“I can do it back at the office. What was that about arrest warrants in Monaco?”
“Just obeying my orders to frighten him a little. I think I owe you dinner, you and the baron. Are you free this evening? My place at seven, very informal. Please download the stuff from the phone and print it out and thanks for your help. Okay?”
She nodded, looking solemn, and gazed after him as Bruno drove off and headed back to his office, where he phoned the baron, to thank him for his help, invite him to dinner and to ask him how the meeting had gone.
“Nothing very urgent, I’ll tell you over dinner,” the baron said. “Constant is a smooth little devil and I wouldn’t trust him a millimeter. He’d done a fair bit of research on me. Is it just you and me for dinner?”
“No, we’ll be joined by that young policewoman from Les Eyzies, Juliette. You’ve met her before at my place. She’s involved—I got her to follow Constant after he left you.”
Bruno called J-J to report on his meeting with Constant and gave him the two mobile numbers he’d found for Constant and Lara Saatchi. Yves would have a way of tracking their whereabouts, or at least the nearest cell tower. Bruno promised to send J-J a copy of the phone logs and warned him to expect a call from Maître Duhamel on the civil case being brought by Driant’s son. Then he went shopping for chicken thighs from the bio shop and a pain campagnard from the Moulin. Putting the chicken in the fridge in the mairie kitchen, he ran into the mayor.
“Cooking tonight?” the mayor asked hopefully.
“Yes, can you join us?” asked Bruno, who could take a hint. “It’s just me, the baron and Juliette.”
“With pleasure,” said the mayor.
Bruno excused himself when he heard his desk phone ring and found Maître Duhamel on the line. He sounded very pleased at the prospect of a lawsuit against an insurance company, which presumably had very deep pockets. Bruno briefed him and put him in touch with Brosseil, whose own testimony against Sarrail might be useful to the lawyer. Twenty minutes later he was cantering along the ridge above the valley on Hector, with Balzac at his heels, and feeling the wind blow away his self-doubts about his treatment of Constant. He knew it was standard police procedure, but it was not the way he liked to work.
Back at his home, he fed his chickens, picked some onions and salad from his garden, took a jar of pâté from his cupboard and set the table before taking a quick shower and changing into jeans and a corduroy shirt. It was warm enough for them to take their p’tit apéro on the terrace, so he set out four glasses and a bottle of crème de cassis on the outdoor table, then dusted the chairs. He took a bottle of Château du Rooy dry white wine from the fridge to stop it from being too cold and then went to his cherry tree and picked enough fruit for four.
In the kitchen, he chopped two shallots and three cloves of garlic. He seasoned the chicken thighs with salt and pepper and took some of his homemade duck stock from his fridge. In the garden, he picked a handful of fresh tarragon, put some to one side for garnish and chopped the remainder. In a casserole dish he began gently to sauté the shallots in butter. Once they were soft, he added the garlic and the chopped tarragon, a generous wineglass of the stock and a less generous glass of dry white wine and brought it to a low simmer. Then he put the lid onto the pot and put it into the oven on high heat for fifteen minutes, then lowered the heat to medium. Another forty minutes and the chicken would be just right.
He fed Balzac and refilled his water bowl and sat down to watch the subtle approach of twilight while awaiting his guests. It fell so slowly at this time of year, a very gradual but steady diminution of brightness. Sometimes out here reading, he hadn’t noticed the dying of the day until suddenly he could no longer make out the words on the page.
As always, Balzac was the first to hear the distant sound and was standing in welcome at the head of the lane when Juliette’s motorbike appeared. She parked, took off her helmet, caressed Balzac and then shrugged off her black leather jacket to reveal a bright pink sweatshirt. She handed Bruno a large, fat envelope.
“Printouts of Constant’s phone logs, address book, texts, e-mails and his photo gallery,” she said. “From the intimate pictures, he obviously had a very close relationship with a young woman. I imagine she’s Lara Saatchi, with whom he shares very explicit texts. I e-mailed them all to J-J like you asked.”
Bruno poured her a kir and began skimming through the printouts when Balzac barked again, signaling the arrival of the baron’s car with the mayor in the passenger seat. The mayor offered a bottle of Monbazillac from Château Bélingard, and the baron presented a chilled bottle of a white wine from Les Verdots, whose label read simply VIN. Each man greeted Juliette with a kiss on either cheek.
“I’d better decant this wine first,” said the baron, heading for the kitchen.
Bruno poured a splash of cassis into the waiting glasses and added white wine for his guests, murmured that he had to check something and went back to his study to review the text messages for that Sunday when Lara Saatchi’s cell phone had placed her at Driant’s farm. His eyes widened as he read.
He called J-J and said, “This is now beyond just putting a fright into Sarrail and Constant. We’ve got them. Lara Saatchi texted Constant at eight-twenty at night to say Driant had signed the insurance contract and backdated it. She added that he shouldn’t worry—she’d be sure to use a condom. Then at nine-seventeen she texted, ‘He’s collapsed. I’m leaving.’ Then Constant texted her back, ‘Leave no traces.’ ”
“Where is Constant now?” J-J asked.
“I left him at Château Marmont about three hours ago and I have his phone and ID card. Do we arrest him? Or do we have to call the brigadier first?”
“Let me call him. And I’d better talk to Prunier. I’ll let you know. Which is the nearest gendarmerie if we do have to pick him up?”
“St. Cyprien,” Bruno replied. “I think the law is clear. You have to arrest him. This looks like conspiracy to defraud and to conceal a homicide. And now that Yves has found the cocaine, I’m tempted to call it murder.”
“I’ll call you back.” J-J ended the call, leaving Bruno staring at his phone in frustration.
“If I understand what I just heard, she screwed the poor devil to death and left him,” said the baron, standing in the doorway. “Sorry, but I was in the kitchen. I couldn’t help but hear. Do you want me to keep quiet about it?”
Bruno shrugged and led the way back to the table where Juliette and the mayor were chatting over their drinks. “I think this may be a moment when four heads are better than one.”
He read the key texts from the printout and explained why the role of the fisc and of the brigadier meant that he could not be sure Constant would be arrested.
“That can’t be right,” said Juliette, shaking her head.
“We don’t know what the larger issues are and, whatever they may be, they are the responsibility of General Lannes and the minister of the interior,” said the mayor. “But look on the bright side, Bruno. This makes it certain that Driant’s heirs will win their civil case and probably with punitive damages.”
Bruno put on the kettle to boil water for the rice, sliced the bread and led the way into the dining room for the foie gras with glasses of the mayor’s Monbazillac. For the benefit of Juliette and the baron, Bruno explained the case from the beginning, the lunch with J-J and Goirau, the Russian oligarch behind the insurance company, French government concerns about the sale of passports and insurance scams and his own renewed secondment to the brigadier’s staff.
“I can’t help but feel that if the brigadier is this involved, there has to be more to it,” Bruno concluded. “His real concerns are national security and intelligence.”
“This oligarch Stichkin, Russia and Putin—that could be the real issue here,” said the baron as Bruno stacked the plates and went into the kitchen to cook the main course.
He splashed olive oil into a saucepan, added the rice and stirred until all the grains were lightly coated. He added boiling water and put the lid on the pan. Then he took out the casserole, removed the chicken thighs to a warm plate and covered them with tinfoil to retain their heat. The rice water was boiling, so he turned the heat down to a low simmer. Then he strained the sauce from the casserole dish through a sieve, poured the sauce into a sauté pan, added a wineglass full of crème fraîche and some lemon zest and put it on the heat for about five minutes to reduce. He fluffed the rice with a fork, put it into one bowl and the chicken with tarragon sauce into another and took them to the table, where the baron was pouring the Verdots into fresh wineglasses.
“Delicious,” declared the mayor, just as J-J called back to say that Commissaire Prunier had decided that Bruno’s confiscation of Constant’s phone meant that the evidence had been improperly obtained and thus would not be admissible in court.
“You screwed it up, Bruno,” said J-J bluntly. “Worse than that, you tipped him off. You took his mobile, but that won’t stop him from warning Lara and Sarrail and everybody else what you’re up to. You were told to frighten the little bastard, not send him into a complete panic.”
Chapter 22
Bruno passed a miserable night. He was unable at first to sleep and then dozed fitfully, waking to the acceptance that he had destroyed the chance of a conviction by seizing improper evidence. But then he began to question this. It was not improper. He had not formally seized the phone, simply used routine police methods to obtain the damning evidence it contained. The real problem, he told himself with a surge of self-pity, was that he’d been given ridiculously vague orders by the brigadier. He’d been the terrier sent down the burrow to frighten the rabbits out to the waiting hunters. Then he dozed again to wake knowing that he’d behaved in a way he wasn’t proud of and couldn’t defend. There was little relief even in reminding himself what nasty tricks Constant and Lara had played to get Driant’s signature on that contract.
He sat up in bed, recalling that he had ways of dealing with these occasional moments of self-questioning. When in doubt, he told himself, do something. The sky was still dark, but dawn came early in late May, and even before his cockerel had crowed Bruno was up, in his tracksuit and whistling for Balzac to join him on their morning run. He set himself a punishing pace through the fringe of the woods and then along the full five-kilometer length of the ridge, where he could watch the sun rise over the Massif Central far to the east. When he reached the rocky outcrop that looked down over the valley, he sank down and did ten fast push-ups, jumped to his feet and jogged back, meeting Balzac on the way.
As always, the sight of his dog running with his tongue lolling out and his long ears flapping made Bruno smile. He profoundly admired Balzac’s determination to keep up with his human companion, despite his short legs. Bruno stretched out on the grass and waited for his dog to jump on him and slather Bruno’s face before tucking his head beneath Bruno’s neck. He hugged his basset hound, enjoying the familiar smell and hearing that sonorous, affectionate growl of contentment deep in the dog’s chest. In the face of such absolute love, Bruno thought, it was impossible not to feel better about the world. He rose and they trotted back, side by side, Bruno keeping to Balzac’s pace.
He showered, shaved, dressed, then turned on the radio for the news as he made coffee, boiled an egg and toasted the remains of last night’s bread, sharing it with Balzac. All the chicken from last night had gone, so at least that had been a success, and Bruno tipped the last couple of spoonfuls of rice into Balzac’s bowl. Twenty minutes later he was at the stables, greeting Hector with his morning carrot and watching his horse and his dog exchange their usual courtesies of greeting, sniffing each other while Balzac wagged his tail and Hector flicked his own.
Then Pamela’s dogs, Beau and Bella, came into the stables, waiting politely until at some signal of welcome from Balzac they came to the door of Hector’s stall. Bruno smiled at this canine etiquette as he began saddling horses for himself and Pamela, not sure if anyone else would be joining them. This was the weekend when the season of summer rentals began for her gîtes, and there might be strangers wanting to take part in the morning exercise.
“You’re early,” Pamela said, suppressing a yawn and stamping her feet to settle them into her tight riding boots. “Jamie and his girlfriend aren’t here yet, and we’ll take it easy because Miko will be joining us and she’s still a beginner.”
“Miko from Ivan’s bistro?”
“Yes, she’s been taking riding lessons, beginning with Miranda on the ponies. She’s such a slim little person but very keen. I like her, she’s always cheerful, and the horses like her, too. I’ll put her on the Andalusian, and we won’t do much more than a trot. If you want a gallop, go off ahead. How’s that Driant business you’re working on?”
“More complicated than I thought,” he replied, saddling the Andalusian and then checking the saddle girths before leading them out into the yard as Ivan’s battered Renault Clio came along the lane, followed by Jamie’s minivan.
“Bonjour, Pamela, bonjour, Bruno,” said Miko. Bruno had to bend down quite far to reach her cheek, and even though the Andalusian was a small horse, he had to boost Miko to get her into the saddle. Her pink hair flared out from under her new riding cap like the tendrils of some exotic tropical anemone as she waved at Jamie and Galina.
Hector set off at a gentle pace led by Pamela until they left the outer paddock. Then he took off at a fast trot that within a couple of strides had become a canter and then a gallop. Even Galina was left far behind. The rush of air in Bruno’s face was just what he wanted, and he whooped with joy as they raced off and up to the entrance to the bridle path, where Hector finally slowed, turned and, head high, neighed at the plodding horses behind him as if to show them what a real horse could do.
Half an hour later, Bruno was in his office, going line by line through the printouts from Constant’s phone and making notes of the relevant texts and e-mails. They made a powerful and damning case that Constant, Sarrail and Lara knew exactly what they were doing to Driant. He also wrote a brief report to J-J on his questioning of Constant and how he had obtained his phone, using the standard phraseology that every young cop learned in training. “I asked to examine his phone, saying that if he refused I would consider him to be obstructing justice and would seek a magistrate’s warrant to obtain it. He then withdrew his objection and I gave him a signed receipt for his phone. It was returned to his residence this morning and a signed and dated receipt for it was obtained.”
When she had called to thank Bruno for dinner, Juliette confirmed that she’d delivered Constant’s phone to the retirement home before starting work and demanded and received a receipt. Bruno then drafted a short summary of what he learned, with quotes from the texts, and e-mailed it to the brigadier’s office, noting that it contained clear evidence of conspiracy to defraud. He then attacked a pile of paperwork while waiting for J-J’s inevitable call.
“Your mayor is a piece of work,” said J-J when he called just after ten. “He’s told Prunier he wants to use Constant’s texts in a letter he’s sending to the finance minister on the need for closer supervision of insurance firms. He also reminded Prunier that as a former senator he has the privilege of direct access to any minister. Then he said he just happened to have seen the texts as part of a routine time-and-motion study in his capacity as your legal employer. As if that wasn’t enough, General Lannes has reminded Prunier that you’ve been seconded to his staff and are thus covered by the emergency regulations. I imagine Goirau will also be giving him a call, so I think you’re in the clear. I’d say you have the luck of the devil except I suspect you’d already planned this.”
“A good man, my mayor,” Bruno replied and replaced the phone. He heard a chuckle behind him and turned to see the man himself. He wasn’t sure whether the mayor
had been amused by Bruno’s remark to J-J or by the enthusiastic welcome given him by Balzac, who had slipped out from where he’d been dozing under Bruno’s desk.
“Thanks for your message to Prunier,” Bruno said.
“We take justice seriously in St. Denis,” said the mayor with a wink, rising from Balzac’s greeting. “I did enjoy that chicken dish last night. Where did you learn that?”
“From Florence. She says it’s her kids’ favorite.”
“I’m glad you’re finally starting to realize how fine a person she is,” said the mayor, and left before Bruno could retort that it was he who’d found Florence her teaching job and brought her to St. Denis. Nor could Bruno add that this was supposed to be his day off.
The buzz he’d enjoyed after his morning run and the ride with Hector was fading, and Bruno felt tired. He finished the essential paperwork and, with Balzac trotting along behind, he headed downstairs as the mairie clock struck ten. Bruno’s bad night worried him. He’d always thought one of the most useful things he’d learned in the army was the ability to sleep wherever and whenever he wanted.
He stopped at Fauquet’s to buy a restorative slice of apple tart. Back at home, he put a slice of Cantal cheese on top of the tart, squeezed the juice from a couple of lemons into a glass and filled it up with water. He strolled slowly around his garden, looking in on the chickens and geese, eating his tart washed down with lemon juice and enjoying the day. Then he undressed in his bedroom, closed the curtains and settled down to get some sleep. His thoughts drifted to the next day, when he’d be taking Balzac to lose his virginity and seeing Isabelle. Knowing he was smiling, he drifted away.
He woke just after two in the afternoon, feeling splendidly refreshed. He showered, dressed in civilian clothes and checked his phone, which he’d left on silent. He had three calls. The first he returned was to J-J, who said that Commissaire Prunier had referred the issue to the procureur, the top legal official in the département. The procureur said that after consultation with his magistrates, he’d be prepared to argue in court that the evidence was admissible, if backed up by France Télécom records. The second return call was to Annette, his magistrate friend in Sarlat, who said everyone on the procureur’s staff was discussing it and she’d found precedents that made such use of phone records admissible in conspiracy cases and forwarded them to her boss. The third call was to Rod Macrae.
The Shooting at Chateau Rock Page 19
