boys who had signed up for his rugby training class.

Bruno’s gun, a rather elderly MAB 9mm semi-automatic, was locked in his safe in

his office in the Mairie, and taken out once a year for his annual refresher

course at the gendarmerie range in Périgueux. He had worn it on duty on three

occasions in his eight years in the Police Municipale. The first was when a

rabid dog had been sighted in a neighbouring Commune, and the police were put on

alert. The second was when the President of France had driven through the

Commune of St Denis on his way to see the celebrated cave paintings of Lascaux.

He had stopped to visit an old friend, Gérard Mangin, who was the Mayor of St

Denis and Bruno’s employer. Bruno had saluted his nation’s leader and proudly

stood armed guard outside the Mairie, exchanging gossip with the far more

thoroughly armed presidential bodyguard, one of whom turned out to be a former

comrade from Bruno’s army days. The third time was when the boxing kangaroo

escaped from a local circus, but that was another story. On no occasion had

Bruno’s gun ever been used on duty, a fact of which he was extremely but

privately proud. Of course, like most of the other men (and not a few women) of

the Commune of St Denis, he shot almost daily in the hunting season and usually

bagged his target, unless he was stalking the notoriously elusive 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 Vézčre 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 Secrčte, 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