The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

But the fathers turned up as well and beat the hell out of them. I tried to sort it out but the English guys all left the area. The French boys were sent away on sudden holidays and everybody clammed up. There was one boy I could never track down, who may have been young Murcoing.’
    ‘Ten years ago, that’s just before Francis went to prison. And I recall that he did go on holiday not long before he was arrested. I don’t remember him being beaten up.’
    ‘Did your brother drive a Range Rover?’
    ‘No,’ Brian answered. ‘But his partner did, Sam Berenson, the one who died and left him the antiques business.’
    The names of the Englishmen had been on the rental agreement and on the car registration forms. Bruno was sure he’d have copied them down in his notebook.
    ‘Do you recall any poems on your brother’s laptop?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, he wrote a lot, poems, short stories. He even wrote a few songs when he was in New York, made a couple of CDs which I still have. I don’t know if his writings were all in his computer but they probably are. Why?’
    ‘Yves Valentoux told me the other day that he remembered Francis reciting a poem he’d written about a French boy. That may have been where all this started. I’m going to have to look out my old notebooks.’
    ‘That’s a shame, because I was just about to invite you to dinner, if you’re free, that is,’ said Brian. ‘I’ve had enough of going through these emails and the mess of my brother’s life.’
    ‘You’re very kind, but I have some horses to take care of and a friend who’s just gone into hospital. I may have to leave at any moment.’

22
    It was Bruno’s day off, and after he’d phoned the hospital and Fabiola hoping in vain for some news of Pamela, he decided to plunge into activity rather than sit around worrying. He’d started by hunting through the cardboard boxes containing his old notebooks. Each box was sealed with sticky tape and numbered with years. Inside, wrapped in the plastic bags the dry cleaner used to protect Bruno’s uniforms, the notebooks were in rough chronological order. He found the relevant one, resisted the temptation to read it through and relive old events and cases, and checked on the names of the Englishmen he’d written down from their car insurance forms. One of them was Francis Fullerton and another was Samuel Berenson, the name of the older man whose home and business Francis had inherited.
    The only French name he found was Edouard Marty, the boy who’d disappeared to England before taking his place at university. While his notebook didn’t say so, Bruno was sure he remembered that it had been the university of Bordeaux. And he’d planned to study architecture. His parents had been old when he was born and Bruno knew the father had died and the mother had moved away to be with her sisters. He called the faculty of architecture, asked to speak to the director’soffice, identified himself and explained that he was trying to trace a former student, Edouard Marty.
    ‘He’s still here,’ she said. ‘What are you after him for, speeding again in that new Jaguar of his?’
    Nothing like that, he replied with a laugh, just a routine inquiry about a possible witness. But what did she mean, that Edouard was still at the university?
    ‘He’s not teaching today, he’s only part-time,’ he was told, and then he was given the name and number of a company named Arch-Inter where Edouard Marty could be found, when he was not teaching a course on the history of interior design as an associate professor. Bruno searched for the company on his computer and found an elegant website, with the words Arch-Inter forking out to say
Inter-national
and
Inter-iors
. To his great surprise, it boasted offices in Bordeaux, Cannes, London and Los Angeles.
    The company offered services in architecture, interior design and furnishings in different traditions, from English country house and minimalist modern to French
ancien régime
or Empire. There were photographs of very grand-looking rooms furnished in various styles, each of them captioned in Russian and in English. It seemed to be a one-stop service for wealthy Russians, who would buy a house or apartment and have it filled by Arch-Inter in whichever style the client chose. How long, Bruno wondered, before they added Shanghai to their list of offices?
    Bruno clicked on the section titled About Us and saw that Francis Fullerton was listed as the London