Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

sense. And this paint isn’t coming off, neither with water nor with turpentine. It seems to be some special kind of paint.”
    “They made a hell of a job of it,” said the mayor, staring at the splashes of red paint at his feet and around the door and the whitened sides. “It’s all around the back as well.”
    Isabelle led the way inside one of the greenhouses, which was still warm but with the familiar smell of soil and fruitfulness now masked by the acrid smell of the paint. Some of theroof panes had been left open for ventilation, and beneath them the white paint pooled around the rows of plants.
    “That’s as clever a piece of sabotage as I’ve seen,” she said. “They didn’t break the glass, so there was no sound. There was no break-in, so no alarm sounded. But the place is destroyed, just the same.”
    “Have you looked at the security cameras?” Bruno asked Petitbon.
    “First thing I did. But we’re not going to learn much. Come and see.”
    He led the way to the front of the old house, where one camera had been fixed above the door. Its lens and the stone wall behind it were covered in a spray of white paint.
    “It’s the same around the back,” Petitbon said. “The only one they missed was on the chimney, looking over the side. I was just going to check the tape when the mayor turned up. Let’s go and see if we got anything.”
    The images were fuzzy but clear, made just after 2 a.m. The camera showed one man dressed in painter’s overalls and wearing goggles over a hood, moving with slow deliberation along the side of the greenhouses. There was a large pack strapped to his back, presumably the paint reservoir, and a long nozzle in one hand that emitted a fine, spraying arc of paint onto the glass roof as he pumped a lever with the other hand. When he got to the end of the greenhouse, he moved out of sight of the camera for a few minutes and then returned, walking in the same slow way back to spray their sides.
    “I couldn’t identify my own wife, dressed up like that,” said the mayor.
    “That’s a lot of paint,” said Bruno. “I suppose when he disappeared he might have been refilling. He couldn’t have brought all that on foot.”
Or on a motorbike
, he thought. “There must have been a truck or a car somewhere very near.”
    “The chain was cut on the side gates,” said Petitbon. “The cameras don’t cover that. He probably just drove straight in.”
    “Check if there was anything from the other cameras before they got sprayed, just in case,” said Bruno. “I’ll take a look at the side gate.”
    The chain was thin enough to have been cut easily, but on the grass there were two clear tire tracks in white that faded as they led to the gate. Bruno measured the gap between the tires and scribbled a note. It was too wide for a car. J-J’s team might be able to identify the kind of truck and maybe even the tires, although the tracks looked too smeared on the grass for easy identification. There were plenty of smeared white footprints on the grass along the side of the greenhouses, but nothing as clear as the imprint of a shoe. Perhaps the culprit had bags over his feet. He had left nothing else behind, not even an empty can of paint.
    Isabelle was sealing a small plastic evidence bag that she had filled with a sample of the paint she had scraped off as Bruno returned to the greenhouse, where the technicians were trying various products to clean the paint. None of them seemed to be working, and the technicians were muttering about some special type of cement paint. In his office, Petitbon had his head in his hands and a phone to his ear, muttering,
“Oui, monsieur; oui, monsieur.”
    The mayor drew Bruno discreetly aside. “You realize what this means? Bondino won’t go ahead now. First the fire, then the demonstration and now this.”
    Bruno felt a small surge of relief. He hadn’t been thinking of that. From the road outside he heard the sound of a police siren. That would probably be J-J. Bruno went outside to greet him, only to find himself caught in the flash of Delaron’s camera.
Putain
, he thought,
another front-page story on the crime wave of Saint-Denis
.
    “How come you’re always on the scene, Philippe?” he said to the photographer as J-J’s car drew in. “You’ll be at the top of the suspect list if you go on like this.”
    “My uncle works here,” said the young man cheerfully, focusing his camera to get J-J’s hulking form against the