Children of War (13 page)

Bruno’s jaw dropped. He recalled reading articles in the French press about this legendary bomb-maker, his innovative designs and the meticulous craftsmanship of his work, never a centimetre of wire wasted nor a junction that wasn’t doubly soldered. A caption to a photo in
Paris Match
of one of the bombs that had been defused said it looked as professionally made as the interior of a mobile phone or a computer.

‘Even if this wretched young man is not the Engineer himself, at the very least he worked with him. So your Sami may be responsible for dozens of deaths. Under a whole shelfload of anti-terrorism agreements we had no choice but to inform our allies that we’ve got him,’ the Brigadier said. ‘I wish to heaven that he’d never left Afghanistan.’

Bruno kept his face expressionless as he absorbed the news and the visceral shock of horror that it brought. Bruno had
seen men he knew maimed and killed by roadside bombs and cleverly rigged artillery shells that could be timed to spew shrapnel into a passing column.
Mon Dieu
, if Sami had been guilty of that …

He took a deep breath and tried to fit the image of Sami as a star bomb-maker, putting together the intricate timing mechanisms of bombs and booby-traps, with the pathetic figure huddled in a ball as they had first seen him at the airbase. Bruno recalled Sami smiling beatifically as Balzac lay in his arms. It didn’t add up. But the image fitted only too well when he recalled a much younger Sami fixing the appliances at the tennis and rugby clubs and helping Lespinasse repair the ignition in a car so old they had to make their own spare parts. Could that Sami be the Engineer, Bruno asked himself? Recalling the careful artistry of Sami’s repairs in St Denis, it seemed all too possible.

Then the wider implications began to occur to him, of extradition hearings, court appearances and outraged American politicians demanding that the French hand him over so that the Engineer could be brought to justice.

But if Sami was formally declared to be mentally unfit to stand trial, or had been acting under duress, what then? Like most policemen, Bruno suspected that pleas of insanity were open to wide abuse. Most people, he believed, knew the difference between right and wrong. But in the case of Sami, whom he had known as a strange and troubled boy, and whose unspeakable childhood trauma he had learned from Momu, Bruno felt in his bones that the conventional legal rules of guilt and responsibility and medical evidence could hardly
apply. Momu had phrased it best: Sami was put together differently. He was not like other people.

And how would the French state react? After its own terror attacks in Paris, France had been one of the strongest voices for international conventions against terrorism and the extradition of suspected terrorists to stand trial. Could Sami, could the massed ranks of the French psychiatric profession, stand against the overwhelming demand of realpolitik that Sami be surrendered?

French soldiers had been killed in roadside bombings in Afghanistan. French public opinion would be unlikely to stand up for Sami after that. The best that could happen was that Sami would be tried in France and condemned to a psychiatric prison hospital for the rest of his life. Something else occurred to him. Bruno already knew why the men from the Toulouse mosque wanted to find Sami and to silence him. Now he understood just how desperate they must be to kill him before he might talk.

‘I see you understand the implications of this,’ the Brigadier said. ‘As we speak, letters are going out to the legal attaché of the United States embassy in Paris, along with the proper representatives of our British, German, Dutch and Canadian and Australian friends, all of whom have lost men to these damned IEDs. I have no doubt we’ll be getting formal applications for extradition. The British and Germans can simply send us European arrest warrants and he’d be handed over to them almost automatically.’

‘Well, it would be automatic unless we charge him first under French law,’ the Mayor said. ‘That would take precedence and it means we’ll be in charge of the procedure and set up
medical tribunals to assess competence and so on. I’ve been talking to the Minister of the Interior and he’s been talking to the Elysée and this is the way we’re going to handle it.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Bruno said. ‘At what point does all this become public? I ask because I think there will be considerable media interest.’

‘It becomes public when formal charges are laid or if it leaks, and it had better not be leaked from here in St Denis,’ the Brigadier said, menace into his voice.

‘It won’t just be the media, Bruno,’ the Mayor said. ‘I can think of quite a lot of our home-grown politicians who will want to make use of this. A young Algerian immigrant, now a naturalized French citizen, a bomb-making terrorist whose work has killed French soldiers … You know as well as I do what the anti-immigrant politicians will do with that. Then there’ll be Muslim hotheads trying to turn Sami into some jihadist martyr.’

‘That’s why we’re going to move all this into the château, where we can secure the grounds and close the roads if we have to,’ the Brigadier said. ‘And if all this rebounds badly on St Denis, you two gentlemen have only yourselves to blame for arranging to bring Sami home.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Bruno repeated. ‘There might be one legal way to keep this area buttoned up. The doctor reminded me of her powers under the public health regulations. If necessary, we can get this whole area declared to be under quarantine and sealed off.’

‘Good thinking, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Bruno. That might be useful to bear in mind for the future, but we’re not going to persuade our medical tribunal to convene in the
middle of a plague zone, or whatever you plan to call it. The immediate priority is for you to take a full set of Sami’s fingerprints and DNA samples, just so we can be absolutely clear who we are dealing with.’

‘Any news from Toulouse about those two guys who killed Rafiq?’ Bruno asked.

‘They’re still holed up in the mosque, as far as we know,’ the Brigadier replied. ‘Don’t worry, Bruno, we’ll get them when we’re ready. But in the meantime perhaps the Mayor had better explain to Sami’s family that this is likely to become an international incident.’

‘In that case, sir, we’re likely to be holed up in the château for some time. If your extra security guards are available you won’t need me. Might I take this last night off and join you at the château tomorrow? If you need an extra vehicle, the keys to my Land Rover are in the ignition. I’ll take my horse.’

The Brigadier nodded and turned away. The Mayor caught Bruno’s arm and asked, ‘Are you riding all the way home?’

‘No, just to Pamela’s place; I know Fabiola’s on duty tonight so I have to exercise the horses. Our human affairs come and go, but we still have to take care of the animals.’

‘You and I need to talk about the Halévy bequest and the Desbordes farm,’ the Mayor said. ‘This Paris lawyer is coming down tomorrow, so he’ll be here in time for lunch. He was very pleased that you’d tracked the place down. I’ve spoken to the Brigadier and he’s prepared to spare you for the day.’

‘You know my thinking about turning the Desbordes farm into some sort of country camp for the Scouts,’ Bruno said. ‘You can prepare something on that for the lawyer without me.
But that’s in another commune. Do you know of any Desbordes link to St Denis itself?’

The members of Florence’s computer club were helping the staff of the
Mairie
, the Mayor explained, hunting down the names of the Desbordes’ cousins, in-laws, along with local scoutmasters and Protestant pastors.

‘My money’s on Florence’s kids,’ Bruno said. ‘They’ll be faster and won’t try to charge overtime. But how do you think the Halévy family will react to this business of Sami as an Islamic militant? It can hardly make them feel better about St Denis.’

‘I think we’d better warn the lawyer,’ the Mayor replied. ‘St Denis is a community that believes in the virtues of our
République
, a town that gave refuge to Jewish children and also tries to deal honourably with its Muslims, whatever the consequences. There’s nothing else we can say.’

‘And it happens to be true,’ added Bruno.

Bruno felt a touch of nervousness as he led his horse down the bridle path that led through the woods to the paddock behind Pamela’s house. He told himself that he was being ridiculous; they were old friends as well as lovers. And yet the word lovers seemed to Bruno to overstate the relationship, at least in the way that Pamela had defined it. She had once suggested, in a way that she had evidently assumed he would find agreeable and even flattering, that they were affectionate friends who on occasion shared their pleasures in bed. Bruno’s immediate instinct had been to take offence, but he knew better than to surrender to instant reactions in dealing with the opposite sex.

Women, in Bruno’s experience, usually thought before they spoke, while men seldom did. Women were more fluent in the language of feelings, emotions and relationships, and gave much more thought to them. Men lived and thought in two or at most three dimensions, while women were at home in a dozen or more. Bruno believed he could usually tell when a man was lying, but women were much harder to read, far more familiar with the many shades and nuances of truth.

So while he had taken Pamela’s words at face value, he had understood her to be saying something more subtle: that there were some clear limits to their relationship, and
that the intimacies they shared in her bedroom did not automatically transfer to the rest of her life. She had also made it clear that she had no intention of living with him or any man on a permanent basis, far less of setting up a joint home and starting a family. She would let him know when he was welcome in her bed, and he should understand that to take her body or her loyalty for granted would be unforgivable.

This had been more than acceptable to him in the past, but two elements had changed. Since Pamela’s injury, she seemed less at ease with her life, less patient with him and with others. Perhaps that would change when she got back on horseback, as Fabiola kept reassuring him. Bruno was not so sure. Her mother’s death had left Pamela financially independent and in future she would no longer need to rent out her
gîtes
, nor to do all the cleaning and gardening herself. She was already planning a holiday in Venice with an old school friend and was musing about a trip to the sun this winter, perhaps a safari in Africa. Pamela seemed to Bruno like a woman preparing to make some major changes in her life.

The other change had been in his own circumstances. The final breach with Isabelle had affected Bruno more powerfully than he had expected. He had always known their affair was doomed, however gloriously it had begun in that golden summer when they had fallen so tumultuously in love. Once she had made the decision to move to Paris to pursue what was becoming a brilliant police career, he knew there was no place in her baggage for a country policeman, even if he could have given up his home and garden, his horse and dog and his love of the Périgord to follow in her wake.

At first the blow of parting had been cushioned by the righteous anger he felt at learning that she had aborted their child without even telling him she was pregnant. But while the anger faded, the sense of loss remained, somehow deepened now that Isabelle had moved from Paris to The Hague for her new job with Eurojust, the European Union’s judicial arm. She was no longer even in the same country.

Before he could start to feel sorry for himself, Bruno saw the trees thinning and the familiar broad and grassy ridge began to appear. Soon he’d be able to canter and then to gallop, the wind of his passage sweeping away these gloomy, self-absorbed reflections. What simple creatures we are, he thought, that we feel so much better and more alive through the simple sensation of speed. A horse might gallop at a fraction of the speed of a car or train, but the ride felt infinitely faster and more thrilling.

He found Pamela in her garden wielding secateurs and wearing an enormous straw hat. Tendrils of her reddish-bronze hair were loose around her neck and she smelt pleasantly of herbs and feminine warmth when he ducked beneath the rim of the hat to kiss her.

‘I hope you can stay to dinner,’ she said. ‘I’m deluged with tomatoes, green peppers and courgettes but I’m not sure how best to serve them. With pasta, do you think?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll make soup. Do you have any of Stéphane’s
aillou
?’ Bruno loved the mixture of
crème fraîche
and
fromage blanc
, to which Stéphane added garlic and chives, smeared atop vegetables that had been grilled with the merest hint of walnut oil. ‘And if you have any of that
farine de blé
flour and some yeast, I’ll make some bread. And we have the
pâté we canned last winter. Open one of those and it makes a perfect supper.’

‘I just picked some pears, so that’s dinner arranged. We’re on our own this evening since Fabiola is on duty. I’ll finish in the garden and you take care of Hector and then make the bread and we can have a swim together before supper.’ Bruno noticed a sparkle in Pamela’s eyes that suggested that a swim was not all she had in mind.

‘Do we have the pool to ourselves?’ he asked, knowing that two of her
gîtes
were currently being rented by British families.

‘Yes, they’ve gone to Sarlat for dinner and a concert. They won’t be back until late.’

Taking off her hat, she came up to him and raised her lips to be kissed. She locked her hands behind his neck to hold him in place and kissed him very thoroughly indeed. Thinking that this woman always had the capacity to surprise him, and that this was not how he had been expecting the evening to begin, he responded with enthusiasm until she released him, murmuring, ‘I’ll go and pick the courgettes and you’d better take care of your horse.’

Once Hector was rubbed down and settled, Bruno washed his hands, took down the half-kilo bag of whole wheat flour and turned on the oven. He mixed the flour with a generous tablespoon of salt and put it into the oven to warm. Then he added a spoonful of brown sugar and a packet of dried yeast to about half a litre of hot water and put it to one side to work up its froth. He buttered a big baking tin and went off to take a quick shower.