in anticipation. The dog knew what it meant when the barbecue was lit.

‘Not at the moment,’

said Bruno. ‘No woman, no TV, no pictures on your walls except photos of sports

teams. No family photos, no pictures of adoring girlfriends, except that one

when you were in the army. Your house is impeccable – and impersonal – and your

books are all non-fiction. I deduce that you are a very self-controlled and

organised man.’

‘You haven’t seen the inside of my car,’ he smiled, deflecting her comment.

‘It’s a mess.’

‘That’s your public life, your work. This home is the private Bruno, and very

anonymous it is, except for the books, and even they are classics, the kind of

works you might expect to find in the house of an educated man.’

‘I’m not an educated man,’ he said. ‘I left school at sixteen.’

‘And went into the Army youth battalion,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know. And then into

the combat engineers, and you did paratroop training and were promoted. You

served in some special operations with the Legion in Africa before you went to

Bosnia and won a medal for hauling some wounded men from a burning armoured car.

They wanted to make you an officer but you refused. And then you were shot by a

sniper when you were trying to stop some Serb paramilitaries from burning a

Bosnian village, and they flew you back to France for treatment.’

‘So – you’ve read my Army file. Did you make enquiries with the Renseignements

Généraux?’ Privately, he thought how little the official files really knew. He

wondered if she had made the connection between the name of his captain in

Bosnia, Félix Mangin, who wrote that approving report and carefully avoided

explaining why Bruno had tried to save that particular Bosnian village, and the

name of Mayor Mangin in St Denis.

Félix had been with him when they first found the ramshackle old motel that the

Serbs had turned into a brothel for their troops, and had rescued the Bosnian

women who had been forced to service them. Rescued them, then moved them into

what was supposed to be a safe house in a secure Bosnian village and brought in

Médecins Sans Frontičres to treat the women and try to help them recover from

the nightmare. No, the official files never had the full story, and dry prose

never explained all the human decisions and accidents of life that made up

reality.

‘No, I did not ask for your file.

J-J

got hold of it on the day after the

arrests at Lalinde when we realised that this was going to blow up into a

political matter. It was routine, the kind of standard background check we’d do

on anybody mixed up in something as sensitive as this. He showed it to me. I was

impressed. I just hope my superiors write equally good things about me in my

performance reviews,’ she smiled. ‘The RG files cover everything: credit cards,

subscriptions, your surprisingly poor scores on the Gendarmerie pistol range

given that your army file rated you as a marksman, your healthy savings

account.’

‘I’m not rich, but I don’t have much to spend my salary on,’ he said, as if that

might explain something.

‘Except in friends and reputation,’ she said, and finished her Ricard. ‘I am not

here as a cop, Bruno, just as an amiable colleague who is far from home and with

not much to do on the rare evening I get time off. I’m not probing, but

naturally I’m curious about the woman in the photo.’

He said nothing. She picked up the wine and poured herself a glass, twirled it

and sniffed.

‘This is the wine

J-J

ordered when he took me to lunch when I first came down

here,’ she said. He nodded, still with most of his Ricard to finish.

‘And what did

J-J

tell you to brief me about?’ he asked, determined to shift the

conversation back onto safe ground.

‘He hasn’t got very far. No fingerprints and no forensics that put the boy or

the girl anywhere inside Hamid’s cottage, nor any of the other young fascists we

found at her house. They both deny knowing him or ever visiting him, and there’s

no blood on those daggers on her wall. So all we have so far is the drugs and

the politics, and while we can convict the girl on the drugs, the boy was tied

up. A lawyer can say that makes him non-complicit, and since he’s under eighteen

he counts as a juvenile.’

‘That sex looked pretty consensual to me,’ said Bruno.

‘Yes,’ she said briskly. ‘I suppose it was, but that was the sex, which is not

illegal, even for juveniles, and it’s not evidence of drug use. We may have to

release the boy. If it had been down to me and what I learned in Paris, I’d have

put pressure on the boy through the girl. Call it a hunch, but I feel sure they

have some involvement in the murder, even though there’s no forensic evidence.

She’s certainly going down on drugs charges and the boy is evidently obsessed

with her, keeps asking about her. We might have got an admission on the drugs

out of him and used that as a lever to get some more information. But

J-J

does

not play it that way, as you know.’

‘Justice is alive and well and living in Pčrigord,’ said Bruno drily. He glanced

behind him at the embers. Not ready yet. He finished his Ricard and Isabelle

poured him a glass of Médoc.

‘There’s one new development, from that patch of mud on the track that leads to

the cottage,’ she said. ‘We took casts of the tyre prints, and there’s one set

that could match Jacqueline’s car – except that they’re Michelins, and they

match thousands of cars on the road.’

‘Yes, and the track leads to several houses.’

‘True. And some ambitious young Juge-magistrat arrives from Paris on Monday to

take over the case, at which point we simply become the investigators following

the leads he chooses. My friends in Paris say there’s some political jockeying

over who gets the job, but so far

J-J

stays in charge of the case, probably

because there’s so little evidence. If we were close to proving anything, some

Paris brigadier would have been down to take the credit. Now I’ll make the

salad.’

He rose to join her, turning on the terrace light as he passed. In the kitchen

he took some slightly wilted lettuce from the refrigerator and pointed her to

the olive oil and the wine vinegar. He put a pot of water on to boil and began

to peel and slice some potatoes, then he flattened some cloves of garlic, took a

frying pan and splashed in some oil. When the water boiled, he tipped in the

sliced potatoes, aware that she was watching, and turned over his egg timer, a

miniature hourglass, to blanch them for three minutes.

‘When the timer goes, drain them, dry them on a bit of kitchen paper and fry

them in the oil for a few minutes with the crushed garlic. Add salt and pepper –

it’s over there – and bring it all out,’ he said. ‘Thanks. I’ll go and do the

steaks.’

The embers were just right, a fine grey ash over the fierce red. He put the

grill close to the coals, arranged the steaks, and then under his breath sang

the Marseillaise, which he knew from long practice took him exactly forty-five

seconds. He turned the steaks, dribbled some of the marinade on top of the

charred side, and sang it again. This time he turned the steaks for ten seconds,

pouring on more of the marinade, and then another ten seconds. Now he took them

off the coals and put them on the plates he’d left to warm on the bricks that

formed the side of the grill. Soon Isabelle appeared, the frying pan in one hand