The Coldest Case, Martin Walker [famous ebook reader txt] 📗

‘I’ll get there as soon as I can after four,’ Bruno said. ‘Maybe we can have a drink together afterwards and catch up. It’s been too long.’

‘Right, see you then.’

The call left Bruno feeling pensive about his aunt and his childhood in the overcrowded tenement in a grim public housing project where all six children shared a bedroom, even the eldest, Annette. Bruno only ever saw her and the other siblings when he paid a duty call to his aunt on her birthday and at Christmas, each time taking her a bottle of his home-made vin de noix. Annette and the eldest brother, Bernard, lived in Bergerac, in public housing. The other three siblings had all moved away and Bruno had lost touch, except for Alain. Annette worked in the kitchen of the Bergerac retirement home in which her mother had been living and Bernard had been unemployed for years, claiming disability allowance for a bad back which did not seem to stop him taking part-time jobs as a painter and decorator, working off the books and only for cash.

Alain was a senior warrant officer at the air defence control training centre at the Mont-de-Marsan airbase south of Bordeaux, better known as the home of two fighter squadrons equipped with Rafale interceptors, France’s most advanced warplane. The youngest of five children, Alain was just a year or so older than Bruno and they had grown up together when Bruno, aged six, had been taken in by his aunt from the church orphanage. It had not been a happy home and Bruno had long suspected that the main reason for his welcome was the more generous welfare payment his aunt received as a famille nombreuse at a time when the French state was trying to increase the population. The food, he recalled, had been better at the orphanage.

‘You look like you’ve had some grim news,’ the Mayor said as Bruno returned to the table with the apple pie and ice cream. His friends nodded sympathetically when he explained the news of his aunt’s stroke.

‘I don’t recall any of your family coming to St Denis to visit,’ the Mayor went on, as Bruno served them.

‘My aunt came for a weekend in the early days and it was plain she didn’t like it, being woken by the cockerel, the silence for much of the time and the lack of town noises,’ Bruno said, half-smiling and feeling a mixture of affection and regret. ‘She was never a reader and she couldn’t get over the fact that I had no TV,’ he went on. ‘She thought the Dordogne valley was pretty and liked the castles but refused to visit any caves, thought they’d give her claustrophobia.’

‘What about your cousins?’

‘We’ve mostly lost touch. The youngest, Alain, is roughly my age, and we always got on well. He came for a weekend when I was playing in one of those old-timers’ rugby games against the youth team and he liked it a lot. He’s thinking of settling near here when he gets out of the air force in a couple of years.’

‘There’s a programme I worked for when I was in the Senate, to let long-service veterans spend their last year training to be teachers,’ the Mayor said. ‘That might suit him. And we’re always short of teachers in rural areas, particularly men.’

‘I’ll mention it when I see him at the hospital,’ said Bruno. ‘But I know he’s been thinking of setting himself up in business. He learned to be a radar tech and electrician and now teaches air defence systems so he’s good with computers.’

‘Is he married?’ asked Gilles.

‘Not yet. Like me, he can’t find the right woman.’

‘You find them all right, Bruno,’ said Gilles, grinning. ‘You just don’t seem to be able to get them to the altar. It must run in the family.’

3

Bruno was anticipating a depressing visit when he arrived at the hospital the next day. His ancient Land Rover had no air con so he had driven the forty minutes from St Denis with all the windows open, the radio giving news of forest fires in Provence. The car park seemed to radiate heat from the relentless sun and he was sweating freely by the time he reached the hospital doors.

Although looking forward to seeing Alain again, he felt oppressed by memories of his childhood. He had been the charity kid, expected to be grateful for his status as the least regarded relation in his aunt’s overcrowded home. There had been some happy moments. In childhood, there were impromptu games of soccer in the street, a birthday party with a special cake, and his growing friendship with Alain. They served to remind him of the wretched times, the way Bernard the bully, seven years older, would cuff him with casual regularity and sneer at Bruno’s dead mother as a whore.

In the hospital, he found his aunt in a small ward of eight people, all elderly. The place smelled of disinfectant and cleaning fluids with an underlying hint of urine. She was the only one with a visitor, Alain. Bruno kissed his aunt on both cheeks, gave her the flowers he’d brought and received a grunt of acknowledgment in return. He embraced Alain, found a spare chair, sat down on the other side of the bed and announced that he was pleased to see his aunt looking better than he’d expected. She grunted again, waving the fingers of one hand in frustration at being unable to speak. Her face seemed to have been divided into two halves, one normal and the other melting like so much candle wax. The left side of her mouth and her left eye were drooping and the skin seemed to sag with them.

Bruno wondered how sad he truly felt. He knew he had little real affection for his aunt, a woman he usually remembered as tired or angry, always ready to swat one of her brood of kids with a soup