tapped her horse’s sides with her heels. The stately trot became a canter, and she whooped aloud with the joy of it. Bruno grinned widely as flecks of mud spattered him from her horse’s hooves, and he felt the smooth stretching of his own horse as they kept pace and broke into the open field. A startled hare bounded back for the cover of the woods, rabbits took to their burrows and a great cloud of birds rose from their morning feast of worms and took, complaining noisily, to the sky.
They cantered on up the slope to the sunlit ridge. As they topped the rise, the wide plateau lying magnificent and green before them, Bruno saw Pamela lean forward over Bess’s neck, urging her into a gallop. Bruno felt the tautening of great equine muscles beneath him as Victoria gathered her strength to follow. His mare moved easily into the new rhythm, her neck reaching out and her nostrils wide, as if eager to butt aside the clods of earth that were being kicked up by the horse ahead. Bruno sat forward, giving her free rein. He lowered his own body to urge her on and felt the rush of wind in his ears and the tattoo of hoofbeats. Movement by car or bike or any machine was slow and lifeless compared with this.
Pamela reined in and slowed Bess to a trot and then a walk as the plateau began to fall away into the valley of the River Vezere below them, the distant red rooftops and the church spire of St. Denis nestling into the great bend of the stream. Victoria slowed of her own accord, whinnied softly and then edged up to stand beside Bess. Bruno gazed down on the gentle valley and the town below. The sun’s rays gleamed gold on the cockerel atop the war memorial. They breathed warmth into the honey-colored stone of the buildings. The eddies of the river danced in the sunlight as they rippled beneath the arches of the bridge that dated from Napoleon’s rule.
He could never leave this place, Bruno thought. St. Denis owned him now, the only place he had ever thought of as home after his years of travels with the army. Seeing it now from horseback had opened fresh perspectives and a new sense of the terrain that he had previously known only in his car and on foot as a hunter. He felt a rush of gratitude to Pamela for teaching him to ride, knowing him well enough to be sure that he’d take to it and enjoy the strange, beguiling intimacy across species that connects a horse and rider. She was a fine woman, he mused, handsome and spirited and sure of herself and the life she wanted to lead.
Pamela had made it clear that she wanted neither husband nor children, nor even a lover who would share her home. He was her friend for life, she had said one night soon after their affair had begun, but he should know that she saw him as a guest in her home and in her bed. The invitation was hers to bestow. And while Bruno was as jealous as she of his own privacy and equally devoted to the familiar comforts of his own home, he felt puzzled by Pamela. His previous love affairs had been consuming and overwhelming, like diving into a rushing river and being carried headlong with little thought for course or destination. With Pamela, he felt that he took his place amid her horses and her gites and her morning ritual with the BBC World Service and her English magazines and all the other furniture of her life. It was all very pleasant and sometimes marvelous, but not what he thought of as love.
“You’re riding well,” Pamela said, her breathing back to normal after the gallop. “I don’t think there’s much more to teach you, not unless you want to start jumping fences.”
“You’re a great teacher. Six months ago, I couldn’t ride at all,” he said. “A great way to start the day.”
“After a wonderful night,” she said, smiling in that private way of hers that had so confused him in the early days of their affair. He could never tell whether the smile was for herself or whether he was included. She reached out to put her hand on his thigh. “I feel I’m glowing with energy.”
He took her hand. “I’m going to need all the energy I can get today. There’s that foie gras problem I mentioned, plus a security meeting over some big ministers’ visit that’s coming up, and the mayor and council want to pay a visit to Horst’s dig. And there’ll be journalists arriving, catching up on the story they missed at last night’s lecture. They’ll want to visit the site, which means organizing the parking and telling Horst to set up barriers so they don’t all fall into the trenches.”
“Can’t you get the gendarmes to do that?”
“Yes, but knowing Capitaine Duroc, he’ll probably set up speed traps to catch all the reporters.”
Pamela squeezed his hand, but her eyes were serious. “In this blizzard of information I can’t tell whether you’re trying to tell me something or hiding something.”
“I’m not hiding anything, but after tomorrow those security meetings will be taking place twice daily,” he said. “And it seems that they’ll include Isabelle.”
Pamela’s face went very still, and then she removed her hand and turned to pat her horse’s neck. “I thought Isabelle was still convalescing,” she said quietly.
Her horse picked up a step and moved ahead of Bruno so he could no longer see her face. He remembered her outburst of anger at the children’s Christmas party when some busybody had told her of seeing Bruno and Isabelle together at a hotel in Bordeaux. It had been an entirely innocent meeting. But that flash of jealousy made Bruno wonder whether Pamela herself was at ease with the controlled intimacies of their own affair.
“She was supposed to have six months’ leave to recover, but she got bored doing nothing,” said Bruno, talking to Pamela’s back. “I’m told she’s now walking with a cane and is coming down to do something about communications and security. It’s her minister who’s doing the meeting.”
“What brings the minister of the interior to St. Denis?”
Bruno shrugged, then realized Pamela couldn’t see the gesture. “Some meeting with a foreign colleague and a photo op,” he said, raising his voice so it would carry.
“A foreign colleague?” Her voice was mocking. “So St. Denis joins the ranks of international conference centers?” She was sitting very upright in the saddle, her back stiff. “Two meetings a day. I suppose she’ll try to lure you to Paris again. Isabelle has always impressed me as the kind of woman who gets what she wants.”
Carlos Gambara was sitting on the uncomfortable chair outside Bruno’s office and filling in the blank numbers in Sud Ouest ’s Sudoku game when Bruno arrived. He looked up and caught Bruno glancing at his watch. It was two minutes before eight.
“Give me a moment,” Carlos said. “I’m almost done.” He scribbled another number as Bruno went into his small office, put his hat on the table, turned on his computer and sat in his revolving chair. It gave the usual, almost welcoming squeak. He rang Claire, the mayor’s secretary, and asked for two coffees and then tapped in his username and password and began dealing with the accumulated e-mail. Most were routine, but two made him pause.
They both came from Isabelle. The first was a formal note from her ministry e-mail address, attaching a list of “families of interest.” Bruno scanned it, found no surprises and sent it to his printer. The second came from her private Hotmail address.
“It’s good to know we’ll be working together again. Still a lot of convalescing to do, but the doctors are pleased with me. More important, my karate teacher says I’ll be back to normal by midsummer. Isabelle xx.”
Bruno pondered his reply, trying to catch the same tone that she had used, of friendly colleagues rather than old lovers. He wasn’t satisfied with his reply, but as Carlos pushed open the door, he hit the SEND button anyway. “Happy to hear you are recovering and fit enough to be back at work. La Republique can breathe easily again. Always a welcome for you in St D. See you soon, Bruno xx.”
Carlos held up the front page of Sud Ouest with the photo of Horst’s first modern family. There was a smaller photo of Horst, and the headline made Bruno smile-“First Family Found in St. Denis.”
“What did you think of the lecture?” he asked.
“I can’t stop thinking about it and what Horst was saying about murder as the first act of modern man, the original sin,” Bruno said. “It makes me wonder who was the first policeman.”
Carlos pulled two sheets of paper from his inside pocket and laid them on Bruno’s desk.
“Families of Spanish origin in this region who may be of interest,” he said. “Your records may be better than ours.”
Bruno handed him the printout from Isabelle’s attachment. “Most of the names are the same. We have a couple more, but none that rings my alarm bell.”
“What about this old corpse you found? No possible connection to our business?”
Bruno shrugged. “I’ll save you a copy of the forensic report, if you like. I should get something today.”
“This other matter, the animal rights militants. Can we check them out? In my experience, being a radical in one thing makes it more likely to be a radical in another.”
“I can give you a full list of all the students, names, addresses, passport numbers. I was going to ask the brigadier to check them out with the various home countries, but you can probably do that.” He turned to the computer, clicked open Clothilde’s e-mail to him of yesterday and printed out two copies of the attachment.
