“Come with me, tell me if there’s anything unusual,” Bruno said. They set off to make a circuit around the outside of the plant. The wall nearest the road was clear apart from scorch marks, and the rear of the plant looked untouched. On one side of the building, he was not greatly surprised to find that someone had used an aerosol paint can to write arretez foie gras-peta. fr.
“Ever heard of these PETA types?” he asked.
Arnaud shook his head. “Heard of them, yes, but that’s all. We’ve had some nasty letters, but that was some time ago.”
“What are all these bricks doing, scattered around everywhere?” Bruno asked, hearing the siren of the fire engine coming down the road from the bridge. “Your showroom was mainly wood and glass.”
“We had a stack of bricks around the side for the extension we were planning,” Arnaud explained. “We hadn’t started building it yet, and now we’re ruined.”
“Are you insured?”
“For the building, yes, but not the stock. Putain, that was a bad mistake.” He turned away, putting his fist to his mouth as though to prevent himself being sick. The sound of the siren stopped and the fire engine pulled into the yard.
“You might be all right,” Bruno said. “This looks like more than just a fire to me.”
“I thought I told you to keep away from fires,” Albert said to Bruno by way of greeting, before peering into the wrecked showroom and looking curiously at the collapsed roof. He scratched his chin beneath the strap that secured his helmet, more like a habit in reflection than to relieve an itch.
“ Merde, this is a mess. But there’s not much of the fire left. In fact, I’m not sure this was a fire at all. See the way those tiles from the roof have been scattered out to the sides rather than fallen into the room. And most of the glass has been scattered inward.” He turned to Arnaud. “Did you have any explosives stored here? Propane gas tanks, dynamite, anything like that?”
“Explosives?” he looked bewildered. “Why would we need explosives?”
Ahmed climbed down from behind the wheel of the fire engine, and he and Albert clambered through what had been a window, trying to keep their balance on the small tins of foie gras that were underfoot. Albert turned back to Bruno, sniffing. “It smells a bit like cordite. Can you call Jeannot at the quarry? I think we need his expertise.”
Bruno called him and asked Jeannot to come as soon as he could. It was no comfort that Albert shared his suspicions.
“How come you didn’t hear anything?” Bruno asked. “That’s your house around the back.”
“I didn’t spend the night there,” Arnaud said, hesitant.
“Well, I hope she’s not married because I’m going to have to check with her.”
For the first time, Arnaud smiled. “It’s not like that. It’s Mireille, from the florist’s, and we’re engaged. I’m at her flat in town most nights.”
“Congratulations,” Bruno said. “You kept that quiet. I hadn’t heard.”
“It’s my dad. He’s against it, you know, that old family thing.”
Bruno nodded. Arnaud’s grandfather had been wounded when serving with the Resistance in the war, and Mireille’s granddad had been a collabo. There were families where this still mattered.
“I think it was dynamite, and they certainly knew what they were doing,” said Albert, clambering out of the ruined showroom. “See those bricks and those metal springs?”
Bruno nodded. “I was wondering…”
Albert held up a bit of scorched rag. “I think it was a mattress. They used it to tamp down the explosion, covered with those bricks to weigh it down. It would direct the force of the explosion. That’s why the roof tiles were blasted off to the sides.”
He turned to Arnaud. “You must have some pretty serious enemies. Any idea who it could have been?”
Arnaud shook his head, hands in the air and mouth agape. “This is crazy. Who’d want to…” He broke off and turned to Bruno. “You saw that slogan on the wall. We get some of our ducks from Maurice. Do you think…?”
“Let’s hold our horses until Albert’s sure of what happened,” Bruno said. “We might need a forensic report.”
“I’m pretty sure right now,” Albert said. “But I’d still like to hear what Jeannot has to say.”
“Hey, chef,” Ahmed called from the side of the wrecked storeroom. “Come look at this.”
They walked across. Ahmed’s discovery was the scorched and badly bent face of a small clock. Albert bent down to examine it more closely.
“See that little hole drilled there?” he said, looking at Bruno. “That’s the giveaway. This was the timer. They drill that hole for the contact, and when the minute hand comes around and touches it, boom.”
As Bruno pulled out his phone and punched in the speed dial for J-J, an all-too-familiar Peugeot pulled into the parking lot and Philippe Delaron appeared, camera in hand.
“Do you never mind your own camera shop?” asked Bruno, tiredly.
“ Maman can do that. I make more money from the papers these days,” Philippe replied. “Great evening last night, Bruno. So what’s this? I heard the siren and went to the station to ask where the trouble was, but it doesn’t look like your usual fire.”
“It’s not,” said Ahmed before Bruno could stop him. “It was a bomb. Somebody tried to blow the place up with dynamite.”
“ Bordel, dynamite? After those attacks on the farms? Somebody’s declared war on foie gras,” said Philippe, snapping away. “Hey, that’s not a bad headline.” Camera around his neck, he turned to Arnaud, pulling a notebook from his pocket. “So what’s this going to do to your business?”
Meanwhile, Bruno heard the tinny tones of J-J shouting into his phone and quickly stepped away, out of hearing. Philippe knew far too much already. “Sorry, J-J, an interruption. We’ve had an explosion here, looks like dynamite. Nobody hurt, but it was a bomb with a timer. We’re at Gravelle’s foie gras canning plant, the one off the side road by the bridge as you head for Ste. Alvere. There’s an animal rights statement painted on the wall, and the press is here already, talking about a war on foie gras. This is getting serious.”
“Any sign who did it?”
“There was nobody here, and it’s quite a way from the nearest house. You might want to give all the students an explosives test,” Bruno said. “But if they’re all clear we’d better start thinking about the Basques.”
“Get the press out and seal off the whole area. We’ll need a fingertip search so you’d better call Isabelle. She can get the gendarmes to round up all the students. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Maybe a bit more, I’ll collect that Spanish guy, Carlos, bring him with me. He’s been with the prefect.”
Before hanging up, J-J said he’d get a bus to take the students to Bergerac airport. “It’s only thirty minutes away, and all the airports have explosives testing gear for their security checks these days.”
Bruno called Isabelle to report the news and then went to his car for his roll of crime-scene tape, steering Delaron and Arnaud out of the area. He’d barely finished sealing off the scene when Jeannot arrived in a small truck. Albert took him into the wreckage of the showroom, showed him the scraps of mattress and the clock face, and they began sketching likely blast patterns.
Bruno sat in his van and from memory began calling every house he could think of that might have been close enough to hear the blast. He tried three without success before he remembered Manchon, who ran a couple of taxi-ambulances that took outpatients to the hospitals in Sarlat and Perigueux. He might have been up early, and might even have been close enough to hear something.
“Didn’t hear a thing, Bruno,” Manchon replied. “But my son said something over breakfast when he came back from his run. He’s training for the Bordeaux marathon and said he heard something that sounded like an explosion just after five. He thought it was the quarry, starting early.”
Bruno sat back, thinking. He didn’t see the students resorting to dynamite, however many PETA enthusiasts might remain after Kajte’s departure. Nor was it likely that they’d know how to use it and tamp it down. But somebody certainly wanted to make it look that way.
He tried to put himself in the shoes of a terrorist group, isolated and trying to put together a hurried operation in unfamiliar territory, with no military-grade explosives on hand. They raid a quarry for some dynamite, knowing it would bring a massive police operation. It might be worthwhile to use a stick or two to mount a distraction, to send some of the security forces chasing after the students on a false trail.
Bruno slammed a fist into his hand. He was the one being distracted, and not by any terrorist group but by
