The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (26 page)

Prunier waited until the door closed behind them and asked Bruno, “Anything you can tell me about his involvement? A guy like that doesn’t usually get interested in wills and murders.”

“It’s the connection with the Patriarch, that and the fact that Gilbert Clamartin seems to have had two paymasters.”

“I know that,” Prunier said patiently. “I think there’s something else going on.”

Bruno sighed and held up his hands. He was about to say something like
I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask the brigadier,
which even to him would have seemed both inadequate and offensive, when rescue came. He was saved by the bell, or at least by the vibration of his phone.

“Excuse me, I need to take this,” he said, and heard a very alarmed female voice saying, “Bruno, it’s Raquelle. I’m afraid Imogène’s gone crazy. She’s heading to confront Peyrefitte at the hospital to give his son her fawn. I thought I’d talked her out of it, but she’s gone and left a note.”

“Where are you?” Bruno asked, and heard the sound of a car horn down the line.

“Driving like a mad thing to Périgueux hospital, but I’m twenty minutes, half an hour, away. Can you get there faster and stop her? The note says she’s called the radio and newspapers to witness what she calls her gesture of reconciliation. She got a legal letter from Peyrefitte this morning, accusing her of manslaughter and demanding compensation.”

“On my way,” Bruno said. “I’ll see you at the hospital.” He closed his phone, explained to Prunier and asked if he could borrow a driver to take him to the hospital.

“We’ll take my car and a couple of uniformed cops,” Prunier said. “We might need them.”

The blue light flashing on Prunier’s car, another police car behind with its siren carving a way through the beginning of the evening rush hour, they raced up avenue Pompidou and into the Centre Hospitalier to find Imogène blocking the doorway with her fawn in her arms. Peyrefitte, eyes blazing, turned to see Prunier emerging from his car and two uniformed policemen following behind. Hampered by his leg and needing to put down his cane to use his arms to extract himself from the car, Bruno was slow to join them.

As if in slow motion, he saw everything unfold. Imogène stepped forward, her hair wild and her expression unreadable, and tried to thrust the terrified fawn into Peyrefitte’s arms. He flinched, stepped back and put up his hands to protect himself. News cameras began to flash.

The fawn wriggled from Imogène’s arms and darted for the nearest patch of greenery, a small roundabout covered in grass and small shrubs. An ambulance, its own siren taking over from the silenced police siren, braked hard in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the fawn. With a crunch of metal it skidded into another car that had just pulled away from the parking lot. Tires squealed, and then another car rammed into the rear of the ambulance.

Glass broke, airbags exploded, and horns blared. Imogène screamed and ran toward her stricken fawn.

“Cardiac victim, emergency,” shouted the ambulance driver, jumping from his vehicle and running back to find the rear doors of his ambulance jammed by the car that had crashed into them. “We’ve got to get him out and into the emergency room.”

As a shrieking Imogène ran past, Bruno grabbed her with both arms, lifted her off her feet and used his full weight to press her down against the hood of Prunier’s car and keep her from escaping. Uncomfortably close, the blue light on the hood was strobing in a way that was disorienting him, and he closed his eyes against the pulsing glare while burrowing his face into the squirming woman’s neck, telling her his name and asking her to stop struggling while her heels drummed furiously into his legs.

Time seemed to stretch out. Then a man in a white coat was beside him, injecting something into Imogène’s arm. Slowly, she stilled. The doctor helped Bruno stand up and two attendants put Imogène onto a stretcher and wheeled her away. Bruno had lost his cane and his képi.

The cars had been disentangled. The rear doors of the ambulance were open; the interior was empty. Deflated airbags drooped over steering wheels, but there was no sign of the drivers. By the roundabout was a small, inert bundle underneath a blanket. Photographers were snapping away around it. Bruno presumed it was the fawn.

“Looks like I got here too late,” came a voice and Bruno turned to see Raquelle. She bent down, picked up his walking stick from beneath Prunier’s car and handed it to him. She bent again and picked up his képi, flattened as if the tow truck had run over it. She looked him up and down, straightened his tie and collar, took a handkerchief from her sleeve and began dabbing at a sore spot on his cheek, saying, “She scratched you.”

They walked across to the hospital doorway where Peyrefitte, surrounded by reporters, was saying, “That women is evidently insane. She needs to be locked up for her own protection, let alone that of others.”

He was speaking in tones of cold, controlled fury. “Can you imagine the effrontery of this crazed woman, demanding I give this wretched deer to my sons who had seen their mother killed by one of the damn beasts?”

Prunier gave Bruno a friendly nod and then gestured to the two uniformed cops who began pushing the journalists back. Prunier took Peyrefitte by the arm, smiling sympathetically and guiding him into the hospital. It was smoothly done, thought Bruno. He turned aside, taking Raquelle’s arm, and led her away from the press people toward a bench from which he could keep an eye on Prunier’s car and on the hospital entrance. As they sat, a tow truck arrived and began to haul away the car that had run into the rear of the ambulance.

“I’m sorry, I should have kept an eye on Imogène and stopped her, but I thought I’d talked her out of it,” Raquelle said, lighting a cigarette. “She seemed to be fine, devoted to that little fawn, getting on well with the others at Le Thot, but opening that letter from Peyrefitte this morning seems to have driven her over the edge. The letter was addressed to her at Le Thot. He somehow found out she’s working there.”

“Somebody probably recognized her,” Bruno said. “Imogène has become quite a local celebrity over the past couple of weeks.”

“I think it might have been my sister-in-law. She visited me at Le Thot the other day, and she was angry when she saw Imogène working with me. And Madeleine knows Peyrefitte.”

Bruno felt a frisson at hearing her name but made do with saying, “They’re political allies; she’s going to replace him as candidate for the National Assembly.”

“It’s all she talks about, getting out the vote, visiting every town and village to make speeches, calling at all the hunting clubs. She’s got no time now for the vineyard, so Victor is having to do all the work, as if he didn’t have enough to put up with from her already.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

She threw him a sidelong glance. “An older husband, a much-younger and beautiful wife who’s never at home; what do you think? That marriage has been a sham for years.”

“Poor Victor,” said Bruno, feeling himself blush as the guilt began to build. It was odd; he’d never been able to control his blushing. It was if the blood vessels in his face were hardwired into his conscience.

“My brother is a very unhappy man.” Raquelle shook her head sadly and then looked at Bruno, and her face fell. “Oh, Bruno, don’t say she’s got her hooks into you, too.”

He looked down at his feet and said nothing, knowing his face was burning.

Raquelle sighed heavily, and then looked back at the hospital. “How long will they keep Imogène in there?”

Grateful for the change of subject, Bruno explained the usual procedure. The hospital would contact her doctor, which in Imogène’s case was Fabiola, and they’d review the police report on the incident and probably agree on a psychological assessment. It was rare these days for anyone to be confined unless they had been violent or were deemed to be a danger to themselves.

“I’ll brief Fabiola on what happened and then we’ll see,” he said. “Once Peyrefitte calms down, he’ll probably agree that he can hardly claim to have been assaulted with a baby deer by a woman half his size. People would tell jokes about it, and then he’d start losing public sympathy, particularly if he pursues his case against Imogène to the point where she’d be homeless. Peyrefitte’s a decent man, a good lawyer with political instincts, and he’s no fool; for the sake of his boys, he’ll realize it’s time to move on.”

“What a very unusual cop you are,” said Raquelle, stubbing out her cigarette. “Is that how they train you village policemen?”

“It’s not what I learned at the police academy, no. But it’s how the people of St. Denis trained me over the years.” Through the hospital’s entrance doors Bruno could see Peyrefitte and Prunier still locked in conversation.

“How’s your robot bull?” he asked. “If that got loose around here, it could do a lot more damage than Imogène’s fawn.”

“I’ve got it moving over rough ground, not very gracefully, but it copes. Did you ever hear of Big Dog, that American military robot, four legs, designed to carry supplies and the wounded over any terrain? It’s a bit like that, except Big Dog can run at fifty kilometers an hour. My auroch manages only six or seven.”

“Sounds like just the thing for hunters, carrying game back through the woods,” he said. “Ah, I think I have to go. That’s Prunier, the police commissioner, he’s my lift. We’ll stay in touch about Imogène.”

Bruno rose, kissed Raquelle farewell and limped across to Prunier, who was shaking hands with Peyrefitte before the lawyer headed back into the hospital. Prunier beckoned to Bruno to join him in his car. Once Bruno had inserted himself gingerly, Prunier told his driver to head for St. Denis and began punching numbers into his phone. When it was answered, he handed it to Bruno and said, “The brigadier wants to talk to you.”

“Prunier is going to bring you to join us at the Patriarch’s château,” came the brigadier’s voice. “On the way can you brief him on Colonel Clamartin’s statement, the one from the
notaire.
He’s been cleared to know.”

Bruno handed back the phone and said, “That was quick. Just an hour or so ago he told me not to tell you anything. How did you change his mind? You had time for no more than a couple of calls.”

“The brigadier is not the only one with friends in Paris,” said Prunier. “So what did Clamartin’s last testament say?”

“That the Patriarch might have been working under Russian control for many years,” Bruno said, and gave as full a version as he could remember of Gilbert’s statement.

Prunier nodded thoughtfully. “So Gilbert knew of this since 1989, but presumably Russian intelligence would have known of it since 1944. However, this is the first we’ve heard of it, even though people boast that we had some well-placed agents in Moscow over the years.”

“The brigadier told me that people had taken some very close looks at the Patriarch over the years, and nothing was ever found against him,” Bruno said, feeling some vestigial loyalty to the bold young fighter pilot who had entranced his boyhood.

Bruno was stretched out on the backseat, Prunier in the front passenger seat, his body turned so he could study Bruno. His face was neutral. After a long moment, he nodded, as if reaching a decision, and plucked one of the files from the briefcase by his feet.

“I have something for you, on that guy who assaulted you, Fabrice,” he said. “We wanted to find out how long he’d been waiting for you, so we checked his phone. According to the logs of the various cellular towers, he’d barely moved for nearly three hours. The signal kept coming from a location around your house. His next connection to a tower came about thirty minutes after you called the emergency services, and it tracked him all the way to the hospital here in Périgueux. So he was waiting for you at your place for two hours.

“That’s not all,” Prunier added. “He got two calls, both from an unregistered, disposable phone, so we don’t know who it was, but it was a number he’d called earlier that day in the morning. That number called him back just before three in the afternoon and then again after midnight. It sounds like somebody was telling him your movements.”

“What’s the number?” Bruno asked, thinking there was only one person who would have known his movements that afternoon and evening, known them all too well.

Prunier read it out. It meant nothing to Bruno. Prunier added that the phone hadn’t been used since that late-night call, and there had been no subsequent connection to a cell-phone tower that could give its location.

“What was the phone’s last-known location?” Bruno asked, knowing he could already guess the answer and feeling the stirring of some feeling he couldn’t quite name. There was some shame in it, some humiliation, some self-loathing at having been played for such a dumb, masculine fool.

“Bordeaux,” said Prunier. “For each of the calls to and from Fabrice, that phone was in central Bordeaux.”

Bruno nodded, aware that his shock must already be plain on his face and that Prunier was watching him closely. Whatever reputation for competence as a policeman that Bruno had earned over his decade in St. Denis was crumbling.

“Your statement said that you had been in Bordeaux all day and had driven back late after dinner with a friend,” Prunier went on. His voice was sympathetic, but still implacable. “Your cell phone bears out your statement. What’s interesting is that while you were in Bordeaux your cell phone was pinging the same tower as the phone that was in contact with Fabrice. That’s quite a coincidence.”

Bruno sighed deeply. “I’m an idiot. I’ve been played like a teenage boy.”

“You’re saying you were with a woman? The same woman who seems to have been briefing the guy who was waiting to brain you with an ax?”

“Pathetic, isn’t it?” said Bruno, glumly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Prunier, a glint of humor in his eyes. “Think of the jokes when news of this gets around. Screw what’s-her-name and die. That’ll teach you to take her flowers next time.”

Prunier turned to his driver. “If word of this does get out, Marcel, I’ll blame you. And you’ll be back in uniform and on night shift for the rest of your days.”

Prunier pulled from his briefcase the political leaflet Bruno had seen at the Bergerac debate, the one where Madeleine tried to coax the serene beauty of her face into something less intimidating, more like the girl next door.

“Is this her?” he asked and then looked himself at the image of Madeleine’s face. “I can’t say I blame you. She’s almost worth a visit from the mad axman.”

Bruno found himself smiling, briefly; a touch of gallows humor before the gloom returned. “Do you want my resignation?”

“Apart from the fact that you don’t work for me, why on earth would I want that?” Prunier asked. “It’s not a crime. You’re not married. It’s not even an indiscretion. And she’s not a suspect. Or is she?”

“She had a motive to bump off Gilbert,” Bruno said. “And she took the same wine course that her daughter is currently attending, which means she knows just as much chemistry. And there’s never any shortage of decent laboratories in wine country.”

“Would she have any conceivable motive to have you killed?”

“Only that I was suspicious about Gilbert’s death and kept on asking questions,” Bruno said. He was trying to see this from Prunier’s point of view. The phone logs meant that Madeleine would have to be questioned. Since she was a rising political star, this was tricky. If charges were brought against her and resulted in a conviction, her political career was over. If not, Prunier would have made a mortal enemy of a future deputy of the National Assembly who might rise even higher in the future.

“We can’t take this much further until we can question your axman, Fabrice,” said Prunier. “And surprise, surprise, he’s just gotten himself a very good lawyer. The cop we’ve stationed at the hospital says nobody was more surprised than Fabrice when this lawyer turned up and started referring to Fabrice as ‘my client.’ ”