enclosure where he kept his ducks and hens. “And that’s all she is.”
13
Bruno had learned to worry whenever Capitaine Duroc looked triumphant. As he stalked out of the gendarmerie pulling on his gloves against the early morning chill Duroc looked very smug indeed. Following him in a dark blue trouser suit beneath an open black raincoat, Annette seemed impassive. She still looked astonishingly young, almost like a schoolgirl dressing up in her older sister’s clothes. Alongside her was a stranger, a small, dark-haired man in blue overalls and rubber boots with some sort of badge on his chest pocket and a large black bag in his hand. Pouillon emerged from his warm Citroen, its engine purring to keep the heater going. Still glowing from a jog through the woods with Gigi followed by a brisk shower, Bruno barely felt the cold. But beside him Maurice was shivering despite his overcoat.
“You’re probably aware that temporary security precautions have delayed my investigation into the shooting and wounding that took place at your farm,” Duroc told Maurice. “In the meantime, the magistrate has asked me to investigate reports of breaches of the hygiene regulations at your farm. You will now accompany us while Inspector Varin here from the INRA office in Bordeaux makes his report.”
Damn Duroc, Bruno thought, and damn Annette too. They had planned this carefully. The inspector from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique had either gotten up very early to reach St. Denis or had been called in late yesterday. They were determined to get Maurice for something, and once Duroc had him in the gendarmerie they could put pressure on him over the shooting.
Bruno felt Annette staring fixedly at him. Any hint of that understanding he thought they had reached was gone. Beside him, Maurice looked ashen. Bruno’s heart sank as he thought of that gift of foie that Maurice had left at his house the previous evening. He must have killed the ducks sometime that afternoon, but he only had a license to rear them. Although few farmers observed the rule, animals for human consumption were supposed to be killed in a licensed abattoir.
“Aren’t they supposed to give some kind of notice of an inspection?” Bruno asked Pouillon in a whisper. The lawyer shook his head. Bruno had another worrying thought. The insurance company would pay Maurice’s legal fees if he was accused on the firearms charge, but not for illegal killing of his own ducks. Maurice had no money for lawyers.
“The inspector and the magistrate and Monsieur Soulier will come with me,” Duroc said, pausing to escort Annette to the gendarmerie van. “The rest of you may follow, as you wish.”
Bruno called out to Pouillon, who was about to climb into his car, to ask if they could drive together. They needed to talk without Duroc or Annette being able to overhear. This latest gambit by Annette and Duroc, Pouillon warned as they followed the gendarmerie van, was something for which he had not prepared. He had read the relevant parts of the Code Criminel on firearms, and he believed they could mount a very strong defense. But the hygiene regulations were different, complex and constantly being updated. The most dangerous provision of the law for Maurice would be the clause prohibiting unlicensed slaughter, even for personal consumption.
“You know what always worried me most when I was magistrate, Bruno?” Pouillon went on. “It was the fear of doing something so stupid that the public felt justified in taking the law into their own hands. You know the kind of thing, blocking roads with their tractors, sending flocks of sheep into official buildings and dumping strategically placed heaps of manure. Nothing really violent, of course, that might justify the state in taking strong action.”
“You mean the kind of spontaneous public demonstration that makes the law look like an ass and the authorities look worse?” Bruno said, as he began to understand. “Like enforcing an unpopular law that is widely ignored.”
“Exactly,” Pouillon replied. “Particularly if there’s some humor attached to the protests, and an elected public official or two among the protesters. Perhaps a mayor wearing his tricolor to show that the politics of this are going to be much more complicated than people first thought. Naturally, the power of such public opposition is magnified if the media happen to be present. And what always scared me the most was the thought of demonstrations led by women.”
Pouillon glanced across at Bruno, a twinkle in his eye. Bruno was grinning as he reached for his cell phone.
“Any public official found using his phone to foment such events could be in big trouble,” Pouillon said, taking his hand off the wheel and putting it over Bruno’s phone. “But I happen to have my young granddaughter’s cell phone in the car. She forgot it the other day.”
He pointed, and Bruno opened the glove compartment and took out a small pink phone with a cartoon figure of a smiling kitten on the screen when he turned it on. He opened the address book of his own phone to get the right numbers and began dialing. His first call was to his friend Stephane, his second was to the head of the syndicat, the farmers’ equivalent of a trade union, and his third to the St. Denis cooperative where the farmers bought their supplies. He asked each one to make more calls and round up more people. He then called the mayor, followed by Philippe Delaron, the local photographer and reporter. By the time they turned into Maurice’s farmyard, he was on his last call to Nicco, his counterpart as municipal policeman of nearby Ste. Alvere.
“Have you called the Villattes?” Pouillon asked. “They live pretty close and they know everybody in this valley.
“I’ll delay matters here a bit,” he continued, as Bruno began urgently punching more numbers into his pink phone. Pouillon parked the car, climbed out and shouted to the impatient Duroc, “Just a minute, I think I may have broken something.” He bent down to peer behind his rear wheel, and then raised his head to shout again. “And I don’t want any questions or any word to come from Maurice unless I’m standing beside him.”
He winked at Bruno as he bent again, evidently enjoying his foray onto the other side of the law.
But for Sophie, coming to the door of the farmhouse and drying her hands on an apron, there was only cause for fear in the scene before her. A tall gendarme was holding her husband’s arm, flanked by a woman who looked both stern and official and a man in overalls who looked like a farm inspector. Sophie’s hands flew to her mouth as Maurice tried to go to her and Duroc held him firmly back.
“Mon Dieu,” she cried, stretching her hands out to Maurice, making Bruno wish that he’d also called Father Sentout. Perhaps the mayor would ensure the local priest turned up, as a symbol of civic unity.
“Inspector, do your duty,” said Duroc in tones that would have graced the highest court in France rather than a muddy farmyard that echoed with the cackling of ducks who assumed this gathering meant they were about to be fed again.
Bruno kept his eyes on Annette. Conscious of his accusing gaze she bit her lip and turned to watch the inspector, who knelt to open his black bag and pulled out a small camera and a tape recorder. The camera went in a pocket. The tape recorder was hung around his neck, and he made the usual sounds of testing to check that it was working. Then he began a muttered monotone, describing the farmyard and the date and time as he took photos.
The inspector led the way into the paddock where the ducks clustered, shooing them away as he squeezed through the gate. Annette, Bruno and Pouillon followed him. Duroc remained, Maurice still pinioned. The inspector checked the tall barrels, heaped with dried maize, and the low huts where the ducks sheltered at night, long gutters filled with water and feed running through them. There were few droppings; the ground had evidently been swept earlier that morning. Thank heaven for that, Bruno thought. The inspector examined the funnels that Maurice used to feed the ducks and then took photographs. They were the old-fashioned type, the narrow end made of leather, and well oiled to minimize any damage to the ducks’ gullets.
He put the camera away and picked up a duck at random, opened its protesting break to peer down its gullet, probed its stomach and lower back with skilled fingers and then did the same with three more plucked from different parts of the flock.
He looked into the storage cupboards where Maurice kept his gardening tools and his additives for the feed. He examined all the labels, dictating them into his tape recorder. He checked the flow of the taps, probed the dunghill where Maurice raked the droppings and then waded into the wide pond to scoop up the mud from the bottom, which he sniffed before tossing it back into the water.
Bruno stole a quick glance at his watch. The longer the inspector took the more time for his plan to take
