The Devil's Cave: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 5)

along the ridge that he enjoyed so much. The solitary rider had gone. It was at this time ofevening, even more than when night fell and Bruno retired to his solitary bed, that he most missed Pamela.
    She had taught him to ride, organized the birthday gift of Hector and become a trusted friend as well as a lover. For almost all of his life, in the orphanage and then in the military, he had been in masculine surroundings. Women were placed in convenient categories: wife and mother, nun and teacher, colleague and sister, lover. But women had never been friends before. Indeed, he remembered nodding in agreement when some rugby club sage had suggested that friendship between the sexes was impossible: the sexual current would always flow. So it did, he thought, and so it must. But just because he found Fabiola attractive, or because he was privileged to spend some of his nights with Pamela, that didn’t mean that there was no friendship. He liked them, enjoyed spending time with them and their shared responsibility for the horses. Above all, he trusted them, in the way that he trusted the Mayor and the Baron, some old army friends and a handful of men in the town.
    Now the gathering speed of Hector’s run through the firebreak blew from his mind all thoughts of anything save the gallop and the sense of Hector’s power beneath him. With the drumming of the hoofs and the wind in his face, Bruno felt wonderfully alive and knew that he was laughing aloud as he passed a small clearing and caught, from the corner of his eye, a glimpse of another rider on a white horse.
    It took something from his pleasure, his assumption that he was alone with a horse he adored in woods that he knew. He was being foolish; his communion with nature did notrequire solitude and the woods were big enough for everyone. Still, slowing Hector to a canter and then to a trot as the end of the turf approached, he felt the real world start to intrude once more. Once stopped, he checked his phone and saw that he’d missed a call from Pamela. As he waited for Bess and Victoria to amble up the ride towards them, Bruno returned her call.
    ‘How is your mother?’ he began, after they exchanged greetings.
    ‘Not much change. My aunt insists that she recognizes us, but I doubt it. She seems to react the same way whoever comes into her room, the doctor or a nurse or even the cleaner. Anyway, I’m going to have to make a decision, because the doctor says she’s stabilized now and she’ll have to leave the hospital.’
    Her mother would need full-time care. Pamela had looked at various homes in Britain but the only ones that she deemed tolerable were alarmingly expensive, so costly that they would devour the value of her mother’s house and her savings within a few years. Bringing her to France might be an option, but Pamela had no illusions about the emotional drain it would be to keep a comatose mother at home. They had talked it through on the phone before; there were no good options.
    Bruno told Pamela of the ride, of the horses, and of the strange appearance of the dead woman in the punt, the pentagram and the candles and the bottle.
    ‘What was the brand?’ Pamela asked at once. ‘The vodka.’
    ‘I didn’t notice and it’s gone to the lab now to be tested for prints and probably contents. Why?’
    ‘If it’s a rare brand, it might give you a lead. I don’t know, it just struck me as possibly important.’ She broke off. ‘Listen, Bruno, I’m going to have to come back, maybe next week, for a few days to do some admin and find out if it’s going to be possible to cope with my mother at home. Maybe I can find a young school-leaver who can combine some cleaning with keeping an eye on Mother, like babysitting, to give me a break.’
    ‘You know what the minimum wage is here, and then you can almost double it for the social charges,’ Bruno said. ‘But I’ll ask around.’
    Pamela rang off, and Bruno saw that Bess and Victoria, who had done this ride with Pamela a thousand times, had reached the end of the firebreak and had now turned round and begun to trot back. He put the phone into its holster and urged Hector into a trot, pondering the impact the arrival of Pamela’s mother might have on their affair. At that moment he spotted a white horse being led by a tall woman emerging from the small clearing. It was presumably the same horse he had seen from the corner of his eye.
    ‘Can you hear me this time?’ came a woman’s voice. She