Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

from the window. Even when Bruno suggested they call on the mayor to confirm that Alphonse was a model citizen, the brigadier’s eyebrows rose in what looked like mockery. “He’s a responsible type, so he may be prepared to help us if we treat him right,” Bruno concluded. It sounded lame, even to him.
    “You may be right, but we don’t have enough time to treat anybody with kid gloves. If he knows anything, I need to know it now,” said the brigadier. “How did word get out about the GMO crops?”
    “Possibly through Dominique Suchet or one of the other employees at the station,” Bruno said, wondering how he could explain what he knew about his local people to an outsider who simply wanted to make an arrest and move on.
    “Dominique told me that she’s part of an
écolo
chat group on the Internet and she started arguing in favor of some GMOs on the basis of her own experience at the station,” he said. “It wouldn’t be difficult for anyone in that chat group to put two and two together.”
    Bruno scratched his head, half remembering something, and then took out his battered notebook and read what he had scribbled after talking to Dominique. He looked up. “This is interesting. She called that chat group
Aquitaine Vert
, so there must be a connection with this newsletter in Bordeaux.” Suddenly he felt more cheerful. It looked as if the focus of the inquiry might be shifting away from Saint-Denis. “I’d better phone J-J and let him know.”
    “That’s already taken care of,” said the brigadier. “There’s a whole floor of an office building in Paris filled with computer experts who have since this morning been trawling through
Aquitaine Vert’s
entire history on the Net: e-mails, phone numbers, call histories, credit-card records, Web searches. You have no idea how many resources we have when we focus our efforts. We’ll have every exchange on that chat site, so if our fire starter learned about the GMOs from Dominique Suchet’s indiscretions, we’ll find him.”
    “Captain Duroc, I’m going to need your office,” the brigadier now said. “I also need your men to bring in Alphonse Vannes and Dominique Suchet. I’ll start by talking to them.”
    “Are they under arrest?”
    “No, of course not. Just helping us with our inquiries. But I’ll want their computers.”
    “And if they don’t want to come?”
    “You’ll have to find a way to persuade them.” He turned to Bruno. “Most of these old ’68 types usually have some drugs around. We can always hold them on that. What do you think?”
    “Alphonse must have grown out of it by now,” said Bruno. “And the young people up there now are more interested in rugby. A raid might be counterproductive. It might be more useful to keep Alphonse cooperative.”
    The brigadier studied Bruno in silence for a long moment.“Just so long as you don’t forget which side of the law you’re on,” he said, then turned to Duroc. “Take a long hard look at those rugby-playing youngsters. They were probably brought up to be zealous little
écolos
. And when we’ve done that, we’ll go through the other inhabitants of Saint-Denis, one by one until we find what we’re looking for. And make a special note of every France Télécom phone card you find.”
    Bruno felt a chill as the brigadier turned away to pull a laptop from his case, plugged it in and settled down before the screen. Duroc and Bruno were dismissed. Duroc went to the front desk to order a car to fetch Alphonse and Dominique. Bruno walked thoughtfully back toward the
mairie
, thinking about that room full of computer experts in Paris trawling through e-mails and tracing phone calls and probably listening in to numbers of interest. By now, that would probably include Dominique’s cell phone. His instinct was to give Stéphane a warning call. But any sign that Dominique was prepared, or that she had called in a lawyer, would just deepen the suspicions about her.

12
    Bruno felt miserable as he took the short stroll from the gendarmerie to the fire station, but his spirits were restored by the cheery greetings he received from the throng on the pavement outside the nursery school. As they always did this close to noon, young mothers with their strollers and shopping bags massed and gossiped and showed off new babies as they waited for the morning classes to end and their children to pour out of the front door in a happy, shrieking horde. If the birthrate alone were the sign