The Patriarch, page 4
“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.
5
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.”
“I’ll phone you at the mairie, about that lunch we discussed with Marco and the countess,” Madeleine called after him.
6
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.
