Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

busy roundabout and the bustle of the main shopping street behind it.
    Most of the people he could see were tourists, studying the houses for sale in the real estate agents’ windows. Saint-Denis now boasted four bakeries, four salons, four real estate agencies, three banks and three shops selling foie gras and other local delicacies, but there was only one grocery and one butcher’s shop. The fishmonger had long since given way to an insurance agency. Another grocery had been replaced the previous winter by a business that serviced computers and sold cell phones and DSL lines for the Internet. And a butcher had retired in the spring and now rented his premises to a real estate agent. It was no longer the Saint-Denis Bruno had first come to a decade ago, when the small towns of rural France still retained the shops and the texture he remembered from his boyhood. Now people shopped at the supermarkets on the outskirts of town, or drove to the complex of shopping malls and hypermarkets outside Périgueux, forty minutes away. Bruno sighed and turned back to his desk.
    He filled out the good conduct forms, signing and stamping each one with his seal, and signed the musicians’ contracts. He completed the paperwork for two death notices to be sent to the prefecture, and phoned Father Sentout to confirm the church for the funerals. Then something jogged his memory. He had signed another batch of good conduct forms earlier in the year. He looked at his file of copies, and there he foundwhat he was looking for: an application for a summer job as a lab assistant at the Agricultural Research Station for Dominique Suchet, Stéphane’s daughter. He and J-J had interviewed the permanent staff, checking the backgrounds of the technicians and the farmworkers. But he hadn’t thought about the summer workers.
Putain
. That meant more work, but it had to be done.
    Bruno paused. Dominique had been at the scene of the fire with her father—natural enough since their farm was just down the hill. Still, it was an interesting coincidence. He looked again at Dominique’s good conduct form, which contained a recommendation from the headmaster of the town
collège
, the secondary school where the kids went before going on to the
lycée
. He picked up the phone and called Rollo, the headmaster.
    Rollo told him Dominique was a very promising girl, good at math and science. She’d done well at the
lycée
and was now studying computer science at a university in Grenoble. She was a hard worker and had been captain of the school swimming team. Bruno began to scribble notes as Rollo described how during a mock election, Dominique and her partner had held meetings about global warming and melting ice caps, plastered the school with posters about it and defeated the Socialist favorites to pull off a victory for the Greens. When he asked who had been her partner, Rollo said it had been Max, Alphonse’s son.
    Bruno thanked Rollo and put down the phone. The prospect of a militant young Green at the research station, doubtless knowing about the GMO project, with a father whose farm was near the trial crops, was by far the best lead in a case where he was making no progress. But Stéphane was a friend of his. He’d have to make some inquiries of his own before talking to J-J, at least to establish whether the girl had adecent alibi for the time of the fire. He rose and was reaching for his cap when Claire put her head around his door to say the mayor needed to see him.
    “I like the new haircut, Bruno,” she added, lingering in the doorway.
    “It’s the same one I get every month,” he said, grabbing his notebook.
    “No, it’s shorter,” she said, edging closer to the door so that he had to squeeze past. “It makes you look younger.”
    “But I’m even older now than I was when it was cut,” he said, and left her nonplussed.
    His spirits rose as they always did when he entered the mayor’s office. The rich colors of old wood and paneling and faded rugs could hardly have been more different from those of his own cramped and functional office, or from the modernized reception area. The mayor kept to the old ways, preferring his fountain pen to a computer terminal, and the traditional system of manila file folders bound with green and red tape over some electronic database.
    “Bonjour
, Bruno. I had a call earlier from the American embassy in Paris, commercial section, following up on a letter they sent that somehow Claire seems to