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

but to invite her to stay for dinner. He looked at her, his face neutral. She raised her arms to her neck, slipped off the band that shaped her pony tail and shook her head to let a cascade of hair tumble over her shoulders. He was tempted to applaud.
    ‘That’s better,’ she said, tucking her feet beneath her on the sofa but leaving plenty of space for him. He remained in his separate chair, his back straight and his arms folded. ‘Don’t you agree?’
    He gave a polite smile and tried to analyse why he felt socold towards her. She was making herself highly agreeable, yet what he felt was a mix of curiosity and suspicion.
    ‘Don’t you ever relax?’ She put her glass down on the low table, making enough noise that Bruno had to look and notice it was empty. He made no move to refill it.
    ‘Yes, with friends,’ he said. He looked across at her and saw a flash of something briefly unpleasant in her eyes, impatience perhaps. This woman had nothing for him and he was getting tired of the shadow play.
    ‘I must get to sleep,’ he said, rising. ‘It’s market day tomorrow so I have to be up very early. Can you find your way back?’
    She left without a word, her shoulders as stiff as a member of the
Garde Républicaine
on parade. As he closed the door he heard her stumbling on the path as she tried to put her riding boots back on.
    He waited until he heard the sound of her horse going down the drive and then went into his bedroom, sniffing to see if he could sense that perfume of hers. He was sure she’d been in the room. His suspicion growing, he went out to his van for a pair of evidence gloves and then began to search his barn and his home thoroughly. He started with the chicken coop and then he checked the freezer and behind the preserves on the shelves in the barn. In the bathroom he lifted the lid on the cistern, took everything from the airing cupboard and then searched the kitchen. In his bedroom he lifted the mattress, pulled the drawers from his desk and checked their undersides. He went carefully through his wardrobe and cupboards and finally checkedhis bookshelves before he called Sergeant Jules at home.
    ‘I need a big favour,’ he said when his best friend among the Gendarmes answered his phone. ‘Could you come up to my place? I think someone may be trying to set me up. And another thing, you know that white Jaguar that’s been tooling around town?’
    ‘We’ve got a bet on for who’s going to be first to get it for speeding,’ Jules replied.
    ‘Could you make sure the driver is breathalysed, probably a man called Lionel Foucher. The important thing is that you keep the tube when he’s done, whatever the alcohol count?’
    ‘You want the DNA of whoever’s driving?’ Jules asked.
    ‘Any male,’ Bruno replied. ‘You remember the dead woman in the punt? It’s now a suspicious homicide and she had sperm front and rear. Wouldn’t it make life simpler if we found a match?’
    ‘I’m on my way.’

28
    The priest had been as good as his word. When Bruno arrived with the croissants still hot from Fauquet’s oven, the list of château baptisms awaited him, written in Father Sentout’s neat script. A steaming coffee pot stood beside it. He had been right about the fashion for adding all the names of godparents: some of the infants had been loaded down with a dozen names. One name appeared twice in the same year, February and March of 1945.
    ‘Who is this McPhee and how on earth do you pronounce it?’ Bruno asked. It was the one of the names of the illegitimate child of the Red Countess, and also of her sister’s child, born in the same month.
    The priest shrugged. ‘The name sounds British, perhaps Scottish, possibly American, perhaps some distant relative or friend of the family. It was the year the war ended and France was free. It might have been thought useful to have a connection with our liberators.’
    Children born in February and March of 1945 would have been conceived in the May or June of 1944, Bruno reflected, around the time of the D-Day invasion of Normandy or just before it. And the Red Countess had always refused toidentify the unknown Resistance soldier who’d fathered her child.
    ‘Excuse me, Father.’ He checked the address book on his phone to dial the direct number of the curator of the Centre Jean Moulin in Bordeaux, a man he’d worked with on previous cases. Named after the man de Gaulle sent into France to try to unify the rival Resistance groups