The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (17 page)

“Come along,” said the mayor, breaking into his reverie. “My counterpart has invited us to the
mairie
for a postdebate reception. Apparently Luchan has begged off, probably terrified of being cornered by some aggrieved local Greens. But we can enjoy mingling with all the political kingmakers celebrating the launch of their new star.”

The reception turned out to be a scrum, too many people and too much alcohol in too small a room, and all of them trying to cluster around Madeleine. She had managed to secure some space around her by standing behind a small table on which stood her handbag, a vase filled with flowers and a stack of campaign leaflets that carried a photograph of her with her family and the Patriarch. The caption read “Madeleine Desaix, mother, winemaker and a powerful voice for our Périgord.” She was signing them as souvenirs. Still, Bruno felt absurdly pleased when she spotted him, called out his name and beckoned him to struggle through the crowd to be kissed on both cheeks.

As always when he slept alone, Bruno awoke at once to full consciousness, aware of the familiar bedroom of his home despite the darkness now that dawn came a little later each day. He rose and opened the door to greet Balzac, who slept in the kitchen and somehow always seemed to wake a moment or so before his master, and let him into the garden. Bruno ran through the morning exercises he had continued since his time in the army, drank a small glass of water, then donned his tracksuit and running shoes. With Balzac at his heels he checked the chicken run and then set off into the familiar woods for the morning jog that allowed him to think about the day ahead. There was Hector to exercise, then breakfast at Fauquet’s before the market began, and he should check that all was well with Imogène. That meant he’d have to make some discreet inquiries in the
procureur
’s office to see if he planned to prosecute her. He also needed to see Fabrice to ask what he’d been doing the night that Rollo’s garden had been destroyed.

He was in the café just before eight, the market stalls already erected in the square outside with minimal fuss and argument about who had the choice spots. Now that the summer rush had ended, only the regulars remained in the market. They all knew one another, and in the space behind their stalls they prepared and ate their
casse-croûte
together at around ten when the morning rush was over. Sipping his coffee, Bruno scanned the headlines in
Sud Ouest,
lingering only at the photo of Rollo looking sadly over his demolished garden. The story took up most of an inside page.

Bruno waited until the stroke of eight before calling his colleague Quatremer in Lalinde to ask if Fabrice had a regular girlfriend. He got a name, Véronique Ferreira, and asked what car she drove. A small red Peugeot, he was told. The name Ferreira meant she was from one of the Portuguese families who had come to the Périgord in the twenties and thirties to work as fruit and grape pickers. Hard workers, most had stayed and prospered. Bruno finished his croissant and second coffee and went out to the market to see José, who ran the stall that sold work clothes, flannel shirts and cheap boots. He was also a Ferreira, and Bruno asked him if he knew Véronique, who turned out to be a cousin.

“Why do you want to know?” José asked, some suspicion in his voice. He knew Bruno well, but family is family. Bruno explained it was her boyfriend, Fabrice, who interested him, and he needed to check with Véronique if she had been with him on Wednesday evening. Bruno was so accustomed to young men citing their girlfriends as their alibis that he’d learned to check with the girlfriends first.

“She can’t have been with him then; it was my aunt’s birthday. We were all there until well after midnight, the whole family, and there was no young man with Véronique. She left with her parents, so I don’t think she’d have gone out after that, not on a weeknight. She works in the dentist’s office in Lalinde, and they start at eight,” José said. “What’s this Fabrice like? Is he in trouble?”

Bruno shrugged and said the young man seemed to have a job but suggested that José check with the rugby club on Fabrice’s suspension. He thanked José and then rang Fabrice and found him in his car, heading to work on the Patriarch’s estate. He sounded nervous but agreed to meet Bruno at nine in the barn behind the château where the estate offices were located. Bruno had seen Fabrice play and knew him to be a large and brawny young man, fit but not very fast, with his head shaved down to a stubble and tattoos on his neck and arms. In his gamekeeping gear, they weren’t visible. Bruno began by asking about the rifle that fired the tranquilizer darts. Fabrice unlocked the chest inside his truck and brought it out. It was clean and well cared for, recently oiled.

“You know the regulations say it has to be stored in the place where it’s registered, the fish farm,” Bruno said.

“I know, but this is more secure.”

“Not if your truck gets stolen. Where’s the vet’s certificate and the inventory for the darts and tranquilizers?” Bruno checked through the papers and asked, “When did you last use the gun?”

“Last weekend. I stayed up all Monday night, watching for those otters. I got one on Sunday evening, the male, and then we put him in a trap by the fishpond. Sure enough his mate came up after midnight. She was very quiet, very careful, but I got her as well, and now they’ve both been shipped way back upstream.”

“You haven’t filled in the number of darts fired. You know you have to do that. And where are the doses of tranquilizer?”

“In the fridge at home. I fired several darts, some missed.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you fired and missed and an otter still stayed around to be hit by a second dart? Or maybe a third? That’s hard to believe.” Bruno was now convinced that Fabrice was lying.

Fabrice shrugged, saying nothing.

Bruno tried another tack. “I heard you’re pretty keen on mountain biking, is that right?”

“What, mountain bikes? Me? No way, you must be thinking of somebody else. I like motors.”

“Where were you Wednesday evening and night?” Bruno asked.

“With my girlfriend, Véronique.”

“Are you sure about that? A truck that sounds like yours was seen late at night near Limeuil. We were told it was hunting wild boar.”

“Nothing to do with me,” said Fabrice, shaking his head. “I was with Véronique all night. She’s quite a girl—you know these passionate Portuguese.” He gave Bruno a wink, one guy to another.

“Right, we’ll draw up a statement for you to sign. You have to be sure it’s right because it will go to the
procureur
’s office.” Bruno had no qualms about trapping the young man. He didn’t like dirty play on the rugby field, didn’t like men talking about their girlfriends that way and didn’t like people misusing weapons. And he did like Rollo and his garden.

Fabrice took Bruno into the small room in the barn that was his office to draft the statement. There was a calendar on the wall featuring photos of naked big-bosomed girls.

“Let’s be absolutely sure about the date, Wednesday evening and night, the day before yesterday,” Bruno said, handing Fabrice his pen.

“That’s right, no doubt about it,” said Fabrice and signed. Bruno witnessed the signature and then used his office stamp to make the document formal. Fabrice looked relieved when Bruno turned as if to go.

“I’ll just go and check your story with your girlfriend—Véronique Ferreira, I believe her name is. Am I right in thinking I’ll find her at the dentist’s office in Lalinde?” Bruno asked.

“You know her?” Fabrice looked startled.

“I know her well enough to tell you she was at her aunt’s birthday party Wednesday evening and then went home late with her parents and was still on time at the dentist’s office the next morning,” Bruno said. “You weren’t with her all night, even though you just signed a sworn statement that you were. That’s perjury; making false statements is a criminal offense.”

Fabrice swallowed. “I made a mistake, I confused the day.”

“Tell it to the magistrate. You’d better tell your boss you won’t be working today. You’re going to be in a gendarmerie cell. In fact, you’ll probably be there all weekend. I doubt the magistrate will get around to questioning you until Monday morning.”

“
Putain,
you can’t do this to me when I just got the date confused.” Bruno simply stared at him. “I can’t afford to lose this job,” Fabrice added.

“So tell me what really happened Wednesday night. And don’t bother to lie. I know most of it, tranquilizing the wild boar, short-circuiting the fence around that garden, putting the boar in.”

Fabrice’s face seemed to collapse. He ran a hand over the stubble on his head and sat down heavily beside the table where he had just signed the false statement. He breathed out noisily and looked first at Bruno and then at the door as if thinking of making a run for it.

“Now that it’s been stamped and sealed, it’s an official legal document,” said Bruno, picking up the statement and putting it in his shirt pocket. “It won’t go away, Fabrice. Why not tell me the full story of what happened that night? You weren’t alone, so who were you with? Did some friend talk you into it after a few beers, a bit of a joke that went too far? Was that the way it happened? Maybe there are mitigating circumstances, but I can’t know until you tell me.”

Fabrice remained silent. He had closed his eyes, clenched the fists he was too ready to use on the rugby field, and his face was turning red, as if he was holding his breath. Bruno waited, knowing that silence was one of an interrogator’s best weapons. Finally Fabrice blew out his breath, almost like a horse snorting. Half expecting violence, Bruno automatically thought how to react. Fabrice was bigger, younger and probably stronger, but the only rule for that kind of fight was to deliver the first, decisive blow. Fabrice would have to rise, his body still half bent. Bruno could slam the man’s face down onto his own rising knee and break his nose. He had no handcuffs with him, but he saw leather straps hanging from the wall, the kind hunters used to haul deer from deep woods. They would do.

Fabrice shook his head, as if to clear it. Then his shoulders slumped. This was not a man preparing to fight. A few moments ago he’d had no troubles in the world. Now he looked defeated, but he still had not spoken. Bruno would have to bluff the story out of him.

“The next stop is the gendarmerie, Fabrice. We’ll take your fingerprints, of course,” Bruno said. “We’ll also do a swab for your DNA, like you’ve seen on television. The forensics experts will test that against the wire on the fence in that garden those boars destroyed. There’s no arguing with that. So that’s criminal damage, and Rollo is a popular guy with that radio program, so that will be two, maybe three years. Then there’s the misuse of an official gun, that could be another year. You’ll never get a hunting license again, and you can forget about Véronique. And then when you get out of jail, there’ll be the civil damages to pay to Rollo for the loss of his garden.

“That’s not much of a future,” Bruno went on, his voice sympathetic, but privately he was starting to worry. Unless Fabrice started talking, he had very little on the man. Swearing to a false statement was hardly a serious charge, simply the kind the police used as a lever to extract more information. The
procureur
’s office would probably laugh at Bruno if he tried to file it.

“Anything you can tell me that might help? It’s just that I can’t work out why you did it, what you had against Rollo and his garden. You didn’t even go to his school. Do you know who he is?”

“That gardening guy on the radio,” Fabrice said.

Bruno felt a wave of relief. At last he’d broken silence; it should be easier now. “So why did you do it? Why risk your job, your freedom?”

“I was told…I was asked to do it, like a favor.”

Bruno felt even more relief; he had an admission. “Who asked you to do it?”

Fabrice shook his head and refused to say another word. Bruno felt more baffled than frustrated until he finally went outside to phone Sergeant Jules to say he’d be bringing Fabrice to spend the day in a cell while the petty charge was filed. Bruno could almost hear Jules’s surprise on the phone, but he agreed to take a DNA swab. He and Bruno both knew that the swab would never be examined. Police budgets didn’t stretch to a full DNA test on something as minor as this.

Bruno was almost ashamed of himself as he informed the estate office manager that Fabrice was being taken into
garde à vue
in an inquiry over false statements. Then he set off to drive Fabrice to St. Denis. His interrogator’s tricks had not worked, his threats were going to prove empty, and he still had no idea what lay behind the destruction of Rollo’s garden. Who could be the person for whom Fabrice was doing the favor? It had to be someone or some group in a position to reward Fabrice very handsomely or to punish him with something greater than Bruno’s threat of prison. It could be a very close member of Fabrice’s family or perhaps someone he loved.

Once started, Bruno knew he had to carry through this charade with Fabrice and marched him into the gendarmerie to be processed. Sergeant Jules solemnly entered Fabrice’s details in the big daybook, gave him the usual warnings and told him of his rights. Fabrice’s belt and bootlaces were confiscated, his fingerprints and a mouth swab taken, and then he was led downstairs. Bruno tried one last time to get Fabrice to talk, but he just shook his head stubbornly, sat on the cell bench and lowered his head to stare at his laceless boots.

As Bruno turned to go, Fabrice asked, “When do I get my phone call? The gendarme upstairs said I had a right to see a lawyer and to telephone someone. When does that happen?”

“As soon as the desk sergeant has a free moment. I’ll tell him you asked. Anything else?”

Fabrice shook his head, and Bruno left, the cell door locking itself automatically behind him. Upstairs, he checked the
annuaire
for the number of the dentist’s office in Lalinde. He called and spoke to Véronique, who confirmed that she had indeed spent the evening at a family celebration. She’d not seen Fabrice since the previous weekend and added that she didn’t intend to see him again.

“Is he in trouble again?” she asked, not sounding too concerned about the answer.

“Just a routine inquiry,” Bruno replied.

Bruno waited in a side room until Fabrice had been allowed to make his call and then taken back to his cell. Bruno dialed the code that brought up the last number called on the gendarmerie phone. It seemed familiar. He checked the special directory that identified subscribers by their number and found that Fabrice had called the estate office of the Patriarch’s château, even though he knew Bruno had already informed them of Fabrice’s arrest. Why on earth would he do that? And why had Madeleine put in a good word for him to join the Lalinde club? He’d have to call her.

“You’ll be interested in this,” said Sergeant Jules. “I called it up on the computer after you phoned.” He handed Bruno a printout of Fabrice’s criminal record. He had a stint in juvenile reform school for repeated car theft, one six-month suspension for drunken driving, and he was still serving a year of probation for putting another man in the hospital in a fight in a Bergerac bar.