The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

by Martin Walker

  It was when he’d ended the training session with a grooming session and was cleaning Balzac’s ears that he’d been reminded of one avenue he had not tried. It was the identifying tattoo inside Balzac’s ear that did it.

  Bruno went into his study and pulled out the phone book, turned to Tatouages in the pages jaunes and found two tattooing parlours in Bergerac. He checked his watch, donned his uniform and headed into town, where he’d be in time to catch Pascal at the Post Office taking his mid-morning break. He dropped off Balzac in Hector’s stable and armed with Paul Murcoing’s photograph and the sketch Pascal drew from memory of the tattoo on the arm of the driver of the white van, he drove to Bergerac. Stopping to buy diesel, he made the obligatory courtesy call to Inspector Jofflin to say he’d be coming onto Jofflin’s turf and might have a lead on Murcoing. To Bruno’s relief, he was passed to voicemail and left a message without having to explain his hunch.

  At the first parlour, a place in a run-down part of town that seemed to specialize in gothic images, he drew a blank. The second place was just off the old town, not far from the river, in a street where flower shops alternated with bio food stores, hairdressers and vegetarian restaurants. Ahead of him two women, one with a severe crew cut, were strolling hand in hand. The shop window of the tattoo parlour was dominated by a dramatic collage composed of posters advertising local concerts. Inside, a shaven-headed man in black leather pants and a matching waistcoat, his arms and chest covered in ornate and colourful designs, glanced at Pascal’s sketch and said proudly: ‘That’s my Maori warrior.’

  ‘Your what?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘Maori warrior, from New Zealand, I saw it on one of their players in a rugby match on TV. Different designs say different things about how many fights you’ve been in, how many enemy you killed. I adapted it and made my own design.’

  ‘Did you do one for this guy?’ Bruno showed him Paul’s photo.

  ‘Paul, yes, I did that one, and another that only his best friends would see. But I haven’t seen him for a few days. He’s usually in Marcel’s of an evening.’

  ‘Is that a bar?’

  ‘Bar, bistro, little theatre in the back, its real name is Proust but we all call it Marcel’s. It won’t be open now, though. Weekend nights run late so they don’t open Mondays until the evening. Is he in trouble again?’

  ‘No, he’s a witness in a case, but what was he in trouble for?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s just something you say. But I make sure he pays me cash in advance,’ the man said. ‘You know what I mean?’

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘You might find him at Marcel’s, he’s got one of the rooms upstairs. I don’t know if he lives there or just uses it for pickups, but like I said, I haven’t seen him for a bit. And if you find him, don’t tell him it was me that told you.’

  Bruno found the place easily enough, between a dog-grooming parlour and an antiques shop with a single Buddha head in grey stone dominating its window. Proust was painted black, and the windows were filled with movie posters of Jane Russell and Lana Turner, flanking a blown-up photo of a beautiful woman’s eyes. Bruno thought they might have belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. Below the eyes was a photo of Marcel Proust in profile. The door to the bar was closed, but it opened when he tried the handle. Inside, chairs were piled atop tables, the floor was wet and a black woman who was mopping it looked up guardedly at his police uniform.

  ‘Looking for Paul Murcoing,’ he said, showing the photo.

  She shrugged and slopped water on the floor. ‘Boss not here,’ she said, not looking at him.

  He walked across and put the photo in front of her face. ‘Do you know this man?’

  She closed her eyes. ‘You talk to boss.’

  Bruno sighed. She was almost certainly an illegal immigrant. He disliked doing this but he did not want to waste time.

  ‘Your papers, please, Madame.’

  ‘Papers at home.’ Now she had stopped mopping and was standing still, head down.

  ‘You have a choice, Madame, you either show me his room right now or we go to the police station and check your papers.’

  She shrugged again, this time with an air of defeat, pulled a large ring of keys from the pocket of her apron and led the way up two flights of narrow stairs to an unpainted wooden door. She unlocked it and let him step into a room that was clearly unoccupied. There was a plain double bed, with a mattress and a pillow but no bedding, a small table with a water jug and basin, a hard-backed chair and a handsome armoire that had seen better days. It was empty.

  ‘Paul gone,’ she said, a phrase she repeated when he asked when he had gone, how long he had been there and who else had stayed.

  ‘His things, his possessions?’ he asked. ‘Where are they?’ He knew the police lore, that when you wanted to intimidate, you took out a notebook. He fished in his jacket pocket for something to write with, remembering with a sinking feeling that he had left his pen in his car when checking the tattoo-parlour addresses on the map. The notebook was sufficient. Sullenly, she led the way downstairs to the cellar and pointed to two cardboard boxes.

  ‘Boss packed these when Paul gone. He leave Tuesday.’

  That was the day of Fullerton’s murder. He put the notebook away and opened the first box, full of unwashed clothes and a pair of dirty sheets. The second box contained shoes, toiletries, a small TV set, some books and what Bruno assumed were sex toys. They included leather manacles with straps, a battery-driven vibrator and what looked like clothes pegs in brass. He assumed they were nipple clamps. There was a small brown bottle with a label describing it as leather cleaner, which Bruno suspected was amyl nitrate, a drug that was sniffed and supposedly enhanced sexual pleasure. At the bottom was some mail. The biggest envelope had an English stamp and postmark and inside was a printout of two crude photos that appeared to have been taken with a cell phone. One was of Yves Valentoux and Francis Fullerton standing together, eyes only for each other, at a bar. On a counter behind them was the kind of beer glass, a dimpled jug, that you only found in English pubs. The second photo was in the same place and showed the two men kissing. Was this the trigger for Paul’s jealous rage? Who might have sent it, and with what motive?

  Most of the mail was junk, but he found an insurance form for the white van, a pharmacist’s receipt for eighty-three euros that had not yet been claimed back from the mutuel, the health insurance fund of the transport employees section of the Force Ouvrière trade union. Finally he found a bank statement that showed Paul with just over two thousand euros in his account. The address for the account was the bar downstairs.

  ‘No more,’ said the woman, and made no objection when Bruno took the papers. She followed him upstairs, and by the time he was at the door she was mopping the floor again. He suspected her boss would never learn of his visit. He left messages for both J-J and Jofflin to pass on Murcoing’s old address and to suggest that a visit to Marcel’s bar might produce some leads. Since he was in Bergerac he looked up the address he had for Joséphine, Murcoing’s aunt. She worked with old people, Father Sentout had said. She lived not far from the first tattoo place he had visited, a crumbling neighbourhood where the butchers advertised halal meat and several of the women were veiled.

  She answered the door in a housecoat with a towel wrapped turban-style around her head and flapping her hands in a way that suggested she was drying her nail polish.

  ‘I’ve come to give you fifty euros,’ he said, showing the banknote.

  ‘I thought you’d pay me at the funeral tomorrow.’

  ‘I was nearby so I thought I’d deal with it now. You might be busy tomorrow. If you’ll just sign this receipt for two of your father’s old banknotes, one for the Mairie and the other for the Resistance museum, and I’ll be on my way.’

  She invited him in, offered a cup of coffee, and as her kettle boiled she glanced casually at the receipt he’d brought and pocketed the fifty euros. Bruno had drafted the receipt with care, say
ing that the sum was received ‘in return for two invalid banknotes of a thousand francs, dated 1940, said notes to be used for historical display only’. The space to be signed and dated by Joséphine identified her as representing the lawful heirs of Loïc Murcoing.

  She sat at the kitchen table to sign it, and made no objection when he pulled out a chair and joined her, resting his arms on the slightly sticky waxed tablecloth. The kitchen looked as though it hadn’t been changed for decades. There were none of the usual fitted cupboards, but racks of shelves for the plates and a small refrigerator that growled and wheezed. Joséphine wrote clumsily, as one not much accustomed to writing, and then turned aside to make the coffee, grinding the beans and then using a cafetière. It was good and he said so.

  ‘I’m never one to scrimp on a good cup of coffee,’ she said, adding three lumps of sugar to her cup. ‘One of my only treats these days.’

  ‘Everybody in the family coming to the funeral?’ he asked.

  She eyed him narrowly, her hand sliding down to the pocket of her housecoat as if to make sure the banknote was still there. ‘I’ll say this for you, you’re the first copper who didn’t push his way in and start asking where I was hiding Paul. And before you ask, I don’t know where he is and nor do my sisters. And nobody will be more surprised than me if he shows his face at the funeral and gets arrested.’

  ‘I heard he was living over a bar near the centre, a place called Proust, known to the customers as Marcel’s.’

  ‘You know more than the coppers round here then. He was supposed to have part-ownership of that place, but I don’t know what came of it. Probably nothing, like most of Paul’s big ideas.’ The words were harsh but her tone was fond, Bruno noted.

  ‘He seemed a bright lad from what I hear, someone who should be going places rather than just driving a van.’

  ‘His grandpa was so proud of him, always top of the class,’ she said. ‘We all were when he passed his Bac and went off to the university, first time anyone in our family ever did that. He was always clever, but a sweet kid. Everybody liked him, even animals. He always had one in tow, a dog or a cat. He had a way with them, stray dogs used to follow him home. He always wanted to keep them but his dad had walked out soon after he was born so there was no money.’

  ‘He did well to get to university,’ said Bruno.

  ‘That’s when it all went wrong. He was easily led astray was Paul, fell in with the wrong sort, and that’s why he dropped out. I blame those damn drugs, or he’d really have made something of himself.’

  ‘What did he study?’ Bruno was happy to have got her talking. He still didn’t feel he knew much about Murcoing.

  ‘He was specializing in architecture. He could always draw beautifully, even as a little boy. Portraits, landscapes, he had a real gift. He drew one of me and I didn’t even know he was watching me. It was so good I framed it, look.’ She heaved herself to her feet, went into the sitting room and brought back a cheap plastic frame. The pencil sketch it contained was not simply recognizable as her, but it conveyed something of the determination with which she had endured a hard and ill-paid life.

  ‘That’s very good.’

  ‘He was only fourteen when he did that. You ought to see his landscapes, ones he did when he was a bit older.’ She gestured to the kitchen wall behind Bruno and he turned to look at something that had not registered when he first glanced around the kitchen. Now that he looked more carefully he saw a framed watercolour of a Bergerac street scene in autumn, leaves turning brown and the stone of the buildings merging with the grey sky. It felt sympathetic rather than gloomy, an attempt to find some beauty in a drab scene.

  ‘He could make a living at this.’

  ‘He made a few francs in the summer, doing sketches of tourists down by the statue of Cyrano, but they wanted quick caricatures, not the little portraits he liked to make. Come and look at this.’

  She led him back into the sitting room, dominated by an elderly three-piece suite around a TV set, and from the cupboard beneath the TV she drew a thick sheaf of paintings, all sketches in pencil or chalk and some more watercolours. Bruno leafed through, thinking of the waste of talent that Paul’s life represented. There were a couple of scenes of Périgord villages and churches that he’d have been proud to own, and some more fine portraits. He stopped at one that looked familiar and he suddenly realized that it was Edouard Marty as a grown man in his late twenties. There were three exquisite portraits of Francis Fullerton, one dozing in a summer hammock, another in a formal pose in a chair, and a third on a beach-front, hair ruffled by the wind. There was an intimacy about them, a depth of affectionate knowledge that suggested love.

  ‘He’s really gifted. I wouldn’t mind buying some of these from him, or from you maybe.’ He pulled out a watercolour of a river scene and another of a Périgord village. ‘If I gave you the money, I know you’d see he got it eventually.’

  ‘Give it him in prison, you mean, once you buggers round him up?’ The moment of shared appreciation had gone and Joséphine was back in her defensive stance.

  ‘I’d forgotten about that, I just like the paintings,’ he said, genuinely. Her glance softened.

  ‘He used to charge twenty, thirty euros down at the statue. Give us fifty and you can have ’em both.’

  23

  This time his police uniform ensured that Bruno was shown directly to Pamela’s room in the hospital. Fabiola’s phone call with the good news had reached him as he was leaving Bergerac. Pamela was awake and lucid; the scan had shown no lasting damage beyond a broken collarbone and two cracked ribs. The tubes and wires had all been removed. She was sitting up with one arm in a sling, reading an English newspaper with a pen in her good hand, when he poked his head around the open door. He gave her the overpriced flowers he’d bought at the hospital shop.

  ‘They’re lovely, Bruno, thank you,’ she said, returning his kiss. She tasted of toothpaste and there was a scent of lavender he’d not known her to wear before. She filled in one of the clues in her Times crossword before continuing. ‘Fabiola was here earlier and told me about Bess. It’s very sad and I’ll miss her, but she was an old horse and you obviously had no choice.’

  ‘When will they let you go home?’ There was a rather battered metal vase on the cupboard. He filled it with water from the tap.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow, the doctor said, since Fabiola will be there to keep an eye on me. But why the uniform? Isn’t today your day off?’

  ‘Something came up on this murder case so I had to go to Bergerac and look official.’ He placed the flowers in the vase and turned back to her.

  ‘Bruno, really, you can’t just dump them in like that,’ she said in mock reproof. ‘Bring the vase to me and hold it while I arrange them. Honestly, you men have no idea.’ She began with her good hand to arrange the mixed red and white roses, making him strip some leaves and bend some of the stems to change their height. ‘At least I can afford to buy a new horse now, thanks to my mother’s will. That’s something to look forward to.’

  ‘Make sure it has a rabbit-hole detector.’ He was pleased to hear her sounding so normal and looking so much better than he’d expected. Fabiola must have brought in some make-up and the pretty white nightgown that he recognized. The newspaper was probably her idea, too.

  ‘I hope these are tough enough for you.’ Bruno laid on the bed beside her a booklet of Sudoku puzzles. Normally she raced through them almost as quickly as she could fill in the numbers.

  ‘Lovely, such a treat, but now I want to hear all about the murder case. Have you traced Murcoing yet?’

  No, but he now knew a lot more about the young man, and he explained his findings in Bergerac and the Arch-Inter connection.

  ‘So who would have sent the photo to Murcoing of his lover kissing Yves? Who might have had an interest in driving him into a fit of jealous rage? And who would benefit from Fullerton’s death? It’s obvious, it must be the brother. He stands to inherit, after all.’

&nb
sp; Bruno shook his head. ‘Brian says his brother’s will leaves everything to Brian’s kids, to be held in trust. He may be lying but we can check that through the British police. Now they have a death certificate there’s no reason for the will to be secret. If Brian is lying about the will, then obviously he becomes the main suspect. But how would Brian or anybody else have known that Paul would be driven to kill just by that photograph? He doesn’t strike me as a man so concerned with sexual fidelity that he’d murder a lover who cheated on him. And we might never have known about the Corrèze farm if Brian hadn’t told us. It doesn’t hang together.’

  She nodded. ‘How certain are you that Murcoing is the killer?’

  He shrugged. ‘We can place him at the murder scene at about the relevant time, but mainly it’s because he’s gone on the run. That always feeds suspicion. He had a romantic motive and maybe also a financial one, if he thought Fullerton was cheating him. Certainly Fullerton had a lot of money and Paul seems to have been getting very little.’

  Not wanting interruption, he’d switched both his phones to vibrate that morning before going to see Joséphine. The second, private one vibrated now. He glanced at the screen, recognized the number that was calling and said: ‘I have to take this.’ He excused himself, heading into the corridor and out of earshot as he answered Isabelle.

  ‘Have you seen the Paris Match website?’ she began, her voice neutral rather than angry. ‘Your friend Gilles is making news again.’