Bruno, Chief Of Police

away elsewhere in July and August and showing a handsome profit from the tenants

to whom Dougal rented their homes. With the handymen, cleaners, gardeners and

swimming pool maintenance staff that he hired to service the holiday homes,

Dougal had become a significant local employer. Bruno thought it made sense,

with so many foreigners moving into the district, to have one of them on the

council to represent their views. Dougal had always declined, pleading that he

was too busy and his French too flawed, but the day after the disturbances he

was in the council chamber with the rest of the delegation of local businessmen.

Speaking an angry but serviceable French, he explained how bad the TV news

reports of the previous evening had been.

‘I’ve had three cancellations today, all from good and regular customers, and

I’m expecting more. It even made the English papers. Look at this,’ he said, and

tossed a stack of newspapers onto the table. Everybody had already seen the

headlines, and photos of the riot in the town square, but Bruno winced as Dougal

brandished the copy of SudOuest with Bruno’s picture on the front page. He had

been photographed standing with his arms outstretched to protect two cowering

women from a group of attackers, and the headline read ‘St Denis – the front

line’. It was the moment when he had tried to shelter Pamela and Christine and

the other women, just before he had been struck down. The photo should have been

of Isabelle, he thought. She had been the real heroine.

‘All credit to you, Bruno, you did a great job, but this is very bad for

business,’ Dougal said. And the rest of them chimed in. Everybody was worried

about the coming season: the hotel, the restaurants, the camp sites, the

amusement park manager.

‘How long is this going to go on?’ demanded Jerome, who ran the small theme park

of French history where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake twice a day and

Marie Antoinette was guillotined every hour, with medieval jousting in between.

‘It is up to the police to end this quickly, arrest somebody and get it over

with. This business of interviewing suspects with no real result is going to

spark more trouble from the right and more counter-demonstrations from the left

and more bad publicity on TV. It will just ruin our season.’

‘We all know that and we all agree. But what do you propose we do about it?’ the

Mayor asked. ‘We can’t ban all demonstrations, that’s against the law, and as a

town council we have no authority to intervene with the judicial authorities.

There’s been a hideous racist murder and passions have been aroused on both left

and right. We’ve been assigned extra gendarmes to keep order and we have over

forty people charged with riot and assault, so they’re unlikely to bother us

again. This is an isolated event. It may well hurt our business this year, but

the effects won’t last. We just have to grit our teeth and wait this process

out.’

‘I’m not sure I’ll still be in business next year,’ said gloomy Franc Duhamel

from the camp site. He said this every year, but this time he might be proved

right. ‘I borrowed a lot of money from the bank to finance that big expansion

and the new swimming pool, and if I have a bad season I’m in real trouble. If it

hadn’t been for that group booking by the Dutch lads who came down for the

Motor-Cross Rally, I’d have been in trouble already.’ Bruno nodded, recalling

the traffic chaos the event had caused the weekend before Hamid’s murder, with

hundreds of motorbikes and supporters filling the town and surrounding roads.

‘I’ve talked to the regional managers of the banks,’ said the Mayor. ‘They

understand that this is a temporary problem, and they won’t be closing anybody

down – not if they want to get any business from this Commune again. And not

unless they want to make an enemy of the Minister of the Interior. You all saw

the report of his speech last night, about the whole of France standing firmly

with the brave citizens of St Denis and our stout policeman.’

Bruno felt himself squirm. The politician had just been trying to put the best

possible face on what had for him been a humiliation, shouted down from speaking

and pelted with fruit and eggs. To be seen on TV presiding helplessly over a

riot was not a good image for a Minister of the Interior, so naturally he had

tried to spin it differently in his scheduled speech in Bordeaux. Bruno doubted

very much that he would lift a finger to help any troubled businessman falling

behind on his bank loans. He would never be able to hear of St Denis again

without an instinctive shiver of distaste. But such assurances were what the

businessmen needed to hear from their Mayor, and Bruno told himself he should be

sufficiently astute to understand that by now.

‘What we want is a breathing space,’ said Philippe, the manager of the Hôtel St

Denis, who usually acted as spokesman for the town’s business community. ‘We

need some temporary tax relief for this year to help us get through this bad

patch. We know taxes have to be paid, but we want the council to agree to give

us some time, so that rather than pay in June, we agree to pay in October when

the season is over and we can show you our books. If we go down, the whole town

goes down, so we see this as a sort of investment by the town in its own

future.’

‘That’s a useful idea,’ said the Mayor. ‘I’ll put it to the council, but we’ll

probably need to be sure such a delay would be legal.’

‘The other thing on our minds is that new head of the gendarmes,’ said Duhamel.

‘He was useless, totally useless. If it hadn’t been for Bruno taking charge it

could have been a lot worse. We’d like you to ask for Capitaine Duroc to be

transferred. Nobody in town has any respect for him after yesterday.’

‘I’m not sure that’s fair,’ said Bruno. He had felt a great deal better about

Duroc when he arrived at the bank car park after the riot and saw the three

coaches blocked by a dozen gendarme motorbikes, a burly cop standing guard at

each door, and the lanky Captain taking the names and addresses of the forty-odd

men detained inside. Two blue Gendarmerie vans were parked beside the coaches.

The reinforcements had finally arrived, and the policemen were doing their job.

‘His immediate reaction was to ensure that the Mayor and distinguished guests

were secure,’ Bruno went on. ‘Then he called for reinforcements and took

personal charge of the arrests of the rioters who invaded our town. I found him

in the car park, where he had forty of them under lock and key in their own

coaches. And his men behaved well. Although he is obviously new in the town and

a bit short of experience, I’m not sure we have anything to reproach him with.’

‘Bruno could be right,’ the Mayor chimed in. ‘I’d rather we used the sympathy we

now have in official circles to get some financial help through this rough patch

than squander whatever influence we have in a fight with the Defence Ministry to

get the Capitaine removed. And after those two generals got egg and tomato all

over their uniforms, I’m not sure St Denis is very popular with the Defence

Ministry this week.’