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  Bruno, chief of police

  ( Bruno, chief of police - 1 )

  Martin Walker

  Martin Walker

  Bruno, chief of police

  CHAPTER 1

  On a bright May morning, so early that the last of the mist was still lingering low over the great bend in the river, a white van drew to a halt on the ridge over the small French town. A man emerged, strode to the edge of the road and stretched mightily as he admired the familiar view. He was still young, and evidently fit enough to be dapper and brisk in his movements, but as he relaxed he was sufficiently concerned about his love of food to tap his waist, gingerly probing for any sign of plumpness, always a threat in this springtime period between the end of the rugby season and the start of serious hunting. He wore what appeared to be half a uniform – a neatly ironed blue shirt with epaulettes, no tie, navy blue trousers and black boots. His thick, dark hair was crisply cut, his warm brown eyes had a twinkle and his generous mouth seemed always ready to break into a smile. On a badge on his chest, and on the side of his van, were the words Police Municipale. A rather dusty peaked cap lay on the passenger seat.

  In the back of the van were a crowbar, a tangle of battery cables, one basket containing new-laid eggs, and another with his first spring peas of the season.

  Two tennis racquets, a pair of rugby boots, training shoes, and a large bag with various kinds of sports attire added to the jumble which tangled itself in a spare line from a fishing rod. Somewhere underneath all this were a first-aid kit, a small tool chest, a blanket, and a picnic hamper with plates and glasses, salt and pepper, a head of garlic and a Laguiole pocket knife with a horn handle and corkscrew. Tucked under the front seat was a bottle of not-quite-legal eau de vie from a friendly farmer. He would use this to make his private stock of vin de noix when the green walnuts were ready on the feast of St Catherine.

  Benoоt Courrиges, Chief of Police for the small Commune of St Denis and its 2,900 souls, and universally known as Bruno, was always prepared for every eventuality.

  Or almost always. He wore no heavy belt with its attachments of holster and pistol, handcuffs and flashlight, keys and notebook, and all the other burdens that generally weigh down every policeman in France. There would doubtless be a pair of ancient handcuffs somewhere in the jumble of his van, but Bruno had long forgotten where he had put the key. He did have a flashlight, and constantly reminded himself that one of these days he ought to buy some new batteries. The van’s glove compartment held a notebook and some pens, but the notebook was currently full of various recipes, the minutes of the last tennis club meeting (which he had yet to type up on the temperamental old office computer that he distrusted) and a list of the names and phone numbers of the minimes, the young boys who had signed up for his rugby training class.

  Bruno’s gun, a rather elderly MAB 9mm semi-automatic, was locked in his safe in his office in the Mairie, and taken out once a year for his annual refresher course at the gendarmerie range in Pйrigueux. He had worn it on duty on three occasions in his eight years in the Police Municipale. The first was when a rabid dog had been sighted in a neighbouring Commune, and the police were put on alert. The second was when the President of France had driven through the Commune of St Denis on his way to see the celebrated cave paintings of Lascaux.

  He had stopped to visit an old friend, Gйrard Mangin, who was the Mayor of St Denis and Bruno’s employer. Bruno had saluted his nation’s leader and proudly stood armed guard outside the Mairie, exchanging gossip with the far more thoroughly armed presidential bodyguard, one of whom turned out to be a former comrade from Bruno’s army days. The third time was when the boxing kangaroo escaped from a local circus, but that was another story. On no occasion had Bruno’s gun ever been used on duty, a fact of which he was extremely but privately proud. Of course, like most of the other men (and not a few women) of the Commune of St Denis, he shot almost daily in the hunting season and usually bagged his target, unless he was stalking the notoriously elusive bйcasse, a bird whose taste he preferred above all others.

  Bruno gazed contentedly down upon his town, which looked in the freshness of the early morning as if le bon Dieu had miraculously created it overnight. His eyes lingered on the way the early sunlight bounced and flickered off the eddies where the Vйzиre river ran under the arches of the old stone bridge. The place seemed alive with light, flashes of gold and red, as the sun magically concocted prisms in the grass beneath the willows, and danced along the honey-coloured faзades of the ancient buildings along the river. There were glints from the weathercock on the church spire, from the eagle atop the town’s war memorial where he had to attend that day’s ceremony on the stroke of noon, from the windscreens and chrome of the cars and caravans parked behind the medical centre.

  All looked peaceful as the business of the day began, with the first customers heading into Fauquet’s cafй. Even from this high above the town he could hear the grating sound of the metal grille being raised to open Lespinasse’s tabac, which sold fishing rods, guns and ammunition alongside the cigarettes. Very logical, thought Bruno, to group such lethal products together. He knew without looking that, while Madame Lespinasse was opening the shop, her husband would be heading to the cafй for the first of many little glasses of white wine that would keep him pleasantly plastered all day.

  The staff of the Mairie would also be at Fauquet’s, nibbling their croissants and taking their coffee and scanning the headlines of that morning’s Sud-Ouest.

  Alongside them would be a knot of old men studying the racing form and enjoying their first petit blanc of the day. Bachelot the shoemender would take his morning glass at Fauquet’s, while his neighbour and mortal enemy Jean-Pierre, who ran the bicycle shop, would start his day at Ivan’s Cafй de la Libйration.

  Their enmity went back to the days of the Resistance, when one of them had been in a Communist group and the other had joined de Gaulle’s Armйe Secrиte, but Bruno could never remember which. He only knew that they had never spoken to one another since the war, had never allowed their families to speak beyond the frostiest ‘bonjour’, and each man was said to have devoted many of the years since to discreet but determined efforts to seduce the other man’s wife. The Mayor had once, over a convivial glass, told Bruno that he was convinced that each had attained his objective. But Bruno had been a policeman long enough to question most rumours of adulterous passion and, as a careful guardian of his own privacy in such tender matters, was content to allow others similar latitude.

  These morning movements were rituals to be respected – rituals such as the devotion with which each family bought its daily bread only at a particular one of the town’s four bakeries, except on those weeks of holidays when they were forced to patronise another, each time lamenting the change in taste and texture. These little ways of St Denis were as familiar to Bruno as his own morning routine on rising: his exercises while listening to Radio Pйrigord, his shower with his special shampoo to protect against the threat of baldness, the soap with the scent of green apples. Then he would feed his chickens while the coffee brewed and share the toasted slices of yesterday’s baguette with his dog, Gigi.

  Across the small stream that flowed into the main river, the caves in the limestone cliffs drew his eye. Dark but strangely inviting, the caves with their ancient engravings and paintings drew scholars and tourists to this valley. The tourist office called it ‘The Cradle of Mankind’. It was, they said, the part of Europe that could claim the longest period of continual human habitation.

  Through ice ages and warming periods, floods and wars and famine, people had lived here for forty thousand years. Bruno, who reminded himself that there were still many caves and paintin
gs that he really ought to visit, felt deep in his heart that he understood why.

  Down at the riverbank, he saw that the mad Englishwoman was watering her horse after her morning ride. As always, she was correctly dressed in gleaming black boots, cream jodhpurs and a black jacket. Her auburn hair flared out behind her neat black riding hat like the tail of a fox. Idly, he wondered why they called her mad. She always seemed perfectly sane to him, and appeared to make a good business of running her small guest house. She even spoke comprehensible French, which was more than could be said of most of the English who had settled here.

  He looked further up the road that ran alongside the river, and saw several trucks bringing local farmers to the weekly market. It would soon be time for him to go on duty. He took out the one item of equipment that never left his side, his cell phone, and dialled the familiar number of the Hфtel de la Gare.

  ‘Any sign of them, Marie?’ he asked. ‘They hit the market at St Alvиre yesterday so they are in the region.’

  ‘Not last night, Bruno. Just the usual guys staying from the museum project and a Spanish truck driver,’ replied Marie, who ran the small hotel by the station.

  ‘But remember, after last time they were here and found nothing, I heard them talking about renting a car in Pйrigueux to put you off the scent. Bloody Gestapo!’

  Bruno, whose loyalty was to his local community and its mayor rather than to the nominal laws of France, particularly when they were really laws of Brussels, played a constant cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors from the European Union who were charged with enforcing EU hygiene rules on the markets of France.

  Hygiene was all very well, but the locals of the Commune of St Denis had been making their cheeses and their pвtй de foie gras and their rillettes de porc for centuries before the EU was even heard of, and did not take kindly to foreign bureaucrats telling them what they could and could not sell. Along with other members of the Police Municipale in the region, Bruno had established a complex early warning scheme to alert the market vendors to their visits.

  The inspectors, known as the Gestapo in a part of France that had taken very seriously its patriotic duties to resist the German occupation, had started their visits to the markets of Pйrigord in an official car with red Belgian licence plates. On their second visit, to Bruno’s alarm, all the tyres had been slashed. Next time they came in a car from Paris, with the telltale number ‘75’ on the licence plate. This car too had been given the Resistance treatment, and Bruno began to worry whether the local counter-measures were getting out of hand. He had a good idea who was behind the tyre-slashing, and had issued some private warnings that he hoped would calm things down. There was no point in violence if the intelligence system could ensure that the markets were clean before the inspectors arrived.

  Then the inspectors had changed their tactics and come by train, staying at local station hotels. But that meant they were easily spotted by the hotel keepers who all had cousins or suppliers who made the crottins of goat cheese and the foie gras, the home-made jams, the oils flavoured with walnuts and truffles, and the confits that made this corner of France the very heart of the nation’s gastronomic culture. Bruno, with the support of his boss, the Mayor of St Denis, and all the elected councillors of the Commune, even Montsouris the Communist, made it his duty to protect his neighbours and friends from the idiots of Brussels. Their idea of food stopped at moules and pommes frites, and even then they adulterated perfectly good potatoes with an industrial mayonnaise that they did not have the patience to make themselves.

  So now the inspectors were trying a new tack, renting a car locally so that they might more easily stage their ambush and subsequent getaway with their tyres intact. They had succeeded in handing out four fines in St Alvиre yesterday, but they would not succeed in St Denis, whose famous market went back more than seven hundred years. Not if Bruno had anything to do with it.

  With one final gaze into the little corner of paradise that was entrusted to him, Bruno took a deep breath of his native air and braced himself for the day.

  As he climbed back into his van, he thought, as he always did on fine summer mornings, of a German saying some tourist had told him: that the very summit of happiness was ‘to live like God in France’.

  CHAPTER 2

  Bruno had never counted, but he probably kissed a hundred women and shook the hands of at least as many men each morning on market day. First this morning was Fat Jeanne, as the schoolboys called her. The French, who are more attuned to the magnificent mysteries of womanhood than most, may be the only people in the world to treasure the concept of the jolie laide, the plain or even ugly woman who is so comfortable within her own ample skin and so cheerful in her soul that she becomes lovely. And Fat Jeanne was a jolie laide of some fifty years and almost perfectly spherical in shape. She was not a beauty by any stretch of the imagination, but a cheerful woman at ease with herself. The old brown leather satchel in which she collected the modest fees that each stall holder paid for the privilege of selling in the market of St Denis thumped heavily against Bruno’s thigh as Jeanne, squealing with pleasure to see him, turned with surprising speed and proffered her cheeks to be kissed in ritual greeting. Then she gave him a fresh strawberry from Madame Verniet’s stall, and Bruno broke away to kiss the roguish old farmer’s widow on both wizened cheeks in greeting and gratitude.

  ‘Here are the photos of the inspectors that Jo-Jo took in St Alvиre yesterday,’

  Bruno said to Jeanne, taking some printouts from his breast pocket. He had driven over to his fellow municipal policeman the previous evening to collect them. They could have been emailed to the Mairie’s computer, but Bruno was a cautious man and thought it might be risky to leave an electronic trail of his discreet intelligence operation.

  ‘If you see them, call me. And give copies to Ivan in the cafй and to Jeannot in the bistro and to Yvette in the tabac to show their customers. In the meantime, you go that way and warn the stall holders on the far side of the church. I’ll take care of the ones towards the bridge.’

  Every Tuesday since the year 1346, when the English had captured half the nobility of France at the Battle of Crйcy and the grand Brillamont family had to raise money to pay the ransom for their Seigneur, the little Pйrigord town of St Denis has held a weekly market. The townspeople had raised the princely sum of fifty livres of silver for their feudal lord and, in return, they secured the right to hold the market on the canny understanding that this would guarantee a livelihood to the tiny community, happily situated where the stream of Le Mauzens ran into the river Vйzиre – just beyond the point where the remaining stumps of the old Roman bridge thrust from the flowing waters. A mere eleven years later, the chastened nobles and knights of France had once again spurred their lumbering horses against the English archers and their longbows and had been felled in droves. The Seigneur de Brillamont had to be ransomed from the victorious Englishmen all over again after the Battle of Poitiers, but by then the taxes on the market had raised sufficient funds for the old Roman bridge to be crudely restored. So, for another fifty livres, the townsfolk bought from the Brillamont family the right to charge a toll over the bridge and their town’s fortunes were secured forever.

  These had been early skirmishes in the age-old war between the French peasant and the tax collectors and enforcers of the power of the state. And now, the latest depredations of the inspectors (who were Frenchmen, but took their orders from Brussels) was simply the latest campaign in the endless struggle. Had the laws and regulations been entirely French, Bruno might have had some reservations about working so actively, and with such personal glee, to frustrate them. But they were not: these were Brussels laws from this distant European Union, which allowed young Danes and Portuguese and Irish to come and work on the camp sites and in the bars each summer, just as if they were French.

  His local farmers and their wives had their living to earn, and would be hard put to pay the inspectors’ fines from the modest sums they ma
de in the market.

  Above all, they were his friends and neighbours.

  In truth, Bruno knew there were not many warnings to give. More and more of the market stalls these days were run by strangers from out of town who sold dresses and jeans and draperies, cheap sweaters and T-shirts and second-hand clothes.

  Two coal-black Senegalese sold colourful dashikis, leather belts and purses, and a couple of local potters displayed their wares. There was an organic bread stall and several local vintners sold their Bergerac, and the sweet Monbazillac dessert wine that the Good Lord in his wisdom had kindly provided to accompany foie gras. There was a knife-sharpener and an ironmonger, Diem the Vietnamese selling his nems – spring rolls – and Jules selling his nuts and olives while his wife tended a vast pot of steaming paella. The various stalls selling fruit and vegetables, herbs and tomato plants were all immune – so far – from the men from Brussels.

  But at each stall where they sold home-made cheese and patй, or ducks and chickens that had been slaughtered on some battered old stump in the farmyard with the family axe rather than in a white-tiled abattoir by people in white coats and hairnets, Bruno delivered his warning. He helped the older women to pack up, piling the fresh-plucked chickens into cavernous cloth bags to take to the nearby office of Patrick’s driving school for safe keeping. The richer farmers who could afford mobile cold cabinets were always ready to let Tante Marie and Grande-mиre Colette put some of their less legal cheeses alongside their own. In the market, everyone was in on the secret.

  Bruno’s cell phone rang. ‘The bastards are here,’ said Jeanne, in what she must have thought was a whisper. ‘They parked in front of the bank and Marie-Hйlиne recognised them from the photo I gave to Ivan. She saw it when she stopped for her petit cafй. She’s sure it’s them.’