wonderful dog – is this the great hunting dog

J-J

told me about?’

‘

J-J

asked you to come?’ She was not the first woman to come here alone bearing

food, but she was the first to descend upon him uninvited, and he was

old-fashioned enough to be disconcerted by her arrival. He decided he had better

approach this unexpected evening as if she were here as a professional

colleague, just another police chum. At least he had no inquisitive neighbours

to start a new episode of the St Denis soap opera that he privately dubbed

Catching Bruno.

‘Not exactly,’ said Isabelle, down on her knees and making much of the enchanted

Gigi, who always liked women. ‘Can basset hounds really hunt wild boar?’

‘That’s what they were bred for, supposedly by St Hubert himself. They aren’t

fast but they can run all day and never tire so they exhaust the boar. Then one

hound goes in from each side and grabs a foreleg and pulls and the boar just

sprawls flat, immobilised until the hunter comes. But I use this one mainly to

hunt bécasse. He has a very gentle mouth.’

‘

J-J

said I should brief you on the day’s developments,’ she said, prising

herself free from the dog’s attentions. ‘He left me in charge at the murder room

here, but all the action has moved to Périgueux and I got bored and lonely, so I

thought I’d pay you a visit. It was another time

J-J

told me what you liked to

eat, as if I couldn’t guess.’

‘Well, I’m curious to know the latest and you are most welcome. And

congratulations on finding the house.’

‘Oh, that was easy,’ she said. ‘I just asked the woman in the Maison de la

Presse when I went to pick up Le Monde. They have a small piece about a racist

murder in the Périgord, with the Front National involved. Half of the Paris

press corps will be down here by Monday.’

And with Dominique in the Maison de la Presse, the whole of St Denis would know

by now that Bruno had a new lady friend. They’d be staking out the bottom of the

road to see if she left at a decent hour. He resolved privately that she would.

‘He’s called Gigi,’ said Bruno, as his dog signalled complete devotion by

rolling onto his back and baring his tummy to be scratched.

‘Short for Gitane.

J-J

told me. He’s a great fan of yours and he told me all

about you on our first drive down here.’

‘He’s a good man and a fine detective,’ said Bruno. ‘Hand me that bag and come

and sit down. What would you like to drink?’

‘A petit Ricard for me, lots of water, please, and then can you show me round?

J-J

said you’d been in the engineers in the army and you built the whole place

yourself.’

She was trying very hard to please, thought Bruno, but he smiled and invited her

through the main door and into the living room with the large fireplace he had

built last winter. They went into the kitchen where he made the drinks while she

leaned against the high counter where he normally sat for his solitary meals. He

poured four careful centimetres of Ricard into each tall glass, tossed in an ice

cube and filled the glasses from a jug of cold water from the refrigerator. He

handed one to Isabelle, raised his glass in salute, sipped and turned to work.

He unwrapped the beefsteak she had brought and made a swift marinade of red

wine, mustard and garlic, salt and pepper. Then he took the flat of a cleaver

and hammered the steaks until they were the thinness he liked, and put them in

the marinade.

‘Your own water?’ she enquired.

‘We put an electric pump in the well. It takes it up to a water tank and it

tastes good, I had it tested. I said we. My friends from the town built this

place more than I did – the plumbing, electricity, foundations, all the real

stuff. I was just the unskilled labourer. Come on, there’s not much more to

see.’

He showed her his boot room by the door, where he kept the washing machine and

an old sink, his boots and coats, fishing rod and gun, and the ammunition, all

locked away. She hung her leather jacket on a spare hook and he showed her the

big bedroom he had built and the smaller spare room that he used as a study. He

watched her make a fast appraisal of the double bed with its plain white sheets

and duvet, the bedside reading lamp and the shelf of books. A copy of Le Soleil

d’Austerlitz, one of Max Gallo’s histories of Napoleon, lay half open by the

bed, and she moved closer to look at the other books. She ran a finger gently

down the spine of his copy of Baudelaire’s poems and turned to raise a

speculative eyebrow at him. He half-smiled, half-shrugged, but said nothing, and

kept silent when she turned to him again after studying the print of Douanier

Rousseau’s Soir de Carneval on the wall opposite the bed. He bit his lip when he

saw her looking at the framed photographs he kept on the chest of drawers. There

were a couple of happy scenes of tennis club dinners, one of him scoring a try

at a rugby game, and a group photo of men in uniform around an armoured car,

Bruno and Captain Félix Mangin with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

Then, inevitably, she focused on the photograph of Bruno, in uniform and

laughing and lounging on an anonymous riverbank with a happy Katarina, pushing

her long fair hair back from her usually sad eyes. It was the only picture he

had of her. Isabelle said nothing but brushed past him and looked into the

spartan bathroom.

‘You’re very neat,’ she said. ‘It’s almost too clean for a bachelor.’

‘That’s only because you caught me on cleaning day,’ he grinned, spreading his

hands in innocence. So now she knows there was a woman in my life, he thought.

So what? It was a long time ago, and the ache had dulled.

‘Where does Gigi sleep?’

‘Outside. He’s a hunting dog and supposed to be a watchdog.’

‘What’s that hole in the ceiling?’

‘My next project, when I get round to it. I’m going to put a staircase and a

couple of windows in the roof, and make an extra bedroom or two up there.’

‘There’s no TV,’ she said.

‘I have a radio,’ he said flatly. ‘Come and see the outside and I’ll make a

barbecue for the steak.’

She admired the workshop he had made at one end of the barn, the tools all

hanging on a pegboard on the wall, and the jars of pâté and preserves standing

in military ranks on the shelves. He showed her the chicken run, where a couple

of geese had joined the descendants of Joe’s original gift of chickens, and she

counted the numbers of tomato plants and the rows of vegetables.

‘Do you eat all that in a year?’

‘A lot of it, and we have dinners and lunches down at the tennis club. Any extra

I can always give away. I put some into cans for the winter.’

He picked up a stack of dried branches from last year’s grapevine and stacked

them in the brick barbecue, then he shook a bag of wood charcoal onto the top,

thrust a sheet of old newspaper underneath and lit it. Back in the kitchen, he

put plates, glasses and cutlery on a tray and opened her wine, a decent cru

bourgeois from the Médoc. He opened the jar of venison pâté she had brought, put

it on a plate with some cornichons and arranged the wedge of Brie on a wooden

board.

‘Let’s eat outside,’ he said, taking the tray. ‘You can make the salad while I

do the steak, but we have time to enjoy our drinks before the barbecue is

ready.’

‘There’s no sign of a woman here,’ Isabelle remarked, when they had sat down at

the green plastic table on his terrace and were watching Gigi licking his lips