‘How sick was he? I haven’t seen him in the café for a while.’
‘He knew he was dying and he didn’t seem to mind,’ Father Sentout replied. ‘He had pneumonia but refused to go to hospital. That was the sickness we used to call the old man’s friend. It’s a peaceful passing, they just slip away.’
‘I remember seeing him coming out of church. Was he a regular?’
‘His wife dragged him along. After she died he didn’t come so often at first, but this place is close to the church so he’d come along for Mass; for the company as much as anything.’
‘Did he ever talk about the money?’ Bruno gestured at the open box on the bed and the banknote still held tightly in Murcoing’s dead hands.
The priest paused, as if weighing his words in a way that made Bruno wonder whether there was some secret of the confessional that was being kept back.
‘Not directly, but he’d rail against the fat cats and the rich and complained of being cheated. It was just ramblings. I was never clear whether he reckoned his daughters had cheated him out of the money from the farm or it was something else.’
‘Is there something you can’t tell me?’
Father Sentout shrugged. ‘Nothing directly linked to the money. I presume it’s from the Neuvic train. Don’t you know about it? The great train robbery by the Resistance?’
Bruno shook his head, reminding the priest that he’d only been in St Denis for a little over a decade. He’d heard of it but not the details. These days, the priest explained, the story was more legend than anything else. A vast sum of money, said to be hundreds of millions, had been stolen from a train taking reserves from the Banque de France to the German naval garrison in Bordeaux. Despite various official inquiries, large amounts had never been accounted for, and local tradition had it that several Resistance leaders had after the war bought grand homes, started businesses and financed political careers.
‘If that was his share, he didn’t get much,’ the priest concluded, nodding at the banknotes on the bed. After the war there had been so many devaluations. Then in 1960 came De Gaulle’s currency reform; a new franc was launched, each worth a hundred of the old ones. ‘In reality, that thousand-franc banknote is today probably worth less than a euro, if it’s worth anything at all.’
Bruno bent down to prise the note from the cold fingers. As he put it inside the box with the photographs, he heard footsteps in the corridor and Fabiola the doctor bustled into the small room. She was wearing a white medical coat of freshly pressed cotton and her dark hair was piled loosely atop her head. An intriguing scent came with her, a curious blend of antiseptic and perfume, overwhelming the stale air of the room. She kissed Bruno and shook hands with the priest, pulling out her stethoscope to examine the body.
‘He obviously didn’t take his medicine. Sometimes I wonder why we bother,’ she said, sorting through the small array of plastic jars from the pharmacy that stood by the bed. ‘He’s dead and there’s nothing suspicious. I’ll leave the certificate at the front desk of the clinic so you can pick it up. Meanwhile we’d better get him to the funeral home.’
She stopped at the door and faced Bruno. ‘Is this going
to stop you getting to the airport? I’ll be free by five so I can do it.’
‘It should be OK. If there’s a problem, I’ll call you,’ he replied. Pamela, the Englishwoman Bruno had been seeing since the previous autumn, was to land at the local airport of Bergerac just before six that evening and he was to meet her and drive her back to St Denis. Pamela, who kept horses along with the gîtes she rented out to tourists, had been pleased to find in Fabiola a year-round tenant for one of the gîtes and the two women had become friends.
Bruno began making calls as soon as Fabiola and the priest left. He started with the veterans’ department at the Ministry of Defence to confirm a Resistance ceremony and then called the funeral parlour. Next he rang Florence, the science teacher at the local collège who was now running the town choir, to ask if she could arrange for the Chant des Partisans, the anthem of the Resistance, to be sung at the funeral. He rang the Centre Jean Moulin in Bordeaux, the Resistance museum and archive, for their help in preparing a summary of Murcoing’s war record. The last call was to the social security office, to stop the dead man’s pension payments. As he waited to be put through to the right department, he began to look around.
In the sitting room an old TV squatted on a chest of drawers. In the top one, Bruno found a large envelope marked ‘Banque’ and others that contained various utility bills and a copy of the deed of sale for Murcoing’s farm in the hills above Limeuil. It had been sold three years earlier, when prices were already tumbling, for 85,000 euros. The buyer had a name that sounded Dutch and the notaire was local. Bruno remembered the place, a ramshackle farmhouse with a roof that needed fixing and an old tobacco barn where goats were kept. The farm had been too small to be viable, even if the land had been good. Murcoing’s last bank statement said he had six thousand euros in a Livret, a tax-free account set up by the state to encourage saving, and just over eight hundred in his current account. He’d been getting a pension of four hundred euros a month. There was no phone to be seen and no address book. A dusty shotgun hung on the wall and a well-used fishing rod stood in the corner. The house key hung on a hook beside the door. Left alone with the corpse until the hearse came, Bruno thought old Murcoing did not have much to show for a life of hard work and patriotism.
He wrote out a receipt for the gun, the box and its contents and left it in the drawer. Beside the TV set he saw a well-used wallet. Inside were a carte d’identité and the carte vitale that gave access to the health service, but no credit cards and no cash. Joséphine would have seen to that. There were three small photos, one a portrait of a handsome young man and two more with the same young man with an arm around the shoulders of the elderly Murcoing at what looked like a family gathering. That must be Paul, the favourite grandson, who was supposed to arrive. Bruno left a note for him on the table, along with his business card and mobile number, asking Paul to get in touch about the funeral and saying he’d taken the gun, the box and banknotes to his office in the Mairie for safe keeping.
As the hearse was arriving, Bruno’s mobile phone rang and a sultry voice said: ‘I have something for you.’ The Mayor’s secretary was incapable of saying even Bonjour without some hint of coquetry. ‘It’s a message from some foreigner’s cleaning woman on the road out to Rouffignac. She thinks there’s been a burglary.’
AVAILABLE FROM JUNE 2013
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Martin Walker
The Devil's Cave Page 32
