The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (5 page)

“I’ll phone you at the
mairie,
about that lunch we discussed with Marco and the countess,” Madeleine called after him.

Bruno went home to change out of uniform and pick up his dog. This was supposed to be his Saturday off duty, but Gilbert’s death and the accident with the deer had taken him well into the afternoon. If he ever charged St. Denis for all the off-duty time he spent working, he’d be earning almost as much as the late Colonel Gilbert. At least he was alive and well to enjoy a fine day with the bracing nip of autumn in the air and the trees flooding the valley with color. It would be a perfect afternoon for a ride.

He called Pamela to see if she’d like to join him. He knew that she would have already taken the horses out for their morning exercise—she did so whenever Bruno failed to turn up by seven-thirty—but there was no reply. When he reached her house, he saw her car had gone. In the stables, his horse, Hector, tossed his head eagerly and pawed at the ground until Bruno’s dog, Balzac, trotted forward to greet the great horse with whom he often slept, tucked up in a nest of warm hay in a corner of Hector’s stall. The elderly mare, Victoria, ignored Bruno and the young basset hound, keeping her attention on the hay in her manger, as if to demonstrate that she’d had quite enough exercise already.

Balzac at his horse’s heels, Bruno trotted up the lane on Hector and then slowed to a walk as they went up the slope to the ridge, musing once again on his relationship with Pamela and whether it had a future. She had returned a few days earlier from another trip to Scotland for the sale of her late mother’s house. Bruno and Pamela had shared several rides but had not slept together for some weeks now, unusual even for their off-again, on-again affair. A woman who carefully guarded her privacy, Pamela always seemed delighted to see him, but somehow matters had been arranged so that when she invited him to dinner, they were never alone. She would bid him an affectionate good-night with the other guests.

Perhaps that was as it should be, Bruno reflected, a gentle way to end their affair that ensured they could remain friends and riding partners. Not for the first time, he chided himself for breaking his usual rule of never getting romantically involved with a woman who lived in the commune of St. Denis. It meant their relationship was constantly observed by the other townsfolk, particularly by the mothers of unmarried daughters, who were always keen to discern whether Bruno as the town’s most eligible bachelor was becoming available once again.

It also meant that ending the affair was unusually delicate. Bruno knew he had no gift for such maneuvers, unsure how to relate to a woman who had suddenly become a kind of stranger after he had shared her bed. Courtesy required that he make it clear that he still found her desirable, even when they both knew their intimacy was over. Indeed, it was graven deep into the bones of any true Frenchman that every woman from sixteen into old age had still to be treated as possessing sensual charm and allure.

Bruno knew that he was a romantic at heart, incapable of involving himself with a woman if he was not at least a little in love, sufficient to sweeten the precious time after lovemaking and to make him eager to spend time with her outside the bedroom. He’d long known there was no future for them; he wanted children, she didn’t. But he felt a deep affection for Pamela, and so he told himself that he should let Pamela decide the future course of their affair and accept what seemed to be her preference for winding it down with sufficient kindness and affection to preserve their friendship. He had to let Pamela believe that she was the one ending the affair. It would be his role to convey sadness along with a resigned acceptance, the impression of a man bearing up despite a broken heart.

As his horse topped the rise and he could see down into the valley, he felt a rush of satisfaction that he had reached a decision that he had too long delayed. He bent forward to pat Hector’s neck, marveling at how much more clearly he seemed to think when riding, and then tapped his heels gently and let Hector stride out into a canter and then into a pounding, thrilling gallop along the ridge. He glanced back to see Balzac running bravely behind, his long ears flapping as he tried in vain to keep up. But at least now his dog was big enough to keep his master in sight during their rides. As they reached the trees, Bruno reined in and steered Hector down the trail that led to the quarry and to the long hunters’ path that led back toward St. Denis.

An hour or so later, he was trotting back up the lane to Pamela’s house and saw her ancient Citroën
deux-chevaux
parked in the courtyard. He knew the car was older than he was, and Pamela was proud of the fact that its vintage status meant it was worth considerably more now than when she’d first bought it. She came out from the kitchen door when she heard Hector’s hooves on the gravel, bent to greet Balzac and then followed him to the stables, hugging Bruno when he dismounted. He took off the saddle and then each of them automatically picked up a rag to rub Hector down, one on each side. Then they brushed him before giving the horse his after-ride apple and draping a blanket over his long back.

“Is it your Sunday off tomorrow?” she asked as they strolled back to the house. When he said it was, she went on, “There’s a riding stable that I know near Meyrals, and it’s up for sale. Some of the horses are first-rate, and I thought you might want to help me pick one out. Poor Victoria is getting too old for the kind of riding I enjoy.”

“You know more about horses than I do, but I’d like to come along.” Pamela had taught him to ride and was a much-better rider. He’d noted that she had become more cautious than she’d been before she’d fallen when Bess, her favorite horse, had broken a leg in a rabbit hole and had to be put down. Bruno sometimes wondered if Pamela had ever forgiven him for executing that coup de grâce, necessary as it had been.

“I had a text from Fabiola,” Pamela went on. “She and Gilles get back this evening, so I went shopping for dinner and got a shoulder of lamb. I was hoping you might make that dish of yours with Monbazillac.”

“Not enough time,” he said, thinking that there was rosemary and mint in the garden. “The proper version takes twelve hours, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’ve got some smoked trout and horseradish to begin, and I’ll make an apple tart. I think there are some black currants left in the freezer. I’ll check that, and you know where the wine is. There’s an open bottle of Monbazillac in the fridge if you need that for the lamb.”

In this part of Périgord, where the water table is high, few of the old homes boast a cellar, so Pamela kept her wines in a small cave Bruno had helped her make beneath the stone steps that led up to her pigeon tower. He brought back a 2011 white from Château Monestier La Tour to go with the fish and a bottle of Pécharmant from Château de Tiregand for the lamb. He went back to the garden for the herbs, and then he and Pamela worked contentedly together in the kitchen as they had so often before, each with a work surface on opposite sides of the sink.

“What time did Fabiola say they’d get here?” he asked, putting the white wine into the fridge and decanting the red.

“In time for drinks before dinner, about seven or so. They’ll need to unpack and wash, so I’m assuming we’ll eat sometime after eight.”

So Bruno had not much more than two hours for the cooking. He turned Pamela’s sometimes temperamental oven to two hundred degrees centigrade and began wiping the lamb with paper towels until it was completely dry. He cut some rough slashes into the fat side of the meat and then used the knife to poke a series of deep holes in the flesh and inserted a clove of garlic in each one. He stripped a couple of twigs of rosemary of their tiny green leaves and used a pinch of them to top off each hole. Then he poured some of the Monbazillac over the lamb, enough to moisten the surface. He’d already mixed together sea salt and red cayenne pepper, and he patted the mixture onto the surface of the lamb.

He glanced across to watch Pamela make the pastry, wondering at that inexplicable gift some people have of making perfect pastry every time. His pies usually turned out well enough, but never with the lovely, light touch that made Pamela such a peerless pastry cook. She put the pastry into the fridge to chill and began peeling the big green apples from her garden.

Bruno put two generous tablespoons of duck fat into the roasting pan, lit one of the burners on top of the oven to melt it and then browned the lamb on all sides and removed it. He laid down half-a-dozen sprigs of rosemary and put the lamb back in place, surrounded with heads of garlic before adding half of the Monbazillac. He was about to put the roasting pan into the oven when Pamela put a hand on his arm and said, “Trust me. I want to do something I know will work. I remember my mother doing this when she cooked lamb with a Sauterne.”

He watched, intrigued, as she took a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, filled a tablespoon with the rich, dark juice and drizzled it over the meat. Bruno raised his eyebrows, but Pamela’s cooking instincts were good, and he was always game for an experiment, so he cheerfully put the pan in the oven and checked his watch. He’d baste the lamb every fifteen minutes or so, and it would be done by eight. That would allow the meat to rest a bit while they ate the smoked fish. He was looking forward to that; Pamela’s blend of cream and horseradish went perfectly with the trout.

Now he began to peel potatoes while relating the events of the day. He’d expected Pamela to be more interested in Imogène and her deer than in the way the Patriarch’s party had ended with the death of Gilbert. So he was surprised when she looked startled and said, “But that was the man I met, very good-looking in a raffish, ravaged kind of way. He’s an old friend of Jack Crimson’s. Apparently they were at their respective embassies in Moscow in Gorbachev’s time when the Cold War was ending. He came up, embraced Jack and chatted with us both awhile and then led Jack aside for a moment to talk privately. Then I saw him being led stumbling away, and I thought he must have suddenly hit the booze rather hard because he seemed pretty sober when talking to us.”

“Are you sure? I’m told the man was an alcoholic. Maybe he could disguise it for a while.”

“No, he was switching back and forth between French and English, talking to me and Jack and then to that minister from Paris. And then when the Russian ambassador joined us, he and Jack began talking with him in very fluent Russian. I was most impressed. Juggling three languages fluently, and being coherent enough to talk to a foreign minister and an ambassador, make me think that he can’t have been that drunk.”

“He had a flask with him, full of superproof vodka,” Bruno said thoughtfully. “Maybe that was what put him over the top.”

“I didn’t see him use it, and it wasn’t that long after he’d left us that I saw him led away. But tell me about this woman with the deer. Why can’t the court just order her to accept a cull to control the numbers?”

“Politics. Neither the prefect nor the judges want to become targets for the animal rights brigade, so that would be a last resort. By ordering her to build a fence, they’re trying to force Imogène to agree to a cull.”

“And then we’d all be eating venison for weeks.”

“There are worse fates,” he replied, putting the potatoes into a pan of water and the peelings into a plastic bag, planning to take them home for his chickens. “How did Fabiola sound?”

“Very happy. I think it’s all worked out for them.”

“Let’s hope so.” Fabiola Stern, the young doctor who had arrived in St. Denis the previous year to work at the clinic, had been renting one of Pamela’s
gîtes
and had become a good friend and a regular riding partner for them both. But she seemed to take no interest in the opposite sex, spending much of her free time volunteering at a shelter in Bergerac for abused women. But then Gilles had arrived, a journalist from
Paris Match
whom Bruno had first met during the siege of Sarajevo when serving with the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia. Bruno and Pamela had watched fondly as the two of them had begun falling in love, but their affair had been blighted by Fabiola’s inability to consummate the relationship and her refusal to explain why. Some mysterious trauma in her life had blocked her.

Bruno, along with Pamela and Yveline, the head of the local gendarmerie, had tracked down Fabiola’s old professor at medical school, a woman now retired, and found that Fabiola had been sexually assaulted by another teacher at the school and the incident hushed up. Bruno had identified the professor who had raped her and had sexually mistreated some of the other women students. The man was now in prison, and with that symbolic act of closure Fabiola had been able, slowly and gingerly, to rebuild her emotional and physical life with Gilles.

Fabiola disliked big cities and wanted to stay in the Périgord, so Gilles’s own commitment to her had been important. He had accepted a buyout deal and given up his staff job at
Paris Match
to move down to St. Denis but still wrote for it from time to time as a freelancer. He had signed a lucrative contract for his book on the notorious Afghan bomb maker known as the Engineer, an autistic youth of Arab background who had grown up in St. Denis. His first draft finished and sent off to his publishers, at Bruno’s recommendation Gilles had taken Fabiola to the coast at Arcachon, a huge almost-landlocked bay south of Bordeaux, for a vacation.

When they arrived hand in hand, the scent of roasting lamb in itself a welcome reminder of the life and friendships they had made in the Périgord, it was plain that their time away together had been a success. Fabiola was glowing, and Gilles wore that dazed, enchanted smile of a man utterly in love. He could hardly take his eyes off Fabiola and kept touching her arm, her back, her hand, as if to reassure himself that she was real. Bruno felt himself chuckling to see their happiness and hugged them both before turning to pour their drinks, wondering at the strange magic of love that could spread such warmth and good feeling to all within reach.

The riding school sprawled for about four hundred meters along the side of a minor road. To the left there was a large riding ring filled with sand and surrounded by a wooden fence. To the right were two rows of stables for about twenty horses, and directly ahead stood a large barn, attached to a small cottage that seemed to be the office. A sign above the door said
ACCUEIL,
“Welcome.” Behind the barn a generous paddock sprawled back up a gentle slope to a manor house atop the hill. A handsome nineteenth-century building with a porch supported by two stone pillars, it was flanked on each side by two smaller buildings of the same stone, which might have been wings to the house or separate cottages. They formed a large courtyard that contained a terrace, a lawn and a vegetable garden that obviously needed weeding.

Altogether it made an impressive ensemble. Bruno saw a diving board to the right rear of the house that suggested a swimming pool. Overall the place appeared deserted and run down. The paint of the stables was peeling, and the windows of the offices had not been washed for months. There were no riders to be seen, and only a few horses were poking their heads curiously above their stable doors.

“It must have been a good-looking place once, but it hardly looks like a going concern. Do you know why it’s for sale?” Bruno asked Pamela as they climbed out of his Land Rover. She told him that two women had been running the place, and the one with the reputation as a champion horsewoman had died nearly a year earlier. The other, Marguerite, had found the upkeep too difficult with a big bank loan to be paid off.

The door to the office was locked, and there was no reply when they rang the bell. They strolled to the stables, looking at the horses, and then saw a woman in a head scarf half trotting, half walking, down toward them from the big house and waving. She was wearing riding trousers and a quilted riding jacket with slip-on shoes and looked to be well into her sixties. Beneath the head scarf her hair was gray. She was panting when she arrived and took a moment to collect herself before she greeted Pamela by name, shook hands and said she was Marguerite. Bruno introduced himself, and she must have recognized his name, since she instantly said, “Ah, the policeman from St. Denis. I hear you ride, too.”

The place had been up for sale for several months but had attracted no potential buyers, Marguerite told them. She was selling off the horses one by one to raise money. She shrugged, muttering
“La crise,”
the standard French term for the recession that had gripped the country for more than half a decade.

“I can’t keep the place up on my own, and I can’t really afford stable hands,” she went on. “So I’m prepared to be flexible on the sale price. For the right owner, of course.”

“It was just one of the horses that I came to see,” Pamela said, sympathy in her voice. “It’s a lovely spot and a good location. You’ve evidently made a very handsome estate of it all.”

“We were happy here for a long time. There’s the main house, the four
gîtes,
the stables, the riding school and the land. It was valued at well over a million a few years ago, but I know I’ll never get that now. And I’m too old to keep struggling on with the insurance rates and the vet’s bills going up every few months. It’s heartbreaking to think that Dominique and I put more than thirty years of our lives into building this up and now…” She bit her lip and seemed to brace herself. “If I must, I’ll sell it off bit by bit, the horses, the land, the
gîtes,
the house. I suppose that’s the only way.”

“Perhaps we’d better go look at the horses,” Pamela said kindly. “It was your Selle Français that we spoke of on the phone. I’ve always liked that breed. A mare, five years old, you said.”

“Yes, we call her Primrose. She was born here, descended from Duchesse, the horse Dominique rode at the Olympics. We were training her to be a show jumper, but then our best young rider moved away with her family, and her sister was our second-best prospect for winning medals. That was a loss; we had real hopes for those two. If ever you’re interested in running a riding school, take my advice: it’s the young girls who want to come here, but it’s the parents who pay, and there’s nothing like a reputation for winning prizes to open a daddy’s wallet.”

Marguerite led the way across to the stable block, prattling constantly and breaking off only to point out the various horses by name. Bruno noticed that all the stable doors needed painting, and some looked beyond repair. Some tiles were missing from the roof. But the stables that contained horses had clean straw and full buckets of water, and the stable yard was still damp from that morning’s cleaning.

“And there’s a Dutch Warmblood gelding you might also want to look at if you want a good strong horse,” Marguerite said. She was leading out Primrose, but she was addressing Bruno. “We call him Rudi. I’ll bring him out if you like, let you look at him, then you can ride them together. Rudi can do with a bit of exercise, but he’s very good natured, so you won’t find him difficult.”

She walked the two horses in turn around the stable yard. Pamela and Bruno began by making friends, offering each horse a carrot and then stroking their long necks. Pamela checked the teeth and legs and shoes with a practiced eye. Then they saddled each of them and took them to the ring, trotting gently. Marguerite kept the gate open, and having seen that they were good riders, she signaled to them to take the horses out into the paddock for a canter. They rode up to the house and then around the back, pausing to take in the weeds that were beginning to attack the all-weather tennis court that stood beside the empty pool. There was another paddock with half-a-dozen battered obstacles that needed a fresh coat of paint. Pamela took Primrose over two of the smaller jumps and then stopped beside a fine-looking orchard of fruit trees and asked Bruno to change horses.

“What does she want for the Selle?” he asked.

“Seven thousand, but I think she’ll have to come down. She’s a good horse, but there’s not much of a pedigree, so I won’t pay more than four. It’s a buyer’s market, these days, with the price of feed so high. What do you think of the Warmblood? He looks quite strong. Is he a bit of a handful?”

“I hadn’t heard of that breed, but the name suits him,” said Bruno, stroking Rudi’s neck. “He’s certainly strong with lots of energy, keeps wanting to break into a gallop. I don’t think he’s had much exercise lately. But he’s not difficult to handle, seems to have a good nature.”

Pamela gestured at something hanging in the apple trees and asked, “What’s that?”

They led the horses across to look and found each tree had a small plastic net containing crushed eggshells hanging in its branches. Baffled, they exchanged horses to ride back to the stable yard where Marguerite awaited, a hopeful expression on her face.

“I think seven thousand is a lot more than I can afford, even considering what you told me of the pedigree, and I’m not planning to ride her in competitions,” Pamela began. “But before we get into that, tell me about the
gîtes.
Do you rent them out?”

“Yes. They each have three bedrooms, and I charge twelve hundred a week in July and August, a thousand in June and September and eight hundred in May and October. That’s what’s kept me going after Dominique died. You may have heard of her, she was on the Olympic team at Munich so she was always the one who brought in the customers.”

“So your
gîtes
haven’t been full?” Pamela asked. She was speaking casually, but there was an alertness to her posture that Bruno recognized, a little tilting of her head that meant she was getting her teeth into something. He smiled to himself, thinking it was pleasant to know a woman well enough to interpret her moods from her body language.

Marguerite shook her head. “Not this summer. I’ve had to do all the cleaning and the laundry myself, and then there was the leak in the swimming pool that needed to be repaired, and I didn’t have the money for it. That’s why I have to sell Primrose. I’ll never be able to rent the
gîtes
if I can’t offer the guests a swimming pool.”

“I’ll give you four thousand for the Selle, and we can complete the sale this week subject to a checkup by my vet. I don’t want to bargain,” Pamela said firmly. Bruno had never seen her in business mode before. “But if you let me look through your books, I’ve got a friend who might be interested in buying the whole estate, if the price is right.”

“I’ve got some other people coming to look at the horses and then a riding class. If you come back this afternoon, we can go through the books then. Could you go to five for the horse? I really don’t want to let her go for four thousand. My friend Laura picked her out as a foal and always rode her until she became too ill, so she’s my favorite.”

“In that case we might not have a deal. I don’t want to pay any more. But let’s look at the books together, and then we can talk. I can come back anytime this afternoon, but I’ll probably need a few hours to go through your accounts and get a sense of the business.

“By the way,” Pamela added. “Why do you have those eggshells hanging in the apple trees?”

“It’s an old local remedy to stop leaf curl and pests. I’m not sure it’s very scientific, but it seems to work. Dominique was born in the countryside, so she was full of old remedies like that. She’d put yogurt pots half full of beer in the garden to drown slugs and save soapy dishwater to get rid of wasps’ nests.”

Marguerite swallowed and put a hand to her eye and wiped away a tear. “Sorry, I’m still not…You can see how the vegetable garden has suffered since she passed away, just like everything else. Just like me, really.”