The Patriarch: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel by Martin Walker Page B

arrived in St. Denis the previous year to work at the clinic, had been renting one of Pamela’s
gîtes
and had become a good friend and a regular riding partner for them both. But she seemed to take no interest in the opposite sex, spending much of her free time volunteering at a shelter in Bergerac for abused women. But then Gilles had arrived, a journalist from
Paris Match
whom Bruno had first met during the siege of Sarajevo when serving with the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia. Bruno and Pamela had watched fondly as the two of them had begun falling in love, but their affair had been blighted by Fabiola’s inability to consummate the relationship and her refusal to explain why. Some mysterious trauma in her life had blocked her.
    Bruno, along with Pamela and Yveline, the head of the local gendarmerie, had tracked down Fabiola’s old professor at medical school, a woman now retired, and found that Fabiola had been sexually assaulted by another teacher at the school and the incident hushed up. Bruno had identified the professor who had raped her and had sexually mistreated some of the other women students. The man was now in prison, and with that symbolic act of closure Fabiola had been able, slowly and gingerly, to rebuild her emotional and physical life with Gilles.
    Fabiola disliked big cities and wanted to stay in the Périgord, so Gilles’s own commitment to her had been important. He had accepted a buyout deal and given up his staff job at
Paris Match
to move down to St. Denis but still wrote for it from time to time as a freelancer. He had signed a lucrative contract for his book on the notorious Afghan bomb maker known as the Engineer, an autistic youth of Arab background who had grown up in St. Denis. His first draft finished and sent off to his publishers, at Bruno’s recommendation Gilles had taken Fabiola to the coast at Arcachon, a huge almost-landlocked bay south of Bordeaux, for a vacation.
    When they arrived hand in hand, the scent of roasting lamb in itself a welcome reminder of the life and friendships they had made in the Périgord, it was plain that their time away together had been a success. Fabiola was glowing, and Gilles wore that dazed, enchanted smile of a man utterly in love. He could hardly take his eyes off Fabiola and kept touching her arm, her back, her hand, as if to reassure himself that she was real. Bruno felt himself chuckling to see their happiness and hugged them both before turning to pour their drinks, wondering at the strange magic of love that could spread such warmth and good feeling to all within reach.

7
    The riding school sprawled for about four hundred meters along the side of a minor road. To the left there was a large riding ring filled with sand and surrounded by a wooden fence. To the right were two rows of stables for about twenty horses, and directly ahead stood a large barn, attached to a small cottage that seemed to be the office. A sign above the door said ACCUEIL, “Welcome.” Behind the barn a generous paddock sprawled back up a gentle slope to a manor house atop the hill. A handsome nineteenth-century building with a porch supported by two stone pillars, it was flanked on each side by two smaller buildings of the same stone, which might have been wings to the house or separate cottages. They formed a large courtyard that contained a terrace, a lawn and a vegetable garden that obviously needed weeding.
    Altogether it made an impressive ensemble. Bruno saw a diving board to the right rear of the house that suggested a swimming pool. Overall the place appeared deserted and run down. The paint of the stables was peeling, and the windows of the offices had not been washed for months. There were no riders to be seen, and only a few horses were poking their heads curiously above their stable doors.
    “It must have been a good-looking place once, but it hardly looks like a going concern. Do you know why it’s for sale?” Bruno asked Pamela as they climbed out of his