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

only of the danger to Pamela, Miranda and her children, but that Hector and the other horses might also be at risk.

‘Have you spoken to her about it?’ Bruno asked.

‘Not yet. I was going to call her when I got home. Maybe she can at least move the horses to another stables.’

‘The stables aren’t that close to the woods, but Pamela’s house could be in danger.’

‘Don’t forget about her gîtes. Right now they’re full of tourists, probably all Brits.’

‘I’ll go up and see her after we get back to town,’ Bruno said.

Twenty minutes later, he parked the police van at the stables, went to visit Hector and give him his usual carrot and greeted Beau and Bella. He walked up to the house to find her in the kitchen. She was speaking on the phone. She blew him a kiss before saying into the phone, ‘I don’t think anybody really knows how high the risk is. Ah, here’s Bruno. I’ll ask him and call you back.’

‘Bonjour, Pamela,’ he said, embracing her. ‘Your stables should be okay, but this house could be in trouble if there’s a fire in the woods behind. This south wind could sweep the flames right down. Let’s take a look.’

There were twenty metres of garden behind the house, mainly her croquet lawn and flower beds, then a low hedge and another thirty or forty metres of grassland that linked to two big paddocks to left and right. So the woods were probably fifty or more metres from the house, a distance wider than the usual firebreak. The outbuildings that had been converted into four gîtes were even further from risk. The house and gîtes were all stone with tiled roofs so there was little danger of sparks.

‘You should be fine,’ he said. ‘But if you have to get out, make sure you and Miranda prepare boxes with all your essential documents and things you don’t want to lose, and tell your guests to do the same.’ Bruno checked his watch. ‘May I take Hector out, go up to the ridge and see just how dry those woods are?’

‘I’ll come too, on Primrose, we both need some exercise.’

Ten minutes later, Bruno dismounted, handed his reins to Pamela and plunged into the woods, the vegetation was dry and crunchy beneath his feet at first, but as he went deeper the trees were older and the canopy more dense. The grass beneath his feet gave way to the mulch of a forest floor and he saw new shoots and some ferns, all still green. He bent down and brushed away the top layer of mulch, feeling a slight but reassuring dampness below.

‘It’s not too dry so it won’t catch fire easily,’ he said. ‘Have you looked at your spring lately?’

She said she hadn’t so Bruno rode further along the ridge and then diagonally down to the rocky outcrop from which water bubbled throughout the year. It fed a small stream that ran down through the riding school to a pond that housed colonies of toads whose croakings always fascinated Balzac. The water was invariably cool and clear, and Bruno found it delicious to drink, usually filling a twenty-litre bidon before the regular Monday night suppers. He dismounted again and clambered through the rocks to find that the spring was still giving water, not much but the flow in summer was always more feeble. Still, if the water table on the ridge and plateau were still feeding the spring, there would be water underground for the tree roots.

‘It’s still flowing, so the woodland above should be moist enough to resist anything but a massive fire,’ he told Pamela.

The further they rode along the ridge, the drier the woodland below appeared to be, and when they came to the bridle trail they so often took, some of the trees were so dry that they had lost many of their leaves. Land that he knew to be usually boggy was now dry cracked mud. When they reached the hunters’ cabin and took the track back to the valley, the stream that usually fed into the Vézère was barely a trickle. The horses cantered easily but even Hector seemed reluctant to increase his pace, as if drained by the heat. How, Bruno wondered, had Arabian horses won their historic reputation for speed when they must have endured heat like this? Perhaps their breed had grown used to it.

Back at the stables, they unsaddled and rubbed down the horses. Bruno sluiced himself down in the sink and drove back to town where he entrusted Balzac and his boxes to the Mayor. After this he made his usual patrol of the Tuesday morning market. Everyone he knew asked him about the fire emergency and he told them all of the need for fire-watch volunteers. One of the stallholders Bruno knew slightly, who sold novelty T-shirts and only came in the tourist season, brandished a mobile phone at him and said, ‘You know this cop they’re talking about.’

Bruno peered at the Twitter feed on the small screen. It read: ‘Flic should be locked up,’ followed by ‘#CrazedCopPerigord’. He took the phone and scrolled up, seeing insult after insult against J-J, all with the same hashtag. Calling for him to be locked up was mild. Others claimed it should be ‘#CorruptCopPerigord’ and that led to a second stream of different insults. There was one, referring to a long-ago gunfight when J-J had been hit by a bullet, that said, ‘Shooter should have aimed higher, #CrazedCopPerigord.’

Feeling a cold anger at this vicious and anonymous attack on his friend, Bruno handed back the phone, and said curtly before turning away, ‘He’s a brave, honest guy and a friend of mine. If you get robbed or your kids get snatched, you’ll want him on your side.’

‘Aw, come on, don’t take it so seriously,’ the stallholder called after him. ‘It’s just a joke.’

Bruno turned on his heel, controlling his anger but his eyes were blazing. ‘How would you like it if