Текст книги "Bruno, Chief Of Police"

Автор книги: Martin Walker

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this, believe me,’ Bruno said. He shook hands with the Mayor and the other men

in the room, all Arabs except for Momu’s boss, Rollo, the headmaster at the

local school. Rollo held up a bottle of cognac and offered Bruno a glass, but he

looked around to see what others were drinking and took an apple juice like the

Arabs. This was their home, their time of grief, so he would abide by their

rules. Anyway, he was on duty.

‘I just came from the cottage,’ he said. ‘We’re still waiting for the detectives

and forensic men from Périgueux. Nothing more will happen until they arrive, and

the police doctor releases the body. The gendarmes have sealed the place off,

but when the detectives are done, I’ll have to ask you to go up there and take a

good look around to see if you notice anything missing or stolen. There were no

obvious signs of a burglary or theft, except for a missing photo, but we have to

check. When the police are through, they’ll take the body to the funeral home

but I need to know what you want to do then, Momu. I don’t know if you have any

religious rules or special customs.’

‘My father gave up religion a long time ago,’ Momu said solemnly. ‘We’ll bury

him here in the town cemetery, in the usual way, as soon as we can. What about

Karim? Is he still up there?’

Bruno nodded. ‘Don’t worry. It’s routine. The detectives have to talk to the

person who found the body but they probably won’t keep him long. I just wanted

to come and pay my condolences here and find out about the funeral and I’ll go

right back up there and keep an eye on Karim. He’s had a very bad shock.’

When he had called back at Hamid’s cottage, Bruno had gone through another

argument with Duroc who, between angry phone calls to demand why the Police

Nationale were taking so long to get there, insisted on keeping Karim at the

scene. That was about all the gendarme had done. It was left to Bruno to call

the Public Works and arrange for a portable generator and lights to be taken up

to the cottage, which had only basic electricity and no outdoor light. He also

arranged for the local pizzeria to deliver some food and drink for the

gendarmes, something Duroc should have thought of.

The sound of crying from the back room had stopped, and Bruno noticed Momu’s

wife peering round the door. Bruno had always seen her in Western dress, but

today she wore a black scarf on her head which she held across her mouth as

though it were a veil. Perhaps it was her mourning dress, he thought.

‘What can you tell us?’ Momu asked. ‘All I know for sure is that the old man has

been killed, but I still can’t believe it.’

‘That’s all we know at this stage, until the forensics team do their work,’

Bruno said.

‘That’s not what I heard at the fire station,’ said Ahmed, one of the drivers

for the Public Works, who also volunteered as a fireman. There were two

professionals at the small local fire station and the rest were local volunteers

like Ahmed, summoned as needed by the howl of the old wartime siren they kept on

top of the Mairie. And since the firemen were also the emergency medical team

and the first people called out to any sudden death or crisis, it was impossible

to keep anything quiet. The volunteers talked to their wives and the wives

talked to each other and the whole town knew of fires or deaths or road

accidents within hours.

‘It was a brutal killing, a stabbing. That’s all we really know so far,’ said

Bruno cautiously. He had a good idea of what Ahmed must have heard from the

other firemen.

‘It was racists, fascists,’ Ahmed snapped. ‘I heard what was carved on old

Hamid’s chest. It was those Front National swine, taking on a helpless old man.’

Putain. This bit of news had become public even faster than he had feared, and

it would spread more poison as it travelled.

‘I don’t know what you heard, Ahmed, but I know what I saw, and I don’t know if

it was meant to be some kind of pattern or if they were wounds he received when

he put up a fight,’ he said levelly, looking Ahmed in the eye. ‘Rumour has a way

of exaggerating things. Let’s stick with the facts for the moment.’

‘Bruno is right,’ said the Mayor quietly. A small, slim man whose mild-mannered

looks were deceptive, he had a way of making himself heard. Gérard Mangin had

been Mayor of St Denis long before Bruno had taken up his job a decade earlier.

Mangin had been born in the town, into a family that had been there forever. He

had won scholarships and competitive examinations and gone off to one of the

grandes écoles in Paris where France educates its elite. He worked in the

Finance Ministry while allying himself with a rising young star of the Gaullist

party called Jacques Chirac and launching his own political career. He had been

one of Chirac’s political secretaries, and was then sent to Brussels as Chirac’s

eyes and ears in the European Commission, where he had learned the complex art

of securing grants. Elected Mayor of St Denis in the 1970s, Mangin had run the

party for Chirac in the Dordogne, and was rewarded with an appointment to the

Senate to serve out the term of a man who had died in office. Thanks to his

connections in Paris and Brussels, St Denis had thrived. The restored Mairie and

the tennis club, the old folk’s home and the small Industrial Zone, the camp

sites, the swimming pool and the agricultural research centre had all been built

with grants the Mayor had secured. His mastery of the planning and zoning codes

had built the commercial centre with its new supermarket. Without the Mayor and

his political connections, St Denis might well have died, like so many other

small market towns of the Périgord.

‘My friends, our Momu has suffered a great loss and we grieve with him. But we

must not let that loss turn into anger before we know the facts,’ the Mayor said

in his precise way. He gripped Momu’s hand and pulled the burly Arab to his side

before looking round at Ahmed and Momu’s friends. ‘We who are gathered here to

share our friend’s grief are all leaders of our community. And we all know that

we have a responsibility here to ensure that the law takes its course, that we

all give whatever help we can to the magistrates and the police, and that we

stand guard together over the solidarity of our dear town of St Denis. I know I

can count on you all in the days ahead. We have to face this together.’

He went first to Momu, and then shook hands with each of the others and gestured

to Bruno to leave with him. As he reached the door, he turned and called out to

the head teacher, ‘Rollo, stay a while until I return to collect my wife.’ Then,

gently gripping Bruno’s arm, he propelled him into the night, along the driveway

and out of earshot of the house.

‘What is this about a swastika?’ he demanded.

‘It isn’t clear, but that’s what the gendarmes and the firemen thought was

carved into the guy’s chest. They’re probably right, but I told the truth in

there. I can’t be sure, not until the corpse is cleaned up. He was stabbed in

the belly and then eviscerated. There could have been the Mona Lisa painted on

that chest and I couldn’t swear to it.’ Bruno shook his head, squeezing his eyes

to block out the dreadful image. The Mayor’s grip tightened on his arm.

‘It was a butchery,’ Bruno went on after a moment. ‘The old man’s hands were

tied behind his back. There were no signs of a robbery. It looked like he was

interrupted while having his lunch. Two things were missing, according to Karim.

There was a Croix de Guerre he won while fighting for France as a Harki, and a

photo of his old football team. The neighbours don’t seem to have seen or heard

anything unusual. That’s all I know.’

‘I don’t think I ever met the old man, which probably makes him unique in this

town,’ said the Mayor. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Not really. I met him at Karim’s just before he moved here. I never spoke with

him beyond pleasantries and never got much sense of the man. He kept himself to

himself, always seemed to eat on his own or with his family. I don’t recall ever

seeing him in the market or the bank or doing his shopping. He was a bit of a

recluse in that little cottage way out in the woods. No TV and no car. He

depended on Momu and Karim for everything.’

‘That seems strange,’ the Mayor mused. ‘These Arab families tend to stay

together – the old ones move in with their grown children. But a Harki and a war

hero? Maybe he was worried about reprisals from some young immigrant hotheads.

You know, these days they think of the Harkis as traitors to the Arab cause.’

‘Maybe that’s it. And because he wasn’t religious perhaps some of these Islamic

extremists could see him as a traitor to his faith,’ Bruno said. Yet he didn’t

think Muslim extremists would want to carve a swastika into someone’s chest.

‘But we’re just guessing, Sir. I’ll have to talk to Momu about it later. It must

have been a chore for him and Karim, driving over every day to pick up the old

man for his dinner and then taking him home again. Maybe there’s more to Hamid

than meets the eye, and perhaps you could ask Momu if he remembers any details

about that old football team his father played in. Since the photograph has

disappeared, it might be significant. I think they played in Marseilles back in

the Thirties or Forties.’

‘I’ll do that, Bruno. Now I must go back inside and collect my wife.’ The Mayor

turned and held up a fist as he often did when he had prepared a mental list of

what was to be done, unclenching a new finger to illustrate each different

point. He always had at least two points to make but never more than four,

probably because he would run out of fingers, thought Bruno, with a rush of

affection for the old man. ‘I know you understand how delicate this could be,’

Mangin said. ‘We’ll probably have a lot of media attention, maybe some

politicians posturing and making speeches and marches of solidarity and all

that. Leave that side of it to me. I want you to stay on top of the

investigation and keep me informed, and also let me know in good time if you

hear of any trouble brewing or any likely arrests. Now, two final questions:

first, do you know of any extreme right or racist types in our Commune who might

conceivably have been guilty of this?’

‘No, Sir, not one. Some Front National voters, of course, but that’s all, and I

don’t think any of our usual petty criminals could have carried out an act of

butchery like this.’

‘Right. Second question. What can I do to help you?’ The fourth finger snapped

to attention.

‘Two things.’ Bruno tried to sound as efficient as his boss when he spoke to the

Mayor, aware of a sense of both duty and affection as he did so. ‘First, the

Police Nationale will need somewhere to work, with phone lines and desks and

chairs and plenty of space for computers. You might want to think about the top

floor of the tourist centre where we hold the art exhibitions. There’s no

exhibition there yet, and it’s big enough. If you call the Prefect in Périgueux

tomorrow you can probably persuade him to pay some rent for the use of the

space, and there’s room for police vans too. It might be useful for people to

see a reinforced police presence in the town. If we do that, they owe us. It’s

our town property so they’re on our turf, which means they cannot bar us

access.’

‘And the second thing?’

‘Most of all, I’ll need your support to stay close to the case. It would help a

great deal if you could call the Brigadier of the gendarmes in Périgueux and

also the head of the Police Nationale, and ask them to order their men to keep

me fully in the picture. There’s good reason for it, with the political

sensitivities and the prospect of demonstrations and tension in the town. You

know our little Police Municipale does not rate very high in the hierarchy of

our forces of order. Call me your personal liaison.’

‘Right. You’ll have it. Anything else?’

‘You could probably get hold of the old man’s military and civil records and the

citation for his Croix de Guerre faster than I’ll get them through the

gendarmes. We know very little about the victim at this stage, not even whether

he owned the cottage or rented it, what he lived on, how he got his pension, or

whether he had a doctor.’

‘You can check the civic records tomorrow. I’ll call the Defence Minister’s

office – I knew her a bit when I was in Paris, and there’s a chap in her cabinet

who was at school with me. I’ll have Hamid’s file by the end of the day. Now,

you go back up to the cottage and stay there until you can bring Karim back to

his family. They’re getting worried. Any trouble, just call me on the mobile,

even if it means waking me up.’

Bruno went off comforted, feeling rather as he had in the Army when he had a

good officer who knew what he was doing and trusted his men enough to bring out

the best in them. It was a rare combination. Bruno acknowledged to himself,

although he would never admit it to another soul, that Gérard Mangin had been

one of the most important influences in his life. He had sought Bruno out on the

recommendation of an old comrade in arms from that hideous business in Bosnia.

The comrade happened to be the Mayor’s son. Ever since, Bruno the orphan had

felt for the first time in his life like a member of a family, and for that

alone the Mayor had his complete loyalty. He got into his car and drove back up

the long hill toward Hamid’s cottage, wondering what arts of persuasion he might

muster to prise poor Karim out of the custody of the tiresome Captain Duroc.

CHAPTER 8

The regional HQ of the Police Nationale had sent down their new chief detective,

Jean-Jacques Jalipeau, inevitably known as J-J. Bruno had worked amicably with

him once before, on St Denis’ only bank robbery. J-J had cleared that up and

even got some of the bank’s money back, but that had been two promotions ago.

Now he had his own team, including the first young woman Inspector that Bruno

had met. She wore a dark blue suit and a silk scarf at her neck, and had the

shortest hair he had ever seen on a woman. She sat in front of a freshly

installed computer in the exhibition room, while around them other policemen

were plugging in phones, claiming desks, booting up other computers and

photocopiers and setting up the murder board on the wall. Instead of the usual

gentle Périgord landscapes and water colours by local artists, the room was now

dominated by the long white board with its grisly photos of the murder scene,

including close-ups of Hamid’s bound hands and cleaned-up chest where the

swastika could clearly be seen.

‘Okay, here we go. Our rogues’ gallery of the extreme right. I hope your eyes

are in good shape because we have got hundreds of snaps for you to view,’ said

young Inspector Perrault, who had told him with a briskly efficient smile to

call her Isabelle. ‘We’ll start with the leaders and the known activists and

then we’ll go to the photos of their demonstrations. Just shout out if you

recognise anyone.’

Bruno recognised the first three faces from TV, party leaders in publicity

shots. Then he saw one of them again at a public rally, standing on a podium to

address the crowd. Then came random photos of crowds: strangers, ordinary French

men and women being addressed by party officials, each photo identified by the

name and position of the official, including various Departement chairmen,

secretaries and treasurers, regional chairmen, executive committee members,

known activists and local councillors. They were old and young, plump and

scrawny, attractive and lumpy – the kind of people he saw at the market or in

the crowd at a rugby game. In fact he knew one tough-looking chap who had played

rugby for Montpon, at the other end of the Departement on the way to Bordeaux.

‘Just that one,’ he said. ‘I know him through rugby. He’s played here once or

twice.’

She made a note and they continued. Isabelle’s short hair smelled of a sports

shampoo he recognised from the tennis club. She looked fit, as though she ran or

worked out every day. Her legs were long and slim and her shoes looked too

flimsy for a police officer and far too expensive, even on an Inspector’s

salary.

‘Who collected all these pictures?’ he asked, looking at her hands, nails cut

short but her fingers long and elegant as they danced over the computer keys.

‘We get them different places,’ she said. She had no regional accent, but was

well spoken, sounding cool but affable, a bit like a TV news announcer. ‘Some

from their websites, election leaflets, press photos and TV footage. Then there

are some from the Renseignements Généraux that we’re not supposed to know about,

but you know how computer security is these days. We take photos of their

marches and rallies, just so we know who they are. We do the same for the far

left. It seems only fair.’

She was screening images of what looked like a preelection rally in the main

square of Périgueux, shot after shot of the crowd, taken from a balcony. There

were dozens of faces in each shot and Bruno tried to scan them conscientiously.

He stopped at one face, but realised it was only a reporter he knew from

Sud-Ouest, standing to the side of the rally squinting against the smoke from

his cigarette, and holding a notebook and pencil. He rubbed his eyes and

signalled Isabelle to continue.

‘You sure you don’t want to take a break, Bruno?’ she asked. ‘It can send you

crazy, staring at these screens all the time, especially if you’re not used to

it.’

‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much use for computers down here. I don’t

really know how to use them beyond typing and emails.’

She stopped, told him to look out of the window to rest his eyes and came back

with some sludgy coffee from the hotplate they had rigged up in the corner.

‘Here,’ she said, handing him a plastic cup and juggling her own as she fished

one-handed for a cigarette and lit a Royale.

‘This coffee’s terrible,’ said Bruno. ‘But thanks for the thought. If we can

spare five minutes there’s a café on the next corner.’

‘You must have forgotten what a slave-driver J-J can be,’ she smiled. ‘When I

first started working for him I didn’t even dare go to the toilet. I’d go in the

morning and then just wait. I’ll probably pay for it when I’m older.’

‘Well, this is St Denis. Everything stops for lunch. It’s the law,’ Bruno said,

wondering if she would take this as an invitation. He wasn’t sure that he had

enough cash in his wallet to pay for them both.

‘I think we’re too pressed for time,’ she said kindly, and turned back to the

screen.

This time the photos, of the same event in the same square, had been taken from

another vantage point. Again, Bruno tried to look at each face. Nothing, nothing

– then he stopped. There was a face he knew, a central heating salesman from St

Cyprien to whom he had once given a ticket for obstruction. Again, Isabelle made

a note then went on scrolling. The same rally, yet another vantage point, but no

face he recognised except those that he’d seen in the previous photos.

‘Right, that’s the Périgueux rally. On to the one in Sarlat,’ said Isabelle,

clicking her way expertly through the computer screens. She probably used these

machines every day. The only computers they had in the Mairie were the big ones

used for local taxes and social security and the one he shared with the Mayor’s

secretary. In Sarlat the rally was smaller. Again, he saw a couple of people he

knew from rugby, and one from a tennis tournament, but nobody from St Denis.

Then she brought up the photos from a campaign meeting in Bergerac, and at the

third shot he gave a small gasp.

‘Seen someone? I can blow the faces up a bit if you want.’

‘I’m not sure. It’s that group of young people there.’

She enlarged the image but the angles were wrong, and she scanned through the

rest of photos, looking for shots from a different viewpoint. And there, close

to the stage, were two youngsters he knew well. The first was a pretty blonde

girl from Lalinde, about twenty kilometres away, who had reached the semi-finals

of the St Denis tennis tournament last summer. And the boy with her, looking at

her rather than at the stage, was Richard Gelletreau, the only son of a local

doctor in St Denis.

‘We may get lucky here,’ Isabelle said, when she had printed out the photos and

scribbled down Richard’s name. ‘The Party branch in Bergerac is two doors down

from a bank, and it has a security camera. Don’t ask me how, but somehow the RG

got hold of the tape and made some mug shots of everyone coming in and going out

during the campaign.’

‘Is that legal?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s not the kind of stuff that can be used in court,

but for an investigation … well, it’s just the way it is. If you think this is

something, wait till you see the stuff the RG has on the Communists and the left

– archives going back to before the war.’

The Renseignements Généraux was the intelligence arm of the French police, part

of the Ministry of the Interior, and had been collecting information on threats

to the French state, to its good order and prosperity, since 1907. They had a

formidable, if shadowy, reputation, and Bruno had never come across their work

before. He was impressed, even though the shots of the people entering and

leaving the FN office were not very good. It was too far for a clear focus, but

he could pick out young Richard easily enough, holding hands with the girl as

they went in, putting his arm protectively around her waist when they left.

They went through the rest of Isabelle’s mug shots, but Richard Gelletreau

provided the only clear connection to St Denis.

‘What can you tell me about the boy?’ she said, swivelling her chair and picking

up a notepad from the desk.

‘He’s the son of the chief doctor at the clinic here, and they live in one of

the big houses on the hill. The father is a pillar of the community, been here

all his life, and the mother used to be a pharmacist. I think she still owns

half of the big pharmacy by the supermarket. The girl is from Lalinde. She

played tennis here last year and I can get her name from the club easily enough.

The boy went to the usual schools here and has just finished his first year at

the lycée in Périgueux. He stays there in the week and comes home for weekends.

He’ll be about seventeen by now, a normal kid, good at tennis, not much involved

in rugby. His parents are well-heeled so they’d go skiing. And of course he was

in the mathematics class with Momu – that’s the teacher who is the son of the

dead man.’

‘Local knowledge is a wonderful thing. I don’t know what we’d do without it.’

Isabelle smiled at him. ‘Thanks, Bruno. Just hang on here and I’ll go and tell

J-J. It may be nothing, just coincidence, but so far it’s the only lead we

have.’

The forensics team were still working, and the fingerprints report had yet to

come in, but the preliminary report that lay on Isabelle’s desk was clear

enough. Hamid had been hit hard in the face, probably to stun him, and then tied

up for some time. The weals on his wrists where he had tried to work loose the

rough red twine that farmers use were a clear indication that he had been alive

and working on his bonds for more than a few minutes. He had been stabbed deep

into the lower belly by a long, sharp knife, which was then pulled up and across

‘like a Japanese ritual suicide’ said the report. There was no sign of a gag,

and screams would have been likely from the victim, the report went on. Traces

of red wine were found in his eyes and his thinning hair, as though someone had

thrown a glass of it in his face. The time of death was put between midday and

two p.m., most probably around one o’clock. Indications were that the swastika

had been scored into his chest postmortem. Bruno took some small relief from

that.

There was no sign of a theft. Hamid’s wallet was found in the back pocket of his

trousers. It contained forty euros, an ID card, a newspaper photo of himself

standing in a parade by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and another of Karim

scoring a try in a rugby match. Apart from some old bills and postage stamps,

that was it. There was a cheque book from Crédit Agricole in a drawer with some

pension slips, and some previously unopened mail from the bank, mainly showing

deposits from a military pension. The old man had over 20,000 euros in the bank.

Bruno raised an eyebrow at that. He knew from the Mairie’s records that Momu and

his father had bought the small cottage two years ago for 78,000 euros in cash,

which was not a bad deal given the predatory way the local agencies were pricing

up every tumbledown ruin to sell to the English and the Dutch.

The old man had had no luxuries in the cottage, not even a refrigerator. He kept

his supplies in a small cupboard – wine, paté, cheese, fruit and several bags of

nuts. There were two litre bottles of cheap vin ordinaire, and one very good

bottle of a Chateau Cantemerle ’98. At least sometimes the old man had cared

about what he drank. There was cheap ground coffee in an unsealed bag on the

shelf above the small stove which was fuelled, like the hot water, by gas

canisters. This was routine in rural homes; Bruno cooked and heated his own

water in the same way. He continued to run his eye down the list: Hamid had no

gun and no hunting licence, but he did have an up-to-date fishing licence and an

expensive fishing rod. No TV, just a cheap battery radio tuned to France Inter.

No newspapers or magazines, but a shelf of war and history books whose titles

were listed in the report. There were books on de Gaulle, on the Algerian War,

the French war in Vietnam, World War II and the Resistance. And two books on the

OAS, the underground army of the French Algerians who had tried to assassinate

de Gaulle for giving the colony its independence. That might be significant,

Bruno thought, although he could see no connection to a swastika. Apart from the

money, and the medal and photo that had disappeared, there was not a lot of

evidence of what seemed to have been a rather lonely and even primitive life.

At the back of the file, Bruno found a new printout showing details from the

pensions computer. Until almost two years ago, Hamid had been living up in the

north, over twenty years at the same address in Soissons, until his wife Allida

died. Then he moved to the Dordogne. Bruno did the calculation. The old man had

come here the month after Karim’s marriage, probably to be with the only family

he had left. His profession was listed as gardien, or caretaker. Bruno scanned

the pension printout. He had worked at the military academy, where he’d had a

small service flat. Yes, they’d do that for an old comrade with a Croix de

Guerre. And with a service flat, he’d have paid no rent, which would account for

the savings. There was no sign on the pension form of any medical problem, and

no doctor was listed.

That reminded him. He rang Mireille at the Mairie to see if the Ministry of

Defence information had arrived yet. No, but she could tell him that Hamid was

not named on any local doctor’s lists, nor at the clinic, nor with any of the

pharmacies in town, and no medical claims were registered on the social security

computer. Evidently he was a healthy person, probably thanks to having been a