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

between the foie gras and the lamb chops, had been the dinner when Jacqueline had first talked of the Rosenholz dossier.

Enough of that, he told himself. This was a Saturday night. He went back to the table to invite Pamela to dance. Then he should also dance with Rosalie again, he thought. Nor should he leave out Sabine, Florence and Fabiola. The thought of more dances made him feel better. Food could wait.

15

The next morning there was no sound from the guest bedroom upstairs when Bruno rose and took Balzac out for their morning run. He’d bought a couple of extra loaves from the Audrix bread oven the previous evening so he could make breakfast here at the cottage. Looking in at the chicken coop on his return he saw that his hens had been particularly generous that morning. He left six out and put four into the large crockery duck he kept in his pantry. He then went out with Balzac, his wand and a trowel to his row of truffle trees and began tapping as he watched for the shimmering dance of a rising fly.

‘Cherche, Balzac, cherche,’ he said and the hound padded forward to sniff at the point where Bruno had placed his wand and began to paw gently at the ground. Bruno moved him to one side and scraped with his trowel until a summer truffle, perhaps the size of a golf ball, emerged. That would do. Usually he’d have put it with the eggs in his pottery duck for a couple of days so the scent could seep through the porous eggshells but he’d grate this one onto the omelette he was planning.

He showered and dressed, set the table on the terrace and brought out butter, home-made apricot jam and freshly squeezed orange juice. As he went back inside to make the coffee, he heard the shower running upstairs. He went to the garden to pick a small bunch of fresh parsley before peeling and chopping two cloves of garlic, brushing the truffle clean and shaving off half a dozen slices. He waited until his guests had descended before cracking the eggs and announcing that their breakfast would be an omelette aux truffes outside in the garden. He whisked the eggs, added salt, pepper and the remainder of Stéphane’s cream before pouring a little olive oil and a large pat of truffled butter into the frying pan. He tossed in the garlic and as it sizzled he added the egg mix and began to make the omelette, lifting and then lowering the pan to spread the liquid and running a wooden spatula around the sides to stop it sticking.

When he judged it to be almost done, Bruno grated the remainder of the truffle onto a surface that was still slightly liquid and folded the omelette over. He added the slices of truffle he had shaved earlier and took it out to the terrace, where he tore apart the parsley leaves and sprinkled them on top before serving. Alain broke off chunks of bread for them while Rosalie poured out the coffee.

‘A perfect country breakfast,’ said Rosalie, tapping her tummy when the omelette had gone along with all the bread and a third of a jar of Bruno’s apricot jam. ‘I’ll go on a diet when we get back.’

‘And we missed our morning run,’ said Alain.

Rosalie smiled and put her hand on his, giving him a dreamy, loving look that suggested to Bruno that they’d enjoyed a rather different form of exercise this morning already. He smiled at the thought.

‘I think you’re well suited, you two,’ he said. ‘I look forward to seeing more of you when you’re out of the air force and settled somewhere nearer.’

‘We’ve been talking about that, whether we want to settle down in the Bergerac area as we first thought, or somewhere near here. It seems there’s a vocational school in Sarlat we might consider, as well as the one in Bergerac. We heard about it from Florence over dinner last night. She said we might be able to do as she did, get the teaching diploma while actually working.’

‘But Florence already had a university diploma,’ Rosalie added. ‘Still, she said vocational schools were more interested in craft skills and she asked me to send her the qualifications we got from the air force. And since she’s on the executive committee of the teachers’ union, she’ll try to make it work. Your Mayor said he’d help if he could.’

‘It makes sense to have a good look around,’ Bruno said. ‘You know what they say in the army – time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Sarlat will be full of tourists but if we set out now, we’ll beat the rush. It’s a handsome old town and worth seeing for its own sake.’

Soon after, they set off in Bruno’s Land Rover, Rosalie on the back seat with Balzac. At Les Eyzies they looked up to admire the great overhanging cliffs that sheltered the town. They were in Sarlat not long before nine. The town was starting to stir, with stalls of cheese, saucissons and souvenirs being set out in front of shops. The streets weren’t yet crowded so they could admire the heart of old Sarlat.

Other than the shop windows, it was a place that seemed barely to have changed over the past four hundred years. Its centre was filled with Renaissance townhouses, a grand square and cathedral, interspersed with narrow alleys filled with restaurants and shops selling local delicacies. Bruno took them around the back of the cathedral to see the Merovingian tombs from the centuries after the Roman empire fell, and to the Lanterne des Morts, a tall, conical tower built eight centuries earlier from whose top a lantern glowed each night to mark the place of the dead.

‘St Bernard came here to preach the Second Crusade,’ Bruno said, warming to his role as guide. ‘And there are Knights Templar signs engraved inside the tower. This