Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

him before I pushed him out?”
    Fabiola nodded. “You’re right. But we might be able to exclude that if we can establish an accurate time of death. It won’t be easy after he was in the wine so long. It works on the tissues. There are also signs of recent bleeding from the nose and bruising there, but they look three or four days old. Could be a rugby injury, or maybe he was hit on the nose.”
    That must have been during the bar fight, thought Bruno. “Anything else?” he asked, scribbling quickly in his notebook as she took off her face mask and peeled off the surgical gloves.
    “Yes, there’s something the forensics team should look at carefully. I think François is right about the boy having had sex,and rather rough sex at that. It could have been masturbation, or possibly sex under water, reducing the natural lubrication. But I think there was a partner because he has scratches on his buttocks.”
    “Any sign of whether he died before Cresseil or after?” Bruno asked, remembering the mayor’s concern. “The lawyers will want to know for the inheritance.”
    “They both died in the same time frame, but perhaps the Bergerac lab can narrow it down.” She turned to François. “You’re good,” she said. “Not many people would have noticed that inflammation. Did you have any medical training?”
    “In the navy,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “I was an orderly. But I see a lot of bodies. Amazing what you can tell from them.”
    “You’ll be a dead body yourself if you go on smoking like that,” she said. “But while you’re at it, pass me one. I haven’t had a Disque Bleu in years.”

30
    Bruno sighed as he looked around the barn, which still stank of the wine that had splashed out when he’d heaved Max’s body from the vat. Alongside heaps of junk that looked as if it had been there since before the war, dusty shelves and dustier bottles were stacked along the back wall. Two members of the crime scene team, dressed in white coveralls, were poking gingerly through it.
    “They’ll have their work cut out in here,” J-J said. “The forensics people in Bergerac are taking their time, but it looks as if they’ll agree with your doctor. Somebody hit that boy on the head, even if he did die from carbon whatever it was. So if it’s not murder, it’s at least aggravated manslaughter. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good excuse to get away from being at the beck and call of that brigadier. Murder trumps arson. Who are our suspects, beyond that American we saw Max fighting with? He’s got to be number one.”
    Bruno shrugged. “We’ll want to talk to Jacqueline. That was the girl with him. She should know his movements, and if he was having sex not long before he died it was probably with her. We should also talk to Dominique, and then we’ll have to ask Alphonse what he knows about Max’s movements in thelast few days and check the tires on his truck. Then there were those glasses in Cresseil’s kitchen. There may be fingerprints.”
    “I know you think the boy could have been mixed up in that fire. And now Dominique comes up again. Could there be a connection, do you think?”
    “Maybe, but there’s no evidence of that,” said Bruno. “I thought the leads would be coming from your
écolo
network in Bordeaux.”
    “I wanted to talk to you about that. Where can we go that’s private?”
    “Let’s walk in the garden.” Bruno guided J-J out past the forensics team and led the way past the house and the vegetable garden down toward the river before J-J spoke.
    “There’s almost no sign on the
écolo
Web sites that anybody knew much about this research station. It doesn’t come up—no rumors, nothing except one posting by your Alphonse asking if anybody had information about it. Usually before there’s an attack or a demonstration, the Web sites will be full of information about the particular farm or company, like whipping up a campaign about it. Before they attacked that McDonald’s, the Web sites and the left-wing press and newsletters were all full of material. It was the same when they hit that experimental rapeseed crop down near Foix. But not this time. The fire came out of nowhere, and that’s odd.”
    “So what does that mean, a lone arsonist, with no connection to the movement?”
    “Did you ever read Sherlock Holmes?” J-J asked.
    Bruno looked at him quizzically. Where had that come from? “Years ago at school. I saw an old film about