The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (22 page)

“I can feel you had me on a painkiller. What was it?”

“Ibuprofen. It’s all you need. Do you want me to help you into the shower? You’ll find a plastic chair in it so you can sit down. Try not to get the spray directly onto the dressing.” She handed him a towel. “I’ll tell Yveline you’re ready to give your statement. Do you remember clearly what happened?”

“Clearly enough. I got home late, checked on the chickens. Then Balzac growled and I was aware of someone creeping up to attack me, a big man. I fought back and then realized he had a weapon that could kill me if I didn’t stop him.”

“That’ll do. I already gave her my statement, which says your wounds and his correspond entirely with your account. Your blood on the ax should prove everything.”

Bruno gritted his teeth and resolved not to use the plastic chair. If Fabiola thought he could manage with a cane and should start walking, that was good enough for him. He ached whenever he moved, and it was awkward trying to wash himself while keeping his dressing dry, but he managed, after a fashion. The hardest part was drying his back.

Fabiola was waiting for him with clean clothes as he limped out and said, “I’ve told Pamela you won’t be riding for a few days. She’s gone off to Bergerac with Jack Crimson to see the
notaire
about buying the riding school. I wanted to ask if you’d mind keeping Hector in the stables so Victoria won’t get lonely. When Gilles can ride well enough to have a horse of his own, we can think again.”

“Thank you, I’d like that,” he said. Bruno had already checked the trails, and there was a hunters’ trail that covered most of the distance to the riding school and would provide a good gallop through the forest. He imagined that would become a regular morning ride.

“Pamela told me it was over between the two of you,” Fabiola said, her head bent and her face hidden as she tied his shoelaces. “You don’t seem too distressed over it.”

Bruno thought for a moment before replying. “She made it sound like she was doing me a favor, setting me free to find a woman with whom I can settle down and raise a family.”

“Funny that you never seem to be attracted to such a woman, even though the Périgord is full of farmers’ daughters just yearning to take over a homestead like yours and raise babies,” she said. “You seem to like living dangerously.”

He nodded, knowing there was no malice in her words. “I’m so pleased that things have worked out for you and Gilles. He’s a good man, and a lucky one.”

“He wants to get married,” she said, and before he could offer congratulations, she added, “I said we’d wait and see whether we decide to have children. That will be time enough to go to the
mairie.
One thing I’ve learned from seeing the abused women in those shelters: it’s not the first few happy months that tell you whether you can share your life with a man.”

Bruno nodded. He saw the sense in that.

“There are adjustments,” she said. “I’m already having to get used to the way Gilles likes to write at night and sleep late in the morning, and I like to be up and about soon after daybreak. And I’ve been spoiled by your and Pamela’s cooking. He can barely boil an egg.”

“There’s a project for me, teaching Gilles to cook,” Bruno said, smiling. And then came a gentle knock on the door. Yveline entered with a form to take his statement. Hard on her heels trotted Balzac, who put his head onto Bruno’s knee before investigating the crutches Fabiola had left. Yveline must have thought to bring him and had even remembered to bring Balzac’s leash, rescued from Fabrice after handcuffing him.

Bruno was limping through the market with a borrowed walking stick that Balzac kept darting in to bite, assuming this was some interesting new game his master had devised. Bruno was trying to dissuade Balzac while fending off questions about his leg from shoppers and stallholders when his phone vibrated with the special tone. The green light showed it was someone on the brigadier’s secure network.

“Something important has come up so I’m on my way down to St. Denis, but it’s delicate so I don’t want to meet at the gendarmerie,” came the familiar brisk voice. “I’ll see you at your house sometime around noon, and J-J and Prunier will be with me.”

The brigadier ended the call, leaving Bruno baffled. The presence of J-J and Prunier meant something that involved the Police Nationale. And Bruno would only be involved if it was something or someone connected with the region around St. Denis. He shrugged; no point in guessing when he’d find out soon enough. But like any true Périgordin his next thought was that if they were meeting at his place at noon that meant lunch. Since J-J was coming the meal had better be hearty, but because of his leg it would have to be simple. For a working lunch his guests would be satisfied with bread, cheese, salad and cold cuts.

It was warm enough to eat in the open air, and he had lettuce and the last of the cherry tomatoes in his garden. There were cans of his homemade pâté and foie gras lined up on shelves in his barn, and his chickens provided plenty of eggs. He stopped at Stéphane’s stall to buy some cheese, a nutty aged Cantal and some creamy
cabécous
of goat cheese. Gabrielle at the fish stall had some trout that looked tempting.
Mon Dieu,
these were his friends, and they deserved better than cold meats. It would be little effort to barbecue the fish, and knowing hers were always fresh he bought eight. Gabrielle took one look at his limp and gutted and cleaned them herself.

Richard at the vegetable stall had a display of large mushrooms; Bruno bought four, along with some lemons to go with the trout. At Fauquet’s he asked for a liter of his homemade vanilla ice cream to be put into an insulated bag and a large and still-warm
pain.
A simple baguette would not be nearly enough for J-J’s appetite. Fauquet’s wife tried without success to worm out of him the cause of his limp as she drove Bruno home. Until the inquiry into Fabrice’s injuries were complete, Bruno knew better than to say anything at all.

In his kitchen, with Balzac looking up at him expectantly, he located a can of
pâté de Périgueux,
a gift from a friend, the pork neatly surrounding the foie gras and interleaved with slices of black truffle. He checked that he had a bottle of Pierre Desmartis’s good Monbazillac and another of his Bergerac Sec in the fridge. Balzac followed him into the vegetable garden where Bruno selected his best lettuce and some tomatoes. He prepared knives and forks, plates and glasses on a tray and left it in the kitchen. His friends could carry it out. He then headed for his barn to collect a large bundle of the dried vine twigs he always used to start his barbecue. He could carry the bundle in one hand. He returned to fill a small bucket with the applewood charcoal he preferred for cooking fish.

He filled the trout with some crushed garlic and lemon slices. He washed the large mushrooms, put a teaspoon of white wine into the bowl of the mushrooms and then inserted a
cabécou
into each one. He prepared a bowl of honey and some crushed walnuts and then opened one of the jars of black-currant
compôte
he’d made when the hedge below his house had been thick with the ripe fruit. He was ready. He washed his face and hands and then jotted down some notes to himself for the briefing the brigadier would demand.

When Bruno heard J-J’s car lumbering its way up the lane, he lit the crumpled newspaper he’d stuffed beneath the grape twigs and charcoal. Bruno had built his own barbecue of bricks and was proud of one little extra that he’d devised. The charcoal itself rested on a metal plate, and he’d arranged the bricks in such a way that he could put the grill at different heights. But beneath the metal plate he’d built an extra shelf, reckoning that the heat from the metal plate above would act as an overhead grill and allow him to make a gratin.

“Very good of you to receive us like this, particularly after J-J told me about your injury,” said the brigadier, handing Bruno a bottle of Balvenie. “How’s the leg?”

“I can stand, walk and cook,” he replied, and thanked the brigadier and then J-J, who gave Bruno a bottle of Heidsieck Monopole, still chilled. He must have just bought it from the
cave
in town. Having sniffed at their shoes, Balzac realized that he’d met both men before and moved on to greet Prunier, who was looking embarrassed at arriving empty-handed.

“I’ve put a twenty-four-hour guard on this guy who attacked you, but the medics won’t let us in to question him,” said Prunier. “J-J showed me the statement you gave to the gendarmes, and we’ve got the ax. I already talked to the
procureur,
so you don’t have to worry about an inquiry into excessive force. But as of now, you’re on medical leave until further notice.”

Prunier had arrived in his own car, a policewoman at the wheel. Bruno thanked him and suggested they might ask her to join them. She could have one of his trout.

“Better not,” said the brigadier. “We may need her for courier duties.”

“Champagne first, I think, then we’ll eat,” said Bruno. He handed Prunier J-J’s bottle and asked him to open it.

“
Mon Dieu,
it’s a remarkable view you have here,” said the brigadier, gazing out across the black-currant bushes and fields to the series of wooded ridges that unfolded before him, not another house in sight. “
La belle France;
I wish I woke up to a sight like this each morning.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said J-J, holding out his glass to be filled and looking approvingly at the barbecue rather than at the view. “Is this where it happened, the attack?”

“Just over there.” Bruno pointed with his walking stick. “I was lucky Balzac sensed something just before I heard him.”

“You’re alive and he’s under arrest, that’s what matters. And we have other business to attend to, national business,” said the brigadier, topping up his own glass. “You began this particular panic, Bruno, when you told me of Colonel Clamartin’s trust fund and the inquiries being made by the fiscal authorities. We blocked that, of course. But then came the big surprise.”

The trust fund had been set up to receive the pension Clamartin was due from the secret funds for the work he’d done for French intelligence while based in Moscow, the brigadier said. The
fisc
asked the interior ministry to let them know the entire amount in the trust fund, now that his pension had been stopped and his heirs could be liable for taxes. This was not easy with a Liechtenstein trust, but it so happened that in the course of a separate operation French agents had bought a CD from a disgruntled bank employee in Vaduz that carried details of many such trust accounts.

“The surprise was that Colonel Clamartin had two trust funds rather than just the one we knew about,” the brigadier went on. And every month since 1989 some unknown benefactor had been paying five thousand U.S. dollars a month into Clamartin’s second account. The money had not been touched and the dividends simply reinvested for over two decades in the Vaduz bank’s own investment funds, so Clamartin’s secret account now contained over a million dollars.

“We need to find out who was paying him, and paying him more generously than we were. The money has been routed through the Cayman Islands, the Dutch Antilles, banks in Cyprus and Dubai and all the usual shadowy places, so our financial sleuths have not yet identified the donor. Above all, we need to know just what he did for them,” the brigadier concluded.

“So that’s why my suggestion that his death might not have been from natural causes has finally caught your interest,” said Bruno, realizing that the prospect of Gilbert’s death turning into a murder inquiry explained the brigadier’s decision to bring Prunier and J-J. “But first, we should eat. The barbecue’s ready.”

He asked J-J to bring out the tray he’d prepared with the
pâté de Périgueux,
the mushrooms, bread and the bottle of Monbazillac. He put the mushrooms on top of the grill, poured four glasses of the sweet, golden wine and cut off chunks of the fresh bread as J-J sliced the pâté.

“I’ve never seen this before,” said the brigadier as J-J cut into the pâté and the foie gras and sliced truffles were revealed. They ate in appreciative silence, and as the last of the pâté disappeared, Bruno took the mushrooms from atop the grill and slid them beneath the heated plate and watched until the goat cheese started to bubble. When he judged them done, he took them out, sprinkled crushed walnuts over each one and then drizzled honey on top. Bruno then put the trout onto the grill and served the mushrooms. Without needing to be asked, J-J opened the bottle of Bergerac Sec.

Some thirty minutes later, the trout and cheese and salad all demolished, the wine bottle empty and the bowls of ice cream with the black-currant
compôte
wiped clean, Bruno served coffee and handed the brigadier the notes he had made, listing the few people beyond those at the family vineyard whom Gilbert had seen regularly or been in touch with. They were Crimson, Yevgeny, Raquelle, Nicole Larignac in Bordeaux and the
notaire
in the Auvergne. He’d added Clothilde’s name, assuming from her reaction to the news of Gilbert’s death that they’d had an affair at some time in the past.

He then limped across to his Land Rover to bring out a bag he’d kept in his office. From it he took out one large plastic bag that contained Marie-Françoise’s shoes, and several smaller evidence bags containing Gilbert’s phone, his Russian cigarette stub, his flask and its separate cap and some of the hairs Bruno had taken from the brush in Gilbert’s bathroom. A final bag contained the wire samples he’d taken from Rollo’s garden.

“You’d have laughed at me before this, J-J, if I’d asked you for a full forensics check, but I suspect that somebody put something into Colonel Clamartin’s drink at the Patriarch’s birthday party,” Bruno said.

He explained that Clamartin had spilled his drink over a young woman’s shoes, so the experts might be able to identify it. “This is the flask he was drinking from when he died and its cap, supposedly just containing vodka, but I’d like to be sure. And here’s a hair sample from Gilbert, along with a cigarette he smoked and his cell phone. I’d like his DNA checked against the owner of the DNA on this tissue in the bag marked
CHANTAL
to see if they’re related. In return, I’d be grateful if forensics could take a look at this wire from a nonrelated case.”

The brigadier turned to Prunier. “Would your driver please take these evidence bags to the forensics lab at Bergerac? Perhaps you could call them to say it’s top priority and you want them to put their best people onto it.”

Bruno was struck by the speed with which Prunier rose obediently to take the evidence bags to his driver. The breadth of the brigadier’s influence never ceased to surprise him.

“Anything else?” the brigadier asked Bruno.

“Perhaps. I’m in touch with Gilbert’s
notaire
in the Auvergne, which is how I learned of the trust fund. I’m supposed to see him Monday for the reading of the will. That may bring up something new. You should know that the main heir is his goddaughter, Chantal, Victor’s child by his second marriage.”

“You mean the daughter of Madeleine, this politico who’s headed for the National Assembly?” asked J-J.

Bruno nodded. “She’s certainly the mother of Chantal, but Victor may not be the father. The most obvious reason for Gilbert to make Chantal his heir is that he’s the real father. That’s why I want to check her DNA against Gilbert’s.

“There’s more,” Bruno went on. “I’ve talked to three witnesses who say that Gilbert Clamartin was not drunk just a few minutes before the fuss started. That’s when I wondered if something might have been slipped into his drink. Another witness told me that just before he collapsed Gilbert was having a brief private talk with your old colleague Jack Crimson.”

“That’s interesting because earlier this week the
écouteurs
picked up something from an unregistered phone that was briefly connected to a cell tower in St. Denis,” said the brigadier. “They have automatic voice-print recognition, so it was quickly identified as Crimson, telling some old colleague in London that the local police had some doubts about Clamartin’s death and suggesting London might want to look into it.”

“He and Clamartin were old friends,” said Bruno. “Crimson told me they were in Moscow together. And you told me once that men like Crimson never really retire. But I’m surprised he thought he could have a private conversation, even with an unregistered phone. It seems a little careless.”

“Too careless to be true for an old fox like him. I think Crimson was probably sending us a subtle message,” said the brigadier. “That’s why you and I are going to see him next.”