‘When you say our project,’ he asked, ‘do you mean you and Foucher, or you and the Count?’
He felt her scrutinize him coolly before she turned and swung back into the saddle.
‘The Count has the money and Foucher does the paperwork but the idea for the holiday village was mine,’ she said. ‘I have a share of the project, probably less than I deserve. But I’m still determined to make it work.’
Her horse plodded wearily away, and as he watched her leave Bruno pondered what business his friend the Baron might have in this project. He was the main landowner in the commune, so it would probably be some land that they needed, and once he realized they needed it he’d charge them a pretty price. It could even be the Baron’s old dream of having a golf course nearby, rather than having to drive to Siorac or Perigueux whenever he wanted a round. Bruno resolved that he’d simply ask his friend over a quiet drink; the Baron was not much of a man for secrets.
It was the darker end of twilight by the time he got back to the stables at Pamela’s house. It was becoming tiresome, this daily commute between his own place and hers. When she’d first flown off to Edinburgh to take care of her mother, they had both assumed she’d be away for only a few days and he’d been happy to agree to move into her place to take care of the horses, her Bess and Victoria as well as his own Hector. But the moving back and forth was becoming a logistical nightmare as he ran short of clean shirts and underwear and made late-night runs to look after his chickens.
A light flared in the stable yard as the door to Fabiola’s gite opened and the young doctor stood silhouetted in its frame.
‘Bonsoir, Bruno. Have you eaten?’ she called.
He walked across, kissed her in greeting and confessed that he was starving and had been thinking about getting a pizza or a croque-monsieur from Ivan’s bistro in town.
‘I’m cooking and I made enough for two,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
‘Your mother’s risotto again?’ he asked, teasing. Fabiola was perversely proud of her limited cooking skills, and boasted that she had learned only one dish from her mother.
‘No, my father’s fondue, it’s the best comfort food I know,’ she said. Fabiola had a complicated family. Her mother was half Italian and half French, and her father was half French and half Italian-Swiss. Hence the fondue.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, beaming at her. ‘I thought you’d been avoiding me for some reason.’
‘No, I’m not avoiding you,’ she said, leading the way into the kitchen. Other than her books, her open laptop and a large framed photograph of a village in a valley overwhelmed by mountains, the house looked exactly as it had when Pamela was renting it out in the summer. ‘I’m avoiding a question you want to ask me about private patients and I don’t intend to answer. So having got that out of the way, how are you?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘A bit worried about Madame Junot and trying to trace the identity of this dead woman we fished out of the river. And I spoke to Pamela. She’s planning on coming back, but not for long, just to see whether she can find some care for her mother here in St Denis.’
Fabiola nodded, some of her dark hair falling from the loose bun in which she usually kept it. She pushed the lock behind her ear and began to open a bottle of white wine. Seeing Bruno trying to look at the label, she grinned at him and held up the bottle; one of his favourites, a Bergerac Sec from Clos d’Yvigne.
‘I know. Pamela rang me and asked what I thought and I told her it wasn’t a good idea. I’ve seen good people turn into depressives when they start taking care of a parent who’s become a vegetable. From what the doctor says, her mother can only get worse.’
‘You spoke to the doctor in Scotland?’ he asked, sitting at the kitchen table, already set for two, the frame and tiny candle holder for the fondue already in place. As well as the wine glass, there was a small liqueur glass at each setting and a bottle of some clear liquid. He turned it to read the label: Willisauer Kirsch. She must have planned to ask him in.
‘Sure, why not? The prognosis is not good. And the retirement home here isn’t equipped for patients in that condition. Her mother would be better off in a specialized home, if she can afford it,’ Fabiola said, pouring out the wine. She took a sip, put down the glass, yawned and stretched. There were black circles under her eyes, as if she had not been sleeping well. She reached for the pack of Gitanes on the table and lit one.
‘Are you OK?’ He’d only rarely seen her smoke before. ‘You seem a bit down.’
‘Are you surprised? Telling cancer patients they don’t have long to live. Abused wives who won’t make a formal complaint. Old people who are dead in everything except that they still breathe and eat and shit. And lots of hypochondriacs who want me to give them antibiotics for everything. If it wasn’t for the horses and my friends I’d go mad.’
Bruno had never seen Fabiola in this mood before. He didn’t know what to say. She turned aside to the kitchen counter where Emmenthal and Gruyere had already been grated and a baguette of bread chopped into bite-sized chunks. She peeled some heads of garlic, chopped an onion very finely and put them all into the fondue pot.
‘I’m hungry, so I’m going to cheat,’ she said. ‘I should do this at table but it takes for ever.’ Instead, she put the pot on her kitchen stove, splashed in some of the white wine and a dash of the kirsch, added some pepper and mixed spice and began to stir.
‘All those depressing things you mentioned, is that all that’s getting you down?’
‘No,’ she said and paused. Then the words came out in a rush. ‘We had an incident at the shelter this afternoon, just before I got there, and the Gendarmes took ages to respond.’
Bruno knew that Fabiola volunteered at a hostel in Bergerac for battered wives who had taken their children and left their husbands. She treated their cuts and bruises, checked on the health of the children and used her medical title to write letters to recommend that the mother be given social housing in a new town where the husbands would not easily find them.
‘What happened?’
‘One of the husbands found out where his wife was, burst in, smashed the place up, beat her senseless and took his kid. The usual story. Thing is, we’re supposed to have this panic button for the Gendarmes. They took twenty minutes to turn up and I could have walked to the Gendarmerie faster than that. I had to take the woman to hospital, but he’d really done a lot of damage to the shelter. And he’d belted the two volunteers who were there.’
‘Have they arrested him yet?’
‘By the time they got to his home, he’d gone, with the car and the kid. It’s not the first time, Bruno.’
She brought the bubbling fondue pot to the table, lit the candle beneath it and then brought the basket of bread and two side salads she’d prepared.
‘Not very authentic, the salads, but good for us,’ she said. She pushed a long, barbed fork toward him.
‘I put the bread on this, then dip it in the melted cheese, is that right?’ he asked. Cheese fondue was a first for him.
‘Try dipping the bread in the kirsch first, and then in the cheese,’ she said.
He followed her instructions, and chewed with pleasure. It was spicy, tasty and nourishing all at once. She grinned at his grunt of pleasure and then fed herself, each of them taking turns.
‘What did the Gendarmes say when you complained about how long they took to get to the hostel?’
‘That they were busy on another call. It’s what they always say, and we can’t disprove it.’
‘Is there a sympathetic woman on the town council?’
‘Two or three, the ones who finally got us the panic button. They’ll write to the head of the Gendarmes and to the Prefecture.’
‘Get them to write to all the local papers,’ he said. ‘And get Perigord-Bleu to come in and do a story and run one of their talk-shows on the issue. The Gendarmes hate that kind of publicity. And we’ve got a woman Minister of Justice now; your councillors should write to her, too. There
’s nothing like a query from Paris to get the Gendarmes jumping.’
‘I wish we had you there in Bergerac.’ Like his own face, hers was flushed from the fondue. The scar on her cheek, the result of a mountaineering accident, stood out as a jagged red line against her pale skin. As if she sensed the direction of his eyes, she pulled something at the back of her bun, shook her head and her hair tumbled down, hiding her cheeks.
Bruno addressed himself to the kirsch glass and the fondue, then deliberately allowed his piece of bread to fall from the fork.
‘Sorry, clumsy, not used to this,’ he said, using his salad fork to fish into the fondue for his sunken bread. She watched him coolly as he ate it.
‘You can be a very transparent man,’ she said, turning her attention back to her fondue. ‘By the way, I rang my friend at pathology. Your mystery woman had been involved in an orgy, sperm front and rear from different men. They weren’t sure about the mouth because of the alcohol.’
He put down his fork, swallowing. ‘You certainly picked your time to impart that news,’ he said.
‘Yes, we toubibs can be famous for our lack of sensitivity. She’d also given birth at some point in the past. Keep on stirring your fondue, we don’t want it to set. And eat up, the crust at the bottom is the best bit.’
9
Bruno woke early the next morning in Pamela’s spare room, some delicacy restraining him from using her bed in her absence. He took the horses for a quick trot around the paddock, made sure there was hay in their stalls and then drove home in search of a clean shirt and underwear. There was one of each left. He fed his chickens and watered his vegetable garden and then bundled his laundry into a big plastic bag before driving into town. He left his dirty washing at the cleaners, paying the extra for Georgette to iron his shirts, before joining the usual customers at the counter in Fauquet’s cafe. He skimmed through Sud-Ouest while eating a croissant and enjoying the first coffee of the day.
‘Nothing new in the paper,’ said Roberte, a cheerful woman who ran the social security office at the Mairie and was his tennis partner in mixed doubles. ‘Just the interview with Antoine about how you and he picked her out of the river and then went searching the banks yesterday, but I’m sure you’ll have seen that.’
He hadn’t, and read the piece with rising irritation when he saw that Antoine had mentioned the Red Chateau as one of the possible launch sites for the punt. He couldn’t blame Antoine; it was a full page of free publicity for his canoe business and a good photograph of him standing by the big sign for his campsite. But Philippe Delaron was getting inventive in order to keep the story going. It was the headline that jarred — River Search for Devil Woman. The Mayor was not going to like that.
In his office, Bruno skimmed through his predictable post while waiting for the computer to fire up. Most of the envelopes contained brochures for the coming summer’s local music festivals, the usual string quartets playing in ancient churches or jazz ensembles in town squares. He typed in his password and opened his email, to find an announcement of new speed limits from the Prefecture and a characteristically curt message from Isabelle.
‘Have two days off. Arrive tomorrow with special gift from me and Brigadier. Bisous, Isabelle. xx’
Remembering that emails from Isabelle were like a crossword puzzle with emotions attached, he leaned towards the screen intent on deciphering her meaning. Bisous was at the lowest rung of affection, the literary equivalent of an air kiss. The extra xx gave it a slightly warmer tone, but not enough to persuade him that any advance would be met with Isabelle’s open arms. Tomorrow was tricky, since it had been sent at two minutes after midnight. Did that make it this day or the next? There was no request for him to book a hotel, but that was not necessarily a signal that she’d want to stay with him. There was nothing about trains to be met, nor any time or place for a rendezvous. And what might the special gift be? Since it also came from the Brigadier, her boss, it was hardly personal. It also gave her trip a slightly official flavour. The next test was to draft his reply.
After some moments of slightly edgy reflection, he typed: ‘Wonderful news. Intrigued by gift. Do you arrive 18th or 19th and will you be here in time for dinner? Where shall we meet? Bisous and hugs, Bruno.’
He read it again, pondered the ‘Where shall we meet?’ but decided a little precision was justified after Isabelle’s vagueness, crossed his fingers and hit the Send button just as his desk phone rang and another email pinged into his inbox.
‘Tomorrow being today. On morning train from Austerlitz and on usual mobile number. Warning: a new man in my bedroom but he sleeps on floor. Will msg ETA. Ixx’
She must have sent that before getting his reply. At least he had the right date, and there were no more than four trains from the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris, each arriving in St Denis at very different times. He decided that while he knew he was being teased he couldn’t bear to interpret the phrase about the new sleeping partner. He answered the phone to hear a friend’s excited voice.
‘Bruno, it’s the Baron. Something very urgent has come up, not for the phone. Can you come out to my place? And be discreet, park at the back and bring a civilian jacket.’
The Baron was convinced that Claire at the Mairie’s reception desk eavesdropped on phone calls, fuelling her taste for town gossip. Bruno had too few secrets to care, and if discretion was required he had his new mobile phone, supplied by the Brigadier during a previous case, that was reputed to be secure against all invasion. He always kept an anonymous dark windcheater in his official van. Checking that he had his notebook, pen, phone and torch, and a set of latex evidence gloves and bags in his pocket, he told Claire he was going on patrol. He used his phone to text Isabelle with the message ‘What time do you arrive?’ and headed down the stairs.
The Baron lived in a chartreuse, the local name for a historic home just one room wide that was too small to be a chateau and too large to be a manor house. His family had owned it for centuries. The rear of the building, which faced away from both the hillside and the river, was an almost solid wall of stone, interspersed with arrow slits for windows and flanked by two formidable towers. Bruno turned into the courtyard to park before the much more welcoming facade. He sat for a moment, enjoying the way the Renaissance builders had softened the look of a fortress with large stone windows, a handsome staircase and a balustraded terrace. The main door, a massive structure of wood reinforced with iron studs and bars, still carried the scorch marks of the Revolution. Having failed to storm it, the local peasantry had vainly attempted to burn the home of the Baron’s ancestor, their feudal oppressor. This same ancestor had gone on to become one of Napoleon’s generals. As a result, the Baron liked to say, the peasants had been taking on rather more than they had bargained for.
The door opened and the Baron came out, car keys jingling in his hand. ‘Got a call from Marcel at the Gouffre,’ he said. ‘There’s been a break-in overnight and he said he wanted both of us there to see it. He sounded worried.’
‘Any details?’ Bruno asked.
The Baron shook his head. ‘He just said he thought there might be a link to that dead woman you pulled out of the river.’ He led the way across the courtyard and over a wide lawn to the barn where he kept his cars. He steered Bruno to the battered old Peugeot rather than his Mercedes, reversed out and set off through the archway into the tiny hamlet that surrounded his home and up the hill.
Part of the wide stretch of land that the Baron owned, the Gouffre de Colombac was one of the largest caves in the region. Unlike the more famous caves such as Lascaux with its prehistoric paintings, this was simply a vast space beneath the earth. Its main chamber was almost spherical, over a hundred metres wide and almost as high. The space was unevenly divided by an underground river that led to an ominously still lake. Bruno had been inside several times for concerts, the musicians performing from the far side of the river and the audience on chairs and benches or perched on the wide stone steps that nature had
somehow carved into one wall. He had once paid the entrance fee just to see the place, one of the largest caves in France, and with a dark reputation.
For centuries, the locals had called it the Devil’s Cave, for the puffs of smoke they saw sometimes gusting from a hole in the earth. This phenomenon was now known to be a form of condensation from the micro-climate inside the vast cave rather than smoke from the fires of Hell. The land around it, part of an old pilgrimage route from the shrine of Rocamadour and the Abbey of Cadouin that led to Compostela at the far north-western tip of Spain, had for centuries attracted bands of brigands. They lay in wait to rob ill-guarded pilgrims and tip their bodies down the smoking hole into the gulf below. When the cave had first been opened in the nineteenth century, an intrepid explorer had been winched down on a rope, trying vainly to pierce the darkness with a puny lantern. When he had finally touched bottom, he found he had landed on a great heap of bones, mainly human but also animal, from beasts that had stumbled into the hole.
Now, cleverly lit and with pedal-boats for hire to explore the sunken lake, it was a tourist attraction. As well as the entrance fee, the cafe and souvenir shop and the special concerts, the cave made a steady profit from the stoneware it produced. Rack upon rack of plates, jugs, glasses, vases and every other implement that the managers could think of were left under the places where the water, heavy with particles of limestone, dripped down and slowly calcified the objects beneath. After a year or so in the cave, the items looked as though they had been carved from solid stone, and they were so popular that Marcel could barely keep up with the demand.
Smaller chambers led off from the main space, and the eerie formations of stalagmites and stalactites had been carefully lit to justify the rather fanciful names they had been given, such as the Chapel of Our Lady, after a thick rock that looked like a praying woman in a hood and a long cloak; or Napoleon’s Bedchamber, which resembled a massive four-poster bed with hangings swooping around it and a curious shape that could be interpreted as a giant letter N.
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