Bruno, Chief of Police

by Martin Walker

  “It was a butchery,” Bruno went on after a moment. “The old man’s hands were tied behind his back. It looked like he was interrupted while having his lunch. Two things were missing, according to Karim. There was a Croix de Guerre he won while fighting for France as a Harki, and a photo of his old soccer team. The neighbors don’t seem to have seen or heard anything unusual. That’s all I know.”

  “I don’t think I ever met the old man, which probably makes him unique in this town,” said the mayor. “Did you know him?”

  “Not really. I met him at Karim’s wedding last year just before he moved here. I never spoke with him beyond pleasantries and never got much sense of the man. He kept to himself, always seemed to eat on his own or with his family. I don’t recall ever seeing him in the market or the bank or doing his shopping. He was a bit of a recluse way out there in the forest. No TV and no car. He depended on Momu and Karim for everything.”

  “That seems strange,” the mayor mused. “These Arab families tend to stay together—the old ones move in with their grown children. But a Harki and a war hero? Maybe he was worried about reprisals from some young immigrant hotheads. You know, these days they think of the Harkis as traitors to the Islamist cause.”

  “Maybe that’s it. And because he wasn’t religious perhaps some of these extremists could see him as a traitor to his faith,” Bruno said. Yet why would Muslim extremists want to carve a swastika into someone’s chest? “But we’re just guessing, sir. I’ll have to talk to Momu about it later. It must have been a chore for him and Karim, driving over every day to pick up the old man for his dinner and then taking him home again. Maybe there’s more to Hamid than meets the eye, and perhaps you could ask Momu if he remembers any details about that old soccer team his father played on. Since the photograph has disappeared, it might be significant. I think they played in Marseilles back in the thirties or forties.”

  The mayor nodded. “I know you understand how delicate this could be,” he said. “We’ll probably have a lot of media attention, maybe some politicians posturing and making speeches and organizing marches of solidarity and all that. Leave that side of it to me. I want you to stay on top of the investigation and keep me informed, and also let me know in good time if you hear of any trouble brewing or any likely arrests. Now, two final questions: First, do you know of any extreme Right or racist types in our commune who might conceivably have been guilty of this?”

  “No, sir, not one. Some Front National voters, of course, but that’s all, and I don’t think any of our usual petty criminals could have carried out an act of butchery like this.”

  “Right. Second question: What can I do to help you?”

  “Two things.” Bruno sounded as efficient as his mayor, aware of a sense of both duty and real affection as he did so. “First, the Police Nationale will need somewhere to work, with phone lines and desks and chairs and plenty of space for computers. You might want to think about the top floor of the tourist center where we hold the art exhibitions. There’s no exhibition there yet, and it’s big enough. If you call the prefect in Périgueux tomorrow you can probably persuade him to pay some rent for the use of the space, and there’s room for police vans, too. It might be useful for people to see a reinforced police presence in the town. And if we do that, they’re on our turf, which means they cannot bar us access.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “Most of all, I’ll need your support to stay close to the case. It would help a great deal if you could call the brigadier of the gendarmes in Périgueux and also the head of the Police Nationale, and ask them to order their men to keep me fully in the picture. There’s good reason for it, with the political sensitivities and the prospect of demonstrations and tension in the town. You know our tiny Police Municipale does not rate very high in the hierarchy of our forces of order. Would you be comfortable calling me your personal liaison?”

  “Right. You’ll have it. Anything else?”

  “You could probably get hold of the old man’s military and civil records and the citation for his Croix de Guerre faster than I’ll get them through the gendarmes. We know very little about the victim at this stage, not even whether he owned his house or rented it, what he lived on, how he got his pension or whether he had a doctor. His family will help, but I think we should investigate independently, too.”

  “You can check the civic records tomorrow,” said the mayor. “I’ll call the defense minister’s office—I knew her a bit when I was in Paris, and there’s someone in her cabinet I went to school with. I’ll have Hamid’s file by the end of the day. Now, you go back up to the cottage and stay there until you can get Karim back to his family. Any trouble, just call me on my cell phone, even if it means waking me up.”

  Bruno went off comforted, feeling as he had in the Army when he had a good officer who knew what he was doing and trusted his men enough to bring out the best in them. It was a rare combination. Bruno acknowledged to himself, although he would be reluctant to admit it to another soul, that Gérard Mangin had been one of the most important influences in his life. He had sought Bruno out on the recommendation of his son, who happened to be an old comrade in arms of Bruno’s from that hideous business in Bosnia. Ever since, Bruno had felt like a member of a family, for the first time in his life, and for that alone the mayor had his complete loyalty. He got into his van and drove back up the long hill toward Hamid’s cottage, wondering what arts of persuasion he might muster to extricate poor Karim out of the custody of the tiresome Captain Duroc.

  8

  The regional headquarters of the Police Nationale had sent down their new chief detective, Jean-Jacques Jalipeau, inevitably known as J-J. Bruno had worked amicably with him once before, on the one bank robbery in St. Denis in recent memory. J-J had cleared that up and even got some of the bank’s money back. That had been two promotions ago. Now he had his own team, including the first young female inspector that Bruno had met. She wore a dark blue suit and a silk scarf at her neck, and had the shortest hair he had ever seen on a woman. She sat in front of a freshly installed computer in the exhibition room, while around them other policemen were plugging in phones, claiming desks, booting up other computers and photocopiers and setting up the murder board on the wall. Instead of the usual gentle Périgord landscapes and watercolors by local artists, the room was now dominated by the long whiteboard with its grisly photos of the murder scene, including close-ups of Hamid’s bound hands and cleaned-up chest where the swastika could clearly be seen.

  “Okay, here we go. Our rogues’ gallery of the extreme Right. I hope your eyes are in good shape because we have got hundreds of photos for you to view,” said Inspector Perrault, who had told Bruno with a briskly efficient smile to call her Isabelle. “We’ll start with the leaders and the known activists and then we’ll go to the photos of their demonstrations. Just shout if you recognize anyone.”

  Bruno knew the first three faces from TV, party leaders in publicity shots. Then he saw one of them again at a public rally, standing on a podium to address the crowd. Then came random photos of crowds: ordinary French men and women being addressed by party officials, each photo identified by the name and position of the official, including various regional chairmen, secretaries and treasurers, executive committee members, known activists and local councillors. Bruno pursed his lips at the thoroughness of the research that had gone into this.

  “Just that one,” he said, pointing to a tough-looking man. “I know him through rugby. He plays for Montpon, and we’ve seen him here once or twice.”

  She made a note and they continued. Isabelle’s short hair smelled pleasantly of shampoo. She looked fit, as though she ran or worked out every day. Her legs were long and slim and her shoes looked too flimsy for a police officer and far too expensive, even on an inspector’s salary.

  “Who collected all these pictures?” he asked, looking at her hands, nails cut short but her fingers long and elegant as they danced over the computer keys.

&
nbsp; “We got them from different places,” she said. She had no regional accent he could discern, but was well spoken, sounding cool but affable, a bit like a TV reporter. “Some from their Web sites, election leaflets, press photos and TV footage. Then there are some from the Renseignements Généraux that we’re not supposed to know about, but you know how computer security is these days. We take photos of Right-wing marches and rallies, just so we know who they are. We do the same for the far Left. It seems only fair.” The Renseignements Généraux is the intelligence arm of the French police.

  She was screening images of what looked like a preelection rally in the main square of Périgueux, shot after shot of the crowd, taken from a balcony. There were dozens of faces in each shot and Bruno tried to scan them conscientiously. He stopped at one face, but it was only a reporter he knew from Sud Ouest, standing to the side of the rally squinting against the smoke from his cigarette, and holding a notebook and pencil. Bruno rubbed his eyes and signaled Isabelle to continue.

  “You sure you don’t want to take a break, Bruno?” she asked. “It can drive you crazy, staring at these screens all the time, especially if you’re not used to it.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “We don’t have much use for computers down here. I mainly use them for typing and e-mails.” Nor did he much like to, he added to himself. They tended to get in the way of the kind of police work he understood, which was mainly about getting to know people. And his time in the military had left him with a healthy skepticism of the kind of official records that computer systems usually offered.

  She stopped, told him to look out the window to rest his eyes and came back with some sludgy coffee from a hot plate that had been rigged up in the corner.

  “Here,” she said, handing him a plastic cup and juggling her own as she fished one-handed for a cigarette and lit a Royale.

  “This coffee’s terrible,” said Bruno. “But thanks for the thought. If we can spare five minutes there’s a café on the next corner.”

  “You must have forgotten what a slave driver J-J can be,” she said, and smiled. “When I first started working for him I didn’t even dare go to the toilet. I’d go in the morning and then just wait. I’ll probably pay for it when I’m older.”

  “Well, this is St. Denis. Everything stops for lunch. It’s the law,” Bruno said, wondering if she would take this as an invitation. He wasn’t sure that he had enough cash in his wallet to pay for them both.

  “I think we’re too pressed for time,” she said kindly, and turned back to the screen.

  There were more photos of the same event in the same square, taken from another vantage point. Bruno looked at each face one by one until suddenly he recognized a central-heating salesman from St. Cyprien to whom he had once given a ticket for obstructing traffic. Again, Isabelle made a note then went on scrolling. There were more photos of the same rally, yet another vantage point, but no familiar face except those that he’d seen in the previous photos.

  “Okay, that’s it for the Périgueux rally. On to the one in Sarlat,” said Isabelle, clicking her way expertly through the computer screens. In Sarlat the rally was smaller. He spotted a couple of people he knew from rugby, and one from a tennis tournament, but nobody from St. Denis. Then Isabelle brought up the photos from a campaign meeting in Bergerac, and at the third shot he gave a small gasp.

  “Seen someone? I can blow the faces up a bit if you want.”

  “I’m not sure. It’s that group of young people there.”

  She enlarged the image but the angles were wrong, so she scanned through the rest of the photos, looking for shots from a different viewpoint. And there, close to the stage, were two youngsters he knew well. The first was a pretty blond girl from Lalinde, about twenty kilometers away, who had reached the semifinals of the St. Denis tennis tournament the previous summer. And the boy with her, looking at her rather than at the stage, was Richard Gelletreau, the only son of a doctor in St. Denis.

  “We may get lucky here,” Isabelle said, after she had printed out the photos and scribbled down Richard’s name. “The party branch in Bergerac is two doors down from a bank, and it has a security camera. Don’t ask me how, but somehow the RG got hold of the tape and made some mug shots of everyone coming in and going out during the campaign.”

  “I would say that’s borderline legal,” said Bruno.

  She shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not the kind of stuff that can be used in court, but for an investigation … well, it’s just the way it is. If you think this is something, wait till you see the stuff the RG has on the communists and the Left, archives going back to before the war.”

  The Renseignements Généraux was part of the Ministry of the Interior, and had been collecting information on threats to the French state, to its good order and prosperity, since 1907. It had a formidable, if shadowy, reputation, and Bruno had never come across its work before. He was impressed, even though the shots of the people entering and leaving the Front National office were not very good. It was too far for a clear focus, but he could pick out young Richard easily enough, holding hands with the girl as they went in and putting his arm around her waist when they left.

  They went through the rest of Isabelle’s mug shots, but Gelletreau provided the only clear connection to St. Denis.

  “What can you tell me about the boy?” Isabelle said, swiveling her chair and picking up a notepad from the desk.

  “He’s the son of the chief doctor at the clinic here, and they live in one of the big houses on the hill. The father is a pillar of the community, been here all his life, and the mother used to be a pharmacist; I think she still owns half of the big pharmacy by the supermarket. The girl is from Lalinde. She played tennis here last year and I can get her name from the club easily enough. The boy went to the usual schools here and is just finishing his first year at the lycée in Périgueux. He stays there during the week and comes home on weekends. He’d be about seventeen by now, a normal kid, good at tennis, not much involved in rugby. His parents are well-heeled, so they’d go skiing. And of course he was in Momu’s mathematics class—that’s the teacher who is the son of the dead man.”

  “Local knowledge is a wonderful thing. I don’t know what we’d do without it.” Isabelle smiled at him. “Thanks, Bruno. Just stay here and I’ll go and tell J-J. It may be nothing, just coincidence, but so far it’s the only lead we have.”

  The forensics team was still working, and the fingerprints report had yet to come in, but the preliminary report that lay on Isabelle’s desk was clear enough. Hamid had been hit hard in the face, probably to stun him, and then tied up for some time. The burns on his wrists where he had tried to work himself loose of his bonds, the rough red twine that farmers use, were a clear indication that he had been alive for more than a few minutes. He had been stabbed deep into the lower belly by a long, sharp knife, which was then pulled up and across “like a Japanese ritual suicide,” said the report. There was no sign of a gag, the report went on. Traces of red wine were found in his eyes and his thinning hair, as though someone had thrown a glass of it in his face. The time of death was put between noon and two p.m., most probably around one o’clock. Indications were that the swastika had been scored into his chest postmortem. Bruno took some small relief from that.

  There was no sign of a theft, except for the missing photo and medal from the wall. Hamid’s wallet was found in the back pocket of his trousers. It contained 40 euros, an ID card, a newspaper photo of himself standing in a parade by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, another of Karim scoring a try in a rugby match, and some old bills and postage stamps. There was a checkbook from Crédit Agricole in a drawer with some pension slips, and some previously unopened mail from the bank, mainly showing deposits from a military pension. The old man had over 20,000 euros in the bank. Bruno raised an eyebrow at that. He knew from the Mairie’s records that Momu and his father had bought the small house a year ago for 78,000 euros in cash (not a bad deal given the predatory way the local agencie
s were pricing up every tumbledown ruin to sell to the English and the Dutch).

  The old man had had no luxuries in the cottage, not even a refrigerator. He kept his supplies in a small cupboard-wine, pâté, cheese, fruit and several bags of nuts. There were two liter bottles of cheap vin ordinaire, and one very good bottle of a Château Cantemerle ’98. At least sometimes the old man had cared about what he drank. There was cheap ground coffee in an unsealed bag on the shelf above the small stove, which was fueled, like the hot water, by gas canisters. This was routine in rural homes; Bruno cooked and heated his own water in the same way. He continued to run his eye down the list: Hamid had no gun and no hunting license, but he did have an up-to-date fishing license and an expensive fishing rod. He had no TV, just a cheap battery radio tuned to France Inter. There were no newspapers or magazines, but a shelf of books on war and history whose titles were listed in the report. There were books on de Gaulle, the Algerian war, the French war in Vietnam, World War II and the Resistance, and two books on the OAS, the underground army of the French Algerians who had tried to assassinate de Gaulle for giving the colony its independence. That might be significant, Bruno thought, although he could see no connection to a swastika. Apart from the books of an old soldier revisiting his campaigns, all the evidence suggested a rather lonely and even primitive life.

  At the back of the file, Bruno found a new printout showing details about Hamid’s military pension. Until almost two years ago, he had been living in the north, spending over twenty years at the same address in Soissons until his wife, Allida, died. Then he moved to the Dordogne. Bruno did the calculation. The old man had settled in St. Denis the month after Karim’s marriage, probably to be with the only family he had left. His profession was listed as gardien, or caretaker. Bruno scanned the pension printout. He had worked at the military academy where he’d had a small flat. Yes, Bruno thought, they would do that for an old comrade with a Croix de Guerre. And with a caretaker’s flat, he’d have paid no rent, which would account for the savings. There was no sign on the pension form of any medical problem.