The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

special attention when the
Procureur
came back to the office on Monday? Once the
Procureur
listed the case as a
délit
, a serious crime, there would be a paper trail that would make any attempt at a cover-up very difficult.
    ‘This sounds intriguing, so let’s talk about it over dinner tonight,’ she said. ‘I’m with Yves at the house and he’s been shopping in the market to make that dinner he promised you. I already called Pamela and Fabiola.’
    ‘Is there enough for a couple more guests? My friend Gilles from
Paris Match
is in town and I think you’d like to meet Jacqueline.’
    ‘The more the merrier,’ Annette replied. ‘My place in Sarlat, about eight? And by the way, Bernard Ardouin has brought me in to help on the Fullerton murder, so I need to call to Sergeant Jules. I’ll just ask him if anything has come up, and that way the
Procureur
’s office will be informed.’
    Bruno rang off, called Gilles to tell him about dinner and smiled to himself at the difference between the way the French judicial bureaucracy was supposed to work with its separate jurisdictions and checks and balances, and the way that in practice friendships and personal connections could cut through the red tape. He took a mischievous pleasure in the way that he, a village policeman, could play the system. But this time he would have to be particularly careful. Usually he could count on discreet support from the Brigadier and Isabelle. This time the politics made that problematic, and he’d hate to have either one of them as an enemy. The Brigadier could squash him like a bug.
    Suddenly he looked at the cheap phone in his hand and cursed himself for a fool. Isabelle had the number. If she decided to track the phone records, his careful manoeuvring could be uncovered. So much for his moment of self-satisfaction! He’d have to buy another disposable phone as soon as he got back to town.
    Why was he taking this risk? He barely knew Jacqueline. But he knew he wasn’t doing this for her but for his Mayor, to whom he owed just about everything that made his life rewarding: his home, his work and his place in St Denis. More than that, he had a visceral dislike of the way that agents of the French state often rode roughshod over the law. If the Brigadier, say, had staged Jacqueline’s burglary to protect the government from embarrassment, it stuck in his throat. He remembered the cross words he’d exchanged with Isabelle over the growing number of scandals piling up at the door of her Ministry. At least she was making arrangements to move to another job.
    ‘I thought you might like some coffee,’ said Jacqueline, coming out of the house with a tray. ‘I’m just sorry that I can’t serve it in Paul Revere’s jug.’
    She took the tray to a small garden table with two spindly metal chairs, tucked into a sunny corner among the rose bushes.
    ‘I think you ought to know what’s going on, or at least what I think may be happening,’ he said. ‘Somebody in the French government is worried that the Americans want to unleash a scandal just ahead of the election. There is some suspicion that Jack Crimson is involved – I presume you know his background?’
    Jacqueline nodded. ‘And they think my research is somehow involved, is that what you mean? But it all happened so long ago. Anybody involved in that business with the slush funds and the Resistance money is almost certainly dead.’
    ‘You mentioned that you were working on something else, about the French nuclear deterrent not being truly independent.’
    Yes, she told him, and explained how it started with Nixon’s summit with President Pompidou in 1970 and that by 1973 the French were being given assistance in developing their missiles, their multiple warheads, and even shown how to set up underground testing sites for nuclear weapons. They were also helped on missile guidance systems. She had a Pentagon document that recorded the French saying they didn’t need their missiles to be accurate enough to hit Soviet missile silos, they just wanted to be able to take out cities.
    ‘When you say you have a document, you had it here?’
    She nodded. She had a whole file of documents, memos of talks between Nixon and Pompidou, between Kissinger and the French defence minister, Robert Galley. The cooperation had gone a lot further under Presidents Carter and Giscard d’Estaing. Most of the material was marked Top Secret, but she had managed to get some of it