The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

he was being too hasty. Bruno acknowledged to himself that Valentoux’s alibi deserved further probing, and that his theatrical experience meant he could probably play the role of innocent with enough conviction to fool Bruno. But there had been something pathetic in the way he carried his plastic bag with the lunch ingredients, something genuine in his look of shock. And much as Bruno liked and respected J-J as a policeman, he was an old-fashioned type who made little secret of his dislike of homosexuals.
    Bruno, by contrast, felt guilty about gays. This stemmed from an incident that he recalled uncomfortably as one of his own failures as a policeman. It was a memory that kept returning, a frustrating and ugly event that he remembered as the swimming-pool affair. Even this name made him feel guilty, since it concealed the reality of the brutal attack he had encounteredand his impotence in dealing with it. It had been in his first year as a municipal policeman, when he was still limping slightly from the bullet he had taken in his hip in Bosnia. He’d been part of the French contingent in the UN peace-keeping force and the wound had invalided him out of the army.
    He had been summoned by a phone call late on an August afternoon when the heat had begun to subside, the time when people begin to rise from their after-lunch naps and the bakeries reopen for the evening trade. A voice he did not recognize, slurred with drink, had informed him there was a mess to be cleared up at a remote farmhouse at the far end of the commune. The phone had then been slammed down with a burst of laughter.
    Bruno had checked the map of the commune on the wall of his office to remind himself of the district that was just beginning to become familiar. There was no swimming pool there that he could recall. He phoned Géraldine, who ran the bar at the local tennis club and lived in that area. A disused farmhouse had been restored and turned into a
gîte
over the winter and a pool installed, she told him. It was mainly rented by British visitors, some of whom she’d persuaded to take out temporary membership at the club. Géraldine gave him directions which he traced on the map with his finger and then set off.
    It took twenty minutes to get there, a pleasant drive along country lanes, fields of sunflowers giving way to grazing cows in the meadows and then to sheep as the road climbed and the grass thinned out. As he rounded the last bend on the dirt track that wound up the hill the scene appeared to be peaceful. The stone farmhouse had a new roof of red tiles and the gravel forecourt was so new and white it almost hurt the eyes.
    The front door was closed and he strolled around to the rear, calling out ‘
Y’a quelqu’un?
’ Then his eye was caught by the trail of blood that ran over the terrace of flagstones and led to a swimming pool at the rear of the house. Shards of glass glittered in the sun from an overturned drinks trolley and at the pool steps he saw brownish swirls of blood hanging in the water. To the right of the pool was a white Range Rover with British plates, its windscreen starred and cracked and the headlamps smashed.
    A voice challenged him in English. He turned to see a middle-aged man in very tight swimming trunks standing at the sliding glass doors that led into the house. He had blood on his chest, a swollen lip, two black eyes, and he was holding a pair of fire tongs. Bruno saluted, addressed him as Monsieur and said he’d had a phone call to say there had been trouble. Bruno remembered thinking he’d seen faces like that after a particularly tough rugby match. He’d asked if Monsieur needed driving to the medical clinic.
    ‘An argument. Private. Much drink,’ the man said in broken French. Bruno looked past him into the house where another middle-aged man was helping a naked youth to limp his way down the stairs from the upper floor. Despite the bloodied nose and battered features, Bruno thought he recognized the young man. At the sight of Bruno in uniform, the youth turned as if to climb back up the stairs again. Bruno gently took the fire tongs from the first man’s hands and stepped inside the house. The two men on the stairs had also been beaten, with red marks on their bodies as if they had been hit with sticks. The older man, blood trickling from his mouth and nose, winced as he stood upright. The buttocks and thighs of the young man flared an angry red.
    A pair of jeans and a T-shirt lay on a chair