Bruno, Chief Of Police

raise money to pay the ransom for their Seigneur, the little Périgord town of St

Denis has held a weekly market. The townspeople had raised the princely sum of

fifty livres of silver for their feudal lord and, in return, they secured the

right to hold the market on the canny understanding that this would guarantee a

livelihood to the tiny community, happily situated where the stream of Le

Mauzens ran into the river Vézčre – just beyond the point where the remaining

stumps of the old Roman bridge thrust from the flowing waters. A mere eleven

years later, the chastened nobles and knights of France had once again spurred

their lumbering horses against the English archers and their longbows and had

been felled in droves. The Seigneur de Brillamont had to be ransomed from the

victorious Englishmen all over again after the Battle of Poitiers, but by then

the taxes on the market had raised sufficient funds for the old Roman bridge to

be crudely restored. So, for another fifty livres, the townsfolk bought from the

Brillamont family the right to charge a toll over the bridge and their town’s

fortunes were secured forever.

These had been early skirmishes in the age-old war between the French peasant

and the tax collectors and enforcers of the power of the state. And now, the

latest depredations of the inspectors (who were Frenchmen, but took their orders

from Brussels) was simply the latest campaign in the endless struggle. Had the

laws and regulations been entirely French, Bruno might have had some

reservations about working so actively, and with such personal glee, to

frustrate them. But they were not: these were Brussels laws from this distant

European Union, which allowed young Danes and Portuguese and Irish to come and

work on the camp sites and in the bars each summer, just as if they were French.

His local farmers and their wives had their living to earn, and would be hard

put to pay the inspectors’ fines from the modest sums they made in the market.

Above all, they were his friends and neighbours.

In truth, Bruno knew there were not many warnings to give. More and more of the

market stalls these days were run by strangers from out of town who sold dresses

and jeans and draperies, cheap sweaters and T-shirts and second-hand clothes.

Two coal-black Senegalese sold colourful dashikis, leather belts and purses, and

a couple of local potters displayed their wares. There was an organic bread

stall and several local vintners sold their Bergerac, and the sweet Monbazillac

dessert wine that the Good Lord in his wisdom had kindly provided to accompany

foie gras. There was a knife-sharpener and an ironmonger, Diem the Vietnamese

selling his nems – spring rolls – and Jules selling his nuts and olives while

his wife tended a vast pot of steaming paella. The various stalls selling fruit

and vegetables, herbs and tomato plants were all immune – so far – from the men

from Brussels.

But at each stall where they sold home-made cheese and paté, or ducks and

chickens that had been slaughtered on some battered old stump in the farmyard

with the family axe rather than in a white-tiled abattoir by people in white

coats and hairnets, Bruno delivered his warning. He helped the older women to

pack up, piling the fresh-plucked chickens into cavernous cloth bags to take to

the nearby office of Patrick’s driving school for safe keeping. The richer

farmers who could afford mobile cold cabinets were always ready to let Tante

Marie and Grande-mčre Colette put some of their less legal cheeses alongside

their own. In the market, everyone was in on the secret.

Bruno’s cell phone rang. ‘The bastards are here,’ said Jeanne, in what she must

have thought was a whisper. ‘They parked in front of the bank and Marie-Hélčne

recognised them from the photo I gave to Ivan. She saw it when she stopped for

her petit café. She’s sure it’s them.’

‘Did she see their car?’ Bruno asked.

‘A silver Renault Laguna, quite new.’ Jeanne read out the number. Interesting,

thought Bruno. It was a number for the Departement of the Corrčze. They would

have taken the train to Brive and picked up the car there, outside the Dordogne.

They must have realised that the local spy network was watching for them. Bruno

walked out of the pedestrian zone and onto the main square by the old stone

bridge, where the inspectors would have to come past him before they reached the

market. He phoned his fellow municipal police chiefs in the other villages with

markets that week and gave them the car and its number. His duty was done, or

rather half his duty. He had protected his friends from the inspectors; now he

had to protect them from themselves.

So he rang old Joe, who had for forty years been Bruno’s predecessor as chief of

police of St Denis. Now he spent his time visiting cronies in all the local

markets, using as an excuse the occasional sale from a small stock of oversized

aprons and work coats that he kept in the back of his van. There was less

selling done than meeting for the ritual glass, a petit rouge, but Joe had been

a useful rugby player two generations ago and was still a pillar of the local

club. He wore in his lapel the little red button that labelled him a member of

the Légion d’Honneur, a reward for his boyhood service as a messenger in the

real Resistance against the Germans. Bruno felt sure that Joe would know about

the tyre-slashing, and had probably helped organise it. Joe knew everyone in the

district, and was related to half of them, including most of St Denis’s current

crop of burly rugby forwards who were the terror of the local rugby league.

‘Look, Joe,’ Bruno began when the old man answered with his usual gruff bark,

‘everything is fine with the inspectors. The market is clean and we know who

they are. We don’t want any trouble this time. It could make matters worse, you