Back at his house Bruno fed his ducks and chickens, refilled their water bowls and collected their eggs. He checked the lamb he had cooked the previous day and spooned off the surface fat that had set overnight. He showered, shaved and dressed in his old uniform, and with Balzac on the passenger seat drove to Pamela’s riding school to saddle Hector and join his friends for the morning exercise of the horses. Shortly before eight, he had made his first patrol of the town, more like a pleasant stroll through the town, shaking hands with the men and kissing the women on each cheek.
Then he went to enjoy his coffee and croissant at Fauquet’s counter while checking Sud Ouest to see what new embarrassment Philippe Delaron had concocted for him. It was on an inside page under the headline “Limeuil Death—U.S. Steps In.” This was based on a bland statement from the American embassy’s press spokesman saying that they counted on the French authorities to complete their investigation “with all due dispatch.” No problems there, Bruno said to himself.
“What did you make of the radio news?” asked Fauquet, using the excuse of a cursory wipe of the counter to lower his mouth to Bruno’s ear. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“About this dead girl being about to expose some big art forgery before she was silenced. It turns out she was a star researcher attached to the Louvre. The radio said that came from some American newspaper.”
Bruno opened his phone and searched Google to find the France Inter website quoting the Washington Post on Claudia. She was described as “a brilliant young art historian attached to the Louvre” making shocking allegations of forgery against famed French art scholar and Resistance hero Pierre de Bourdeille. The police were to interview him today.
Merde, he thought, instantly suspecting that the source was Madame de Breille, who would know from the case files that J-J would be seeing the old man. But as he read on, scanning quotes from Madame Massenet at the Louvre on Claudia’s scholarly talents, Bruno saw the only other quotes came from “veteran French police detective Gustave Pellier.” Either the private eye was getting himself some free publicity or Madame de Breille was using him as a conduit for her own purposes. Bruno recalled Hodge’s warning that if Hexagon couldn’t solve the case themselves they’d do what they could to discredit the French police.
“Well?” asked Fauquet, intent on adding another nugget to the store of gossip that was as much his stock-in-trade as the peerless croissants he made and the excellent coffee he served.
“Amazing, these journalists,” Bruno replied vaguely as he put down a two-euro piece and some copper coins and headed for the door, half-eaten croissant in hand. “What will they think of next?”
The efficiency of his exit was spoiled by Balzac, who had not yet been given his morning treat of a corner of Bruno’s croissant and who therefore stayed stubbornly by the counter, eyes switching from Bruno at the door to Fauquet looming overhead. Bruno sighed, bent down and made the necessary offering. Balzac then trotted contentedly at his heels on Bruno’s second stroll through town by a different route, which ended in front of the gendarmerie, where he’d parked his van.
A few minutes before nine, Bruno pulled up outside Bourdeille’s chartreuse. The balcony above the main doorway, where Bourdeille so often sat, was empty. There was no sign of J-J’s car, but Philippe Delaron’s SUV was parked in the driveway, and Philippe was standing at the door, ringing the bell in vain.
“You can’t force them to answer the door, Philippe,” Bruno said. “If I were you I’d see if Amélie would find this a good time to pose for your camera. I don’t think you’ll get anything out of Bourdeille.”
“Why are you here, Bruno? Are you going to interview him?”
“No, I’m here to defend a citizen, a taxpayer and a Resistance veteran from being pestered by the intrusive media when he doesn’t want to be. He’s ninety years old, for heaven’s sake. Where’s your sense of respect?”
“I can’t leave here with nothing. My editor will give me hell, scooped by the damn radio.”
“Have you read the full Washington Post story?”
Philippe shook his head.
“The real story is the guy they quote, the ex-copper, now a notably unsuccessful private eye in Périgueux. He’s behind this. You didn’t hear this from me, but he’s been hired by a woman called Monique de Breille, staying at the Vieux Logis. She runs the Paris branch of a shadowy firm of ex-spies and top accountants called Hexagon Trust, which seems to make most of its money investigating tax havens for fat-cat clients—including the dead girl’s father. That’s the real story. If you leave now, you might just catch de Breille at breakfast.”
Philippe’s car was disappearing out of sight to the east as J-J’s big Citroën appeared from the west. He parked beside Bruno’s van and lumbered his bulk from the passenger seat. His assistant, Josette, turned off the ignition, opened the rear door and heaved a bulging shoulder bag onto her back before offering her cheeks for Bruno’s bise.
“You heard the radio news?” J-J asked. “Pellier was never more than just barely competent when he worked for me.”
“Madame de Breille is behind Pellier,” Bruno said. “She hired him and brought him to St. Denis yesterday to try and sell me the same story.”
J-J grunted. “This whole case is a can of worms.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” said Josette, looking crossly at her boss. “I still think we should have handed this to the art squad.”
“They’d take forever to respond and I’m already getting flak for spending too long on it.”
Bruno offered to take Josette’s heavy bag, but she tossed him a scornful look, marched up to Bourdeille’s door and hammered hard on the wood with the side of her fist. Bruno glanced at J-J and raised his eyebrows in question. J-J shrugged and looked baffled. Josette was usually as cheerful and friendly as she was efficient in managing J-J’s life.
“Police, we’re expected,” Josette barked and marched in as soon as Madame Bonnet opened the door. “Commissaire Jalipeau to interview Monsieur Bourdeille.”
Madame Bonnet led the way upstairs to a large library where Bourdeille in his wheelchair awaited them behind a large table, presumably the place where Claudia had worked. A tray with a coffeepot, cream, sugar and three cups and saucers lay on the table with a plate of cookies. In front of Bourdeille was a slim folder, an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes.
“Messieurs-dames, welcome to my home. Madame Bonnet, we will need an extra cup if you please,” said Bourdeille, glancing at Josette, who placed her bag on a chair and followed Madame Bonnet back downstairs. That was routine. J-J always liked Josette to take a good look around any new location and to keep an eye on others in the building.
“Bruno, I want to thank you for that introduction to Laurent and that marvelous day I spent with him and his hawks. And that young Caribbean friend of yours is delightful. She gave us a couple of songs in the main hall of the château. She said she needed to assess the acoustics, but I got the impression she was singing for her own pleasure. It certainly added to mine.”
He turned to J-J and asked with an attempt at old-fashioned courtesy, “And how may I help you, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
J-J opened Josette’s shoulder bag, pulled out a bulging box file and said, “The late Claudia Muller has made some serious written accusations against you of fraud and forgery to her academic adviser in the United States. I’m curious as to whether those charges might have been linked in some way to her death.”
“You imply that I may have ended her life to shut her up?” Bourdeille said lightly. “How do you think I managed it, at my age and in this contraption?” He tapped the arms of his wheelchair.
“I’m aware that you told Chief of Police Courrèges that you didn’t think her death was an accident.”
“That’s true. I don’t,” Bourdeille said. “Claudia was an intellig
ent and capable young woman with everything to live for, not someone who’d make a fool of herself at a dangerous well.”
“She accuses you of forgery in her e-mails to her professor at Yale. I have the details here. She mentions the works of Antoine Caron, Josse Lefrinc, Ambroise Dubois—did she mention these to you?”
“Have you ever heard of those names before?” Bourdeille asked with a smile. “Do you know if they are painters, engravers, sculptors?”
“I’m not an art historian, monsieur. And I’m the one asking questions.”
“Let’s be precise. Claudia did not question the paintings,” Bourdeille said, explaining that it was nearly impossible in modern times to forge a medieval painting. The forger would have to fake the wood, the canvas or linen, the way the surface was prepared, the paint, the aging and so on. Modern scientific techniques could detect such fakes.
“The three paintings exist, and scientists agree that they and their canvas and frames date from the right period,” he went on. “The question is, Who painted them? Many, perhaps most, scholars would agree with my attributions because of the subject matter, the style, the individual methods and brushstrokes of the painter.”
If there was no other evidence, such subjective attributions by known experts were often sufficient, Bourdeille explained. In the cases Claudia had raised, his archival research had unearthed some documentary evidence that reinforced his finding. She had not questioned whether the letters and archive entries he had found were genuine. Her complaint was simply that she had not found parallel records in other archives.
“She picked three cases out of hundreds of attributions I have made in my long career,” Bourdeille said. “In the vast majority of cases where I have unearthed hitherto unknown documents, they were later corroborated by documents in other archives. Claudia’s three cases may be easily resolved simply by asking the experts at the Louvre to examine them to see if they are genuine documents or if they were forged. I suggested to her that this should be done, and indeed I myself wrote to the Louvre proposing this step. Here is a copy of my letter.”
He opened the folder before him, pulled out a photocopy and slid it across the table to J-J.
“And you should know,” Bourdeille continued, “that Claudia never used the word ‘forgery’ in this context in my presence nor when she raised the matter with Madame Massenet, her supervisor at the Louvre. I’d be surprised if she did because she’d have been aware that the same modern forensic techniques that make it almost impossible to forge a Renaissance painting also apply to documents.”
“Antique paper may be bought, monsieur,” said J-J. “I believe there is a lively trade in historic books of blank paper.”
“There used to be,” Bourdeille replied. “But mass spectroscopy analysis and peptide mass fingerprinting have made the traditional paper from hemp and linen rags much easier to date. We can now tell whether the paper was dried with pressed felt or after the 1790s by a pneumatic press. By that time, of course, cotton was coming into the rag mix. Even if one can obtain paper of the right period and the right region, the almost universal use of iron-and-oak-gall ink contains organic elements which these days can be analyzed and dated with great precision. Any attempts to age the ink artificially with chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide and ammonium hydroxide, as in the Hofmann case, can be detected with ultraviolet light. You may recall his forgery of early Mormon documents.”
Bruno bit his lip, sure that J-J beside him was feeling the same sense of inadequacy, even of humiliation, as Bourdeille casually displayed his mastery of the subject to toy with the two lumbering policemen.
“You are claiming that it is impossible to forge the documents you found to make your attributions?” J-J said.
“No, not that it is impossible to forge them. People try. But it is impossible to do so without a modern forensic laboratory being able to detect it.”
J-J tried another tack. “You were a close friend and associate of Paul Juin, the master forger.”
Bourdeille leaned back, shaking his head and chuckling. “Paul was a great forger in the days before mass spectroscopy and X-ray luminescence. He’d have been caught if he tried it now, when every little airport has a handheld spectrometer. They even use them here in garbage dumps to identify scrap metals.”
Bourdeille leaned forward to fix J-J with his gaze. “I get the impression that you have not been in touch with your expert colleagues in the art squad of the Police Nationale, whose forensic facilities are among the best in Europe. Might I suggest that before you come here with such ridiculous and ignorant accusations, you contact the deputy head of the squad, Marc d’Alentour. He is a world-renowned expert. I trained him myself.”
“Are you saying, monsieur, that these new technologies are infallible?” Bruno asked, more to ease the tension between J-J and Bourdeille than because he thought the question pertinent. Bourdeille’s expertise was evident.
“Infallible? I’m not sure anything is infallible. Let me give you an example, the case of the Vinland map, which was claimed to be the first chart showing the Norse settlements of North America some decades before the voyage of Christopher Columbus. It was hailed as genuine when it was found in 1957 and sold for three hundred thousand dollars. But later analysis found traces of titanium dioxide, which under the commercial name of anatase had been used in some pigments only since the 1920s. Did that destroy the map’s credibility? Not entirely, because such traces of anatase could have come from the sand used to dry ink in medieval times. Then researchers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington found that anatase could be produced in the early stage of manufacturing oak-gall iron ink. The problem is that the ink on the Vinland map was not made from oak gall but appears to come from soot.
“One interesting footnote is that the first researchers to express doubts came from the British Museum, who noted that while the parchment clearly dated from the early fifteenth century, it contained a substance they could not at that stage identify. We now know that these were traces of radiation, nuclear fallout from the atom-bomb and hydrogen-bomb tests of the 1940s and 1950s. We now find such traces of fallout in every archive in the world. But none of that fallout has yet been found on top of the ink, which suggests to me and I think to many scholars that the map is probably a fake. But is that judgment infallible? No.”
Bourdeille beamed at them as if ready to take a bow. Bruno was tempted to applaud. It had been a bravura performance. He glanced at J-J, who was nodding thoughtfully. J-J then pointed at Bourdeille’s cigarettes with a brief “May I?” The old man pushed the pack across, and J-J extracted and lit one before sitting back in his chair.
“If there’s no fallout on the ink, that suggests it was written after the fallout,” J-J said. “But those nuclear tests went on into the 1960s. Maybe the ink didn’t absorb the fallout. Have they looked under the ink to see if there is any fallout on the parchment below?”
“An excellent question,” Bourdeille replied, lighting a cigarette for himself. “I suggested it myself at a symposium some years ago. Or at least making tests to see if that ink is truly resistant to radiation.”
“What do you think happened to Claudia?” J-J continued.
“I wish I knew. I suppose she may have been murdered, although heaven knows by whom or why. Maybe she was drunk, ill, disoriented or possibly somebody made her that way.” Bourdeille shrugged and blew out a long stream of smoke. “That brings us back to murder.”
“Why do you want to give your home and your paintings to St. Denis?” J-J asked, his tone affable. “Why not to the Louvre, which has been your academic home?”
“The Louvre has far more paintings than it can display,” came the reply. “It has satellite museums in Lens and Abu Dhabi and is building a new storage facility at Liévin. It is overwhelmed, and my little offering would not get a great deal of attention. In St. Denis it would be a great and valued addition.�
��
“Very well, monsieur,” said J-J, rising and stubbing out his cigarette. “Thank you for your time. I don’t think we need detain you further.”
He shook hands and led the way down the stairs in silence. Josette was waiting for them in the hall. As they walked out to the cars, she pulled out her phone, pressed a button and began to play a recording of someone speaking.
“You’ll want to hear this, J-J,” she said. As she held up the phone, Bruno realized he was listening to Bourdeille talking about the Vinland map. “I was in the kitchen with Madame Bonnet, and when she went to the loo I saw a small loudspeaker, fiddled with the knob and began hearing this.”
“He’s an invalid. It’s probably the equivalent of a baby alarm or a way he can say he wants his supper. It’s just a useful bit of technology,” J-J said.
“Or it could be a way for her to overhear him,” said Bruno. “How long had you been waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs?”
“Since I heard you coming out of his room.”
“Did Madame Bonnet hear J-J’s final question?” Bruno asked her.
“I doubt it, because I turned the volume back down when you said you were leaving and went out to the hall to wait. She hadn’t returned by then.”
“Unless she has another loudspeaker somewhere.”
“Where are you going with this, Bruno?” J-J sounded and looked impatient.
“Bourdeille has been keeping to himself this plan to give everything to St. Denis. Madame Bonnet thinks she’s his heir and will inherit it all. If she finds out he’s planned it differently, things could get complicated.”
“They already are.” J-J grunted and heaved himself into his car. He gestured to Josette to drive off. Bruno remained standing by his own car, wondering how much Madame Bonnet had heard of Bourdeille’s plans, or of Claudia’s offer to buy his estate.
Chapter 28
This was supposed to be Bruno’s day off so he considered changing out of uniform, but since Amélie had his Land Rover, he was stuck with his police van, so the uniform stayed. When he parked in Le Buisson, where it was market day, he took off his police jacket and slipped on a windbreaker to look at least partly civilian as he shopped for dinner. He needed cheese, a kilo of red onions, some lardons, puff pastry, cream for whipping, lemons, some young turnips about the size of a baby’s fist and a round tourte of bread from the bakery. The rest he had already in his garden or his pantry.
The Body in the Castle Well Page 23
