The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

The ground was too dry for prints but there were tyre tracks in the grass behind the house, out of sight of the road. Jacqueline parked her BMW at the side of the house.
    Inside, the house was strangely tidy for a burglary. Usually drawers were pulled out and upended, mattresses shoved aside and often ripped and cupboards dragged away from walls. In the bedroom a rather fine wooden box, obviously for her jewels, had been tipped onto the bed. A charming nude sketch of a woman sitting on a bed, her shapely back to the painter, hung between the two windows. Even the least artistic thief would have thought that was worth money.
    ‘I haven’t touched anything since I found the house like this, except for some of the books and notes downstairs to see if anything was missing,’ she said. ‘The most important thing is the manuscript of my father’s memoirs. I have copies, of course, but not here in France, they’re …’
    Bruno put a finger to his lips to signal for silence. He was not one to leap to conclusions but there was a possibility that Jacqueline’s burglars had been the kind of people who would also leave the house bugged. It was going to be a very interesting conversation with the Brigadier.
    ‘Are you insured against theft, Madame?’ he asked. She nodded, her eyes widening. ‘And the value of your stolen silver and jewels would be what in your estimate?’ He waved his hand upwards two or three times to encourage her to set the figure high.
    ‘Well over ten thousand euros,’ she said, catching his meaning. ‘Probably more, some of them were antiques, irreplaceable family heirlooms. The silver coffee pot is eighteenth-century American, and since my father was descended from Mary Robbins there’s a family legend that it was made by Paul Revere.’
    Bruno looked at her blankly.
    ‘He was a silversmith in Boston, a famous revolutionary who carried the news of the British raid that started the War of Independence. There are poems about him that children learn in school, at least we did in my day. Mary Robbins married his son.’
    Bruno nodded, thinking that would be useful for the plan that was forming in his mind. ‘Do you have a photo of this coffee pot?’
    Jacqueline went to a two-drawer filing cabinet disguised as a wooden chest of drawers. He told her to wait and brought another set of gloves from his car. She put them on, muttering that the files seemed to have been searched, but finally gave him a postcard-sized print of a handsome coffee pot with a curved spout.
    ‘I had to do it for the insurance once I’d listed it as a special item,’ she said. ‘I put the value at ten thousand.’
    ‘And your laptop? How much would that be worth?’
    ‘Over a thousand. Both it and the TV were quite new.’
    ‘So altogether this could be up to twenty thousand euros in value that has been stolen? Perhaps we’d better see if anything has gone from the outbuildings before I call the Gendarmes.’ He steered her outside and into the garden at the rear.
    ‘You think I’m being bugged?’ she asked in a whisper.
    He shrugged. ‘It’s possible. What about the material on your laptop? Do you have it all backed up?’
    ‘Yes, on the university mainframes, both in Paris and back in the States. It’s tiresome but I won’t have lost anything. But what are you thinking, is this some government operation, spying on me?’
    ‘I don’t know but we’ll do this by the book.’
    After a vain search of the barn and shed Bruno led the way back into the house and called the Gendarmerie at St Denis, where Sergeant Jules was on the desk. Jacqueline’s house was roughly halfway between the gendarmeries in Montignac and St Denis, so he couldn’t be accused of deliberately calling in the Gendarmes he knew. Bruno explained the burglary and the value of the items stolen and stressed the news value of Paul Revere’s coffee pot. Most important, he added, was that the same method of entry had been used in the burglary of Monsieur Crimson, so that pointed to Paul Murcoing. That would get Yveline excited, Bruno thought.
    He then went to his van and pulled out the cheap pay-as-you-go phone he’d bought in a previous case when Isabelle had wanted to contact him in a way that could not be traced. He used it to call Annette in Sarlat, and explained not only the burglary but also his suspicion that the real target of the thieves might have been Jacqueline’s papers. Could she make sure that the report of the burglary got