‘Francette needs your help,’ said Brigitte. ‘She’s scared stiff. Can you take her somewhere safe?’
‘You’ll have to tell me everything, Francette, if I’m going to be able to help,’ he said, taking off his cap and sliding in alongside her.
‘It’s not a story for church,’ she said. Bruno glanced at her mother and raised his eyebrows. She nodded and murmured that Francette had told her everything. Meanwhile Bruno was thinking that his own place was known and so was Pamela’s, where he kept his horse. Too many people knew of his friendship with Stephane and his farm was too near to the Junot place. He called Maurice Soulier, an elderly duck farmer who owed Bruno a favour. It was answered by his wife, Sabine, a motherly soul. Their children had long left home and she agreed at once.
‘Go down behind the altar to the vestry and wait there. I’ll come and fetch you.’
He went back to the Gendarmerie and borrowed the keys to Jules’s private car, a well-maintained Renault Laguna. He drove to Father Sentout’s house, where he borrowed the key to the vestry from his housekeeper. He loaded the two women into the car and followed the back road past the cemetery, taking country lanes to the Soulier farm. Sabine was waiting for them with a pot of coffee and a plate of her home-made madeleines. Her husband came in from the barn to greet them. When Bruno asked for a place where he and the two guests could speak in private, Maurice showed them to the shaded terrace and left them alone. Humming happily to herself, evidently pleased at the thought of guests, Sabine went upstairs to make up the spare bed and lay out towels.
‘I’ve been a fool,’ Francette said dully. ‘It’s my fault that Dad’s dead and now I think Mum’s in danger as well as me.’
‘Start at the beginning,’ Bruno said. ‘What made you leave your job at the supermarket?’
‘I met this guy, a bit older than me but good-looking, you know?’ She described how he’d come to her checkout, chatted a little, and he asked her out. He picked her up after work in his sports car, took her to a dinner in Bergerac and then to a nightclub for dancing before driving her home.
‘He was really sweet, just kissed me on the cheek and asked to see me again. Next time he brought me flowers and he took me to a smart restaurant, white tablecloths and everything. He knew all about wines. Then we went to that big disco in Perigueux that the other girls used to talk about, but I’d never been there.’
Bruno nodded sympathetically, suspecting that he knew already how this would turn out. A girl from a poor home who had never been taken out before was suddenly being treated like a princess. The next date had been a day trip to Bordeaux, where he’d taken her to an expensive hairdresser, bought her new clothes and lingerie that he chose for her, and then to a boutique hotel for the afternoon.
‘Leo was so kind, so sweet,’ she said. Bruno could imagine the contrast between the skilled seduction in the hotel room and the clumsy, insistent fumblings of the boys of her own age from St Denis.
‘Was that his real name?’ he asked. No, she replied, it was her pet name for him. His real name was Lionel.
Then he had taken her to Paris for the weekend, a hotel on the Quai Voltaire with a room overlooking the river. They had smoked a joint of the strongest dope she’d ever had and then made love until it was time to go to the famous Queen disco on the Champs Elysees.
‘There was this long line of people trying to get in, but one look at Leo and they opened the red velvet rope and we went straight in,’ she said, her voice wistful, still conveying her pride in that moment. And even in her low mood, Francette had the physical assurance and poise of a woman now aware of her own allure and sexual power. At the disco, she said, she had tried cocaine for the first time.
They slept until late and then more shopping, until Leo took her to an exclusive party where there was more cocaine and endless champagne. Suddenly people were taking off their clothes and Leo was making love with another woman and a man and it seemed the natural thing to join in. She looked up at Bruno defiantly and said that she’d enjoyed it. Then there had been the week at a villa in St Tropez, more cocaine and more sex parties; in hotel suites and even on a yacht. When Leo offered her a job at the hotel, she’d taken it at once.
Bruno felt a cold anger start to build, deep inside him, at hearing of Foucher’s cynical seduction of an inexperienced young woman, and one whom Bruno still recalled as a little girl.
‘I had no illusions about the job.’ There was a challenge in her voice, but she wouldn’t look at him while she spoke. Her mother sat in silence, listening with her eyes closed, one hand resting on Francette’s forearm. ‘My eyes were wide open and I’d have taken the job even without the thousand euros in cash he gave me. He called it a signing bonus.’
It was one thing having sex with others when she was high and Leo was taking part, but not nearly as much fun when strangers who spoke no French took her off to their rooms at the hotel. It was even worse when one of them was only able to perform when he hit her. Then there were the dressing-up games: doctors and nurses, cops and prisoners, priests and nuns. Sometimes the clients wanted exhibitions, girls with girls, or nuns with nuns, and pulled out their phones to take videos. There were discipline games, when the girls could be spanked. With all the cocaine available, it didn’t seem to matter.
One night, Leo and Beatrice had taken her and some other girls into the Gouffre, dressed them as nuns and filmed them in Our Lady’s Chapel. That was the first time since the initial orgy in Paris that she’d met the man they called the Count.
‘Did you ever see this woman?’ Bruno asked, taking from his breast pocket the photo of Athenais.
Francette nodded. ‘Tina was with us in the cave.’
‘You called her Tina?’ Bruno asked, thinking it was probably as close a nickname as she could get to Athenais.
‘I liked her, she was nice to me after I was hit the first time. Tina really got off on the scene in the cave when Leo dressed up as a priest. But it was the Count that she wanted. Apparently they’d met in New York and they’d had an affair. She told me she was in love with him and he was going to pay for this film project she had about some ancestor who was the mistress of Louis Quatorze. She talked about it all the time, like it was an obsession with her. I remember once she told me she thought was the reincarnation of this Madame de Montespan. She even promised me a part in the movie. But she was going to be the star.’
‘Did she ever talk about love potions?’ Bruno felt a mounting excitement at the realization that Francette’s testimony was breaking open the whole case, along with anger at the way she’d been treated. She was just eighteen. She should be playing doubles at the tennis club, holding hands and locking eyes in a cheap students’ restaurant, not dressing up to thrill ageing customers in the defence industry.
‘You know about the Black Mass?’ she asked, her eyes widening.
He nodded. ‘Was Tina trying to make sure the Count fell in love with her?’
‘It sounds crazy now, but it all made sense then. She told me it was certain to work, that it worked with Louis XIV.’
‘Were you there when she did this?’
‘No, Leo organized it. Tina wanted to do the Black Mass in a real church and there was some family chapel over the river he said they could use. He and Richard took her; he’s the Lebanese guy but he claimed to have been raised as a Christian.’
‘Did you ever see Tina again after that?’
Francette shook her head. ‘They said it hadn’t worked and she’d gone back to Paris. It wasn’t till I came home that Mum told me about the woman in the boat and I knew it had to be Tina. I was getting scared already but that really freaked me. That’s when I said we had to come and see you.’
‘You never saw any newspapers or listened to the TV or radio while you were there at the auberge?’
‘Some of the clients had TV in their bedrooms but all they wanted to have on was porn.’
‘Did you ever see your dad, or did he get in touch with you?’
&nb
sp; Francette shook her head, and for the first time she took her mother’s hand. Now the story came in fits and starts. With hindsight, she now thought he’d been to the auberge the night after Bruno had brought her father to see her. It had been a doctors and nurses party that night and some of the clients had become frisky over dinner, so the nurses were all topless. There had been some commotion at one of the windows and some shouting. Beatrice had come back and said there’d been an intruder but it was all under control. At the time Francette had thought nothing of it, but looking back that must have been her father.
‘That’s why I’m responsible,’ she said, her voice dull. ‘He must have been so worked up after you brought him to see me that he crashed.’
This was not the time to tell her it had been no crash. ‘Did you know of any other disturbance on the evening of that day I brought him to the auberge to see you? I’m wondering if your dad might have come back.’
Francette shrugged. ‘Not that I heard of. But there was a big party that night, some guys down from Paris and they had their own security guards outside. We were all ordered to stay indoors.’
The security men from the defence Ministry had been at the entrance to the auberge. But on such a special occasion the Count would not have tolerated any more intrusions from Junot. What if Junot had been caught trying to break in at the rear? Could that have been sufficient motive to kill him? Or to beat him so badly they had to finish him and fake the accident? Lionel, or Leo as Francette knew him, was probably ruthless enough. Bruno had one more question.’Did you ever meet a girl called Eugenie, tall with dark hair?’
‘Could she have called herself Gina? She was with the Count at the party in Paris and again with him that night in the cave. She was really beautiful.’
‘Have you seen anyone from the hotel since you came back to your mother’s place?’
‘Leo came yesterday evening to ask when I was coming back. He brought flowers for Mum and was full of sympathy but he said I’d better get back to work soon. It was the way he said it, I got scared. After Mum told me about Tina in the boat, I knew we had to get away. And then this morning Richard came by in the car, just sat there and looked at the house. It was creepy.’
‘Richard has been staying at St Philippon?’ Bruno asked.
She nodded. ‘There and at the Red Chateau over the river. He’s a friend of the Count. I don’t like him. He’s the one who hit me when he couldn’t get it up.’
‘How did you get down here from the farm?’
‘We walked down through the woods and along the river. There’s one more thing, Bruno. You’re going to have to be careful, they’re really freaked about you. Leo kept asking me if you’d been to see me at home.’
‘That’s all right, don’t worry about me,’ he said, and asked her to write down a statement, exactly as she’d told it to him. He gave her the phone he’d just bought and put his own numbers onto speed-dial.
He left mother and daughter sitting silently, holding hands, and went in to explain to Sabine that Francette was being stalked by a violent ex-boyfriend. He asked for some writing paper and took it back to the terrace with his pen. As Francette began writing her statement he went to the duck barn for a word with Maurice.
‘I don’t think her ex-boyfriend will find her here, but if a white sports car turns up, call me straight away.’
‘I’ve got my shotgun,’ Maurice said. Bruno winced. He’d had enough trouble with Maurice’s shotgun over another matter when some animal rights activists had tried to liberate his ducks and geese. No guns, he insisted and left to buy another phone from a bemused Jolliot.
As he left the shop, his usual phone buzzed at his belt. It was Lemontin, to say that the signature to authorize the mortgage payments was that of the Red Countess, dated in May of the previous year. But her sister had claimed the Countess hadn’t had a lucid moment in years. Not only did this look like fraud; it meant his plan for the hotel to be used as collateral for St Denis’s investment in the Count’s project couldn’t work. The hotel was not the Count’s to pledge.
At the Gendarmerie, Sergeant Jules was visibly enjoying himself. Madame de la Gorce had sworn another statement saying Eugenie had been the one who told her that Bruno must have been the thief. In a second room, Foucher was insisting it was all a misunderstanding, while his drinking glass was now ready to be picked up by Yves from the forensic team for DNA analysis. The one problem was that Mademoiselle Ballotin was not at the Red Chateau and nobody seemed to know where she was.
‘If her name’s Eugenie, then that last message Foucher sent when you stopped him was to her,’ Jules said, holding up one of the phones that lay on the desk before him. ‘One word: flee. And here’s the bonus,’ he went on, holding up a plastic bag that contained a breathalyser unit. ‘The driver of a white Jaguar, one Richard Abouard, Lebanese passport, booked for speeding on the Perigueux road, passed his breathalyser test, but here it is. Yves will pick it up with the drinking glass.’
‘Excellent,’ said Bruno. ‘Is the Procureur still here? Or J-J?’
‘J-J is here taking statements. The Procureur has gone to brief the Prefect and the Mayor went with him. That inspector you know from Bergerac is leading the search team at the hotel. The forensic team linked Junot’s death to a truck there and J-J said something about the same truck being caught by a camera at the dechetterie.’
‘Anybody called for a lawyer?’
‘Once he’d given his statement Foucher was free to leave, but he’s waiting for the old lady. If we can bring Eugenie in, J-J says to hold them both on charges of making false statements.’
‘And the old lady’s giving a new statement without a lawyer present?’ Bruno asked in disbelief.
‘First thing he did, J-J got her to sign the release saying she didn’t need a lawyer. She said her grandson would take care of everything.’
‘So it’s all under control,’ Bruno said, thinking of the renewed chaos that would follow the delivery of Francette’s statement that linked Foucher and the Count directly to the death of Athenais.
Then his phone vibrated, and with some premonition that everything was about to go wrong he saw that it was Gilles.
‘We missed her,’ Gilles said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What happened?’
‘It’s my fault, I didn’t brief our guys in California properly,’ the reporter said. His Hollywood correspondent had tracked down the girl’s father in Santa Barbara and learned that she was at McGill University in Montreal. But he told the father that Athenais was dead, and once the reporter left the father called his daughter to pass on the bad news. By the time the correspondent from New York got to her address in Montreal, she’d already left. Her flatmate said that she’d contacted international directory inquiries to get the number for the Red Chateau and called there for details about her mother’s death. She was already on a plane to Paris by the time the reporter reached Montreal.
‘Do you know who she talked to at the Red Chateau?’ Bruno asked.
‘The flatmate said she talked to some male relative, an uncle or cousin. Apparently he was really surprised to hear from her because he didn’t know her mother had had a child, but he said she should come to France and he’d take care of the ticket. I’m really sorry, Bruno, but we can pick her up when she gets here.’
‘Sorry?’ Bruno said, the pent-up anger from Francette’s story finally exploding. ‘You may have signed the girl’s death warrant. She’s what stands between the Count and inheriting a fortune, and until you blundered in he didn’t even know she existed.’
‘How was I to know?’
‘What flight was she on?’ Bruno demanded.
‘I don’t know, but our guy got there late yesterday so it must have been the evening flight. She’ll already have landed in Paris.’
‘Putain de merde,’ Bruno roared, closing the phone, and barging into the interview room where J-J sat opposite Madame de la Gorce.
‘Emergency,’ he said, and forced hims
elf to remember his manners and the need for discretion. ‘Excuse me, Madame, but we need the Commissaire outside.’
Once they were outside the room Bruno explained then slammed his hand against his forehead and called himself an idiot when he realized he’d never asked Gilles for the girl’s name. He called Gilles back, apologizing for his temper, and wrote the details down on his notepad.
J-J was already on the line to the security office at Charles de Gaulle airport and repeated the girl’s name as Bruno showed his notepad: Marie-Francoise Bourbon Merrilees. It must be her father’s surname. Gilles had given Bruno the father’s number, the girl’s mobile phone and the fact that she had both a French and an American passport. The father might have the passport numbers. Who might speak English well enough to call him?
He tried Gilles but the line was engaged. On an impulse, he rang Pamela in Scotland, briefly explained and asked her to call the father to ask him for the numbers and any other details. And if the father spoke to his daughter, he should tell her to go direct to any police station and stay there while insisting they contacted him or J-J.
‘She flew in on Air France and connected with a flight to Bordeaux that should have just landed,’ J-J said. He was already calling the security office at Bordeaux’s Merignac airport.
‘Check if they’ve had any incoming helicopters at Merignac,’ Bruno said, reading out the tail number of the Count’s helicopter from his notebook. His mind raced as he tried to think of any other useful information he could provide J-J. He almost hopped up and down with frustration as J-J waited, then said who he was, gave his security code and explained what he wanted.
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