The Patriarch, page 3
“That was Fabrice, the gamekeeper,” said Madeleine. “When I saw what was happening, I asked him to remove Gilbert.”
“Did you look in on him after that?” Bruno asked.
“I did, sometime after seven, when most of the guests had gone, except for those staying the night,” said Madeleine. “He was snoring, but there was no vomit. I’m sure if he’d been sick I’d have smelled it. I didn’t see that flask, or I’d have removed it; I put that blanket over him.”
Madeleine was pointing to a large leather-covered hip flask, perhaps twice the size of the one Bruno took when he went hunting. It lay between Gilbert’s chest and his arm.
“It was the same at about ten, when I looked in just before I went to bed,” said Victor. “No sign of vomit, and the blanket was still in place, as though he hadn’t moved.”
“I heard he was an alcoholic. Is that true?”
“He was always a heavy drinker,” Victor said. “After he came back from Moscow he was in bad shape. We got him into a couple of clinics and then into Alcoholics Anonymous and he stopped drinking for a while, but he always went back to it. Vodka, mainly. He acquired a taste for the stuff in Russia, or maybe he assumed we wouldn’t smell it on him.”
“Had he been this drunk before, throwing up in his sleep?”
“Not to my knowledge, but this was unusual, him being here at the château,” Victor said. He turned to look at the body of his friend, and the sadness on Victor’s face aged him so that he looked more like Madeleine’s father than her husband. “We didn’t often have to put him to bed.”
“Just before I saw him being carried away from the party, he was obviously drunk but still on his feet,” Bruno said. “Did he go straight to sleep when you brought him in here?”
“Yes, he seemed to crumple. By the time we got his shoes and tie off and laid him down, he’d passed out.”
Bruno turned to Gelletreau. “Alcoholics usually have a fairly high tolerance for booze. Is this sort of reaction unusual in any way?”
“It might have been, if we hadn’t found the flask.”
Bruno pulled on a pair of plastic gloves, then lifted the flask to his nose. It was empty, had no cap and smelled of alcohol. He put it in an evidence bag and began looking around for the cap. He found it underneath the lounger. There were markings on the bottom of the flask, and he squinted in the dim light to make out MADE IN ENGLAND, 12 OZ. He knew about English fluid ounces from whiskey bottles; twelve fluid ounces was a third of a liter.
Bruno felt the dead man’s clothes where the flask had been. There was no dampness; whatever liquid it had contained had not spilled out. Presumably he’d drunk all of it.
“What did he usually drink?”
“Stolichnaya Blue,” Victor replied. “It’s a hundred proof, fifty percent pure alcohol.”
Bruno raised his eyebrows. Gilbert had been stumbling drunk at five in the evening. Depending on how much there had been in the flask, there was more than enough to keep him dead drunk until midnight.
“Do you know if he left a will or where he kept his papers? I should go and take a look.”
“I don’t know about a will, but he had nothing to leave. Gilbert was usually broke. He lived in a small house on the vineyard and had an old car but with the drinking…” Victor ran his hand across his eyes. “You should have known him before. He was a good man, an amazing pilot, brave as a lion—”
“Gilbert hadn’t driven a car for years,” Madeleine interrupted. “We wouldn’t let him. He had a bicycle to get around the estate, and if he needed to go into Bergerac he’d come with us.”
“There’s nothing more for me to do here, and I’d better get to the clinic,” said Dr. Gelletreau, handing Bruno the signed certificate of death. He’d written “natural causes; alcohol abuse.”
“Has Gilbert’s family been informed of his death?” Bruno asked Victor as Gelletreau left.
“He had no family, only divorced wives and abandoned mistresses,” said Madeleine sourly. “Most of them will probably celebrate at the news.”
“Are there any next of kin that you know of?” Bruno pressed. “Brothers, sisters, cousins. There’s usually some relative.”
“He always indicated me as next of kin,” Victor responded. “I was his wingman for years, in the same squadron, so we were very close. I think there was a sister who died a few years ago.”
Bruno looked down at the body, thinking this was a sad end for a man gifted enough to be a fighter pilot, one of the lords of the air. He remembered his own youthful dreams of becoming one. “In that case you’ll have to decide whether this is to be a burial or a cremation.”
“I can help you with that,” broke in Father Sentout. “Perhaps I should call later in the day when you’ve had some time to settle yourselves.”
“Well, it all seems very straightforward,” said the mayor, briskly, in the way he did at council meetings when the main decision had been taken to his satisfaction. “It’s very sad, of course, and a great loss to you, Victor, saying farewell to an old friend and comrade of your youth. But I’m sure the chief of police here will handle matters with his usual discretion and dispatch.” He looked at Bruno and added, “We don’t want anything that could cast a shadow over the Patriarch’s birthday.”
Bruno nodded amiably while putting his hand beneath the body. He found a full pocket and drew out a well-used wallet. There was an identity card, one of the old French driving licenses in pink cardboard, a Carte Bleue credit card, a carte vitale medical card and four twenty-euro notes. In a smaller pocket he found an out-of-date ID card for the foreign ministry and a membership card for the Air Force Association. He took the cheap mobile phone from the pouch on Gilbert’s belt and thumbed through the recent calls, surprised at how few there were. He’d made just one call the previous day, to a recipient identified as Victor.
“He called you yesterday morning?” Bruno asked Victor.
“I took the call,” said Madeleine. “It was about what time we’d pick him up to drive here to the château.”
“Did you drive home after the party?”
“No, we stayed here last night,” Victor replied. His wife broke in, “We live at the vineyard but we keep a suite here.”
“Was Gilbert going to stay here as well?”
Victor shrugged and looked at his wife. He seemed to let her answer most of the questions, Bruno thought.
“No, the château is pretty full with guests, so Marc or somebody would have given him a lift back,” she said. “In fact some of them must be getting up about now, so I’d better go and check on breakfast.”
“I’m sure the chief of police won’t need to disturb your guests,” the mayor said firmly, and looked at his watch.
“Just one more thing,” said Bruno. “I’d better take a look at Gilbert’s house. Where is it, exactly?”
Madeleine explained, already at the door that led to the château. “Sorry, but I have to go.”
“Excuse me, but I have to be at Mass,” said Father Sentout, quickly shaking hands with Bruno and the mayor and following her out. The mayor stepped forward, took Victor’s hand and shook it solemnly, in silence. Then he turned to put his hand on Bruno’s back and steer him to the door. It was very neatly done.
“You don’t have any reason for doubt about this, do you?” the mayor asked, when they were outside.
“No, not really,” Bruno said. He was about to say that he didn’t like being pressured, but his phone began vibrating at his belt. He checked the screen and saw it was Albert, the chief pompier.
“There’s been another accident on the Rouffignac road just after the turnoff to the big camping site,” Albert said. “It’s those damn deer again. You’d better bring a gun in case the animal is still alive.”
4
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.
