“Hector’s already had his evening ride. I assumed you were tied up and took him with me on a bridle,” she said, holding up her face to be kissed.
“That was kind, thanks. I feel bad about not getting here earlier.”
“I know. I assume it’s this security alert for the summit that people are talking about.”
“I didn’t know it had been announced yet,” he said, surprised.
“It hasn’t, but we were told at the clinic to make sure we were fully staffed and had an ambulance on alert for the day after tomorrow. And we expect a military surgeon to join us tomorrow, an expert on gunshot wounds. So naturally the news spread, and the town is filling up with journalists.”
“You can’t keep secrets in St. Denis,” Bruno said, smiling ruefully. “I’ll take Hector for a walk anyway, just up the lane and back, help him get used to me.”
“I’m inviting you to dinner after that, so shall we say in half an hour?”
Bruno raised his eyebrows. “Thank you, but you always say you don’t cook.”
“I make two dishes, one my mother made me learn and another Pamela taught me. You’re having both tonight. And I have some wine so don’t offend me by bringing any. I’ve eaten enough of your meals and never returned the favor.”
“I’ll be delighted,” said Bruno. “Just the two of us?”
“No, a couple of friends. One of them is Florence from the college; she’s just putting her kids to bed in my spare room.”
“Good, I haven’t spent an evening with her for far too long. And the other?”
“A new friend, a surprise. And I heard from Pamela. Her mother’s had another stroke, more serious this time. She said she tried to call your mobile, but you must have been out of range. She left a message on your office phone.”
“I tried calling her, but we keep missing each other,” he said. “I’ll try again now.”
“Any news of Horst?” Fabiola asked. Bruno shook his head and turned away, wondering in what grim and makeshift cell his friend might be tonight.
Bruno’s thoughts were a jumble as he greeted Hector, fondling his horse’s nose and ears before he saddled him and led him into the yard to mount. Gigi appeared from somewhere behind the stable, now quite comfortable with the horse and ready to trot alongside. It was a fine evening, cold but clear, a good night to look at the stars, but there was too much on Bruno’s mind.
He was concerned about Teddy, whom he liked. Bruno believed he learned a lot about someone from watching him play rugby, and Teddy had been impressive, after the match as well as on the field. He was far more worried about Horst, who was in the hands of people who would hardly shrink from killing him if it served their purpose. He supposed he ought to be concerned about his own fate, with Annette and Duroc launching their vendetta against him, but the mayor was on his side. Most of all, he was worried about Pamela. He called her mobile, but heard some automated response in English too fast for him to understand.
And as always, when he was in this somber and fretful kind of mood, Bruno’s thoughts turned to the mess he had made of his relationships with women. The affair with Pamela was faltering. In some ways, it had never really begun, given her insistence that her one failed marriage had been more than enough. He doubted whether they would ever be anything more than good friends who happened to sleep together. And while he admired her spirit and enjoyed her company, Bruno admitted to himself that it was a relationship that made him more perplexed than happy.
If only he could be as clearheaded about Isabelle. Equally independent, equally determined to deal with men on her own terms, she had a grip on him that was as powerful now as it had been in that passionate summer when they had met. To see her, even to receive an e-mail from her, triggered a leap in his heart. They had each said time after time that it was over, that it could never work, but where else in his life would he encounter that jolt of electricity that she sent pulsing through his veins? It had been there that afternoon in the ornate chateau bedroom she used as an office. The wound in her leg didn’t stop her being a woman, she’d said; why didn’t Bruno treat her like one? Because she wasn’t just a woman, she was Isabelle, the woman who kept invading his dreams.
Hector tossed his head as if impatient with this quiet amble up the lane, or perhaps he was disturbed by Bruno’s own distracted musings. Horses, Pamela had taught him, were highly sensitive to a rider’s mood. Bruno leaned down to pat his neck, murmured Hector’s name and turned him back down the lane toward the paddock. Hector wanted to trot, and so did he, Bruno admitted, hoping to chase away his gloom with a little exercise. They made a few gentle circuits of the paddock together, not enough to warm him, with Gigi loping happily alongside. Bruno didn’t want to be late for Fabiola’s dinner, so he walked Hector a little and then took him back into the stable.
He’d noted earlier that the stable had been cleaned and the straw changed. He’d have to get Fabiola some flowers. Taking Hector along on the evening ride was kindness enough, but mucking out the stable was beyond the call of friendship. Bruno rubbed Hector down, checked his water and gave him a wizened apple by way of farewell. He washed his hands and face in the stable sink, savoring the old-fashioned smell of the big square block of Marseilles soap that Pamela kept there. He pulled out his phone and tried her number again. This time she answered.
“I’m standing in your stables, about to have dinner with Fabiola, and all the horses are fine,” he said. “How about you? Fabiola says there’s been a second stroke.”
“That’s right, a big one. She’s in a coma, but her entire left side is completely paralyzed. I’m just outside the hospital, waiting for my aunt to bring the car round. We’ll know more tomorrow, when she’s scheduled for a brain scan.”
“I’m sorry. Would you like me to come?”
“No, really. Things are hectic already and now we have to go to the airport and pick up my ex-husband. I’m not sure I could cope with him and you at the same time. And I know you’re busy-anyway, here’s my aunt with the car. I’ll call tomorrow when there’s news. Love to Fabiola and the horses, and to you.”
She hung up, leaving Bruno staring at the horses and wondering how long he was going to be staying in Pamela’s home. Gigi seemed content with his new surroundings, but Bruno missed his own place. Leaving Gigi settling himself in a corner of Hector’s stall, he walked across to Fabiola’s house and knocked.
Florence opened the door, a smile of welcome, but her eyes seemed wary before she leaned forward to kiss cheeks. Bruno understood her caution when he walked into the room and found Annette setting the table. He was speechless, and he felt his face turning red and his eyes narrowing.
“Bonjour, Bruno,” she said hesitantly and tried a half smile, but then shrugged, as if this evening wasn’t her fault. Bruno stood where he was, uncertain how to react, looking around for Fabiola and some explanation when she bustled in from the kitchen, an apron around her waist and the light of battle in her eye.
“You can do better than that, Bruno,” she said firmly. “This is my house and I have invited friends whom I like. I really don’t care what arguments you have outside these walls, but in here you’ll be courteous with each other.”
“Today she tried to get me fired…,” Bruno began, but Fabiola cut him off.
“I know all about it, and I think you’re both behaving like a pair of idiots and I don’t want to hear any more about it this evening. That’s an order. And you owe Annette a favor, anyway. She helped me ride the horses this evening, then she cleaned the stables so that I could get on with the cooking.”
“And she helped me bathe the children. She’s made the salad and the first course, and she brought a nice bottle of wine,” said Florence. “She and I may have gotten off on the wrong foot when she drove into town, but we’ve put that behind us. She’s even driven me around the motor-cross course she uses to practice her rallying. So now it’s up to you.” Florence moved to stand beside Annette as if to demonstrate a common front. Floren
ce and Fabiola had planned this, he thought.
“Fabiola’s right, Bruno,” Florence went on. “I don’t know all the details of what has passed between you, but I like you both too much to let it go on. And Fabiola feels the same way. So imagine that the two of you are meeting for the first time.”
Bruno took a deep breath and looked from Florence to Fabiola, two women he respected just as much as he liked them. He grimaced and then slowly nodded. They were probably right; this feud with Annette had gotten out of hand.
“Bonsoir, Annette, and thank you for cleaning the stables,” he said, stepping forward and holding out his hand. She was clutching a napkin in one hand and a tablespoon in the other, and she looked down at them as if unsure what to do with them. Then she put them down on the table beside her, set her small chin and came forward to take his hand and to offer her cheek to be kissed. Bruno complied, catching a pleasant scent from her fair hair.
When he stepped back, Annette handed him a glass of white wine. “It’s from the Domaine,” she said. “I thought we ought to support our local winemaker.”
“A good choice, since you’re also supporting me.” He grinned. “I’m a shareholder, and so is Fabiola and lots of other people around here. Has she told you the story of how we saved the vineyard from an American company and how it’s now a kind of communal vineyard for St. Denis?”
Annette said she hadn’t, but would like to hear it. Bruno could almost hear the ice breaking as he told the story and saw the tension in Fabiola’s face relax.
“You haven’t mentioned the crime, and my part in it,” said Fabiola. “It was my forensic work that cracked the case. And I saved Bruno’s life, when you were going to suffocate in that wine vat.”
With that, Fabiola had to start the whole story again from the beginning, with the arson and the genetically modified crops and the Canadian girl who worked in the wine store. Then Florence began her own tale of the fraud in the truffle market at Ste. Alvere where she had worked and how she had helped Bruno solve the case by getting hold of a vital logbook. By this time they had drunk the first bottle and Annette had opened a second and they were seated convivially around the table and tucking into Annette’s vegetable terrine.
“I thought somebody told me you didn’t drink,” said Bruno, after praising her terrine and taking a second helping.
“You must have been talking to people who took the magistrates’ course with me,” said Annette. “I stopped drinking for a while because I was too nervous about failing. I’d been out of university and away from studying for too long, and I found it really hard to get back into the discipline of it. But when Fabiola and Florence invited me to dinner, I thought how I’d really missed drinking wine with friends. Of course, I didn’t know until this evening that you were coming…” She put her hand to her mouth in embarrassment. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“So what happened between university and starting the magistrates’ training course?” he asked.
“Medecins Sans Frontieres, first in Paris, just doing office work, and then I got interested in the logistics of it and went to Madagascar to help run the office there and the depot with the food and medical supplies. I was there for three years, which is why I’d forgotten most of the law I’d learned. That’s where I took up rally driving. But I found myself getting really concerned about France and politics and migrants and the Front National and, you know-the whole mess.”
“We know,” said Fabiola. “But how did you find out what was going on from Madagascar?”
“I used to be on the Internet on this terrible phone connection for hours at a time at night, trying to keep up with the French news. And friends in the Paris office would make sure they put back copies of newsmagazines into the supplies that came out. Then I came back to Paris and worked as a legal assistant for an organization that tried to help Muslim women integrate. Mainly it meant learning to navigate the bureaucracy, which confirmed me in my plan to become a magistrate.”
Bruno nodded, impressed. Medecins Sans Frontieres was an operation he respected. And he approved of people who wanted to experience something of real life along with their studies. Running a food and medical depot in Africa must have been a challenge for a young woman who still looked barely out of her teens. He could understand her nervousness at her first posting, even understand her suspicion of a local policeman like him who must have seemed prickly and set in his ways. And he’d been a soldier in France’s postcolonial wars in an Africa that she knew from a different perspective.
But how could a young woman so obviously intelligent be taken in by the blundering Capitaine Duroc? And why had she been so vindictive against that sweet couple Maurice and Sophie? Worse still, Annette had no idea what would happen tomorrow when she was hit by the counterattack of St. Denis in the media and she discovered that the story was no longer about foie gras but about her. The mayor was a veteran politician who knew how this game was played.
Fabiola brought in her mother’s dish, a risotto made with fish stock, and coquilles St. Jacques, brushed with olive oil and grilled, on a separate platter. The rice was perfect, the short-grain Italian variety that was made for risotto. The scallops still had their roe attached. Fabiola hovered over the dishes before serving, looking both shy and proud as she presented her first dinner party in St. Denis.
“I used the crayfish shells left over from your birthday dinner, Bruno, to make the stock for the risotto. Pamela showed me how to do it.”
“It’s wonderful, Fabiola,” he said, and it was. “Truly, it’s perfection with these scallops. Annette, what do you say?”
“I seldom eat fish, but I’ll make an exception for this, Fabiola, anytime you want to cook it.”
The apple tart from Pamela’s recipe was pronounced an equal success, and as Fabiola took the plates away and started to make coffee, Bruno asked Annette if she had managed to do any more rally driving. Not enough, came the answer, with what she tactfully called the drama under way in St. Denis. But Fabiola had shown her the motor-cross course in the woods nearby that the farmer rented out for weekend races. He was happy for Annette to try it out and she was planning to use it again early the next morning.
“Want to come for a ride?” she asked him.
“Try it, Bruno, it’s fun,” said Fabiola, bringing the smell of fresh coffee with her from the kitchen. “Annette took me on a few circuits. I never thought you could go so fast on forest tracks.”
“I’d love to, but I have to ride Hector in the morning,” he said.
“I’ll be riding Victoria tomorrow while Fabiola rides Bess, so we can hit the circuit after that,” said Annette. “It won’t be long, just enough to give you the flavor.”
“In that case, sure, and thank you. But I have to get an early start tomorrow, so I can come if we take the horses out at dawn,” he said. “I’ll skip the coffee, if you don’t mind. I have to walk Gigi and then unpack.” He looked across at Fabiola. “I trust Pamela told you she asked me to stay here to look after the horses while she’s away?”
“Yes, and we’re going to have a full house. Florence is staying in the spare room overnight rather than wake the children, and Annette’s bedding down on the couch.”
“Rather than use a couch there’s a spare room in Pamela’s house. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind,” Bruno said, but as soon as he spoke he wished he hadn’t. He and Annette may have declared a truce, but inviting her to sleep in the same house was pushing it a little far.
“I don’t think my reputation in St. Denis could fall much lower than it has,” Annette said, a twinkle in her eye. “But it might damage yours. Still, so long as you think you’re safe with me I’m prepared to risk it. There’s not enough room in the kitchen for all of us, so Florence and I can do the washing up and you and Fabiola take Gigi for his walk. By the time you’re back, I’ll probably be asleep.”
The other two women agreed so fast-Fabiola already putting on her coat-that Bruno suspected this had been contri
ved between them. Evidently Fabiola had something to say, and by the time they reached the lane, she was just as ready to say it as Gigi was for his exploration of the paddock. It was a cloudless night with a rising moon, the stars bright and clear and the air still fresh with the new scents of spring.
“Annette is thinking of handing in her resignation, and I want you to persuade her not to,” said Fabiola, direct as ever.
“She’s pretty much burned her bridges with St. Denis,” he replied. “She’ll always be known as the woman who accused us of barbaric practices, not just here but all across the Perigord. It’s the kind of label that sticks, and she’ll have to live with the consequences.”
“Consequences?”
“She publicly attacked one of the main industries of this part of the world, which means she attacked people’s jobs and their livelihoods, and those people are going to fight back. The mayor and the council are running a media and political campaign against her, and they won’t care about her good works in Africa.”
“If she withdrew herself from this whole foie gras case, wouldn’t that help? She knows she made a big mistake.”
“Perhaps if she’d done it yesterday, but it may be too late. I’ve been tied up on this security business so I’m not up-to-date, but I think there’ll be some nasty stories in tomorrow’s newspapers. As far as the mayor’s concerned, St. Denis is fighting for its life.”
“Annette said she’d had a call from someone at Liberation who is doing some kind of story. She said she was shaken by the questions.”
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