Black Diamond - Martin Walker [97]
He turned back to the spidery writing in the logbooks. Not only was Pons the biggest single buyer, but as Florence had noted he was consistently paying less per gram than others were paying for their batches of truffles, no matter what he bid at the auction. And they in turn were paying about two-thirds of what the customers in Paris and elsewhere were being charged when they bought direct from the market. This was like giving them a license to print money, a guaranteed profit. Was it possible that Pons was getting a discount because of the volume of his purchases?
Bruno checked his figures again. Not only was Pons getting a consistent discount, but because he was invariably listed as paying in cash, that presumably meant Pons would have attended each auction. Bruno found that very hard to believe. But could he prove it? Then he remembered. He opened his own pocket diary and turned back to January, when he and Pons and the baron and others from the St. Denis rugby club had gone to Marseilles for three days to support the town’s team in a tournament there. Pons had been hundreds of miles away with Bruno when he was listed in the market logbook as present and buying truffles cheaply with cash.
So if Pons was not present, then someone—presumably Didier—had been buying on his behalf. And Pons and Didier had worked together before at Pons’s truffle plantation. And what was Pons doing with all the truffles he bought? By Bruno’s calculation, he had spent half a million euros the previous year buying hundreds of kilos. He had to be selling them somewhere. And all that cash, tens of thousands of euros a week, had to come from somewhere. This stank of money laundering, and Bruno began to feel that this inquiry was getting far too big and complex for him. He’d have to call in J-J and the specialist accountants from the fraud squad. The national tax authorities would want to get involved.
As he gathered his notes and logbooks and climbed up the stairs to the photocopying machine, another thought struck Bruno. If the investigation into Pons was launched within the next three months before the election, that would be the end of Pons’s campaign to become mayor. Those votes would drift back to their usual recipient, Gérard Mangin, the veteran mayor who had given Bruno his job and been something of a father figure to him since Bruno’s arrival in St. Denis. Copying page after page of the two logbooks, Bruno pondered the political consequences. The election would be a straight fight between young Bill Pons and his Red-Green coalition and the mayor. There would be no Oedipal battle between father and son to bring the TV cameras to excite the politics of St. Denis out of their usual placid ways.
His copies of the logbooks tucked safely into his briefcase, Bruno headed for the mayor’s office in Ste. Alvère. He greeted the secretary and politely refused her offer of coffee. He paused at the mayor’s door, knowing as he looked down at his notes and logbooks that he was probably holding the political future of St. Denis in his hands. He collected himself, looked once more at his notes and at Alain’s statement as he worked out how to explain the double fraud. He’d start with the tampered vacuum packs and the evidence from the digital counter, and then he’d explain about the auction ring and Pons’s manipulations. It was an odd way, Bruno reflected, to spend the time before he had to become Father Christmas. He knocked, opened the door and went in to greet the energetic and doubtless ambitious young politician, no older than himself, who ran the affairs of Ste. Alvère.
After the usual handshakes and preliminaries, Bruno launched in. “Monsieur le Maire,” he began. “I’ve come up with some troubling information. You’re being doubly