Fatal Pursuit

by Martin Walker

  Once past the path, Bruno whistled in admiration and pulled out his mobile phone to take some photos. To his left was the two-story gatehouse with a four-by-four vehicle outside. It was about the size of Bruno’s own cottage, big enough for at least two generous bedrooms upstairs. Straight ahead was the stone archway leading into the courtyard with another four-by-four vehicle parked in the shade of the central tree. The chartreuse itself was a fine building, with two white pillars supporting a porch above the main door, tall French windows to either side and mansard windows on the floor above. The barns to each side of the courtyard had also been given tall French windows, and the walls of local stone had been cleaned and repainted.

  As he advanced he saw to his right an all-weather swimming pool with a sliding glass roof where somebody was swimming laps. Behind the pool stood a handsome stone pigeonnier just beyond a terrace. A long stone building, evidently newly built and topped with solar panels, seemed to be the pool house. Expensive deck chairs lined the length of the pool. On a terrace between the pool and the house stood a large wooden table and chairs where Sylvestre was sitting with a dark-haired woman in jeans, an off-white cotton sweater and very large sunglasses. As he approached, Bruno saw a tall, slim bottle that signaled an Alsace wine on the table, along with green-stemmed glasses and a large ashtray.

  “Bonjour, Bruno, this is an unexpected pleasure,” said Sylvestre, rising and speaking loudly above the geese. “Do you know my cousin, Martine? Will you join us in a glass of Riesling?”

  “I’m glad to see at least two members of the family are talking,” he said and turned to Martine. “I’ve just been to see your mother and father. He’s very proud of you and your career in London.”

  “Did he add that he can’t wait for me to drop it all and start giving him grandchildren?” she replied, an edge to her voice as she stretched out a lazy hand to be shaken.

  She took off the sunglasses and gave him a lopsided smile. Her voice was lower than he’d expected and her accent pure Parisian. Her dark hair fell gracefully to her shoulders from a side parting. Bruno guessed it had been expensively cut. She wore no makeup, except perhaps for something subtle that made her eyes look striking. They were her father’s eyes, bright blue and twinkling. She had a wide, full mouth, perfect cheekbones and an imperious nose that some would have found too large for her face. Bruno thought it gave her character. Her legs were long and her shoulders broad. He noticed she was wearing flat shoes of the kind people wore on yachts in glossy magazine ads. She could be a model herself.

  “Your father said something about wanting grandchildren to leave the farm to, and he’s right to be proud of it and the business he’s built with your mother. But I think everybody’s inheritance could be improved if the two wings of the family could reach an agreement,” Bruno said. “The mayor is hoping that can happen because he likes Sylvestre’s project. He thinks it will bring more tourists and maybe a few more jobs for local people.”

  “The mairie is already enjoying the new property taxes I’m paying,” said Sylvestre. He gave a short, barking laugh. “If anybody can reach a settlement, it will be me and Martine.”

  “You’ve made the place look great,” said Bruno. “I wish you luck, and if I can help in any way…”

  “Thanks, but let’s not talk of that now.” Sylvestre poured a glass of wine and pushed it across to Bruno. “I don’t think you were there the other day after the parade when we got talking with your doctor and that Green council member, Alphonse, about electric cars. He was wondering if I could help organize a special race for them in the Vézère Valley. Martine is in public relations, and she’s been sharing some ideas she has about getting sponsorships to make it happen.”

  “I imagine your Tesla would start as the favorite,” said Bruno. “Talking of that car, where is it?” He looked around.

  “There’s no way I’d bring it up that rutted path. The truck with the Tesla and the Bugatti is in the secure parking lot of that logistics company in Le Buisson. I hired the Range Rover to get into my property and to get around.” Sylvestre gestured to the vehicle parked in the courtyard behind him. “Alphonse said he’d talk to the mayor, and he called me this morning to say the mayor is interested in the idea.”

  “The mayor has become an enthusiast after the concours and yesterday’s rally,” said Bruno as a splash came from the pool and Freddy hauled himself out. He was thin and wiry, a mass of black hair tumbling down from his chest and into his trunks. He grabbed a towel from one of the deck chairs, put on a terry-cloth robe and came to shake hands before excusing himself to go and change.

  “You’re a brave man,” said Bruno. “It’s too late in the year for me to go swimming in the open air.”

  “The pool is heated by those solar panels,” said Freddy, in good French but with an accent Bruno didn’t recognize.

  “How are you enjoying the Périgord?” Bruno asked. “Is this your first visit?”

  “I like it a lot, all those old castles. And it’s very green, a pleasant change after living in the Emirates. Excuse me, I should go and change.”

  He nodded courteously and left, and Bruno noticed that he headed for the gatehouse rather than the main building.

  “Perhaps I could come and see you about the electric-car-rally idea,” said Martine. “My father tells me you’re the mayor’s right-hand man.”

  “No, that’s his deputy, Xavier, the maire-adjoint,” said Bruno. “I’m just the municipal policeman, but I’d be happy to make an appointment for you to see the mayor. It’s this family feud that I’m here for. You two seem to get on well, and your father seems to be open to some kind of financial settlement—”

  “He is,” said Martine, smoothly interrupting. “But every time he meets Sylvestre, all the old family resentments come out, and he starts demanding the return of a grandfather clock and some bed of my great-great-grandmother and talking about historic inflation rates. If there’s a deal to be made, Sylvestre and I will do our best to reach it, and then it will be up to me to sell it to my father.”

  “Which way did you come here?” Sylvestre asked, and Bruno explained how he’d walked through the woods from Fernand’s home.

  “So he didn’t steer you the other way around, where you’d have seen a perfectly good road that goes around his walnut trees and comes out by my swimming pool. That’s the logical way to get here, but he’s fenced it off.”

  “The law gives you a minimum right of access to your property,” said Bruno. “You could turn that rutted path into a decent gravel road, and it would make for a handsome approach.”

  “ ‘Minimum’ is the word, not even two meters wide, and since it’s not my land I can’t make it into a paved or tarmac road. Still, I’m going to put down the gravel. But that doesn’t solve the problem of the geese. Even with double glazing and earplugs, they wake me at dawn, and it goes on all day. It’s enough to drive me crazy. I’d never be able to sell any of these apartments.”

  “That reminds me of a tourist who came to the mairie to lodge a complaint about the house he’d rented for a week,” said Bruno. “It was just on the outskirts of St. Denis, and the people in the houses on each side kept chickens. The tourist wanted me to find some way to silence the cockerels who woke him at dawn every day.”

  “What did you say?” Martine asked. She’d been raised in the country herself and sounded amused.

  “I asked him why he’d come to the French countryside where cockerels were to be expected. And he should count himself lucky that the neighbors didn’t raise geese or donkeys.”

  “Peacocks are the worst of all,” she said. “Their screams sound like someone’s being murdered.” She turned to Sylvestre. “Don’t worry, I won’t suggest my father get some peacocks—as long as you’re prepared to be reasonable. In the meantime, just to show goodwill, I’ve brought you a peace offering.”

  Sylvestre sat up when she reached into her shoulder bag and brought out a sheaf of photocopies of handwritten pages that looked a
s if they came from a private journal or diary.

  “It’s about that Bugatti you’re interested in,” she said. “It’s the unpublished memoir of an RAF bomber pilot shot down in 1941 and rescued by someone driving a car that sounds like the car that obsesses you. When the airman died, his family sent his unpublished memoir to the Imperial War Museum in London. I’d been working with them on getting French sponsors to help promote a new exhibition about French escape routes for downed pilots, which is how I heard about it.”

  She handed the pages across to Sylvestre, who took them as if receiving some holy relic and began quickly scanning the pages.

  “Is this about the Bugatti that disappeared in the war when being driven to Bordeaux?” Bruno asked.

  She looked at him in surprise. “You know about it, too?”

  “I just heard about this lost Bugatti at the dinner that followed the Concours d’Élégance. Some people were talking about the most valuable cars in the world. I didn’t know it was that famous.”

  “I’d never heard about it until I was doing some business with the new Bugatti headquarters in London, and Sylvestre let them borrow his old sports car for the launch of their showroom,” she said. “Once I heard his name, I realized that we were cousins, even though we were on opposite sides of the family feud, and I introduced myself. We agreed to meet for lunch, and he told me of his interest in the lost Bugatti.”

  “This airman says he was hit by flak after bombing the Michelin plant in Clermont-Ferrand, lost an engine, and the crew had to bail out,” said Sylvestre, lifting his head from the pages, his eyes alight with excitement. “He was picked up by someone in a black Bugatti who didn’t give his name but was in his mid-forties and said he’d been a pilot in the First World War. He drove very fast and dropped the airman at a château where the family spoke English. They got him in touch with some people who had access to an escape route to Spain over the Pyrenees. He says it was called the PAT, after a British naval officer named Pat O’Leary who had helped to start it.”

  “Any route from Clermont-Ferrand to Bordeaux would probably have come through this region,” said Bruno.

  “A man in his mid-forties who drove fast, a pilot in the Grande Guerre—that could be Robert Benoist,” said Sylvestre. “He won the French, British and Italian Grand Prix, and he went on to win Le Mans and run the Bugatti racing team. Who else would they trust to get the Bugatti to Bordeaux?”

  He turned to his cousin, his eyes shining. “This is amazing, Martine. I won’t forget this.”

  10

  Back in town, Bruno turned down the rue de la Paix and pulled into the parking lot by the river that served the amusement park. Bruno had long considered it an eyesore. At the far end of the park was a stretch of scrubland, almost a field, between the windmill and the camping site farther downriver. That would be the place to park cars, tucked well back so they didn’t spoil the view of the river from the other bank. Whatever Jérôme said about his plans for expansion, changing the parking area was going to be Bruno’s first recommendation to the mayor.

  Bruno had visited the place twice, once as a new arrival in St. Denis and more recently when he had taken Florence and her young children there as a treat to ride the carousel, to eat sausages smothered in mild mustard and ketchup inside a baguette and to watch him win each of them a stuffed animal at the popgun range. She had ignored the children’s pleas to see the burning of Joan of Arc and the guillotine beheading Marie Antoinette, the park’s two more renowned attractions, and marched them into the water garden to eat their sausages and paddle in the shallow streams. When Bruno saw the burning at the stake, he had been mildly impressed, thanks mainly to the clothes worn by the figure of Joan. They were fashioned from a special kind of paper that burned furiously with a bright flame, like the blond wig that ignited in a suitably dramatic manner as a bell tolled, black smoke poured out, and the visitors were wheeled out to make room for the next batch.

  “They’re banning Joan,” said Jérôme when Bruno went into his office. “They’ve been at me for years about it, first for the smoke and then for the asbestos that we used to make the model. And now the new prefect is pro-Green, so I’m sunk. I have to think of something else, and I remembered something my father always wanted to do.”

  A burly man in his forties with a long, thin nose and a salesman’s easy patter, Jérôme was a member of the town council who was usually at odds with the mayor over anything that might increase his taxes. The mayor in return kept an eye on any of Jérôme’s more imaginative plans for new exhibits and had memorably vetoed the scheme to reenact a Black Mass being performed on the naked form of one of King Louis XIV’s mistresses.

  “My dad dreamed it up in the seventies, when I was still a kid, and the small farms around here were closing down or being brought together into bigger units with tractors, and all the old rural life was disappearing. Dad thought people would like to see how it used to be, so he had this idea to re-create a nineteenth-century village with its schoolroom, blacksmith, apothecary and basket weaver, people dressed in period costumes, making knives and spinning wool and weaving cloth on looms.”

  “I think the mayor would prefer that to the Black Mass,” said Bruno as Jérôme unrolled a large blueprint that more than covered his desk.

  “I’d put a waterwheel in here in a little cut I’d make in the riverbank and use that to grind corn, then we could sell both the flour and the old-fashioned bread we’d make. At the far end beyond the windmill, I’d have an old-fashioned farm with ducks, geese and chickens, a petting zoo for the kids with some sheep and dwarf goats and a display of traditional farm implements, including horse-drawn ones. My dad had already started collecting some. We’d have a restaurant called the Old Farmhouse Kitchen, and I want to start a brewery. I’d keep the existing amusement park, minus poor old Joan, of course, and build this new village on that land beyond the windmill. We just use it now for storage. What do you think?”

  “I think the mayor will like it. I certainly do, and it sounds like it means some new jobs in season.”

  “About five or six jobs, probably, but if it works well, it could be more. The thing is, Bruno, we can promote it as educational, which would mean school groups coming here and bringing in business outside the school holidays.”

  “You’ll need more parking space. Could you use some of that land beyond your windmill, over by the campsite but on the side near the road rather than the river?”

  “That makes sense. Yes, why not?”

  “Just two more questions,” said Bruno. “How are you going to replace Joan of Arc, and how do you get that effect on Marie Antoinette’s neck when her head rolls into the basket?”

  “For Joan, I’m going to build an exhibition of nineteenth-century clothes with a small photo studio attached so people can dress up and have their photos taken—singly, couples, the whole family. But Marie Antoinette is a trade secret.”

  “Come on, Jérôme. I worked out that you have a small pump in there that shoots out the fake blood, but it’s the neck that interests me.”

  “It’s spaghetti in tomato sauce behind a sheet of glass, but don’t you agree it looks good? I came across it in England when I went over for a rugby international. I saw people eating it on toast in a café and couldn’t believe my eyes. Spaghetti and toast—those English will eat anything. And they sell it in cans. But as I looked, I thought it was just the thing for Marie’s neck, so I brought some cans back.”

  Bruno took his leave, telling Jérôme to drop off a copy of the plans at the mairie. His working day was over, his horse needed exercising, and he needed to pick up his dog. And tonight was the regular weekly dinner with his friends. He found himself smiling as he drove up the familiar road, imagining their reaction when he told them of Jérôme’s use for tinned spaghetti.

  —

  Even though his affair with Pamela was over, Bruno always enjoyed the approach to what he still thought of as Pamela’s house, even though she no longer lived the
re. Gilles and Fabiola had bought it, and Bruno still kept his horse, Hector, in the adjoining stables along with the old mare, Victoria. And his dog, Balzac, often spent the day there with Hector, whom he’d known since he was a puppy. Gilles was waiting for him, the horses already saddled. Hector nuzzled at Bruno, expecting his usual apple. Bruno gave it to him as he stroked Hector’s smooth neck. Balzac put his paw on Bruno’s foot by way of greeting, and Bruno gave him a biscuit. The basset hound wolfed it down and then darted around the horses’ legs, eager for his customary run. Bruno donned his riding boots and hat as Gilles explained that Fabiola would meet them at Pamela’s riding school where there was a new horse she might buy. Gilles had just started learning to ride, so Bruno checked the saddle girths and kneed each horse gently in the stomach so he could tighten the straps a notch. They set off side by side at a sedate walk, Balzac trotting ahead.

  “Do you remember Annette’s English boyfriend talking about the Bugatti the other night, the one that’s worth millions?” Bruno asked. “Something has come up that might make a story for you.” He explained what he had learned from Sylvestre about the downed British airman and his handwritten memoir.

  “Robert Benoist?” Gilles exclaimed. “I’ve heard of him, a hero in both world wars and a Resistance leader. I’m pretty sure he was arrested and shot. They held a special race in his name in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris after the war. There’s a plaque about the race in the Bois. I’d better go and see Sylvestre; it’s the kind of story Paris Match loves.”

  Gilles had taken a buyout at the magazine after getting a book contract and deciding to leave Paris to be with Fabiola, but he still wrote articles for them as a freelancer.