The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel by Martin Walker Read Free Book Online

when you drove him over there?”
    “Not at all,” Madeleine replied. “He was his usual self, freshly showered and shaved, neatly dressed; clothes were his one extravagance, other than the booze. You had to know him to realize he was already drunk. He concealed it well. Chantal said she wasn’t even sure he was drunk, and certainly not angry with her, just very determined to haul her off.”
    Bruno asked Victor, “Did you find anything interesting here among his papers, anything that might explain what he wanted to tell your daughter?”
    “Not really. Gilbert wasn’t one for keeping records or souvenirs, beyond his logbooks and other stuff to do with flying, and they’re all here in his desk. No letters, no photos beyond the ones on the wall, not even an address book. I suppose he kept them all on his phone, and you found that on his body.”
    “He had no laptop?”
    “No computer of his own,” said Victor. “He’d sometimes come up and use the office desktop at the vineyard if he had to look something up or send an e-mail. People at Alcoholics Anonymous were always trying to get him back to the meetings. Well, actually it was only a guy called Larignac, from somewhere near Bordeaux, one of our former mechanics in the air force. He always thought the world of Gilbert, and he’d been helped by AA, so he kept trying to get Gilbert to dry out again.”
    “It was good of him to try,” said Bruno. “Talking of the air force, will it be a military funeral?”
    Victor looked startled. “I hadn’t even thought of that. Perhaps I should call the old squadron or the Air Force Association.”
    “With a colonel, I think it would be customary.”
    “Of course. I’ll look into it.”
    “Have you looked at the other rooms yet?”
    “There’s just the bedroom and bathroom—take a look,” said Madeleine, slipping down from the desk. “I’d better clear out whatever he left in the fridge and in the cupboards, although heaven knows the man hardly ever seemed to eat. He got most of his calories from vodka.”
    The bedroom was monastic in its sparseness. A metal-framed single bed stood against the wall, made up military-style, the blankets stretched so tight Bruno could have bounced a coin off them. The bedside table carried only a pitcher of water, a glass and what looked like a volume of poetry in Russian. Beneath the bed was a pair of white flannel bathroom slippers of the kind provided to guests by expensive hotels. These carried some sort of heraldic emblem on the toe and the words GRAND HOTEL, VADUZ . Bruno had no idea where that might be.
    There were more books in Russian on a small bookshelf, along with some French classics, some of the garishly covered SAS spy novels by Gérard de Villiers, a French-Russian dictionary and a pile of
Aviation Week
magazines. On top of the bookcase was a plastic cigarette lighter and an ashtray with several white cardboard tubes that seemed to contain tobacco. They looked a bit like some of the joints rolled by more fastidious marijuana smokers. He slipped one into a small evidence bag and put it in his pocket.
    He took the poetry book and the ashtray back into the main room. “Do either of you read Russian?” he asked, holding out the book.
    “I do, a bit,” said Madeleine. “That’s Akhmatova, a poet; she was Gilbert’s favorite. Her husband went to the Gulag under Stalin.”
    “And did he use marijuana?” he asked, showing her the ashtray.
    She smiled, and he thought,
Mon Dieu,
this is a beautiful woman.
    “They’re
papirosi,
Russian cigarettes,” she said. “They come like that with those little tubes instead of filters. He always smoked them when he could get them. It’s a brand called Belomorkanal, ‘White Sea Canal.’ ”
    “Where did you learn your Russian?” he asked.
    “I studied it at university and then went to Moscow during a long vacation,” she said casually. “I got a job as an intern in the French embassy’s commercial office.”
    She