“Two evenings a week, jazz clubs mostly. The kids I work with call me the singing magistrate, which is cool, makes me recognizable. It means they know me from something other than the law, and that helps. Some of the schoolteachers I have to deal with also like it.”
“And politics?”
Amélie sighed. “It was a bad defeat, so morale is low, and we’ll need a long time to rebuild the party. On top of that we need to define our priorities and what we stand for. It’s not enough anymore to rely on the trade unions, since their members are disappearing even faster than our votes. But I don’t think we have any choice. If we can’t engage with the working class to battle the extreme right, nobody else will even try. I see your Périgord voters still support the left.”
“Even though we don’t have much of a working class down here and hardly any factories,” Bruno replied. “Maybe your party needs to work out why that should be. But you’re not down here to talk politics. You spoke with Mademoiselle Neyrac over the phone. Was that just to arrange today’s meeting, or is everything settled on the contract?”
“Mostly settled. She’s saying the audio and visual should not count as two separate recording fees, but I think we’ll reach a compromise. And after going through a Paris winter, I think I needed this break down here. It’s good to know I have quite a few friends in St. Denis. That reminds me, I saw Isabelle yesterday, and she sends you her love. She’s planning to come down here the week I’m doing my concerts.”
“Do you see much of her?” he asked, thinking that Isabelle never missed an opportunity to keep contact, to reach out to Bruno’s friends in Paris and to those in the Périgord like J-J and ask to be remembered to Bruno, to pass on her love. Then there were the enigmatic postcards she sent him from wherever her coordination work might take her: London, Berlin, Brussels, even Washington. They usually contained exaggerated words of affection for Balzac and a token kiss for Bruno. He knew it was her way of staying in touch and in his bitter moments thought of it as a way to keep her hooks in him. But he knew the hooks were of his own making, that he neither could nor would resist her.
“We have lunch from time to time,” Amélie said. “And she’s brought me into a women’s group of cops, security-service people, the law—we meet every month for dinner. It’s a great way to widen my acquaintances. Sometimes she comes to my concerts. Isabelle’s good at staying in touch, or should we say networking.”
She paused and then looked at him intently. “You haven’t asked about Yacov. You know we broke up.”
Bruno nodded, keeping his eyes on his plate. “He told me. He sounded regretful about it.”
She put out a hand to his chin and pushed it up until he was looking into her eyes. Then she spoke, keeping his head still so he couldn’t move away.
“It was a lovely affair while it lasted, which wasn’t very long, but I have no regrets because he’s a good man and we both had fun. You don’t need to tiptoe around the subject, Bruno. I’m a big girl, and he wasn’t my first lover and he certainly won’t be the last. You can talk to me about Isabelle as much as you want. I know you’re crazy about her, and she feels the same way about you, but it’s never going to work. She wants her career and Paris, and you want the Périgord. So find someone new who wants what you want. You know I’m right, no?”
He nodded. “You’re right. But then we meet again and bang. We can’t stay away from each other.”
“I know, she says the same. But at least she talks about it, which means she’ll eventually talk herself out of it. I understand it’s tough for you guys with your macho posturing who’ve never learned to admit your vulnerabilities. But you’re going to have to learn to talk about your feelings, too. We all have them. There, lecture over.”
Before the dessert, Amélie slipped out to the ladies’ room, which gave Bruno a chance to push her words to the back of his mind and check his phone for messages. There was one from J-J, saying he’d see Bourdeille at nine the next morning, and another from Madame de Breille, saying simply, “Call me.”
“My appointment is at three,” Amélie said, returning and attacking the apple cake. “Should we skip coffee?”
Bruno nodded and called for the bill. Ivan shook his head and shrugged.
“It’s on me, I already paid. This is instead of an agent’s commission,” Amélie said. “Besides, you’re giving me supper tomorrow.”
He drove Amélie to his home, handed over her suitcase and the keys to the Land Rover and a map and said, “If you see a very old man in a wheelchair with the falcons, say hello to him from me, and say hello to the falconer, Laurent.”
She opened the door, climbed in, unfolded the map.
“Just stay on the main road to Le Buisson, Siorac toward St. Cyprien, then turn off to Allas-les-Mines and follow the signs to Château des Milandes,” he said, and then paused.
“And thanks for the lecture,” he added. “I think I needed it.”
“In that case, there’s hope for you yet. Is it okay if I take your car back to Pamela’s place?”
He told her to keep it for driving around the next day; she could bring it back in the evening when she came to dinner. He might see her again at Pamela’s that evening when he came to exercise the horses and wished her good luck with her meeting. After he’d waved her off, he sat awhile with Balzac in his garden, trying to rekindle that thought he’d had about Claudia and the drugs.
What if the second drug, the yaba, was not hers? Could somebody else have climbed the balcony into her room and hidden that straw full of the pills in her rucksack frame? The same person could then somehow have slipped her one. They would have to know that in combination with the opioids she was taking it would be dangerous. It sounded far-fetched even to him, but it was possible. Maybe it was in her fruit punch before the lecture. He tried to remember what Florence had said about the prelecture drinks. And wasn’t it Félicité who had been serving the punch?
He still couldn’t see a motive for killing Claudia. Bourdeille might have had one, but he seemed relaxed about her claims that he’d falsified some attributions. The woman at the Louvre had dismissed them, and even Professor Porter had poured cold water on her suspicions. Her ex-boyfriend Jack seemed to be ruled out, as was Marcel.
At his feet, Balzac lay slumped, eyes closed, with his head resting on the ground between his outstretched front paws and his ears flowing out to each side like a set of heavy curtains. His tail wagged automatically when he felt rather than saw Bruno’s attention shifting to him. Bruno felt a wave of affection for his dog and bent down to scratch just behind his ears. Balzac rewarded him with a sound Bruno had heard from no other dog: a long, soft, satisfied rumbling that was more than a breath, less than a growl. Had Balzac been a cat, he’d have called it a purr.
Bruno leaned back, telling himself to start from first principles. Motive, means and opportunity—these were the three elements of a crime that had been drummed into him at the police academy. Even the means were less than clear; had it been the well alone or the well plus drugs? Not only did he have no motive, he had yet to establish that anyone had the opportunity to thrust her into the well. Everyone at the lecture had been accounted for. Florence had been sitting by the door and was certain that nobody else had left early. He knew from his own climb that someone could have come into the gardens unseen by the others.
Who else did she know in the region? Could Claudia have arranged a discreet meeting with someone in the gardens and only pretended to be ill to have an excuse to slip out? And maybe it had not been a murder. He tried to concoct a plausible scenario. She had heard the kitten meow, got the mystery man to boost her onto the rim of the well and then lost her balance, perhaps when the cat scratched her, and had fallen in.
Who might she have been meeting and why? Could it have something to do with her suspicions about Bourdeille, or perhaps with her plan to buy his house and collection? But
why go to such lengths to keep the meeting secret? Bruno’s thoughts went back to his talk with Dominic. He’d said he darted out to pee as soon as the lecture finished, so who might have beaten him to the single toilet? Might it have been Claudia? He hadn’t thought of that. Had Félicité checked the toilet before locking up? He’d have to ask her.
He frowned, thinking about the timing. Dominic had said when he’d finished there were only Pamela, Florence and Clothilde still chatting by the gate. How long would a pee take? A minute, maybe two at the most, since Félicité had recalled that Dominic was still doing up his fly when he emerged from the bushes.
How long would it take a lecture hall of thirty people to empty? They had to get their coats on and say their good-nights. That would take more than two minutes. So maybe Dominic was out there longer. Would there have been time for him to find Claudia somewhere in the gardens, thrust her into the well and get back to the main gate? Probably not, unless he had an accomplice who had already found Claudia. But what motive might Dominic and his accomplice have to kill her? It didn’t add up. He was getting nowhere.
Then his phone vibrated. It was a local number from a fixed line, not a mobile phone.
“You’re not very polite, Monsieur le Chef de Police,” came a crisp Parisian voice. “When a lady asks you to call her, you’re supposed to reply.”
“Madame de Breille,” he said, his own tone as flat as he could make it. And he was damned if he was going to apologize to her. “Bonjour. How can I help you? I assume your own phone is out of order. Or are you simply trying to keep your number to yourself?”
“You can start by calling me Monique. My phone is fine, but I’m in a café, and since I’m not alone, I didn’t want to call from my table. I presume you’ve read today’s Sud Ouest? Now that this story has gotten into the papers, the pressure is going to build. And I have some information for you. Are you in St. Denis?”
“I can be there in ten or fifteen minutes. And yes, I read today’s newspaper with the remarks by Claudia’s mother.”
“I’ll see you in that convenient café behind the mairie. Ten minutes.”
Chapter 24
Madame de Breille was wearing another expensive-looking suit, and she was not alone. A burly man in his fifties sat beside her, wearing an out-of-fashion dark suit, heavy black shoes and a blue silk tie around his bull neck. Bruno thought he looked vaguely familiar, or perhaps it was just that he looked like a cop.
“Meet Gustave Pellier, private detective, based in Périgueux, and something of an expert on Bourdeille.”
“Madame de Breille, Monsieur Pellier, this is my dog, Balzac,” said Bruno, shaking hands. “Would you care for a coffee?”
“They’re on the way,” said Madame de Breille. She ignored the dog. Pellier leaned down to stroke him.
“That’s a fine dog. Is he fast enough to hunt?” Pellier asked.
“Yes. He can’t sprint, but he can follow a scent and keep trotting all day. Deer, wild boar, he just wears them out, but mainly we hunt bécasses. He’s brilliant at that. And I’m training him to find truffles.”
Pellier continued to stroke Balzac and smiled up at Bruno, as if some masculine bond had been established.
“I was working with J-J in the detective squad when you first came to St. Denis. We met once on a bank robbery case, that gang from Toulouse,” Pellier said, sitting back up. “Took my retirement, got bored with the garden and went private. I was hired by the real de Bourdeille family when this art historian decided to change his name and declare himself a member of the clan. He hired a fancy lawyer from Bordeaux and came up with a document supposedly from the abbot of Brantôme and written in the sixteenth century, which provided for some land and a sum of money for a woman to pay for the education of her son. He also had a family tree in an old Bible, which he said supported his claim that his mother was a direct descendant of the abbot.”
“This isn’t new. It was in that report on Bourdeille that you did for Claudia,” Bruno said to Madame de Breille. “You said that his connection with the forger Paul Juin meant he could fake old documents almost at will.”
“Together with the other instances that Claudia unearthed, it suggests a pattern of forgeries that Bourdeille used for personal gain,” she said as a waitress brought three cups of coffee and a metal bowl of water for Balzac. “But this story isn’t finished. I told the family about the link to Juin, and they decided they were prepared to go to court, call Juin as a witness and refute Bourdeille’s claim. That was when he backed down.”
She went on to explain that the de Bourdeilles’ lawyer had met with the lawyer for the art historian and proposed a compromise, a settlement out of court in which the family would withdraw their objection to his use of the name and Bourdeille would sign a formal undertaking that he would not seek any claim on the family’s estate. Rather than face the cost of a court case that could go on for years, the family agreed to it.
“The point is that he backed down,” said the ex-cop.
“Perhaps,” Bruno said. “Or maybe he didn’t want his friend Paul Juin to go through a grilling in court, during which he’d have to prove a negative, that he hadn’t forged the document. And that kind of mud tends to stick.”
Pellier shrugged, took a sip of his coffee and said, “That’s true.”
“Did you have the document examined by an expert?” asked Bruno.
“Bourdeille suggested that we submit it to the Louvre or the Bibliothèque Nationale, but since he was a big shot there, we weren’t too keen on that. That was when the idea of a settlement came up.”
“It’s striking that ancient documents seem to emerge conveniently just when Bourdeille needs them,” interjected Madame de Breille.
“Do you have anything else?” Bruno asked. Pellier shook his head.
“Would you wait a moment, please, while I see Monsieur Pellier out,” Madame de Breille said, rising. Bruno noticed that at the door she slipped the ex-cop an envelope.
“I hope you think that was worth it,” Bruno said when she returned.
“At least it brought you to the table,” she said. “I like your theory that Claudia might not have known she was taking those Burmese pills. Her father will like it even more than I do. He’s excited that you and your doctor have established that his daughter wasn’t alone when she went into that well.”
“You have access to our case file?” he asked sharply. The computerized case files were supposed to be secure.
“I don’t, not directly. But Hodge does and he’s under orders from his ambassador and from the FBI to share information with me as the representative of Claudia’s father. And since you’re the one who seems to be coming up with ideas on this case, I thought I’d ask what ideas you haven’t put into the file.”
“None.”
She gave him a sardonic glance. “Okay. But let me see if I can help. I have access to resources and methods that might be beyond you. I can hire private eyes, researchers, bribe filing clerks, get into bank accounts and tap phones. If you need that kind of help, just ask for it. Her father has given me an open budget.”
Bruno pushed back his chair. “I’ll let you know, madame.”
“I told you, my name is Monique. And I’m hoping that we might be colleagues. I had you checked out, Bruno, so I know about the army, Sarajevo, the Croix de Guerre and your connections with the security services. I even recognize that phone you carry. It’s one of the few I can’t get into, and General Lannes doesn’t give out many of those.”
Bruno assumed that Yacov Kaufman must have told her about his connection to the man he knew as the brigadier, a senior figure in the French security service. Whichever political party was in power, General Lannes always worked on the personal staff of the minister of the interior.
“By the way, Isabelle sends her love,” she added, with a tight smile as she saw the surprise o
n his face.
Bruno had never been very good at hiding his emotions, just as he could never stop himself from blushing. The best he could do was the old soldier’s trick of a wooden expression, his eyes focused on the officer’s cap badge and repeated barks of “Yessir!” That wouldn’t work in this situation.
“I know you called Yacov to ask about me, and now I presume you’ll call Isabelle, too,” she said. “Go ahead. Give Isabelle a call. If you want privacy, I’ll go outside and have a cigarette while you phone her. You can even give her my regards. We’re old friends.”
“What is it you want from me that you can’t get from Hodge and reading the case files?” he asked.
“I told you before. I want to recruit you for Hexagon. I know you make seventeen hundred euros a month. We’ll pay you five times as much, with a signing bonus of twenty thousand. That’s more than your life savings, not counting those shares you have in the town vineyard.”
“So you can read my bank account. I’m not sure I’d like to work for people who can do that and tap phones without getting a warrant,” he said. “I really don’t think I’d fit in with the way your company seems to work. And I don’t think I’d be much use outside of my home ground of St. Denis and the Périgord, where I’ve known people for years and they trust me enough to tell me things. I’d be lost in a big city.”
“That’s not what your military record says,” she countered. “Bosnia, Chad, Ivory Coast, you did well in some very different situations. And I’ve heard from Isabelle something of your work down here.”
“Hexagon deals mainly in financial inquiries, an area where I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said.
“Financial experts are easily found. That’s not how we’d use you, Bruno. You have contacts in French security, with the British and the Americans, and people in a position to know such things tell me that you’re an all-around useful man. You can fight.” She paused and then gave what seemed like the first genuine smile he’d seen from her. “Isabelle tells me you can even cook.”
The Body in the Castle Well Page 20
