Bruno, Chief Of Police Page 0,1

bécasse, a bird whose taste he preferred above all others.

Bruno gazed contentedly down upon his town, which looked in the freshness of the early morning as if le bon Dieu had miraculously created it overnight. His eyes lingered on the way the early sunlight bounced and flickered off the eddies where the Vézère river ran under the arches of the old stone bridge. The place seemed alive with light, flashes of gold and red, as the sun magically concocted prisms in the grass beneath the willows, and danced along the honey-coloured façades of the ancient buildings along the river. There were glints from the weathercock on the church spire, from the eagle atop the town’s war memorial where he had to attend that day’s ceremony on the stroke of noon, from the windscreens and chrome of the cars and caravans parked behind the medical centre.

All looked peaceful as the business of the day began, with the first customers heading into Fauquet’s café. Even from this high above the town he could hear the grating sound of the metal grille being raised to open Lespinasse’s tabac, which sold fishing rods, guns and ammunition alongside the cigarettes. Very logical, thought Bruno, to group such lethal products together. He knew without looking that, while Madame Lespinasse was opening the shop, her husband would be heading to the café for the first of many little glasses of white wine that would keep him pleasantly plastered all day.

The staff of the Mairie would also be at Fauquet’s, nibbling their croissants and taking their coffee and scanning the headlines of that morning’s Sud-Ouest.

Alongside them would be a knot of old men studying the racing form and enjoying their first petit blanc of the day. Bachelot the shoemender would take his morning glass at Fauquet’s, while his neighbour and mortal enemy Jean-Pierre, who ran the bicycle shop, would start his day at Ivan’s Café de la Libération.

Their enmity went back to the days of the Resistance, when one of them had been in a Communist group and the other had joined de Gaulle’s Armée Secrète, but Bruno could never remember which. He only knew that they had never spoken to one another since the war, had never allowed their families to speak beyond the frostiest ‘bonjour’, and each man was said to have devoted many of the years since to discreet but determined efforts to seduce the other man’s wife. The Mayor had once, over a convivial glass, told Bruno that he was convinced that each had attained his objective. But Bruno had been a policeman long enough to question most rumours of adulterous passion and, as a careful guardian of his own privacy in such tender matters, was content to allow others similar latitude.

These morning movements were rituals to be respected – rituals such as the devotion with which each family bought its daily bread only at a particular one of the town’s four bakeries, except on those weeks of holidays when they were forced to patronise another, each time lamenting the change in taste and texture. These little ways of St Denis were as familiar to Bruno as his own morning routine on rising: his exercises while listening to Radio Périgord, his shower with his special shampoo to protect against the threat of baldness, the soap with the scent of green apples. Then he would feed his chickens while the coffee brewed and share the toasted slices of yesterday’s baguette with his dog, Gigi.

Across the small stream that flowed into the main river, the caves in the limestone cliffs drew his eye. Dark but strangely inviting, the caves with their ancient engravings and paintings drew scholars and tourists to this valley. The tourist office called it ‘The Cradle of Mankind’. It was, they said, the part of Europe that could claim the longest period of continual human habitation.

Through ice ages and warming periods, floods and wars and famine, people had lived here for forty thousand years. Bruno, who reminded himself that there were still many caves and paintings that he really ought to visit, felt deep in his heart that he understood why.

Down at the riverbank, he saw that the mad Englishwoman was watering her horse after her morning ride. As always, she was correctly dressed in gleaming black boots, cream jodhpurs and a black jacket. Her auburn hair flared out behind her neat black riding hat like the tail of a fox. Idly, he wondered why they called her mad. She always seemed perfectly