Black Diamond - Martin Walker [96]
“Exactly,” she said. Somehow, Bruno had automatically taken the helm of the stroller as they walked, Florence striding briskly as she explained her thinking. Rather than search Didier’s office, she’d gone down to the basement storeroom, telling the secretary who gave her the key that she needed to check some of last year’s figures. She’d found the logbook in the third box she looked in, tucked beside a pile of taxe d’habitation returns. She pointed to a red leather accounts book with a black spine peeking from the bag attached to the stroller.
“I guess you’ll need to compare it with the main set of accounts,” she added. “I saw you had sealed that box so I couldn’t examine it. But I checked it against my own records, and two things struck me. The first was that the prices paid at these end-of-day auctions were consistently much lower than prices at the market itself.”
“That suggests a ring,” said Bruno. Florence looked blank. “It means an agreement among the bidders in order to keep the prices low. It can only work over time if the auctioneer, which means Didier, is prepared to go along and sell at the lower price rather than withhold his stock. What’s the second thing?”
“The main buyer almost every time was someone called Pons, and he seemed to be paying less than his official winning bids. And he always paid cash.”
“Was there an initial? There’s a Boniface Pons and a Guillaume.”
Florence shook her head. Bruno cast his mind back to a conversation with Hercule. The old man had said Didier once worked for Boniface Pons, running a truffle plantation before Pons gave up and sold the trees as timber. So Pons would know something of the truffle trade. It was possible that Pons’s name was being used without his knowledge, but either way Bruno reckoned that Florence had come across something far more serious than some cheap Chinese truffles stuffed into a vacuum pack.
“It seems you’ve done my work for me,” he said, turning his head to smile at her. She looked at him directly, her gray-blue eyes suddenly seeming less cold than he remembered.
“Watch out!” she grabbed his arm, as he was about to run the stroller into a lamppost.
“Sorry, I’m not used to this,” he said.
“I do it myself, once I start thinking and I’m suddenly miles away.” She looked down at the children. “They usually warn me when I’m about to run into something.”
“I’m going to have to check this logbook against accounts at the mairie,” Bruno said. “But I expect I’ll see you at the children’s party. There’ll be lots to eat and drink there, so you needn’t bother feeding them beforehand.”
She looked down. “I’m not sure we’ll be able to come. The other mother who usually gives me a lift has gone shopping in Périgueux. I don’t have a car.”
“Mine is parked at your place. I’ll come back from the mairie and pick you up and take you all to St. Denis,” he said, thinking what kind of life it must be, stuck in a small country town with no car, little money and the supermarket at the other end of town.
“And I can bring you back, if you don’t mind waiting while I change out of Father Christmas clothes.” He looked down at the children, now squabbling amicably over a picture book. “I’d hate the kids to lose their illusions too early.”
“If it’s not too much trouble …”
“Not at all.” Bruno checked his watch. “I’ll be back at your place at about four-fifteen because the party starts at five and I’ll need some time to change into my Christmas gear.”
“You can find your way back?”
“I think I can manage that.” He said good-bye to the children and went off down the rue République toward the mairie, the logbook tucked inside his jacket.
With Florence’s advice to guide him, Bruno began to list the difference in prices paid at the morning market and the much lower prices at the later auction. Florence was right. One name kept recurring in the lists of buyers in the final auctions. Pons seemed to be buying every time there was an auction, although it wasn’t clear from the logbook whether it was father or son. Leafing back to the previous year, it was still