Black Diamond

Nguyen-Vendrot, if she can be found. I assume that may be the daughter, but it doesn’t say so. If she is not traced by his executors in a reasonable time, the house goes to the commune of Ste. Alvère. The latest available information on her whereabouts is with his
notaire
in the town here. He is named as an executor of the will, along with you and the baron.”
    She put down the will. “And that, my dear Bruno, means that I had better arrest you. And your friend the baron when he turns up. You two found the body. You are the heirs. Obviously you had the motive and the opportunity, and presumably you had the means. How was he killed?”
    “That’s not funny, Isabelle. He was tortured, left hanging by his wrists.”
    “Mon Dieu!”
She shuddered. “Do we have a time of death yet?”
    “No, but the baron and I were there a bit before nine, and the blood was still wet. He can’t have been dead long, and we saw nobody on the trail up to the hide where we found him. There are other ways out from there, but you’d have to know those woods pretty well.”
    “Not in these days of GPS. But they’d still need to rinse the blood off themselves, most likely. Was there water nearby?”
    “Yes, a stream. I’ll make sure the forensics guys check that. But Hercule was a hunter and a trained soldier. And he was armed. It wouldn’t have been easy to sneak up on him or takehim by surprise. He knew those woods like the back of his hand.”
    “One of the things they’ll be looking for in the archives is anything that could point to a motive for his murder. It’s a bit complicated because of the way he left the service,” she said. “I don’t know the details, but he was one of the victims of Mitterrand’s big cleanup in eighty-two, when he closed down SDECE and started the new foreign intelligence department. It was all political. Mitterrand thought the old guard was a bunch of right-wing anti-Communists, and his coalition government depended on Communist support. So he closed the old bureau down and put the new organization under the Ministry of Defense.”
    “And Hercule was one of the sacrificial lambs.”
    “Exactly. And when they fired him Hercule was running the Action Division, that’s the clandestine service. So you can imagine, one of the top priorities of the new organization was to keep an eye on the disgruntled veterans of the old one, just in case they used their files to make trouble.”
    “But he never did.”
    “Not Hercule, no. But some others caused Mitterrand a lot of problems, leaks of files to
Le Canard Enchaîné
and
Figaro
. And remember back in eighty-two Mitterrand was running a very left-wing government, nationalizing the banks and big companies, and there was a run on the franc. Closing down la Piscine was seen as part of that, a big move to the left. The Americans were very worried.”
    “La Piscine,” he said, almost to himself. “I haven’t heard that for a while.” It was the old slang term among insiders for French intelligence, named because its headquarters on boulevard Mortier in Paris adjoined the big Tourellesswimming pool. “So how closely would Hercule have been watched?”
    “Very closely, but that’s long over,” Isabelle replied. “I checked before I came, and there’s no surveillance here, no microphones and not even a phone tap. Hercule was listed as ‘inactive’ until the brigadier got your phone call this morning.”
    And now it all starts up again, thought Bruno. Hercule’s old outfit was taken over by the defense ministry, and Isabelle works for the minister of the interior. There would be turf wars over this.
    “So when do we expect the defense ministry guys to turn up?” he asked.
    “We don’t,” she said firmly. “At least not officially. This is an internal French matter, so it’s our affair, not theirs. I’ll call you on your mobile as soon as the archives team turns up,” she continued, a touch of hesitation in her voice. She looked at him almost shyly. “Perhaps we can have a drink before I get a train back to Bordeaux?”
    “I’d like that, but what happened to the helicopter?” He was smiling at her, despite himself, despite having been through all this before. He knew that theirs had been an affair without a future, but the grip of the past was very strong.
    “The chopper just dropped me off. Getting here was urgent, not getting back.”

9
    So big and boisterous that he always seemed to fill every room he entered, J-J threw