The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

make them. It’s for his funeral. I’d like to put them by the coffin in the church.’
    Once Delaron had left, Bruno called Gilles at
Paris Match
to say he’d always be welcome in St Denis but he wasn’t sure how much of a story there would be in a burglary.
    ‘I see you’ve got a murder on your hands as well, the victim being another Brit. Any connection?’
    ‘It’s not clear yet. Look, Gilles, this is not an affair where I can give you much help. A
juge d’instruction
has been brought in and I’ll be in real trouble if I start feeding you stuff. Crimson hasn’t even got back here yet.’
    ‘I was talking to one of the British reporters here in Paris. He said Crimson gets back tomorrow and he and some others are heading down to St Denis. I’ll be joining them, but I’ll arrive earlier. I’m booked into the Vieux Logis from tonight.I’ll be in that café of yours by eight tomorrow morning.’
    ‘The Vieux Logis? I didn’t know
Paris Match
was making that much money these days.’
    ‘Let’s just say I have a hunch about this story. See you tomorrow.’
    When Bernard Ardouin called to say he was finished with Fullerton’s brother, Bruno went to the Gendarmerie to pick him up and propose a drive to Francis’s farm in the Corrèze.
    ‘Nothing else for me to do,’ Fullerton replied. ‘They can’t release the body until the identification is confirmed and then I’ll have him cremated and take the ashes back to England. If you take the autoroute to Ussel, I think I remember the way. I need to see the
notaire
there, in any event.’
    He pulled a mobile phone from his briefcase and began dialling. Bruno called J-J to tell him of his plans and then called Isabelle to keep her in the picture. Finally he made a courtesy call to the police in Ussel to say he was coming onto their patch. When he finished, Brian Fullerton was looking at him, a perplexed expression on his face.
    ‘That’s odd. I just called the number of the farm in Corrèze, wondering if my brother had left one of his usual messages about where to find the key. He’s got these different hiding places each with its own letter. It was a sort of code he worked out with my kids when they spent a summer here, a family joke. But somebody answered, a woman, and when I gave my name and asked who she was she slammed the phone down.’
    ‘
Merde
,’ said Bruno. Could it have been Yvonne? Was that where she and her brother were hiding out?
    He called the Ussel police again and explained the situation. They promised to send a car.

13
    A single policeman waited by his van in front of the farmhouse. It was similar to those around St Denis except the stone was grey and the shutters were painted bright red. One long, low barn was attached to a wing of the house and a second, taller barn stood to one side. The garden was unkempt. Stalks of last year’s dead geraniums lay forlornly in pots and there was jungle where the vegetable garden would have been. The trees planted to the north and west looked stunted, as though hunched against the wind. It would be cold here in winter, Bruno thought.
    ‘By the time we got here, the birds had flown,’ said the
flic
. He introduced himself as the town policeman from Neuvic, a name that startled Bruno. ‘I know, you keep thinking it’s the one in Dordogne. This is another Neuvic, best known for the lake. You can’t see it from here but it’s just over that ridge to the south.’
    ‘Have you been inside?’ Bruno introduced Fullerton as the new owner, brother of the murdered man.
    ‘The main house was open so we took a quick look around. The beds had been slept in, dirty dishes in the sink and there’s a cashier’s ticket from Leclerc in the bin dated two days ago. I don’t know if anything’s been touched or stolen. The messagefrom Ussel said it was that guy in the bulletin from the
Police Nationale
, the murder suspect.’
    Bruno took two sets of gloves from his van, donned one and gave the other to Fullerton, who’d been peering through the windows. Nothing seemed different, he said. Bruno led the way into the house. It was an odd mixture. Some beautiful pieces of old furniture, an Empire clock atop an Empire table, two Louis XVI chairs, a large tapestry on the stone wall that Bruno thought might be an Aubusson, were scattered like islands of good taste among cheap modern stuff that looked like IKEA. The kitchen was filthy, layers of grime on the red tile floor and the stove was worse. Bruno