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

Defence. Here they are together in the Gulf edition of
OK
magazine, this time at a party in Dubai.’
    ‘And you were supposed to be in bed with hot drinks and aspirin,’ he said.
    ‘I had to get up. The sheets were soaked, and so was yourrugby shirt so I put them through the washing machine. I think I sweated out the fever. And I drank all your orange juice and a lot of mineral water.’
    ‘How do I find out about his investment company, the one in Luxembourg?’ he asked.
    ‘You don’t, at least you won’t find much on open-source material. And we can’t get access to the Luxembourg system unless we have evidence of crime or tax evasion, and then it will be special investigators from the Ministry of Finance. Remember he started as an
inspecteur de finances
. His books will be clean, or at least the ones we can get to see.’
    ‘Is there anything else you can find out without getting into trouble?’
    ‘Criminal records, tax records, the old
Renseignements Généraux
files, but that’s mainly political stuff and I think we know he’s connected. The juicy stuff will be in Defence Ministry files, and a red flag goes up if I go in there. Still, the Brigadier might think it useful to have a closer look at one of the golden boys of the Hôtel de Brienne.’
    Bruno remembered the imposing Defence Ministry building off the Rue St Dominique in Paris, close to Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides. As a former soldier, he felt a certain loyalty to the place and wasn’t sure he wanted to help the Interior Ministry embarrass it.
    ‘I saved the best till last,’ she said. ‘I was looking for anything on those other names in this development project, the Eugénie woman and Foucher. Look at this.’
    She opened another tab, this one from the
New York Times
in November 2007, recording that Lionel Joseph Foucher, aFrench citizen, had been fined $400,000, given six months’ probation and barred from further employment in a fiduciary capacity after pleading guilty to a charge of insider trading.
    ‘What’s that mean?’
    ‘It means he can’t work in Wall Street again. What’s interesting is that he was working for the New York office of the Count’s hedge fund. And now he’s a director of one of the Count’s companies in Europe. That’s loyalty for you. I’ve emailed our liaison man at the New York consulate asking him to get me the full court documents. That’s something to interest the Brigadier.’
    ‘I’m very grateful. I feel you deserve a reward.’
    ‘So do I,’ she said. ‘I was thinking you could help me bring in the sheets off the line and put them back on the bed and we could test how dry they are. I don’t think I’ll be needing your rugby shirt.’

22
    They had just finished the main course of roast lamb with crispy rice and a blend of red peppers flavoured with olives when Bruno’s phone began to vibrate with the call from Gilles. Bruno savoured the last sip of the Grand Millésime of Château de Tiregand, shrugged an apology to Isabelle and left the dining room to avoid disturbing the other diners, or more important, offending the chef. It was not a good moment to leave the table. The roast lamb had been milk-fed, from the celebrated farms of the Grefeuille brothers in Aveyron, where the sheep were carefully chosen for their ancestry. The ewes were of the Lacaune breed, whose milk made the cheese of Roquefort and the rams from the Berrichon, and they produced the white lambs that were becoming essential to the reputation of the finest restaurants of France. Their AAA designation, standing for
l’Agneau Allaiton d’Aveyron
, was as carefully guarded as the appellation of a great vineyard.
    ‘What’s the news from Hollywood?’ he asked Gilles, a little more testily than he should.
    ‘The bad news is that they have no file on her any more, no documents at all. The good news is that her agent’s secretary is still there, and she remembers Athénaïs trying to selltwo film ideas, treatments they call them. One was for the Red Countess, who she claimed was her grandmother, and the other was a horror film and love story about Louis XIV and his mistress, Madame de Montespan. Athénaïs claimed to be a direct descendant, and that Athénaïs de Bourbon was one of the several names she was entitled to use.’
    ‘But no films were ever made?’
    ‘The Red Countess had no chance. Hollywood doesn’t do commie heroines. “The Royal Mistress”, the title she gave to her script, was the