The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

ended up with a reputable dealer, the chances of tracking them down, even with the photos, were slim. The wine might be different, unless the thieves had very discerning palates and wanted it for themselves.
    That triggered an idea, and as he re-entered St Denis Bruno checked the time and turned off into the driveway to the
collège
, parking in front of the row of modest apartments where the teachers lived. Subsidized and almost free housing was one of the ways the French state sought to lure well-qualified teachers to live and work in the country. For his friend Florence, a divorced mother of two toddlers with a science diploma who had found it tough to make ends meet, the teaching job had been a godsend.
    Her arrival had been even better for St Denis. Now the mainstay of the town choir, Florence had also taken over the administration of the school sports teams, arranging fixtures and registrations. She had blossomed in her new role. The dispirited and somewhat dowdy young newcomer Bruno had first met had blossomed into a cheerful self-confident woman with a widening circle of friends. She had earned the respect of her pupils and turned science into the most popular subject. One of her first purchases with her new salary had been a new computer, and she had persuaded the local recycling centre to let her have all the discarded laptops and desktops so that she could repair them to launch a computer club at the school. The
Sud Ouest
newspaper had run a story about the way all the club computers, when not in use, were offering their free time to the SETI institute, helping process the reams of data fromits radio-telescopes that were scanning outer space for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
    Florence was giving her children lunch when Bruno arrived. They waved their spoons and chanted ‘
Bonjour, Bruno
’ when she showed him into the small kitchen.
    ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. ‘I made Pamela’s fish pie and there’s more than enough.’
    Bruno kissed the children and accepted gratefully.
    ‘I know you like this bit,’ said Florence, scraping off some of the crisp cheese
gratin
that covered the pie and transferring it to Bruno’s plate. ‘It’s come to rival pizza as the kids’ favourite meal.’ She poured two glasses of Bergerac Sec from the 5-litre box in the refrigerator and handed one to Bruno. ‘This is a pleasant excuse to have a glass of wine at lunchtime, but what brings you here?’
    ‘Your computer club,’ he replied. ‘There’s been a burglary and a lot of good wine was stolen and I was thinking that the thieves might try to sell it on priceminister.com or one of those other websites like eBay. Could your club come up with a program that would monitor such sites for these wines?’ He handed over a copy of the list he had made of the gaps in Crimson’s cellar.
    Florence sipped her wine and scanned the list. ‘It should be possible. You have the vineyard, the year, even some of the shippers. Your burglary victim must keep good records.’
    ‘He’s an Englishman, a retired civil servant. He has his cellar all catalogued like a filing system, along with what he paid for the wine. They took over ten thousand euros’ worth. I can also get photos of the furniture, rugs and paintings that were stolen.’
    Her eyes widened. ‘Leave it with me. It’s the kind of project that should get the kids thinking.’
    ‘He’s the kind of man who’d pay a reward, so you can offer them an incentive.’
    ‘The thrill of the chase is all the incentive they need. You ought to see the way they’ve taken to hacking.’
    Bruno stopped chewing. ‘You’re teaching them to hack? Is that a good idea?’
    ‘They’d do it anyway, kids being what they are. I’m just teaching them about computer security, how to build firewalls and search for malware. I don’t let them practise on anything serious, but they’ve got behind a few of those pay firewalls some newspapers and magazines put up. The next project is to see if they can build their own version of an iPad, so they’ve been all over the web looking for technical tips. The English teacher says it’s done wonders for their English, so now Pamela is helping us to set up a twinning system with a school in Scotland. We’ve already got a Skype link with their computer club.’
    School had never been like this in his day, Bruno thought. This was an unusual generation that was about to be unleashed on St Denis, a rural commune where there were