The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

still farmers who drew their water from an ancestral well and in winter slept above their livestock for warmth.
    ‘How are things between you and Pamela?’ she asked, clearing away the children’s plates and serving their dessert of stewed apple and yoghurt. ‘I get the impression she’s still depressed by her mother’s death.’
    ‘She’s due to fly back from Scotland later today after some complicated business with lawyers about the will and inheritancetaxes,’ he replied, deliberately not answering her question. ‘Her finances are none of my business, but it seems that she has arranged matters so that she can stay in St Denis.’
    Bruno was not at all sure about the status of his relationship with Pamela, a woman with whom he’d had an on-and-off affair over the past few months. It was an affair where he sometimes felt he served at her pleasure, spending the night only at Pamela’s invitation and not allowed to take anything for granted. A woman who guarded her privacy, she could nonetheless charm him with her warmth and generosity. And she could surprise him, bringing a flavour of the exotic and the unfamiliar. She was a woman unlike most of those he knew in St Denis, and it was no surprise that she had forged friendships with Fabiola the doctor and with Florence, similarly strong and independent women with their own careers.
    He kissed Florence and the children when he left, the taste of the after-lunch coffee lingering pleasantly in his mouth, and was just climbing into his van when his mobile phone launched into the opening notes of the
Marseillaise
. He checked the screen and saw a Paris number that he recognized.
    ‘I got your message,’ said Isabelle. ‘This burglary of yours is delicate stuff. Crimson is not just your usual British pensioner. His last job was running their Joint Security Committee in the Cabinet Office in Downing Street. That’s the body to which both their spies and their security people report. He was their spymaster.’
    ‘You mean like that “M” woman in the James Bond films?’ He felt himself grinning at the absurdity of such a role being played by the genial old tennis player who had served him such excellent wine.
    ‘Just like that. And he’s an old friend or at least a longstanding colleague of the Brigadier, so I’ve been ordered down to St Denis to take over the inquiry. There may be more to this burglary than meets the eye.’

3
    Bruno could tell from the way he took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose that his Mayor was not happy. His wife was in hospital for some tests that sounded ominous. The project for the new sewers was well behind schedule and the financial crisis meant that funds and grants from Paris were being cut. And now the commune was being hit by this wave of burglaries. The fact that one of the victims turned out to be an eminent Englishman with official connections in Paris was bad enough, but that neither the Mayor nor Bruno had known that a retired British spymaster had been living on their territory for years was even worse.
    Burglaries were supposed to be the responsibility of the Gendarmes, but Bruno knew it would have been a mistake to make such a pitiful excuse. This was his turf and therefore his responsibility. However, Bruno knew how easily the Mayor could be distracted by anything to do with local history.
    On the shelf by the ancient desk lay a thick file of handwritten pages, the Mayor’s ambitious project of writing the definitive history of St Denis from Neanderthal man through the iron and bronze ages, the coming of the Celts to the arrival of the Romans and all through the centuries to the present day. At various times Bruno had heard him wax lyrical aboutthe Merovingian kings and the ancient Duchy of Toulouse, the Hundred Years War against the English and the Albigensian heresy. There had been a whole year when the Mayor spoke of little but the passage of the conquering Arabs from Spain until they reeled back in defeat after Charles Martel stopped them at the battle of Tours in AD 732. The Mayor loved the coincidence that his three great French heroes shared the same name: Charles Martel, King Charles VII, who finally evicted the English in 1453, and, of course, Charles de Gaulle.
    So Bruno solemnly laid one of his banknotes on the Mayor’s desk, smoothed it out, and said: ‘Old Loïc Murcoing died this morning and had this in a box on his bed. Father Sentout thinks it came from the Neuvic