The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (18 page)

“Nasty dude,” said Jules. “He belongs inside if you ask me, so we’ll keep him here overnight. I heard what happened to Rollo’s garden. Do you think Fabrice was behind that?”

Bruno nodded. “I’m surprised it was just probation with a record like that.”

Jules pointed to the name of the gendarme who’d arrested Fabrice after the bar fight. “You know Ducas. He and Fabrice played rugby together, so he probably went easy on him in the report.”

Climbing the stairs in the
mairie
and heading for his office, Bruno felt the mobile at his waist began to vibrate. He looked at the screen and saw it was Pamela.

“Jack Crimson’s daughter has arrived,” she began in a businesslike tone that served to remind him of the change in their relationship. “We’re all going out to the riding school this afternoon to look it over if you’d like to join us, but in any event you’re invited to join us for dinner at Jack’s house this evening. Jack particularly asked that you come; I think he wants to show off his daughter’s cooking. He’s obviously very proud of her. Her children are still back in London with the other grandparents.”

“Have you decided whether you want to go ahead?” he asked.

“She hasn’t seen the place yet, but even if she doesn’t like it, I think I might buy it anyway. There’s some rather-good old furniture in the big house and a lovely old armoire in the barn, so I might offer to buy, furniture included. The barn is full of useful stuff, garden furniture, some of those handsome old canvas loungers for the pool. I’ve been through the books, and even being badly run it was making a modest profit. I know I can do better.”

Bruno didn’t doubt it. Even beyond his affection for her, he had a firm appreciation of Pamela’s talents. And it would be interesting to see Jack in the company of his daughter. One of the many things he had learned in his decade as a policeman was that one can learn a great deal about a person from the way he relates to his grown-up children.

But one of her remarks had set off a distant bell in Bruno’s head. She had mentioned a canvas lounger which reminded him of the dimly lit room in the Patriarch’s château where Gilbert had died. Some of his vomit had pooled on the lounger. If he could get that analyzed, thought Bruno, it might tell him something. He drove back to the Patriarch’s estate and was greeted at the main door by the housekeeper, who noted his uniform but also remembered him from the party. She raised no objection when he said he needed to visit again the room where Gilbert had died. She led the way, and when his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom inside, he looked around the half-familiar room but saw no lounger. He asked if it had been moved.

“No, we burned it,” she said. “It was ruined, anyway, even without the fact that he’d died on it.”

“Did you do that?”

“No, the new gamekeeper did it earlier this week. I think Victor may have told him to do so. Fabrice just said it was someone in the family.”

Bruno was so accustomed to wearing a uniform, or disguising it slightly by putting a civilian jacket over his uniform’s dark blue trousers and light blue shirt, that he felt slightly odd in his khaki slacks and checked shirt and blazer as he presented himself at Crimson’s front door just after seven. Wearing brown leather loafers rather than his customary black boots, his feet felt unusually light. In one hand he carried a jar of his homemade raspberry jam and in the other a bottle of his
vin de noix.
The door was opened by a plump, pretty woman in her early thirties with a hesitant smile, and something in her eyes that suggested she felt bruised by life. Her dark brown hair fell in natural curls to her shoulders, and over a simple dress of light blue she was wearing a
vins de Bergerac
apron that Crimson must have found in the wine shop.

She held out her hand to greet him and asked, “Are you Monsieur Bruno?” She spoke in that stolid English-accented French that made native speakers wonder if the English had any ear for rhythm or the musical tones of their language. “I’m Miranda and you are very welcome and thank you for getting my father’s paintings and furniture back after the burglary.”

“I think he was also especially pleased that we were able to recover most of the wine that was stolen,” Bruno said with a smile. He kept hold of her hand and kissed her lightly on each cheek before releasing it. She may have wanted to maintain the ridiculous English habit that men and women should just shake hands as if they were the same sex, but Crimson’s daughter was in the Périgord now. “And as one of his friends who is sometimes allowed to share his wines, I was almost as pleased as your father.”

Looking slightly flustered at being kissed, she thanked him for the jam and bottle and led him through the house to the terrace where her father and Pamela were watching the sunset and drinking scotch. A thin file of papers that looked like accounts was open before Crimson, and in front of Pamela was one of the notebooks she liked to use, open to a page filled with figures and notes in her neat handwriting. Bruno felt a flash of something that might have been jealousy at this new intimacy between Crimson and the woman whose bed Bruno had been sharing. Their affair might be over, thought Bruno, but some of the ties that accompanied it would never really go away. Miranda excused herself to return to the kitchen.

“Are you going to buy the riding school?” he asked, kissing Pamela’s cheeks and shaking hands with Crimson, who poured him a generous helping of Balvenie and left Bruno to add a splash of water.

“Well, we’re making an offer,” said Crimson. “If the owner accepts it, we’re going to divide the property. Pamela will buy the main house and the
gîtes
and garden and run them separately, and we’ll all jointly buy the riding school and stables. And the paddock, of course.”

“If this all goes ahead, Fabiola and Gilles are going to buy my property,” said Pamela. “They’ll live in my house and rent out the
gîtes
just like I do. Fabiola will continue working at the clinic, and Gilles can write his books and run the
gîtes.
Fabiola likes riding my old mare, so Victoria would go with the deal, and Gilles will be our first new pupil at the riding school.

“We’re a bit on tenterhooks,” she added. “Marguerite said she’d call us this evening to let us know if she accepts our offer. Jack has a bottle of champagne in the fridge so we can celebrate if she says yes.”

“In that case, we should talk of other things until you hear from her,” said Bruno, turning to Crimson. “And there’s something I have to ask you. I hear you had a brief, private conversation with Gilbert at the Patriarch’s party. Can you tell me anything about it? You already told me you didn’t think he was drunk.”

“He didn’t
seem
drunk,” said Crimson. “We’d been drinking champagne, and I don’t recall him getting any refills. I pulled him to one side to ask him about a mutual friend, a Russian woman that Gilbert had known in Moscow. She was called Ludmilla.”

“Why was she important?” Bruno asked.

Ludmilla Alexandrevna Gracheva was an economist, Crimson explained, and one of Gilbert’s many girlfriends. She was important because she was very close to Boris Yeltsin, had worked on his staff when he was mayor of Moscow and then went with him to the Kremlin after Yeltsin replaced Gorbachev. She was part of the economic reform team that brought in privatization and then went into one of the new private banks, but Crimson said he’d lost track of her after Putin came to power.

“I asked Gilbert if he was still in touch with her, and he said he was, but only sporadically, exchanging New Year’s cards and so on. She’d married and had children, he told me—and I’ve just remembered something. A waiter came up to us with a tray that had a large glass of orange juice, murmured something to Gilbert, and he took it. He hadn’t finished his champagne, I recall, but he gave it to the waiter.”

“One of the waiters dressed in an air-force uniform?” Bruno asked.

“That’s right. I’d assumed Gilbert had asked for it, so he wouldn’t be tempted to drink too much and disgrace himself.”

“And that was all?” Bruno asked, feeling a sudden frisson as he realized that Crimson must have had the opportunity to slip something into Gilbert’s drink. And who knew what motives might have been in play among old acquaintances in that strange, warped world of Cold War intelligence? It was an uncomfortable thought to nurture while enjoying the man’s hospitality, but Bruno realized that if his hunch about Gilbert’s death was correct, then Crimson had just become an obvious suspect.

“Then your chum the brigadier joined us, and Gilbert sort of drifted away, you know how it is at parties,” Crimson said. “I never saw him again.”

The doorbell rang and moments later Fabiola and Gilles were shown in by Miranda. Just as their drinks had been poured, Pamela’s mobile phone rang. She rose and turned away to answer it, gesturing at them with her fingers crossed for luck, and then turned back with a big grin on her face—the crossed fingers had become a thumbs-up.

“That’s wonderful, Marguerite,” she said into the phone. “We’ll meet at the
notaire
’s tomorrow to sign the initial contract.” She hung up and beamed at them all as she declared, “Time to open that champagne; we’ve got it.”

Fabiola and Gilles kissed each other, announcing that this meant they were now to become joint householders of Pamela’s property. Pamela kissed Miranda as Crimson went for the champagne, and then once it was poured and the glasses were clinked, toasts were proposed and everyone kissed everyone else.

Miranda led them into the dining room, and Bruno was able to appreciate the furniture and paintings he had recovered after Crimson’s burglary. On the longest wall were two large oil paintings, each of food. One showed birds and animals after a hunt, game birds, ducks and hares all displayed on a wooden table with two deer hanging from pegs in a stone wall behind them. The other painting showed fruit and vegetables heaped up in generous bounty on what looked to be the same wooden table, an old-fashioned bulbous wine bottle and a small glass in the foreground. Bruno recalled the inventory Crimson had made of the stolen goods; these two paintings were French, eighteenth century, and he’d forgotten the name of the artist, but they had been valued at sixty thousand euros.

On the wall to Bruno’s right was a nineteenth-century English oil painting of a landscape with hills and sheep and a sky with a mixture of clouds and light that Bruno thought was wonderful. Again he forgot the artist’s name but recalled that it had been valued at thirty thousand euros; he smiled at himself inwardly, thinking his unschooled artistic appreciation probably had more to do with money than with the art itself. The painting stood above a handsome chest of drawers in dark wood that was also valuable, although Bruno forgot how much it was supposed to be worth. The antique silver cutlery at the place settings had been valued at twelve thousand, and Bruno knew the stolen wine had been valued at more than fifteen thousand.

All this meant a degree of wealth and discreet good taste that Bruno could hardly begin to comprehend. But this was not like the Red Countess’s home, where Bruno had somehow automatically expected the furniture and possessions that went with the château’s history and her aristocratic heritage. Crimson’s was a different kind of comfort, more modest and far more personal, reflecting Crimson’s own taste as a collector rather than the countess’s inheritance from centuries of noble forebears. Bruno recalled Crimson telling him that he’d been most distressed by the theft of two charming English watercolors that he and his wife had bought each other early in their marriage.

Bruno wondered if Crimson’s possessions and comfort were of a level to which ordinary folk like himself might someday aspire if they had the good taste and timing to acquire them relatively early in life or at a time before antique prices had exploded. The countess’s far-grander circumstances were altogether different. But what of the Patriarch, Bruno pondered, a man from a modest family of the Périgord who now owned a handsome château and vineyard, walked with presidents and princes, took part in the councils of state and went on discreet missions at the request of a president of France? The Patriarch had carved out a brilliant career, all done and all won through his own courage and daring. An earlier generation might have said it had been won with the sword. It was good to know, thought Bruno, that France was still a country that believed in careers being open to individual talents, the central principle of the French Revolution and of Napoléon’s time that had followed it.

The arrival of Miranda with the soup tureen brought Bruno out of his reverie. They began with a carrot soup flavored with ginger. The main course was a dish that Bruno recognized as one of Pamela’s favorites: a fish pie topped with mashed potatoes and dusted with cheese to make a crisp, brown gratin. Miranda had used salmon, whereas Pamela made it with cod, but they each used smoked mackerel, shrimps and slices of hard-boiled egg atop the creamy sauce. Bruno thought he detected a pleasing hint of nutmeg in the sauce that he didn’t recall Pamela ever using. Miranda had made
petits pois
to accompany it, and her father served a dry white Bergerac from Château Thénac.

Toasts were drunk to Miranda and her cooking. The salad and cheese were served, and then Crimson brought a bottle of Clos l’Envège Monbazillac to accompany what he described as his favorite dessert. Miranda brought out what looked at first like a cream cake, but on close examination Bruno saw it was a large and almost-brown meringue, sliced in half and filled with cream and raspberries. Only as he took his first mouthful did he realize that the meringue had been flavored with hazelnuts.

“This is wonderful,” he told Miranda, who blushed prettily and looked down shyly at her plate as the rest of the table chorused their praise. “I’d really like to get the recipe,” he added sincerely.

He wanted to put Miranda at her ease and make her welcome. Bruno knew only that Crimson’s daughter had just gone through a difficult divorce, and for the past several years she had known her father as a widower. And so seeing him in this quite different environment, with new friends speaking a different language and embarking on a new business venture, must have been something of a shock. And he suspected she’d felt under a certain pressure when her father had asked her to produce a dinner for French guests in the culinary heartland of France. He complimented her on her French and asked after her children, Fabiola and Pamela joining him in helping Miranda over her shyness.

Crimson sought to pour out more Monbazillac and asked Bruno whether he expected any more developments over Gilbert’s death. Bruno put his hand over his glass and shook his head. This wasn’t something he wanted to discuss in front of Gilles. Good friend though he was, Gilles was still a journalist, with some freelance connection to
Paris Match.

Crimson seemed to understand Bruno’s reluctance. He turned to Gilles and asked, “Can we go completely off the record here?”

Gilles nodded.

“Come on, Bruno, tell us what you can,” Crimson said. “You know Gilbert was a friend of mine.”

“We’ll have to wait for the reading of the will,” Bruno said, wondering if Crimson’s determination to probe was itself suspicious. “That sometimes brings surprises. And I’m still baffled at the way he became so drunk so fast, though since he was cremated we’ll never know.”

“So it could have been a perfect crime,” Crimson said. “An alcoholic dies in a drunken stupor. End of story.”

Bruno shrugged. “Who had a motive to kill him? And why would they need to take the risk of murdering him when Gilbert was already killing himself with the booze?”

“Well, a bit of history goes with him,” said Crimson. “He probably knew better than any other non-Russian why that coup against Gorbachev failed, and how Gorbachev was so easily replaced by Yeltsin. I remember him telling me on the first day that the coup was doomed, that maybe the generals wanted to overthrow Gorbachev, but the captains and majors didn’t, nor did the troops.”

“He was that close to the military?” Bruno asked.

“Very much so. When he wasn’t at the Yeltsin White House, the Russian parliament building, he was at the defense ministry on the Frunze embankment. He told me that orders from the generals were just piling up unsent; the clerks sabotaged them, screwed up the coding and disabled their teleprinters.”

“Is that generally known these days?” Gilles asked.

“Yes, there were stories about it in the Russian media after the coup failed. Marshal Akhromeyev and his generals were drafting orders and pulling at the usual levers, but nothing happened. I was able to tip off London that the coup might not be a sure thing, but Gilbert had trouble with the ambassador, who simply refused to believe him. I heard they had a screaming match in the ambassador’s study and Gilbert was thrown out of the embassy and the diplomats tried to get Paris to recall him. Since he was a military attaché, under defense ministry orders, the diplomats couldn’t do it. And within a couple of days Gilbert was proved right, of course.”