A Taste for Vengeance

by Martin Walker

  “They haven’t had the concours yet,” she replied. The rules said that all jobs in the public service had to be filled by qualified personnel, either equipped with a suitable diploma or certificate of expertise or selected after sitting a concours, a competitive exam. Those who passed the exam had then to undergo a training course in order to obtain the requisite certificate.

  “So when should this aide arrive?” he asked.

  “The concours results will come next month, then they have the two-month training course and then it will be July and the vacation time so if the budget has been approved in Bordeaux as the capital of our new region, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, and then authorized by Paris, you might get someone in September,” she replied. “Until then, you’ll have to do the paperwork yourself, as you really should have done on your own working hours since those new forms came in.”

  “So who’s been completing my forms until now? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.”

  “The mayor said it was all nonsense and not to bother. But he’s the mayor and can get away with it. You can’t.”

  “Thank you, Claire,” he said and headed downstairs to the sanity of the market to buy the picnic lunch for his colleagues. Once outside, and with a sinking feeling, he saw Philippe Delaron sitting at a table outside Fauquet’s café talking to Kathleen, who was scribbling in a notebook. When reporters joined forces they could be even more of a menace, and this new alliance would probably inspire more complaints from J-J. Luckily, they seemed too absorbed to notice him.

  His shopping completed, Bruno set off to pick up Balzac and the picnic basket from his home, and then drove out past Les Eyzies to Puymartin. He had a fondness for the château there, which had been built in the thirteenth century and then restored in neo-Gothic style six hundred years later by an eccentric marquis whose family still owned the place. Bruno thought of it as the basset hound of châteaux, improbable to look at but impossible not to like.

  Juliette was already in the parking area, leaning against her van in her shirtsleeves with her eyes closed, enjoying the sun on her face. Louis arrived as Balzac was energetically renewing his acquaintance with her. Bruno took hold of his picnic basket and led them through a path in the woods to a sunny spot where they could enjoy the view of the château. With a smile of quiet pride Juliette brought out a quiche she had prepared at home. Louis contributed one of his wife’s walnut tarts and some homemade peach chutney. He also brought a folding chair, pleading that if he sat on the ground he might never get up again. Bruno set out the plates of ham, pâté and cheese he had bought in the market, opened the bottle of Bergerac rosé from Château Briand and began to slice the bread, giving the heel of the loaf to Balzac.

  “This is a good idea, much better than meeting in some cramped office and trying to find a place to park,” said Juliette.

  “Good quiche, Juliette,” said Louis. “You’ve got the pastry just right.” He clinked his glass against hers and then against Bruno’s.

  “This is how meetings ought to be,” said Bruno, grinning. “Any problems I should know about or can we concentrate on lunch?”

  “There is an unsolved murder, well, unpunished anyway,” said Louis. “La Dame Blanche, right here in this château. You know this place is haunted by the White Lady? Her husband came back from the war and found her in the arms of a handsome young neighbor. He killed the guy and sealed her up in the north tower for fifteen years until she died. Her ghost comes out at midnight, looking for her lost lover. Lots of people have seen her, including my wife’s sister.”

  Bruno smiled at the old tale and Juliette rolled her eyes and said, “This is a new job for me. Is this how we’re going to meet from now on?”

  “It’s new to me, too,” said Bruno. “We’re going to have to invent a new way of working that takes advantage of the way we can support one another. I thought we should stay in touch daily. Maybe if I start by sending you an email in the evening saying what I plan to be doing the next day and each of you sends me an email at the end of the day saying what you’ve done. I don’t want to hear about every road safety class for kids or traffic duties, but I do want to hear about anything important or unusual. On a quiet day, simply say ‘routine patrols.’ We should share lists of each of the main events like town saints’ days, fairs and so on, in case we need to support one another, like Louis came to support me when we had that emergency at Lascaux.”

  “So as far as Montignac is concerned, I’m still in charge?” Louis asked.

  “Certainly,” Bruno replied. “You know the town better than I ever will. And Juliette’s in charge of Les Eyzies. I’m on call if you think you need my help and I may call on you from time to time. I think we should meet at least once a week, preferably like this, but I suppose we had better be seen to be in regular contact, so at least once a month we should have a meeting in one another’s offices, by rotation.”

  “That makes sense,” said Juliette. “If we start meeting in restaurants and have even a glass of wine, people will begin to talk.”

  “A lot of my work is done in restaurants and bars,” said Louis. “That’s where you learn what’s going on. I make a point of knowing all the waiters and barmen, and I never forget a face.”

  “I learn a lot chatting to the mothers outside the primary school at lunchtime,” said Juliette.

  “You’re both right,” said Bruno. “But a little bit of social life together might be good. How about you come to dinner at my place one night? Louis, bring your wife, and Juliette, would you like to bring someone? I thought I might invite that young magistrate, Annette in Sarlat, who deals with juvenile matters, and maybe Commandante Yveline from our local gendarmes, and J-J, the chief detective. We need to stay on good terms with them.”

  Louis turned to Juliette, his expression suddenly grumpy. “That’s how he got the promotion, hobnobbing with the top brass.”

  “It sounds like a good idea to me,” said Juliette, crisply. “But since I’m new in this job maybe I should come alone at first.”

  “Up to you,” said Bruno, ignoring Louis’s remark.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “And that reminds me, what do you make of your mystery man now?”

  Bruno was enjoying a piece of her excellent quiche. He looked at her sharply.

  “How do you mean? I was at police headquarters this morning and nothing much new had come through. What have you heard?”

  “That guy Yves from forensics we met yesterday called me when I was on the way here, asking if I’d like to meet him for a drink sometime or maybe a meal. We were chatting and I think he was trying to show off a bit with what he knew about the case. The Irishman who hanged himself, McBride, apparently he’s not a real Irishman. They had heard from Dublin that the passport is a fake and he was never in the Irish army, nor the UN peacekeepers.”

  “Well, it’s not our business now, if it ever was,” said Louis. “Lalinde isn’t in our area and it’s up to the Police Nationale.”

  “That’s not all,” Juliette added. “There’s news about Monika’s husband. They found him through his company. He’s in a special hospital in Texas somewhere, trying a last-ditch treatment for terminal cancer, and he’s too ill to talk.”

  Chapter 7

  Bruno tracked down Jack Crimson at the bar of the St. Denis tennis club, where he was helping Florence make some sense of the club’s chaotic accounts, which had been kept by the various volunteers the previous year.

  “It’s hopeless,” said Florence, throwing down her pencil and giving Bruno a despairing look. “We issued ninety-two membership cards last year but only fifty-two seem to have paid their dues, not including me, or you, Bruno. And I know we paid because I have a receipt and you got one, too. We were playing mixed doubles together against Fabiola and Gilles that day and I remember they paid their dues at the same time, yet they’re not listed. Worse still, we don’t seem to h
ave received any money for court fees from nonmembers. Relying on volunteers to keep the accounts is costing us more than we’d have to pay to employ someone full-time.”

  “The bar accounts are even worse,” said Crimson cheerfully. “We seem to have been paid for one barrel of beer but we bought three. Can I get you a beer, Bruno? If we start to charge two euros for a beer instead of one it seems like the easiest way to repair the damage and it’s still cheaper than any of the bars in town.”

  “I’ll have a coffee, but let me buy you one.” He turned to Florence. “How are the children?”

  “Getting lost in the bushes while hunting tennis balls,” she replied. “Do you have any idea how many cans of balls we go through each season? By the way, if we don’t send our annual subscription to the national federation before the end of the month we won’t get our annual allocation of tickets to the French Open.”

  “Math was never my strong point,” said Bruno, sniffing at the coffeepot before deeming the contents fresh enough to be worth drinking. “Do you want me to go look for them? The kids, I mean.”

  Florence’s head rose from the accounts as she picked up something in Bruno’s tone. She looked at the two men, sighed and put down her pencil. She rose, murmured something about finding the children and left the club.

  “I wanted to follow up with you, Jack, about Monika Felder,” Bruno said once they were alone. “You said her name rang a bell.”

  “Not her so much, but I knew a Mike Felder, military intelligence, married a gorgeous German girl called Monika,” Crimson said, pouring himself a beer from the tap on the bar and putting a two-euro coin into the cashbox. “Sorry, I should have got back to you on it but the imminent bankruptcy of the tennis club took priority. Still, I made a couple of phone calls about Felder. It seems he’s at death’s door in some American cancer hospital and his wife has taken an apartment to be near him, so she can’t be your dead woman.”

  “It is her, I’m afraid,” Bruno said. “Monika Felder has been in and out of Houston a lot lately but she died in Lalinde two days ago while supposedly on the way to your daughter’s cooking classes. And this McBride guy I told you about had an Irish passport that turns out to be a forgery, but from the scars on his body he certainly saw combat.”

  “Why do you think I can help?” Crimson asked, his face the very picture of innocence.

  “Felder ran British military intelligence, which means he must have spent time in Northern Ireland,” Bruno said. “So it’s interesting that his wife seems to have been murdered by a former soldier with a fake Irish identity who then hanged himself. Criminal records have nothing on the fingerprints, but I was thinking that if McBride had been in the British military…”

  “That our defense ministry would have his fingerprints on file. Yes, I understand,” said Crimson. “Why not ask the British police liaison to do that?”

  “We asked them in the usual way to search all available databases. Their report came back saying Monika Felder and McBride were both clean according to criminal records, which may be true but isn’t quite what we requested. So if the British are being a little coy I wonder if that’s because we seem to have both a military intelligence and an Irish connection. I can understand that Northern Ireland remains a sensitive issue for you British. But since the dead woman was your daughter’s customer, and before your retirement you ran the Joint Intelligence Committee, I was hoping you might be able to help.”

  Crimson stared at Bruno for a long moment before taking a deep gulp of his beer.

  “Very well,” he said. “You said math was not your strong point. You may be adding two and two and getting five but email me a scan of their prints and I’ll see what I can do.”

  As Bruno opened the door, Florence was approaching with her two children, their little arms filled with tennis balls, some of which fell as they scampered toward him. Florence asked drily, “May we come in now?”

  “Of course you may,” he said, bending down to scoop up the children as more tennis balls tumbled and Daniel and Dora shrieked with delight while complaining that Bruno was losing all their balls again. They spent a couple of happy minutes searching for them and then found a bucket in which they began to count the balls in one by one.

  “That’s eighteen,” he said as the nineteenth ball went in.

  “No, Bruno, nineteen,” they cried out together.

  “Nineteen balls at five cents a ball is ninety-five cents, but I have no change so here’s a euro and now we have to give it to your mother for the club as a lost ball fee. Will you give it to her while I go looking for dangerous criminals who might be on the lookout for more of our tennis balls?”

  “Will you shoot them?” Dora asked, and Bruno was suddenly conscious of the SIG Sauer that was on his belt, and that under Police Nationale regulations he would now be required to carry every day.

  “No, we’ll make them look for more lost balls,” he said and then quietly asked their mother when would be a good time to talk about Paulette.

  “I’ll call you,” Florence replied, gathering up her children.

  Bruno kissed each of them goodbye, thinking he’d forgotten to ask Jack about having the Monday evening dinners at his own place. He also wondered whether or not he’d get the tickets he expected for the French Open tennis tournament at Roland Garros if St. Denis could not pay its dues to the federation. He’d already arranged to take two days’ leave and make a long weekend of it, and Isabelle had already arranged to be in Paris that weekend. Still, he mused, Paris in early summer with Isabelle on his arm could never be bad. And he’d always rather play tennis than watch it.

  “How did you know to google Felder?” he texted Isabelle and headed back to the mairie to see if he could access the département’s vehicle registration records over the internet. It turned out that he could, if he could provide his log-on and password as an officier judiciaire, which as a result of his promotion he now was. Typical of the police, he thought; they had been assiduous in giving him his new weapon, but he had not yet been given the appropriate access codes. He called Marie-Pierre, Prunier’s secretary, who said she had a sealed envelope for him that probably contained them, along with details of his new pay scale, pension rights and system for being reimbursed for expenses. But she could only give it to him in person, after he had signed for the package. He could pick it up tomorrow, she went on, since Prunier had added Bruno’s name to the list of those on the murder inquiry team, which meant being at police headquarters each morning at eight.

  “But he told me this morning that I should concentrate on my new job,” Bruno said.

  “Yes, he took you off the list this morning but now he’s told me to put you back on again and your name is on his list to call. I think he wants to explain.” She paused. “He had one of those calls from Paris, you know, on the special line.”

  “Ah,” said Bruno, as if all were now clear. But it wasn’t. Calls on a special line from Paris meant either Isabelle or the brigadier, a senior official in the interior ministry with wide-ranging responsibilities for intelligence and security. Why would he be interested in a squalid murder and suicide in the Périgord? Bruno thanked Marie-Pierre, said he’d see her in the morning and hung up, thinking he must remember to take her some chocolates. Marie-Pierre was likely to become an important figure in his new life. But his old life still had its obligations. He checked his watch, realized that he was due to tell the cooking clients about foie gras and set off for home to wash and change and pick up Balzac.

  * * *

  —

  Between them, Pamela and Miranda had done a clever design job to convert the old barn into a cooking school. The place already had water and electricity, and they had installed a large central island with two sinks, two stoves—each with six gas burners—and vast amounts of work surface. They had done it cheaply, buying the stoves and sinks secondhand through Leboncoin. Pamela’
s stableboy, Félix, and his father had put down a concrete floor and then laid terra-cotta tiles on top. Bruno and the baron had installed the lighting, and Claude, a retired plumber and keen member of the local hunting club, had taken care of the plumbing and bathrooms in return for free riding lessons for his twin granddaughters.

  Bruno was now standing behind the island, the cooking students lined up before it. At Pamela’s insistence he was wearing a white chef’s jacket. In front of him on the work surface was a duck carcass, two breasts, two legs and wings, a fat liver and a kilo of aiguillettes.

  “We start with the bouillon,” he said and smashed a kitchen chopper down to flatten the skeleton. He covered the bones with cold water and added a chopped carrot, a celery stalk and two peeled cloves of garlic, which he flattened with the side of the chopper. He tossed in a coffee spoon of salt and half a dozen crushed black peppercorns and turned on the heat beneath the pan.

  “We bring this gently to simmer and leave it for a couple of hours, strain it, and then reduce by about two-thirds at a fast boil. Then I always add a hachis. Do you know what that is? I chop very finely two garlic cloves, a bunch of parsley and two slices of dry, cured bacon. I throw that into the stock, add a glass of cheap red wine and let it cook together, barely simmering, for another hour and it will reduce even further. I strain it once more, let it cool, and then pour the liquid into a tray for ice cubes and put it in the freezer so I always have stock when I need it. In the old days, the farmers would bury the softened bones deep in their potager, the vegetable garden. But my dog likes to dig for bones so I don’t do that.”