“That’s right. In a little place like Limeuil it’s hard not to get put on the council. I’ll probably have to do it one day, but they’ll have to catch me first.”
“Don’t I know you from rugby?” Bruno asked.
“Could be. I used to play for Limeuil for a few years. Anyhow, we’re busy. Got to get this well finished.”
“So I see. Take care, and don’t forget to seal it again when you go.”
“We won’t, and maybe you might think of hauling in that ex-convict for some questioning. You know who I mean, Laurent, the one who did ten years for killing those Boy Scouts when he was drunk.”
“What makes you think he was involved?” Bruno replied, startled. “I thought the American girl just fell down the well.”
“Maybe, maybe not, but I hear he was hanging around her, taking her to see the sights. Ten years inside, no women, he must have been pretty desperate when he got out.”
“We talked to him, and he’s got an alibi.”
“Just make sure you double-check it, then.”
Bruno was struck by the venom in the way Luc spoke. He decided to probe a little. “Do you know him?”
“I was at school with the bastard. He was stuck-up, always had ideas above himself, going off to that agricultural college. It served him right, going to jail.”
“That’s kind of harsh,” said Bruno. “He got a tough sentence, and he’s served his time. He deserves the right to rebuild his life.”
“That’s the problem with this country these days,” came Luc’s retort. “Even the cops are going soft. Arab immigrants everywhere, calling themselves refugees. The Muslims are taking the country over, terrorists half of them, and you guys are doing nothing to stop ’em. It makes me sick.”
“There were times when a lot of our own people had to flee France and were glad to find refuge elsewhere,” said Bruno.
“Yeah? Well, good riddance is what I say. If you don’t love this country, you can damn well leave it.”
“Funny that you never put your money where your mouth is,” said Bruno.
“What do you mean?”
“I spent ten years in the army before I took this job,” Bruno said crisply. “And I served with a lot of good men—Arabs, Africans, you name it. Some of them got killed; others got crippled wearing a French uniform. I doubt you ever loved this country enough to fight for it.”
Luc turned away with a sneer. Bruno shook his head and went back to his van, thinking that there was an ugly mood building in the country. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard such sentiments, although not often expressed so crudely. He sighed and headed up past the hilltop church, through the stone archway, and took the road to the upland plateau where Sylvestre, a member of his hunting club, raised the best sheep in the district.
Bruno’s mood eased as he turned into the familiar lane and saw the clumps of ewes with their snow-white lambs nuzzling at the teats or gamboling in the fresh green grass. He found Sylvestre’s wife, Marie-Hélène, sitting on a bench outside the stone farmhouse, enjoying the sunshine and feeding a small lamb with a baby’s bottle. He told her not to move as he kissed her on both cheeks and asked how the lamb was doing.
“She’ll be all right, but she was one of three in the litter, and the mother seemed to think she had enough on her plate with the first two. So we’re starting this one off ourselves,” she said. “You want some lamb for your dinner?”
“I’ve got some friends coming tomorrow, we’ll be ten, and I thought of doing a navarin,” Bruno said. “I remember one you made here last year. It was delicious.”
“That will please Sylvestre. Most people want a leg or a shoulder even though the tastiest meat is in the neck. It’s always the hardest to sell. Anyway, you’ll find him in the barn.”
Sylvestre was busy with a very pregnant and sick ewe, so he told Bruno to help himself from the top shelf of the big refrigerator, where he’d put the neck chops from two one-year-old lambs that had been butchered that morning. Bruno pulled out a plastic bag marked COLLETS and put them on the scales. They weighed two and a half kilos. He asked Sylvestre what he owed him.
“You never charged me for that half of the boar you shot last month,” he replied. “So I won’t take your money.”
“That’s different,” Bruno replied. “You helped me carry it in.”
“You’ve done the same for me often enough,” came the reply. Bruno had half expected this, so he nodded, thanked Sylvestre and took the lamb back to his van. From under the seat he grabbed a bottle of not-quite-legal eau-de-vie made by a friend and took it back to the barn, putting it on a shelf out of reach of the livestock.
“Have this one on me,” he said as Sylvestre grinned at him from the stall where he was squatting beside the sick ewe. “And thanks.”
Knowing that a navarin always tasted better on the day after it was cooked, Bruno drove home, turned his oven to a hundred and eighty degrees centigrade and washed his hands. He rinsed the lamb chops and put them in a bowl in which he’d mixed a heaped teaspoon of salt and another of ground black pepper, three teaspoons of herbes de Provence and three tablespoons of flour. He tossed the chops until they were thoroughly covered. Then he peeled and halved the half kilo of shallots from his garden along with six garlic cloves. He turned on the gas under his biggest casserole, turned it down to a low heat, put in a tablespoon of duck fat and tossed in some lardons. He went out to the garden and picked three sprigs of fresh rosemary.
Once the lardons had turned golden he removed them onto kitchen paper with a slotted spoon and began browning the lamb chops, three at a time, and turning them to be sure they were done on all sides before removing them and adding new ones. When they were all browned and removed from the casserole, he lowered the heat and put in the shallots and garlic. After five minutes he added the lamb and lardons, a half bottle of dry white wine and half a liter of duck stock. He bruised the rosemary sprigs with the side of his chopper to release the flavor and added them and waited until the stew started to simmer. He put the lid on the casserole, placed it in the oven and then cleaned up the kitchen.
As so often when he cooked, questions that had been quietly doing their own stewing at the back of his mind began to fall into place. On impulse he called the hotel in Trémolat and asked if Madame Muller was available. He was put through to her room.
“Hello?” she said with a catch in her voice that made Bruno think she’d been weeping. At once he felt a touch of guilt. He identified himself and apologized for disturbing her. While her voice was hesitant and muffled, he could tell that she was making an effort to pull herself together.
“Ah, you’re the policeman who has kindly invited us to dinner tomorrow evening,” she said. “I met Jacqueline yesterday and she told me a lot about you. How can I help?”
“Do you have a few minutes for some questions, madame?”
“I’ll be grateful for the company,” she answered. “Professor Porter has gone to Bordeaux, and Hodge always works in his own hotel around this time of day so he can be in contact with Washington.”
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting at a table in the garden of her hotel, admiring the precision of the topiary that marched down the lawn in an orderly pattern of spheres and obelisks. A glass of wine stood before each of them. With red-rimmed eyes, she had greeted him with a handshake still damp from the handkerchief she’d been clutching. She had seemed grateful for the presence of Balzac, whom she had petted and admired before he trotted off to explore the large garden. She smiled as she watched the dog tackle with determination the challenge of lifting his leg at each of the many pieces of topiary.
“I’m sorry to intrude upon you, Madame Muller, but I wanted to ask you how Claudia got on with her father’s second wife,” he asked.
“She didn’t,” she said with disdain, something fierce flashing in her eyes. “Claudia sim
ply chose to ignore her existence. When she had to greet that woman at some social occasion, she did it as a stranger. She was very upset by the divorce.”
“Why was that?”
“The breakup of our family came as a shock to her and to me. His request for the divorce was very sudden.” Her mouth worked as if she was trying to turn a grimace into a smile, but she didn’t succeed.
“I’m sorry if this is intrusive,” he said.
“Of course it’s intrusive—it has to be,” she said with spirit. Bruno was struck by the way the topic of divorce had turned her grief into anger. It gave her energy.
“But I’m glad that somebody is starting to ask the obvious questions. The woman he left me for was one of his work colleagues. They had a fling, and she got pregnant. My husband was desperate to have a son, which I couldn’t give him. I had a very difficult birth with Claudia, and I couldn’t have any more children.”
“Claudia has a half brother?” Bruno asked.
“No, his new wife had a miscarriage after their honeymoon and has not become pregnant since. I hear she’s having fertility treatment.” This time she managed a smile, albeit a rueful one. “I try not to gloat.”
“Was Claudia still on reasonable terms with her father?”
“ ‘Reasonable’ is a good word. She was polite, would occasionally have lunch with him on his or her birthday, but only in restaurants, never at his new home. And since the trust is a family firm, she was on his board of directors, so she went to those meetings.”
“Does that mean Claudia was his only heir?”
“And now he has none, except for his second wife,” she said, sipping at her drink. “The woman has a haunted look these days, I’m told, as if fearing that he’ll dump her for a newer, fertile model. Or maybe he’ll use his money to hire carefully chosen women from around the globe to bear his children and spread his precious genes.”
“You don’t like him anymore?”
“I still love the man he used to be when we were young and starting out and Claudia was little,” she replied, choosing her words with care. “But I don’t like what he’s become in recent years. The money did it, the outrageous, monstrous amounts of money along with the fawning praise from his investors that went to his head and made him feel like a superman, as though his skill and luck in making money translated into some special moral virtue. You have no idea of the obscene displays of flattery and adulation that the superrich can attract. I imagine few human beings could withstand it.”
“Claudia seemed to me and to my friends here to be a very levelheaded woman,” Bruno replied. “She was discreet about her private life and her family and never talked about her money, although one or two women seemed to have noted the quality of her clothes. Do you think she could have withstood the impact of wealth?”
“I had my hopes, and she seemed to be doing fine, determined to get her doctorate and have a career in an area she loved. I was proud of her. But now we’ll never know, God rest her soul.”
She picked up her glass and drank, but her hand trembled as she replaced it on the table. Bruno told himself he was dealing with a formidable woman, a professor who was accustomed to a certain deference. She was wealthy in her own right and at the top of her profession, helping to set policy for the central bank of the world’s largest economy. But she was also a mother who had just lost her only child. It was a daunting combination for a country policeman trying to get to the bottom of what remained a suspicious death.
“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “In the United States, if someone seems to be winning an argument, the other person is likely to say, very aggressively, ‘If you’re so goddamn smart, how come you aren’t rich?’ Have you ever heard that in France?”
“Not quite like that, although we do have sentiments that aren’t very different.”
“Maybe it’s just us Americans,” she said with a tight smile. “I’m comforted to learn that she had friends here. And please, do call me Jennifer.”
“With pleasure. In France we’re familiar with the syndrome of too much wealth or power or deference. Louis Quatorze comes to mind, along with some other kings, and then there is Robespierre, Louis-Napoléon, Maréchal Pétain. Too much of it can drive men mad. I remember reading that owners of powerful newspapers are particularly vulnerable to fits of insanity.”
Jennifer laughed out loud. “That’s reassuring,” she said. “It’s such a relief to be able to laugh again, despite…Hell, Bruno, you know what I mean. I need taking out of myself. Would you be my guest for dinner here this evening?”
“Thank you. I’d like that,” he said, realizing that he meant it.
In the hotel restaurant, the arrival of the menus interrupted her reminiscences of living in Paris nearly thirty years earlier. They chose foie gras poached in white wine with an apple-and-walnut compote. This was followed by coquilles St. Jacques and then pigeon, its breast roasted, a thigh prepared in confit.
They asked Yves, the maître d’hôtel, to choose some suitable Bergerac wines and, like more and more restaurants these days, they had installed a storage system for opened bottles that meant they could offer excellent wines by the glass. Bruno was delighted to be served some of his own favorites, a glass of Tirecul la Gravière, a Monbazillac with the foie, some Château Feely with the shellfish and then a glass of Montravel from Château Puy Servain with the pigeon. They stayed with the Montravel as they toyed with the cheese board until they ended with a soufflé flavored with an eau-de-vie of plums.
“You remember I said that people had commented on Claudia’s clothes,” he said over the dessert. “I was thinking of that young woman in the gardens, Félicité. She shared lodgings with Claudia, they had breakfast together, chatted a lot, went out for meals. They were friends, and she’s very poor. Unless you have any other plans for Claudia’s clothes and stuff, it would be an act of kindness to let her have them, even if they might not fit. And perhaps you’d like to talk to her, get a sense of Claudia’s life here. I think she enjoyed it.”
“That’s an excellent idea, Bruno. I was dreading the thought of packing up her things, and I was wondering if there was a local charity that might take them. It’s good to know they’ll be used and appreciated. And she did mention in an e-mail being friendly with a girl in the same house.”
“You can find Félicité at the gardens in Limeuil. And there’s someone else you might like to talk to, a man she met the first day she arrived here.”
“She wrote to me about him, Laurent, with whom she went to Lascaux.”
“That’s the one I was going to mention,” Bruno said. “It wasn’t romantic, I think, but they just warmed to one another. And she was interested in his job.”
“Hawking. She told me about that and some lecture on medieval hawking she attended with you. I’d love to meet him because she mentioned him two or three times in her e-mails to me, and always very fondly.”
“You’d better hear this from me, since someone else is likely to tell you in a cruder way.” Bruno explained the accident that had sent Laurent to jail for ten years.
“Ten years!” she exclaimed. “You don’t get that for murder. And he wasn’t even drunk, you say?”
“He was just a hair over the limit. Had there been no accident, no dead Boy Scouts, he’d have been waved on by most cops after a Breathalyzer test. If they had proceeded, he’d have lost his permit for a few months, and that’s all. But with the dead boys and the new law going through the National Assembly and the lobbying groups, he didn’t stand a chance. It’s amazing that he’s not more bitter.”
“Did Claudia know about all of that? She never mentioned anything of it in her e-mails to me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d still like to see him and talk to him. Claudia thought of him as a friend, a good man.”
“Maybe we could arrange something for t
omorrow afternoon. He works with the hawks at Château des Milandes, where a jazz singer friend of mine is going to do the Josephine Baker concert. She may be there too, but in any event you’ll meet her at dinner tomorrow night.”
They decided against coffee, and she waved at Yves to get the bill.
“I’d like to share this,” said Bruno, reaching for his wallet.
“Absolutely not,” she declared firmly. “Not only have I enjoyed an interesting evening, but for the first time since I heard of Claudia’s death I’ve been able to think and talk of something else. I invited you and you’re having me to dinner tomorrow evening, which I’m looking forward to. Hodge tells me you’re a fine cook,” Jennifer said as they rose, replete, from the table. “Thank you for joining me, Bruno.”
Chapter 27
Bruno rose just before dawn to jog through the woods with Balzac at his heels. For the first few minutes everything was still and crisp with just the sound of his dog’s panting and his own breath and footsteps, until the life of the forest began to stir. Then the hound was distracted by some tantalizing scent just as the sun peeked above the horizon to send slanting rays through the woods. It woke the birds, and they began to greet the new day with song, filling Bruno’s heart with pleasure until he thought back on the previous evening with Jennifer Muller. She had impressed him as a woman of courage and dignity as she battled to cope with the most grievous loss that can befall a mother.
And she had been kind and courteous to him, one of the policemen who was supposed to bring some order to the chaos that had invaded her life. So far, the police had not even been able to ascertain whether Claudia had died by tragic accident or by malice. And now their work was being dogged by this grim woman from Hexagon Trust who seemed hardly to care whether the head she delivered to her client was that of a killer or of a cop. Bruno tried to think if there was anything he had left undone, any avenue unexplored. Perhaps this morning’s session with Bourdeille might spark some new idea.
The Body in the Castle Well Page 22
