A Chateau Under Siege, page 6
Fabiola was leaning against the door of her car, arms crossed beneath her breasts and looking fierce.
“What is all this bullshit, Bruno?” she said in a quiet but angry voice. “I didn’t want to upset Nadia, but the ambulance didn’t go to the hospital in Bergerac after picking up the extra blood. It went to that secret place at Domme. They seem to have some kind of clinic where that doctor, Barrat, is apparently in charge. Nor did they go to the hospital in Périgueux, even though Sarlat had called them to set up the intensive care unit. My friends at Périgueux tell me they heard there was a special helicopter that took him to the secure wing at the Piqué military hospital outside Bordeaux.”
“That’s news to me,” Bruno said, his eyes widening as he heard this. “All I know is that Kerquelin is a high-up in French intelligence, a top-level computer expert, and by the time I got to his house the interior ministry was taking charge of things. The important thing is that he seems to still be alive.”
“That’s what I find very hard to believe,” Fabiola snapped. “From the amount of blood he lost, a major artery, probably the aorta, had been punctured. Repairing that probably means open heart surgery and an artificial pump to maintain blood flow. Putting such a patient on an hour-long helicopter flight would be unforgivable. I don’t care how important he is to our so-called security services.”
Stunned by this tirade which seemed directed more at herself than at him, Bruno had no idea what to say.
“Do you have medical contacts in Bordeaux who might…,” he began hesitantly.
“I blame myself,” she went on, ignoring his remark. “I should never have let Barrat take charge like that, even though he said Kerquelin was his patient.”
“I’m sorry you’re so upset by this,” he said. “Perhaps I should have stepped in, but between two doctors…” His voice trailed off.
“It’s not just that,” she said grimly. “It’s Gilles. He wants to go off to Ukraine again. Ever since he did that interview with the TV star who was running for the presidency, he thinks he owns that story, and the Ukrainians want him back again for something. I hate it.”
“Well, Gilles has made that story his own, ever since his reporting on the battle in Maidan Square where this all began, back in 2014.”
“You mean those terrible two days when I didn’t know if he was alive or dead or if I’d ever learn what happened to him?” she demanded, her voice rising.
“None of us will forget that,” Bruno said. “But that’s Gilles. He’s a journalist; it’s what he does. And that’s part of what makes him the man you love.”
She rolled her eyes at him, jerked open the car door, installed herself, slammed the car door and drove off, the electric motor of her Renault Zoe unable to relieve her feelings with the roar of a conventional engine—but gravel flew as she raced off up the drive.
Back in the kitchen, Bruno found Gilles talking of his time at Paris Match, happily unaware of Fabiola’s outburst.
“I’m freelance now, but I still write for them from time to time,” Gilles was saying. “I was with Libération before that, which was how I first met Bruno, in Sarajevo.”
“How did you come to settle down here?” Nadia asked.
“I came down for Paris Match to cover some Satanist goings-on around the death of a young heiress and found myself reunited with Bruno. Then I met the beautiful doctor Fabiola and lost my heart to her and to this region. By good luck I then got a contract to write a book and here we are. The best decision I ever made. How about you, Nadia. Are you entranced by our glorious Périgord?”
“Domme is certainly the loveliest place we’ve ever lived, and I’m fascinated by the valley and all the history and the prehistory, but it’s very quiet out of season and crammed with tourists in summer. I’m only there during vacations. Most of the time I’m at university in Bordeaux.”
“What are you studying?”
“Philosophy, history and literature, and don’t say that I’ll never get a job with that or you’ll sound just like my mother.”
“That’s what I studied and it served me well,” said Gilles.
“I gather you’ll be seeing your mother today,” Bruno said. “That should be a comfort.”
“You think?” Nadia replied drily, rolling her eyes and leaving little doubt that her relations with her mother were not close.
“Have you not seen much of her since the divorce?” Bruno asked.
“About as much as I could stand. We weren’t a happy family, and she wasn’t exactly cut out to be a mother. I always had to call her Suzanne, never maman. I was never sure whether she really wanted to have been born a man or whether it was just part of her need to compete with my father. She wants to be the queen bee of French intelligence and couldn’t bear the thought of Dad beating her to it.”
Gilles glanced across at Bruno, his eyes wide in surprise. Bruno was at a loss for a reply to Nadia, so he simply raised his eyebrows.
“They even competed for us,” Nadia went on, a chill in her tone. “So I became Papa’s girl, and Ricky became Mama’s boy. My father and I always called him Richard, but she tried to insist on Ricky. Anyway Ricky and I aren’t that close, and my relations with Suzanne are no more than correct, sometimes not even that.”
She looked up at Bruno defiantly. “So, I’m not looking forward to seeing her again and dealing with her obsessive need to take charge of everything. Many of my happy memories are in that house with Papa. He’s a big man with a wonderful deep laugh, and sometimes I thought the whole house would shake with it. My best memory of childhood is being held in his arms against that enormous chest while he laughed. I called it a Papa-quake, like an earthquake, only comforting.”
This time more than a single tear seemed to come to her eyes. She took a paper napkin from her plate and blew her nose loudly and thoroughly, not discreet feminine dabs at her nostrils but in an almost boyish way that made Bruno want to smile. It made him think of the girls he’d trained on the local rugby team.
“Do you know what you want to do after you graduate from university?” Bruno asked. “From what I saw in the pageant yesterday, I think you could do very well as an actress.”
“Oh no, not that. I want to teach, research, spend a lot of time in libraries, have lots of dogs and raise my children like my dad did. Suzanne wants me to join the family business, as she calls La Piscine, and follow in her careerist footsteps.” Nadia shook her head. “No way.”
“Well, if you’ve been raised to be so clear about fulfilling your own goals, maybe your parents didn’t do a bad job,” said Gilles. “It’s the fate of being a parent to give the kids something to rebel against.”
Nadia shrugged and muttered, “Suzanne certainly succeeded in that.”
“Does your brother feel the same way,” Gilles asked, “or does he go along with her ambitions for him?”
“It’s too soon to tell, but I get the impression that Ricky is breaking away, spending less and less time at her place in Paris,” she said. “He’s always been into sailing, and he’s been crewing on an ocean racer out of Brest, dreaming of competing in the America’s Cup. So he’s moving out of her clutches, and more recently when we see each other we get along fine.”
“Did you ever go along with your father, reenacting the various battles?” Gilles asked.
“Not to go camping with him under canvas with the other soldiers,” she replied. “Suzanne wouldn’t have that—not at all the right thing for a well brought-up young girl. We’d go out for the day and watch, for what little we could see with all the gunpowder smoke. The parades were fun, and when the soldiers were lining up for battle, and going around the camps where a lot of the wives and girlfriends of the volunteers were dressed up in period costume. They had drummers and bands. In England, one of the battles was the siege of a stately home, which was more Suzanne’s idea of a good day out. She pulled some strings to get a letter of introduction to the milord who owned the place and got herself invited to lunch, so I was able to have a picnic with Papa. We were on a rug in the camp, and he was dressed like one of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan soldiers.”
She smiled fondly at the memory. “That was a lovely day.”
“What would you think of my writing a piece about your father’s reenactments for Paris Match,” Gilles asked her. “With some of your photos. It could make a great spread, this guy at the heart of France’s secrets, but his hobby is the ancient battlefields. I’d need your help, but I may have to wait a bit because I’m flying to Ukraine tomorrow.”
“I’d better check with Papa when he recovers. But don’t say a word to Suzanne, if you meet her. What’s happening in Ukraine? I thought that war had died down.”
“I’m not sure, but I got a call from a guy I know on the president’s staff in Kyiv. He was being very cagey, but he said it would be worth my while.”
“Did you write the piece about the guy who became president after playing one on TV, like a Slavic version of West Wing? I remember it.”
“Yes, that was me,” Gilles began, and Bruno took his leave, saying he was expected at police headquarters in Périgueux, and left Gilles, Nadia and Balzac to their breakfast.
Chapter 5
J-J had taken over the big conference room at the police commissariat, and three male and three female officers in uniform were sitting in front of separate screens in their shirtsleeves and scanning video. J-J had an even bigger screen to himself, or rather to himself and Guyon, the stage-fight consultant Bruno had met the previous day. On the whiteboard that covered an entire wall someone had drawn a map of the Sarlat main square, showing the location of the benches for the audience. To their right were the steps where Kerquelin had fallen, and to the left stood the Church Ste. Marie with the sheepfold and market stalls. Beyond them was a smaller square flanked by a fourteenth-century building known as the Hôtel Plamon, and another, of later vintage, called Hôtel de Mirandol. At the time, Bruno’s attention had been fixed on this smaller square where the townsfolk were attacking the men dressed as the drunken English soldiers. From his place high on the left-side benches, the action on the steps in front of the Hôtel de Ville to the right had been hard to see.
“Bonjour, Bruno,” said J-J, shaking hands. “The good news is that Kerquelin is still alive but in intensive care, but the prognosis is barely fifty-fifty, and he might need a heart transplant. We also have some mystery men. At least that gives us something new to tell the press conference that we’ll have to face this afternoon. Guyon has identified two extra armed men dressed as townsfolk at the place where Kerquelin was stabbed, and he wasn’t supposed to be on those steps anyway.”
“I know,” said Bruno. “Monsieur Guyon told me that yesterday.”
“That’s why there was such a confused scuffle on those steps,” said Guyon. “I’d choreographed the whole attack for six knights in a wedge in the center, and having three more threw off all my spatial planning.”
“Could the pageant director have approved that without your knowledge?” Bruno asked.
Guyon shook his head. “He says he didn’t and I believe him. It would invalidate all the insurance.”
“We just called him,” said J-J. “He’s at police headquarters in Sarlat. We came up here because we have the facilities to go through the videos. We’ve got hours of footage from the phones of people in the crowd, but the TV crew missed the battle on the steps altogether. They were shooting the action in that small square right in front of the benches. The best sequences we’ve seen so far are the two placed at either side of the square by the director. The problem is that each camera was mounted on a tripod in a balcony and quite high, so the one that should have got a frontal view of the charge by the knights was shooting over their heads—the action on the far side of the square by Ste. Marie Church. That was where the townsfolk were attacking the English archers. So we have a rear view of the knights from that other camera.”
J-J sat down, rewound the tape and started it again just as the tall knight in the black surcoat appeared on the screen. He was on foot and waving his sword while apparently calling to the other knights to join him as he headed to the steps where the English soldiers were forming a defensive line.
“That’s Kerquelin,” said J-J.
“My plan called for three knights in white surcoats and three in red to attack the English on the steps,” said Guyon. “Behind the knights I had planned four townsmen with a couple of townswomen and two more men on each flank. But when du Guesclin’s horse fell, the damn fool decided to join them on the steps—in his distinctive black surcoat—rather than ride around them brandishing his sword, as I had planned.
“That’s the first problem,” Guyon went on. “Now look, because now come two more guys dressed like the other Sarlat townsmen, carrying clubs and war hammers. They push their way in right behind Kerquelin, just as he has his sword raised over his head to attack the English line. And that was when the steps were so crowded that people began stumbling and falling over each other.”
J-J set the tape to inch forward, frame by frame, and the impact of the extra townsmen was dramatic, toppling two other knights to their knees on the steps, where they tripped some of the armed townsfolk joining the charge.
“All of the footage we’ve seen so far is from the same angle, behind the charging knights,” said J-J. “We don’t seem to have any footage taken from behind the English soldiers so we could see the knights’ charge from the front. We have one piece of footage from a cell phone in the audience that gives a partial side view, which shows du Guesclin falling. We think we have five, maybe six, possible suspects who were close enough to inflict the knife wound, and one of them is a woman.”
J-J handed Bruno some printouts of individual frames from the video. The first showed one of the washerwomen, arms bared to the elbows and wielding a sturdy pole like a lance. She was falling over a sprawled townsman who was down on one knee, one hand on the step to keep his balance, the other raised and holding a knife. The next frame showed him getting to his feet while trying to help the washerwoman keep her own balance. The hand bearing the knife was obscured by one of the knights.
“That seems to be the nearest knife to du Guesclin that we have seen so far,” Guyon said. “But then look at these two images of Kerquelin.”
The first frame showed the knight on foot and on the way to the steps, half turning to wave on the townsfolk.
“Look at the dagger in his belt,” Guyon went on, “and now look at this.”
This new frame showed a standing knight in a black surcoat heaving himself to his feet from the tumbled sprawl of people on the steps, just as a woman dressed as a milkmaid seemed to threaten one of the English soldiers with a wooden bucket.
“Look at him again, the surcoat flapping loose because he’s lost his belt,” said Guyon. “Not just no belt, but also no dagger this time. The presence on those steps of du Guesclin was not authorized by me, which raises a serious insurance problem. But since nobody expected him to be on those steps, this looks to me more like an accident than a premeditated attack.”
Guyon explained that, as he was an experienced film-and-stage fight director with a special license from the actors’ union, his approval of the choreography was required by the insurers of the whole event. The mayor of Sarlat and Muselier, the overall director, had each signed the insurance contract that gave Guyon complete authority over the fight scenes. That contract included a copy of Guyon’s own plan with a precise time frame, number of characters, weapons involved and sequences of the various movements. Each of the participants in the pageant had to sign a letter of indemnity, drafted by the insurers, which said they agreed to abide by the rules of the choreography.
“Muselier wanted more knights in the attack up the steps and I said no,” Guyon said. “I insisted on no more than six maximum. There wasn’t really room for more. We compromised by letting him have more knights on horseback riding into the square, but these others had to stay on horseback, riding around and cheering the other knights on. And it was in the insurance contract that only one knight was to wear the black surcoat, du Guesclin, and he was to stay on horseback.”
“So three people disobeyed the instructions. There was Kerquelin, and two more joining him in the charge, dressed as townsmen, is that right?” asked Bruno. “Kerquelin also broke his orders when his horse fell, and he decided to join the fray, but nobody knew the horse was going to fall, so nobody could have planned all this in advance?”
“Yes, that’s right, and that invalidated the insurance contract, and may have ended my career in this business,” Guyon said, the bitterness clear in his voice. “So the family of the man who may be dead by now can sue the pants off the town of Sarlat, and all the spectators can claim their money back because the show was stopped prematurely. This is likely to get expensive.”
“Guesclin’s horse slipped and fell on a patch of manure from one of the cows,” said J-J. “Whose idea was it to have the cows?”
“Good question,” Guyon replied. “It wasn’t mine. That was part of the scene arranged by Muselier. But du Guesclin should never have ridden that far forward to where the cows had been. We had taken precautions. If you look at the horse, it’s wearing an incontinence bag, that leather bag under the tail that’s strapped to the saddle, like the horses that drive carriages around the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. All my horses were fitted with them.”
“Can you identify who these extra townsmen might be?” Bruno asked.
Guyon shook his head, pointing to one of the photos that showed a side view of a man dressed in a rough leather jacket and leather cap over a kind of chain-mail balaclava that came down to his eyebrows and covered his chin and cheeks.
