Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

swallowing hard. Bruno knew that wasn’t the case, but he ignored it.
    “Well, all this will obviously have to be looked into, and it confirms the importance of local knowledge,” said the brigadier. He glanced briefly but knowingly at Bruno, who maintained a solemn face. “If Madame Vuillard confirms that Gaston was with her on the night in question, we have no reason to detain him, or to trouble his unfortunate wife further.”
    On his way out, Bruno stopped for a word with Jules at the desk to tell him Gaston was in the clear. “And another thing. Cresseil’s old dog is missing. You remember, that Porcelaine. Can you put out a call to the gendarmes and municipal cops downstream, in case he went into the river?”
    The Bar des Amateurs had become a remarkable success despite its location at the far end of the rue de Paris, opposite the gendarmerie, of all places. It boasted a large TV screen for sporting events and stayed open late. Its location and the formidable size of the owners, whose wives prepared the crèpes and pizza and the occasional
croque-monsieur
, guaranteed that its customers seldom dared to disturb the late-night peace of the town. So the proprietors were keen to answer Bruno’s questions about the drunken American and the pretty Canadian girl, to make sure he understood that what had happened in their bar was an aberration.
    “He’d been in most of the evening off and on, going out to walk along the street and then coming back,” said Gilbert, a tall man with a hooked nose. “He said he was waiting for somebody, and had another drink each time he came back.”
    “Vodka and tonics, he was drinking,” said his partner, René, a squat and powerful man.
    “Then at about eleven he came back in, this time with the girl, and they sat talking, quietly enough, until she got up to leave and he grabbed her arm,” Gilbert said. “I walked over, and very politely asked if everything was okay. She said it was. He asked for another drink, but we wouldn’t serve him. He’d had more than enough. The girl said she’d see him back to his hotel.”
    “Why did you still serve him after he smashed your window?”
    “He paid up fast enough. And it’s only a couple of evenings they’ve been in, usually pretty late, as if they’ve come from dinner. She used to come in with Max, and I was kind of surprised when she switched to the American. I thought they’d only gotten together very recently from the way they always seemed to be talking, like strangers discovering things about each other.”
    As Bruno strolled up the rue de Paris toward his office he passed the most modest of the town’s three hotels and remembered another small detail he wanted to check. The hotels of Saint-Denis were each well tailored to the range of visitors: the Manoir was for the wealthy, the much larger Royale was for the package tours and the Hôtel Saint-Denis was cheaper, much more old-fashioned and, in Bruno’s eyes, far more agreeable.
    It had long ago been a fairly grand town house with its own large courtyard and stables, and the best rooms had their own bathrooms. In the communal bathrooms on each floor, the plumbing was ancient, but the scale of the bathtubs was magnificent. On market days and in the tourist season, the courtyard was constantly filled with tables and customers, and in winter the hotel seemed reserved for commercial travelers and morose fishermen. It served breakfast and a light lunch but had no restaurant per se, no conference rooms and no Internetservice. It was as French provincial hotels used to be, which was why Bruno felt warmly about it, and its owner-manager was the long-standing chairman of Bruno’s hunting club.
    “Salut
, Mauricette,” he said to the owner’s wife, who ran the café, kissing both cheeks of the formidable woman with steel-gray hair. “Is Christophe around? Or maybe you can help. I need to check the guest book.”
    She led him to the small reception desk with its telephone and registration book.
    “It’s about one of your guests, Mademoiselle Duplessis, a Canadian who stayed with you for a while. Do you have her details?”
    “Jacqueline? A busy girl, that one.” It was clear she was not a favorite of Mauricette’s. She leafed back through the pages of the massive book. “Early August she arrived. Here it is: on the fourteenth, not long before that big fire.”
    “Are you sure? I thought she told me she’d arrived in town later than that.”
    Mauricette