Bruno, Chief of Police

by Martin Walker

  Nationale from Périgueux.”

  “Murder?” Duroc put his glass down. “In St. Denis?” “That’s what my caller said.” Bruno telephoned the fire station and gave them directions, then grabbed his cap. “Let’s go. I’ll drive, you ring your people.”

  5

  Karim was waiting for them at the end of a long unpaved lane that led through the fields to the tidy yard of a single-story stone cottage, with a carefully tended vegetable garden to one side and some magnificent rosebushes to the other. Karim was white-faced. He looked as if he had been sick. He stepped aside as Bruno and Duroc, still in his full-dress uniform, strode in.

  The old man had been gutted. He lay bare-chested on the floor, intestines spilling out from a great gash in his belly. The place stank of them, and flies were already buzzing. There was indeed blood everywhere, including some thick pooling in regular lines on his chest.

  “It seems to be some kind of pattern,” Bruno said, leaning closer over the chest but trying to keep his shoes out of the drying pools of blood around the body. It was not easy to make out. The old man was lying awkwardly, his back raised as though leaning on something that Bruno could not see for the blood.

  “Mon Dieu” said Duroc, peering closely. “That’s a swastika carved in his chest. This is a hate crime. A race crime.”

  Bruno looked carefully around him. It was a small house: one bedroom, this main room—with an old stone fireplace— that was kitchen, dining and sitting room all in one, and a tiny bathroom built onto the side. It was sparsely furnished, almost spartan, with no curtains and just one elderly easy chair by the fireplace, a small table and two straight-backed chairs. Beneath the window was an old stone sink with a single tap and, beside it, a small camping stove with two burners. A meal had been interrupted; half a baguette and some sausage and cheese lay on a single plate on the table, alongside the remains of a bottle of red wine and a broken wineglass. A chair had been knocked over, and a photo of the French soccer team that had won the World Cup in 1998 hung askew on the wall. Bruno spotted a bundle of cloth tossed into a corner. He walked across and looked at it. It was a shirt, some of the buttons clearly missing, with small tears around the buttonholes, as if the garment had been ripped from the old man. There was no blood on it, so somebody quite strong had probably done it before starting to use the knife. Bruno sighed. He glanced into the bathroom and the tidy bedroom, but could see nothing out of place there.

  “I don’t see a cell phone anywhere, or a wallet,” he said. “It may be in his trousers, but we’d better leave that until the scene-of-crime and forensics people get here.”

  In the distance, they heard the fire engine’s siren. Bruno went outside to see if his phone could get a signal this far from town. One bar of the four showed on the screen—just enough, so he called the mayor to explain the situation. Then everything seemed to happen at once. The firemen arrived, bringing life-support equipment. Duroc’s deputy drove up in a big blue van with two more gendarmes, one of them with a large old camera, the other carrying a big roll of orange tape to mark out the crime scene. Bruno went out to Karim, who was leaning awkwardly against the side of his car, his hand covering his eyes.

  “When did you get here, Karim?”

  “Just before I called you. Maybe a minute before, not more.” Karim looked up, his cheeks wet with tears. “Putain, putain. Who could have done this, Bruno? The old man didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  Bruno knew it usually seemed that way, but it wasn’t always the case.

  “Have you called Rashida?” he asked.

  “Not yet. I’ve got to pull myself together first. She loved the old guy.”

  “And Momu?” Karim’s father was the math teacher at the local school, a popular man who cooked enormous vats of couscous for the rugby dinners. His name was Mohammed but everyone called him Momu.

  Karim shook his head. “I only called you. I want to tell Papa myself, he was so devoted to him. We all were.”

  “When did you last see your grandfather alive? Or speak to him?”

  “Last night at Papa’s. We had dinner. Papa drove him home and that was the last I saw of him. We sort of take turns feeding him and it was our turn tonight, which is why I came up to get him.”

  “Did you touch anything?” This was Bruno’s first murder, and as far as he knew the commune’s first as well. He had seen a lot of dead bodies, though, and not just in his military service. It was Bruno who organized the funerals and dealt with grieving families, and he had coped with some bad car crashes, so he was used to the sight of blood. But nothing like this.

  “No. When I got here, I called out to Grandpa like I usually do and went in. The door was open like always and there he was. Putain, all that blood. And that smell. I couldn’t touch him. Not like that. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Karim turned away to retch again. Bruno swallowed hard. Duroc came out and told one of the gendarmes to start stringing the tape around the crime scene. He looked at Karim, still bent double and spitting the last of the bile from his mouth.

  “Who’s he?” Duroc asked.

  “Karim is the grandson of the victim,” Bruno replied. “He runs the Café des Sports. He’s a good man, he’s the one who called. He told me he touched nothing, called me as soon as he got here.” Turning back to Karim, he asked, “Karim, where were you before you drove here to pick up your grandfather?”

  “In the café, all afternoon.”

  “Are you sure?” snapped Duroc. “We can check that.”

  “That’s right, we can check that,” Bruno said, staring at Duroc. “Meantime, let’s get him home,” Bruno said calmly. “He’s in shock.”

  “No,” said Duroc. “I want him here. I called the brigade in Périgueux and they said they’d bring the Police Nationale. The detectives will want to talk to him.”

  Albert, the chief fireman, came out, wiping his brow. He looked at Bruno and shook his head.

  “Dead for a couple of hours or more,” he said. “Come over here, Bruno. I need to talk to you.”

  They walked down the drive and off to the side of the vegetable garden and a well-tended compost heap. It should have been a pleasant spot for an old man in retirement, the hill sloping away to the woods behind and the view from the house down the valley.

  “You saw that thing on his chest?” Albert asked. Bruno nodded. “Nasty stuff, and it gets worse. His hands were tied behind his back. That’s why his body was arched like that. He would not have died quickly. But that swastika? I don’t know. This is very bad, Bruno. It can’t be anyone from around here. I didn’t know the old man but we all know Momu and Karim. They’re like family.”

  “Somebody didn’t think so,” said Bruno. “Not with that swastika. Dear God, it looks like a racist thing, a political killing.”

  There was a shout from the cottage. Duroc was waving him over. Bruno shook hands with Albert and walked back.

  “Do you keep a political list?” Duroc asked. “Fascists, communists, Front National types, activists, all that?”

  “No, never have and never had to,” said Bruno. “The mayor usually knows how everyone votes, and they usually vote the same way they did last time, the same way their fathers did. He can usually tell you what the vote will be the day before the election and he’s never wrong by more than a dozen or so.”

  “Any Front National types that you know of? Skinheads? Fascists?”

  “Le Pen usually gets a few votes, about fifty or sixty last time, I recall. But nobody is very active.”

  “What about those Front National posters and the graffiti you see on the roads around here?” Duroc’s face was getting red again. “Half the road signs seem to have ‘FN’ scrawled on them. Somebody must have done that.”

  Bruno nodded. “You’re right. They suddenly appeared during the last election campaign on all the roads up to Périgueux and down to Bergerac, but nobody took them very seriously. You always get that kind of thing in elections. Nobody knew who did
it.”

  “You’re going to tell me that it was kids again?”

  “No, I’m not, because I have no idea about this. What I can tell you is that there’s no branch of the Front National here. They might get a few dozen votes but they’ve never elected a single councillor. They never even held a campaign rally in the last election. I don’t recall seeing any of their leaflets. Most people here vote either Left or Right or Green, except for the Chasseurs.”

  “The what?”

  “The political party for hunters and fishermen. That’s their name. Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions. It’s like an alternative Green Party for people who hate the real Greens as a bunch of city slickers who don’t know the first thing about the countryside. They get about fifteen percent of the vote here, when they put up a candidate, that is. Don’t you have them in Normandy?”

  Duroc shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to politics.”

  “Grandpa voted for the Chasse Party last time. He told me,” Karim said. “He was a hunter and very strong on all that tradition stuff. You know he was a Harki? Got a Croix de Guerre in the Algerian war. That’s why he had to leave Algeria to come over here.”

  Duroc looked blank.

  “The Harkis were the Algerians who fought for us in the Algerian war, in the French Army,” Bruno explained. “When we pulled out of Algeria, the ones we left behind were hunted down and killed as traitors by the new government. Some of the Harkis got out and came to France. Chirac made a big speech about them a few years ago, how badly they’d been treated even though they fought for France. It was like a formal apology to the Harkis from the president of the republic.”

  “Grandpa was there,” Karim said. “They paid his way, gave him a rail ticket and hotel and everything. He wore his Croix de Guerre. Always kept it on the wall.”

  “A war hero. That’s just what we need,” grunted Duroc. “The press will be all over this.”

  “You say he kept the medal on the wall?” said Bruno. “I didn’t see it. Come and show me where.”

  They went back into the room that looked like a slaughterhouse and was beginning to smell like one. The firemen were clearing up their equipment and the room kept flaring with light as a gendarme took photos. Karim kept his eyes firmly away from his grandfather’s corpse and pointed to the wall by the side of the fireplace. There were two nails in the wall but nothing hanging on either one.

  “It’s gone,” Karim said, shaking his head. “That’s where he kept it. He said he was saving it to give to his first great-grandson. The medal’s gone. And the photo.”

  “What photo?” Bruno asked.

  “His soccer team, the one he played on when he was young, in Marseilles.”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. Thirties or forties, I suppose.”

  “During the war?”

  “I don’t know,” said Karim. “He never talked much about his youth, except to say he’d played a lot of soccer.”

  The three of them left the house for the open air. It was a relief to be away from the smell.

  “You said your grandfather was a hunter,” Bruno said. “Did he have a gun?”

  “Not that I ever saw. He hadn’t hunted in years. Too old, he used to say. He still fished a lot, though.”

  “If there’s a gun, we’d better find it. Wait here,” Duroc instructed, and went back into the house. Bruno called Mireille at the Mairie, and asked her to check whether a hunting or fishing license had been issued to Hamid Mustafa al-Bakr.

  “Look under ‘A’ for the ‘al’ and ‘B’ for the ‘Bakr,’” Bruno said. “And if that doesn’t turn him up, try ‘H’ for ‘Hamid’ and ‘M’ for ‘Mustafa.’” He knew that filing was not Mireille’s strong point. A widow whose great skill in life was to make a magnificent tête de veau, the mayor had taken her on as a clerk after her young husband died of a heart attack.

  Duroc emerged from the house shaking his head. “Now we wait for the detectives,” he said derisively. The gendarmerie had little affection for the detectives of the Police Nationale. The gendarmes were part of the Ministry of Defense, but the Police Nationale came under the Ministry of the Interior, and there was constant feuding between them over who did what.

  “I’ll go and see the neighbors,” said Bruno. “We have to find out if they heard or saw anything.”

  6

  The nearest house was back toward the main road, which led to a gigantic cave, a source of great pride to the St. Denis tourist office. Its stalagmites and stalactites had been artfully lit so that, with some imagination, the guides could convince tourists that a given one was the Virgin Mary and that another looked like Charles de Gaulle. Bruno could never remember whether the stalactites grew up or down and thought they all looked like pipes in giant church organs, but he liked the place for the concerts, jazz and classical, that were held there in the summer. And he relished the story that when the cave was first discovered, the intrepid explorer who was lowered in on a long rope found himself standing on a large heap of bones. They belonged to the victims of brigands who lay in wait to rob pilgrims who took this route from the shrines of Rocamadour and Cadouin to Santiago de Compostela in distant Spain.

  The house he approached belonged to Yannick, the maintenance man for the cave, and his wife, who worked in the souvenir shop. They were away from home all day and their daughters were at the lycée in Sarlat, so Bruno did not expect much when he rang the doorbell. Nobody came, so he went to the back on the chance that Yannick might be working in his garden. The tomatoes, onions, beans and lettuces stood in orderly rows, protected from rabbits by a stockade of chicken wire. But there was no sign of Yannick. Bruno drove back to the main road and on to the next nearest neighbor, the so-called mad Englishwoman. Her house was a hill and a valley away from the slain man’s cottage, but they used part of the same access road, so she might have seen or heard something.

  He slowed at the top of the rise and stopped to admire her property. Once an old farm, it boasted a small farmhouse, a couple of barns, some stables and a pigeon tower, all built of honey-colored local stone and arranged on three sides of a courtyard. There were two embracing wings of well-trimmed poplars set back from the house, sufficient to deflect the wind in winter but too far away to cast shade over the buildings or grounds. Ivy climbed up one side of the pigeon tower and a splendid burst of bright pink early roses covered the side by an old iron-studded door. In the middle of the courtyard stood a handsome ash tree, and large terra-cotta pots filled with geraniums splashed color against the gravel. Beside the largest barn was a vine-covered terrace with a long wooden table that looked like a fine place to dine in summer. Off to its side was a vegetable garden, a greenhouse and a level area for parking. On the other side, behind a low fence covered in climbing roses, he saw the corner of a swimming pool.

  From the top of the long gentle rise of the meadow, the property looked charming in the late afternoon sunlight, and Bruno drank in the sight. He had seen many a fine house and some handsome small châteaux in his many tours through his commune, but he’d rarely seen a place that looked so completely at peace and welcoming. It came as a relief after the shock and horror of what he had found at Hamid’s cottage. He felt calmer for seeing it but reminded himself that he had a job to do.

  He drove slowly up the gravel road, which was lined on each side with young fruit trees that would form a handsome avenue someday, and stopped in the parking area. The Englishwoman’s old blue Citroën was parked alongside a new VW Golf convertible with English license plates. He settled his cap on his head, switched off his engine and heard the familiar sound of a tennis ball being struck. He strolled around to the back of the farmhouse, past an open barn where two horses were chewing hay, and saw a grass tennis court that he had not realized was there.

  Two women in short tennis dresses were playing with such concentration that they didn’t notice his arrival. An enthusiastic but not very gifted player himself, Bruno watched with appre
ciation, for the women as much as for their play. They were both slim, their legs and arms graceful and tanned against the white of their dresses. The Englishwoman had her auburn hair tied up in a ponytail; her dark-haired opponent wore a white baseball cap. They were playing a steady and impressive baseline game. Watching the fluidity of the Englishwoman’s strokes, Bruno realized that she was rather younger than he’d thought. The grass court was not very fast and the surface was bumpy enough to make the bounce unpredictable, but it was freshly mowed and the white lines had been recently painted. It would be very pleasant to play here, Bruno thought, and she could evidently give him a good game.

  In Bruno’s view, anyone who could keep up a rally beyond half a dozen strokes was a decent player, and this one had already gone beyond ten strokes. The balls were hit deep, and were directed toward the other player rather than to the corners. They must simply be practicing, he thought, rather than playing a serious match. When the ball was finally hit into the net, Bruno called out, “Madame, if you please?”

  She turned, shading her eyes to see him against the slanting sun that was sending sparkling golden light into her hair. She walked to the side of the court, bent gracefully at the knees to put down her racket, opened the gate and smiled at him. She was handsome rather than pretty, he thought, with regular features, a strong chin and good cheekbones. Her skin glowed from the tennis, and there was just enough sweat on her brow for some of her hair to stick there in charmingly curling tendrils.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur le Policier. Is this a business call or can I offer you a drink?”

  He walked down to her, shook her surprisingly strong hand and removed his hat. Her eyes were a cool gray.

  “I regret, madame, that this is very much business. A serious crime has been committed near here and we’re asking all the neighbors if they’ve seen anything unusual in the course of the day.”