Bruno, Chief Of Police

seen his friend lose his temper. The Mayor paced back and forth before Bruno’s

desk, then stopped and fixed him with an angry eye. ‘How do we fix this?’

‘Well, I’ll see what I can do with the police in Périgueux. But if there’s a

Juge-magistrat being assigned to lay charges against the Front National thugs,

he’d also be the one to decide about charges against Karim, and that’s way above

my head. If that’s the case, you’ll probably have to see what influence you can

bring to bear. It’ll be a local Juge-magistrat, so you might be able to get the

Prefect to have a quiet word. A lot will depend on the statements taken by the

police, so some depositions by you and the Minister and the generals would be

very useful.’

The Mayor took a pad and pen from Bruno’s desk and began to scribble some notes.

‘The first thing is to find out exactly on what grounds the gendarmes arrested

him, and whether charges have been filed by the Front,’ Bruno said. ‘I’ll do

that.’

‘Is it possible that these swine are trying to set up a deal?’ the Mayor asked,

looking up from his notes. ‘You know the sort of thing – if we drop the charges

against them, they’ll drop the charges against Karim. They’re politicians, so

they can hardly like the idea of forty of their militants getting charged with

riotous assembly; and certainly not after members of their security squad are

being charged with drug trafficking.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been involved in that kind of legal

deal-making. I’ll go and see what I can find out at the Gendarmerie,’ he said,

grabbing his cap and heading for the stairs.

‘And I’d better go and see if there’s anything we can do for Rashida at the

café, and we’d better call Momu. He may not know about this yet,’ said the

Mayor.

‘I’m worried that this could be really serious for Karim,’ Bruno said from the

top of the stairs.‘If he’s convicted of violent assault he’s likely to lose his

tobacco licence, and that means the end of his café and probably bankruptcy. If

those bastards insist on a deal where we have to drop all charges against them,

we may not have a lot of choice but to agree.’

CHAPTER

18

A long stroll along the Rue de Paris, the main shopping street of St Denis,

always calmed Bruno by forcing him to adapt to the slow and timeless ways of his

town no matter what the urgency of his mission. But today, they slowed him down

even more because everybody wanted to talk about the riot. He had to shake the

hands of all the old men filling out their horse-racing bets at the Café de la

Renaissance, though he refused their offers of a petit blanc. The women standing

in line at the butcher’s shop all wanted to kiss him and tell him they were

proud of him. More women wanted to do the same at the patisserie, and Monique

insisted on giving him one of his favourite tartes au citron as a token of her

renewed esteem. He walked on, munching happily, shaking hands at the barber’s

shop and again at Fabien’s Rendez-vous des Chasseurs where Bruno bought his

shotgun cartridges.

Fabien wanted his opinion on a new lure he was inventing to tempt the fish in

that fiendish corner of the river where only the most perfectly cast fly could

evade the trees and boulders. Jean-Pierre was tinkering with a bike in front of

his shop and raised an oily hand in salute. Not to be outdone, Bachelot darted

from his shoe shop, nails still gripped between his lips and carrying a small

hammer, to shake Bruno’s hand warmly. Pascal came out from the Maison de la

Presse to make sure Bruno had seen the newspapers and to assure him that at

least three small boys had bought scrapbooks to record the sudden fame of their

local policeman, and he was joined by the ladies in the flower shop and Colette

from the dry cleaner’s. By the time he’d reached the open ground in front of the

Gendarmerie and greeted the two rugby forwards who were making a success of

their Bar des Amateurs with its new snack lunches, sadly refusing their offer of

a beer, he felt restored by the familiar rhythm of the town and its people.

Francine was at the desk in the Gendarmerie, and she had been stationed in St

Denis long enough to understand Karim’s importance to the town as its star rugby

player, which had to be the reason for Bruno’s visit. After he kissed her cheeks

in greeting, she jerked a thumb towards the closed door of Duroc’s office and

rolled her eyes to signal her own view of Karim’s arrest. She beckoned him

closer and spoke very quietly.

‘He’s in there with Karim and a juge-magistrat from Périgueux who just turned up

this morning with a couple of videotapes,’ she whispered. ‘He’s the one behind

this arrest, Bruno. Duroc is just obeying orders.’

‘Did you recognise the guy from Périgueux?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s a new one on me, but a very fancy dresser. And he came

in a car with a driver, parked over there by the vet’s office. He made the

driver carry in the video machine.’

‘Merde,’ muttered Bruno. It must be Tavernier, already armed with the TV film of

Karim’s part in the brawl. He thanked Francine and strolled out to the trees

that shaded the old house that was the office for Dougal’s Delightful Dordogne.

There he pulled out his mobile and called the Mayor to warn him that Tavernier

was now the problem.

‘I’m with Rashida at the café and she’s in hysterics,’ the Mayor said. Bruno

could hear Rashida in the background. ‘I called Momu’s house to get Karim’s

mother over here,’ he went on, ‘but she then rang Momu at school and he’s

heading for the Gendarmerie. You’d better make sure he does nothing foolish,

Bruno, and I’ll have to tackle Tavernier. The moment you have Momu calmed down,

get hold of Tavernier and say that I want to see him urgently, as an old friend

of his father.’

‘Do you have a plan?’ Bruno asked.

‘Not yet, but I’ll think of something. Is there a lawyer in there with Karim?’

‘Not yet. Can you call Brosseil? He’s on the board of the rugby club.’

‘Brosseil is just a notary. Karim will need a real lawyer.’

‘We can get a real lawyer later. We just want Brosseil to go in there, tell

Karim to say absolutely nothing, and insist that anything he has said so far is

struck from the record since he was denied legal representation.’

‘That’s not French law, Bruno.’

‘It doesn’t matter. It buys us time and it will certainly shut Karim up. And it

is European law, and Tavernier won’t want to run foul of that – Brosseil has to

keep on saying so. Do you have the deposition yet from the Minister or those two

generals on what they saw in the square?’

‘From the generals, yes. They faxed it. Nothing yet from the Minister.’

‘Tavernier won’t know that, Sir. If he thought that his prosecution of Karim

called into question the deposition of his Minister, not to mention two senior

figures in the Defence Ministry, he might have second thoughts.’

‘Good thinking, Bruno. We’ll try it. But first you had better stop Momu.’

That depended on whether Momu came by car, in which case he would have to come

past the infants’ school and the post office, or on foot or by bicycle through