Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

by Martin Walker

  28

  From his perch on the window ledge, Duroc looked triumphant as Bruno was shown into his office. The place had been transformed. Even the obligatory portrait of the president of France had been taken down and leaned against a wall. Duroc’s photographs of himself in uniform at his promotion parade had been cleared away and replaced with a large cork bulletin board. It was covered with photos of the burned-out shed at the scene of the fire, lists of names and phone numbers and mug shots of the militants arrested at the research station. The brigadier rose from behind Duroc’s desk to shake Bruno’s hand.

  “So who’s been arrested?” Bruno asked. “And where is this friend of mine now?”

  “In a cell below,” said Duroc. “He’s one of the gardening staff employed at the research station whom you and the Police Nationale were supposed to have checked out. We received information that someone was lying about being at home that night. Apparently he knows you from the hunting club. We offered him a lawyer and he asked for you instead. His name is Gaston Thiviers. No previous record.”

  “I certainly know him, but he seems an unlikely suspect. What’s the evidence against him? What kind of information did you receive, an anonymous letter?”

  “I can’t talk about my informants,” Duroc said, turning directly to the brigadier and looking smug. “But I got his wife to confess that she’d lied to the police and he wasn’t home on the night in question. And he also lied about it in the statement the police took from him at the research station.”

  Bruno closed his eyes and winced. Damn Duroc, acting like a bulldozer with so little sense of the town and the people in it. When Bruno looked up, the brigadier was looking at him curiously. “You have something to add?”

  “Yes, sir. I congratulate Captain Duroc on his initiative, but I think you’ll find that if we check with Geneviève Vuillard at the bank, Gaston will have an alibi.”

  He turned to Duroc. “You know, I’m sure, that Madame Thiviers is in a wheelchair?” Duroc nodded. “She was crippled in a car crash about five years ago when her brother was driving,” Bruno went on. “He was killed in the crash. So what you’ve stumbled on is a very discreet family arrangement. Gaston’s a good man, a devoted husband, and he takes wonderful care of his wife. But because of her injuries, she can’t be a wife to him in certain respects. So he spends a couple of nights a week elsewhere. Gabrielle knows about it and has been very understanding. After we first interviewed the research station staff, I checked on Gaston’s whereabouts on the night of the fire with Geneviève.”

  “Madame Thiviers said nothing about that,” said Duroc, irritated and openly skeptical of Bruno’s account. “Under questioning, she confirmed that her husband hadn’t spent the night with her. She lied in her initial statement to the police. I warned her she could be prosecuted.”

  Bruno controlled his anger. Whatever brief satisfaction he would feel from telling Duroc he was a fool would be paid for in bad relations for months to come. “She probably felt humiliated at confessing to a stranger that her husband was elsewhere overnight,” Bruno said. “Now she’ll be terrified of getting him into trouble and being in trouble herself. I just wish you’d asked me about this earlier so I could have explained the background. I told J-J, which is why the Police Nationale didn’t pursue it. In fact, I think J-J made his own discreet check with Madame Vuillard.”

  The brigadier was grinning, whether at the suspect’s marital arrangements or at Duroc’s discomfiture was not clear. “Anonymous letter, was it?” the brigadier asked Duroc.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Bruno said. “It wasn’t posted but hand-delivered to the gendarmerie early in the morning. Mauve notepaper, handwritten in the old-fashioned way they used to teach and with lots of words underlined.”

  Duroc blushed, but nodded reluctantly when the brigadier looked at him.

  “It’s Virginie Mercier from the retirement home,” said Bruno. “She’s been a bit funny that way for years. She spent over fifty years working as a maid in Father Sentout’s house before he sent her off into retirement. The time she doesn’t spend in church she spends trying to root out what she calls ‘immoral behavior’ and sending off letters denouncing it. I can’t imagine this is the first one you’ve received from her. I get one a week. I think one of them was about you, mon capitaine.”

  “I’ve had several complaining that you and the mayor are suppressing the evidence she gave you,” Duroc said stiffly. “This is the first one she sent with any information we could act on.”

  “You didn’t ask any of your gendarmes about it first?” Bruno asked. If the man didn’t consult his own team, he was even more of a fool than Bruno feared. “Your sergeant Jules would certainly know about Gaston’s little arrangement.”

  “Sergeant Jules is off today,” Duroc said, swallowing hard. Bruno knew that wasn’t the case, but he ignored it.

  “Well, all this will obviously have to be looked into, and it confirms the importance of local knowledge,” said the brigadier. He glanced briefly but knowingly at Bruno, who maintained a solemn face. “If Madame Vuillard confirms that Gaston was with her on the night in question, we have no reason to detain him, or to trouble his unfortunate wife further.”

  On his way out, Bruno stopped for a word with Jules at the desk to tell him Gaston was in the clear. “And another thing. Cresseil’s old dog is missing. You remember, that Porcelaine. Can you put out a call to the gendarmes and municipal cops downstream, in case he went into the river?”

  The Bar des Amateurs had become a remarkable success despite its location at the far end of the rue de Paris, opposite the gendarmerie, of all places. It boasted a large TV screen for sporting events and stayed open late. Its location and the formidable size of the owners, whose wives prepared the crèpes and pizza and the occasional croque-monsieur, guaranteed that its customers seldom dared to disturb the late-night peace of the town. So the proprietors were keen to answer Bruno’s questions about the drunken American and the pretty Canadian girl, to make sure he understood that what had happened in their bar was an aberration.

  “He’d been in most of the evening off and on, going out to walk along the street and then coming back,” said Gilbert, a tall man with a hooked nose. “He said he was waiting for somebody, and had another drink each time he came back.”

  “Vodka and tonics, he was drinking,” said his partner, René, a squat and powerful man.

  “Then at about eleven he came back in, this time with the girl, and they sat talking, quietly enough, until she got up to leave and he grabbed her arm,” Gilbert said. “I walked over, and very politely asked if everything was okay. She said it was. He asked for another drink, but we wouldn’t serve him. He’d had more than enough. The girl said she’d see him back to his hotel.”

  “Why did you still serve him after he smashed your window?”

  “He paid up fast enough. And it’s only a couple of evenings they’ve been in, usually pretty late, as if they’ve come from dinner. She used to come in with Max, and I was kind of surprised when she switched to the American. I thought they’d only gotten together very recently from the way they always seemed to be talking, like strangers discovering things about each other.”

  As Bruno strolled up the rue de Paris toward his office he passed the most modest of the town’s three hotels and remembered another small detail he wanted to check. The hotels of Saint-Denis were each well tailored to the range of visitors: the Manoir was for the wealthy, the much larger Royale was for the package tours and the Hôtel Saint-Denis was cheaper, much more old-fashioned and, in Bruno’s eyes, far more agreeable.

  It had long ago been a fairly grand town house with its own large courtyard and stables, and the best rooms had their own bathrooms. In the communal bathrooms on each floor, the plumbing was ancient, but the scale of the bathtubs was magnificent. On market days and in the tourist season, the courtyard was constantly filled with tables and customers, and in winter the hotel seemed reserved f
or commercial travelers and morose fishermen. It served breakfast and a light lunch but had no restaurant per se, no conference rooms and no Internet service. It was as French provincial hotels used to be, which was why Bruno felt warmly about it, and its owner-manager was the long-standing chairman of Bruno’s hunting club.

  “Salut, Mauricette,” he said to the owner’s wife, who ran the café, kissing both cheeks of the formidable woman with steel-gray hair. “Is Christophe around? Or maybe you can help. I need to check the guest book.”

  She led him to the small reception desk with its telephone and registration book.

  “It’s about one of your guests, Mademoiselle Duplessis, a Canadian who stayed with you for a while. Do you have her details?”

  “Jacqueline? A busy girl, that one.” It was clear she was not a favorite of Mauricette’s. She leafed back through the pages of the massive book. “Early August she arrived. Here it is: on the fourteenth, not long before that big fire.”

  “Are you sure? I thought she told me she’d arrived in town later than that.”

  Mauricette shrugged. “That’s what the book says.”

  “Do you remember her arrival?”

  “Not particularly; we were busy then. And I hardly saw her during the day—she was out and about. In the evenings she always seemed to have a different beau in tow. Sometimes the beau didn’t leave when he should have.”

  “Did you know them?”

  Bruno knew what was coming. “There was a young American, and then poor Max from our rugby team,” Mauricette said, dropping her voice almost to a whisper. “The American was a stranger to me, except he’s been in here at lunchtime for a sandwich and spoke enough French to get by. We got to talking, so I learned he was from California. A little plump but very well dressed.”

  “Did you ever talk to Jacqueline?” Bruno never underestimated the amount of information that could be elicited by a hotel keeper, and Mauricette was a born gossip.

  “Oh yes, she told me all about her job down at Hubert’s cave and her own family’s wines. I never knew they could make wine in Canada. She was a very pleasant young person, apart from her love life. She checked out a few days ago, and Max helped her with her suitcases. One was really heavy, full of wine books. She used to have them all piled up on the desk in her room.”

  “How did she pay her bill?”

  “By credit card, a Visa.” Mauricette turned the register toward him and pointed to the final column, where she had written down the number of the credit card. Bruno copied it into his notebook.

  “What’s your interest in the girl, Bruno? Is she in trouble?”

  “No, but we’ve got a team of detectives looking into that fire and they asked me to get the details of any strangers staying in town. It’s just routine. Thanks, Mauricette.”

  Back in his office, when he opened his e-mails, he doubted there’d be one from Isabelle, but he sat up straight when he saw the message from her private address on Hotmail, not her official one: “Sorry for silence. Suddenly reassigned to Luxembourg. Same case, new direction. I’ll call when I can. Maybe. Don’t use my other e-mail. Kisses, Isabelle.”

  What on earth did she mean by that, except to keep him guessing and uncertain? She’d call, maybe. And “Kisses” was the way you might end a note to an old boyfriend from school, or to a family member. It was a usefully vague word for Isabelle to deploy. There was a hint of conspiracy in her asking him to avoid her official e-mail address, and what on earth could be taking the case to Luxembourg? I’m being kept on the hook, Bruno concluded, and I’m a little old for that. A ringing phone brought him back to the real world. It was the funeral parlor calling. Could he come at once?

  29

  François Cheyrou had inherited the Saint-Denis funeral business from his father and grandfather, and Bruno expected that François’s teenage son, Félix, would probably bury him one day. Since Bruno was responsible for the registration of all deaths in the commune, he knew François well and was a frequent caller at the funeral home, which was tucked away behind the municipal campground. There was a large parking area in front of it, shaded by trees, and then inside, a row of rooms where the dead could be laid out for viewing. The rooms were furnished with simple dignity, each containing a bed, two prayer stools, vases for flowers and a small table that held the condolence book for visitors to sign. Behind the viewing rooms was an office, a waiting room and a garage for the hearses. Farther back was the large workshop, where the coffins were made. To one side stretched some smaller rooms for embalming and others for the dressing of the dead and the application of cosmetics that could repair the ravages of death before the deceased were subjected to public view.

  It was to one of these smaller rooms that François led Bruno; Max’s washed and naked body lay on a long metal table that had two taps at one end and a drain at the other.

  “I was trying to comb out the hair when I found it,” said François, and he lifted Max’s head so Bruno could see the gash on the side of the scalp. He bent down to examine it more closely. It was less a wound than a bad scrape, but the skin had been broken and the flesh was swollen. Max’s body had spent hours soaking in wine before being washed here at the funeral parlor; Bruno wondered what effect that had on a wound.

  The ash on the end of the cigarette François kept in his mouth curved down at an improbable length. Automatically, François turned his head and blew. Ash tumbled to the floor. “Sorry. The smoke stops me from smelling the corpses. Some of them get a bit ripe until I do the embalming. Anyway, look at the size of that bump. I don’t think he got that by accident.”

  Bruno nodded, agreeing. “Have you called a doctor?”

  “Of course. You know the law. Anything suspicious on a body and we call the police first and then a doctor. I called the medical center and asked for that new one, Fabiola. She signed the initial death certificate, so she has to be called in. Max’s death was marked as nonsuspicious. She was the one who told me to try that number I reached you on. Your own cell phone isn’t working. Have you changed it?”

  “It’s a long story. Use the new number for the moment. It was a nonsuspicious death when we found the body, but it’s certainly suspicious now,” said Bruno. “What do you make of it? Could he get that kind of wound from just falling and hitting his head on something?”

  “If he fell from a height, yes. But the way it’s supposed to have happened, collapsing in a wine vat, I can’t see how that would have caused this bump. It’s not the usual kind of wound you get from a club or anything like that. I can’t say much more because I don’t have the kind of equipment that forensics teams have, but it just looks odd to me.”

  “Could it have been inflicted after death?” Bruno pressed. “I wasn’t being gentle when I pulled him out of the vat and threw him over the side. Maybe the wound happened when he landed.”

  “Don’t ask me.” François shrugged. “You need a forensics specialist.”

  Bruno was already on the phone to J-J when Fabiola arrived, pulling on surgical gloves and a face mask, wrinkling her nose at the smell from François’s cigarette. With her scar covered, Bruno noticed that her eyes were magnificent, large and dark and fringed with very long eyelashes. She took plastic bags from her briefcase and put them on the corpse’s hands, and then pulled out a magnifying glass and began to peer at the wound.

  “The doctor is looking at him now, J-J. What time should I expect you? Okay, within the hour. Call me when you get to Saint-Denis because I’ll be at the farmhouse where it happened, sealing off the place. You might have trouble finding it.”

  “There are wood splinters in this gash in the head,” said Fabiola as Bruno closed his phone. “I’ll leave them there, but make a note of that, would you?”

  “The forensics experts from Bergerac …,” Bruno began.

  “I know,” she said briskly. “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything to affect what clues may be left. But write down what I said about the wood splinters. I’m pretty sure that blow to the
head wouldn’t have been fatal, and I’m going to stick with my initial opinion of asphyxiation as the cause of death, but he may have been knocked unconscious.”

  “Could that have been accidental?” Bruno asked.

  “I don’t know. Head wounds are funny things.” She pulled back the eyelids, peered into the mouth and nostrils and then began to examine the rest of the body more closely.

  “Have you noticed the penis?” asked François. “If you ask me, this guy had sex not long before death. You might want to tell the forensics team to check the seminal vesicles.”

  Fabiola nodded and took her magnifying glass to the groin area. “I think you’re right. Make a note of that too,” she said to Bruno, and took another plastic bag and placed it carefully around the boy’s genitals. She parted his legs and peered closely. “No sign of anal penetration.” Then she began to look at the hands through the thin plastic film, paying particular attention to the nails. “Left hand, foreign matter in the nails of index and middle fingers. Hair, possibly pubic.”

  Her inspection completed, Fabiola took a large plastic bag and wrapped it around Max’s head. “Short of cutting him open, that’s the best I can do, but make sure the forensics team gets my notes, and give them my card. Since this looks like it’s going to be a police inquiry, I’ll type out a statement for you, Bruno. I can’t rule out the possibility that he fell awkwardly and hurt his head that way, but I’d say it was unlikely. I think somebody hit him or pushed him.”

  “It could have been me, when I got him out of the vat,” said Bruno. “You remember helping me hold him up when we tried to breathe air into him before I pushed him out?”

  Fabiola nodded. “You’re right. But we might be able to exclude that if we can establish an accurate time of death. It won’t be easy after he was in the wine so long. It works on the tissues. There are also signs of recent bleeding from the nose and bruising there, but they look three or four days old. Could be a rugby injury, or maybe he was hit on the nose.”