Bruno, Chief Of Police

change his name, no easer way than to join a unit where his brother or his

cousin was already well installed.’

‘Right, thank you very much. If we need copies of this for the judicial

proceedings, may I contact you again?’

‘Of course, young man. Now, did you receive my fax of the pay book photo?’ Bruno

checked the fax machine. It was there, the first two pages of an Army pay book,

featuring a passport-sized photo of a young man known to the French Army as

Hamid al-Bakr. Beneath it were two thumbprints, an Army stamp, and on the

previous page the details of name, address, date and place of birth. The address

was listed as Rue des Poissoniers, in the Vieux Port of Marseilles, and the date

of birth was given as 14 July 1923.

‘Yes, it’s here. Thank you.’

‘Good. And again, well done in that brawl of yours. We need more policemen like

you. I presume you are an old soldier.’

‘Not that old, I hope. But yes, I was in the combat engineers.’

‘You were in that nasty business in Bosnia?’

‘That’s right. How did you guess?’ ‘I couldn’t resist looking up your file. You

did well, young man.’

‘I was lucky. A lot of the lads were not.’

‘Feel free to call on me any time, Sergeant Courrčges. Goodbye.’

His ear was damp with sweat when he removed the phone. He focused on the notepad

in front of him and the two photos. Hamid al-Bakr of the French Army was the

spitting image of Hussein Boudiaf, the footballer. Could they be one and the

same person? That would explain Momu’s surprise at the photograph and Momu’s

surprise had been real. If Hamid had changed his name, why had he done so? What

was he so intent on covering up that he hid his real name from his own son? And

could this secret of the past explain Hamid’s murder, nearly sixty years after

the young football player decided to join the Army and change his name?

He could talk this through with Isabelle this evening, he thought, smiling at

the prospect, then admitting to himself that there probably wouldn’t be a lot of

time spent talking about crime and theories – or talking about anything. He

remembered the way she had kissed him in the cave, just a millisecond before he

was going to kiss her, and then that sweet and trusting way she had slipped his

hand onto her warm breast … The phone broke into his reverie.

‘Bruno? It’s Christine, calling from Bordeaux. I’m at the Moulin archive and I

think you had better get down here yourself. There’s nothing about Hamid al-Bakr

that I could find, but we have certainly tracked your Villanova and that new

name you gave me, Hussein Boudiaf. It’s dynamite, Bruno.’

‘What do you mean, dynamite?’

‘Have you ever heard of a military unit called the Force Mobile?’

‘No.’

‘Look, Bruno, you’re not going to believe it unless you come and see this stuff

for yourself. Your men Villanova and Boudiaf were war criminals.’

‘War criminals? Where? How do you mean?’

‘It’s too complicated to explain on the phone. There’s so much background. What

I suggest is that you go to Pamela’s house and ask her to give you a couple of

my books that she’ll find on the desk in my room. Have you a pen? I’ll give you

the titles. Look up the Force Mobile in the indexes. The first one is Histoire

de la Résistance en Périgord by Guy Penaud, and the other one is 1944 en

Dordogne by Jacques Lagrange. I’ll call Pamela and get her to look them out for

you, but you have to read the bits about the Force Mobile and call me back. I—

Dammit, my phone’s running out of juice. I’ll recharge it and wait for your

call. And my hotel in Bordeaux is the Hotel d’Angleterre, easy to remember.

Believe me, you have to come here.’

CHAPTER

24

In Pamela’s large sitting room, where the walls were glowing gold in the

sunlight and her grandmother’s portrait stared serenely down at him, Bruno

plunged back nearly sixty years into the horror of war and occupation in this

valley of the Vézčre. The smell of burning and cordite seemed to rise from the

austere pages of Christine’s books, and the history of times long before he was

born suddenly seemed intimately, terribly close.

The Force Mobile, he read, was a special unit formed by the Milice, the

much-feared police of the Vichy regime that administered France under the German

Occupation after 1940. Under German orders, transmitted and endorsed by French

officials of the Vichy government, the Milice rounded up Jews for the death

camps and young Frenchmen who were conscripted into forced labour in German

factories. As the tide of war turned against Germany after 1942, the Resistance

grew, and its ranks were swollen by tens of thousands of young Frenchmen fleeing

to the hills to escape the

STO

, the Service de Travail Obligatoire. They hid out

in the countryside, where they were recruited by the Resistance and took the

name Maquis, from the word for the impenetrable brush of the hills of Corsica.

To this raw material, the Maquis, came the parachute drops of arms and radio

operators, medical supplies, spies and military instructors from Britain. Some

came from the Free French led by de Gaulle, some from Britain’s Special

Operations Executive and others from British Intelligence, MI6. The British

wanted the Maquis to disrupt the German Occupation, or, in the words of Winston

Churchill’s order establishing the

SOE

, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. But as the

invasion neared, the prime British objective was to disrupt military

communications in France, and to force German troops away from defending the

beaches against an Allied invasion, and drive them into operations against the

Maquis deep inside France. The Gaullists wanted to arm the Maquis and to build

the Resistance into a force that could claim to have liberated France, thus

saving France’s honour after the humiliation of defeat and Occupation. But the

Gaullists also wanted to mould the Resistance into a political movement that

would be able to govern France after the war and prevent a seizure of power by

their rivals, the Communist Party. On occasion, Gaullists and Communists fought

it out with guns, usually in disputes over parachute drops.

The Milice and their German masters crafted a new strategy to crush the

Resistance in key areas. Specialist German troops, anti-partisan units, were

shipped in from the Russian front, and from Yugoslavia where they had become

experienced at battling similar guerrilla forces. But the real key to the new

strategy was to starve out the Resistance by terrorising the farmers and rural

people on whom the Maquis depended for their food. Rural families whose sons had

disappeared were raided, beaten, sometimes killed and the women raped. Crops and

livestock were confiscated, farms and barns were burned. This reign of terror in

the countryside was carried out by a unit specially recruited for the task, the

Force Mobile. In the Périgord, it was based in Périgueux.

Sitting in Pamela’s peaceful home, Bruno read on, rapt and appalled. He knew

that the Occupation had been rough, that many in the Resistance were killed, and