Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard Read Online Free PDF Page B

The usual mail and paperwork awaited him, along with the endless to-do list that had grown while he was at the research station with J-J. It ranged from providing certificates of good conduct for people applying for jobs and university places to signing contracts for the musicians who would play at the civic ball on the night of the fair of Saint Louis. As secretary of the council’s sports committee, he had to sign the check for the first stage of the repainting of the rugby stadium. There was a faxed notification of death from the Préfecture de Police in Paris informing him that a resident of Saint-Denis had died in the jurisdiction of Paris, and asking that he please notify the family. The name of the deceased was unfamiliar, but the address was that of the hippie commune that had survived in the hills since the 1960s, probably because they produced the best goat cheese in the market. He would have to find time for that visit before the end of the day, but he would use the occasion to put some questions about GMOs to the commune residents. If anybody knew about the
écolos
,environmentalists who were militants for the Green cause, it would be Alphonse and his people.
    He put his hat on top of the bookcase, beside the FBI baseball cap that a friend had brought him after a vacation in New York, then squeezed between the filing cabinets and the wall to get behind his battered metal desk. He sat down, hearing the familiar squeak of his swivel chair, and looked down through the window at the busy roundabout and the bustle of the main shopping street behind it.
    Most of the people he could see were tourists, studying the houses for sale in the real estate agents’ windows. Saint-Denis now boasted four bakeries, four salons, four real estate agencies, three banks and three shops selling foie gras and other local delicacies, but there was only one grocery and one butcher’s shop. The fishmonger had long since given way to an insurance agency. Another grocery had been replaced the previous winter by a business that serviced computers and sold cell phones and DSL lines for the Internet. And a butcher had retired in the spring and now rented his premises to a real estate agent. It was no longer the Saint-Denis Bruno had first come to a decade ago, when the small towns of rural France still retained the shops and the texture he remembered from his boyhood. Now people shopped at the supermarkets on the outskirts of town, or drove to the complex of shopping malls and hypermarkets outside Périgueux, forty minutes away. Bruno sighed and turned back to his desk.
    He filled out the good conduct forms, signing and stamping each one with his seal, and signed the musicians’ contracts. He completed the paperwork for two death notices to be sent to the prefecture, and phoned Father Sentout to confirm the church for the funerals. Then something jogged his memory. He had signed another batch of good conduct forms earlier in the year. He looked at his file of copies, and there he foundwhat he was looking for: an application for a summer job as a lab assistant at the Agricultural Research Station for Dominique Suchet, Stéphane’s daughter. He and J-J had interviewed the permanent staff, checking the backgrounds of the technicians and the farmworkers. But he hadn’t thought about the summer workers.
Putain
. That meant more work, but it had to be done.
    Bruno paused. Dominique had been at the scene of the fire with her father—natural enough since their farm was just down the hill. Still, it was an interesting coincidence. He looked again at Dominique’s good conduct form, which contained a recommendation from the headmaster of the town
collège
, the secondary school where the kids went before going on to the
lycée
. He picked up the phone and called Rollo, the headmaster.
    Rollo told him Dominique was a very promising girl, good at math and science. She’d done well at the
lycée
and was now studying computer science at a university in