The Shooting at Chateau Rock

by Martin Walker

  “I see,” he replied. It wasn’t quite a denial. This was not the time to push too hard, but he could try a little nudge. “We’re trying to identity the young woman, claiming to be from the insurers, who was visiting Monsieur Driant when his friend, another sheep farmer, called at the farm. Right now, it seems she may have been the last person to see Monsieur Driant alive, so you’ll understand why we are anxious to question her. Do you have another female associate in the office?”

  “You would have to ask Monsieur Constant about that,” she replied. “He’s in charge of personnel.”

  “Of course. Do you have a number for him at the Monaco office, or a cell phone? There are still some legal matters to clear up.”

  She gave him the number of the Monaco office, pleaded an imminent meeting with a client, thanked him for his help and ended the call. Bruno was left staring at the dead phone in his hand. He felt sure this was the woman Guillaumat had seen. She might well have been the last woman to see Driant alive. But what did that mean, and what did it prove?

  Bruno could not be sure whether he was making mountains out of molehills. Even if there was something to his suspicion that Driant’s death had been extraordinarily, even suspiciously convenient for Sarrail and Constant, the cremation meant there would be no proof. Bruno knew his biases might be getting in the way—there was something about Sarrail’s city-slicker smoothness that offended him. And he had no grounds for suspicion against Lara except for that catch in her voice when she’d used the word chaque.

  At least he could check on that. He could ask J-J to send a plainclothes cop to watch outside the office and snatch a photograph of her that he could show to Guillaumat or take Guillaumat to identify this young woman for himself. But first he called the Monaco number, to be told that Constant was traveling to the Luxembourg office. He took the number, called Luxembourg, identified himself and requested a callback from Constant the moment he arrived, on urgent legal business. The man was infuriatingly and probably deliberately elusive.

  Bruno told himself to calm down. Just because Constant and Sarrail didn’t give a damn about the livestock they had so casually acquired did not make them criminals. And just because he suspected that Gaston Driant and his sister had been victims of an injustice did not mean he could do anything about it without proof. He’d already found one small lever against Sarrail and Constant, their careless mistreatment of animals, that he’d been able to use to embarrass them publicly. And if he could find more evidence that would help turn the procureur’s questioning of the sale into a powerful case, the Driant heirs might yet have justice. He’d keep on probing. If Guillaumat recognized Lara Saatchi, that would be an excuse to call her in for questioning.

  Content that he had a plan, Bruno dealt with various e-mails and told the mayor’s secretary that he’d be back later that afternoon. He drove home for more tools before heading to the riding school to help finish the work on the chicken coop. The first thing he saw was Michel’s mechanical digger, scooping out the ditch in which the enclosure chicken wire would be buried. Up toward the main house, Bruno saw Balzac leading the two sheepdogs on a tour of their new home, each of them stopping at each corner and fence post to raise a leg and mark their territory. That would help keep foxes away.

  The baron and Félix’s father had assembled the coop’s walls and the sloping roof and attached the corrugated plastic to it. The coop was now ready to be fixed to the four main posts once the cement was dry. The two men were already working on the floor. Bruno took off his jacket, picked up his sledgehammer and began hammering in the iron stakes, one every three meters, while the baron attached the chicken wire. The bottom half meter of the wire was sunk into Michel’s ditch, and Pamela brought successive wheelbarrow loads of broken bricks and stones to help keep the wire in place against burrowing foxes.

  By the time Michel had finished the ditch, Félix’s dad had the fresh cement ready to pour onto the broken bricks. Michel waved goodbye, taking with him a bottle of Pamela’s scotch in thanks. Bruno sank the final stake just a meter short of the stable wall. Pamela brought the last wheelbarrow of rocks and bricks and stood back to watch as the final cement was poured.

  “You’ve all done wonders. I can’t believe it’s finished already,” Pamela said. “But why the gap beside the stable wall?”

  “We’ll make a door of wood frame and chicken wire so we can go in and feed them,” Bruno replied. “Once the chickens are settled here, you can leave it open in the day and let them roam free. When they get used to their new place, they’ll make their own way back at dusk.”

  “Will the chicken coop be ready for them to sleep there tonight?” Pamela asked.

  “No, we have to let the cement in the postholes dry thoroughly overnight so the frame is stable enough to attach the coop. Once that’s done, I’ll attach some gutters under the slope of the roof with a downpipe into a cistern so you’ll be able to have rainwater for their drinking bowls. Tonight I think they can fend for themselves in the stables.”

  He glanced at the stable yard, where chickens were pecking at the straw and the small piles of fresh horse manure and pottering in and out of the stables. “They’ve made themselves at home already,” he said, “and the horses don’t seem to mind.”

  “I’m very impressed with all of you,” she said. “Why don’t I go and prepare some lunch for you while you finish the door?”

  “À vos ordres, madame,” said the baron, giving her a mock salute.

  Half an hour later the door was finished.

  “Time for lunch,” said Bruno.

  Pamela had made a simple stew from minced beef, vegetables and a can of tomatoes with some potatoes on the side and a magnum of red wine from the town vineyard. She joined them to eat and attacked the food with the same hungry appetite as the three men.

  “Will I get fresh eggs tomorrow?” she asked.

  “The birds need to settle first,” said the baron. “You might get one or two, though.”

  She brought out the cheese board and a bowl of salad, fresh lettuce and arugula in walnut oil and a splash of white wine. Dessert was affogato, strong espresso coffee poured over vanilla ice cream.

  “Lovely,” said the baron, leaning back and patting his tummy. “If all workers were fed like this by their bosses, there’d be no strikes.”

  “You’re getting this because I can’t afford to pay you,” Pamela replied, and brought out the cognac.

  Chapter 13

  Back in his office Bruno felt in no mood to work, so he looked up the number for the 132ème Bataillon Cynophile, the French military kennels at Suippes. The place was home to four specialized companies of troops and to the largest assembly of military dogs in the world. It was the place that raised and trained the two thousand war dogs currently deployed by the French armed services. There were two companies of troops training to deploy with guard and patrol dogs. A third company worked with dogs being trained to detect mines and explosives, and a fourth was training them to find narcotics.

  Bruno had seen these war dogs at work in Bosnia, when he’d been attached to the United Nations peacekeepers. He’d been deeply impressed at the way they and their handlers guarded military compounds, ran security patrols, detected minefields and guarded suspects. He had heard from old friends who were still in the military that use of war dogs had expanded dramatically in Afghanistan, where French troops had been deployed as part of the NATO forces and had seen how much more use the American troops had made of dogs. They had proved invaluable on night patrols, in guarding prisoners and in searching vehicles for car bombs. Their main new task was to search in advance of patrols and convoys for the IEDs, improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs that the Taliban favored.

  The canine specialist base at Suippes had gone into overdrive to keep up with the fast-growing demand for war dogs and for the sniffer dogs increasingly deployed at airports and rail st
ations. There were now three hundred dogs being trained at Suippes every few months. The French and British troops had followed the American military in equipping their war dogs with harnesses carrying a camera and microphones and sending them to search for the human ambushers and snipers. The allied war dogs had been so effective that the Taliban had started targeting the animals, shooting them on sight and sending in their own dogs to attack them. In response, the allied dogs were given thick, spiked leather collars to protect them against the Afghan hounds.

  Bruno also knew that the NATO forces in Afghanistan were under orders to play down the role of the war dogs in the media, wary of the effect on public opinion at home. Instead, the military public relations teams focused on the use of tracked robots and drones, but Bruno knew most of the troops preferred to rely on the dogs. They weren’t rendered useless by dust storms, nor were they vulnerable to the small plastic-covered mines that the Taliban laid around their IEDs, specifically to knock out the robots. While Bruno knew himself to be as softhearted as anyone else when it came to one of the dogs being wounded or killed, he understood that preventing human casualties took precedence. At least now the French military no longer euthanized dogs at the end of their active service but allowed them to retire with their human handlers.

  When his call was answered, Bruno asked for the adjutant’s office. Every old soldier knew that while officers come and go, the adjutant’s top sergeant is always the person who knows how to get things done.

  “Yeah, I remember. You’re the cop with the basset hounds,” came the answer when Bruno identified himself. “Your last dog is listed on the memorial here, killed in action. What can we do for you?”

  Bruno explained that when the bataillon had arranged for a new basset hound puppy to be delivered to him, it had come with the message that they would want in the future to breed from him. Since his dog was now getting to be old enough, he was calling to ask whether that requirement still remained in force.

  “We don’t use bassets here, although I’d like to. They’re not all that easy to breed. I’ve got your file up on my screen now. I see you got a Croix de Guerre. They’re pretty rare in these peaceful times. Your dog came from a litter from the hunting pack at Cheverny. You called him Balzac, right?”

  “That’s right, Balzac. But why do you say they are hard to breed?”

  “Bassets sometimes need a little human help to get things to fit, that’s why most breeders use artificial insemination these days. It’s also economics. You can get more pregnancies from a single stud male that way, and a top-pedigree stud doesn’t come cheap. I can give you the phone number of the master of hounds at Cheverny and you could talk to him. Or I may have a better idea.”

  “Go ahead.” When a sergent-chef came up with a better idea, Bruno knew that it was worth paying attention.

  “You’re in the Dordogne, is that right? We had a caporal-chef here, terrific woman, great with dogs, a lifer who did her twenty years and retired around the time your last hound was killed. In fact, I think she was the one who arranged your replacement basset, and she’s a real fan of the breed. Now she runs a kennel, raising them in the Dordogne, near Excideuil. Her name is Claire Mornier, and I’m sure she’d like to hear from you. Give her warmest best wishes from Sergent-Chef Plarin, and tell her we all miss her, particularly the dogs. Let me know how it turns out.”

  “I certainly will,” said Bruno. “But why don’t you train bassets at Suippes? They’re brilliant sniffer dogs.”

  “Don’t tell me, I know,” Plarin replied. “I’d use them for sniffing out explosives and narcotics and as trackers, but the problem is that they’re just too popular, too lovable for our kind of work. Whenever you get a crowd, at an airport or a station, kids gravitate toward the bassets. You don’t get that kind of distraction with the German shepherds. And some of the troops don’t like to use them because they don’t look menacing enough.”

  “But bassets hunt wild boars and foxes,” Bruno objected. “They’re brave and relentless.”

  “I know, I know, I believe you. Claire used to say the same. But that’s just the way it is. You were in the army long enough to know that. I’ll text you Claire’s number.”

  Bruno thanked him, ended the call and sat back to reflect on the curious ways of the military, the importance that so many soldiers attached to the way they and their weapons looked and how they lived up to the warrior image of themselves. He could understand that the beguiling looks of a basset hound might not quite match the desired military style. They were making a mistake. Anyone who had hunted with bassets knew that along with bloodhounds they had the best nose of any dog. They were designed that way, their long, floppy ears perfect for stirring up the grass to release any lingering scent. Bruno’s former dog, Gigi, had once identified and tracked down a burglar from a blurred fingerprint left on a pane of glass a month earlier. After that incident, Bruno had done some research and learned that while humans had only some twenty million smelling cells, dogs usually have more than two billion, with bassets closer to three billion.

  And it wasn’t just their sense of smell, Bruno knew. Humans can hear sounds from zero to twenty kilohertz, while bassets have a much higher range, able to hear up to seventy. Even when asleep in Bruno’s bedroom, Balzac would wake and alert him if a passing fox even thought about investigating Bruno’s chicken coop. Bruno smiled at the memory, and in that almost telepathic way he had, Balzac lifted himself from his seated position, stretched and yawned and then nuzzled at Bruno’s leg. Maybe he was just scratching, but Bruno didn’t think so. He bent down to stroke his dog’s back and pat his side.

  Bruno wondered whether their close bond would change once Balzac had been at stud? Would he develop some more special canine relationship with his dam, or with their pups? He had no idea. It was startling, Bruno thought, how little we know of these utterly different beings with whom we have been so close for some thirty thousand years.

  Bruno had trained his dog in the usual way, with treats and praise when he did the right thing. He never beat Balzac, and even now he still persevered, raising his hand, palm forward, and frowning as he spoke a crisp “Non,” to try and teach his dog not to jump up in eager friendship each time he saw a familiar face. But Balzac’s cheerful instincts usually got the better of his training.

  “How do you feel about meeting a lady basset and making some puppies?” he asked his dog. Balzac stared back at him, trying to figure out what this human tone of voice meant. Bruno caressed his dog’s head in reassurance. “You think you’re ready to be a father?”

  “Do you think he understands the question?” came a voice. Bruno had been so focused on his dog that he hadn’t noticed that the mayor was standing in the doorway. Bruno’s former dog, Gigi, had been the son of the mayor’s own basset, Montaigne, named for the sixteenth-century philosopher who was the Périgord’s most famous son. Montaigne had been known as the best hunting dog in the valley. Bruno remembered seeing Gigi stand over the plot in the mayor’s garden where he and Bruno had buried the old hound. The mayor had suggested that Gigi could smell his parent’s long-dead remains. At the time, Bruno had been skeptical, but he’d kept silent, not wanting to disturb the mayor’s memories.

  “I’m thinking of breeding him,” Bruno said.

  “I’m glad to hear it, about time,” said the mayor. “That pedigree is too special not to be continued. But in the meantime, what did you learn from Macrae?”

  “He’s hoping to sell the place for three million, but the agent says he’ll be lucky to get two and a half. His kids want to keep a foothold here, so he’s doing up a cottage near the vineyard for them. And he’s making music again, writing songs, doing duets with his son. I listened to a CD he gave me. It’s pretty good, and I’m hoping he’ll start his comeback at one of our free concerts.”

  “Good,” said the mayor, turning to leave. “Keep me informed. And make sure you find a good
dam for Balzac. He deserves the best.”

  On an impulse, Bruno turned to his computer and googled “basset hound pedigree puppies” and was startled to see that prices went as high as fifteen hundred euros. That was close to his monthly salary. In St. Denis, you could rent a three-bedroom house for three or four months for that kind of money. But that would mean selling the pup to a stranger and Balzac losing any connection with his pup. Pamela’s business partner, Miranda, had two sons who adored Balzac. They would love to have a dog of their own, and the same with Florence’s children.

  He picked up his phone and called Claire Mornier. When she answered, he conveyed Sergeant Plarin’s greetings and introduced himself, thanking her for her role in sending him Balzac.

  “Chef de Police Bruno Courrèges,” she said. “I’m so glad you called. How’s Balzac doing? I saw that story in Sud Ouest about him catching that Irish terrorist. He looked wonderful in the photo.”

  “Balzac’s in great form, sitting beside me as we speak.” At the mention of his name, Balzac gave a cheerful bark and then laid his head on Bruno’s foot. “When I first got him, he came with a message that the bataillon at Suippes might want to breed from him when he was old enough.”

  “That was me,” she said. “I was already close to finishing my time, and I knew I’d want to start breeding bassets, and Balzac has a wonderful pedigree, including the Stonewall Jackson breed. It descends from the bassets the Marquis de Lafayette presented to George Washington when he went over to help him defeat the English.”

  “Do you think Balzac is ready to breed?”

  “Certainly, he’s nearly two years old. That’s perfect. Leave it another year, and some of them get a bit confused about what to do. I’ve got a lovely brown-and-white bitch, Carla. I named her after the ex-president’s wife because I’m a fan of her music but not so much of her husband. Carla’s formal name for the Kennel Club is Diane de Poitiers, and she likes Carla Bruni’s music, too. I think they find it restful. I never play heavy rock or pompous classical stuff for them.”