Bruno, Chief Of Police Page 0,2

sane to him, and appeared to make a good business of running her small guest house. She even spoke comprehensible French, which was more than could be said of most of the English who had settled here.

He looked further up the road that ran alongside the river, and saw several trucks bringing local farmers to the weekly market. It would soon be time for him to go on duty. He took out the one item of equipment that never left his side, his cell phone, and dialled the familiar number of the Hôtel de la Gare.

‘Any sign of them, Marie?’ he asked. ‘They hit the market at St Alvère yesterday so they are in the region.’

‘Not last night, Bruno. Just the usual guys staying from the museum project and a Spanish truck driver,’ replied Marie, who ran the small hotel by the station.

‘But remember, after last time they were here and found nothing, I heard them talking about renting a car in Périgueux to put you off the scent. Bloody Gestapo!’

Bruno, whose loyalty was to his local community and its mayor rather than to the nominal laws of France, particularly when they were really laws of Brussels, played a constant cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors from the European Union who were charged with enforcing EU hygiene rules on the markets of France.

Hygiene was all very well, but the locals of the Commune of St Denis had been making their cheeses and their pâté de foie gras and their rillettes de porc for centuries before the EU was even heard of, and did not take kindly to foreign bureaucrats telling them what they could and could not sell. Along with other members of the Police Municipale in the region, Bruno had established a complex early warning scheme to alert the market vendors to their visits.

The inspectors, known as the Gestapo in a part of France that had taken very seriously its patriotic duties to resist the German occupation, had started their visits to the markets of Périgord in an official car with red Belgian licence plates. On their second visit, to Bruno’s alarm, all the tyres had been slashed. Next time they came in a car from Paris, with the telltale number ‘75’ on the licence plate. This car too had been given the Resistance treatment, and Bruno began to worry whether the local counter-measures were getting out of hand. He had a good idea who was behind the tyre-slashing, and had issued some private warnings that he hoped would calm things down. There was no point in violence if the intelligence system could ensure that the markets were clean before the inspectors arrived.

Then the inspectors had changed their tactics and come by train, staying at local station hotels. But that meant they were easily spotted by the hotel keepers who all had cousins or suppliers who made the crottins of goat cheese and the foie gras, the home-made jams, the oils flavoured with walnuts and truffles, and the confits that made this corner of France the very heart of the nation’s gastronomic culture. Bruno, with the support of his boss, the Mayor of St Denis, and all the elected councillors of the Commune, even Montsouris the Communist, made it his duty to protect his neighbours and friends from the idiots of Brussels. Their idea of food stopped at moules and pommes frites, and even then they adulterated perfectly good potatoes with an industrial mayonnaise that they did not have the patience to make themselves.

So now the inspectors were trying a new tack, renting a car locally so that they might more easily stage their ambush and subsequent getaway with their tyres intact. They had succeeded in handing out four fines in St Alvère yesterday, but they would not succeed in St Denis, whose famous market went back more than seven hundred years. Not if Bruno had anything to do with it.

With one final gaze into the little corner of paradise that was entrusted to him, Bruno took a deep breath of his native air and braced himself for the day.

As he climbed back into his van, he thought, as he always did on fine summer mornings, of a German saying some tourist had told him: that the very summit of happiness was ‘to live like God in France’.

CHAPTER 2

Bruno had never counted, but he probably kissed a hundred women and shook the hands of at least as many men each morning on market day. First this morning was Fat Jeanne,