This time Bruno’s police uniform ensured that he was shown directly to Pamela’s room in the hospital. Fabiola’s phone call with the good news had reached him as he was leaving Bergerac. Pamela was awake and lucid. The scan had shown no lasting damage beyond a broken collarbone and two cracked ribs. All tubes and wires had been removed. She was sitting up with one arm in a sling, looking at an English newspaper with a pen in her good hand, when he poked his head around the open door. He gave her the overpriced flowers he’d bought at the hospital shop.
“They’re lovely, Bruno, thank you,” she said, after returning his kiss. She tasted of toothpaste, and there was a scent of lavender he’d not known her to wear before. She filled in one of the clues in her crossword puzzle before continuing. “Fabiola was here earlier and told me about Bess. It’s very sad. I’ll miss her very much. But I know you had no choice.”
“She was in great pain. It had to be done,” he said. He paused before speaking again. “When will they let you go home?” There was a rather battered metal vase on the cupboard. He filled it with water from the tap.
“Maybe tomorrow, the doctor said, since Fabiola will be there to keep an eye on me. But why the uniform? Isn’t today your day off?”
“Something came up on this murder case, so I had to go to Bergerac and look official.” He placed the flowers in the vase and turned back to her.
“Bruno, really, you can’t just dump them in like that,” she said in mock reproof. “Bring the vase to me and hold it while I arrange them. Honestly, you men have no idea.” She began to arrange the mixed red and white roses with her good hand, making him strip some leaves and bend some of the stems to change their height.
He was pleased to hear her sounding so normal and looking so much better than he’d expected. Fabiola must have brought in some makeup and the pretty white nightgown that he recognized. The newspaper was probably her idea too.
“I hope these are tough enough for you.” Bruno laid a booklet of Sudoku puzzles on the bed beside her. Normally she raced through them almost as quickly as she could fill in the numbers.
“Lovely, such a treat, but now I want to hear all about the murder case. Have you traced Murcoing yet?”
No, but he now knew a lot more about the young man, and he explained his findings in Bergerac and the Arch-Inter connection.
“So who would have sent Murcoing the photo of his lover kissing Yves?” Pamela asked. “Who might have had an interest in trying to drive him into a fit of jealous rage? And who would benefit from Fullerton’s death? It’s obvious, it must be the brother. He stands to inherit, after all.”
Bruno shook his head. “Brian says his brother’s will leaves everything to his nieces and nephews, to be held in trust. He may be lying, but we can check that through the British police. Now that they have a death certificate, there’s no reason for the will to be secret. If Brian is lying about the will, then obviously he becomes the main suspect. But how would Brian or anybody else have known that Paul would be driven to kill just by that photograph? And we might never have known about the Corrèze farm if Brian hadn’t told us. It doesn’t hang together.”
She nodded. “How certain are you that Murcoing is the killer?”
He shrugged. “We can place him at the murder scene at about the relevant time, but mainly his running off is what feeds our suspicion. He had a romantic motive and maybe also a financial one, if he thought Fullerton was cheating him. Certainly Fullerton had a lot of money, and Paul seems to have been getting very little.”
He’d switched both his phones to vibrate that morning before going to see Joséphine, and now the second, private one vibrated. He glanced at the screen, recognized from the number who was calling and said, “I have to take this.” He excused himself, heading into the corridor and out of earshot as he answered Isabelle.
“Have you seen the Paris Match website?” she began, her voice neutral rather than angry. “Your friend Gilles is making news again.”
“I haven’t seen it, but I think I know what it’s about.”
“The brigadier knows you’re behind it. And there’s a rumor that there’s something coming in Le Monde.”
“I don’t understand why he thinks I’m involved. Gilles talked directly to Jacqueline Morgan. Her book is finished, and she’s looking for publicity. I know she’s written something for Le Monde, but it’s up to them to decide what to do with it.”
“Don’t be coy, Bruno, not with me. And I don’t care whether her story runs or not, but there are aspects of this that you don’t know. Can we meet?”
“Did the brigadier tell you about the difference of opinion between him and me at our last meeting?”
“Yes, and that’s partly why I need to talk with you.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Périgueux. I need to be discreet, so can I come to your place?”
Bruno checked his watch. “All right, let’s say five this afternoon.”
They hung up, and he went back to Pamela, who greeted him with a question. “Are you absolutely certain that your corpse is the man you think it is? The head was destroyed. How did the brother identify him?”
“They’re doing a DNA test and the usual fingerprints. The dead man had served a prison term, so they’re on file. We’d have used dental records, but as you said, the head was smashed.”
“But right now you’re assuming that your dead man is who you think he is and not the brother. Am I right? What if your corpse is the brother, and the man you think is the brother is in fact the crooked antiques dealer and also the murderer?”
Pamela had been doing too many crossword puzzles, he thought. “If it’s the crooked antiques dealer who’s alive, why would he have led me to his hoard of stolen goods? And he had to assume that we’d check the fingerprints. That’s routine.”
“Who called you?”
“It was about Gilles. His piece on Jacqueline’s nuclear secrets is on the Paris Match website.”
“Are you trying to avoid telling me that your caller was the person you refer to as my ‘favorite French policewoman’?”
He nodded, feeling guilty and reminding himself that he should never underestimate Pamela’s powers of perception.
“Will this Paris Match story mean trouble for you?” she asked.
“Maybe, I don’t know. As long as the mayor stays in office, there’s not much anyone can do, beyond taking my special phone away, which I wouldn’t mind. Life was a lot simpler before the brigadier had me on speed dial.”
“Presumably Isabelle wants to see you about it.”
He nodded again and warily scanned Pamela’s face. She looked neither cross nor suspicious, simply thoughtful.
“Have you looked into this Arch-Inter group you mentioned? If it has offices in California, it must be a big operation. Wouldn’t it have to fill in some type of customs form if it ships goods overseas?”
“Yes, but not within Europe. Fullerton could bring in and take back truckloads of antiques to Italy or England with no problem. For Russia, he’d need a customs declaration, and for America they’d have to go by container, so there’d be records. The art squad can handle all that, they do it all the time.”
“Pass me my laptop. Fabiola brought it.” She asked him to plug it into the wall socket and inserted the little plug that connected to the Internet through the cell-phone system. While she booted up, he took the opportunity to visit the men’s room, his uniform provoking the usual range of curious and worried glances.
“This Arch-Inter firm is pretty big in the States,” she said when he returned, gesturing for him to look over her shoulder. “That’s quite a showroom they have in Santa Monica, and they’re promising regular new deliveries of English and European antiques. Hmm, I wonder…”
She did a Google search for Companies House, London, accessed the website for the register of British companies and typed in “Arch-Inter.” Up came the name and a number. She tapped twice on the number and up came a list of documents filed by the company, each of which could be downloaded for one pound.
“Here are the names of the directors of Arch-Inter. Surprise, surprise, look who we find.”
Over her shoulder he read the names: Paul Murcoing, Brian Fullerton and Édouard Marty, all added to the board on the same date three years earlier. Francis Fullerton had been a director since the company was formed in 1986. There was another English-sounding name, Alan McAllister, which Bruno recognized from the California branch of Arch-Inter.
“The plot thickens,” she said, sitting back and looking extraordinarily pleased with herself.
“You should be doing my job.”
“Too easy,” she replied with a grin. “And you might want to check whether Murcoing had a company credit card. If it’s attached to a British bank, he could have access to money that your systems aren’t tracking.”
“Mon Dieu, we never thought of that.” He wondered how Pamela knew about such matters and then remembered her account of spending hours with lawyers and accountants, while sorting out her mother’s estate.
“Now you need to get your juge d’instruction to check the annual reports to see just how much money the company is making,” she went on. “Above all he needs to find out how many shares each director owns. That’s how you can tell who’s really in charge.”
“With Francis Fullerton dead, the question now is what happens to his shares. Presumably that’ll be in his will,” Bruno said, reaching for his hat. “I have to go and see Ardouin, the juge, and then relate all this to J-J.” He bent down and kissed her. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’re as brainy as you are beautiful?”
“Never in quite this context, with me lying in bed and a man who ought to be much more grateful just about to don his hat and leave me to languish.”
He kissed her again. “Close your eyes and think of justice.”
When Bruno returned to his home with Balzac he saw no sign of Isabelle or a rental car. Balzac scooted from the back of the Land Rover and around the side of the house to the chicken coop, where Isabelle was sitting on a tree stump in the late afternoon sun, watching the birds and smoking. She stomped out her cigarette just before Balzac leaped onto her lap and used his back legs to pedal his way up to lick her neck. Holding the puppy in both hands, she rose and offered Bruno the cheek Balzac was not monopolizing to be kissed.
“You walked here?” She was dressed like a hiker in walking boots and jacket and somehow still managed to look chic. A light rucksack was on the ground beside her.
“I parked at the hunters’ blind on the far side of the ridge and walked the trail. You should be impressed that I remembered the way.”
“Why the discretion?”
She gave a slow smile. “I could say I was thinking about your reputation or maybe I just wanted to take a gentle walk through the woods to see how my leg had recovered.” She took a paper-wrapped bottle from the rucksack and passed it to him. “But I’m also bringing a message from the brigadier along with this peace offering. He says you passed the test.”
Did the brigadier never stop playing games? He opened the tissue paper and found a bottle of Balvenie. “It didn’t seem like a test to me.”
“I know, he put me through a similar interview. The mood in Paris is poisonous right now with the election so close, people worried for their jobs, lots of documents being shredded, files being sanitized. It’s hard to know who to trust.”
“That’s the life you chose, Isabelle.”
She nodded. “It’s what I thought I wanted, what I still want, if only it weren’t so damn political all the time. It’s like living in Machiavelli’s kitchen. Anyway, it looks like I could be getting that European job. I’m on a short list of three, and I’m the only candidate who speaks English and has experience of international liaison. I go up to The Hague for the formal interview on Friday morning. You ever been to Holland?”
Bruno shook his head.
She gestured to his house. “I see you finally put the windows in the roof. Will you show me?” She picked up Balzac to carry him with her.
Bruno led the way inside, remembering how he had talked of his plan as they had lain in bed, sharing that special territory of new lovers as they spoke of plans and dreams and explored possible futures together. Always practical, Isabelle had said he’d have to knock down walls to install stairs. So Bruno was proud of the solution he’d found, to put the staircase into the small room he’d used as a study, fitting his desk and books beneath the stairs and not taking space from his sitting room. When she climbed the stairs ahead of him, her limp was still noticeable.
“It’s great, Bruno,” she said, putting Balzac down to explore as she looked into the smaller room to the left and the much larger room to the right and then poked her head into the small shower room he’d inserted between them. The rooms were still empty of furniture. She looked again into the smaller room.
“The children’s room you always planned,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“That depends if there’s more than one, then they get the big room, or maybe both of them.”
“Aren’t you planning to move up here yourself?”
“Not yet,” he said. “There’s the painting to finish, blinds and curtains to choose. And I like that bedroom downstairs.” He did not have to add that it was the bedroom that they had shared.
“How will you get the beds up that staircase?”
“I just have to get the mattresses up. The beds I can build myself.”
She walked to the window, opened it and looked out at the view across the steadily rising ridges, fields and woodlands with not another house or road in sight. Then she turned, leaned with her back against the windowsill and looked carefully around the big room as if furnishing it in her mind. He wondered if she was thinking of what might have been, but she pushed herself off from the windowsill, flashed him a determined smile and headed down the stairs, speaking over her shoulder.
“I’ve got something for you as well.”
Balzac was too small to get down the stairs without tripping over his ears, so Bruno scooped him up and followed her. Outside, she went back to her rucksack and pulled out a stiff cardboard envelope and handed it to him.
“We were interested in her too, not just Crimson,” she explained as Bruno pulled out a grainy surveillance photo of Jacqueline taken at a hotel entrance. She was with a tall and slender man with a thick head of flowing white hair, a man instantly recognizable to anyone who read French newspapers. The next photo showed the two of them embracing in the shadows of an entrance courtyard to what looked like a very plush apartment building.
“That’s your boss,” Bruno said, finally realizing why anything to do with Jacqueline could set off alarm bells in Paris.
“That was before he became a minister, five or six years ago, when he was still mayor of Orléans and she was teaching at the Sorbonne. The building is where he kept a discreet pied-à-terre on a fancy street behind the Parc Monceau.”
“Did the RG get photos like this of everybody?” he asked. The Renseignements Généraux had been famous for their voluminous files on left-wing parties, but he wasn’t very surprised that they had been keeping an eye on fast-rising politicians of all stripes.
Isabelle shrugged. “Who knows if they were watching her or him? Does it matter? They both turn out to be people of interest, particularly now.”
Bruno was trying to work out the political implications. “So now the minister is worried that Jacqueline’s book might rebound on him, and he would be blamed if his party loses the election?”
“That’s why he needs to find someone else to take the rap. That’s one of the first laws of politics,” Isabelle said. “And if the blame somehow falls onto the Americans or the British and their shadowy secret services trying to manipulate our elections, not to mention our foreign policies…”
She took the cardboard folder and the photos back from Bruno. “I’d better go. Will you walk back to the car with me, you and Balzac?”
He printed some names on a page of his notebook and gave it to her, explaining the results of the Web search at Companies House. “We need to see a copy of the will Francis Fullerton made in England. J-J is trying to get it through the usual channels. If you can find out faster it would help. And I’d like to hear if anything is known about these people, directors of this Arch-Inter Company.”
“I thought you already had your suspect, Paul Murcoing. Or are you following one of your hunches?”
“Never leave potentially useful information unchecked—isn’t that what you used to tell me?” Bruno asked.
Isabelle shouldered her rucksack and began to walk around the chicken coop to pick up the track into the woods. Bruno saw her grimace, her limp apparent. He took her arm and turned her around and steered her toward his Land Rover.
“I’m getting a bit pressed for time,” he lied. “I’d better drive you back to your car.”
She gave him a sharp look but agreed, saying, “I’ve got something to tell you, and it might be easier to tell you in the car when I don’t have to look you in the eye.”
“If you want to tell me that it’s all over between you and me, I’ve been expecting it,” he said, carefully keeping his voice neutral. “We’ve both known long enough that there’s no future for us. You’re not coming back to Périgord, even if you are giving up your career in Paris.”
To get to her car by road would mean driving two long sides of a triangle, so he was taking the shortcut along the bridle path. It meant driving slowly but they would still be there in a fraction of the time, and this was not a conversation that he wanted to prolong.
“We’ve lived with that,” she said. “This is something else.” She paused, and they drove on in silence, Balzac resting quietly on her lap, content just to lie there and feel her hand stroking his back.
“I don’t really know how to begin, because I know that as soon as I say this it really is over between us.” Her voice didn’t sound like Isabelle’s at all, none of that energy and eagerness he knew so well. “There’ll be no more surprise reunions, no more fantasies of having you for a weekend in Paris. It’s final. You’ll never want to speak to me again.”
He rounded a bend and saw her car parked by the hunters’ shack, perhaps a hundred yards ahead. He had a sudden presentiment of what she might be about to say and felt a great hollowness begin to gather somewhere deep in his gut.
“I have done something unforgivable,” she said as he drew up beside her car. Her head was bowed, and she seemed to be speaking to Balzac more than to him, or perhaps making her farewell to the puppy she had always called “ours.”
“It was that night before the summit, the night before Gigi was shot, when we were together.”
Bruno was sure of it now. Her voice seemed to be coming from a long distance away. He wasn’t sure that he could speak.
“I got pregnant and I didn’t tell you.” He heard her open the car door and felt her place Balzac gently on his lap, but he couldn’t turn his head to look at her. “I had the abortion and never told you. I think I knew that you’d talk me out of it, or you’d try, and that was a conversation I couldn’t face.”
Her hand touched his cheek, and he felt the vehicle shift as her weight left it. “I know what this means to you. I’m sorry, Bruno.”
He sat immobile, stunned, barely registering the way she limped to her car without looking back, unlocked it, climbed stiffly in and drove away. It was Balzac who brought him back to reality, clambering up the steering wheel to get close enough to lick Bruno’s chin before tumbling back onto his lap.