrise and the moon had already set, but there was just enough of its light being reflected from the clouds that Bruno could see to run the familiar path along the ridge. He set off, Balzac at his heels, musing on what Marie-Do had said.

Bruno knew that the public mood in France was sour, the cost of living was rising and there seemed to be ever fewer doctors in rural areas like the Périgord. Not much of this troubled him since most of Bruno’s food came from his garden, his hunting, the chickens he raised and the local system of barter, whereby the Baron ate Bruno’s eggs and truffles and he ate the fish the Baron caught.

This age-old system of the countryside was not as vibrant as it had been, but Bruno had seen that more and more of the incomers of retirement age were starting to grow their own food, to take up fishing, raising chickens and investing the six to nine months it took to get a hunting licence. It was, the newcomers came to realize, an engaging way to make friends and integrate themselves into the community, like joining the communal feasts of the town’s rugby and tennis clubs. Some had bought shares in the town vineyard and volunteered to spend a few days harvesting the grapes, which earned them a ten-litre box of wine.

By the time he had reached the edge of the ridge and could stare down at the dark valley below, a rosy glow was touching the clouds as the sun began to rise. He trotted back, relishing the magical way the white-frosted edges of the shrubs and woodland caught the pink light of the emerging dawn. And after he had reached his garden and fed and watered his fowl, he felt all was well with the world. After a shower, shave and dressed in uniform, he made coffee and shared the remains of yesterday’s baguette with Balzac. Then he headed out to Pamela’s riding school to greet his horse, Hector, and join his friends for the comforting ritual of the morning exercise.

As the horses came out from the stables, steam almost whistling from their nostrils as they exhaled into the frosty air, Bruno was reminded of the locomotives he had only ever seen in films and photographs. A thin layer of ice covered the water trough, and fanciful swirls of frost decorated the windows. All he could see of Pamela’s face was her nose peeking out between the scarf that covered her mouth and her huge sunglasses. Bruno could feel Hector’s eagerness to start the running that would warm his blood. But they walked from the stable yard and then trotted through the paddock and up the path that climbed the slope around the shoulder of the hill that led up past the woodland to the ridge.

As soon as he reached the open expanse, Bruno felt his horse’s muscles start to quiver and then bunch as Hector began that astonishing acceleration from trot to canter to gallop. Bruno rose in the stirrups and leaning forward with his face close to Hector’s great neck he felt that unique rocking motion that only such speed could bring. His eyes narrowed against the wind and his cheeks tingled from the chill as from behind came the thrilling sound of hooves hammering at the frosty earth, giving Bruno some faint sense of what a cavalry charge must have felt like in the olden days. He heard himself whoop with delight at the sheer thrill of the ride. If he’d had a sword, Bruno thought, he’d have drawn it.

He was still panting as his horse slowed and then stopped just short of the treeline. As he watched Pamela and the others slow their own horses and join him his phone vibrated at his waist. J-J. He answered and left it to his friends to discuss whether to ride back the same way or go down the bridle trail to the hunters’ cabin and then back to the stables.

‘I certainly didn’t know that Condorcet was now working for Poincevin and nor did anybody else. I spoke to Prunier and we’re going to have a full-scale assessment of any technical vulnerabilities we might face. So, thanks for the tip, Bruno. How did you find out?’

Bruno explained the meeting over dinner, Annette calling Messager at home and his recognition of Condorcet.

‘But why would Condorcet spy on us while working for Poincevin? Annette is sure it’s against the law.’

‘I think so, too,’ J-J agreed, ‘but the lawyers are arguing. One says it can’t be a privileged conversation between a lawyer and client since Célestine is not Annette’s client and you were present. Another says you should all sue him for invasion of privacy.’

‘What does the procureur say? He’s the one who must decide on charges.’

‘He’s thinking about it, but because Condorcet’s on a police pension we’re authorized to search his home and office. Stay in touch, and Prunier says thanks for the warning.’

Bruno let Hector follow the others down the bridle trail. The sun was now fully above the horizon. Pamela had some Scottish saying about it, but whether a red sky was good in the morning and bad at dusk or the other way around, he could never recall. At the bottom of the trail, he cantered along to join her on the wide path and asked which was which.

‘Morning rhymes with warning, night rhymes with delight. That’s how you remember.’

‘So this red sky is a weather warning?’ he asked.

‘It would be in Scotland but here, I’m not sure. The lower latitude might make a difference? Anyway, what’s the latest crisis for law and order? I can recognize J-J’s voice at twenty paces.’

‘How about “ciel rouge le soir, matin de gloire”?’ he responded.

‘Not bad,’ she replied. ‘But what about the morning?’

‘Ciel rouge le matin, journée de crachin,’ he replied, feeling very proud of himself.

‘A day of drizzle,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, that will do. In fact, it’s quite good. I was thinking more along the lines of restez chez soi avec une tarte tatin.’ But you’re trying to distract me from J-J’s call. Another crime?’

‘No, an old one becomes more complicated,’ he said, and explained the events of the previous evening. ‘Isn’t this when you usually see Annette at Pilates?’

‘Yes, at five thirty, when it’s too dark to do much with the horses. But it’s not an occasion for gossip, Bruno. It’s serious exercise.’ She gave his forearm a token tap of reproach with her riding crop. ‘Talking of serious matters, is there a date yet for Monique’s funeral?’

‘I don’t know for sure, but Annette expects Saturday. Where will it be? Sarlat?’

‘Apparently there’s a problem with that,’ Pamela said. ‘Because she’s a suicide they’re edgy about using the Sarlat cathedral, and nobody wants to go to the crematorium up near Périgueux, so they may end up using our church in St Denis because she was born locally and went to church here as a child.’

‘Has anybody asked Father Sentout about that?’ he asked as they reached the stables, dismounted and led the horses inside.

‘No idea. By the way, there was a nasty piece about you they read out on the radio from these far-right people. You don’t expect that around here.’

‘Difficult times,’ he replied with a shrug.

Five minutes later, having fed and watered Hector and covered him with a blanket, Bruno was on the way back to the Mairie. Once parked in the main square he called Laura.

‘Bruno, what a nice surprise. How are you?’

‘Very well after my ride. Laura, I’m calling about Monique’s funeral. Have a place and time been arranged yet?’

‘Not that I know of, but Dominic is in charge of all that and he hasn’t asked my or Becca’s advice, nor anyone else’s as far as I know.’

‘A friend of mine heard something on the Pilates network about there being a problem with the location. Could you get Annette to let him know, discreetly, that Monique worshipped at the St Denis church as a girl, and that I’m sure we could arrange the funeral there, with a choir and so on for a proper send-off? I’d call him myself, but I seem to be in his bad books.’

‘Join the club. I’ll get Annette to check, and look forward to seeing you, despite the sad occasion.’

She ended the call and Bruno let his thoughts linger a moment on Laura, the pleasant tone of her voice, her love of basset hounds. Still, duty called. It was almost time to go down and act as traffic cop for the young mothers with their toddlers attending the maternelle. He knew them all from his tennis and rugby classes, had watched them grow up, marry, start families. With Balzac at his heels, he wandered down to the special crossing point from the post office to the maternelle, kissing the cheeks of the two young mothers already waiting, then walking onto the crossing with one arm raised to stop the traffic. Balzac, wholly accustomed to this strange custom of his master, waited patiently by La Poste for Bruno to escort all the groups of mothers and toddlers over the road.

‘My little Delphine thinks you’re some kind of relative, because she sees you more often than she sees her grandpa,’ said Chantal, a girl whose self-confidence had soared once he’d shown her how to play a double backhand. She was staring down proudly at the baby in the pram, wrapped in layers of warm clothes, but still waving its arms and legs as if in delight when it saw Bruno peering down.

‘It’s the uniform,’ he said, beaming at the baby. ‘It always works with little girls, until they get to be old enough to know better.’

‘And when is that, Bruno?’

‘Pretty soon after they learn to listen to their mothers.’

Chantal laughed and waved goodbye as he went back to escort the next batch across. He probably made half a dozen crossings every morning, but he usually enjoyed the banter.

‘Didn’t like what they said about you on the radio this morning,’ said Anne-Marie, one of the hairdressers, waiting to cross the road with her three-year-old in one hand and five-year-old in the other.

‘Bonjour, Ramon, et bonjour, Gabrielle,’ Bruno said to the two children, giving each one a kiss on the brow before he kissed their mother’s cheeks.

‘Which bit was that, then? I seem to be getting a lot of stick lately.’

‘It was about people saying you always give preference to black kids because they were better at sports.’

‘Really?’ said Bruno. ‘How many black kids do you reckon we have in town, Anne-Marie?’

‘Five, three from Léopold and two from Jérome.’

‘And how many white kids?’

‘Four or five hundred in the collège, couple of hundred in the école, eighty or so here in the maternelle. That’s the point. There aren’t enough to make a difference, so what were they on about?’

‘I wish I knew, Anne-Marie. But people just make things up.’

‘That’s what my Didier said when he rang the station to complain, and that Marie-Do put him on the radio to say exactly that. It’s all right for us here in the countryside but my cousin Margo, the one who lives in Paris, says it’s terrible in the schools there. Half the kids are black or Arabs. She’d move back here in a flash but Paris is where the jobs are. See you later, Bruno.’

What a depressing conversation, he thought, as he walked back to the main square with Balzac. He climbed the stone stairs of the Mairie to hear raised voices coming from the Mayor’s office. Claire, the Mayor’s secretary, mouthed the word ‘Xavier’ at him, and he nodded and went to his old office. It was now occupied by Colette, who had become a fixture in the Mairie. She was nominally his administrative assistant, but as a veteran of similar posts across the regional civil service and a law graduate, Colette was far more powerful than her rank suggested. This was often the case with women in such large organizations, he had noticed, but her influence was all the greater since she was also on the board of the staff association, the trade union for public employees. Bruno was content to leave his office and the paperwork to her.

‘What are they arguing about?’ he asked Colette, jerking his thumb toward the Mayor’s office.

‘Xavier is still under the illusion that he has a political future in the Périgord,’ she said, giving Balzac a welcome biscuit. ‘The Mayor is explaining why he’s mistaken. I’m not even sure that he’s got one in St Denis.’

‘You don’t think this will all blow over?’ Bruno asked. ‘People forget.’

‘Yes, but not when there are several other councillors all thinking they have a chance when the current Mayor retires or dies in office. They may make it their business not to forget.’

‘Do you have a favourite?’

‘Yes, but I’m not saying. Anyway, the immediate issue is less Xavier than the new gendarmerie.’

‘You forget the Mayor’s friends in the Senate,’ Bruno replied. ‘Imagine the reaction if they start asking questions about a general threatening to cancel an almost complete gendarmerie to protect a nephew from charges of sexual assault, among other matters.’

‘Your political innocence is touching, Bruno,’ she said, with an almost indulgent smile. ‘The cancellation will have nothing to do with the general. My guess would be a report from a government surveyor that our recent flood casts serious doubt on the location of the enlarged gendarme centre. The gendarmes call for a review. That’s how I’d arrange it.’

‘But that’s crazy – the new centre is on higher ground than the old one.’

‘There you are, Bruno. Makes it even simpler. That means they can say that there’s nowhere in St Denis that’s fit for the gendarmes’ regional HQ. And then watch all the other towns east of Bergerac start fighting like cats to get this plum for themselves. And some of them have Senate contacts of their own.’

‘You make me feel like a country bumpkin.’

‘No, Bruno, just an innocent abroad. You’ll learn. Put that to one side and tell me why people suddenly seem to be ganging up on you – the Greens, that sad old drunk from Montignac, and now the far-right. A soldier with the Croix de Guerre, you should be one of their heroes. What did you do to upset them?’

Bruno explained the long-ago case of Dr Gelletreau’s son, seduced by a bored young woman who enjoyed combining her extreme-right politics with Nazi porn, and how Bruno had led J-J to her home, where eight members of the old Front National were arrested on serious narcotics charges.

‘They’re supposed to have cleaned up their act since then,’ Colette said. ‘A new name, a new figurehead, the old guard retired, policies rather more moderate, no more storming out of Europe, but the bones of the same old beast remain under the new skin.’

She cocked an ear to the hall where the sound of angry voices had faded. But then a door slammed shut and feet began stamping heavily down the stone stairs.

‘Sounds like Xavier has gone,’ she said. ‘In more ways than one. And the real problem is that not only will he blame you for this, but I imagine his wife will probably take the same view.’

Bruno was startled to hear this. ‘I simply tried to make him apologize and patch things up, and since she’s a keen churchgoer I thought bringing in Father Sentout might help.’

‘But in the process, Bruno, you became part of her own humiliation, everyone knowing about the affair. So the one thing that husband and wife can agree on is to blame you.’

‘But that’s ridiculous. I was only trying to help.’

‘You know the old saying about the road to hell being paved?’ she asked.

Bruno nodded, glumly. ‘With good intentions, yes, I know.’ He paused. ‘What would you have done?’

‘You started out all wrong,’ Colette said. ‘If you were going to get involved at all, and I know the Mayor was pushing you to do so, you should have gone first to Mirabelle, tell her how sorry you were, and asked her if there was anything you might do to help. Better still, you should have asked me, or some other woman of my age or older who’s seen it all before.’

She reached behind her, opened a cupboard door and pulled out two coffee capsules, turned on her machine, put two cups under the spouts, inserted the capsules and switched it on.

‘Just because the Mayor tells you how well you handle these delicate situations, you don’t have to believe him, Bruno. I know you are good at handling all sorts of problems, but I don’t think matters concerning women are your strong point. Since you’re such a ridiculous romantic, you tend to see us as ciphers of some sort: maidens in distress, saintly mums, or grannies-in-waiting, not complex human beings.’ She paused. ‘No sugar for you, is that right?’

He nodded and thanked her, musing on what she’d said, and asked, ‘Suppose I’d done what you said and asked her if there was anything I could do. What do you think she’d have said?’

‘She was probably just looking for a sympathetic ear, a man she’d long thought of as reliable and safe. But what you did closed down her options. You took Xavier to confession, even though we all know you’re not a believer, and thus you gave her a grim choice. Reject Xavier, and thus reject the rite of confession, which is tough for a believer to do with Father Sentout standing there beside you. In effect you forced her to accept her church’s teaching – in which you do not yourself believe – that confession and penance cleanse us of sin. You cynically used her faith as a weapon to force her to forgive the wretched man.’

‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I hadn’t thought it through. Is there anything I can do to put this right?’

‘Almost certainly not, but you may have helped save the marriage by giving them something to agree on, namely that you are the enemy. Now drink your coffee before it gets cold. Tell me, have you got any more enemies who’ll be rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of kicking you when you’re down?’

19

Followed by Balzac, Bruno was trotting down the stairs of the Mairie when his phone vibrated. The number on the screen was unknown to him, and he was surprised to hear that his caller was Dominic. Ducking behind one of the pillars, Bruno answered politely.

‘I’m calling to ask you about the idea of holding the funeral service in the church in St Denis. I should add that she wasn’t in the least religious. I’ve looked into a cremation, but that means people having to trek out to Bergerac or Périgueux.’

Bruno explained that the suggestion had come from Ghislaine, and while St Denis was not Monique’s local church, she and Ghislaine had worshipped there on weekends together. Ghislaine had kindly offered to have her buried in the family plot, and whether religious or not, such traditions in this corner of France were taken seriously.

‘In that case it sounds very suitable,’ Dominic said. ‘Is there time now to arrange this for Saturday morning?’

‘That’s very short notice. Next Monday or Tuesday might be better. Let me check when the priest is available. Would you want a full mass or just a simple benediction?’

‘The simpler the better, I think.’

Bruno promised to call him back, checked with Father Sentout, who had two funerals on Saturday already but would be happy to hold a simple benediction on Monday or Tuesday morning at ten or eleven and would ask for a donation to the church of two hundred euros. The burial in Ghislaine’s plot would have to be arranged separately with the undertaker. He reported back to Dominic, who declared himself pleased that the funeral could go ahead.

Bruno was about to end the call when Dominic spoke.

‘I think I may have unintentionally offended you the other evening,’ he said. ‘I wanted to apologize since you’ve been very helpful throughout this sad business. More than doing your duty.’

‘That’s fine, monsieur, not a problem. You had just suffered the shocks of two deaths in two or three days, with two long drives on top. I’m surprised you held up as well as you did.’

‘Well, I really am sorry for my rudeness and most grateful for what you’ve done for me and Monique, particularly since I gather you are going through difficult times yourself, with these Greens and right-wingers all sniping at you.’

‘Well, a bit of criticism comes with the job sometimes. We can’t be popular with everyone.’

Bruno gave him Father Sentout’s phone number, and said he’d see him at the church next week. Perhaps he’d misjudged the man, he thought, as he put the phone back in the pouch on his belt. He’d better inform Ghislaine, but it was getting cold here beneath the pillars. He climbed the stairs back into the Mairie and went to the kitchen where he closed the door for a little privacy. He left a message for Ghislaine, then called Annette to see if she or Becca Weil had any problems with the day and time.

‘That means the reading of the will should be on the Monday or Tuesday afternoon,’ said Annette. ‘Becca isn’t very religious, but I don’t think she’d have been happy to read a potentially contentious will on a Saturday. I doubt it contains any surprises, but Dominic may want to vent his feelings.’

‘I thought Monique made it clear in her letter to him that he’d only inherit the building and a share in the notary business,’ said Bruno.

‘It’s not quite so clear. According to Becca the will leaves Dominic a lifetime lease on the penthouse and all the furniture, and a small share in the notary, but not the ownership of the building and nothing at all of the conciergerie. The letter she wrote to him was probably written just before she died. She must have been tense and depressed; maybe she’d forgotten the precise terms of the will.’

‘So her husband could be in for an unpleasant surprise,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m not sure how he’ll take it. I was just talking to him about arranging the funeral in St Denis. He was pleasant enough and apologized for being rude on Tuesday.’

Annette snorted. ‘Ha! He was usually more careful about the people he looked up to than those he looked down upon, climber that he is. I suspect your status may have improved in his view.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Bruno. ‘He made a point of commiserating with me on my mauling at the hands of the massed ranks of the far right and the Greens, and all the other crap that’s come my way.’

‘You must have run out of enemies, mon cher,’ she said gaily. ‘From now on, things can only get better.’

Bruno instinctively crossed his fingers at Annette’s casual tempting of fate. He was about to replace his phone in his pouch when it vibrated again. This time it was Ghislaine.

‘It seems agreeable, in a somewhat ghoulish kind of way, now that I know Monique’s and my remains will stay close through the coming centuries,’ she said. ‘And thanks to Mister Google, I’ve been reading up on your various exploits so I’m suitably awed. I’ll come down tomorrow and hope to take you to dinner. I’ll stay at the Vieux Logis in Tremolat.’

‘Good choice, but you could always stay at my place. I have a couple of spare rooms.’

‘That’s very kind, Bruno, but in my business, we usually stay at the most expensive place available since it’s all deductible from our taxes. I’ve already booked a room, so let’s dine there. The table is booked for seven thirty. Are there other good friends of dear Monique that I should invite? Her partner, Laura, and perhaps the magistrate, Annette? I’d rather not invite Dominic. I’m sure I can count on you to arrange matters, Bruno. I have emailed you a letter for your local priest, giving my permission to use my family plot for Monique. I see another call incoming; you must excuse me.’

He called Annette first, to thank her for dinner and the opportunity to meet Célestine, and then to convey Ghislaine’s invitation to the Vieux Logis, adding that Monique was to be interred at her family plot in St Denis.

‘Ghislaine said she wanted to meet Monique’s friends, so I should also invite Laura and Becca. Who else would you recommend?’

‘She thought the world of Fabiola, and also that Scottish friend of hers and yours who runs the riding school.’

‘Pamela, of course, I should have thought of her and Fabiola. They all did Pilates together. What about male friends?’

‘I don’t think she had any. There were the gardeners she’d known for years but they were employees. There was old Monsieur Castanet at Castel Merle whom Monique had known since she was a little girl, and some of the overseas clients became friends, but that was usually more because of the wife than the husband. I know that Laura has been busy for the last couple of days phoning all their main clients with the news, reassuring them that the concierge business will continue as before, but probably not here in Sarlat, which will be a blow for my own social life. Maybe I should move to St Denis.’

‘You’ll always be very welcome, Annette. People still speak in awe of your rally skills.’

Bruno called Pamela and Fabiola, who both said they’d be delighted to join, and then Becca Weil, who accepted before saying she’d met Ghislaine once before and found her a formidable woman.

‘You’re pretty formidable yourself,’ he replied, and heard her laugh as he ended the call. Then he tried Laura but her line was constantly engaged. He sent her a text, asking her to call him. It took a while and when she rang she explained that she’d been talking to clients, reassuring them that the conciergerie services would continue as before, despite Monique’s sad loss.

Bruno told her about Ghislaine’s generous invitation to dinner at the Vieux Logis the following evening.

‘What a sweet idea, and will you be there, too? Our token man?’

‘I’m invited, but I think perhaps I should leave you all to enjoy a girls’ night out.’

‘No,’ she said, drawing the word out. ‘We’d all be very disappointed if you didn’t come, Bruno. And I find it hard to believe you’re the kind of man who could ever say no to a dinner at the Vieux Logis.’

‘Well, there is that,’ he agreed. ‘And I suppose somebody has to be sober enough to drive you all home.’

‘There, you see! You’ll be keeping the crime rate down, Bruno. It will be almost like being on duty.’

‘Mon Dieu, I certainly hope not. But I think you’ve talked me into it.’

The call ended and Bruno felt that cheery glow that comes after a little light flirtation with a woman he found attractive.

He put his phone away and went to collect Balzac from what he still thought of as his own office and was surprised to see Mademoiselle Cantagnac waving an envelope at him.

‘Special delivery from Paris,’ she said. ‘I signed for you.’

Bruno took the envelope, recognized the handwriting, thanked Colette and took Balzac with him down to his van to drive home. How strange. Isabelle never sent him handwritten letters. Heart sinking, he guessed at its contents.

He and Balzac went into the sitting room, where he opened the chimney flue and built up the embers. The stove was still warm with well-seasoned wood that he recalled chopping one weekend while she was here. He took off his jacket, sat in the easy chair he liked to use for reading and opened the letter. Before he read it and confirmed his suspicion, he gazed around the room and recalled the times they had made love in this room, on the chair, on the floor beside the fire. He remembered one time when the two of them had been in the middle of dinner, gazing at one another across the table as they ate, when each of them rose simultaneously and fell into one another’s arms.

He stared into the growing flames in the stove, then rose and went to his music player and loaded the Jacques Brel playlist they both had loved so much. He skipped ahead to the fourth song, ‘Je t’aime’, knowing that the next would be ‘Ne me quitte pas’.

Bruno was interested to see how the letter might be phrased, the tone that she sought to condemn them to history. It began with a note of amiable formality, to inform him that she was to be married, to a man who was some years older than herself, incomparably richer, at least as well connected in Parisian politics and with children already full grown. Isabelle wished him well, and knew that Bruno would feel the same goodwill for her . . .

And at this point the handwriting changed, became more fluid, evidently written more quickly. Some scent of emotion seemed to lift off the page to touch his heart as he read, that neither of them would ever forget or regret the glorious, impassioned tumult of their time together, of what they had known and what they had been and what they had lost.

‘Dearest Bruno,’ it ended. ‘Embrace our Balzac and hold him close.’

He sat, remembering, and then Brel’s ‘Chanson des Vieux Amants’ began to play, postcards of thunderstorms, packed bags, a silent and empty home in his mind’s eye.

This would never do, Bruno told himself. He changed into a tracksuit and running shoes and with Balzac trailing behind he began to race along the ridge as the wintry daylight began to fade. Below him in St Denis the streetlamps twinkled into life. This was his signal to turn and begin the trot back.

‘Embrace our Balzac and hold him tight,’ he repeated to himself as the basset hound approached and Bruno dropped to his knees and took him in his arms. They then walked back together where Bruno fed his dog, took a shower first cold, then hot, and a final blast of cold again, and changed for his dinner appointment in Yveline’s apartment at the gendarmerie.

Bruno knew that Annette the magistrate and Claire the newly promoted sub-lieutenant were to be guests, and he was delighted to see that the Mayor and Julien from the town vineyard had also been invited. Julien was a widower and the Mayor’s partner, Jacqueline, was in Paris, finishing her term of teaching at the Sorbonne before coming back to St Denis for Christmas. The thought made Bruno feel guilty about the presents he had yet to buy and wrap, a feeling that was intensified when he saw the Christmas tree erected in Yveline’s living room. There were even some wrapped gifts beneath the tree.

‘Congratulations on your promotion to the officer class, where the air is thinner, the rivalries deeper and the enemies always aim for you,’ he said to Claire, after hugging her and planting a bise on each cheek. It was the usual informal greeting to new officers. ‘And welcome back to St Denis. You’re looking wonderful. We’re all counting on you to get the women’s rugby teams fighting fit.’

‘I’m not sure my commander is inclined to give me much free time,’ Claire replied with a grin. ‘She has a reputation as a slave driver. And not much of a reputation as a cook, but I believe she’s been working hard to improve.’

‘She has breathed the air and enjoyed the food and wine of the Périgord,’ Bruno declared. ‘After that, anyone who can read and is capable of following instruction can learn to cook.’

Yveline came up to give him a hug and he handed her a bottle of his favourite Château de Tiregand, saying, ‘If I’d known Julien was coming, I’d have felt obliged to bring a bottle of the town wine.’

‘So we’re all fortunate,’ said Julien, shaking Bruno’s hand. ‘Although I do expect a little more loyalty to the town wine from a significant shareholder and director of the company.’

‘I am loyal, and the day we can make a Pécharmant I’ll be even more loyal.’

‘We could always rent a hectare from some generous landowner,’ said the Mayor. ‘And most of the Pécharmant does not produce the Tiregand wines that Bruno’s so fond of.’

Bruno, relieved that he was not the last to arrive, knew that Annette was coming and the table was set for six. Yveline had retired to the kitchen and Bruno followed. She was peering into her oven.

‘Just checking,’ she said, with a slightly nervous laugh.

‘It smells great,’ he said. ‘What are you making? I’m smelling beef but also picking up just a hint of oranges which is interesting.’

‘Gardiane de boeuf,’ she said. ‘I had it once as a girl when I was in the Camargue on holiday with my parents and we came across this dish in a restaurant in that amazing mediaeval town, Aigues-Mortes. It’s been marinading since yesterday and stewing very slowly for the past three hours. I’m serving it with rice.’

She showed Bruno a notepad where each step of the dinner was listed with rough timings.

‘Good for you,’ said Bruno. ‘I used to do that when I was learning to cook. It’s the best way to start. I think this will go well with it.’ He handed her the Tiregand.

‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘There’s a whole bottle of Bouches du Rhône red in the dish already.’ Six small bowls, each filled with half an avocado stuffed with prawns in pink mayonnaise, stood on the side, and a saucepan half filled with quick-cook brown rice was ready to be filled with boiling water and placed on the stove. Bruno nodded approval.

‘A dish like this deserves brown rice to keep the slightly chewy texture, so you’ve really done your homework,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I read that the texture comes from the layer of bran that’s kept on during the milling.’

The downstairs doorbell rang and Annette’s voice came over the entry phone. Yveline pressed the code to open it and moments later the young magistrate was there in the kitchen, having greeted the others, also with a bottle of Tiregand.

‘Hi, Bruno, it’s been far too long,’ she laughed and winked at him.

‘Ages.’ He grinned. ‘The funeral is set for Monday morning and the will is to be read that afternoon.’

She nodded. ‘And Dominic is unlikely to be pleased. Do you think he’ll stay in Sarlat? I’m not sure what rights come with his lifetime lease; he may want to move away and rent it out.’

‘I’m sure we’ll find out,’ Bruno said. ‘You had better circulate. After all, we’re dining together again tomorrow.’

‘Is this where I say we can’t go on meeting like this?’ she said in English, fluttering her eyelashes like some Hollywood vamp as she moved to chat to the Mayor. He turned and saw Claire standing off to one side, looking unsure of herself. ‘Come help me open the red wine,’ he said, steering her into the kitchen where he began to open the Château de Tiregand that Annette had brought.

‘What was the most important thing they told you at officer training school?’ he asked her.

‘Never look like you don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘Guess what we NCOs learn?’

‘Go on,’ she said, smiling.

‘An officer who tries to assure you he knows what he’s doing can get you into real trouble. So find some way to distract him. Or her.’

‘Have you forgotten that when we last met, I was a brand-new NCO?’ she replied, smiling, as Bruno picked up the bottle of Tiregand that he’d brought and began to open it too.

‘Because I haven’t forgotten I have no fears for your future, at least when it comes to dealing with the troops,’ Bruno said. ‘Dealing with senior officers is another matter entirely. Yveline is good but she’s never been a ranker, never even been an adjoint. That’s where you come in. You now speak officer, but you also spoke the language of rankers. You are bilingual. That’s one reason why I’m confident you’ll do well.’

‘Is there any other reason?’

‘Yes, Sergeant Jules thinks you’re terrific, likes you a lot. And you can trust him.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘But it sounds as though I’m coming into a real mess here. The gossip about the two young gendarmes getting arrested is alarming, along with the rumour that St Denis might not be our new base after all. What do you know?’

‘Nothing reassuring, but I’m pretty sure that my Mayor is probably better at politics than your generals. The evidence against the two gendarmes is now overwhelming. A positive identity parade not just by the women but also by a wine expert they tried to shake down for two hundred euros to avoid a breathalyser. So look on the bright side, Claire. You’re joining a brigade where the bad guys have been thrown out.’

‘So, nowhere to go but up. Is that right?’

Yveline’s voice came from the kitchen, calling out, ‘A table, mes amis.’ And she emerged, carrying a tray with the first course.

20

Dawn was breaking as Bruno drove into Pamela’s stable yard and released Balzac to pay his usual courtesy call on the sheepdogs before trotting in to greet his big friend Hector. Bruno took from the back of his ancient Land Rover a small sack of the biscuits he made regularly for Balzac, and which Pamela had recently requested for her own dogs. It was his day off, so he was in civilian clothes, a sweater beneath his riding coat to fend off the winter chill. He donned his riding boots, went to the stalls to greet and saddle Hector, then saddled Primrose, Pamela’s usual horse, and was about to lead the two horses out when Pamela shouted for him to join her.

‘It’s the radio, about you and some secret slush funds,’ she said, and Bruno could hear that the usual early morning news show had been overtaken by something out of the ordinary.

‘ . . .the headline, Secret Cash for Hero Cop, sparked curiosity and outrage in the Périgord Noir, with respected Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges accused of being on a secret payroll from the Department of Internal Security that has recently brought him a windfall of tens of thousands of euros.’

The voice was that of Marie-Do, a woman Bruno considered a friend, and he shook his head in disbelief as she went on: ‘Former Senator Gérard Mangin, the long-standing mayor of St Denis, is now on the line with us. Monsieur le Maire—’

‘This is a pack of vicious lies,’ the Mayor interrupted, his voice crisp with controlled anger. ‘Bruno Courrèges, who is indeed a hero as one of the few soldiers to have been awarded the Croix de Guerre in recent years, has not received a single centime, let alone thousands of euros, from state funds. But while still officially on the reserve list of the French Army, he has been from time to time recalled to the colours to serve France. When this happens, he is entitled to be paid according to his rank, and as chief of police of the Vézère Valley, he holds the honorary rank of a senior army captain and is entitled to a captain’s pay for his days on special duties.’

The former senator paused for breath and continued. ‘However, the fact is that he does not receive any of that money, not a single centime. It comes to our Mairie, and Bruno just collects his usual pay as chief of police, even though some of these missions have involved real danger to his life. Earlier this year, as you know from your own reporting, he was shot in the course of such a mission and went to hospital. He was then injured again while rescuing a mother and child from a car that was being swept away in the floods. He was only last month released from hospital once again.’

‘So you are insisting that there is no secret fund coming to the chief of police?’ Marie-Do asked.

‘Absolutely not,’ said the Mayor. ‘The council of St Denis and the Mayors of other communes in the valley have all been informed of Chief Bruno’s recall to the colours when our security services need his skills and local knowledge. There has never been anything secret about that. I am astonished that a reputable newspaper could have printed such a pack of lies, since no news reporter came to ask me or anyone in the Mairie about this, nor has anyone put the question to Chief Bruno.’

‘The newspaper says they have the information from – I quote – “sources in the St Denis Mairie”,’ said Marie-Do.

‘I for one find this claim difficult to believe. Certainly, none of the usual regional reporters has a byline to this story, and according to our switchboard, no press enquiries were received at the Mairie yesterday.’

‘How many people at the Mairie knew that Chief Bruno was from time to time seconded to the security forces?’

‘Let me be clear,’ the Mayor said. ‘Every elected member of the St Denis council and every mayor of all the communes along the valley was aware that, from time to time, Bruno was recalled to military service and assigned to the Ministry of the Interior, where he worked with the army, with special forces, with the Directorate for Internal Security, and on occasion with the Directorate for External Security. There are times when Chief Bruno’s local knowledge and connections have been of real importance to our security services.’

‘Have you talked to Chief Bruno about this?’

‘Not yet. I only heard of this newspaper story when you phoned me to ask about it and today is Bruno’s day off. I imagine he is out helping our local stables to exercise the horses, or out with his hunting club. He may not even know about it, having better things to do than deal with this fabricated nonsense. And so do I, Marie-Do. Au’voir.’

Bruno went to pull out his phone but it wasn’t there. Changing into his winter riding clothes, he’d taken off his usual belt and his phone was presumably resting on the seat of his car where it may have vibrated without his hearing it. And since it was his day off, he had not turned on the radio news. Instead, he’d been listening to an audio book of Saint-Exupéry’s classic Vol de Nuit on the combination digital radio and CD player that Pamela had bought him as a birthday gift.

‘I can’t believe it, you putting yourself in so much danger for no reward at all,’ said Pamela. ‘I know all the scars on your body, Bruno. It’s an outrageous way to take advantage of you and your loyalty and I have a good mind to go to town and tell your precious Mayor just what I think of his exploiting you.’

‘Please don’t,’ he said, taking her in his arms and planting a fond kiss on her forehead. ‘He’d be terribly embarrassed and so would I. The Mayor would be so much happier if I turn up in his office knowing nothing at all about it and then he can tell me the story and we can decide what to do, if anything. Knowing the Mayor, he’ll already have had Philippe Delaron frogmarched into the Mairie to confess everything that he knows about this story, whence it came and why, and who’s behind it.’

‘I don’t trust that old devil any further than I can throw him,’ Pamela declared. ‘And it’s outrageous that the Mairie gets all the money that you earn for putting yourself in danger. And remember what I told you, that Xavier would never forgive you for interfering in that row with his wife. I warned you that he’d want revenge. This could be it.’

‘Yes, you’re probably right again. Now, let’s take advantage of my day off and take out the horses. I’ve already saddled Primrose for you.’

And off they set, each with some of the other horses on a leading rein and with Balzac trotting steadily along behind. It was a chilly day but, as always, Bruno found himself surprised by the speed with which Hector’s body generated heat, so much so that from time to time he lifted the fabric of his mid-length coat from over his legs so as to let the warmth escape. It was a day to canter, with the horses trailing behind, rather than gallop freely, and Hector seemed content merely to be leading the way.

His thoughts drifted to the Mayor’s performance on the radio, which had surprised him by the deliberate attempt to mislead. It was true that Bruno was receiving none of the money directly to which he was entitled, but he would probably do well enough in the long run and he liked the idea of supporting the town vineyard with a new tasting room. A single man with no family to support, Bruno knew that his modest salary was more than enough for his needs. He grew and hunted much of his own food and used his eggs and chickens as barter for the rest. The clothing he wore most of the time was a uniform and boots paid for by the town, which also paid for his phone bill and health insurance. His biggest expense was probably his electricity and water bills, along with wine, occasional restaurant meals and the coffee and croissants at Fauquet’s café.

That reminded him. He’d need to dip into his savings to buy Christmas presents for his friends, or rather their children. Adult friends and colleagues were usually presented with bottles of his home-made vin de noix, made every year a day or two before 21 June. He’d collect fifty or so green walnuts, chop them up and put them into a big enamel pot with a lid. He’d add ten litres of local wine, bought in a box from the town vineyard for twenty-five euros, six hundred grams of sugar and a litre of home-made and not-quite-legal eau de vie from Jo, his predecessor. Other than Jo, it was getting harder to find a reliable local supplier, now that the tradition that had allowed sons and daughters to inherit the family still had been stopped.

‘Penny for them,’ came Pamela’s voice, teasing him to pay attention and stop day-dreaming.

‘They aren’t worth that much,’ he answered, laughing. ‘I was wondering what to get you for Christmas.’

‘What I need is a good maréchal to take care of shoeing the horses now that old Fernand is retiring,’ she replied. ‘Do you feel like learning a new skill, Bruno? They’re getting harder and harder to find.’

‘You’re likely to know more about this profession than I do. Think again.’

‘Okay – I choose a massage of my choice, once a month.’

‘Done, and with pleasure. Now I just have to hope that none of your friends will ask for the same.’

‘And what do you want for Christmas, Bruno?’

‘I’d like Balzac to father another set of puppies and I’ve been thinking that maybe I’d like to keep one. I’ve so much enjoyed watching him with his offspring, The Bruce and Gabrielle.’

‘Do you think he knows he’s the father?’

‘I haven’t the slightest logical explanation for it but, yes, I think he recognizes something in them that’s special to him.’

‘That’s a sweet thought,’ she said, as the stables came into sight. ‘I do hope you’re right. And I gather I’ll see you tonight at dinner. The Vieux Logis, no less. I’ll have to dress up. Have you met our hostess?’

‘Ghislaine? Not yet met, no, but we had a long and interesting talk on the phone about her friendship with Monique when they were young girls. She told me how Monique and Ghislaine’s brother fell in love, and then he was killed in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11.’

Pamela gasped and her hand came up instinctively to her mouth. ‘How awful for her! Monique, I mean, but Ghislaine and her family as well.’

After helping Pamela take care of the horses, he left for the Mairie, still in his riding clothes, to find out if there’d been any further developments since the morning’s radio show. The Mayor, Colette told him, was in Périgueux for a meeting with the Prefect about plans for a leg of the Tour de France to come through the Dordogne valley the year after next.

‘I think I prefer you in uniform to your current attire,’ Colette said, taking a dog biscuit from a box in her desk to hand to Balzac, then gave Bruno that look he’d come to understand meant she was deadly serious. ‘I assume you heard the radio this morning. I hope the Mayor hasn’t said things that may come back to bite him,’ she murmured so that he had to strain to hear. ‘Nothing he said was false, but certain aspects of the truth were unfortunately suppressed. But that tells us something important, which is that whoever leaked this story only knew a part of it, not the whole thing.’

‘That doesn’t get us any closer to the source of the leak.’

‘I disagree, Bruno. I think this means it wasn’t Xavier, since he as deputy Mayor was in a position to know exactly how and when the money would eventually come to you. The leaker is someone who only knows half of the story and believed the money would come to you directly.’

‘Ah, I see what you mean. Those who knew the real story were aware that the money was being invested in the town vineyard until the day I finally retire.’

‘Exactly, and I know of only one person who might have got hold of only half of the plan – Xavier’s wife, Mirabelle. Remember that I told you she’d never forgive you? This is her revenge.’

There was something close to glee in Colette’s eyes as she said this, reminding Bruno that she was a woman who delighted in being proved right. And she usually was. He suddenly had an image of her as a clever and rather intimidating schoolgirl, always the first to put her hand up to answer a teacher’s question. The kind of girl the boys steered clear of. It occurred to him that Pamela was a similar but more restrained version of the type. They were both women whom he respected, but it was their intelligence and their company that was the core attraction in both cases.

He smiled at Colette and nodded agreement. ‘I think you’re probably right. But it’s still my day off and I have things to do. Please convey my thanks to the Mayor when he returns for sticking up for me. Now I’m off to sort out Christmas presents.’

‘I’m told if I’ve been very good this year, Père Noël might bring me some of his home-made vin de noix.’

‘I don’t know his plans, but I hope he might bring me something like that,’ he said, smiling. ‘See you tomorrow, when Père Noël visits the market and the choir sings Christmas carols on the market steps.’

‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ she said.

He went off to the attic storeroom, to rescue the Père Noël outfit from a cupboard that housed long-lost hats and scarves and single gloves. It was draped over a hanger, protected by a large plastic bag and did not look too bad. But he couldn’t find the red hat with the furry rim and the white bobble. After an increasingly frantic search, he found it buried in a collapsed stack of Tricolor bunting flags on the cupboard floor, presumably left over from the 14 July festivities. The bushy white beard was in bad shape, but he could patch it with some synthetic spiderwebs left over from an old Hallowe’en party, more realistic than blobs of cotton wool. He found a large Monoprix plastic bag amid the flags and put everything inside it, then headed out to his Land Rover, Balzac sniffing suspiciously at the bundle.

The adults were mostly catered for with the vin de noix, although close friends were also given personal presents, but there were four children he was especially attached to: the two children of Jack Crimson’s daughter, Miranda, and Florence’s twins, Dora and Daniel. He went to the junkyard of Les Recuperapteurs and began browsing in a corner of the huge warehouse where the children’s books were stored. For Dora he bought a copy of Cent poèmes pour les enfants and for Daniel a collection of fairy tales. Miranda’s children were older, so one got Les Sciences pour les enfants and the other a beautifully illustrated book of Greek myths.

There was a shelf for new donations, and he quickly cast his eye along it for anything interesting. There was one evidently old book, and he pulled it out and saw it was by George Sand, an edition of 1876, when her death was marked by a series of new editions. It was a title he hadn’t heard of, La Mare au Diable, The Devil’s Pool, and since it was priced at two euros fifty cents, he bought it as a Christmas gift for Laura. Or perhaps, he thought with a smile, he would wrap it as a gift from Balzac for Laura’s dog. For Pamela he found a handsome fruit bowl in dark wood to add to the monthly massages he’d promised; for Florence a carafe for wine that he guessed was older than the Baron, and for Fabiola and Gilles, a matched pair of tall candlesticks in smoked blue glass. For his cousin Alain and his wife, Rosalie, he spotted what had to be a copy of a Tiffany table lamp, but it worked and he liked the soft glow of the colours. From the supermarket he bought a large roll of wrapping paper and another of sticky tape, went home and began wrapping.

He had finished the children’s gifts and was working through the adults’ pile when he heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the single track from the road below his house. Then the sound stopped, and he assumed it was some stranger who’d taken a wrong turn and would find a place to turn around or reverse down the hill. But there was no sound of an engine. Curious, he went to his sitting room, where a side window looked over the lane. He couldn’t see a vehicle but he caught a movement. A figure in a winter coat with a dark scarf around their head was flitting between the trees, stopping as if fearing discovery before dashing to the next tree. This was odd and, after the bizarre wave of media attacks on him, a little disturbing.

Bruno went to his gun cabinet, unlocked it and took out his double-barrelled shotgun. He loaded it with buckshot, put on a camouflage jacket and cap and slipped a handful more shells into a pocket. He let Balzac out of the front door and whispered ‘Chasse’, a word his dog associated with hunting. Then he went out through the back door into his courtyard and took cover beside his woodpile, waiting for Balzac to flush the game. But instead of the long hunting howl Bruno had expected, his faithful companion gave a friendly bark of recognition, which was followed at once by a woman’s cry of alarm and surprise. Bruno broke open and unloaded his gun, then left it on the woodpile and stepped out to greet whoever it was that Balzac had found.

It was Mirabelle, Xavier’s wife. She held an envelope in one hand and the other was raised, almost clutching at her throat. She swayed as if about to faint, and stretched out her free hand to support herself against a nearby apple tree.

‘I came to give you this,’ she said, closing her eyes as if not wanting to look at Bruno, or perhaps not being able to stand the sight of him. The hand holding the letter shot forwards.

‘You look as if you could do with a stiff drink, Mirabelle,’ he said, gesturing her to sit down on the bench that stood against the back wall of his house. ‘Come on, take a seat and tell me what this is about.’

She shook her head firmly, put the envelope on the bench and then stepped back.

‘It’s to say I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘The story about you. That was me and it turned out to be wrong, or only half-right, and the new woman at the Mairie came to my house and told me I had to apologize to you. But I’m ashamed and didn’t want to face you so I wrote a letter instead.’

‘Well, it’s good that you came here because I ought to apologize to you. The new woman at the Mairie – her name’s Colette, by the way – ticked me off firmly because in trying to get you and Xavier back together she says I humiliated you in front of your neighbours. I’m afraid I can only say that I thought it was a good idea at the time. I’m so sorry.’

‘We’re a pair of fools,’ said Mirabelle, who gave a sigh and then sat down beside him on the bench.

‘Is that you and me or you and Xavier, or are we altogether a trio of fools?’ Bruno asked.

‘All of us, I suppose,’ she replied. ‘And Father Sentout should never have come with you and Xavier to our house. That makes four of us. I was so cross with you, just as cross as I was with Xavier. More, even. Then I remembered that girl I knew at the lycée who writes for the Sarlat paper, the one who used to play for Beaumont. I told her what Xavier had told me, and it was a way to get back at both of you. What I didn’t know was that Xavier had told me only half the story.’

Bruno sighed. ‘Are you happy with him, Mirabelle?’

‘That depends on what you mean by happy,’ she replied. ‘Do I love my children? Yes, totally, and they are wondrous. It’s more than love, it’s the miracle of life. If you ask, do I love my husband? I’m not sure. Sometimes, I see his features in my son, and something of him in my daughter’s eyes and say, yes. Other times, I wonder. Life becomes complicated.’

They sat in silence for a long moment, and then she asked, ‘Are you going to read the letter? You look as if you were about to go hunting.’

‘I thought I might go and see if there was a plump little bécasse up in the woods,’ he said, and opened her letter. It was very short, just five lines, saying what she had done, and why, saying sorry and adding that she had been misinformed.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said. ‘You’re forgiven, and now go back to your kids. Who’s looking after them?’

‘They’re with their cousins at Xavier’s sister’s house. That family connection is one of the completely good things that Xavier brought into our marriage, the way the kids grow up together.’

‘Give them a hug from me.’

‘I will,’ she said, and gave him a quick hug with one arm and then something that was more of a peck than a kiss on his cheek. ‘Thanks, Bruno.’

Then she turned and went off down the path and Bruno sat silently until he heard the sound of her car starting and then fading away. He went across to retrieve his shotgun from the wood pile, emptied his pockets of shells and locked everything away in the gun cupboard.

He finished wrapping and labelling the gifts, then went to the cupboard that he used as a cave and took out two bottles of vin de noix and wrapped one for Mirabelle and Xavier and another for Xavier’s sister, Melissa. He added them to the crate that already held bottles for the Baron and Jack Crimson, for the Mayor and for Colette, for Michel of the town works department and for Sergeant Jules at the gendarmerie.

Then there were more bottles for Yveline, for Dr Gelletreau and Stéphane, for Ivan at the restaurant, Raoul at the collège and Jules and Hubert at the vineyard, for Annette the magistrate and Tim Birch at the Domaine de la Barde. He always gave a bottle each to Albert and Ahmed at the fire department, to Father Sentout and Philippe Delaron and Lespinasse who was chairman of the rugby club and Marianne at the tennis club. That only left a dozen bottles for his future dinner guests until he made the next lot in June.

Damn, he’d forgotten J-J at the commissariat de police, Horst and Clothilde at the prehistory museum, Léopold and Fat Jeanne in the market, Fauquet at the café, Amélie in Paris and the musicians Flavie and Rod Macrae. He’d just have to make an extra dozen bottles next year. At least . . .

He would also need some extra bottles to take along to several predictable festivities during the Christmas and New Year season, so before heading to the riding school to help Pamela with the evening exercise, he stopped at the saleroom of the town vineyard to buy a case of four whites, four reds and four of the remarkably good sparkling wine. To his surprise, his cousin Alain was there, measuring tape in one hand and a notebook in the other.

‘It’s for the new tasting room for visitors,’ said Alain. ‘They can’t make up their minds whether they want to convert one of the old buildings at the Domaine alongside the chateau or build something new here by the chais where they make the wines.’

‘What do you think?’ Bruno asked. ‘You’re building it.’

‘There’s more scope here,’ Alain said. ‘At the Domaine they’ll be cramped for space because they want to offer food as well. And they’ll have to go through the usual hoops of approvals from the Bâtiments de France to add or change much. Here I can have something up and functioning in time for the next summer tourist season, kitchen, dining area, tasting room and toilets. Nothing fancy, all wood on the outside, sloping roof with solar panels, septic tank.’

‘What did you think of those two I recommended you visit, Château de Fayolle and David Fourtout’s old place at Les Verdots?’

‘Very impressive, but expensive – way beyond the budget I’ve been given,’ Alain said. ‘Forty grand will only go so far.’

‘But you’ve got free labour with you and the kids you’re teaching, and Rosalie can handle the plumbing and you can do all the electrics,’ said Bruno.

‘Have you any idea of the kind of weight we’re looking at with all those bottles on shelving? The tasting room alone is ten metres by six, the kitchen will be six by six, the bathrooms the same, along with secure storerooms. I should know, because I’m having to do the design along with Michel from the works department.’

‘I thought we were getting some retired architect to give his advice for free?’

‘He’ll cast a friendly eye over my plans, but we’re going to need insurance on the building and that means a licensed architect putting his stamp on the design, which means he could be liable if anything goes wrong.’

‘Who does the insurance for the Mairie and all the other the public buildings in the town? There’s the works department, the retirement home, the maternelle and the collège for starters. That should get us a few favours.’

Alain shrugged. ‘That’s the Mayor’s business.’

21

There were now seven Michelin-starred restaurants in the département of the Dordogne – and several more were hammering on the door to be so rewarded – but for Bruno his favourite would always be the Vieux Logis, the one that had kept its rosette even in the lean years. The opportunity to dine there was always for him a rare privilege as well as a gastronomic exploration and delight. He preferred it in summer, when the tables were set beneath the trees and guests could look over the ornately sculpted shrubs and bushes of the garden. Winter had different pleasures, a sense of warmth and protection that almost, but never quite, verged on the cosy. Whether it was the musicians’ gallery and balustrades or the wallpaper, there was a discreet touch of the Lumières, the Enlightenment, about the décor, as if to tame the excesses of the Grande Epoque, although he noted that the bottled water they served was the one that had been the favourite of Louis Quatorze. All year round, the waiters and waitresses dressed in discreet black, a subtle invitation to the guests to make an effort to look their best, men and women in their finery shining in contrast to the muted staff.

Slightly stiff in his formal suit complete with cummerbund, Bruno was driving Pamela and Fabiola from St Denis. When he collected them, he’d been suitably complimentary about Pamela’s emerald green gown that went with her bronze-red hair, and equally for Fabiola’s beautifully-cut trouser suit of dark blue heavy silk, and waited in vain for praise of his own efforts. The women went at once to the ladies’ room to check that Bruno’s Land Rover had not disturbed their coiffures. Bruno was greeted by Yves, the maître d’hôtel, who escorted him to the private room that had apparently been booked for their dinner. He was standing at the table alone when Annette, Becca and Laura made their own entrance, and Bruno could not help but bring his hands softly together in well-deserved applause.

Becca was wearing a full-length gown that seemed to him North African in inspiration, and which set off her dark hair. Annette could almost have appeared in court in the black silk gown she was wearing, set off with a high white collar and some esoteric accoutrement that clearly referenced a lawyer’s scarf. Laura emerged behind them wearing a long pale blue dress of heavy silk with a wide belt in the same fabric that might have been inspired by a Japanese obi, the belt worn around the traditional kimono.

Ghislaine was the last to arrive, in a sparkling sheath that showed off a well-toned figure, her grey hair piled high on her head. She was accompanied by someone Bruno thought at first might be a chauffeur, but then realized was a solemn-faced woman in her fifties wearing a severe business suit. When she turned to face him, without any hint of smile or greeting, he saw an open-neck collar that revealed a necklace that looked like gold coins.

‘Bruno,’ Ghislaine declared, ‘I’m delighted to meet you in person. Would you please make the introductions?’

Bruno bowed and acceded, announcing first that the speaker was Ghislaine, Monique’s friend from childhood and their hostess for the evening, and finishing by introducing himself as the local policeman.

‘And this is Antonia Laperrine,’ said Ghislaine, gesturing to the stranger. ‘She is a business associate, a good friend and a very discreet private investigator who has spent this last week looking into Dominic’s background. Antonia will tell us more later, but for now let’s sit down to enjoy the chef’s balade of the season. I’ve asked Yves to choose a wine to accompany each course, and you are of course all my guests.’

She raised a hand and as if from nowhere four waitresses appeared, carrying two Champagne flutes apiece. Behind them came two waiters, each with a bottle of Dom Pérignon from 2016. The men proceeded to pour while the waitresses retired to the kitchen and returned with amuse-bouches of foie gras, lobster tail and black caviar.

This was enjoyed amid a buzz of conversation until the first course arrived, an invention of the chef, Vincent Arnould. This was foie gras d’esturgeon, tartine de champignons à l’huile de noix, an elaborate layered dish formed of smoked sturgeon and foie gras, with a wafer-thin slice of green apple briefly cooked in verjus, and more layers of the foie gras and the sturgeon. This was then compressed with weights while being chilled so that when sliced and served it looked mathematically precise. On top of this was a thin slice of toasted brown bread covered in shavings of white mushrooms and shallots which had been marinated together in sherry vinegar and walnut oil.

As the guests stared in awe at this almost work of art, Yves entered bearing a tray on which stood eight small wine glasses. Into each he poured a generous thimbleful of Monbazillac from Château Tirecul la Gravière, the celebrated Cuvée Madame.

Conversation ceased, save for murmurs of appreciation and muted expressions of surprise and delight, followed by purrs of satisfaction and contentment as the glorious dessert wine was sipped.

At this point Ghislaine tapped her glass and invited Antonia to tell the company something of her researches and what she had discovered.

‘With pleasure,’ she began. ‘But let me begin by saying I was only asked to look into Dominic’s background late on Monday, so I’ve had less than a week. I was greatly helped by Dominic’s foster sister, Sabine Ensingen – she specially asked me to convey her regards to you, Bruno. The difference between the siblings is that Sabine was formally adopted and welcomed into the Ensingen family and Dominic never was. While they raised him, gave him a home and an education, he remained a foster ward. Madame Ensingen, the foster mother, said, “I wouldn’t trust the little devil as far as I could throw the cathedral itself,” and she claimed that her husband when alive felt the same way.’

But the husband had a sister, Antonia went on. She was unmarried and childless, a notary who had done extremely well from the expansion of the Paris suburbs. She settled in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, home to the international school and therefore popular with ex-pats. She spoke fluent English and benefited from the influx of English and German speakers. Dominic spoke both, and was taken on as his foster aunt’s apprentice while he went to university, got his Master’s degree in law and then his Diplôme d’Aptitude. After two more years under her wing, he was fully qualified.

‘He was in his mid-twenties and the foster aunt was twenty years older. Sabine and her mother are both convinced that the relationship was also a sexual one,’ said Antonia, looking around the table.

When she wouldn’t make Dominic a full partner in her business, Antonia continued, he left her and found a similar role with another older female notaire in Nantes. He remained in Nantes for two years, where he married the woman. She later committed suicide, leaving both her business and her home to Dominic. In his late twenties he sold them and moved to Bordeaux, where he found work with another notaire, a woman with an office in Talence. He did some freelance work for her, but she became suspicious of his intentions and ended the relationship.

‘I have a sworn statement on her suspicions of Dominic’s behaviour and ambitions, and a copy of the letter she wrote to her own Chamber of Notaires in which she described her concerns. These were not taken seriously as she was thought to be, one of her colleagues told me, “a woman somewhat prone to hysteria with an unfortunate record of complaints against colleagues”. Dominic then moved to Bergerac, where he met Monique in Sarlat. I can’t prove that he targeted her specifically, but I do think that they met when she was under strain by the double burden of being a notaire and growing her conciergerie business.

‘At first, I wondered if we were looking at Monique being murdered, but the evidence is against it,’ Antonia went on. ‘At the time of her death, he was already in Strasbourg, more than eight hundred kilometres away. Monique’s three farewell letters leave little room for doubt of her intentions.’

At this point Ghislaine tapped her knife against a glass, and said: ‘An interjection, if you don’t mind? I received a handwritten letter from Monique by mail in Paris on Tuesday, posted in Sarlat on Sunday. It was a letter of farewell, with kind words about our many years of friendship, a reference to my brother as the love of her life, and her determination to end that life. Here’s a photocopy of the letter that I made for you, Annette.’ She handed it across the table.

Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the next course, a magnificent mignon de veau rôti, a fillet of roasted veal, topped with a ravioli filled with the yolk of an egg which was itself topped with slices of the black truffle of the Périgord. It was accompanied with rondelles of onion and plumes of fresh asparagus that Bruno assumed must have come from a hothouse. The wine was a Château Bélingard, cuvée Ortus, of 2019, a classic of the Bergerac.

‘Mon Dieu,’ announced Ghislaine, raising her glass. ‘How I wish that Monique were here with us to enjoy this meal. So, here’s to her, wherever she might be. To chère Monique.’

The toast was drunk and then Ghislaine called on Bruno to give whatever news there might be on the enquiry.

‘I know of no news and, as Annette can confirm, the enquiry is officially over now that the verdict of suicide has been declared. But there’s one thing I should mention, and perhaps I should have done so earlier. The evening that Dominic got back from Strasbourg and read the letter Monique had left him, he started making some strange suggestions.’

‘How do you mean?’ Ghislaine asked.

‘He said that on the basis of the letter, Laura was the person who would benefit most from Monique’s death, as though that came as news to him, and that you, Becca, would be involved since you had helped her to draft her will. He even hinted that I might be involved in the plot, along with you, Annette, as magistrate. I put it down to strain, since he’d been driving all day after the stress of his foster-father’s funeral. He withdrew the remarks, saying he was exhausted and was not himself, but it’s possible that he might still nurture these fantasies of a conspiracy. He apologized again when I called him yesterday about the funeral being held in St Denis.’

‘Thanks for letting us know,’ said Becca. ‘But I hardly think he can include the medical examiner in his plot, and that would have been the key person to get the legal verdict of suicide. I don’t know who it was, and I’d guess neither do you. Aren’t they on some kind of rota?’

‘It depends whether the circumstances suggest the need for a full-scale post-mortem at the police lab in Bergerac or Périgueux, or if the duty doctor can sign off after checking stomach contents for any trace of the pills she took,’ said Annette. ‘That’s what happened in this case. Standard operating procedure. I received a copy of the med report and sent a copy to Becca as Monique’s registered lawyer. Dominic also received a copy as next of kin.’

‘Bruno,’ said Becca, ‘I’m thinking, what if he was deliberately suggesting that Laura and I were involved to shift attention away from his own role in all this? After she married him, Monique slowly but surely became a different woman, more nervous, more prone to depression, looking to him for approval which almost never came. It’s something we’ve seen happen to lots of women in marriage, that steady decline in self-confidence. And for Monique, at her age, not being able to carry a child to term was a massive blow to her self-esteem. To have a child was why she married Dominic in the first place.’

‘The more I think about it, that was something he played on, treating her like a piece of fine china, almost like an invalid, helping her into and out of chairs,’ said Annette.

‘But a lot of people would think that kind of behaviour, caring for a pregnant wife, is pretty normal,’ said Bruno.

‘Bruno, this is a thought experiment I’m trying here,’ said Becca. ‘I’m wondering if Dominic was capable of being that subtle and wicked, playing slowly but deliberately on Monique’s insecurities until she felt so worthless she did the job herself.’

Bruno shook his head. ‘Sorry, but I’m not convinced. He signed off on a marriage contract with a separation of property, so he knew he wasn’t going to inherit.’

‘But if he was confident that he could over time undermine her self-confidence, make her more and more psychologically dependent on him, then he could take her to another notaire and get her to sign a new will,’ Becca countered.

‘I see what you mean,’ said Bruno. ‘What does the law do in that case?’

‘The most recently dated will is the one that’s valid,’ Annette replied. ‘Unless there is reason to question its validity.’

Ghislaine then spoke. ‘So in theory he could have taken her to another notaire to sign a new will last week, let’s say in Bergerac or even Bordeaux, and get it properly witnessed and sent off to be registered. Then he turns up at Rebecca’s office on Monday, drops the new will on the table, thumbs his nose at everybody and waltzes off with everything.’

‘Theoretically, yes, but the letters she wrote to us on Sunday make it clear that shortly before she took her own life she believed that the old will was valid,’ said the lawyer.

‘His reaction when he read Monique’s final letter to him, which said explicitly that her business would go to Laura and her colleagues and not to him, suggests that he did not have such a new will in hand,’ said Bruno.

‘Unless he was lulling you into a false sense of security,’ said Ghislaine.

‘My motto has always been hope for the best but prepare for the worst,’ added Antonia, as a discreet knock came on the door.

Two bowls of winter salad were served. Bruno saw shredded kale, carrots and Brussels sprouts, diced apples and some roasted pumpkin, along with goats’ cheese and hazelnuts, all glistening with olive oil and giving off scents of fresh lemon juice and ground pepper.

As the door closed behind the waiters, Antonia went on to propose some discreet enquiries among the notaires in the rest of the département, or wherever Dominic might have reliable contacts.

‘I don’t think we need to worry overmuch,’ suggested Laura. ‘For me and the other employees, the important part of Monique’s heritage is the company, and the majority of the shares are already in our names. Dear Monique was down to just under thirty per cent of the shares, so even if he did play dirty with the will, Dominic won’t have control and the rest of us can always outvote him.’

‘Your faith in your fellow employees does you great justice, Laura,’ Ghislaine observed.

‘The Monique I knew wouldn’t have gone along with any last-minute changes to her will,’ said Pamela.

’I agree,’ Fabiola chimed in. ‘She was made of sterner stuff than that, an honourable woman. It’s hard to believe we lost her in such a manner.’

The salad was consumed and the plates removed, and in their place came the double-decker cheese tray, which could be carried by a single waiter and then opened to become twice the size. Unusually, it included some British cheeses among the French classics, a Cornish Yarg and a Sparkenhoe Red Leicester, and seeing that Pamela and Laura had each chosen them, Bruno followed suit, partly from curiosity, partly because he thought each of them to have good taste. Then he noticed that the cheese had come with a dusty bottle of old port, a dessert wine that Bruno had only hitherto tasted at the table of his friend Jack Crimson, a retired British diplomat.

The Yarg was odd, creamy on the outside and then crumbly in the middle, and the Red Leicester was silky in the mouth, a slightly sour taste balanced by a nutty flavour. He enjoyed both cheeses and sipped at the port with pleasure, while he wondered which dessert Vincent would serve them this evening. Or perhaps which dessert Ghislaine had chosen for them, as she had evidently arranged the whole meal in advance; there had been no fussing over menus and choices. He had dined very well indeed, felt not at all full, and had drunk sparingly. He saw from the watch on Annette’s left wrist beside him that it was still some minutes short of ten.

As the cheese plates were removed, Ghislaine raised her glass again.

‘Thank you all for coming,’ she said, ‘and I’m sure I speak for all of us women that we were pleased to have a very agreeable monsieur among us. It’s always a risk, throwing a Daniel into a den of lionesses, but we didn’t have to growl once. Thank you, Bruno. It says a lot about our dear Monique that she had such lovely friends, and I’m sure all our lives were enriched by having known her. After her funeral, I shall endeavour to stay in touch with you all.’

Heads around the table nodded and there were murmurings of ‘Well said.’

Laura raised a hand.

‘Recently I probably spent more time with Monique than almost anyone, working alongside her day by day, although I know, Ghislaine, that you and she were friends for nearly forty years. And Becca, you and she were close throughout the Sarlat years, and then Annette joined your friendship and Pamela and Fabiola widened it with the Pilates sessions we enjoyed, and which did us all so much good. Monique was a very special woman, and we are all honoured to have known her as a friend, and I cannot think of a better way to remember her than to dine here, together, all of us thinking what a fine woman she was and how much she’d have loved to have been here with us.’

Then each of the women said a few words, recalled something especially kind or wise that Monique had done or said, and Bruno suspected that at least one waiter was listening in, since when the last voice had spoken, the door opened. Servers entered with trays carrying what looked like drinks in white mugs, on flat white plates that contained raspberries flecked with cream and then red rolls of something that looked like sliced beetroot.

‘What on earth . . .’

On cue, Vincent appeared at the door, and each of them began to applaud but the chef raised a hand. ‘I know you’ve had your cheese course,’ he said, ‘but I call this dessert my vacherin – a vacherin aux framboises, sorbet framboises betteraves. And thank you all for coming, and Bruno, my friend, I think you must be the luckiest man in France tonight!’

As he left to applause, the group was exploring the plates before them, realizing that the white mugs were made of meringue and that they contained a sorbet of raspberries and beetroot that had been transformed into something unusual and sublime, a pavolva named for a cheese and in this instance topped with a vanilla-flavoured Chantilly cream.

‘I hate to break this perfect mug, but I do so love meringue,’ Ghislaine declared, tapping the side of the tall, white tube until it shattered and the mingled juice of beetroot and raspberries flowed bright crimson against the perfect white of the meringue.

22

The dinner party at the Vieux Logis had gone on a little longer than Bruno had anticipated, then the drive back to St Denis had been interrupted by a phone call from Kyiv, where Fabiola’s partner, Gilles, a journalist, was waiting for the Russian invasion that he and his hosts were convinced was coming. But it wasn’t coming just yet, they had agreed, and Gilles felt he was free to fly back to St Denis for Christmas. Fabiola, understandably, wanted to celebrate this news. Pamela and Bruno felt obliged to help drink the bottle of Champagne that she opened as soon as they reached her home. Bruno stood, gamely nodding his head, smiling and sipping Champagne he did not want as Pamela and Fabiola discussed emergency appointments at hairdressers, special welcoming dinners (one of which Bruno had been convinced to cater) and Christmas presents. Then Fabiola burst into tears at the thought her partner would be going back to Ukraine early in the New Year and Gilles was sure that war would follow.

He then had to drive Pamela home, and, given the knowledge that he was to see Laura and her beautiful basset on Sunday, Bruno was a little nervous about how the night would continue. He and Pamela had been for some time deeply affectionate and loving friends, each aware that their liaison had no future but each far too fond of the arrangement to permit it to end. Pamela had once even ended the affair, saying he deserved the time and space and freedom to seek the wife and future mother of his children that she knew Bruno wanted. When such a mythical creature failed to appear, she had relaunched their arrangement, saying that much as she occasionally enjoyed the presence of a man in her bed, she had no intention of being woken at night by the cries of a babe in the nursery. ‘Friends with benefits’, the young were said to be calling it, phrasing that amused Bruno because every friendship had a benefit of sorts.

Bruno had long ceased to be amazed by the foresight, or perhaps the intuition of women. Their survival skills and levels of understanding went far beyond the primitive thinking of the males with their belief in muscles and the simplistic skills of the hunt. So he wasn’t entirely surprised when, pleasantly relaxed from Fabiola’s Champagne, Pamela brought up the topic he’d hoped would not be broached that evening.

‘I enjoyed meeting Laura this evening,’ she said, ‘and I understand you and she have a devotion to basset hounds in common.’

Instantly sober and every sense alert, Bruno wondered where this was heading.

‘Yes, hers is named after the feminist writer George Sand,’ he said, thinking that safety might lie in shifting the conversation in a literary direction.

‘She was impressed that you recognized the name,’ Pamela said. ‘And that you had even read some of Sand’s books. Who would ever expect a policeman to be literary, she commented to me, and I had to reply that our mutual friend Bruno had hidden depths, and how clever of her to notice them.’

Bruno felt these same depths now opening as a chasm beneath him and, seeking to change the subject, he touched upon a theme close to Pamala’s heart.

‘But you know how much I enjoy horses as well as basset hounds,’ he said, knowing how lame it sounded.

‘Oh, yes, my dear Bruno,’ she said. He kept his eyes on the road but he could imagine the mischievous glint in her eye. ‘There’s never been anything lacking in your animal instincts,’ she went on, ‘which explains why you’re so good at hunting or, should I say, at chasing game?’

‘A literary creature, that’s me,’ he replied, knowing as he said it that he was uttering a hostage to fortune.

‘Yes, and there are few men more dangerous than hunters who read, or perhaps one might say bookish animals.’ Now the teasing in her voice was all too obvious. He kept quiet as he turned the Land Rover into the driveway of the riding school.

‘Seriously, dear Bruno, I wish you well,’ she said. ‘Laura is an interesting woman, and unlike me she’s one who hopes to have children of her own, should the right man cross her path. A literary basset lover who enjoys his food and is a very good cook might be just the thing, so long as he understands her commitment to the business that she helped Monique to build up.’

He pulled into the driveway before her house and removed his hand from the steering wheel to take hers. ‘Pamela, you’re a most extraordinary woman.’

‘You’re not too bad yourself,’ she replied, planting a kiss on his cheek and letting herself out of his Land Rover. ‘Sleep tight, Bruno. And don’t forget your duties to the children tomorrow, Père Nöel.’

The children, thought Bruno, were usually the least of his problems. They just wanted to get close to the choir and grab whatever little snacks or goodies or fizzy drinks had been prepared for them. It was the parents who tended to be the issue. Each of them wanted to snap the perfect family photo or Christmas memory on their smartphone. And these days everyone had one: the mums and the dads, the grandparents and uncles and aunts, the teenagers, and each of them thought he or she was an undiscovered Cartier-Bresson, a born photographer. They would clamber on top of vehicles, crawl beneath market stalls, hang from lamp posts, stand on the parapet of the bridge – anything to snap that perfect image.

He could imagine it already. It would be Père Noël, par ici, s’il vous plaît . . . tournez . . . souriez . . . l’enfant dans les bras . . . avec la boisson . . . tchin-tchin . . . un petit bisou pour le Père Noël . . . vers-moi un petit instant . . . et le chien.

Cheered by the thought that Balzac would be waiting loyally by the door as he returned, Bruno drove off, turning on the radio for any late news at midnight. He found instead a late-night talk show, and he would have switched channels to get some music, but he recognized the voice of one of the guests, an arrogant drawl that suggested the man’s very presence should be seen as a gracious favour. It was the lawyer, Poincevin.

‘ . . .the whole relationship strikes me as unusual, rather odd, perhaps even a little unwholesome. I understand that they are colleagues and are required to work together, to cooperate for the common good. But as the young man’s commandante, Capitaine Yveline’s first duty should have been to her new recruit. Instead, she tossed the poor youth to the wolves.’

‘And in your view, the wolf would be, er, who, exactly? Are you suggesting that Chief of Police Courrèges is in any way responsible?’

‘The question is, what was the village policeman doing – excuse me, Chief of Police Courrèges – giving himself a free hand to meddle in the internal gendarme training of recruits? It’s unheard of, and many gendarmes tell me so, in the clearest terms.’

Bruno pulled into a convenient lay-by at the side of the road to listen, keeping his side lights on.

‘So that’s why you say this relationship between the gendarme capitaine and Chief of Police Bruno is questionable?’

‘More than just questionable, it’s scandalous,’ Poincevin insisted. ‘Courrèges was an army sergeant and is now a village policeman, given an honorary title because he acts, secretly, as the local eyes and ears of the security services, which is ostensibly not his job. It all smacks to me of double-dealing. You may want to believe in this nonsense of his not seeing a penny of his secret pay packets from the secret police, but that is the reality. He’s not a village copper, he’s a secret policeman. And he has influence, extraordinary and undue influence. That is why some poor and wet-behind-the-ears young gendarme recruit is in jail for reacting too amiably to some pretty woman he thought was making a pass at him.’

‘Not just one young woman, Monsieur Poincevin, there are now several women who have filed complaints.’

‘Are you surprised, given this village policeman’s contacts and influence? I have little doubt that he made sure the charge sheet was loaded with plausible complaints from all sorts of women, and of course an extra one from an elderly and unmarried male wine connoisseur, the type we used to call a “confirmed bachelor”.’ Bruno could hear the air quotes in the lawyer’s voice. ‘Oh yes, this secret policeman Bruno knows how to fill out a charge sheet to make things look very bad indeed.’

‘You sound as though you nurse a personal grudge against Chief of Police Courrèges, Monsieur Poincevin,’ suggested the radio interviewer. ‘Is that the case?’

‘Not at all. I have only met the man once. I was applying for bail on behalf of some poor Chinese chap who didn’t know much French and had been arrested after some misunderstanding with a Vietnamese stallholder in the market. Courrèges was rude and unhelpful and seemed to nurse some animus against the Chinese fellow, or perhaps against me. I got the Chinaman out on bail in the end despite the efforts of the chief of police. This was in the St Denis gendarmerie, by the way, where he seemed to be running the place. Not surprising, I suppose, given his connections to the security services.’

‘So what’s happening to your new client, this gendarme accused of sexual assault? Are you getting him out on bail?’

‘Oh, I don’t think Chief Bruno would want that to happen, oh no. He wants the poor boy locked up until it’s time for trial, when all the witnesses have been carefully prepared. Just the other evening he was seen having dinner with one of the women bringing these baseless charges, grooming her in her testimony, I imagine. This Bruno is quite the ladies’ man in his own right, or so I’m told, with lady loves in Paris and Bordeaux and Sarlat. One wonders how he has time for the secret police work.’

Bruno sent a message to Marie-Do at France Bleu who ran the morning show, asking her to have a full text of the interview sent to him, with copies to J-J, Yveline and Annette, at her earliest convenience in the morning. He suggested the radio station’s own lawyer should also have a copy, since the station’s late-night host did not seem aware of the sub judice rule, which banned public discussion of a pending case.

Poincevin must have known that, thought Bruno. So what was he playing at? Was it some legal trick to get the trial postponed or transferred elsewhere, or simply to buy time?

Bruno drove on home, barely listening to whatever followed Poincevin on the airwaves, but wondering whether the lawyer was shooting for some kind of mistrial. How on earth could that be made to work? He’d put the matter to Annette in the morning, but for the moment all he wanted to do was to greet Balzac, take him out for a last patrol while the dog watered the garden, then bank up the stove so it would burn all night. Suddenly he realized that with his mind on other things he’d gone past the turning to his place. He drove on, knowing he could take another road and come to his house from the back, a route he sometimes took when returning from Savignac.

As his Land Rover climbed the hill and turned right, he saw a sudden flash of light as a car door opened somewhere near his house. One figure was walking past it, another seemed to be coming out from the vehicle. That was odd. Balzac wasn’t barking to greet or warn any strangers. That was even more odd. J-J sometimes dropped by late at night but always called first. Bruno cut his own lights, turned off the motor and buttoned up his coat to prevent his light shirt from showing. He picked up some earth, spat on it and rubbed blotches onto his cheeks, brow and the backs of his hands. He had a tyre iron in case of punctures and, his Land Rover being old enough sometimes to need manual starting, an old-fashioned starter handle that could probably smash a knee.

He struck off through woods as familiar as the streets of St Denis, coming down the slope behind his property and then skirting to the side away from the usual entrance road. He could see the shadow of a car looming, somebody leaning against it, low voices murmuring. He looked for the second voice and saw that it came from the stand of trees at the head of the road, probably watching for his arrival.

He might be able to get into his house through the back door, unlock his gun cabinet, load and come out firing a warning shot. But they could be armed too. And there might be a third man, watching the back door. If so, he would have to be very good at fieldcraft for Bruno to miss him. Over the course of several minutes spent waiting, Bruno identified two voices and doubted that there was a third. There was no hint of Balzac’s presence, so they must have drugged, shot or beaten him. They would pay for that.

His immediate target was leaning against the bonnet of the car, a civilian saloon. The man was facing the entrance road, his back to Bruno. He was about Bruno’s height, the shoulders seemed broad, and he was looking up at the cloudy night. Bruno had the tyre iron in his right hand, hissed and, as the man turned, he slammed the iron onto the man’s head just above the ear, and then rose to embrace him as he toppled, a dead weight. Bruno let him down gently onto the ground.

Then Bruno slipped into the car, a standard Renault, closed his eyes and turned the headlamps on full beam for just a few seconds before opening his eyes and slipping out again to see a dazed and dazzled man standing at the head of the entrance drive with his black-gloved hands clamped over his eyes. Bruno went up, kneed him hard in the balls and karate-chopped him in the throat, then used the man’s belt to tie his elbows together behind his back. He did the same to the first man, still unconscious on the ground.

Then Bruno went to his police van and came back with two sets of large-size handcuffs, which he used to cross-lock their ankles together. He turned on the headlights of their vehicle again to illuminate the scene as he took the wallets of the two men and their identification papers.

He was surprised to learn that they were gendarmes attached to the Périgueux motorized brigade on Rue Trarieux. He knew the place well, and they were supposed to be in uniform when on duty. These two were wearing civilian clothes and each man sported tactical gloves in black leather. He pulled one glove from the man who was still unconscious; it was heavy with lead weights across the padded knuckles. The man he’d blinded with the headlights had a telescopic baton. They were planning to do some serious damage, or at least threaten it.

The intruders temporarily incapacitated, Bruno set about looking for Balzac, and was relieved to find his faithful companion just inside the always-unlocked door to the kitchen, conked out but seemingly uninjured. While checking Balzac for wounds, Bruno called J-J’s home number and told him what had happened, suggesting that a Police Nationale patrol should come and take the gendarmes away. Then he called Fabiola and the Mayor, who arrived at Bruno’s about ten minutes later. His dog was breathing heavily but seemed simply to be asleep and Bruno suspected knock-out drops in his food or water.

The Mayor used his own phone to take photos of the two immobilized gendarmes and their papers. Fabiola checked the eyes of the one Bruno had hit and said he had been temporarily dazed rather than concussed. The Mayor then called Philippe Delaron of Sud Ouest to come with his camera. Then he called the Prefect. She was still up and said she would come directly to St Denis. She would also alert the duty officer at the Elysée in Paris to the news of the extraordinary attack on a senior policeman by two gendarmes in civilian clothes.

Bruno woke the vet and asked him to come directly to ascertain what drug had been given to the basset hound. A hypodermic needle was found in the gendarmes’ car with a 100mg injector containing ketamine. Almost all of it had been used. Bruno checked his phone. A standard anaesthetic dose was five mg per kilo and Balzac weighed thirty-three kilos, so Bruno felt a wave of relief.

By one o’clock in the morning, the Prefect, the Mayor, Prunier, J-J and Philippe Delaron were all standing in Bruno’s garden, drinking Scotch as they kept watch on the ambushers and waited for the arrival of the general of gendarmes for the département, who had spluttered in confusion and bafflement when called from his bed by the Prefect. The two handcuffed gendarmes had, after a few curses, sensibly kept silent, although both were now shivering.

The general’s official Peugeot 5008, his personal driver at the wheel, had trouble finding room to park with all the other cars clustered at the top of the lane that led to Bruno’s house. It was forced into a place some way down the hill and the general was out of breath when he came to attention in front of the Prefect and saluted.

‘Do you have an explanation,’ demanded the Prefect, ‘as to why two of your gendarmes in civilian clothes, using a private car, should lie in wait to ambush the chief of police?’

‘The two gendarmes are off duty, madame, and they were not under any orders to come here,’ the general replied. ‘I have no explanation for their behaviour and the head of their brigade was surprised, indeed shocked to hear of this. I have no objection to their being taken into custody of the Police Nationale, questioned and duly charged.’

‘Is it possible that over-zealous loyalty to the gendarmerie after the charging of a gendarme with sexual offences might have led to this extraordinary attack?’

‘That may be so, Madame Prefect, but I couldn’t possibly comment.’

The Prefect asked Philippe Delaron to back away out of hearing, as a courtesy.

‘I’m under orders to report back your reply to the Elysée where officials of senior rank are waiting for my report,’ she went on. ‘I will give you five minutes to come up with a better answer and then I will leave your career in the hands of the Elysée. I think we both know that another general is involved in this unhappy saga, the uncle of the young man who should never have been allowed into the gendarmes. You might want to consider whether your career ends with this squalid affair or whether the boy’s uncle takes the responsibility. Five minutes, then it’s on your own head.’

‘Thank you, madame.’

She turned away and then waved Bruno to join her, walking towards his chicken coop.

‘I assume you think this ambush was linked to that dirty-minded young devil with the uncle who’s a gendarme in high places,’ she said.

‘It seems that way, madame,’ Bruno replied. ‘And you know that the same senior officer has threatened to cancel the new gendarmerie in St Denis.’

‘Not on my watch, he won’t,’ she said, glancing at him. ‘I’m told you came up with the extra evidence that nailed the gendarme, but I don’t know the details. I’d like to hear them.’

Bruno explained the attempted shakedown of the wine taster who had then written a letter about this to the vineyard, who then informed Bruno.

‘That’s how I learned about it, took the vintner’s statement and brought him into an identification parade, where he confirmed the identifications made by the women, Célestine and the bishop’s secretary,’ Bruno said.

‘So the testimony of one man was taken more seriously than the testimony of two women, however well-connected,’ she said, rolling her eyes.

Bruno shook his head. ‘Not quite. Villon had already been arrested and placed under garde à vue by J-J before we heard about the wine taster.’

‘But was that not because of the cocaine found among Villon’s possessions?’ she asked.

‘It’s all interlinked. But there’s another aspect to this,’ Bruno went on. ‘Villon’s lawyer is Poincevin, known to all of us in law enforcement as an unscrupulous man who would probably sell his own mother if the price was right, and a known – frequent – cocaine user. He was careful to be publicly elsewhere, on a late-night radio chat show, while the gendarmes were here awaiting my return. But I think Poincevin might be involved in this, and other than Villon’s uncle, I don’t know who else in this affair could afford his fancy legal fees.’

‘I know of Poincevin’s reputation, but he never quite steps over the line. But somebody certainly has,’ she said, glancing fiercely at the local gendarme general.

Bruno felt a twinge of sympathy for the man who must be feeling uncomfortably squeezed between his own chain of command in the gendarmes, and the deeper power of the state which was now, thanks to the Prefect, taking a direct interest in this affair.

‘The Elysée was already aware of one aspect of this because of the threats to cancel the new gendarmerie,’ she said.

‘Yes, the local general you’re about to interview seemed to be acting under orders that he did not like.’

The Prefect gave Bruno a stern look. ‘Why is this the first time I’m hearing anything about that from you?’

‘Because the Mayor told you, indirectly through his old friends in the Senate, and he doubtless suggested that they should call you for details, such are the machinations of the State. And with all due respect, Madame Prefect, I work for the Mayor and council of St Denis.’

‘And for General Lannes and the DGSI,’ she retorted.

‘When summoned back to the armed forces, yes, I come under his orders. But not in this case.’

‘Very well, Bruno. I may need to talk to you again before I make my report to the Elysée.’

‘I’m at your disposal, Madame Prefect.’

‘And I hope your dog gets better soon, Bruno.’

‘Thank you, so do I.’

23

Having got to bed after two a.m., Bruno was not feeling his best later that morning as he changed into the Father Christmas costume in the men’s toilets at the Mairie. Balzac had slept right through and was breathing normally again when Bruno left him in the little cave-like sleeping space in his bedroom. Bruno had showered, shaved, and dressed, feeling grumpy at having missed his morning run, and went into town, where he was so late he had to park on the far side of the river. At least he’d remembered to buy the lamb shanks for Gilles’ welcome-home dinner and some cheese from Stéphane’s stall. He’d brought a sprig of thyme, bay leaves and ten heads of garlic from his garden, purchased a bottle of Monbazillac from Hubert’s wine shop, and then borrowed the largest bowl from the kitchen in the Mairie to marinate the lamb in the Mayor’s fridge. He broke each of the heads of garlic into their separate cloves and added them all to the marinade. On top of the bowl he laid a sheet of paper on which he wrote the word DANGER, adding a warning that nobody should touch this bowl on penalty of Bruno’s vengeance.

‘Ho-ho-ho,’ he announced as he plunged into the crowd, wincing at the sound of the handbell he had begun to ring, and wishing he hadn’t. And at once the barrage began as he knew it would, smartphones wherever he looked.

At least there was no foolish attempt at fixing antlers to one of Stéphane’s calves this year as a kind of make-do reindeer, a scheme dreamed up one well-lubricated evening at the hunting club.

‘Is that you, Bruno?’ demanded one cheeky child.

‘Ho-ho-ho,’ he replied. ‘Who has been naughty and who has been nice? Did you help Maman with the washing-up, and did you help Papa wash the car?’

‘Papa takes it to the car wash,’ came the dispiriting reply. Or ‘Maman puts the dishes in the machine.’

And then the choir began to sing, but instead of ‘Vive le vent’ half the children were chanting ‘Jingle Bells’, and ‘Mon beau sapin’ had become ‘O Christmas Tree’ for some kids and ‘Oh Tannenbaum’ for others and Bruno wondered what language the children would be singing in another thirty years’ time. Even that most French of Christmas hymns, ‘Il est né le divin enfant’, had an English chorus, ‘Play the oboe, sound musettes.’ It just proved how ruthless the English had been in their plundering of the French language with its original name for the instrument, Jouez hautbois, résonnez musettes!

But Bruno knew the tune he wanted to sing and his heart swelled as he belted out the words he had known all his life:

Ô peuple fidèle,

Jésus vous appelle,

Venez, triomphants, joyeux,

Venez en ces lieux !

Ô peuple fidèle,

Venez voir le roi des cieux ;

Que votre amour l’implore,

Que votre foi l’adore

Et qu’elle chante encore

Ce don précieux !

It didn’t seem to matter that Jack Crimson, Miranda and her children, along with Pamela and some of the other British and American voices in the crowd, were roaring out their version of ‘Oh come, all ye faithful’ to its grand old rousing tune. Bruno could close his eyes and almost remember the smell of the incense at mass as the familiar words took him back to the little chapel of the church-run orphanage where he had spent his first years.

He blinked to brush away the tears that had suddenly formed and into the silence he waved his handbell and called out again, ‘Ho-ho-ho, Joyeux Noël. Merry Christmas, everyone.’

Then the choir broke into ‘Douce nuit, sainte nuit’, ignoring the solitary protest of the wife of Montsouris, the only Communist on the town council. She was far more militant and leftist than her husband. She was standing at the edge of the small square above the steps and waving a tall pole with a placard that read, ‘Christmas is a Religio-Capitalist PLOT’.

At least she’s not targeting me for once, thought Bruno, and at that moment she twirled the pole around so he could see the slogan on the placard’s other side that read: ‘BRUNO is a SECRET policeman’.

And Merry Christmas to you, too, he thought, as the choir launched into their farewell song, ‘Minuit, Chrétien’, and began marching back to the church. They were followed by all the children whom Bruno had to lead towards the little path past the church to their feast at the retirement home, where the entrance hall was today framed by balloons.

Inside the big dining hall, where a huge Christmas tree stood in pride of place, rows of tables were laden with little sandwiches of ham or cheese or pâté, almond tarts and apple pies. There were cakes with a thick layer of jam in the centre and cream on top, plate after plate of home-made biscuits and bottles of every fizzy drink that was available in the local supermarket, from orange soda to limeade, ginger beer to lemonade, and every form of cola. Elderly women were standing like so many soldiers behind the loaded tables, gazing fondly at their grandchildren as they lined up ready to dive into the food.

Groups of parents, knowing from experience the chaos that a large number of children in a limited space can wreak, were watching nervously from the back of the hall. But this was a Père Noël with a voice of command, determined that the heroic efforts of the catering brigade should not be plundered by a gang of little Goths.

‘What do we say to these kind grandmothers who have prepared for you this splendid feast?’ he demanded solemnly.

‘Merci, grands-mères,’ they all piped up.

‘And what do you wish them?’

‘Joyeux Noël,’ they chanted, more or less in unison.

‘Now you each take a plate and one tart and one sandwich at a time, and a glass of pop, then you go back to the far side of the hall and sit quietly while the choir sings their carols for you, and you can join in if you know the words. Now, you go to the tables to get some food when I give you the word and remember that you have to walk slowly. Wait for it – walk.’

The rush was on, at something close to walking pace, but once the tables were reached, little arms became tangled as they were thrust towards the food. Sandwiches slid off plates and splashed into glasses and dropped soggily to the floor until Père Noël had had enough.

‘Stop!’ he roared in a parade ground voice. ‘Now, each of you step back three paces. Go!’

With a mutinous look here and there, interspersed with looks of longing at the still-loaded tables, the children backed away.

Père Noël then made a stately parade, walking up and down between the children and the tables of food, noting that there were five tables and forty children. He got them to form orderly queues of eight children per table and they went up one at a time to fetch their food and rejoin their parents. The choir, joined by various parents and grandparents, stood by the Christmas tree and began to sing in excellent harmony, going from ‘Petit papa Noël’ to ‘Mon beau sapin’ and rounding it off with ‘La fille du Père Noël’.

Later, when the hubbub was over, someone brought Bruno a plate containing a cheese sandwich and a somewhat battered apple tart, all that remained of the feast. He put the plate down to clap his hands and ask the children, before they put their outdoor coats on, to thank everyone, especially the choir and the kind people who’d made all the food, by singing the mediaeval carol he knew they had all rehearsed in infants’ school:

De bon matin j’ai rencontré le train

De trois grands rois, qui allaient en voyage . . .

The market was drawing to a close as the clock on the Mairie struck noon and Bruno emerged looking like himself again, the constable of St Denis, with the uniform and peaked hat to prove it, the Père Noël uniform hung up for another year. Thinking that a mobile phone suddenly ringing would not help the infants to suspend their disbelief, Bruno had left his phone with Colette in the Mairie. But she had come out to watch the fun and his phone appeared to have been ringing non-stop ever since.

He had calls lined up from J-J, Annette, Marie-Do at the radio station, General Lannes, the Prefect, Laura, J-J again, and Philippe Delaron. As he looked at the screen it rang again. Annette.

‘Thank heavens you answered. Where on earth have you been? All hell is breaking loose,’ she began breathlessly.

‘I’ve been playing the role of Père Noël for the children’s concert,’ he told her calmly. ‘It’s not too convincing if your phone starts jangling away. So, what’s been happening?’

‘The gendarme general in Paris, the uncle of Villon, has resigned, along with the local one here,’ she replied. ‘And the Procureur has called in Poincevin to explain his breach of the sub judice rule. Everybody wants to know if you’re going to sue Poincevin for defamation, and Marie-Do is worried that you might sue the radio station, too.’

‘What are the penalties these days?’

‘One year in prison and a fine of up to forty-five thousand euros.’

‘In Poincevin’s case that’s very tempting, but I wouldn’t ever sue the radio station. We all depend on it too much for that. He’s a lawyer, he must have known he was risking a lawsuit.’

‘I suspect he may have dined too well to be cautious,’ she said. ‘Some of his words were slurred and the interviewer and the technician both told Marie-Do that he stumbled on entering the studio.’

‘Any other news, or should I answer the rest of my calls?’ Bruno replied.

‘A little bird tells me you have a big date coming up tomorrow.’

He sighed. ‘I’m supposed to be walking the dog with a friend, but Balzac was still asleep when I left this morning after he’d been drugged last night. He may not be able to walk very far tomorrow, far less rouse the amorous interest of the most beautiful lady basset I ever saw.’

‘Fingers crossed for Balzac, and if you want me to track down the best defamation lawyer in France, just let me know.’

Next, Bruno called J-J, apologized for not being available, and was at once interrupted.

‘I called your Mayor and he told me you were with the kiddies. Have you heard the news? Two generals resigning on the same day – unbelievable.’

‘Not a good day for law and order, except that I gather we get to keep the new gendarmerie and Yveline stays on as commandante. I was pleased to hear Poincevin may be in trouble for talking on the radio about a case that’s sub judice.’

‘My heart bleeds,’ said J-J, laughing. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. You know how these lawyers stick together.’

‘What’s going to happen to those two gendarmes who were at my place?’ Bruno asked.

‘Under garde à vue until the Procureur decides just what to charge them with, beyond drugging your dog and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. If it were up to me, I’d offer them a deal under which they agree to be witnesses against Poincevin and the gendarme general – unless a deal has been agreed in return for the generals’ resignations. It’s not a case the gendarmes would like to see made public.’

Bruno then called General Lannes, who said he was glad that Bruno was unhurt, that neither gendarme general was a serious loss and that he hoped Balzac would be fine.

Bruno then called Laura, who said that Annette’s bush telegraph had sent word across Sarlat of the attack on Bruno and his dog, and that she could hear he was fine but how was Balzac?

‘I’m glad you have your priorities right, Laura, and I only hope that Balzac will not be a disappointment to George Sand. He might not be at his best tomorrow, but let’s go ahead as planned.’

‘Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it and I hope you’ll show me the scene of the crime.’

‘Not much crime, despite what Annette may be saying,’ Bruno said, laughing. ‘I suggest we meet for a coffee and croissant at Fauquet’s café at nine thirty or so. I’ll be there from nine with the morning papers. We can stroll through St Denis, and if Balzac seems up to it, we can take a proper walk and then have a light lunch. How does that sound?’

‘We’ll look forward to it, Bruno. Nine to nine thirty and we’ll bring dessert. Hugs to Balzac. Bisous.’

His next call was to Marie-Do, who began by burbling apologies down the phone until he had to interrupt her, saying it was not the station’s fault, and that the Procureur was going through the broadcast, not to punish the radio station but to see if Poincevin had broken the sub judice rules.

‘I couldn’t believe that crap he was saying about you, Bruno, when I played the tape this morning. It was really vicious, defamation, if you ask me.’

‘We’ll see, Marie-Do. Anyway, don’t worry about me and thanks for getting us the transcripts. See you soon.’

His last call was to Philippe Delaron, to say sorry but no comment until the Procureur decided what action to take.

And finally the marathon phone-a-thon was over. The market stalls had gone, the clean-up crew had removed all traces of the market debris and the choral concert except for two little tufts of fake white hair from the beard of Père Noël, which would now certainly need to be replaced.

He walked across the river to his police van and drove home where he changed into working clothes and checked on Balzac, who seemed to be sleeping normally. The bowl of water Bruno had put out for him early that morning was now half-empty, so he’d woken, evidently thirsty, and then gone back to sleep.

Bruno started by tidying the garden and the chicken coop, sweeping the terrace and the driveway and then cleaning the kitchen, bathroom and living room. He brought in sufficient wood to keep his stove going overnight and the next day and then thought what he might make for lunch. He and Laura would be peckish after the walk, so he’d start with some soup, followed by an omelette with truffles and a winter salad with cheese. He planned to serve it with a bottle of an unusual red wine from Château de la Jaubertie, from its range of cépages oubliés, or forgotten harvests.

It was a blend of 40 per cent Merille, 40 per cent Fer Servadou and 20 per cent Malbec. Merille, sometimes called Périgord Noir, was an old grape variety, known across south-western France for being full-bodied with strong tannins. Fer was another local veteran, named for the iron-hard wood of the vine trunks, with softer tannins and a distinctive perfume of red fruits. These grapes had fallen out of use, partly because of the phylloxera plague of the late nineteenth century, but more in the Bergerac region because of the competition from the then-new wonder crop of black tobacco that went into Gauloises cigarettes. Bruno liked the idea of reviving the old wines and thought that Laura was the kind of woman who would be interested in them.

The soup would be easily prepared. He had stock in his freezer made from boiling beef bones, which he would use to make a garlic broth with some stale bread and a beaten egg, and he’d add what portion of chopped cabbage he would not use for the winter salad. He had some Cabécous goat cheese, one of Stéphane’s Tommes d’Audrix and a block of aged Cantal. And he’d have the pleasure of showing Laura where he had the black truffles to hand, under the oak trees he’d planted in his own garden.

The real challenge would be the welcome home meal for Gilles, at which Jack Crimson and the Baron would be present, along with Pamela, Fabiola and Florence and maybe Jack’s daughter Miranda and her children, which would mean Florence’s children too. He called Pamela who would know by now whether Miranda planned to come.

‘No, I was going to call you to say Miranda has a date, so Jack Crimson had to babysit but Florence is bringing Daniel and Dora.’

‘Well, if Florence’s children are joining us, why not Jack and his grandchildren? The kids all enjoy being together and they’ve probably missed Gilles just as much as we have.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ she agreed. ‘Why don’t you call Jack and suggest it?’

Jack said he’d be delighted to bring the children and to join them all. What could he bring?

‘Wine and maybe some cheese,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m cooking lamb shanks with garlic and Monbazillac. The Baron’s bringing some of that trout you and he smoked when I was in hospital as the first course. Florence is bringing a big salad, and Pamela is making her lemon meringue pie. But if you and Miranda’s kids are coming, she might be persuaded to make two. We all know that it’s your favourite.’

‘And Fabiola’s, and the children’s favourite, too. We’ll count on you to persuade her, Bruno. And to go with your lamb shanks, I’ll bring some Montravel red from Daniel Hecquet. Which Monbazillac are you using?’

‘One of Julien’s Clos l’Envège. I’d better start on the lamb, but I’ll call Pamela first.’

Pamela was already making two pies, she assured him, so Bruno set to work. He took the lamb shanks from their marinade, patted them dry and then browned them in duck fat before putting them into his largest casserole. Then four peeled and chopped shallots went into the duck fat to cook through before they went into the casserole along with the marinade. He took a large sheet of parchment paper, crumpled it, ran it under cold water, shook the drops off, and then spread the paper over the meat, wine and garlic in the casserole. He put the lid on the casserole and checked his watch. It would need two hours in the oven at 180 degrees.

Bruno began to calculate. Gilles was arriving from Kyiv on a flight that reached Paris at noon. He would then have a comfortable two hours to clear customs and baggage and take the train from Charles de Gaulle airport to the Montparnasse train station to catch the two p.m. fast train to Bordeaux. Then he should catch the 16.40 local train to Le Buisson. Fabiola would pick him up from the station at 18.40 and they would be back at Pamela’s by seven p.m., which meant eating sometime after eight. So Bruno should arrive at Pamela’s soon after six to cook his lamb shanks, and he could use the extra time to cook the vegetables that he’d take from his garden; potatoes, carrots and parsnips.

He was expected at Pamela’s riding school around four to take out the horses for their evening exercise. As he was looking at his watch, he heard a sound from the corridor and then a shuffle, and a rather wan-looking Balzac padded slowly into the kitchen and looked at his empty food bowl. He then gazed up at his master with a look of disappointed reproach. The dog must have caught the tempting odours of Bruno’s cooking.

And after sleeping for close to eighteen hours as the ketamine worked its way out of his body, Balzac must have felt very hungry indeed. Bruno turned at once to the box where he kept his home-made dog biscuits, made from wholewheat and white flour, wheat germ, eggs, apples, milk powder and baked in the shape of bones. He handed one to Balzac to chew on, crumbled two more into a saucepan that he filled with milk and turned on the gas to warm it. Meanwhile he took some mincemeat from the fridge and fried it quickly in duck fat with salt and a clove of crushed garlic. He then stirred the meat into the milk and biscuit mush and set it down before his dog.

Balzac gave a grunt that might have been forgiveness, but Bruno suspected that what it really meant was that Balzac had been through a pretty rough day and Bruno had better make sure to do better next time.

Once they arrived at the stables, Balzac decided to stay in the stall of his giant friend, Hector, who had now disappeared with Bruno aboard and lots of other friends on horseback. Balzac, however, decided that after his meal, a pleasant doze in Hector’s warm and familiar-smelling straw was called for.

Barely had he drifted off to sleep, it seemed, that the usual sounds were back, horses’ hooves on the stable yard, then the panting of Pamela’s amiable and welcoming sheepdogs. Then came human voices, boots in the straw, the creak of leather as saddles and bridles were removed and horses were rubbed down. His big friend Hector then came slowly and carefully into the stall, and Balzac felt his warm, horsey breath as he was given an affectionate nuzzling by way of greeting. Balzac half turned, gave Hector’s jaw an affectionate lick and then tucked himself into the warm straw to doze again. He heard the splashing of water as Bruno sluiced himself down in the stable sink and then the sound of familiar pattering feet and children’s voices as Daniel and Dora came to hug him but were then called away to their bath.

Balzac woke again to the sound of a familiar car rolling over the gravel. He padded to the door and looked outside. He knew this magical car which did not stink belonged to Fabiola and here she was with her male friend who had been absent for some time and there were shouts of welcome, sounds of human affection, shrieks from children, softer tones from women, hearty male voices of friends that he recognized.

Then they all went indoors to their dinner and Balzac wandered back inside and drifted off to sleep again, to dream of that wondrous meaty scent that had earlier awoken him when he was home with Bruno.

24

Balzac seemed to be himself again the next morning when Bruno took him for a brisk, chilly run, skirting the woods to run along the ridge and watch the sunrise before returning home. He changed into corduroy slacks, a flannel shirt and a puffer jacket and headed down to Fauquet’s for breakfast, where he had planned what he hoped would be an intriguing surprise for Laura.

He had invited Yveline and Rod Macrae to join them sometime after nine, and to bring along Balzac’s two pups. Yveline was the proud owner of Gabrielle d’Estrées, named for the mistress and would-be wife of Henri Quatre, Bruno’s favourite French king. Rod, the veteran rock musician whose comeback tour had begun at one of the riverside concerts Bruno organized each summer, was the owner of Balzac’s son, Robert the Bruce, named for the king who had secured Scottish independence for the next four centuries by defeating the English at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Bruno thought Laura would be interested to see some of Balzac’s progeny, and also to meet Yveline and Rod, just as he wanted them to see Laura’s glorious dog.

Yveline was the first to arrive with Gabrielle, walking along the rue Gambetta from the place people were already beginning to call the old gendarmerie. Gabrielle was mainly brown with white legs and paws, with a white muzzle that stretched up to her brow and a black back that continued onto the first third of her tail, while the next third was brown and the final tip was white. He bent down to welcome her, delighted to see that her first greeting was for her father, Balzac, before she turned to allow Bruno to scratch behind her ears.

Then Bruno saw Rod’s lanky figure strolling along the bridge from the car park, The Bruce too low to the ground to be seen at first. Balzac gave a cheerful ‘Woof’ of greeting when he saw his son and Gabrielle gave little yips of excitement at seeing her brother.

The reunions were still under way when a grey Range Rover pulled up in front of the Mairie and Laura emerged, swiftly followed by George Sand. Balzac and his two pups turned to examine the newcomer then Balzac bounded forward to sniff noses. Yveline and Rod exclaimed at the striking looks of the light brown and white female basset as Fauquet emerged, carrying a tray loaded with coffee pot, cups, plates and a basket that seemed to be overflowing with croissants and chocolatines.

Bruno made the introductions of Laura to Fauquet and the others and the pack of bassets. They all shared breakfast while Laura marvelled at the good manners of Balzac and his offspring in waiting, trembling with excitement, to be offered portions of the food. George Sand, by contrast, sat back on her hind legs, her head held high and immobile. Her eyes were fixed on Laura but otherwise she seemed not to twitch a muscle as if waiting as a grande dame of letters should, for lesser mortals to feed her.

Once Balzac and his young had each been given a corner of croissant, Laura reached across to give her dog a portion, but with the speed of a born pickpocket The Bruce leapt into the air and plucked it from her fingers, swallowing the morsel before his legs touched the ground. Bruno felt like applauding and, to his great pleasure, Laura exclaimed in surprise and then laughed, not only at his cheekiness but at The Bruce’s skill in snaffling the food without touching her fingers.

‘Och, he’s a right scallywag,’ said Rod, speaking English to her and smiling, and Bruno could guess at the mixture of admiration and reproof in the word’s meaning.

‘I haven’t heard that word in years, not since I played with my naughty cousins on family holidays back in Cornwall,’ Laura replied in French. ‘I suppose we’d call him a coquin.’

That seemed to break the ice, and Yveline asked if Laura had any tips on bringing up female dogs. ‘You’re doing just right, bringing her up with lots of male dogs in company and I wish I’d done that for this one. She seems superior but I think she’s really just rather shy. I’m afraid I don’t know many people who have dogs in Sarlat.’

‘What games do you play with her?’ Bruno asked. ‘Throwing and fetching balls? Catching frisbees? My Balzac likes running after horses, playing with children and finding truffles. Basset hounds have some of the most sensitive noses in the dog world.’

‘The Bruce likes chasing rabbits but never catches them and he seems to like music, sometimes I even think he’s trying to dance,’ said Rod. ‘And once he gets onto a scent, he’ll not let go. The times I’ve followed him uphill and down dale, catching up to him standing over an old rabbit warren, wagging his tail and proud as punch.’

‘Gabrielle had real problems learning to go downstairs because of her short legs,’ said Yveline. ‘But she’ll trot after a scent all day and she’s a born tracker, a perfect hunting dog. There’s a woman in our hunting club who’s training her bassets to hunt wild boar. They can run very fast for short periods but they don’t have much stamina. She’s training her bassets to chase them all day until the boar just stands there, so exhausted that the head sinks to the ground. Then, she says, you wait to see if the tusks are sticking into the ground. At that point, you let the hounds go in, one from either side, and each one grabs a foreleg and pulls. And that’s it. The boar is completely immobilized.’

‘Then what?’ asked Laura, fascinated.

‘Then she goes in with a boar spear and finishes it. Or if the undergrowth has been too thick for the spear, she’ll use a rifle.’

Bruno rolled his eyes. ‘Every hunter has heard this story but I’ve yet to meet one who’s seen it happen. But a whole pack of bassets can certainly run a boar to exhaustion, then he turns at bay and the hunter shoots him. But you need to be a good shot with a powerful rifle. Boar were so prized by hunters in the old days because with their thick fur and skin and heavy bones, they were very hard to kill.’

‘Your George Sand just doesn’t look like a hunting dog,’ said Rod. ‘She’s too beautiful. All that lovely soft white fur, I’d hate to see it all muddy and her skin scratched by the undergrowth. To me she seems more like a model than a hunting dog.’

‘Hunting wild boar wasn’t quite what I had in mind for her, nor anything else,’ said Laura. ‘But we do go jogging together around Sergeac, where Monique had her country place.’

‘Most mornings Balzac and I go for a run,’ said Bruno. ‘Like this morning, I needed it. A friend came back from Ukraine yesterday in time for Christmas, so it was quite an evening. A run clears out the cobwebs and gets me ready for a new day.’

Yveline was on duty and Rod Macrae had to visit the St Cyprien market, so they said goodbye and Bruno settled the bill. Laura’s Range Rover, some sixty-plus years younger than Bruno’s ancient model, had been left parked by the Mairie. They loaded the dogs into the back of his much older vehicle and she climbed in beside him, gazing in wonder at the primitive interior of one of the first civilian models Land Rover ever made.

‘How old is this truck?’ she asked.

‘It was built in 1954, the year of Dien Bien Phu,’ Bruno replied. ‘An old hunting friend of mine bought it when he got back from Vietnam and he left it to me in his will.’

As they drove the short journey home, Bruno kept half an eye on the dogs in the backseat. What had started as tentative sniffing became an ouroboros of ears and tail as the pair curled up.

‘Great view,’ Laura said as they pulled into his driveway. They sat a moment looking over the valley to the east, where ridge after edge climbed away and there was not another building to be seen, although many houses and whole campsites were tucked away in the valleys between the rolling hills. There was another ridge to the west, partly wooded. Due north was mainly forest all the way to the valley of the Isle, the river that ran through Périgueux.

‘Which way are we heading for our walk?’ she asked.

‘We’ll start by going up behind my house through the woods and then onto the ridge to the west. Then we’ll make a circuit to come back from the east. It’ll take maybe a couple of hours, ten kilometres, and that way we’ll work up an appetite for lunch.’

Laura was sensibly dressed in walking boots, heavy trousers tucked into thick socks, a heavy waterproof jacket over a roll-neck sweater and a woollen hat that he guessed had been bought for skiing. The overall look was functional for a wintry walk rather than fashionable and Bruno approved. George Sand was well behaved, even off the leash, padding along beside Laura and ignoring Balzac, who forged ahead, occasionally darting off in the woods at either side of the path, scaring those nesting bécasses who chose to live dangerously, too close to the ground.

The reunion of the two dogs had been polite, even cordial, with some wagging of tails as they had sniffed at one another, and George Sand had looked on approvingly as Balzac was reunited with his son and daughter. How the dogs understood these family relationships was unclear, but Bruno felt that somehow they did. Now she was content to walk beside her mistress and follow Bruno and his dog.

Bruno was not nearly so at ease, thinking it was some time since he had set out to woo a new woman and he was rather more nervous about it than he had expected. He was struck once again by the thought that he found himself attracted to a woman from the British Isles, like Pamela, although Laura was only British on her mother’s side.

Never let it be said that Bruno was not a man happy to build castles in the air; his biggest issue as a romantic and optimistic soul was trying to live in the blasted things. That particular piece of self-knowledge that had been hard won was vital when it came to his efforts at curbing his tendency to project fantastical futures onto unsuspecting women.

Anyway, this day with Laura might be an unmitigated disaster, leaving not just Bruno but even poor Balzac in the lurch. He very much hoped not, now that he had got to know George Sand rather better and realized that what he thought was a canine version of grandeur or snobbery was far more likely to be simple shyness, since George Sand did not seem accustomed to the presence of other dogs. But she had warmed to the two puppies, and to Balzac, perhaps all the more because she seemed now to understand that the pups were somehow his.

Bruno pondered this, wondering what dogs made of pregnancy and motherhood, and recalled the discovery of Monique’s suicide, and her letter describing her pain at the thought of never being able to give birth to a child. Might dogs feel that same instinctive sense of loss? And that triggered another thought. He might not be a woman, whose fertile years ended with menopause, but there were days when Bruno was also starting to feel his age. There was less and less time ahead for him to be a father who could raise his own children and see them on into adulthood and hope to have enough time to witness the arrival of their children, the next generation. He shook his head in a vain attempt to change his train of thought; he had been down this path before, and it led precisely nowhere.

‘Slow down a bit, could you?’ came a voice. Startled, he turned to see Laura, trailing some metres behind as they slogged up the steep and narrow track through the woods.

‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to go so fast,’ he said. How could he have been so stupid as to take this route through the woods where the path was too narrow to walk side by side, leaving Laura to plod along behind him like some dutiful wife of an earlier century? He should have planned this more carefully. He hadn’t even had much chance to talk to her this morning, and maybe it hadn’t been that good an idea to have Rod and Yveline along with their dogs. He and Laura could have got to know each other a little better before starting to trudge in single file. Finally, they reached the open ground of the hilltop, and he was able to point out to the west towards the tower of La Fage, where he had on occasion played tennis with the owners, a nice German couple called Hannes and Tine.

Rather closer to him, Laura and the dogs, he pointed out the hillock called La Ferrassie where archaeologists had found the oldest known human grave, the first deliberate burial of human beings with what seemed to be some ritual and respect. First thought to date from around seventy thousand years ago, the latest technology had dated it to around fifty thousand.

‘The latest dig was just a few years ago and I met the archaeologists, from Binghampton University in America. They had all the latest technology,’ Bruno said. ‘They could even find the tiny bones in the ear of the old man, who had the most complete Neanderthal skull and skeleton ever unearthed. They found that he suffered from arthritis of the spine and bone disease in his legs before his death at the then advanced age of fifty or more. I asked them if he’d been able to hunt and they doubted it. His community had, apparently, fed him. The heads of the babies and foetuses were protected by stones. Pollen had been found around the neck of the woman, perhaps a memory of flowers.’

‘Maybe the man could have contributed in some way, even crippled, maybe making flint knives or something,’ Laura said, breathing more easily after the slog up the hill.

‘You’re probably right,’ Bruno replied. ‘They found that his teeth had a strange slanting angle to them and suspect that they got that way when he held animal skins in his teeth while scraping off the hair and flesh with edged flints to make leather garments.’

From here they could see north as well as west and the route back along the ridge was broad enough for them to chat as they walked abreast. From Bruno’s interest in archaeology they moved on to Laura’s fascination with chateau life, the transition from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. One of her hobbies was the history of food and cooking, and why the Périgord had the reputation as a land of milk and honey even in mediaeval times, and whether a distinct regional form of cooking had emerged early.

‘These were the borderlands between the milk and butter fat of the north and the olive oil of the south,’ she said. ‘And here it was duck and goose fat, because this region and our rivers were the midpoint of the birds’ migration flights between Scandinavia and North Africa. This was where they came down for water and could be hunted and bred.’

‘I always like looking at the kitchens whenever I visit an old castle or chateau,’ Bruno said. ‘They’re often the largest part of the house, with a dining area that suggests a great deal of entertaining.’

‘The nobles and barons had money,’ she said, ‘from taxing the trade along all the rivers that inspired the Romans to call this region Aquitaine, the land of waters. The rivers were the only way to move goods in bulk.’

‘That would be wine, I suppose,’ said Bruno. ‘But what else did we have in Périgord to sell in bulk downriver?’

‘The real gold of this region in the Middle Ages were our chestnuts and to a lesser extent the hazelnuts. They were like liquid gold because in this part of France the main starch came from chestnuts before potatoes became common in the eighteenth century, when a man called Parmentier persuaded the king to wear a potato flower in his buttonhole.’

‘You are a bottomless well of facts, it seems,’ Bruno teased.

‘And you’re not?’ she laughed in response. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying being in the company of someone who doesn’t roll their eyes when I get going.’

They strolled on, chatting happily about food and history, discovering one another’s interests in a natural, unforced way, and putting to rest Bruno’s earlier concerns. The two dogs pottered along behind, side by side, amiably exploring together, tracing the scents of sheep and rabbits, sometimes running ahead and then trotting back to rejoin their human partners.

‘Did you know that one of the reasons for the wars between Rome and Carthage was that Carthage and its region were the main source of truffles, which ancient Romans esteemed highly?’ Laura asked.

‘No, that’s fascinating,’ he said. ‘I read somewhere that truffles were first appreciated by the Sumerians, and that the Romans mostly had our melanosporum, the Périgord black truffles we get in winter, and that Plutarch thought truffles came from lightning striking the soil.’

‘Yes, the Romans had them, but mainly they had Terfez truffles which had very little flavour of their own but were noted flavour carriers. Juvenal wrote that he thought truffles were produced by thunder, and Cicero called them children of the earth.’

‘What a pleasure it is talking with you,’ Bruno said, suddenly noticing that they had stopped and were facing one another, and that Laura was beaming at him.

He didn’t know whether she had stars in her eyes or they were in his but before they knew it, they were kissing. Their lips were closed but hers seemed very full and welcoming as if they had a life of their own. Then he felt her fingertips caressing his neck and despite the thick layers of coats and sweaters and flannel shirts they each wore on this wintry walk, he was intensely conscious of her body against his and the way her hand at the back of his neck was drawing him deeper and deeper into her.

Then she drew back, stroked his cheek, took his hand in hers, kissed it, and murmured, ‘Take me to your home, Bruno.’

They walked on, not talking, their heads turned simply to look at each other, careless of the dogs following on patiently behind. Once at the house they were about to go inside but turned to watch Balzac proudly showing off his estate to George Sand, escorting her to his kennel and the chicken coops, to admire the stately geese and lively ducks and the avenue of trees nurturing Bruno’s truffles.

He opened the door for her to enter and followed, but before he could reach for the door handle to close it, she turned, put a hand on his chest and kissed him very slowly. Then she reached behind him to close the door, as if to make clear that this encounter and this time and this exploration was for the two of them alone.

25

Some hours later, with the daylight beginning to fade, Bruno and Laura were in dressing gowns in the living room before the stove. They were sharing kir royale, a chilled Champagne made rosy pink and a little sweeter by the addition of crème de cassis, a blackcurrant liqueur. He was tending the fire, and she was breaking Bruno’s home-made dog biscuits in two. She gave one half to Balzac and the other to George Sand, and then she and Bruno each took a sip of the last of the kir from a single glass.

‘Hungry?’ he asked. ‘Or shall I simply bring us another glass of this glorious kir that makes me want to explore your lips again?’

‘Yes, I’m beginning to feel a little hungry, but mainly for you,’ she answered, kissing him again, pushing him down onto the floor and sliding herself on top of him as she loosened her dressing gown and let her breasts trail over his chest, his neck, his mouth, his eyes. He groaned with pleasure until she slid back down again so that her lips were level with his.

‘That’s just to remind you what lies in wait after we eat,’ she said.

‘As if I could possibly forget,’ he replied and kissed her again. ‘I need to eat to build up my energy for this evening. Balzac can help me find a truffle for you, and maybe George Sand might want to join us,’ he added, kissing her again. ‘I’ll bring back some eggs. They’ll still be warm from the chicken coop, the freshest you’ve ever had.’

‘Excellent idea, so long as I can watch you through the window and keep near the fire.’

Bruno put on warm clothes and took a trowel from the box of gardening tools in the gun room. Balzac, who knew his master’s habits well enough to understand what Bruno intended, went to wait by the door. Bruno was delighted to see George Sand, after casting a short farewell glance at Laura, decide to join Balzac by the door ready to leap out into the cold.

Bruno started in the chicken coop, collecting six eggs, three of them still warm to the touch, and went back to hand them to Laura. Then he began at the eastern end of the garden, tapping the cold earth with a bamboo cane to wake the truffle fly. There was no sign of movement, so he repeated the action at the second tree, and then again at the third, without success. At the fourth tree, a white oak, his tapping stirred a tiny flying insect, the truffle fly, almost too small to see, but he caught its movement in flight against the sun’s fading rays.

‘Cherche, Balzac, cherche,’ he said softly, and his dog obediently began sniffing at the spot where Bruno had first seen the fly. Balzac began to scratch at the earth, and politely stood back so that George Sand could follow suit, sniffing and scratching. Then Bruno eased them aside and began to dig, gently, with his trowel in the cold but not frozen earth, and put his own nose down to sniff.

There it was, that special, almost fecund scent of truffle, a scent so close to the sexual pheromones of pigs that many a hunter in the old days had lost a finger or two to a porker that was determined not to give up its treasure to a human. These days, hunters who used pigs to find truffles usually had a bridle wrapped around the muzzle so the pig could sniff but not bite. Dogs had to be trained to recognize the scent, which did not take long, and Balzac’s nose was several times more sensitive than any pig.

It was at that point that Bruno was aware of some movement in the hedge at the front of his garden. He heard something, a distinctive kind of mechanical click that he associated with cameras. There wasn’t much wind but what little that Bruno could feel was wafting from his position towards the hedge, so the dogs would not be smelling a thing.

Bruno dug again, felt something small and round, a very small truffle but with a fatter one almost alongside. He pulled out the small one, let Balzac and George Sand each give it a tentative sniff, and then tossed it at the hedge where he’d heard the noise. Balzac shot off like a rocket as Bruno pushed himself into a crouch and then ran to the opening, where he spotted a man wearing some kind of mask and a camouflage jacket who had risen to his feet and was trying to run – or rather to stumble – away. Bruno ran after him, soon catching up and then rugby-tackling the stranger, the dogs baying as though he were felling a boar.

Bruno’s hip, with all his diving weight and momentum behind it, hit the man just below the knee. The masked stranger cried out in pain as he crashed to the ground, a mobile phone spinning away from his hand to fall with an expensive sound of glass breaking.

With his good arm, Bruno ripped off the intruder’s face mask, pulled up the man’s head by his hair and then smashed his face down onto the ground to stun him before he rolled the figure over, his face bloodied from a smashed nose. Despite the bloody nose, the man was clearly recognizable as Condorcet, the former police technician who was now a private eye, working most recently for Poincevin, the crooked lawyer.

‘Attempted theft of truffles from a private garden,’ said Bruno, as he patted the man down searching for a wallet or a weapon.

Condorcet looked daggers at him but then tried to shrink away as Balzac’s snarling muzzle with bared teeth came within biting distance.

‘Be careful,’ Bruno said, finding a wallet in the rear hip pocket. ‘This dog’s a killer, hunts wild boar. Stay very still and don’t upset him.

‘As I was saying, any theft of black truffles at this time of year is a serious business, because our prized melanosporum are going for up to a thousand euros per kilo. Our rural magistrates take that very seriously, and so do our attack dogs, Monsieur Raoul Condorcet, whose face I recognize from our recent encounter at the restaurant in Sarlat. And I have to inform you that this time you are also quite clearly guilty of invasion of privacy, and secret filming, along with trespassing with illegal intent . . .

‘And what have we here?’ Bruno asked, reaching under Condorcet’s jacket and pulling out a heavy revolver from a leather pouch under the man’s armpit. He recognized it at once, the Manurhin MR73 that was standard issue for the gendarmerie and much of the police in the 1970s into the 1990s. This one looked like the 9-millimetre parabellum model, and all the chambers but one were loaded.

The gun’s barrel looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for years and there was dust and hair around the bullets that Bruno could see. It was long overdue for an overhaul.

‘If you tried to fire this revolver, it would probably blow your wrist off, if the cartridges were even still able to fire.’

He patted down the rest of Condorcet’s form, pulling out an iPhone, an older model than the one that had been confiscated at the Sarlat restaurant. He used it to call the gendarmerie in St Denis. Sergeant Jules was on the desk and Bruno identified himself, explained why he was calling and then asked for two armed gendarmes to take an illegally armed trespasser, and former police employee, into custody.

The phone call over, Bruno was about to go to the house to reassure Laura, but Condorcet spoke suddenly, his voice hoarse and his injured nose making him sound as if he had a heavy cold.

‘My mother is eighty-five and alone. Can I give her a call to say I won’t be back tonight, but all is well and I’ll see her tomorrow?’

‘You probably won’t see her tomorrow, not after being arrested with an illegal weapon,’ Bruno replied.

‘I know, but that’s for tomorrow. She’s an old lady. I just want to reassure her for tonight.’

Bruno thought about it, then nodded and said okay. He pulled a tissue from his jacket pocket, held it to Condorcet’s nose and said, ‘Blow, or your maman will know something’s wrong from your voice.’

He let him blow out the blood, then used a second tissue to do it again and this time Condorcet’s voice sounded less like a foghorn as he said, ‘She’s Maman in the contacts list. Or go to recent calls; I rang her this morning.’

Bruno called the number and heard an elderly female voice, answering ‘Oui, mon cher?’ and he put the phone to Condorcet’s mouth.

‘Oui, Maman, desolé,’ he said. ‘I’m tied up on a job, but I’ll be home for lunch tomorrow, so take care. Love you, Maman, and sleep well.’

Bruno closed the phone and looked at his prisoner before asking, ‘You live with your mother?’

Condorcet nodded. ‘I was married but she wanted a divorce. No kids. She got the house, so I moved back in with Maman.’

Bruno nodded, and said, ‘I’m going to have to tie you up until the gendarmes come to take you to jail.’

He pulled out Condorcet’s belt, rolled him onto his belly and used the belt to tie the man’s elbows together behind his back. Then he left Balzac and George Sand watching the bound man and went to his door to reassure Laura that all was well and to stay out of sight. He picked up a notebook, pen and his own phone from the hall table, and went outside to join the dogs. Bruno sat on his prisoner’s rump so that his own trousers stayed dry and called J-J’s mobile.

‘Your ex-tech who now works for that dubious lawyer, Poincevin, has just tried to ambush me in my garden while armed with an old police weapon that I don’t think he’s entitled to have,’ Bruno began. ‘Even if it’s legal he needs to be tried and sentenced for incompetent care of a lethal weapon. I think he also may have planned to steal my truffles, to spy on me and take photos. His device fell to the ground when I arrested him. Sergeant Jules is sending a couple of gendarmes to take him to the cells. I suggest we leave him there overnight while I draft a statement, and you can have him picked up in the morning and brought up to your cells.’

Bruno went on, ‘He’s no genius so he may not yet realize that we’re really after Poincevin, and if he helps us, we might be able to go easy on the guy. Otherwise with what I’m pretty sure is an illegal handgun he’s facing five to ten years, without even counting the other charges.’

J-J said that made sense and he’d see Bruno in the morning and hung up. Bruno drafted a brief statement in his notebook of Condorcet’s spying, his phone, his face mask, his illegal and armed trespass, his apparent theft of truffles and his attempted escape. He wrote out the charge sheet in his notebook before using his phone to scan the document as a pdf for his records. The original, once torn out, would go with the gendarmes to Sergeant Jules.

‘Where did you leave your car?’ Bruno asked, leaning over so that Condorcet could see him. His head was turned sideways and his eyes were fixed, nervously, on Balzac’s snarling face.

‘On a lay-by near the Brin d’Amour campsite,’ came the gasped reply. ‘Walked over the hill and through the woods to get here.’

‘Did you see me out walking, maybe three, four hours ago?’ Bruno asked.

‘No, I’d just got here when you came out with the dogs.’

Bruno finished his statement and signed it. When the gendarmes came to take Condorcet away, he used his official stamp to certify the statement. He tore the sheet from the notebook and gave it to them after he’d scanned and saved a pdf of the final document.

Then he, Balzac and George Sand all gathered to dig out and admire the lovely melanosporum truffle, about the size of Laura’s delicate ear. They went back into the house together, and Bruno hugged Laura, kissed her soundly and was delighted to see that she was still in one of his dressing gowns and had not taken fright and dressed to flee. Bruno said that the panic was over and that he now proposed to make Laura the finest truffle omelette that she had ever eaten, along with a winter salad from the garden.

‘Does this sort of sudden emergency happen often with you?’ she asked, her voice light, as if trying to convince them both that she knew this was in the day’s work.

‘Hardly ever,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘And it wasn’t really an emergency, just an overweight and retired police tech with an old gun that he’s probably never fired in anger, and which probably wouldn’t have fired if he pulled the trigger. It’s certainly been a long time since he cleaned it.’

‘Are you usually armed?’ she asked.

‘No, only when we have an emergency, and that’s usually left to the gendarmes,’ he said. ‘But you should know that I’m a licensed firearms teacher for hunters, and I hunt regularly.’

He took her hand and led her past the kitchen door to the utility room where he kept his washing machine, dryer, freezer and a locked metal cabinet which he opened with a key. In pride of place was the classic Purdey shotgun, bequeathed to him by a wealthy friend, a wartime fighter pilot who had gone on to make a fortune in the aviation industry. He pointed out his usual hunting weapon, a second-hand St Etienne shotgun made by Manufrance. Then he showed her his veteran MAS-36 bolt action rifle, standard issue for the French army through World War Two, Vietnam and Algeria. Finally, he indicated his personal treasure, an old bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle, standard issue for the British Army from the 1890s until 1957. He thought it the perfect gun for deer and reliable for wild boar. Each weapon had been cleaned before being locked away. His official handgun, a SIG Pro nine millimetre, was kept in a safe at the Mairie.

‘I follow the gun laws to the letter, and so do most hunters,’ he said. ‘So I’ll look forward in future to getting a couple of bécasses and cooking them for us, maybe some venison. If you like, I can teach you how to hunt. You already have a fine hunting hound, even if George Sand will need a little training, and I’m sure Balzac will be keen to help. Or you might just like to come out with me for the walk and enjoy being in the countryside.’

She looked at him a little coolly, as if surprised by the invitation, but then she smiled.

‘Let me think about that,’ she replied. ‘I’ve never really considered taking up hunting, even though I’m not a vegetarian and like a bit of roast venison or rabbit as much as the next person. But I’m starting to feel hungry, and that truffle omelette sounds good.’

‘After spending half the day in bed with you, I need to get my strength back,’ he said, grinning and taking her in his arms.

‘And the night is yet young,’ she said, cupping her hands around his cheeks and pulling his head down to her soft lips.

26

The next morning, Bruno woke before dawn, stretched luxuriously and smiled as he caught the hint of Laura’s scent on the pillow beside him, its owner having left for her own bed well after midnight. He took Balzac out for a brisk trot in the chill air, returned to shower and shave while grilling the remnants of the previous evening’s baguette while listening to the radio news. The last item said that a large crowd was expected at the funeral and burial in St Denis of local businesswoman and employer, Monique Duhamel.

As soon as the news ended, his phone vibrated, and Sergeant Jules said, ‘The ex-tech you arrested yesterday with the old handgun, he wants to talk to you, and he wants to offer a deal. I think he’s figured out his police pension is at stake, never mind the rest of it.’

‘On my way,’ said Bruno, thinking of the other things he’d have to do, from arranging parking spaces to bringing in reinforcements if there were serious crowds at the church at eleven and then at the cemetery.

‘Captain Yveline has already authorized a squad for you to use on crowd control,’ Jules said as Bruno entered the gendarmerie. ‘And Condorcet is waiting for you in the first cell. He’s already had a wash, some coffee and a bit of not too stale baguette from yesterday.’

Condorcet looked better than he had the previous day, although he had black eyes coming along nicely. He stuck out a hand for Bruno to shake as he rose from the narrow bed where he had slept. Bruno leaned against the door and said, ‘You wanted to talk?’

‘Yeah, and with a witness present if you like.’

Bruno called for Jules to send down a witness and was pleased to see the new trainee officer, Claire, arrive in uniform with a notebook and pen. She turned on her phone to use for recording. He greeted her, checked that the recording was working and asked Condorcet what he wanted to say.

‘I want to be able to get out of here today and go home to look after my mother,’ he said. ‘And I think I can tell you enough to get you to agree. I can tell you how and why Dominic’s wife lost her baby and how things have been fixed by Poincevin so that Dominic will inherit every bit of property and money that his wife had to leave.’

Bruno’s eyes widened. ‘You mean to tell me that Monique’s will scheduled to be read today is not the real will?’

‘It’s real, all right, but it’s been superseded, and I know all about it,’ said Condorcet, looking smug. ‘I know how and when and where it was fixed and what it says. Poincevin planned the whole thing, drafted the will and he’s going to share in the take.’

‘You say you know how and why Monique lost her baby – you mean it was not a simple miscarriage?’ Bruno asked.

‘No, it was deliberate, and I was the one who had to get the drugs.’ Condorcet shrugged. ‘Simple enough. There are always nurses and young doctors short of money. I got both mifepristone and misoprostol. First, you take a pill called mifepristone because pregnancy needs progesterone so the foetus can start to grow normally. Mifepristone blocks the mother’s own progesterone, so basically it just stops the pregnancy in its tracks.

‘The second drug is misoprostol and it’s best to take it soon after the first, but you can use it up to a day, a day and a half later,’ he went on. ‘This stuff causes cramps and bleeding, in effect to empty the woman’s uterus. They say it’s a bit like having bad cramps, a really painful period, and altogether it’s supposed to be rather like having a natural early miscarriage.’

‘Did you give her these drugs?’ Bruno asked.

‘No, and I don’t know who did, her husband or Poincevin. I assume it was the husband; it would be much easier for him to hide them in her food or slip them in her drink than some lawyer. He could even have swapped out her vitamins, they look just like the zinc tablets Maman takes every morning. But what do I know? I just got hold of the drugs, cost me two hundred euros, no questions asked,’ said Condorcet with a shrug. ‘I was told by the nurse who helped me that it’s quite common for women to abort a kid without their old man knowing.’

‘When was this?’

‘It was the end of the first week in December when I got hold of the drugs; they said it was a rush job.’

‘Did they say why it was a rush job?’

‘I assume they thought time was critical. You’re not supposed to use these drugs after the ninth week.’

‘And what week was this? Do you know?’

‘No idea, just that Poincevin said it was a rush. I got the stuff in two days, and I assume Dominic gave her the drugs almost immediately.’

‘Why such urgency?’

‘Because the drugs may not work after ten, eleven weeks, I don’t know. I’m no doctor, but Poincevin and Dominic had been reading up on it.’

‘Did they say why they didn’t want Monique to have the baby?’

‘No, but it’s obvious – a baby would inherit, or at least share, in whatever she left. Dominic wanted it all for himself, with whatever he had to pay Poincevin, who was also helping to fix the will with his legal advice.’

‘Did you get paid?’ Bruno asked.

‘I was just on Poincevin’s usual starvation wages,’ said Condorcet, this time with a brittle laugh. ‘The bastard. He reckoned I was still in debt, what with the interest.’

‘Had Poincevin lent you money?’

‘Sort of. He paid off the casino, bought off the heavies who’d already beaten the shit out of me and then threatened to do the same to my mum. I couldn’t have that, so I went to Poincevin, because I’d done a fair bit of work for him in the past, and he went to the casino, the one outside Boulazac, and sorted it out. Whether he threatened them or paid a bit, I don’t know, but he came back and said I owed him twenty big ones and would have to pay it off at ten per cent a month or I could work for him. He gives me a thousand a month in cash, plus expenses, plus he pays the woman who comes in to look after my mum.’

‘Are you prepared to testify to this, against Poincevin, in court, and to sign an affidavit?’ Bruno asked.

‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ said Condorcet, with a bitter laugh. ‘Lead me to it. I’d like to slaughter the bastard.’

‘So Monique lost the baby,’ Bruno said. ‘What happened then?’

‘This was Poincevin’s clever bit. We all went up to Paris. Officially it was just Dominic and Monique, a visit to art galleries and concerts to help recover from the psychological loss of the baby, cos she had no idea that Dominic was behind it all along, the poor thing. And then they went off to see this other woman notaire, must have been at least sixty, some old contact of Dominic, where they got Monique woozy on some kind of drug and she signed the new will, leaving it all to Dominic.’

‘Who witnessed the new will?’ Bruno asked.

‘Two women who worked for the notaire. She was like some aunt of Dominic or something, but she was a proper notaire. I don’t know whether she knew that Monique had been given drugs. But I got her address and I had my phone on record so I have an audio record of the whole thing, except that you have it on the phone you confiscated in Sarlat.’

‘What do you remember of this event with the new notaire?’

‘Well, she seemed to know all about it. She had the company records of Monique’s operation, tax returns, lists of employees, all that. She’d already done all the paperwork, drafted the new will, leaving everything to Dominic.’

‘Were you and Poincevin formally listed as witnesses?’ Bruno asked.

‘No way,’ said Condorcet, with a second bitter laugh. ‘No paper trails for clever old Poincevin. He’s too sharp for that. No, it was two women who worked in the notary’s office.’

‘Where did you stay while this happened? Was it in Paris?’

‘Dominic and his wife were at some hotel in Paris, Poincevin was somewhere else in the city and I was in a cheap Airbnb near the notaire’s office. The bastard said he’d knock a few extra grand off my debt to him.’

‘Why were you snooping around my place yesterday?’

‘Dominic told Poincevin that he reckoned that some woman who worked for Monique, someone called Laura, wanted to get her claws into you and that could be a problem with the inheritance. They were worried about you being involved, that you’d smell a rat with the change of will. I was supposed to get photos of you and Laura together, preferably compromising.’

‘A pity you lost your camera,’ said Bruno. ‘Who knows what you might have captured to the cloud?’

Bruno turned to Claire, asking if she had any questions she wanted to ask of Condorcet.

‘Were you aware that Monique was drugged in some way when she signed the new will?’ she asked.

‘Not for certain. I mean, I didn’t see her given drugs, but she definitely wasn’t in command of her faculties.’

‘In what way; how did this show?’

‘Well, she could hardly stand up.’

‘And Poincevin, Dominic and the new notaire were all present when Monique was visibly not able to sign of her own free will. Is that correct?’ Claire went on.

‘That’s right,’ said Condorcet. ‘And as I said, I can prove it because I recorded the whole thing on my phone, the one that you confiscated at the restaurant. You get that, mon vieux, and you’ll have all the proof you want, Dominic, Poincevin, the bent notaire, Monique. The lot.’

Bruno turned to Claire. ‘Let’s get that printed out, signed and witnessed, and I’d better go home and find that phone, and make some calls.’

‘Can you cancel the funeral?’ Claire asked. ‘A good autopsy should be able to find evidence of these abortion drugs Monique was given.’

‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave that with you. Brief Yveline, get her to call Fabiola and say we need to do a new autopsy on Monique’s body, with full-spectrum blood and organ analysis. Call Father Sentout and cancel the funeral. Then get ready to haul in Poincevin and Dominic for questioning. I’ll brief J-J while I drive home and look for the phone I thought was a camera. In questioning Condorcet and writing out my statement I forgot to look for it. It should still be there, by my hedge.’

‘Can I go now?’ Condorcet asked.

‘Not just yet,’ said Bruno. ‘But once your statement is signed and witnessed, I’ll approve your release on bail to go see your mum. And if your story holds up, I’ll see you get out of this with no prison time and free of any debts to Poincevin or to the casino. Are you happy with that?’

‘More than happy.’

Bruno went to brief Sergeant Jules, leaving Claire to brief Yveline, and drove off home, calling J-J on the way to update him.

‘You sure about this, Bruno? said J-J. ‘It’s a bit too bloody good to be true, to my sceptical old ears.’

‘We’ve got Poincevin’s private eye on tape, saying all this, and I’m trying to find this phone he had when he was spying on me yesterday, presumably a back-up for the one Messager confiscated in Sarlat. Call him and make sure he’s still got it.’

Bruno parked in his driveway and went to the area beyond the hedge where he’d tackled Condorcet the previous day. He was feeling ashamed of himself for not remembering to tell the arresting officers about what he’d thought was Condorcet’s camera. But he found it quickly enough, a sopping wet iPhone with a shattered screen. He drove back to St Denis, checking his watch to see that it was still only eight thirty. He had time to call Fabiola to explain the urgent need for another autopsy on Monique’s body, currently in the St Denis funeral parlour and about to be moved to the church.

‘I have a very urgent question for you,’ he began when Fabiola answered. ‘Can you identify in an autopsy whether a woman had lost a baby because she took two drugs called . . .’ he checked his notes, ‘mifepristone and misoprostol? We have a witness who claims he obtained the drugs to allow Monique’s husband to end her pregnancy.’

‘What?!’ Fabiola said. ‘Her husband? The bastard! Wait, let me think. The short answer is that I don’t know. I’ll have to make some calls. But the funeral is in just over two hours.’

‘I know. We’ll have to postpone it. Is there any way I can help, calling medical schools or something?’

‘Leave it to me,’ she said. ‘We’ll probably have to take the body to the police lab in Bergerac, but I’d better call the forensic expert there first. I’ll call you back once I know.’

Bruno contacted Father Sentout to say the benediction was off pending the new autopsy, and then called Annette to explain the new development and asked her to inform Ghislaine and Becca Weil. He called Laura himself, and after some sweet words about how happy she was to be seeing him again soon, despite the tragic circumstances of the funeral, he explained why it would have to be postponed.

‘So far it’s just an allegation by Condorcet, the guy that I caught spying on us yesterday,’ he told her. ‘But he has a lot of collateral evidence that we can check out through car mileage, phone locations and so on.’

‘Could it possibly be true?’ she said, her shocked tone coming down the line. ‘His own child? What sort of monster would do that?’

‘Maybe somebody whose own childhood was so completely miserable that they grew up thoroughly damaged,’ said Bruno. ‘I can’t begin to fathom something like that. I must go but can’t wait to see you again.’

‘Same for me,’ she said. ‘This evening, can we get together? And it’s my turn to cook.’

She gave him her address, a detached house on the road up to the hospital, and asked if there was anything she could do.

‘Did Monique call you in those days when she went off to Paris, just after the miscarriage? We can probably verify her location from her call records, so if you can give me dates and times of your recent calls, we can cross-reference your call history with hers, in case it’s been tampered with somehow. Business aside, I’ll be counting the hours until l see you tonight.’

As soon as that call ended another one came in, this time from J-J, to say that Sarlat police chief Messager could not put his hands on the phone he’d confiscated from Condorcet at the restaurant. It had been logged in at the guarded room where items in evidence were stored, and while it had not been logged out it had yet to be found.

‘What does Messager think?’ Bruno asked.

‘He doesn’t know, but he agrees that it’s possible somebody on his staff may have been bribed by Condorcet or even by Poincevin himself to remove the phone from the police station,’ J-J replied. ‘I can’t imagine Villon had anything to do with this, at least, not unless he has friends we don’t know about in the Sarlat gendarmes.’ J-J groaned. ‘How far do you think this cancer has spread?’

Bruno shook his head. ‘We’ve not unearthed anything about him becoming pals with any of your officers, so I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about on that front. Condorcet may be in the clear. He’s been cooperating fully, giving us chapter and verse on Poincevin and the husband and the new will. You’ll get the transcript of my interview with him later today. And even if Condorcet is trying to trick us, I have his other phone, which should have the time of most of the calls he sent and received. And his digital camera. If you get onto France Telecom they may be able to follow the location of the phone after it was taken from Sarlat police station. The question is, where are Dominic and Poincevin now?’

‘Poincevin is not in his office in Périgueux, and nor is he at home. It’s the same story with Dominic. Poincevin’s secretary hasn’t heard from him, but says he has an appointment at the reading of a will at Maître Weil’s chambers in Sarlat this afternoon.’

‘The key is going to be whether Fabiola and the police surgeon can prove the presence of abortion drugs in Monique’s body after the time that has passed,’ Bruno said. ‘For that, we just have to wait. And in the meantime, I have a promise to keep.’

Bruno ended the call and returned home to collect his Land Rover and a civilian jacket before driving to the gendarmerie in St Denis to collect Condorcet and head north towards Périgueux. Condorcet directed him to the modest terraced house near the train station where he had been raised and now lived with his mother.

‘I’ll wait here,’ said Bruno.

‘She might be reassured to see you,’ said Condorcet. ‘Show her your police credentials and say I’m working with you, that would please her. She doesn’t like Poincevin, the hours I keep, all that.’

Bruno shrugged and followed him into the property, which reminded him of his aunt’s place in Bergerac, a small townhouse where he had spent his boyhood.

‘I know you from your photos in the newspaper,’ Condorcet’s mother said as soon as they were introduced, putting a broom to one side and taking off her rubber gloves to shake hands. ‘Marie-Claire. You’re that flic from St Denis, the one with the basset hound.’

Bruno agreed that Balzac was his dog and went out to the Land Rover to bring him to greet the old lady. They had moved from the hall into the living room, and Marie-Claire had taken a seat to be able to pat Balzac and tell him what a fine hound he was.

‘What job are you on at the moment?’ she asked her son.

‘Can’t say, Maman. Bruno would have to answer that.’

‘It’s a bit delicate,’ Bruno replied. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go into details. Your son is being a great help to us in a confidential matter, but I can’t tell you any more until the operation has been concluded successfully.’ Bruno noticed the old woman sit taller at the formal language, a small smile edging its way onto her lips. ‘We’ll try to let him get back here this evening, but it could be late or even longer – I’m sure you understand that policework is round-the-clock. We’d better let you get back to your housework, madame, although this house looks impeccable to me already.’

Bruno rose, said farewell, put Balzac on a leash, and waited a moment outside the house for Condorcet to follow him.

‘Thanks, Bruno,’ he said when they were all settled back in the Land Rover. ‘She said she was proud of me, and I nearly fainted. What now?’

‘We drive back to St Denis and hope that I get some news from the autopsy. Then we decide whether to take you with me to Sarlat for the formal reading of Monique’s will.’

‘But there’s the new will that Poincevin and Dominic arranged with the notaire in Saint-German-en-Laye,’ Condorcet said. ‘That’s the latest will by date, so it’s the one that counts.’

‘Unless it can be legally challenged,’ Bruno replied. ‘If there is reason to believe she might not have been in full command of her faculties, or the will was signed under duress, or under false pretences. Any of these objections throws the will open to be questioned in court. And at that point you become a crucial witness because you can testify to Monique’s state of mind, and why everybody went all the way to Paris to sign a new will, and have Poincevin on hand, even though he didn’t witness it. And Dominic’s foster-aunt is the one to certify it?’ He raised an ironic eyebrow. ‘The whole thing smells fishy.’

27

Rebecca Weil’s chambers were in a relatively modern part of Sarlat, south of the historic centre and near the secondary collège named for Montaigne’s great friend, Etienne de la Boëtie. Suitable, thought Bruno, for a lawyer to be based near a place named for the man who invented the legal concept of the rights of man. The building was three storeys high and contained the offices of two lawyers and two notaires. Rebecca’s were on the first floor, and included a waiting room that could double as a conference room when needed.

When Bruno arrived with Condorcet shortly before two that same afternoon, he saw J-J’s heavy jaw drop in surprise at seeing Bruno accompanied by the disgraced former police technician. Beside J-J sat his driver and ever-reliable aide, Josette, who gave Bruno a friendly smile, and Laura gave him an even wider smile along with a little pursing of the lips, as if blowing him a kiss, that lifted Bruno’s heart. She was in a row of four chairs in which sat other members of Monique’s conciergérie team with a second row behind them, two of whom Bruno vaguely recalled from the dinner at l’Octroi, only six days earlier. Behind them he saw the gardener he had met briefly in the penthouse apartment of Monique and Dominic, along with some other men and women that Bruno assumed were company employees.

Ghislaine, in the front row and flanked on one side by Annette and on the other by her own private eye, Antonia Laperrine, gestured to Bruno to take a seat next to them. He pointed to Condorcet, shrugged and took two places in an empty row behind Ghislaine, shaking hands with Messager, the Sarlat police chief, who was in the back row with Bruno’s friend Romain, the deputy Mayor of Sarlat. Bruno recalled being told by Rebecca Weil that Romain was on the board of directors of Monique’s company, and he shook hands with him, too. There was no sign of Fabiola, nor of Dominic, but there were still a few minutes to go when Bruno’s phone vibrated and he saw that he had a message from Fabiola to say that she was just entering Sarlat.

‘Positive news!’ she had added, and Bruno had to make what he would of that. Looking around and counting the rows and chairs he saw there was room for thirty or more people in the room. The conference table facing them was empty except for a young woman sitting to one side, a shorthand pad and pencil before her and a machine that might have been a tape recorder. There were three empty seats, one probably for Rebecca, and another presumably for her colleague, the notaire. He had no idea for whom the third seat might be reserved.

The room had been designed for a certain solemnity, with wooden panelling on all the walls, heavy double doors behind the vacant table at the front of the room, two large doors at the rear, one on each side. There were portraits of serious-looking men in nineteenth-century dress, presumably lawyers or notaires, on each side wall. And behind the empty table was a rather fine landscape, too precise to be Impressionist, that Bruno recognized as the riverside beach at Vitrac, a few kilometres south of Sarlat, where the road to the south crossed the River Dordogne.

Feet were shuffled and pages turned. Coughs were suppressed and mobile phones were consulted. Some people spoke in discreet whispers and others sighed heavily until the double doors at the rear opened. Rebecca Weil, in legal robes of black and white with a double-tailed collar, and another woman of a similar age in sober civilian dress, came in and took two of the seats at the main table.

‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending at the reading of the last Will and Testament of the late Monique Duhamel, a friend to many of you here,’ Rebecca began. She introduced herself and the notaire beside her, Madame Hervault, and added, ‘We are still awaiting the arrival of some interested parties, so please forgive this short delay.’

She turned and began conversing with her neighbour in a very low voice until the sound of feet coming quickly up the stairs turned every head. The door was flung open and Dominic entered, followed swiftly by Poincevin.

Their arrival was hardly unexpected, thought Bruno, and he kept his eyes on Rebecca, interested to see that it was at this point the secretary at the side of the table appeared to turn on the tape machine.

‘Sorry to be late,’ said Dominic, taking a seat in the vacant part of the front row, and gesturing to Poincevin to sit beside him. ‘Traffic.’

Rebecca nodded curtly, turned to the notaire and said, ‘Let’s begin.’

‘This is the last Will and Testament of the late Monique Duhamel, spouse of Dominic l’Estringen, signed and dated and witnessed this year, on the twenty-first of October, and formally registered at the national Fichier Central des Dispositions de Dernières Volontés, on the twenty-eighth of October.’

Dominic rose, coughed briefly and said, ‘Excuse me, madame, but I have here the copy of a later will signed by my late wife on the eleventh of this month, at the office of the notary in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and formally registered on the sixteenth.’

Dominic stepped forward and politely handed a copy of the new will to Rebecca, who lifted the cover page and studied the contents.

‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘Would you like me to read the crucial section? It is very short.’

‘Please do,’ said Dominic, poker-faced.

‘In view of my pregnancy, I wish to revoke the last will that I signed and now wish to leave all my worldly goods of whatever kind, mobilier ou immobilier, to my husband, Dominic and to our unborn heir.’

Rebecca put down the document and said, ‘Signed and witnessed on the eleventh of this month at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.’

‘How very sad that your wife suffered a miscarriage on the day after this was signed on the twelfth of December, as you were leaving Paris to return to Sarlat,’ Rebecca said, her voice non-committal.

Dominic raised his head and spoke again. ‘Very sad for me as well as for her. Saddest of all for our unborn child.’

Ghislaine rose majestically from her seat, and said, ‘You utter swine, Dominic. You are not in the least bit sad. In fact, I believe you rejoice.’

A silence fell, filled by intakes of breath, and then by the sound of tyres squealing as on the street below a vehicle turned a corner, braking hard. A car door slammed; feet rushed up the stairs. All heads turned to the door as it burst open to reveal Fabiola standing there, brandishing an official-looking file.

‘I have just attended an autopsy, requested by the Sarlat court on the formal recommendation of magistrates, of the late Monique Duhamel. I was her doctor, and she was my patient. We have found evidence that there was no miscarriage, but a deliberate abortion of the baby that Monique had prayed to have. She’d been given both mifepristone and misoprostol, and there’s no signed official form of consent to an abortion on record. So somebody is guilty of the medical murder of her unborn child and is responsible in the eyes of God and man and woman for Monique’s own death. Commissaire Jalipeau, do your duty!’

‘One moment, madame, if you please,’ said Poincevin, rising. ‘And please take a seat. You are overwrought. With all due respect, madame, for your undoubted medical skills, you were not present when this sad miscarriage took place. And in any event, the will that she signed on the eleventh of December still stands.’

Fabiola turned, and too fast for anyone to stop her, spat in Poincevin’s face, shocking him so that he stumbled and almost fell back into his seat. He cowered against the chair, slowly pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, held it against his face, and mumbled through it. ‘I forgive you that assault, madame, you are not yourself.’

By this time Bruno was there to hold Fabiola and half-pull, half-carry her away from Poincevin.

J-J had pushed his way to the front of the room, with Josette and Messager close behind, shouting, ‘Poincevin, Dominic l’Estringen, you are under arrest, and we’ll sort this out at the police station.’

At this point, a ruler cracked hard against the big desk and Rebecca Weil was standing, the thin sheet of metal quivering in her hand, its tinny echo reverberating in the silence.

‘One moment, Monsieur le Commissaire. This is my office, and I am not finished. I do not object to your arrest, but I insist on making a critical point of law. It has been said in this office today that the will signed here by Monique Duhamel, on the twenty-first of October and subsequently ratified by the national registration agency, is no longer valid.’ Rebecca stared imperiously around the room.

‘That claim is untrue. The will of the twenty-first of October remains valid, because on the day before her death on the thirteenth of December, Monique Duhamel, knowing that her unborn baby was dead, signed an official codicil to that will, adding some details and clarifying various points. That codicil stressed that her will of twenty-first of October was still in force and she added only that she was now leaving nothing, absolutely nothing, to her husband Dominic. The original agreement signed on the eve of their wedding, that there would be a complete separation of goods between her and her husband, Dominic, was no longer in force, rendered null by Monique’s codicil. He would inherit nothing, not the penthouse apartment, nor any fraction of the family notary business, nor any furniture or possessions he could not prove to have brought into the marriage. Other than that every jot and title of her twenty-first of October will was to remain in force, and that codicil and renewal of the original will was ratified by the Fichier Central on Friday. I have here the official confirmation.’

She turned to Laura and the other women of Monique’s team. ‘Mesdames, the company Monique built now belongs to you, and the thirty per cent that remained hers is being divided between you, the gardeners and the housekeepers who contributed to the company’s success. This is a fitting memorial and tribute to one of the finest women I have ever known.’

Bruno had Poincevin immobilized, bent over a chair as he put the cuffs on his wrists, and J-J and Josette had already handcuffed Dominic and were marching him out of the door.

‘Allow me, please,’ said Condorcet, and pulled Poincevin upright by his collar before marching him to the door and down the stairs. As Bruno straightened his jacket, Laura blew him a discreet kiss and mimed holding a phone to her ear, which he understood to mean he should call her once he was free. He nodded, smiling, and hoping that the usual formalities would not take too long.

Epilogue

Bruno remembered the almost hesitant exploration he had made barely two weeks ago, when trying to find the small chateau tucked discreetly into the hills between Les Eyzies and St Denis. This time there were signposts of giant Santa Claus figures holding electric lanterns and pointing the way. And once over the rim that led into the hollow there were so many lights blazing in Ghislaine’s old family home that the whole hillside seemed to glow.

‘I remember being here for the christening of the second child, a little girl who must have been Ghislaine, four or five years younger than her brother,’ said the Baron, sitting in the passenger seat of Bruno’s ancient Land Rover. Balzac had his nose between the two front seats to be sure of missing nothing of this unexpected adventure that was the conciergerie’s legendary Christmas party, and to which the whole of St Denis appeared to have been invited. ‘I think our mothers were somehow distantly related so I’ll be interested to see what Ghislaine says.’

Behind Bruno came Fabiola and Gilles in her Renault Twingo, with Pamela and Felix in the back seat. Behind them, the Mayor and Jacqueline were being driven by Xavier and Mirabelle. At least nominally, Xavier was still deputy Mayor and Bruno would have given a week’s pay to have listened in on the conversation in that car. Rather to his relief, although she had known Monique through Pilates, Florence and her children could not attend. They had gone north to Lorraine to spend Christmas with her parents in the old coal mining centre of Forbach and had left before rumours of Bruno’s affair with Laura had started to spread.

Bruno had sacrificed one of his last remaining bottles of his home-made vin de noix as a Christmas gift for Ghislaine, and another for Becca Weil, whose management of the dramatic scenes at the reading of the will had won his sincere admiration. And from that moment, things had moved very quickly indeed.

The speed with which Monique’s remaining family heir had pounced upon her inheritance, from the penthouse suite to the country house, the estate agency to the notary business, had been so brisk that it was almost predatory. Although the lease that the concierge business had for their Sarlat office was secure for another three years, Laura and her partners were firm in the view that they should move. Laura wanted Bergerac, with its access to the airport. Others preferred Brive, with its own airport and fast train to Paris, but that was no longer strictly the Périgord, where almost all the properties were based.

Bruno had been kept both informed and involved in these various changes by Laura, and there were moments when he felt that these precious early days when he could never get enough of her embraces were being overwhelmed by the concierge business. Laura’s phone began ringing before eight in the morning and the conference calls with her colleagues went on late into the evening. This had come as a surprise to Bruno; Pamela’s work had never been a fraction as demanding of her time, despite encompassing the stables, the holiday lets, and her cooking school. And Laura’s discussions with her colleagues never seemed to reach a clear conclusion as the partners tried to adjust to the new situation after Monique’s death and the end of her unquestioned leadership of the business. Laura’s assumption that she would accede to the prime role had proved to be mistaken, or at least premature.

These internal wranglings were in addition to the endless queries and demands for favours or advice or action from the various customers of the concierge service. Which church offered the best Christmas concert, or the most child-friendly religious celebration? Which restaurants might be open on Christmas Day; which traiteur could be relied on to deliver the finest Christmas lunch? Where might a Father Christmas costume be hired at the last minute? And why was there so little gas left in the reservoir and how might it be swiftly replenished? Why had the customer not been informed that the car insurance had expired?

Usually the various automatic emails containing all of the requested information that went to each client had been unanswered, mislaid or ignored, but the concierge service was expected to resolve such petty inconveniences. Bruno had been startled to learn just how much the customers depended on Laura and her colleagues to do their shopping, their planning, their paying of bills and even their thinking. It seemed like a laborious way to make a living, but Laura and her fellow concierges each had iPads with detailed schedules for each of their clients, their particular needs and preferences. And Bruno had been awed at the endless reserves of patience that Laura could deploy. It was not a job he could have done with a smile.

She rose early every day just like Bruno, took her dog for a brisk walk or run just as he did, was usually at work before eight and ready to work all day, while breaking off to meet planes, ferry clients, book restaurants and wine tastings, all the time making sure that the housekeepers had detailed instructions about the clients and their guests. It had made for a strange time in their love affair, although they managed to spend the nights together, either at Bruno’s place or at the property she owned in Sarlat and shared with two colleagues. On the hill road that led up to the hospital, it was a relatively modern house from the 1950s, and Laura had a bedroom, bathroom and sitting room on the ground floor while her colleagues each had similar suites on the upper floor. Everyone shared the large kitchen and larder.

Once Christmas and New Year were over, Laura had assured Bruno that the pressure would ease and she could then start looking for new offices and probably a new home near Bergerac airport. How would that work? he wondered. At Sarlat, she was less than thirty minutes away. Bergerac was nearer fifty, and his job kept him fixed to the Vézère valley. Such petty logistical concerns could be forgotten in the early days of their affair but at the back of his mind Bruno knew they would come to matter soon enough.

He led the small convoy of vehicles around to the rear of the building to park by the big barn, and then shepherded the Mayor and Xavier and their partners, Fabiola and Gilles and Pamela and the Baron and Felix around to the main entrance, where the front door pillars were now guarded by plastic snowmen and the strains of ‘Le Père Noël arrive ce soir’ rang out across the garden.

Clad in a floor-length evening dress of gold brocade topped by a red Santa hat with a white bobble, Ghislaine embraced each guest in turn as Bruno introduced each new arrival, stressing that the Baron was a long-lost relative on his mother’s side.

And then Laura seemed to fly down the stairs and into his arms, George Sand leaping down after her, long ears taking wing at each bound, with joyous barks of greeting for Balzac.

Acknowledgements

The Bruno novels have always been a family affair. My wife, Julia Watson, a veteran food journalist and renowned chef, has long supervised the meals that Bruno cooks and the ones he enjoys when prepared by others. Her weekly Substack column, titled ‘Tabled,’ is strongly recommended; a terrific mix of the readable, cookable and erudite. Having been a food writer for The Sunday Times of London, the Washington Post and Gourmet magazine, Julia is also behind all the recipes in the award-winning Bruno cookbooks. Our elder daughter, Kate, a travel writer with an admirably intense focus on the food she eats along the way, has always been, like her sister Sophia, one of my first readers. Her writing on motor sports has already appeared in the Financial Times and The New York Times and I owe special thanks to Kate for her prominent role in the editing of this book, a skill she developed while an editor at the Oxford University Press. 

As always, my profound thanks to the people of the Périgord, worthy custodians of one the most remarkable histories on humanity’s long march. Our remote ancestors lived, hunted, used fire and carved stones and bones here at least two hundred thousand years ago. The first formal burial that we know of took place here some seventy thousand years ago; what seems to have been cooking in fire pits took place thirty thousand years ago; and the great masterpieces of the Lascaux caves were painted here between seventeen and twenty-two thousand years ago. 

Celts, Gauls, Romans, Franks, Normans, English and French all lived here and contributed something to the endless legends. And now tourists from across the planet come to visit the caves and chateaux, and to explore the markets and vineyards and restaurants. Many become enchanted by the region, as we did, and buy holiday homes or retire here, to find a warm and generous welcome from the people fortunate enough to have been born and settled on this magical corner of the world. Others make new careers in wine, and I know of excellent American, British, Irish, Dutch, Norwegian, German and South African winemakers in the region.

So far, I know of no enterprise to have pioneered Monique’s idea of a conciergérie service, but it would be a pleasure to see some of the crumbling and unused chateaux finding a new life. The meal that Bruno and the women enjoy at the glorious Vieux Logis restaurant is a creation of its master chef, Vincent Arnould, taken from the book Parcours Gourmands en Périgord. It is a collection of recipes from Vincent and a baker’s dozen of his colleagues, the fellow chefs of the region. I had the honour to be asked to write the introduction, and given the pleasures and education that Vincent and his fellows have given my tastebuds over the past three decades I was more than happy to agree.

This novel could not have appeared without the legendary editing skills of Jane Wood, and the essential teamwork of all her colleagues at Quercus Books.

I have taken appalling liberties in this novel with the reputation of some gendarme characters whom I have invented for the sake of the plot with no justification but literary licence. I have also been unduly harsh on urban Greens, people who have been accused of being prepared to do anything for the countryside except live in it. And it hardly needs saying that the behaviour of the deputy mayor of St Denis falls far below that of all the deputy mayors I have known in the region. And no member of the legal profession could possibly sink so low as Poincevin does here. That is the challenge for fiction writers: to dream up the most bizarre plots and horrendous characters with no excuse but the urge to spin a yarn and entertain the readers and to continue inventing the remarkable life of Bruno, Chef de Police.