Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

shake Bruno’s hand.
    “So who’s been arrested?” Bruno asked. “And where is this friend of mine now?”
    “In a cell below,” said Duroc. “He’s one of the gardening staff employed at the research station whom you and the Police Nationale were supposed to have checked out. We received information that someone was lying about being at home that night. Apparently he knows you from the hunting club. We offered him a lawyer and he asked for you instead. His name is Gaston Thiviers. No previous record.”
    “I certainly know him, but he seems an unlikely suspect.What’s the evidence against him? What kind of information did you receive, an anonymous letter?”
    “I can’t talk about my informants,” Duroc said, turning directly to the brigadier and looking smug. “But I got his wife to confess that she’d lied to the police and he wasn’t home on the night in question. And he also lied about it in the statement the police took from him at the research station.”
    Bruno closed his eyes and winced. Damn Duroc, acting like a bulldozer with so little sense of the town and the people in it. When Bruno looked up, the brigadier was looking at him curiously. “You have something to add?”
    “Yes, sir. I congratulate Captain Duroc on his initiative, but I think you’ll find that if we check with Geneviève Vuillard at the bank, Gaston will have an alibi.”
    He turned to Duroc. “You know, I’m sure, that Madame Thiviers is in a wheelchair?” Duroc nodded. “She was crippled in a car crash about five years ago when her brother was driving,” Bruno went on. “He was killed in the crash. So what you’ve stumbled on is a very discreet family arrangement. Gaston’s a good man, a devoted husband, and he takes wonderful care of his wife. But because of her injuries, she can’t be a wife to him in certain respects. So he spends a couple of nights a week elsewhere. Gabrielle knows about it and has been very understanding. After we first interviewed the research station staff, I checked on Gaston’s whereabouts on the night of the fire with Geneviève.”
    “Madame Thiviers said nothing about that,” said Duroc, irritated and openly skeptical of Bruno’s account. “Under questioning, she confirmed that her husband hadn’t spent the night with her. She lied in her initial statement to the police. I warned her she could be prosecuted.”
    Bruno controlled his anger. Whatever brief satisfaction he would feel from telling Duroc he was a fool would be paid forin bad relations for months to come. “She probably felt humiliated at confessing to a stranger that her husband was elsewhere overnight,” Bruno said. “Now she’ll be terrified of getting him into trouble and being in trouble herself. I just wish you’d asked me about this earlier so I could have explained the background. I told J-J, which is why the Police Nationale didn’t pursue it. In fact, I think J-J made his own discreet check with Madame Vuillard.”
    The brigadier was grinning, whether at the suspect’s marital arrangements or at Duroc’s discomfiture was not clear. “Anonymous letter, was it?” the brigadier asked Duroc.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Don’t tell me,” Bruno said. “It wasn’t posted but hand-delivered to the gendarmerie early in the morning. Mauve notepaper, handwritten in the old-fashioned way they used to teach and with lots of words underlined.”
    Duroc blushed, but nodded reluctantly when the brigadier looked at him.
    “It’s Virginie Mercier from the retirement home,” said Bruno. “She’s been a bit funny that way for years. She spent over fifty years working as a maid in Father Sentout’s house before he sent her off into retirement. The time she doesn’t spend in church she spends trying to root out what she calls ‘immoral behavior’ and sending off letters denouncing it. I can’t imagine this is the first one you’ve received from her. I get one a week. I think one of them was about you,
mon capitaine.”
    “I’ve had several complaining that you and the mayor are suppressing the evidence she gave you,” Duroc said stiffly. “This is the first one she sent with any information we could act on.”
    “You didn’t ask any of your gendarmes about it first?” Bruno asked. If the man didn’t consult his own team, he was evenmore of a fool than Bruno feared. “Your sergeant Jules would certainly know about Gaston’s little arrangement.”
    “Sergeant Jules is off today,” Duroc said,