“I’d have to move to Paris,” he said, wondering if this was why Isabelle had talked to this woman about him. Isabelle had always said that getting Bruno to move to Paris was the only way they could be together, that she couldn’t compete with the Périgord.
“We don’t care where you live as long as you can get quickly to where we need you. That could be anywhere. I hear your English is only just serviceable, so we’d put you through an intensive course, probably in London. You could visit your friend Inspector Moore from their Special Branch.”
Again she gave that tight, unconvincing smile, taking pleasure in the way she doled out these details she knew about him and his contacts, like a cat toying with a mouse. He wondered if that was how she saw herself. As something feline, as a manipulator, a woman who had learned how to work in a predominantly masculine world. She would not be an easy colleague, Bruno thought. And he would never be able to trust her, never certain there was not some hidden motive.
Perhaps he was being foolish in that characteristic masculine way, making an excuse for the male difficulty in understanding women by claiming they were too subtle, too devious. He remembered Fabiola once saying over dinner that women were more intuitive and better at reading character because for them it was an essential survival skill. As the physically weaker sex, women had developed over the millennia the innate ability to assess the mood and atmosphere of any given situation before they found themselves at risk. Bruno didn’t know if there was any science behind it, but the theory made sense to him.
“Don’t give me an answer right away. Think about it,” Madame de Breille said, rising. Bruno refused to think of her as Monique. “And if there’s any research or inquiries we can make to help you on Claudia’s case, just call me.”
“How far did you check Pellier’s story about the de Bourdeille family?” he asked. “Did your colleague talk to the family, to the two lawyers?”
“Offhand, I don’t know. I doubt it, but if you think it’s useful, we can get it done. Anything else?”
“There were some family photos in Claudia’s room, one of her as a child with her parents and another taken when she was grown up. It showed her with her father, but the person standing beside him had been cut out, so the photo looked strange, much narrower than a normal print. I know her father divorced Claudia’s mother and married again. The truncated photo suggests some family tension there.”
“That’s the client’s business,” she replied. “I really don’t think we want to go there.”
“Why not? Think like a policeman. Claudia is the daughter of a very rich man, so we can assume that she stands to inherit the bulk of his wealth. The new wife looks to me like the only person with an obvious motive to kill her. Do you know if the new wife has children?”
“Forget it, Bruno.”
“You see the difference between us, madame? You work for the client who pays the bills. I work for justice.”
“Touché,” she said. “That’s a good line. I’ll remember it. My offer to help still stands, and the job remains open. Think about it.”
Bruno watched her leave, wondering if there was a Monsieur de Breille and, if so, whether they were still married and what kind of man he might be. Whoever he was, he had Bruno’s sympathies. Then he went up the steps to his office to put a note into the case file about Muller’s second wife. Hodge would see it, which meant so would Madame de Breille. Bruno knew that he was being petty, but it would be interesting to see if it led anywhere. Prunier and J-J had promised to pursue all leads. That implied asking Hodge if the FBI could look into it. Had such a request come to the French police from the FBI, they would at least interview the second wife.
Not that Bruno thought it likely that Claudia’s stepmother was involved. If it was murder, her killing required too much local knowledge—about the Sunday evening lecture, the gardens, the work on the well and the way it had been left unguarded. It was either a murder of opportunity or more likely an accident in which the man who lifted her had panicked and fled the scene. And if there had been a man who fled the scene, the place to ask questions about that would be in Limeuil. Bruno phoned David to be sure Félicité was working that day.
Chapter 25
It was turning into a beautiful springtime day as Bruno and Balzac took the familiar road to the hilltop of Limeuil. He slowed his van outside the town vineyard to see the first buds just starting to peek from the vines, and on the other side of the road he saw the rich pink of cherry blossoms. Balzac, sitting on the passenger seat, looked at his master expectantly, probably hoping for a walk in the fields. Bruno fondled his dog’s ears, telling him he’d have the whole hilltop garden to explore.
They found Félicité in the avenue of chestnut trees, using a pitchfork to turn the thick piles of last autumn’s rotting leaves in the long wooden compost frames. She took off a work glove to shake his hand, then bent to greet Balzac, looking mildly curious about Bruno’s visit.
“I just wanted to clear up one or two loose ends,” Bruno said. “Dominic told me that he only went out to pee in the garden because the toilet was occupied. Any idea who might have been using the bathroom?”
She shook her head as she rose from Balzac’s attentions. “I was clearing away the punch glasses and tidying up, so I don’t know. Sorry.”
“Did you check that the toilet was empty before you locked up?”
“I think so, we always do. It’s routine. But I can’t say I have a specific memory of doing it on Sunday. When I turn the central lights off, they go off in the bathroom, so somebody would have shouted.”
“Not if they were unconscious or ill. Or drugged.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“How close were you to Claudia?” he asked, knowing they shared a bathroom and a toilet at Madame Darrail’s.
“We were friendly but not especially close. I mean, she’s mega rich, and I’m broke. It’s not easy to connect to someone with a wardrobe full of designer dresses. Even her jeans were Armani.”
“It sounds as if you were a little bit jealous of her.” Bruno said it lightly, with a grin, trying to make it sound like banter rather than accusation.
“I wasn’t jealous of her, I mean, she was nice. But the general situation got to me, that she’s born rich and I have a full-time job but I still have to work Saturdays in the bio shop just to get by. And I don’t even have a car.”
Bruno nodded. “It doesn’t seem fair,” he said, the sympathy in his voice made genuine by the memory of Madame de Breille offering him untold riches if he started to work for people who were far richer still.
“And she was beautiful, that perfect skin and her figure,” Félicité went on as if she hadn’t heard him, her eyes looking away over the valley. “Men just looked at her and gaped. I can’t say I blame them.” She sighed. “And I’m not even pretty, with fat thighs and hair I can do nothing with. Merde, what am I saying? Hell, Bruno, I liked her and I miss her and I’m really sorry for her mother. Claudia had everything, and it was all taken away, just like that.”
“And you’re alive and young,” he said. “You say you aren’t pretty, but you’re wrong. You have lovely eyes, good cheekbones, and you’ve got one of the healthiest jobs in the world with a view people pay money to see. Madame Darrail’s next lodger will probably be envying you.”
She laughed. “Thank you. And you’re right: I’m alive and I have a job I love, even if it pays less than the minimum wage until I get my brevet.”
“When do you take the test?”
“At the end of June, so I won’t know if I’m a fully qualified gardener until sometime in September, which means another summer vacation of camping sauvage and sleeping on the beach.”
“And living off pizza.” He laughed. “I’ve been there. You’re young enough to love it. Where do you go, Provence?”
“No, Gruissan, near P
erpignan, in the national park with its beaches. It’s beautiful there, do you know it?”
He shook his head but felt that he’d established enough of a rapport to start probing. “How much time did you spend with Claudia? I would think you had breakfast together most days.”
“Yes, usually upstairs in the kitchen, one of Madame Darrail’s supermarket croissants and weak coffee. Last week, when the weather was good, we’d eat on the balcony. One of us usually had some orange juice, which we’d share. A couple of evenings she took me out, once to the hilltop restaurant here and another time to the pizza place at the bottom of the hill.”
“Did she talk about her work, her thesis?”
“A bit, not much. She talked about some mec she’d been seeing for years and how she was going to break it off and go out with different guys while she was still young. And she complained about guys hitting on her, trying to pick her up. I told her to send some of them my way, and we laughed about it.”
“Did Madame Darrail ever join in this girl talk?”
“Mince, no, we didn’t like her, a real old facho who loves Le Pen and talks about how she hated de Gaulle. What do you expect? She’s a pied-noir, came from Algeria as a baby when all the whites fled from independence. She can’t stand Arabs. Funny that the whites are called pieds-noirs. Do you know why that is?”
“It’s because when the French troops first invaded, they all wore black military boots, so the Arabs called them pieds-noirs, black feet.”
“Makes sense. You learn something every day.”
“Was there any particular guy who used to pester her here?”
“David, a bit, but he’s harmless. And Dominic kept at it, trying to get her to take a canoe trip with him. Claudia thought he was creepy.”
“Dominic was hinting to me this morning that you and he had a thing going at one time. Is that right?”
She stared at him levelly, eyes narrowing. “Is that any of your business?”
“Yes, I’m a cop investigating what may be a suspicious death. It’s not just my business—it’s my duty.”
Félicité’s eyes widened. “But everybody said it was an accident.” She looked horrified.
“We aren’t sure about that,” Bruno replied. “That’s why we have to keep on asking questions until we are. Let’s start again. You and Dominic had a fling. How did it end?”
“I suppose you could say by mutual agreement. It only lasted a couple of weeks, and I was on the rebound from a mec in Sarlat who I’d really liked. Dominic asked me out, took me to dinner a couple of times, bought some nice wine, and I was, like, why not. But we had nothing in common. I’m a Green and he kept making jokes about tree huggers. And about feminists. He had one joke that really ended it for me. He asked, ‘What do you call a boatload of Arab migrants at the bottom of the sea?’ And his answer was ‘A good start.’ That one sickened me. Politically he’s just like his mother. If there was any other place in Limeuil as cheap for me to live, I’d take it.”
“Did Dominic then make a play for Claudia?” Bruno asked.
She nodded. “Like he couldn’t see she was way out of his league. But he kept trying. He only went along to the lecture Sunday evening because she was there. He’d never been to a lecture at the castle before. He didn’t even pay much attention, kept looking at his phone. You could tell when the lights went out for the slide show, there was this glow from his phone lighting up his face.”
“He probably wasn’t the only one. People seem to spend half their lives on their phones these days.”
Even as he said the words, Bruno felt the familiar vibration at his waist, excused himself and turned away to answer, nodding in agreement when Félicité asked if she could continue with her work.
“Are you trying to get me fired?” came Hodge’s angry voice. “What’s this merde you put into the file about Claudia’s stepmother?”
Bruno was startled by Hodge’s tone. He knew the FBI agent was usually relaxed. He had an image of Hodge that came from Western movies: a man who made a point of staying calm, a laid-back sheriff who could be tough if he chose to be but was not easily rattled. The bad guys might come, but Hodge would take care of them. Bruno understood that Hodge was under pressure from his chiefs. Bruno caught himself. It was one thing to be pressed by his bosses in the FBI who knew something of the complications of law enforcement. It was something else entirely to be pressured by a diplomat or, worse still, a political appointee who served and enjoyed the pleasures of being the American ambassador in Paris at the pleasure of the wayward man in the White House.
“Most murders are committed by people who know the victim,” Bruno said, stepping away for some privacy and keeping his voice calm and his tone reasonable as he explained that every cop in France was taught that. “And family members without direct blood ties are statistically more likely to commit murder than others.
“It’s just common sense to check whether there could be inheritance issues involved between Claudia and her stepmother,” Bruno added. “You were the one who first mentioned it.”
“I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to pursue it!” came the angry retort.
“Looking into potential beneficiaries of a death is basic policing, and people would start asking questions if we failed to do it. That’s all I was pointing out. I’d like to know that the stepmother was in New York when Claudia died, whether her relations with Claudia were good or bad. You remember that family photo with one person cut out?”
“I know what you’re saying, Bruno, but these people are personal friends of the ambassador. They get invited to the White House, for Christ’s sake. And now it’s all over the media.”
“You can’t blame me for that,” Bruno said. “You’re the one who is supposed to be babysitting Madame Muller, and she was the one who chose to speak to a reporter.”
“I know, but we’ve already got American newsmen in Paris asking the ambassador why he hasn’t intervened to get the body released. Now you want me to have the stepmother interviewed. The ambassador will go ballistic.”
“Why don’t you explain that what you are doing is following up on a routine query from the French police to exclude your ambassador’s friends from suspicion. I don’t see the problem.”
“I sure as hell do. The media is on the case already, asking if this was just an accident.”
“In that case, suggest the ambassador recommend that his friends issue a short statement of grief and how they are content to leave matters in French hands. And since you’re with Madame Muller, couldn’t you ask her how Claudia got on with her father’s second wife? When you think about that photo, it’s a reasonable question. By the way, you haven’t told me how things went with Professor Porter.”
“Who? Oh, the Yale guy. I told him what I could, and he said Claudia’s father was an important donor to the university, so as a courtesy the professor has agreed to take a second look at Claudia’s allegations against Bourdeille. He’s gone off to some Bordeaux museum. At least it keeps him out of the way. I don’t suppose you know how Sud Ouest got that story. I seem to remember you being friendly with the reporter.”
“I think you’ll find he got a tip from someone working at the hotel.”
Hodge grunted. “Just do me a favor, Bruno. Tell me before you drop any more grenades into the case file.”
Chapter 26
Bruno thanked Félicité for her time and whistled for Balzac as he headed back to his van, wondering how many more times he’d visit these gardens. On the way, he turned off to check that the well was still sealed. It was not, but men were working on it, one standing on the rim with his back to Bruno and holding a rope and calling down to a man below.
“Have you got permission from the procureur’s office to resume work?” he asked the man he could see.
The man turned angrily, a burly man in his thirties with a broken nose a
nd a shaven head. Tufts of black hair thrust out from his collar and the turned-back cuffs of his work shirt. There was something familiar about his face, Bruno thought. His stance was instinctively aggressive, jaw jutting forward and eyes narrowed. It remained that way even when he first saw Bruno’s uniform, but then he seemed to relax a little.
“Oh, it’s you. Yes, they faxed the permission through this morning after I sent them a photo of it being sealed last night, and we’ll seal it again tonight. David has the fax in the office, okay?”
“Just checking,” said Bruno in a friendly way as Balzac emerged from the bushes to stand at his side. “Were you the ones working here before the accident?”
“Yes, me and my partner, Grégoire, though he likes to think of himself as the boss. Aren’t you the bastard who dropped us right into the shit for leaving it unsealed?”
“No,” said Bruno, not taking offense. “I’m the bastard who had to go down the well on Monday morning to see if a missing woman might be down there. I wouldn’t want to do that again.”
“So why did you look down the well, then?”
“My dog was following her scent from her room at Madame Darrail’s place, and he led me right here.”
The man grunted and said, “That’s a good-looking hound. I know who you are, Bruno from St. Denis.”
“That’s right, and who’re you?”
“I’m Luc Bonnet. I think you know my mother.”
“If she’s the Madame Bonnet who looks after Monsieur Bourdeille, then, yes, I do.”
“I’d shake hands, but my partner’s down there,” Luc said, gesturing at the well.
“Grégoire would be the one on the town council, I suppose.” Bruno was wondering if he knew Luc from somewhere. He could be a rugby player or a member of another hunting club. Maybe he sometimes worked on a market stall when building work was slow.
The Body in the Castle Well Page 21
