lived here for forty thousand years. Bruno, who reminded himself that there were
still many caves and paintings that he really ought to visit, felt deep in his
heart that he understood why.
Down at the riverbank, he saw that the mad Englishwoman was watering her horse
after her morning ride. As always, she was correctly dressed in gleaming black
boots, cream jodhpurs and a black jacket. Her auburn hair flared out behind her
neat black riding hat like the tail of a fox. Idly, he wondered why they called
her mad. She always seemed perfectly 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 Alvčre 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 Brunos 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
nations 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 Alvčre 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, as the schoolboys called her. The French, who are more attuned to
the magnificent mysteries of womanhood than most, may be the only people in the
world to treasure the concept of the jolie laide, the plain or even ugly woman
who is so comfortable within her own ample skin and so cheerful in her soul that
she becomes lovely. And Fat Jeanne was a jolie laide of some fifty years and