Black Diamond - Martin Walker [31]
Then he heard his friend, speaking so softly he was almost breathing the words, “Putain. Putain de merde.” And then more loudly as the baron closed the breech of his gun, “Ah non, ah mon Dieu. Non.”
Still Bruno did not move, although every nerve was quivering, for he could hear the fear and dismay in the baron’s voice.
“Bruno,” he called, and finally Bruno turned and went through the last fringe of trees and into the clearing where the baron stood before the sight of Hercule. He seemed to be hanging in midair, his head and neck craning forward like some medieval gargoyle thrusting outward from a cathedral roof. And he had evidently been made to suffer before his death. Hercule’s dog lay dead at his feet.
“Don’t touch anything,” Bruno said, and pulled out his phone. No signal, this deep in the woods. He could not touch Hercule without stepping in the pool of blood, too fresh to have dried. Bruno looked into the hide, where Hercule’s broken gun lay on the table. A hand ax and a small pile of kindling was beside it. Hercule’s jacket hung on the back of a chair. He had probably been chopping wood for a fire when he was surprised. Bruno walked across to the jacket and tapped the pockets. Hercule’s wallet was still there and so were the keys to his Land Rover. That would have to be searched. Bruno wrapped his hand in a handkerchief, pulled out the keys and slipped them into his pocket.
There was something else in the pocket. He hooked a finger over the pocket’s edge, peered in and saw an object wrapped in newspaper, but the smell had already informed him. He pulled out two perfect examples of melanosporum, the famous black diamonds, weighing perhaps a pound between them. They could not have been fresher, so they must have been picked that morning, Hercule’s last act before starting to prepare a fire for a casse-croûte with his friends. Hercule wouldn’t want them to go to the ambulance men. He pulled out the truffles, showed them to the baron and put them in his pocket.
“Stay here, keep the dogs away from the blood and I’ll go to phone,” Bruno told the baron. “Keep your eyes open and I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll whistle when I come up the trail so you’ll know it’s me.”
The baron tossed him the keys to the jeep, backed into the hide and settled down on one knee, his back against the stove.
“This is not just a murder,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“This is a killing that triggers phone calls to government ministers. Hercule was a barbouze, one of the top ones. He’ll have files and secrets that could shake la République.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t need to, until now.” The baron gestured with his head toward the hanging corpse. “Somebody’s out for revenge.”
“From his Algerian days?” Bruno asked. “Or is it something else?”
The baron shrugged.
Had Hercule been Deuxième Bureau, military intelligence or the SDECE foreign intelligence and counterespionage service or what? Bruno’s head spun a little at the thought of all the vague and shadowy organizations that had been charged over the past few decades with guarding France’s security by fighting her secret wars. “I know somebody in Renseignements Généraux, but that’s about it.”
“He’ll do. Call him and just say Hercule was an old barbouze. Indochina and Algeria and the OAS. He’ll know what to do.”
Bruno left, avoiding the footpath, in case forensics could find something useful on the trail, and kept a keen watch for any other signs of life. Before he reached the clearing where the jeep and Land Rover were parked, he slowed down, skirting around to approach the cars from another direction. Hercule’s vehicle was locked and showed no signs of tampering. Bruno’s phone still gave no signal. Before starting the jeep he looked carefully for any signs of different tire tracks in the clearing and on the track leading back to the road. He saw two possible tracks. He marked each one with a large stone and crossed branches, and then drove down the track toward Paunat, eyes darting to his phone for the first