Fatal Pursuit

by Martin Walker

  “It’s Denise, the bank manager’s daughter, and she might lose an eye,” said Bruno, trying to distract Amandine long enough for Yveline to get past her bulk. “Several witnesses have identified Tristan as the boy who threw the stone that hurt her.”

  Amandine’s mouth opened and closed, but she stayed immobile and then shouted, “Simon, stop them.”

  “Madame,” said Yveline coldly, “either you let me past or, as well as your son, I’ll have no choice but to arrest you for obstructing the police in the course of their duty.”

  “It’s not true, Tristan was with me here all afternoon,” Amandine said, grudgingly allowing Yveline to pass. “He’s not well, he’s delicate…”

  “That’s fine, Amandine,” said Bruno. “If you say he was with you all afternoon and hasn’t left the house, we’ll just take your statement to that effect. Why not show me where I can sit down to take your statement?”

  “Don’t say a word, Amandine,” Simon called from over Bruno’s shoulder. “I’ve got a lawyer coming, and he said none of us should say a word until he arrives.”

  “Don’t be a fool, spending good money on lawyers when I can clear this up right now,” she told her husband, throwing him a contemptuous look. “Follow me into the kitchen, Bruno.”

  By the time he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, Bruno had Amandine’s brief statement, signed and made official by the stamp Bruno kept in his shoulder case with other forms, evidence bags and gloves, dog biscuits and carrots for the horses, along with keys to the various municipal buildings. Her statement included the key phrase that it had been made “freely and voluntarily and under pain of perjury.”

  Yveline pushed Tristan into the room, looking stunned as he stared down at his hands handcuffed before him. A pair of earphones that looked familiar to Bruno were still hanging from the mobile phone tucked into the breast pocket of his shirt. Some tinny music was still playing. Bruno donned a pair of evidence gloves, plucked out the phone and put it in an evidence bag with the earphones.

  “Madame Vaudon has just given me a statement asserting that her son was with her in the house all afternoon,” he told Yveline, keeping a straight face. “Tristan’s phone should therefore bear out what she says. If not, she’s in trouble for making a false statement.”

  “He’s under arrest anyway, even without the assault charge,” said Yveline, holding up an evidence bag with a half-filled plastic bag inside it. “Almost half a kilo of marijuana. Were you aware, madame, that your son used illegal drugs?”

  Amandine rose to move to her son, and Yveline said firmly “Stand back” and then “Stand aside, monsieur,” as Simon hovered helplessly in the doorway. She pushed the boy out, Bruno following behind, and heard Amandine berating her husband as “an utterly useless apology for a man.”

  At the front door, Bruno turned and said, “Your son will be at the gendarmerie until the magistrate comes to press charges. Your lawyer is free to join us there, but it would be a good idea to telephone the gendarmerie first and see when the magistrate will be available. Thank you for your cooperation, and, Simon, you might want to make your peace with Denise’s parents while you can.”

  Sitting in the backseat with a white-faced Tristan while Yveline drove, Bruno pulled out his phone to call Pamela. He needed his van and Balzac, and he still had to collect the écrevisses from the baron before Martine arrived for dinner.

  18

  As he left the baron’s place with his bag of crayfish, Balzac sitting up beside him, Bruno pulled off the road to answer his phone. He always did that now, ever since being called to a fatal road accident that had been caused by a woman texting as she drove. The screen told him the call was from J-J.

  “The forensics guys have everything they need from the house, but Yves is still trying to get into Hugon’s computer,” J-J said. “And there’s no word yet on the autopsy from the lab in Bordeaux, so we’re heading home. There’s just one thing: one of my detectives who was watching the rally on Sunday and saw Freddy win swears it was Freddy he saw on the station platform in Le Buisson yesterday evening getting on the train for Agen. But you said you’d heard from Isabelle that he was having dinner in Sarlat.”

  “Not quite,” Bruno replied. “She said his phone was at a fixed location in Sarlat.”

  “Maybe he’s playing games with his phones, leaving the one we know about in one place while he goes off to do business elsewhere, probably with a phone we don’t know about. I’ve assigned someone to check the surveillance cameras at the station in Agen, but if he’s being careful about surveillance, they aren’t difficult to avoid.”

  “Have you heard anything from Isabelle about when we should expect her?” Bruno asked.

  “No, she must still be held up by paperwork. You wouldn’t believe the number of forms I’ve had to fill in, defining the limits of the surveillance we’re supposed to mount. I’ve still got to get a magistrate to countersign them and witness my guarantee to destroy any film or tapes not needed in court.”

  Bruno felt a twinge of alarm as J-J ended the call. He’d filled out no forms and asked no permission for his own amateurish attempts to keep watch on the two targets. Perhaps he’d better keep that knowledge to himself or even dismantle his cameras. He’d have to change the batteries by the next evening, he told himself, even if he took the risk of leaving them in place. But perhaps Isabelle and her team would have arrived by then.

  He raced home, stopping only to buy bread just before the bakery closed. He had thirty minutes at the most before Martine was supposed to arrive. That left him no time to shower if he was going to pick some fresh lettuce and feed Balzac and his chickens.

  He dealt with the animals first, then picked the lettuce and put another log into the wood-burning stove. He checked that he’d put the vodka into the freezer. He always kept a couple of bottles of white wine and champagne in the fridge. He knew that he didn’t have the two hours he needed for the dough to rise to make proper blinis to go with the caviar, so he’d have to offer toast instead. But then he remembered how Pascal at the food show had made what he’d called his instant blinis using egg whites. It was not the best time for an experiment with a new dish, he thought, but what the hell? Bruno washed his hands and face, ran his wet fingers through his hair and then gargled quickly with mouthwash to wash away the taste of the day.

  In the kitchen, he began making the court bouillon for the crayfish, pouring into a large saucepan half a bottle of Thomas’s Riesling with the same amount of water. He peeled four shallots and sliced them thin and did the same with two carrots. He diced three stalks of celery and a thin leek and put all the vegetables into the saucepan with a couple of chopped cloves of garlic, one whole clove and some coriander and fennel seeds. He ground in some salt and pepper and then took a small piment d’espelette, the red pepper grown in the Basque country, from the bunch that hung from the beam in his kitchen, and added it to the broth as it heated. He looked at his vegetable basket, where he kept apples mixed with the potatoes to stop them from sprouting. No, potatoes would make the meal too heavy. Perhaps rice? No, he’d serve it just with the vegetables in the bouillon.

  He opened the jar of caviar and put it on the table with a tiny silver coffee spoon for each of them. He’d found them in a vide-greniers, one of the town’s regular jumble sales where people emptied their attics of stuff they no longer needed. Now for the blinis. He measured a hundred grams of buckwheat flour into a bowl, mixed in a little salt and pepper and made a well in the center of the flour. He took an egg from the bowl by the stove and was about to crack it and separate the white from the yolk when he heard the sound of a car coming up the road and turning into his driveway. Balzac was already at the door, bounding out as soon as Bruno opened it to investigate the new arrival.

  Balzac liked new people, and he liked women, so he was squeaking with excitement when he reached Martine’s car just as she opened the door. Bruno thought for a moment Balzac was going to leap into the car, but instead the dog p
ut his front paws onto the sill of the car door and gave her a happy bark of greeting and an amiable sniff at her black jeans as she swung her long legs from the car and stood up. Bruno came forward to give her the bise on each cheek, but she kissed him firmly on the lips and then bent to caress Balzac. She was wearing a T-shirt of black silk beneath a short tweed jacket of dark blue, white and black checks that had been nipped in tightly at the waist. It had been beautifully cut to work as casual clothing or something more formal. It was somehow businesslike and playful at the same time and made Bruno regret that with the pressure of time he had decided against changing.

  “Horses, basset hounds, country dinners and a man in uniform—are there no limits to the props you use to seduce a woman, Bruno?”

  He looked down at his uniform, suddenly realizing he had not cleaned Denise’s blood from his collar.

  “I’m sorry, I just got back. It was one of those days, dramas, injuries, arrests…”

  “Not that awful attack on the little girl that was on the radio just now?”

  “Yes, that was part of it. But when I had to choose between starting the dinner and having a shower and changing my clothes, the dinner won.”

  “A true Périgourdin in your priorities, and quite right, too,” she said. Suddenly her eyes widened in surprise. “Is that blood on the collar of your jacket? You should soak it in cold water right away.” She handed him the bottle she had brought.

  “I asked Claire what wine you liked, and she checked with Ivan who said your favorite was Château de Tiregand. But that’s what my dad usually serves when I come home, so I thought I’d bring you something different that I came across when I was skiing in Gstaad. I was amazed to see a Bergerac wine, this one, Château Monestier La Tour. I loved it.”

  From the look in her eye and the way she was speaking quickly, Bruno realized that Martine was probably just as nervous as he about the evening ahead and where it might lead. They were in that enticing but dangerous moment when each of them knew that all was possible between them but feared that a single false step could send the edifice of fantasy they were constructing tumbling down into embarrassment and disappointment.

  “What a generous and inventive thought,” he said. It was a wine he recalled drinking years ago and not being overly impressed. But he’d heard that the vineyard had come under new ownership, and its wines were now spoken of with deep respect by people whose judgment he trusted. “I always think a wine is better when it comes with a little story attached like that. So now I’ll always think of you in the Alps, swooping downhill and dancing with the mountain whenever I see this wine.”

  She took his arm companionably and asked him to show her his garden. He pointed out the white oaks where his truffles were growing underground, introduced her to Napoléon and Joséphine, his two geese, and to Blanco the cockerel.

  “Named for the rugby player,” she said, rising even higher in his esteem when she recognized the name. She cast the experienced eye of a country girl over his vegetable garden, noting the well and nodding in approval at the three compost heaps, each at a different stage of fermentation.

  “Are those woods yours?” she asked.

  “All the way up to the ridge. That’s where I get my mushrooms, and there are a couple of spots where I can usually count on truffles. The meadow down below is mine as far as that lower hedge. The stream on the right is the boundary.”

  “Does your well work?”

  “Yes, I used to depend on it for water and still use it in summer for the garden. It’s good to drink; somehow it tastes better than the stuff from the water tower. We’ll be drinking it tonight with our meal.”

  “Where do you keep your horse? Is there a barn behind the house?”

  “Hector stays at a friend’s house to keep her horse company, and so she can take him out for exercise when I’m tied up with police work. I do the same for her when she’s busy. It’s Fabiola, Dr. Stern, at the clinic.” After a moment he thought it politic to add, “She and her boyfriend, Gilles, are good friends of mine.”

  “Now tell me what you’re planning for us to eat.”

  “Écrevisses à la nage, the crayfish caught by a friend this morning about three kilometers from here,” he said. “So we’re drinking white wine.”

  “Lovely, I haven’t had those for ages.” Martine squeezed his arm in glee. “Mandy says you’re known in St. Denis as a good cook.”

  “I wish I could cook Asian food like she does,” he said. “Before the écrevisses there’s champagne and then some vodka to go with the caviar and the blinis that I’m making, and as soon as Balzac comes back from his security patrol of the chicken run we’ll go into the kitchen and I’ll cook. Meanwhile, I hope you appreciate this sunset I’ve arranged for you.”

  “It will last another few minutes. Why not go and put your jacket in cold water and come back with some champagne. Meanwhile I’ll enjoy your view.”

  “It’s hardly as good as the view from your folks’ house, with the valley and the river.”

  “That’s why I like it, all these ridges, one after the other, and not another house in sight,” she said, almost dreamily, as Bruno left. He put his jacket in to soak and donned a black leather jacket over his uniform shirt. Fetching the glasses of champagne, he cast an eye on the court bouillon, which was just about to start simmering. He turned down the gas and added another splash of Riesling. Back on the terrace he and Martine toasted each other, and then Balzac returned, perhaps at hearing the familiar sound of glasses being clinked. She took his hand as they strolled back into the house, and he showed her the sitting room with its dining table set for two and the wood crackling warmly in the stove. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of a chair.

  She did the same, looking briefly around and noticing the absence of a TV before glancing at his collection of CDs. She picked out Francis Cabrel’s Hors-Saison and said, “I remember falling in love to that song when I was twenty. I’m in a mood to hear the album again, but softly.”

  In the kitchen, she perched on the high stool at the counter, topped up their champagne glasses from the half bottle he’d opened and then poured herself a glass of his water from the well. She sipped at it, considering, and then said she liked it. She watched as he washed his hands again before going back to the blinis. He cracked the egg he’d put aside when she arrived and poured the contents back and forth over the bowl to separate the white from the yolk. He put the yolk into the flour, added a wineglass of milk and began whisking, pausing only to add, little by little, a second wineglass of milk, some chives and then a tablespoon of butter. When the mixture was well mixed, he began to whisk the egg white until it began to stiffen, then folded it into the batter and put the gas on high under a frying pan he greased lightly with butter.

  “One of the few times I don’t use duck fat,” he said. “This isn’t the proper way to make blinis, but I didn’t have time for the yeast to rise. I hope this works well enough.”

  He put a tablespoon into the batter, filled it and poured it into the pan. He did this four times. As the batter spread out and began to sizzle, he reached into the fridge, pulled out a bottle of the cuvée Quercus, opened it and put it in an ice bucket. After a couple of minutes, he used a spatula to turn the blinis over and took the vodka from the freezer.

  “How hungry are you?” he asked.

  “Two blinis will do for me. Are you serving them with crème fraîche, or do you have some other devious recipe?”

  He flipped the blinis one more time, took the bowl of crème fraîche from the fridge and showed it to her and then put the blinis onto a warmed plate with a knob of butter. He then poured the écrevisses into the simmering bouillon and invited Martine to the dining room. She brought the vodka, so frozen that it poured sluggishly into their small glasses, and then she divided the caviar into two portions. She spread some cream onto her first blini, covered it thickly with caviar, ate, and her eyes widened.

  “That’s good,” she said, and finis
hed the blini before raising her vodka glass and draining half of it. “Naz dorovya,” she said, or that was how it sounded to Bruno. “I think that’s what Russians say. There were a lot of them in Gstaad this year, and they seemed to say it all the time when they drank. Another blini for you, too?”

  “Yes, please. I can make more if you change your mind,” he said, thinking a fashionable ski resort like Gstaad was way out of his financial league. Martine’s business probably made her a wealthy young woman, he assumed, remembering the amount of money she seemed to assume was customary for the work she did.

  “Where did you get the caviar?” she asked. “Is it Russian?”

  “No, it’s French, from around here. Now that we have sturgeon in the river again, a friend of mine has started a business. We used to get Russian caviar sometimes when I was stationed in Bosnia with the UN, though I can’t imagine how the quartermasters got hold of it. Our Dordogne caviar tastes as I remember it.”

  “This tastes as good to me as any I’ve eaten. If our electric-car rally comes off, we can proudly serve our homegrown caviar to the winners. Vive la France!” She finished her second blini and downed the rest of her vodka. “And now do we go back to the kitchen to watch the master at work again?”

  “No, we go back to watch me fumble to peel the écrevisses and get the veins out and then we wait for them to cool a little as we enjoy the white wine and toss the salad.”

  “You don’t peel them before you put them in the bouillon?” she asked.

  “I find it easier this way, and it helps me get the tails out without tearing the flesh. Getting my fingers a bit burned seems a modest price to pay.”

  “Somebody once said that laziness is the origin of genius because smart people look for easier ways of doing things.”

  He smiled. “I don’t think I’m that smart to begin with.” And then stopped as he heard the opening notes of the title song on that album. “Here’s the song you fell in love to.”