The Coldest Case by Martin Walker (mobi reader android txt) 📕

a wooded slope, was open and welcoming. Tall windows suggested the height of the rooms within, and stone steps, wide at ground level but narrowing as they rose, led up to a venerable set of double doors studded with iron. The bottom half of the doors was darker and the Baron claimed they were scorch marks from an attempt to burn out his ancestor in the turbulent years after the Revolution. Since that same ancestor had survived to become one of Napoleon’s generals, the attack had been briskly defeated.

At some point large French windows had been installed on either side of these steps, and from one of them the Baron emerged, carrying a tray of drinks and glasses, to welcome his guests. He put the tray down on a round metal table, painted white, which stood on a stone terrace that stretched along the whole front of the building. Big terracotta urns that reached above Bruno’s waist were filled with bright red geraniums.

‘Welcome,’ he said, advancing to greet them with the stride of a much younger man. ‘Alain, it’s good to see you again, and Bruno, please introduce me to this charming young woman. If you are marrying Alain, my dear, then he’s a lucky man. And Sabine, you must be the gendarme of whom Bruno has spoken.’

Then he sat on one of the garden chairs to greet Balzac, who seemed to assume that the Baron was a member of the family, along with all the other friends of Bruno that Balzac saw almost every day.

‘Your welcome is as courtly as your home, monsieur,’ Rosalie said, as a car horn tooted. Fabiola’s Twingo swung into the driveway and parked to disgorge the doctor, her partner, Gilles, and Florence. Pamela’s elderly deux-chevaux then hove into view, followed by the Mayor, bringing Jacqueline. Balzac at once raced off to greet each of them, and Bruno wondered, not for the first time, whether his dog’s hearing was so acute that he recognized people by the sound of their car engines.

‘Looks like we’re all here,’ the Baron said. ‘Bruno, would you take care of the drinks while I greet the others?’

Three bottles, white, red and rosé from the town vineyard, stood on the tray with bowls of nuts and olives and a bottle of cassis. Bruno began to serve, thinking it might be time for Hubert and Julien to add a sparkling wine to the town’s production. There were chairs enough for all on the terrace but they gathered instead under the shade of a cypress tree. Balzac snuffled around the feet of each one of them, waiting for the inevitable snacks that would come his way.

‘Make a note in your diary for Monday afternoon, Bruno,’ said the Mayor. ‘We’re having the forest fire rehearsal that was postponed, but it’s going to be much bigger with some pompier experts, people from other communes and the Préfecture. Your colleagues from Les Eyzies and Montignac will also be there. It starts at two.’

‘I’ll be there,’ said Bruno, handing the Mayor a glass of kir. ‘Let’s just hope the rehearsal is never needed.’ He made sure everyone had a glass, then managed to have a quiet word with Gilles.

‘Have you and Jacqueline conferred on those articles you’re each writing about that spy business?’ Bruno asked him. ‘It’s tomorrow they come out, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Jacqueline’s is in Monday’s Le Monde, which will be available in Paris late tomorrow afternoon. My piece goes up on the website at five tomorrow, with a longer piece plus photos in next week’s print edition.’

‘What photos have you found?’ Bruno asked.

‘Gisela, of course, sometimes called the spy of the century. Her real name was Gabriele Gast. She went from think-tanks into West German intelligence, the BND.’ Gilles explained that Gisela was an attractive woman and there was a romantic angle, too, with her Stasi handler. That made her story perfect for Paris Match.

‘Then there was the biggest spy of all, Rainer Rupp, code name Topaz,’ Gilles went on. Rupp had worked at NATO HQ in Brussels and photographed secret documents in his wine cellar at home and had a British wife who tried to persuade him to stop but stayed loyal to him. He gave over the crown jewels, the locations of the Cruise and Pershing missiles, NATO’s strategic plans and its assessment of what the Warsaw Pact could do. A lot of that material was given the ‘Cosmic Top Secret’ classification, NATO’s highest, and was copied at once to Moscow.

‘Then I list some of the spies exposed in the Rosenholz dossier in various countries,’ Gilles went on. ‘This raises the obvious question: why would there not be Stasi spies in France? Rupp was recruited when he was a young student leftist in 1968, when our own student revolt would have been a happy hunting ground for Stasi and the KGB. Most of this stuff is available if you know where to look for it.’

‘What about Jacqueline’s article?’ Bruno asked.

‘As you’d expect, hers is much more policy based, on the implications of the continued lack of trust between Paris and Washington, with the Rosenholz dossier as Exhibit A. Predictably for Le Monde, her piece is aimed at the policy-makers whereas mine is aimed at ordinary people, the office worker on the Metro. It’s the same story but with different targets and you know how people always love to read spy stories. I threw in some stuff about how we expelled Dick Holm, the CIA station chief in Paris during the Clinton years, for running an operation against France.’

He gave Bruno a shrewd glance. ‘Are these questions just for your own interest or are you asking on behalf of somebody?’

‘A bit of both,’ Bruno acknowledged.

‘I can guess who’s interested,’ Gilles said, grinning. ‘It’s not a problem for me if I email you my article tonight. It’s already ancient history, anyway. I filed my final version minutes before I came here.’ He took out his phone, tapped a few buttons and said, ‘There you are.