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

him in the kitchen to see his surprise. He opened the oven door, and with great care not to overbalance the chicken on its can of beer, withdrew the roasting pan and set it on top of the stove.
    ‘
Poulet bière au cul
,’ he announced in triumph. ‘Remember when we got that convoy in? The American radio reporter made this, that guy from Texas. I thought it was great, the way the beer steamed and kept the chicken moist from the inside.’
    ‘
Putain
, I remember that,’ said Gilles. ‘He kept saying he’d paid ten dollars for the beer on the black market.’
    Bruno uncorked the chicken from its beer can, put it on a serving dish with the roast potatoes. He told Gilles to takeit to the table and start to carve while he made the gravy.
    The chicken was demolished and they were down to the last third of the Pomerol when Gilles’s phone went. It was his office on the line, so Bruno cleared the table, brought in the cheese, and began picking out scraps of chicken from the carcass to feed to Balzac. Gilles was still talking and scribbling on a notepad, so Bruno washed up, tidied his kitchen and took some sheets and a towel into the spare room.
    ‘Finished,’ Gilles called from the table and poured out the last of the wine to go with the cheese. ‘They just wanted to check headlines and captions and play around with the lead. A good story, but a sad one. They want to know what happens next, after the exorcism. Is there going to be a follow-up?’
    ‘What do you think? Won’t that put a nice, neat finish on it all?’ Bruno asked.
    ‘Not until we know who held the Satanist ceremony in the cave and why Athénaïs made herself a Satanist suicide. Now they want me to get an interview with the Red Countess.’
    ‘It wasn’t the Countess who identified her, it was her sister. The Countess has Alzheimer’s. She’s bedridden.’
    ‘Well, I’ll talk to the sister.’
    ‘She didn’t strike me as the sort of woman who would have much to do with the press,’ Bruno said.
    ‘I’m used to that, and to getting round it. The name
Paris-Match
still works wonders.’
    They went back to the fire and to the scotch and Bruno told the story from the beginning: the holiday village in Thivion and the Red Countess in her hospital room at the château, Foucher’s conviction for insider trading and thedefence industry parties at the Count’s auberge. Gilles heard him out, scribbling a few notes, and waited until Bruno finished and had turned to throw another log on the fire.
    ‘The common factor in all this is the Count,’ Gilles said. ‘What’s he got to say for himself?’
    ‘I’m still trying to nail him down for an interview.’
    ‘Would you mind if I had a crack at him, since he’s the dead woman’s cousin? If Athénaïs was the only descendant then now that she’s dead I suppose that makes the Count the heir to the Red Countess.’
    Bruno jerked upright in his chair. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Then he slumped back. The Count couldn’t be the heir.
    ‘Athénaïs had a child at some point, according to the autopsy,’ Bruno said. ‘Maybe that’s your follow-up story; I presume you’ve got a correspondent in Hollywood. You’d have a better chance of tracking her kid down than I would.’
    ‘More than one,’ said Gilles. For this kind of search, the magazine would probably hire a private detective, someone who specialized in tracking people through hospital records, birth registration, school registries and the like. They had already hired one to find Athénaïs’s last address from the credit ratings and had found a mine of information. She was flat broke, credit cards cancelled and her car repossessed from the street.
    ‘The dump she was living in didn’t even have a garage,’ Gilles said. ‘That was earlier this year. We’ve got a sidebar story on her lowlife in Hollywood: porn and bankruptcy.’
    ‘And then she came home,’ said Bruno.
    ‘Home to die – that’s one of our headlines. Do you want a last drink?’
    Bruno shook his head. He’d had more than enough. ‘I need to get to bed. I’ll have an early start, getting ready for Father Sentout’s exorcism. There’s a spare bed for you here. If you even touch your car keys, I’ll have to arrest you.’

25
    The Gouffre looked magnificent. The lighting effects that Bruno had seen in Our Lady’s Chapel had been moved to the vast cavern, so that the images of giant rose windows shimmered on each side of the assembled audience.