Black Diamond - Martin Walker [0]
FICTION
Bruno, Chief of Police
The Dark Vineyard
The Caves of Périgord
NONFICTION
The Iraq War
Europe in the Twenty-first Century (coauthor)
America Reborn
The President They Deserve
The Cold War: A History
Martin Walker’s Russia
The Waking Giant: Gorbachev and Perestroika
Powers of the Press
The National Front
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Walker and Watson Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Great Britain in slightly different form by Quercus, London, in 2010.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walker, Martin, [date]
Black diamond / Martin Walker.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-70145-9
1. Police chiefs—France, Southwest—Fiction.
2. Truffles—Fiction. 3. Smuggling—Fiction. 4. Country
life—France, Southwest—Fiction. 5. France, Southwest—
Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6073.A413B63 2011
823′.914—dc22 2011003407
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Jacket photograph © Mark Atkins/panoptika.net
Jacket design by Jason Booher
v3.1
To Commandant Raymond Bounichou,
old barbouze, great cook, good friend
and one of the few to be given the honor
of lighting the sacred flame at the
Arc de Triomphe
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
1
There were not many times that Bruno Courrèges disliked his job. But today was certainly one of them. The weather was not to blame, a crisp day in late November with thin, high clouds trailing feebly across a sky that was determined to be blue. And even this early in the morning the sun was warm on his face and lending a rich gold to the few remaining leaves on the line of old oaks that fringed the town’s rugby field. It gave warmth to the aged stone of the mairie across the river and to the red tile roofs of the houses that climbed the hillside. The season was still mild enough, he noticed, for the women to have thrown open their windows and the blue wooden shutters. Splashes of white and blue, stripes and floral patterns, adorned the townscape where they had heaped out bedding to air on the balconies, as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them. It might be the last day of the year that would be possible. A touch of frost had silvered the grass outside his cottage when Bruno walked his dog just after dawn that morning, and he had heard the first of the Christmas Muzak in the supermarket over the weekend.
Bruno turned back to the scene before him, the small crowd waiting outside the silent sawmill, its chimney no longer sending plumes of smoke into the clear sky. The fork-lift trucks that usually scurried like beetles around the warehouses under their loads of timber were all parked neatly in their garage. The air still carried the wholesome scent of fresh-cut wood. But the memory would soon fade, since this was the day that the sawmill, one of the biggest and oldest employers in St. Denis, was to close its doors.
Bruno himself, acting under orders, had two weeks earlier delivered the formal notice of closure from the prefecture, citing the legal judgment against Scièrie Pons and its owner for breach of the new rules on pollution in urban areas. As the town’s only