The dark vineyard b,op-2

by Martin Walker

  He made a fresh pot of coffee and put the other half of the baguette in the toaster. He went to the garden for another fresh apple, and picked a late white rose from the bush by the door. He spread jam on the toast, put everything on a tray and returned with Gigi to the bedroom. Whether it was the smell of coffee or the heavy breathing of Gigi, his front paws perched on the side of the bed, Isabelle awoke and turned to look at him.

  “Hello again,” she said, smiling, and then disappeared under the dog’s happy welcome as Gigi clambered onto the bed and nuzzled her ear.

  “How is a woman supposed to look languorous and romantic with a dog like this in her bed,” she said, laughing and stroking Gigi’s long ears. She sat up, her lovely, delicate breasts appearing above the sheets, ran her fingers through her hair and grinned broadly.

  “Breakfast in bed. Bruno and dog. Fresh coffee. A rose. Mon Dieu, Paris is never like this.” She settled the tray across her lap, put the rose behind her ear and patted the bed beside her. “Come and join me. We have the whole day together.”

  “You forget the duties of a country policeman,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her. Gigi wriggled over to make room for him, and Bruno lay down on his side, enjoying the sight of Isabelle sipping her coffee. She broke the toasted baguette into three portions, one for her, one for Gigi and another for Bruno.

  “I have a rugby class for the minimes and then a quick meeting at the mairie before I’m free. I thought you might like to take a walk in the woods before I go to the rugby club. Then later we could go out to lunch and have the day to ourselves.” He kissed her again, and then asked the question that had been on his mind since her first e-mail. “How long can you stay?”

  “Until you find the arsonist,” she said. “I’m attached to the brigadier’s team. The minister wants one of his own staff on this investigation.”

  “So you’re here on business?”

  “Yes, but I was planning on coming down anyway, since the only time I’m ever likely to see you in Paris is when you come up to watch England play France at rugby.” She leaned forward to kiss him to take any sting from the remark. “How long do we have before your class?”

  “Long enough,” he said, moving the tray from her lap to the floor and shooing a reluctant Gigi from the room.

  “Oh good,” she said, and lifted the sheet to invite him in.

  Bruno understood his dog well enough to have accepted that a human never walks a basset hound. The dog and the human go for separate strolls, which coincide always at the beginning, sometimes at the end and rarely in the middle, unless Bruno gave the special hunter’s whistle. Gigi knew every inch of the woods that backed onto Bruno’s house, and was on nodding terms with every tree, most of which he gave a token watering as he followed the various beguiling scents that rose to his nostrils, scents stirred up by his long trailing ears. Bruno, happy to be showing Isabelle his land again, took her hand as they followed Gigi through the well-spaced assortment of beech and chestnut trees.

  “There’s something on your mind,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Is it about me?” She paused. “You want to talk about it?”

  Skirting the thick entanglements of brambles, he smiled to reassure her and explained his doubts about the Bondino project and the prospect of a conflict, even a breach, with the mayor.

  “What bugs me most of all,” he said as he led the way through the thin brush and onto the ridge that let them look down the valley to the town, “is the thought that Bondino could change Saint-Denis beyond recognition. It’s like being in bed with an elephant to have an international firm worth tens of millions of euros dominating our lives. But as the mayor says, if we don’t get jobs, Saint-Denis could be finished anyway.”

  “So what’s the worst that could happen?” she asked, looking down at the view. “You have a fight with the mayor, resign or get fired and this wine project goes ahead anyway. You’ll walk into a police job in Paris, J-J and I will see to that, and then you’ll move in with me. We can come back here every holiday to your house. Does that sound so bad?”

  She turned to face him, still holding his hand. “You can say I’m being stubborn for not giving up my career in Paris. And I can say you’re being stubborn because you won’t give up your country life in Saint-Denis. And so two people who make each other happy are going their separate ways. But what if Saint-Denis gives you up, Bruno? What then?”

  Her eyes searched his face, but he had no answer. The thought of a new life in Paris with Isabelle, marriage and perhaps children… Appealing as the prospect seemed, he just couldn’t embrace it. Bruno knew himself well enough to understand that much of his need for Saint-Denis was that its people had become the family his orphaned childhood had never provided, with the mayor as father figure. Yet there had never been a woman with whom he could talk like this, a woman whose judgment he trusted, a friend as well as a lover.

  He drew her to him and hugged her close. “Let’s see how things go these next few days,” he said. “Will you be staying here with me?”

  “I can’t, damn it,” she said, speaking into his shoulder. “They’ve based me in Bordeaux. I have to get back for a 9 a.m. meeting tomorrow morning. Merde, Bruno, I never cry,” she said, turning away and putting a hand to her eyes.

  Gigi came running to snuffle at their feet and gaze up inquiringly as Bruno embraced Isabelle and stroked her hair. Suddenly he saw on his watch that he was going to be late for the minimes. He grabbed Isabelle’s hand and they walked quickly back toward the house, Gigi trotting at their side. They laughed as his long ears bounced like flopping wings as he scrambled over fallen branches.

  20

  Bruno had a theory that a country displayed its deepest national character in the way it played rugby. The English relished wars of attrition in the mud, grim battles for inches between bloodied forwards under gray skies. The Welsh played like quicksilver, fans of the dashing break through the line by a nimble fly-half dancing his way through the defense. The Scots loved the heroic charge, even when it looked most hopeless, the brave sprint down the wing with the fullback and every man hurling himself into the line. The Irish loved cunning, and they played with creative trickery, suddenly switching their line of attack or kicking ahead to frustrate their opponents.

  But the French played with unique flair, ready to use their running backs like forwards to power through on the wing. Even better, they loved to play their forwards as if they were wingers, constantly passing the ball to one another and overwhelming the defenders as they sidestepped and broke tackles and moved and thought too fast for the other side to react. And that was how Bruno taught his ten-year-olds, drilling them constantly into the habit of always being just three paces behind the boy with the ball, ready to take the pass.

  “Now turn and pass; turn and pass. Make each pass clean,” he panted as they ran the length of the field and back again. “Tackle low, you defenders. Get his ankles and he’ll come down. That’s how you stop them. Don’t grab his arms. Go low. The lower the better.”

  By now the older juniors and the adult team members were drifting through the entrance gates and past the stadium, heading to the locker rooms to change for their own training sessions. Some girls accompanied their boyfriends and took seats in the stadium to watch. Bruno saw Jacqueline arrive with Max. He waved a greeting to them and turned back to give his youngsters a few last minutes of his attention. Then he shook hands with each of his boys as they trotted off the field to make way for the older players.

  “That’s how he taught me to play,” Max was explaining to Jacqueline as a winded Bruno approached, his chest still heaving. He paused to catch his breath before he greeted them, and then asked Max to help him move aside one of the painters’ ladders that partially blocked the way to the locker rooms.

  Max was already changed into the royal blue shirt and white shorts of Saint-Denis, and Jacqueline was in jeans and a sleeveless white blouse that showed her tanned shoulders to advantage. The other girls in the stands, who h
ad all gone to school with Max, were looking at Jacqueline with curiosity as she slipped her arm around his slim waist. Whatever tension there had been between them the previous day at the vendange was now evidently resolved.

  “You look very well, Jacqueline,” Bruno said. “Treading the grapes agrees with you.”

  “You look good, too, Bruno. I see how you keep so fit,” she said, smiling.

  “How are you spending this lovely Sunday?” he asked. “It’s not a day to waste on watching a training session.”

  “Max is taking me up the river to his favorite swimming spot after practice. Then we’ll have a picnic lunch before we head off to pick Max’s grapes,” she said, keeping her arm around Max’s waist. Cresseil’s grapes, in fact, thought Bruno, but the young man looked at Jacqueline with devotion in his shining eyes.

  The other players came trotting onto the field, a rough chorus of “Oh-la-la ”s and “Allez, Max ”es at the sight of Jacqueline. With a final caress of her cheek, Max followed them, and Bruno nodded amiably at Jacqueline, remembering how closely she had danced with Bondino the previous evening before leaving with him. A very sociable young woman, this Canadian. Indiscriminately sociable, Bruno thought, recalling her instinctive flirting with him. And she was not nearly as attached to Max as he was to her. Some half-remembered quotation came to his mind as he walked to the shower, that in affairs of the heart there is always one who kisses and one who is kissed.

  As he toweled himself dry, Bruno was startled to hear a woman’s brisk footsteps coming into the locker room. Women weren’t allowed in here. It was Isabelle, whom he had left with her laptop at the gendarmerie. She was carrying his boots and his uniform, and she told him to get dressed fast.

  “We’re heading for the research station. It’s been attacked,” she said, bundling his sports clothes into a plastic bag she plucked from a pocket. “That’s all I know.”

  “Again? I’m supposed to be at a meeting at the mairie,” he said, wondering what the security cameras might show this time.

  “I called the mayor. The meeting’s canceled. He’s joining us at the scene.” She bustled him out of the small stadium and into her car, its blue light flashing as she raced into town. “One of the staff went in to monitor the automatic watering systems and found the place trashed. He called his boss, who called the gendarmerie. Paris is going to be furious about this. I called J-J to let him know, and he’s on the way from Perigueux with a forensics team. I also called the brigadier and left a message. I’ll have to call the ministry as soon as we have enough to give them some kind of report.”

  Bruno hadn’t known what to expect, another fire or a break-in, and at first all seemed normal as they drove into the research station. Then they saw the mayor and Petitbon and a couple of the technicians standing in front of the greenhouses, their panes of glass now thoroughly drenched and covered in a thick layer of white paint.

  The front of the greenhouse was still spattered with red paint from the demonstration, but the roof and sides were now an expanse of gleaming white. Petitbon had a bottle of turpentine in one hand and a rag in the other, and he was rubbing hard at one of the panes, but he was only smearing the paint. The main door to the greenhouse was open, and Bruno could see from the darkness inside that the light had been thoroughly blocked.

  “How long will your plants survive without light?” he asked Petitbon.

  “A week or more, but that’s not the point. We have to monitor their progress on a daily basis or our records make no sense. And this paint isn’t coming off, neither with water nor with turpentine. It seems to be some special kind of paint.”

  “They made a hell of a job of it,” said the mayor, staring at the splashes of red paint at his feet and around the door and the whitened sides. “It’s all around the back as well.”

  Isabelle led the way inside one of the greenhouses, which was still warm but with the familiar smell of soil and fruitfulness now masked by the acrid smell of the paint. Some of the roof panes had been left open for ventilation, and beneath them the white paint pooled around the rows of plants.

  “That’s as clever a piece of sabotage as I’ve seen,” she said. “They didn’t break the glass, so there was no sound. There was no break-in, so no alarm sounded. But the place is destroyed, just the same.”

  “Have you looked at the security cameras?” Bruno asked Petitbon.

  “First thing I did. But we’re not going to learn much. Come and see.”

  He led the way to the front of the old house, where one camera had been fixed above the door. Its lens and the stone wall behind it were covered in a spray of white paint.

  “It’s the same around the back,” Petitbon said. “The only one they missed was on the chimney, looking over the side. I was just going to check the tape when the mayor turned up. Let’s go and see if we got anything.”

  The images were fuzzy but clear, made just after 2 a.m. The camera showed one man dressed in painter’s overalls and wearing goggles over a hood, moving with slow deliberation along the side of the greenhouses. There was a large pack strapped to his back, presumably the paint reservoir, and a long nozzle in one hand that emitted a fine, spraying arc of paint onto the glass roof as he pumped a lever with the other hand. When he got to the end of the greenhouse, he moved out of sight of the camera for a few minutes and then returned, walking in the same slow way back to spray their sides.

  “I couldn’t identify my own wife, dressed up like that,” said the mayor.

  “That’s a lot of paint,” said Bruno. “I suppose when he disappeared he might have been refilling. He couldn’t have brought all that on foot.” Or on a motorbike, he thought. “There must have been a truck or a car somewhere very near.”

  “The chain was cut on the side gates,” said Petitbon. “The cameras don’t cover that. He probably just drove straight in.”

  “Check if there was anything from the other cameras before they got sprayed, just in case,” said Bruno. “I’ll take a look at the side gate.”

  The chain was thin enough to have been cut easily, but on the grass there were two clear tire tracks in white that faded as they led to the gate. Bruno measured the gap between the tires and scribbled a note. It was too wide for a car. J-J’s team might be able to identify the kind of truck and maybe even the tires, although the tracks looked too smeared on the grass for easy identification. There were plenty of smeared white footprints on the grass along the side of the greenhouses, but nothing as clear as the imprint of a shoe. Perhaps the culprit had bags over his feet. He had left nothing else behind, not even an empty can of paint.

  Isabelle was sealing a small plastic evidence bag that she had filled with a sample of the paint she had scraped off as Bruno returned to the greenhouse, where the technicians were trying various products to clean the paint. None of them seemed to be working, and the technicians were muttering about some special type of cement paint. In his office, Petitbon had his head in his hands and a phone to his ear, muttering, “Oui, monsieur; oui, monsieur.”

  The mayor drew Bruno discreetly aside. “You realize what this means? Bondino won’t go ahead now. First the fire, then the demonstration and now this.”

  Bruno felt a small surge of relief. He hadn’t been thinking of that. From the road outside he heard the sound of a police siren. That would probably be J-J. Bruno went outside to greet him, only to find himself caught in the flash of Delaron’s camera. Putain, he thought, another front-page story on the crime wave of Saint-Denis.

  “How come you’re always on the scene, Philippe?” he said to the photographer as J-J’s car drew in. “You’ll be at the top of the suspect list if you go on like this.”

  “My uncle works here,” said the young man cheerfully, focusing his camera to get J-J’s hulking form against the gleaming array of what used to be pristine greenhouses. “He was the one who first saw what happened and called his wife, and she told my mother. You can’t keep secrets in Saint-Denis, Bruno.”

  Bruno showed J-J
the greenhouses and led him inside to the office, where Petitbon was still on the phone and Isabelle was downloading the images from the camera onto her laptop.

  “Think it’s the same guy who set the fire?” asked J-J.

  Bruno shrugged. “Who knows? But I think I might know where he got the paint. I even think I may have paid for it.” He turned to Isabelle. “Bring that little evidence bag you filled and let’s follow my hunch. J-J, I’ll leave you here to wait for your forensics boys. If I’m right, we’re going to need them.”

  Isabelle was on the phone to a colleague in the minister’s office in Paris, so Bruno drove, wondering as he parked at the rugby stadium if this was a fool’s errand. The players were still on the field, the knot of girls still watching, and the painter’s ladder was still where he had left it. He took out his ring of keys, and Isabelle followed him to the rear door of the stadium, which led into the kitchen and the large dining room. He didn’t need his keys. The door swung open to his touch-the wood of the lock was splintered where someone had forced it open.

  A dozen large cans of paint, each about half the size of an oil drum, were stacked against the wall, with two backpacks and nozzles leaning against them. Goggles and hooded white coveralls were draped over a trestle table. He was sure the contract had said there would be three painters on the job, but he went into the office to check. Isabelle held her small exhibit bag against the newly painted stadium wall to make a comparison, but she shrugged. White was white.

  He called the contractor at home. Three painters were on the stadium job, and there had been three backpacks and fourteen cans of special cement paint, brilliant white, when they packed up on Friday. Would there be any way to remove it from glass? Bruno asked. Wait for it to dry fully and then scrape it off, he was told. It should peel away easily. How long would it take to dry? Two or three days, depending on the weather. Less, if you applied a dryer. Did he have one, or better still, did he have several? He had one, but could probably round up a few more. The local Bricomarche stocked them. Bruno told him to get to the research station with his workers as fast as he could, along with ladders and scaffolding. Then he called the Brico manager at home and asked him to open up. Finally he called the mayor, still back at the research station.