The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel (4 page)

The accident wasn’t that serious, at least for the humans involved. A small van had hit a deer, which dented its hood and broke its headlights. Bruno knew the driver, Adèle, a woman in her forties whose husband worked for the milk cooperative. She’d been heading for church with her widowed mother. Adèle was shocked and weeping; the mother was made of sterner stuff, leaning against the van and smoking an unfiltered cigarette as she looked critically at the deer. Both its front legs were broken, and it kept trying to rise on its back ones, bleating pitifully as it kept collapsing. It was painfully thin, its ribs sticking out through light brown fur, its chest heaving as it panted in terror.

“There’s not enough meat to make it worth taking back for the freezer,” the old lady said. “It will be that crazy woman up the hill again.”

Bruno asked her to take her daughter back into the van while he took care of the deer. He pulled a tarpaulin from the back of his police van, asked Albert to hold it and screen the deer from Adèle’s sight. He dispatched the suffering beast with a shot behind the ear, and Albert helped him roll it onto the waxed canvas and put it into Bruno’s van. Then Bruno drove the women to church in Adèle’s car, reckoning she’d be in good-enough shape to drive after the service. Albert drove him back to his van, and he took the dead deer to the local butcher.

“Hardly worth it,” said Valentin when Bruno had laid out the deer on the chopping block in the room just behind the shop. Deer killed on the roads of St. Denis were given to the butcher, who’d prepare the meat for the old folks’ home. “There’s no flesh on it, it must be one of Imogène’s. I keep telling you, Bruno, you’re going to have to do something about that stupid woman.”

“We’re doing our best, but the law isn’t exactly fast on these matters,” Bruno replied. “She still has a few weeks to put up that fence the court ordered, and then she might try an appeal.”

“One of these days those deer will kill someone, mark my words,” said Valentin, picking up a cleaver.

Valentin was right, Bruno reflected as he drove up the hill to the home of Imogène Ducaillou. A pleasant but eccentric widow, she worked as a cashier and caretaker in one of the smaller prehistoric caves that dotted the region. She was a mainstay of the town’s literary club, with an inexhaustible appetite for romantic novels and books about animals. She owned and lived on a large tract of mostly forested land that abutted one of the main roads leading to St. Denis. A passionate Green and strict vegetarian, she loved all animals and hated hunting. She had posted
chasse interdite
notices all around her land, which was surrounded by hunting preserves that were used by the town’s hunting clubs. Deer aren’t foolish. Given a choice between land stalked by hunters and territory where they were banned, as soon as the hunting season opened the deer made a refuge of Imogène’s property, just as she had wished.

At first, all was well, although the hunters were unhappy at the scarcity of game in their traditional preserves. But soon the concentration of deer on Imogène’s land had become a different kind of problem as their population exploded and destroyed much of her vegetation. As a result, the deer were all painfully thin and becoming desperate enough to risk the hunters’ guns in their search for food. Today’s accident was the third in the past year to have been caused by deer leaving her land, despite warning signs and speed limits placed by Bruno on that stretch of road. Imogène had repeatedly rejected pleas by Bruno and the mayor to allow the deer on her land to be culled. As a last resort the prefect had secured a court order instructing that Imogène must fence her land within six months to protect those driving on the road nearby. Five months had passed, and she had still not done so. It would be expensive, probably too much for her to afford.

Deer were everywhere as Bruno drove up the winding, gravel lane that led to Imogène’s house, stretching up to nibble the remaining bark on trees, nosing into the earth to see if any shoots remained. There was no undergrowth, just earth and dead trees, and Bruno could see the wooden watchtowers, standing ominously at the edges of Imogène’s property, where the hunters waited for the deer to risk leaving her land in the search for food. The sight gave him an eerie feeling, evoking memories of newsreels of prison camps guarded by similar towers manned by sharpshooters.

Bruno stopped and climbed out of his vehicle, struck by the sense of standing at a frontier. Over a belt of some thirty or forty meters the woodland thickened from barren earth and bare trees on Imogène’s property to the usual fertile jumble of shrubs and ferns. Gazing at this strange contrast, his eyes sensed a sudden movement, and he realized that one of the watchtowers was manned. He leaned through his car window and sounded the horn until he saw an answering wave from the distant blind. He walked toward it, moving through the steadily thickening vegetation and into a clearing. The hide stood on its far side, mounted on four sturdy poles. Two men in camouflage jackets, one big and burly and the other shorter and slim, looked down at Bruno curiously.

“Come to check our hunting permits?” asked the bigger man. He looked familiar, as though Bruno had seen him in another context. His flat tweed cap triggered Bruno’s memory. This was the gamekeeper at the Patriarch’s château, the man who had carried Gilbert from the party. The smaller man was hanging back a little, almost as though trying to keep out of Bruno’s view.

“I can if you want,” Bruno replied affably. “But I was going to ask if you knew whether Imogène is at home or if you’d seen her car leave.”

“That crazy bitch,” the big man said. “No, we’ve seen no cars coming and going until you arrived. And we’ve seen no deer close enough for a shot, not even those skinny ones that come from her land.”

“They probably know you’re here,” said Bruno. The shorter man lifted a hand to pull his baseball cap farther down over his eyes, and Bruno recognized him as Guillaume, a bartender at one of the big campsites in summer who signed on as unemployed for the rest of the year. The gendarmes had picked him up a couple of times on suspicion of dealing drugs to campers, but nothing had ever been proved. Guillaume was a notoriously poor shot but still had the right to hunt his quota. Such men were useful; a keen hunter could go out with Guillaume, shoot in his stead and share the meat. And there were some who just liked extra opportunities to shoot to kill.

“Bonjour, Guillaume,” Bruno said. “Who’s your friend?”

“I’m Fabrice,” said the gamekeeper. “I’m just spotting for Guillaume.”

“Don’t you work for the Patriarch? Wasn’t it you I saw at his party carrying away that drunk?”

“That’s right. He was plastered, didn’t give me any trouble. Laid him down and he went right to sleep.”

“Do you know he’s dead?” Bruno asked. “Died in his sleep. I’ve just come from the château.”

Fabrice shook his head, looking surprised. “Poor bastard.” Then he shrugged and said, “There are worse ways to go.”

Bruno considered checking their permits, but he needed to see Imogène and so just wished them luck, told them to watch out for his return and headed back. He drove on at a crawl but had to keep stopping as the deer strolled along the road and gazed at him incuriously, somehow knowing that they faced no danger on these lands. He found it rather beguiling, thinking that a real refuge such as this could be a wonderful place, so long as there was sufficient food and water and a rational culling or export plan to prevent overpopulation. Perhaps that could be a solution, and maybe funds could be raised to help Imogène pay for the fence and the food. But she was unlikely to accept the culling. Bruno knew he’d have to try, pointing out the desperate thinness of the deer and the weakness of the young fawns he saw.

As he parked the van and climbed out, looking at Imogène’s run-down house with its missing tiles and sagging shutters, deer came up to nuzzle Bruno, doubtless hoping for food. She must feed them herself with what little money she has, he thought. He knocked on the door, which was suffering from years without repainting, and got no reply. But her old Renault 4 was parked beside the house, and her bicycle was on the porch. He knocked again and called her name, saying it was Bruno.

“What do you want?” she said from behind the closed door.

“There’s been another accident on the road. One of your deer had its legs broken.”

“So what did you do, kill it? That’s all you know what to do. Kill, hunt, kill. Why can’t you leave the animals in peace?”

“Because they’re starving, Imogène. The fawns are dying. The deer are desperate, so they come onto the roads. This can’t go on, Imogène. Open the door and let’s talk about this. I have an idea that might help.”

The door opened, and Imogène eyed him suspiciously. “What sort of idea?” She looked normal enough—short gray hair neatly brushed, brown corduroy slacks and a bulky sweater. She wore neither makeup nor jewelry. The sound of a piano concerto came from the room within.

“You only have a few weeks to put up a fence, and you can’t afford it. That means you either pay a stiff fine, which might mean having to sell your property, or you let us organize a cull of the deer. You’re now a bigger danger to these starving deer than the hunters.”

“You’ve said that before. I’m trying to raise funds from other animal lovers. I’ll find a way. But what’s this idea of yours?”

“I was thinking as I drove up here how pleasant it could be to have a real refuge, properly fenced and with sufficient food, to allow schoolchildren to come and walk here among the deer, absent of cars. Maybe some tourists in the season could pay enough of an entrance fee to help feed the animals. It would mean fencing the whole property, but I think there may be ways to raise funds for that.”

“There has to be a catch,” Imogène said. “But you’re the first man who’s come here talking any sense at all. Of course it would be a wonderful place for children. Come in and have some tea and we can talk about it.”

He entered a large sitting room that took up half the house. A kitchen was on the far side, where Imogène put a kettle on the old-fashioned woodstove that served both for heating and for cooking. The radio was set to France Musique, the piano music giving way to a voice he recognized. Three cats occupied an old sofa that looked comfortable. There was a big, round table covered in sketch pads, magazines and photographs of deer. More photos of deer filled the spaces on the walls that were not occupied by bookcases. Some of the deer were so thin he assumed Imogène must have taken them in these woods.

“I know everybody in town thinks I’m mad, but I’m perfectly rational,” Imogène said, giving him a cracked mug of what smelled like mint tea. “I know the deer are hungry, and my land can’t support them.”

Imogène went on to explain that she’d been promised some funds from animal rights groups but not nearly enough. She’d been quoted fourteen thousand euros to have the fence built, and that wouldn’t be for the whole property, just the stretch by the road and a couple of hundred meters farther back on each side.

“I’ve already got a mortgage on this property that I can barely afford, although heaven knows I’ve got nobody to leave it to,” she said. “I can’t afford a fence and can’t afford to buy any more fodder for the deer. I’m at my wits’ end, and I’m ready to consider anything that won’t involve hunting them or killing them. That I just can’t allow.”

Bruno wondered if any compromise would be possible. When she spoke of her deer, Imogène had an almost-religious fervor. It would be hard to shake her conviction, but he had to try. “We’d need to assess just how many deer this land of yours could maintain. Looking at it now, it wouldn’t be many. Your woods are dying from the deer chewing the bark and the shoots.”

“And what happens to the deer you’d call excess?” she asked.

“We could try zoos, other refuges, perhaps release them elsewhere in national parks.” It sounded feeble, even to Bruno.

“You think I haven’t tried that? All the animal refuges in France have the same problem. Some of them are even using contraception to stop the animals from breeding. And most of the national parks permit hunting these days, to their shame. No, Bruno, thanks for trying. I appreciate that you want to help, but we both know that your solution would mean culling the herd every year, and I couldn’t permit that.”

“The choice seems very clear, Imogène. Either you have the refuge and give a lot of your deer a good life, or you lose all of them, whether to the courts or to starvation. You could easily lose your house and land as well. If one of your deer causes an accident that kills or injures people, you’ll be sued for every penny you’ve got.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but I think the choice is even simpler: either the deer live or they get slaughtered.” She put her mug of tea down firmly on the table and sat up straight with her hand on her heart, as if striking a pose. “Whatever the cost, I will do everything I can to ensure that they live.”

It was like watching a bad actress, Bruno thought, convinced that Imogène had imagined this scene, rehearsed it in her mind and now at last had the chance to play the role. It worried him, suggesting that he was dealing with a woman entranced by her own self-image as a crusader, a woman who might seek deliberately to become a martyr for her cause. Still, he talked on, throwing out argument after argument about the needs of the deer and the demands of ecological balance until at least Imogène promised, perhaps out of sheer fatigue, to consider what he’d said.

As he left, picking his way slowly through the hungry deer on the track, he suspected that his effort had failed. Never one to give up at the first setback, Bruno pondered what he might do next. He could suggest that Philippe Delaron, who used to run the St. Denis camera shop and had become the local correspondent for
Sud Ouest,
might do a story with pictures of the hapless deer. There was probably not much point trying the local hunt clubs or the animal rights groups, but maybe there were funds in Brussels that might be tapped. He’d talk to the mayor and see if he had any ideas about raising the money.

Gilbert’s house was not easy to find, and in the end Bruno had to go back to the vineyard office for directions. When Bruno finally found the place, a modest cottage with two small windows on each side of the front door that might once have belonged to a shepherd, an almost-new Range Rover was parked outside. The front door was open, and through it he could see Victor and Madeleine sifting through papers at a desk in what seemed to be the sitting room. Neither one offered a polite smile of welcome nor seemed surprised to see him. Victor vaguely waved an arm to invite Bruno in.

The room, which opened directly from the front door, was about four meters square. There was a single armchair beneath the window that looked comfortable, a small sofa, a coffee table and a desk with the kind of bentwood chair that might have come from a café. In the chimney stood an old-fashioned cast-iron stove, a tall cylinder that was fed through the top. A neat pile of chopped logs stood beside it, and there was a faint, not-unpleasant smell of woodsmoke. Against the far wall was a kitchen area with a sink and a two-burner stove of the kind fueled by bottled gas. A small kitchen table, large enough for two, was covered by a red plastic tablecloth with a glass bowl of apples in the middle and a wooden chopping board beside it.

“There’s no will that we could find, no personal papers, just a lot of bills and bank statements that suggest Gilbert’s only income was his military pension,” Victor said from his place at the desk. Dressed in sagging jeans and an ancient sweater, Victor looked considerably older than he had at the party. Bruno noticed that his hands showed signs of manual labor, thick fingers and scratches that suggested he did a lot of his own work in the vineyard. Victor turned from the desk to pass some recent bank statements to Bruno, who saw there was not quite a thousand euros in Gilbert’s checking account with Crédit Agricole.

“I remember him saying once that he’d never bothered with a will, since he didn’t have anything worth leaving,” Madeleine said. She ran a hand over her eyes as if tired, but her complexion was as clear as a young girl’s, and there was no hint of bags under her eyes.

Looking at the individual credits, Bruno saw a monthly income of thirty-four hundred.
Mon Dieu,
he thought, that’s some pension, a lot more than his own salary. The account was in the name of Colonel Gilbert Clamartin, and the address was that of the vineyard.

“Not much to show for a life in the service,” said Madeleine. Bruno raised an eyebrow; it was a damn sight more than his own life in the service appeared to be worth. “We thought you might have gotten here earlier. Anyway, we started trying to sort through the mess Gilbert left. We’re short of housing for the estate workers, so we want to get this place cleared and made ready for someone else as soon as we can.”

By the door was a large cardboard box filled with empty vodka bottles. Beside it was a big, black plastic bag, and in it Bruno could see some dead flowers, overripe bananas and half a baguette. In one of the large yellow plastic bags that the local communes distributed for rubbish to be recycled, Bruno saw old newspapers, yogurt containers and empty cans of tuna and processed meat.

When Bruno explained that he’d been delayed by the situation with Imogène, Madeleine’s mouth tightened in disapproval. “I’ve heard of that woman and those deer she thinks she’s protecting. That sort of Green bunny-hugger drives me mad. She doesn’t know the first thing about the environment she claims to love so much. You ought to arrest her for cruelty to animals.”

Bruno nodded politely, thinking he’d never before met a woman whose beauty was unsullied by irritation or when she said something deliberately mean. He’d often heard the argument that hunters had the best understanding of the environment, the need to balance the numbers of wildlife with the carrying capacity of the available land.

“My wife has been a keen huntress since childhood,” said Victor. He gave her an affectionate smile, more the look of an indulgent father than of a husband, Bruno thought.

“Sometimes I wonder if we’re hunting the wrong species,” said Madeleine, and then smiled as if to take any menace from the words.

Her blond hair, which at yesterday’s party had fallen free in natural curls to her shoulders, was today pulled into a loose ponytail. She was wearing well-cut jeans, ankle boots and a flannel shirt in some tartan of greens and blues. She wore no jewelry, only simple gold earrings, and on her wrist was a masculine-looking watch. She was perched casually on a corner of the desk on which Gilbert’s papers were strewn, arms loosely folded and her slim ankles crossed. Even without makeup, she looked far too young to have a daughter old enough to make her a grandmother.

“I like to hunt as well, but mainly
bécasses
because they’re so cunning and I enjoy eating them,” Bruno said.

“I haven’t the patience for that, waiting all day until your dog finds one and then it flutters away too low to shoot,” she said, looking at him with interest now that she knew he was a fellow hunter. “Besides, there’s no danger in it. That’s why I like hunting wild boar; you never know when they might start hunting you. It seems to make it more fair.”

Bruno gave a neutral nod, thinking how a woman could get away with a remark like that. A man would be mocked in any hunting club he knew for a remark so vainglorious. Curious about Gilbert, he looked around the room. There was an old TV set opposite the big armchair and, on the walls, several framed photographs of warplanes and young men in cockpits. There was one framed certificate that seemed to be in English. Bruno went across and read that Gilbert had been through the Topgun course in Nevada with the U.S. Air Force.

“We did that together,” said Victor, proudly. “We flew our own Mirages. The Americans hadn’t seen them before, so we could give them a few surprises. It was the nearest we ever got to combat.” He paused. “I’d known him forty years. It’s a wrench to think I’ll never see him again.”

Bruno broke the ensuing silence. “You knew him best. Do you have any idea what he was trying to do yesterday when he was bothering your daughter? He seemed to be trying to pull her away.”

Victor shrugged. “He said he had to talk to her urgently about something private, and she said it would have to wait. She never had much time for Gilbert, even though he was her godfather. He’d been an alcoholic most of her life. Apparently he said it was too important for that and tried to pull her aside. She objected, tried to free her arm, but he persisted. I’ve no idea what he had in mind.”

“Was he disturbed, or angry, or was he behaving at all unusually before the party began, when you drove him over there?”

“Not at all,” Madeleine replied. “He was his usual self, freshly showered and shaved, neatly dressed; clothes were his one extravagance, other than the booze. You had to know him to realize he was already drunk. He concealed it well. Chantal said she wasn’t even sure he was drunk, and certainly not angry with her, just very determined to haul her off.”

Bruno asked Victor, “Did you find anything interesting here among his papers, anything that might explain what he wanted to tell your daughter?”

“Not really. Gilbert wasn’t one for keeping records or souvenirs, beyond his logbooks and other stuff to do with flying, and they’re all here in his desk. No letters, no photos beyond the ones on the wall, not even an address book. I suppose he kept them all on his phone, and you found that on his body.”

“He had no laptop?”

“No computer of his own,” said Victor. “He’d sometimes come up and use the office desktop at the vineyard if he had to look something up or send an e-mail. People at Alcoholics Anonymous were always trying to get him back to the meetings. Well, actually it was only a guy called Larignac, from somewhere near Bordeaux, one of our former mechanics in the air force. He always thought the world of Gilbert, and he’d been helped by AA, so he kept trying to get Gilbert to dry out again.”

“It was good of him to try,” said Bruno. “Talking of the air force, will it be a military funeral?”

Victor looked startled. “I hadn’t even thought of that. Perhaps I should call the old squadron or the Air Force Association.”

“With a colonel, I think it would be customary.”

“Of course. I’ll look into it.”

“Have you looked at the other rooms yet?”

“There’s just the bedroom and bathroom—take a look,” said Madeleine, slipping down from the desk. “I’d better clear out whatever he left in the fridge and in the cupboards, although heaven knows the man hardly ever seemed to eat. He got most of his calories from vodka.”

The bedroom was monastic in its sparseness. A metal-framed single bed stood against the wall, made up military-style, the blankets stretched so tight Bruno could have bounced a coin off them. The bedside table carried only a pitcher of water, a glass and what looked like a volume of poetry in Russian. Beneath the bed was a pair of white flannel bathroom slippers of the kind provided to guests by expensive hotels. These carried some sort of heraldic emblem on the toe and the words
GRAND HOTEL, VADUZ
. Bruno had no idea where that might be.

There were more books in Russian on a small bookshelf, along with some French classics, some of the garishly covered SAS spy novels by Gérard de Villiers, a French-Russian dictionary and a pile of
Aviation Week
magazines. On top of the bookcase was a plastic cigarette lighter and an ashtray with several white cardboard tubes that seemed to contain tobacco. They looked a bit like some of the joints rolled by more fastidious marijuana smokers. He slipped one into a small evidence bag and put it in his pocket.

He took the poetry book and the ashtray back into the main room. “Do either of you read Russian?” he asked, holding out the book.

“I do, a bit,” said Madeleine. “That’s Akhmatova, a poet; she was Gilbert’s favorite. Her husband went to the Gulag under Stalin.”

“And did he use marijuana?” he asked, showing her the ashtray.

She smiled, and he thought,
Mon Dieu,
this is a beautiful woman.

“They’re
papirosi,
Russian cigarettes,” she said. “They come like that with those little tubes instead of filters. He always smoked them when he could get them. It’s a brand called Belomorkanal, ‘White Sea Canal.’ ”

“Where did you learn your Russian?” he asked.

“I studied it at university and then went to Moscow during a long vacation,” she said casually. “I got a job as an intern in the French embassy’s commercial office.”

She took the ashtray and emptied it into the yellow rubbish bag. He thanked her and returned to the bedroom. The handsome wooden armoire was almost filled with neatly hung clothes, and the shelves down one side contained folded shirts from Chauvet and sweaters from Lacoste. He checked the pockets and then turned back the jackets to see where Gilbert bought his suits. The labels said
LONDON
, but the names meant nothing to him. In the dressing table, Bruno found drawers in which socks and underwear had been neatly rolled and carefully arranged, something Bruno had never seen a man do before.

He found no papers or notebooks in the pockets, and the suitcase atop the armoire was empty. Gilbert’s shoes looked expensive, with beautiful rich leather; Bruno guessed they had been handmade. There were four pairs, two of classic black dress shoes with toe caps and laces, and two of brown brogues. They were neatly aligned on the floor of the armoire, each shoe with its own wooden stretcher inside. To one side of the armoire stood a pair of Wellington boots, and the only casual clothes he found were a Barbour jacket hanging in the armoire and a pair of corduroy trousers on the same hanger.

In the bathroom, a military toiletry bag stood on a glass shelf alongside folded towels. Above the sink a razor, shaving brush, toothbrush and toothpaste and a pair of silver-backed hairbrushes were lined up precisely, as if on parade. There was no cologne, and the soap seemed to be a standard white Savon de Marseille. The sink, shower and toilet bowl all gleamed as if freshly scrubbed. Even the underside of the seat had been cleaned. This was unlike the home of any drunk Bruno had ever known. Maybe they instilled a stricter discipline in the air force; he doubted it. Automatically, Bruno plucked some hairs from one of the brushes and put them in an evidence bag.

There was something odd here, but he couldn’t say quite what it was. Dr. Gelletreau had signed off on the certificate for accidental death with unusual speed. He was the family’s doctor, after all, so he must have known the background. The mayor had made it clear he wanted the matter wrapped up—Bruno recalled the exact words—with efficiency and discretion. That was understandable; nobody would want the Patriarch’s big day to be overshadowed by death. But Chantal had not been sure Gilbert was drunk when he tried to haul her away. Bruno himself had instantly assumed that Gilbert was drunk when looking at him from the balcony. But there had been something odd about his movements, the way he set his feet, the cock of his head as he pulled Chantal toward him, that now had Bruno wondering.

Then Bruno pondered something else that had surprised him. He’d never known such a tidy drunk as Gilbert appeared to have been, nor any human being with so empty a paper trail. Usually there were notes, letters, bills and address books, all the litter of modern life. These weren’t alarm bells, just some faint tinklings that triggered curiosity rather than suspicion.

“Nothing of interest in there, so I’ll leave you to it,” he said, stepping out into the main room and heading for the door that led to the porch. He paused, turned to Victor and Madeleine and asked, “Either of you heard of a place called Vaduz?”

“It’s the capital of Liechtenstein, a small principality on the Swiss-Austrian border that used to be known as the false-teeth capital of the world, when they were made from porcelain,” said Victor.

Bruno gazed at him, astonished. “How on earth do you know that?”

“From playing Trivial Pursuit with the children.”

“It sounds like a useful game, maybe I should take it up,” Bruno said with a smile. “Thanks for your help, and again, I’m sorry for the loss of your friend. I’ll see myself out.”