Black Diamond - Martin Walker [72]
Back in his office, Bruno had just finished booking the table at Ivan’s bistro after learning with pleasure that the plat du jour would be calf’s liver with sage leaves when his desk phone rang.
“Is that the police?”
“Oui, madame. Chief of Police Courrèges à votre service.”
“Oh, Bruno, you’re in the paper today, saving that little boy.”
“How can I help you?”
“It’s Amélie Condorcet here, you know, from Laugérie.”
“Yes, Madame Condorcet. We met at your neighbors’ house, the Vinhs, and I know your husband from the rugby club.” Bruno could place her now, a quiet, rather faded woman with a long nose and a bad leg. Her husband worked for France Télécom.
“Well, my husband says it’s nothing and I’m dreaming things, but something suspicious has happened at the neighbor’s place, at the Vinhs’. You know they’ve been away. It might be nothing and I don’t want to waste your time.”
“Go on, madame. What was suspicious?”
“Last night I was woken up by a car. I don’t sleep too well. Anyway, it stopped at the Vinhs’ house, and thinking it might be them coming back I got up and looked through the window. It wasn’t them. It was Asians, but not the Vinhs. But since they were Asian, I assumed they must be friends. Then I heard what sounded like breaking glass, and then they left so it wasn’t a burglary.”
“It certainly sounds suspicious.”
“Well, it’s been on my mind since, so I went over there just now, and in the kitchen window there’s a small round hole cut in the glass and some kind of message pinned to the door in a foreign language. That’s all I could see that was wrong. But the Vinhs gave me a key. They have one of ours, you know, like neighbors do, so I thought you might want to take a look, just to be on the safe side.”
“I’ll be right there, Madame Condorcet.”
Vinh lived on the outskirts of the hamlet, and the Condorcets lived in an identical house, one of a group of four squeezed into what had been a small tobacco field. Madame Condorcet was already waiting on the front doorstep, a key in her hand, when Bruno pulled up in the Land Rover.
“That’s not your police van,” she said.
“I’m waiting for the new one to be delivered. The last one got wrecked by some criminals in a car chase,” he said. “It sounds more exciting than it was. But let’s go and see this hole in the window.”
The hole was about eight inches in diameter and below it was an empty sack, one of the old-fashioned sort made of rough burlap. Although Bruno’s first thought was that the hole had been cut so that gasoline could be poured into the house, there was no smell of it, and looking through the window Bruno could see nothing wrong and no sign of life. He bent to look more closely at the sack.
“One of them was carrying something,” said Madame Condorcet. “It could have been that, but it looked full.”
Bruno opened the sack. Inside there was a whiff of something feral, something animal. He stood up to look through the window again and saw something dart across the far corner of the room. One of the curtains had been torn, and an empty cereal package was on the floor.
A piece of cardboard had been pinned to the kitchen door, with what Bruno presumed was Vietnamese writing scrawled on it with a thick black marker. He pulled out his mobile and called Tran, his old army contact in Bordeaux.
“I need you to translate something. Remember I told you about Vinh disappearing? There’s some writing I found nailed to the door of Vinh’s house,” he said. “It’s in what I think is Vietnamese.”
“Spell it out, or describe each letter to me.”
Bruno did so, letter by letter, Madame Condorcet standing nervously at his side.
“It says ‘Next time we set them on your children,’ ” Tran said. “It’s bad Vietnamese, written by someone who’s almost illiterate or not a native speaker.”
“Next time we set what on your children?” Bruno asked.
“Not clear. It could mean ‘these things’ or ‘this item’ or even ‘this shit’—it’s a slang term. What is it about?”
“I don’t know yet, but there’s a hole cut in the window big enough to put a cat through. I’m here with a neighbor who