Martin Walker: Bruno, chief of police

J-J waited until they were out of Bordeaux and on the autoroute before saying, ‘If you screw me around on this, Bruno, I’ll never forgive you.’

‘I thought you would threaten to put me in jail,’ Bruno said.

‘If I could, I damn well would,’ J-J grunted. ‘I think you already know who killed the bastard, and you are pretty sure that nobody else will ever find out.

That’s what you went out to tell your Mayor. You and your local knowledge. Am I right?’

‘No, you’re wrong. I may have some suspicions, but I’m pretty sure neither you nor I nor anybody else is going to be able to prove it. There’s no forensic evidence. If there wasn’t enough to convict Richard and Jacqueline, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to pin this on anybody else, not without a confession. And some of these old Resistance types went through a Gestapo interrogation without talking. They won’t confess to you. If this case goes public, you can imagine the lawyers who’ll be standing in line to represent them for free, for patriotism. It will be an honour to stand up and defend these old heroes. Any ambitious and clever young lawyer can build a career on a case like this. You know what, J-J? Tavernier will fight tooth and nail for the privilege of representing them. He’ll resign from the Magistrature, resign from the Ministry, make a big media trial and ride it all the way to the National Assembly.’

J-J grunted a kind of agreement and they drove on in silence.

‘Damn it to hell, Bruno,’ J-J finally burst out. ‘Is that what you want? An unsolved murder? Dark suspicions of racial killing? It will poison your precious St Denis for years to come.’

‘I have thought hard about that and it’s a risk we have to take, a risk we have to balance against the alternative,’ Bruno said. ‘And there’s something else that worries me. We toss this phrase around about him being a war criminal, and it was hideous what he and that Force Mobile did around here. But think about it a bit more. He was a kid, nineteen or twenty, living in the slums of Marseilles in the middle of a war. No job, no family, probably despised as a dirty Arab by the people around him. The only guy who ever gave him a break was his football coach, Villanova. Suddenly through Villanova he gets a job and a uniform, three square meals a day and his pay. And just for once he’s somebody. He has a gun and comrades and a barracks to sleep in, and he carries out the orders he’s given from a man he respects and who has all the authority of the state behind him. After the Force Mobile was wound up, he paid his dues. He fought for France, in our uniform this time. He fought in Vietnam. He fought in Algeria. He was in a good unit that saw a lot of combat. And he stayed on for the rest of his life in our own French army, the only place he could think of as home. So yes, a war criminal, but he did his best to make up for it. He raised a fine family, made his kids get an education so that now his son has taught every kid in St Denis how to do his sums. His grandson is a fine young man with a great-grandson on the way. Do we want to drag all that through the shit-storm this would become?’

‘Shit-storm is right.’

‘Anyway, this is not going to be decided by you or me, J-J,’ Bruno went on.

‘This is going to go all the way to the top, to Paris. They’re not going to want a trial of some old Resistance heroes who executed an Arab war criminal sixty years after he burned their farms, raped their mothers and killed their brothers. Work it out. The Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister will all have to troop into the Elysйe Palace and explain to the President of the Republic how the TV news and the headlines for the next few weeks are going to be about gangs of armed Arabs collaborating with the Nazis to terrorise patriotic French families. And then they evade justice by hiding out undiscovered in the French Army. And on top of all that they fool us into making them war heroes with a Croix de Guerre. Can you imagine how that plays out in the opinion polls, on the streets, in the next election? Tell me, what would the Front National do with that?’

‘Those are not our decisions, Bruno. We do our work, collect the evidence, and then it is up to the judicial authorities. It’s up to the law, not us.’

‘Come off it, J-J. It’s up to Tavernier, who’ll do nothing without considering every possible political angle and checking with every minister he can reach.

When we explain all this to him, he will understand instantly that this case is political suicide. In fact I’ll bet you a bottle of champagne that Tavernier takes one look at all this and decides to take a prolonged leave of absence for reasons of health.’

‘I don’t take bets I know I’m going to lose, Bruno. Not for that little shit.

But it’s not just Tavernier. No matter how it gets sat on, this is going to leak out eventually, probably from that English historian woman. Is she your latest, by the way?’

‘Mind your own business, J-J. But I’ll tell you what I want out of today. I want to go with you into Tavernier’s conference room and lay out the evidence, and then I want to drive back to St Denis with young Richard Gelletreau in the back of the car and hand him over to his parents with no charges against him. You have your drugs conviction with that nasty little Jacqueline, and you’ll get bonus points for cooperation with the Dutch police when Jacqueline’s evidence convicts them. You have the Front National thugs on narcotics charges. You and Isabelle come out smelling of roses.’

‘That will be a nice farewell present for her,’ J-J said. ‘You know she’s being transferred back to Paris? The order came in last night and I haven’t had the chance to pass on the good news. We’ll miss that girl in Pйrigueux.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Bruno said automatically, feeling he had just been punched in the stomach, but knowing that he would have to say something or J-J would notice. Deep down, he told himself, this was no surprise. It was inevitable. He made an effort to keep his voice level. ‘The Mayor predicted that she would be assigned to the Minister’s staff.’

‘Who knows? But I wouldn’t be surprised,’ J-J said fondly. He clearly thought a lot of her. ‘The orders just said she was assigned back to HQ in Paris as of September the first. But she’ll go with a feather in her cap and – what was that old Napoleon phrase? – with a Marshal’s baton in her knapsack. She’ll probably end up as my boss in a year or two, but Isabelle will always have a soft spot in her heart for us rustics down here in Perigord. We’ll just have to keep her well supplied with foie gras.’

Tavernier knew all about the promotion, and strode into the conference room with a cheerful smile and a comradely handshake. ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you, my dear Inspector Perrault,’ he said. J-J handed her the transfer order, and for the briefest and most self-indulgent of moments Bruno watched her reaction before he scolded himself and looked away. He had seen her eyes light up and that was enough.

‘Now, I hear you have made a breakthrough in the case,’ Tavernier said. ‘New evidence from Bordeaux, they tell me. Explain.’

Bruno laid out the photocopies of the pay books from Vichy and from the French Army. Then he added the fax photo of Hussein Boudiaf with Massili Barakine and Giulio Villanova, and the Force Mobile action report that cited Boudiaf’s role in the raids around St Denis.

‘Our murder victim was a hired killer for the Vichy Milice, who changed his name and his identity to hide out in the French Army,’ he said, and sat down. ‘That is why his executioner carved the swastika onto his chest.’