Martin Walker - Black Diamond

“Get Piguin to look at the teeth of that corpse in the Auberge,” Bruno said to Jofflin. “I’ll bet you a fortune it’s old Pons.”

“Are you going to lie down?” Fabiola asked harshly.

“No. I’m going with the inspecteur here to Pons’s place. All the answers will be there.”

“You’re going nowhere,” Fabiola snapped. “Get back into bed.”

“It struck me when you reminded me about Pons’s plantation,” he said to the mayor, but sitting back on the bed. “That’s where some of the campers were parked overnight before heading on to Arcachon, where Pons’s son was directing the landing of a shipload of illegal immigrants. They fooled us into thinking that they were estranged, but the two of them were in league all along. They were in it together, father and son, the truffles and the Chinese market, the alliance with the Chinese, the pedophile brothel and above all the election.”

“But they were opposing each other in the election,” the mayor objected.

“No, they weren’t,” said Bruno, remembering that book on British intelligence that had been on Hercule’s desk, the passage about a British agent becoming mayor of some small village in order to issue ID cards and ration books for other agents.

“Old Pons was only running to take enough votes from you so that he’d get his son elected. And guess why? Who issues identity cards and birth and marriage certificates? You do, at the mairie. What better place to give a bunch of illegal immigrants good French identity papers than a mairie under your own control?”

“But what about that fight over closing the sawmill?” the mayor said, speaking loudly above the sound of the helicopter. It sounded as if it were almost overhead.

“That was how they conned us, don’t you see?” Bruno replied. “Pons wasn’t going to lose a damn thing by it. He already had another sawmill site lined up, and he told me and the baron about his plans to develop the sawmill site here in St. Denis for housing. With his son in the mairie granting development approval, he’d have made a fortune.”

“And on top of all that, the son was providing little Chinese girls,” said Jofflin. “And little boys to blackmail Didier with at the truffle market.” Jofflin was thumbing through a notebook, found the page he wanted and looked up. “Piguin in Siorac is on the list of the dentists we’re checking for the teeth. By the way, we found this in Boniface Pons’s Mercedes. It seems like some sort of local diary.”

“Give me some gloves,” Bruno said. The mayor handed him a pair of medical gloves from a box on a side table. Bruno slipped them on, took the bag from Jofflin and pulled out what he was sure would be Hercule’s truffle journal. There was no name on the inside cover, but the first page was dated December 1982, and it began: “Three fine brumales from the oak behind the hunters’ hide just off the Vergt road, total weight 340 grams.”

Bruno turned to the last entry, stopping when he saw one of Hercule’s tidy sketches. A lump came into his throat when there was one of Gigi, front paw and tail raised, nose high and sniffing, his eyes fixed on something off the page. There was a gentle caricature of the baron and an account of the wines the three of them had shared at dinner. Beneath that was evidence of a new technology, a GPS reference for a site deep in the woods where Hercule had found truffles. The last entry listed the sale that Bruno had made in Ste. Alvere and a final phrase, “If anyone can get to the bottom of this fraud, it will be Bruno.”

“This is it,” said Bruno. “Hercule’s journal, the one he left to me in his will.”

“What was it doing in Pons’s car?” the mayor asked.

Bruno could hardly hear him for the sound of the helicopter landing on the sports field behind the medical center. He looked out the window as the noise of the engines died, and J-J and the brigadier emerged, stooping under the slowing rotor blades.

“By being in Pons’s car, it provides the evidence we need that Pons was connected to Hercule’s murder,” Bruno said. “That’s why I have to get to Pons’s house. More evidence will be there. There’ll be a will, with his son as beneficiary. There’ll be paperwork on the truffles trade, and I’ll bet the cash he used at the truffle market came from his Chinese friends. But what I’m really looking for…” Bruno broke off as J-J and the brigadier eased past the baron and Pamela at the door and came into the room.

“What I’m really looking for,” Bruno repeated, “is evidence that Pons was directly responsible for the murder of Hercule.”

“I think I can help you there. We’ve established a motive,” said the brigadier. “But should you be up and about?”

“No, he shouldn’t,” said Fabiola. “But you try stopping him.”

“What’s the motive?” Bruno asked.

“Clear the room, J-J,” the brigadier said, and stood silent at the foot of the bed while J-J escorted Fabiola, Jofflin and the others into the hallway outside. He closed the door and leaned against it. The brigadier turned to check the room and nodded his thanks.

“It’s Hercule’s memoirs, from the safety-deposit box,” he began. “Hercule incriminates Pons not just as a torturer in the Algerian War, but as a crook. Hercule says it all happened at a detention camp called Ameziane, and it was hushed up at the time. He says Pons took bribes from their families to ease up on the torture. He claims Pons would specialize in rounding up children, and then taking money to free them after he’d had his fun with them.”

“Why did he leave it so long to make this public?” From the back of his mind, Bruno recalled the baron talking of Pons coming back from Algeria with enough money to build a new sawmill. Now he knew where the cash had come from.

“The typescript was in a sealed envelope in the safety-deposit box, addressed to his notaire and marked not to be opened until after his death. The manuscript wasn’t complete,” the brigadier said. “There were rumors among the old barbouzes that Hercule was up to something like this. He’d been asking questions of some old comrades. I guess Pons heard those rumors too.”

“Are you going to release it for publication?” Bruno asked.

“That’s not my decision, and there’s a lot of other stuff in there that we wouldn’t want to see made public. But if you subpoena parts of the manuscript for evidence in a murder trial, the memoirs would have to be made available to the court. Just remember you didn’t hear that from me.”

“But if Pons is dead, there’ll be no murder trial.”

“He’s dead?” asked the brigadier. “Are you sure?”

“No, but we think he died in the fire, in bed with a little Chinese girl,” said Bruno.

“There will be a murder trial,” said J-J. “That young Chinese thug you arrested in Bordeaux gave us a DNA match on the tissues and the cigarettes in the abandoned Mercedes that was at the murder scene.”

There was one more question Bruno had to ask before the others came back into the room. “How’s Isabelle?”

“Still not awake when we left, but the doctors say she’ll be as good as new. They have to put a titanium brace onto her thighbone. After a few months, she won’t know it’s there, but she’s in for a long convalescent leave.”

“Can the others come back in now?” Bruno asked. The brigadier nodded, and J-J opened the door and beckoned them in.

“Here,” said the brigadier, handing Bruno a new mobile phone. “It’s got your old number, and you’ve got dozens of messages already, half of them from the media.”

“The other half are from me, calling to apologize,” said Pamela. She didn’t look in the least apologetic, perhaps a little embarrassed. Mainly she looked her usual self, and Bruno felt a rush of affection.