Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

in her old hotel room, but just before I came here I went to check with the manager’s wife, and she said it was two or three nights. Whenever Max wasn’t with her, Bondino was. He could have used her hairbrush then. Or maybe it’s his. So it’s possible that Bondino never laid a hand on Max, just as he said, whatever the DNA evidence might suggest. Somebody else put those hairs under Max’s nails to incriminate Bondino. I think you’d better get your forensics team over here.”
    “That’s pretty far-fetched, Bruno. I suppose you see her motive as that family feud, and those documents you explained to me,” said J-J, looking through the items on the dressing table. “What’s that? A nail file?”
    A nail file might be just the thing to put Bondino’s hair under Max’s fingernails
, thought Bruno as J-J pointed at the thin plastic sleeve on the dressing table.
    “Got any evidence gloves in your car?”
    “In the glove compartment. Help yourself,” said J-J, thumbing a number into his phone to call his forensics team.
    Out in the courtyard, Pamela was poking through a large yellow plastic bag that she had pulled from the garbage can. “No wrapping paper, but more of these strips of tape,” she called. Bruno waved an acknowledgment and grabbed two sets of gloves, then ran back up the stairs and handed a pair to J-J. He blew into them to loosen the latex, slipped his hands into them and then picked up what turned out not to be a nail file. He eased a long flexible plastic strip from the sleeve.
    “A strip of thin plastic protected inside plastic. What on earth could that be?” he asked, holding it up to the window and turning it. Bruno switched on the desk lamp and they looked again.
    “Wait a minute,” said Bruno. He darted down the stairs again and returned with some of the strips of tape that Pamela had rescued, holding them against the light.
    “You always get fingerprints on sticky tape,” said J-J.
    “Yes, but whose?” said Bruno. He went into the bathroom and came out with some talcum powder, then delicately tapped the bottom of the can, dusting a small amount onto one of the bottles of toilet water on the dressing table. “Let’s assume those are Jacqueline’s prints on her scent bottle,” he said, and gently blew away the talc. The ridges of a thumbprint emerged on the glass. He placed one of the adhesive strips alongside it. “That’s the same print, right?”
    “Yes, it looks like it,” said J-J. “So what’s your point?”
    “Watch.” Bruno carefully unwrapped a little of the plastic bag and dusted some talcum power onto the handle of the hairbrush and then blew it away. “That print there will belong to Bondino, and I know why she wanted his prints. His laptop computer has a security device, some kind of sensor that required his fingerprint to unlock it. That’s why she needed him in her bed and asleep in her room. She wanted to get into his computer. Some of the documents in those files of hers downstairs are confidential business plans and company accounts. Maybe that’s what she was after. But if she could fake his prints to get into his computer, what else could she do with them?”
    “You think she could have transferred them onto that glass we found at Cresseil’s place?” asked J-J.
    “That’s what the adhesive tape strips were for. I think she lifted the fingerprints from her hairbrush and then put them on the glass. That’s one for your forensics team to check when they get here. If that’s what she did, there’ll be traces of the adhesive on the glass.”
    “Hello,” called Pamela from downstairs, above the sound ofanother car arriving. “Fabiola’s here. There’s nothing more in the garbage can, no wrapping paper. Are you two both upstairs?” Bruno shouted, “Yes,” and heard her footsteps coming up the stairs.
    “Those bits of tape,” he said when she came into the bedroom. “I think they were used to lift fingerprints from one thing and transfer them to something else.”
    “Oh yes?” she said, not the least bit surprised. “I think I remember something like that from one of the IRA bomb trials in Britain. You remember, the Northern Ireland troubles. So whose fingerprints do you have?”
    “We aren’t sure yet,” said Bruno as J-J began working his phone again. “Let’s go down and say hello to Fabiola. I need to find out what happened with the pathologist’s report.”
    Fabiola’s car was packed. There was a suitcase on the