BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE

‘Written with a deep love of rural France, for the countryside, the people, the way of life and the cuisine … so pervasive and agreeable is the charm of this novel that it might even allow you to pass the time pleasantly as you wait in an airport departure lounge for your long-delayed holiday flight to France’

Scotsman

‘Hugely enjoyable and absolutely gripping. Martin Walker has got off to a flying start in what promises to be a great series. Bruno will be the Maigret of the Dordogne’

Antony Beevor

‘The pleasures of life in the Dordogne, distinctive well-rounded characters and an intriguing mystery are a winning combination … Walker’s relaxed style and good humour help to bring to life his engaging hero and his delightful home and make one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time’

Sunday Telegraph

‘It’s beguiling, evocative and utterly wonderful. It also made me very hungry; ideally one should read the book at the kitchen table while sipping a vin de noix and eating truffle pate. [He is] the Alexander McCall Smith of La France Profonde. No one should be allowed to go on holiday to France this summer without a copy’

Francis Wheen

‘Bruno, Chief of Police has many of the characteristics of Golden Age novels, above all the apparently remote setting which reveals its involvement in wider events. Martin Walker’s Dordogne is worth a visit’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Martin Walker has not only written an engrossing roman policier, but has written a book that goes to the very heart of what France – rural, small-town France – is like. It’s a thriller, and full of surprises, but it will also appeal to anybody who loves France … by recreating the splendid complexities of French culture, history and life, and reminding us how different, how very different, it is from our own. Bruno, Chief of Police is a wonderful creation’

Michael Korda, author of Charmed Lives and Queenie

Martin Walker was educated at Balliol College, Oxford and Harvard. In twenty-five years with the Guardian, he served as Bureau Chief in Moscow and as European Editor and Assistant Editor in the US before becoming the Editor of United Press International. In addition to his prize-winning journalism, he wrote and presented the BBC series ‘Martin Walker’s Russia’ and ‘Clintonomics’. He has written several acclaimed works of non-fiction, including The Cold War: A History, and a historical novel, The Caves of Périgord, which reached No. 8 on the Washington Post bestseller list. He spends his summers in his house in the Dordogne.

BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE

Martin Walker

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Quercus

This edition first published in 2009 by

Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © 2008 by Walker and Watson Ltd.

Map copyright © 2009 by Raymond Turvey

The moral right of Martin Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84916 630 0

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

You can also visit the author's website at:
www.brunochiefofpolice.com

For Pierrot

Police National
Place Dubernin
Périgueux

INCIDENT REPORT
Dossier PN/24/MI/47398(P)

Incident:

Unnatural death.

Cause of death:

Stab wounds, exsanguination.

Related incident:

Not known, no sign of robbery.

Date:

11 May.

Location:

Commune de St Denis, Dordogne 24240.

Reporting Officer:

Chief of Police Municipale, Courrèges, Benoît.

Judge Magistrate:

To be appointed.

Case Officer:

Brigade Chief (Detectives) J-J Jalipeau.

Victim:

Hamid al-Bakr.

Date of Birth:

14/7/1923

Place of Birth:

Oran, Algeria.

Profession:

Retired Army sergeant, caretaker. Army number 47937692A.

Social Security number:

KV47/N/79457463/M.

Place of work:

(last known) Military School of Engineers, Lille.

Address:

La Bergerie, Chemin Communale 43, St Denis, 24240.

Report:

CoP Courrèges, accompanied by Gendarmerie Captain Duroc, Etienne, Post 24/37, were called to the remote country home of the deceased after a telephone call from the victim’s grandson, Karim al-Bakr. Death was certified by Morisot, Albert, Fire Chief of St Denis. Death caused by blood loss after stab wounds to the trunk. Victim had been beaten and hands were bound. Scene of Crime team called from Bergerac.

Note: All reports to be copied to Office of Prefect, Périgueux.

CHAPTER 1

On a bright May morning, so early that the last of the mist was still lingering low over the great bend in the river, a white van drew to a halt on the ridge over the small French town. A man emerged, strode to the edge of the road and stretched mightily as he admired the familiar view. He was still young, and evidently fit enough to be dapper and brisk in his movements, but as he relaxed he was sufficiently concerned about his love of food to tap his waist, gingerly probing for any sign of plumpness, always a threat in this springtime period between the end of the rugby season and the start of serious hunting. He wore what appeared to be half a uniform – a neatly ironed blue shirt with epaulettes, no tie, navy blue trousers and black boots. His thick, dark hair was crisply cut, his warm brown eyes had a twinkle and his generous mouth seemed always ready to break into a smile. On a badge on his chest, and on the side of his van, were the words Police Municipale. A rather dusty peaked cap lay on the passenger seat.

In the back of the van were a crowbar, a tangle of battery cables, one basket containing new-laid eggs, and another with his first spring peas of the season. Two tennis racquets, a pair of rugby boots, training shoes, and a large bag with various kinds of sports attire added to the jumble which tangled itself in a spare line from a fishing rod. Somewhere underneath all this were a first-aid kit, a small tool chest, a blanket, and a picnic hamper with plates and glasses, salt and pepper, a head of garlic and a Laguiole pocket knife with a horn handle and corkscrew. Tucked under the front seat was a bottle of not-quite-legal eau de vie from a friendly farmer. He would use this to make his private stock of vin de noix when the green walnuts were ready on the feast of St Catherine. Benoît Courrèges, Chief of Police for the small Commune of St Denis and its 2,900 souls, and universally known as Bruno, was always prepared for every eventuality.

Or almost always. He wore no heavy belt with its attachments of holster and pistol, handcuffs and flashlight, keys and notebook, and all the other burdens that generally weigh down every policeman in France. There would doubtless be a pair of ancient handcuffs somewhere in the jumble of his van, but Bruno had long forgotten where he had put the key. He did have a flashlight, and constantly reminded himself that one of these days he ought to buy some new batteries. The van’s glove compartment held a notebook and some pens, but the notebook was currently full of various recipes, the minutes of the last tennis club meeting (which he had yet to type up on the temperamental old office computer that he distrusted) and a list of the names and phone numbers of the minimes, the young boys who had signed up for his rugby training class.

Bruno’s gun, a rather elderly MAB 9mm semi-automatic, was locked in his safe in his office in the Mairie, and taken out once a year for his annual refresher course at the gendarmerie range in Périgueux. He had worn it on duty on three occasions in his eight years in the Police Municipale. The first was when a rabid dog had been sighted in a neighbouring Commune, and the police were put on alert. The second was when the President of France had driven through the Commune of St Denis on his way to see the celebrated cave paintings of Lascaux. He had stopped to visit an old friend, Gérard Mangin, who was the Mayor of St Denis and Bruno’s employer. Bruno had saluted his nation’s leader and proudly stood armed guard outside the Mairie, exchanging gossip with the far more thoroughly armed presidential bodyguard, one of whom turned out to be a former comrade from Bruno’s army days. The third time was when the boxing kangaroo escaped from a local circus, but that was another story. On no occasion had Bruno’s gun ever been used on duty, a fact of which he was extremely but privately proud. Of course, like most of the other men (and not a few women) of the Commune of St Denis, he shot almost daily in the hunting season and usually bagged his target, unless he was stalking the notoriously elusive bécasse, a bird whose taste he preferred above all others.

Bruno gazed contentedly down upon his town, which looked in the freshness of the early morning as if le bon Dieu had miraculously created it overnight. His eyes lingered on the way the early sunlight bounced and flickered off the eddies where the Vézère river ran under the arches of the old stone bridge. The place seemed alive with light, flashes of gold and red, as the sun magically concocted prisms in the grass beneath the willows, and danced along the honey-coloured façades of the ancient buildings along the river. There were glints from the weathercock on the church spire, from the eagle atop the town’s war memorial where he had to attend that day’s ceremony on the stroke of noon, from the windscreens and chrome of the cars and caravans parked behind the medical centre.

All looked peaceful as the business of the day began, with the first customers heading into Fauquet’s café. Even from this high above the town he could hear the grating sound of the metal grille being raised to open Lespinasse’s tabac, which sold fishing rods, guns and ammunition alongside the cigarettes. Very logical, thought Bruno, to group such lethal products together. He knew without looking that, while Madame Lespinasse was opening the shop, her husband would be heading to the café for the first of many little glasses of white wine that would keep him pleasantly plastered all day.

The staff of the Mairie would also be at Fauquet’s, nibbling their croissants and taking their coffee and scanning the headlines of that morning’s Sud-Ouest. Alongside them would be a knot of old men studying the racing form and enjoying their first petit blanc of the day. Bachelot the shoemender would take his morning glass at Fauquet’s, while his neighbour and mortal enemy Jean-Pierre, who ran the bicycle shop, would start his day at Ivan’s Café de la Libération. Their enmity went back to the days of the Resistance, when one of them had been in a Communist group and the other had joined de Gaulle’s Armée Secrète, but Bruno could never remember which. He only knew that they had never spoken to one another since the war, had never allowed their families to speak beyond the frostiest ‘bonjour’, and each man was said to have devoted many of the years since to discreet but determined efforts to seduce the other man’s wife. The Mayor had once, over a convivial glass, told Bruno that he was convinced that each had attained his objective. But Bruno had been a policeman long enough to question most rumours of adulterous passion and, as a careful guardian of his own privacy in such tender matters, was content to allow others similar latitude.

These morning movements were rituals to be respected – rituals such as the devotion with which each family bought its daily bread only at a particular one of the town’s four bakeries, except on those weeks of holidays when they were forced to patronise another, each time lamenting the change in taste and texture. These little ways of St Denis were as familiar to Bruno as his own morning routine on rising: his exercises while listening to Radio Périgord, his shower with his special shampoo to protect against the threat of baldness, the soap with the scent of green apples. Then he would feed his chickens while the coffee brewed and share the toasted slices of yesterday’s baguette with his dog, Gigi.

Across the small stream that flowed into the main river, the caves in the limestone cliffs drew his eye. Dark but strangely inviting, the caves with their ancient engravings and paintings drew scholars and tourists to this valley. The tourist office called it ‘The Cradle of Mankind’. It was, they said, the part of Europe that could claim the longest period of continual human habitation. Through ice ages and warming periods, floods and wars and famine, people had lived here for forty thousand years. Bruno, who reminded himself that there were still many caves and paintings that he really ought to visit, felt deep in his heart that he understood why.

Down at the riverbank, he saw that the mad Englishwoman was watering her horse after her morning ride. As always, she was correctly dressed in gleaming black boots, cream jodhpurs and a black jacket. Her auburn hair flared out behind her neat black riding hat like the tail of a fox. Idly, he wondered why they called her mad. She always seemed perfectly sane to him, and appeared to make a good business of running her small guest house. She even spoke comprehensible French, which was more than could be said of most of the English who had settled here. He looked further up the road that ran alongside the river, and saw several trucks bringing local farmers to the weekly market. It would soon be time for him to go on duty. He took out the one item of equipment that never left his side, his cell phone, and dialled the familiar number of the Hôtel de la Gare.

‘Any sign of them, Marie?’ he asked. ‘They hit the market at St Alvère yesterday so they are in the region.’

‘Not last night, Bruno. Just the usual guys staying from the museum project and a Spanish truck driver,’ replied Marie, who ran the small hotel by the station. ‘But remember, after last time they were here and found nothing, I heard them talking about renting a car in Périgueux to put you off the scent. Bloody Gestapo!’

Bruno, whose loyalty was to his local community and its mayor rather than to the nominal laws of France, particularly when they were really laws of Brussels, played a constant cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors from the European Union who were charged with enforcing EU hygiene rules on the markets of France. Hygiene was all very well, but the locals of the Commune of St Denis had been making their cheeses and their pâté de foie gras and their rillettes de porc for centuries before the EU was even heard of, and did not take kindly to foreign bureaucrats telling them what they could and could not sell. Along with other members of the Police Municipale in the region, Bruno had established a complex early warning scheme to alert the market vendors to their visits.

The inspectors, known as the Gestapo in a part of France that had taken very seriously its patriotic duties to resist the German occupation, had started their visits to the markets of Périgord in an official car with red Belgian licence plates. On their second visit, to Bruno’s alarm, all the tyres had been slashed. Next time they came in a car from Paris, with the telltale number ‘75’ on the licence plate. This car too had been given the Resistance treatment, and Bruno began to worry whether the local counter-measures were getting out of hand. He had a good idea who was behind the tyre-slashing, and had issued some private warnings that he hoped would calm things down. There was no point in violence if the intelligence system could ensure that the markets were clean before the inspectors arrived.

Then the inspectors had changed their tactics and come by train, staying at local station hotels. But that meant they were easily spotted by the hotel keepers who all had cousins or suppliers who made the crottins of goat cheese and the foie gras, the home-made jams, the oils flavoured with walnuts and truffles, and the confits that made this corner of France the very heart of the nation’s gastronomic culture. Bruno, with the support of his boss, the Mayor of St Denis, and all the elected councillors of the Commune, even Montsouris the Communist, made it his duty to protect his neighbours and friends from the idiots of Brussels. Their idea of food stopped at moules and pommes frites, and even then they adulterated perfectly good potatoes with an industrial mayonnaise that they did not have the patience to make themselves.

So now the inspectors were trying a new tack, renting a car locally so that they might more easily stage their ambush and subsequent getaway with their tyres intact. They had succeeded in handing out four fines in St Alvère yesterday, but they would not succeed in St Denis, whose famous market went back more than seven hundred years. Not if Bruno had anything to do with it.

With one final gaze into the little corner of paradise that was entrusted to him, Bruno took a deep breath of his native air and braced himself for the day. As he climbed back into his van, he thought, as he always did on fine summer mornings, of a German saying some tourist had told him: that the very summit of happiness was ‘to live like God in France’.

CHAPTER 2

Bruno had never counted, but he probably kissed a hundred women and shook the hands of at least as many men each morning on market day. First this morning was Fat Jeanne, as the schoolboys called her. The French, who are more attuned to the magnificent mysteries of womanhood than most, may be the only people in the world to treasure the concept of the jolie laide, the plain or even ugly woman who is so comfortable within her own ample skin and so cheerful in her soul that she becomes lovely. And Fat Jeanne was a jolie laide of some fifty years and almost perfectly spherical in shape. She was not a beauty by any stretch of the imagination, but a cheerful woman at ease with herself. The old brown leather satchel in which she collected the modest fees that each stall holder paid for the privilege of selling in the market of St Denis thumped heavily against Bruno’s thigh as Jeanne, squealing with pleasure to see him, turned with surprising speed and proffered her cheeks to be kissed in ritual greeting. Then she gave him a fresh strawberry from Madame Verniet’s stall, and Bruno broke away to kiss the roguish old farmer’s widow on both wizened cheeks in greeting and gratitude.

‘Here are the photos of the inspectors that Jo-Jo took in St Alvère yesterday,’ Bruno said to Jeanne, taking some printouts from his breast pocket. He had driven over to his fellow municipal policeman the previous evening to collect them. They could have been emailed to the Mairie’s computer, but Bruno was a cautious man and thought it might be risky to leave an electronic trail of his discreet intelligence operation.

‘If you see them, call me. And give copies to Ivan in the café and to Jeannot in the bistro and to Yvette in the tabac to show their customers. In the meantime, you go that way and warn the stall holders on the far side of the church. I’ll take care of the ones towards the bridge.’

Every Tuesday since the year 1346, when the English had captured half the nobility of France at the Battle of Crécy and the grand Brillamont family had to raise money to pay the ransom for their Seigneur, the little Périgord town of St Denis has held a weekly market. The townspeople had raised the princely sum of fifty livres of silver for their feudal lord and, in return, they secured the right to hold the market on the canny understanding that this would guarantee a livelihood to the tiny community, happily situated where the stream of Le Mauzens ran into the river Vézère – just beyond the point where the remaining stumps of the old Roman bridge thrust from the flowing waters. A mere eleven years later, the chastened nobles and knights of France had once again spurred their lumbering horses against the English archers and their longbows and had been felled in droves. The Seigneur de Brillamont had to be ransomed from the victorious Englishmen all over again after the Battle of Poitiers, but by then the taxes on the market had raised sufficient funds for the old Roman bridge to be crudely restored. So, for another fifty livres, the townsfolk bought from the Brillamont family the right to charge a toll over the bridge and their town’s fortunes were secured forever.

These had been early skirmishes in the age-old war between the French peasant and the tax collectors and enforcers of the power of the state. And now, the latest depredations of the inspectors (who were Frenchmen, but took their orders from Brussels) was simply the latest campaign in the endless struggle. Had the laws and regulations been entirely French, Bruno might have had some reservations about working so actively, and with such personal glee, to frustrate them. But they were not: these were Brussels laws from this distant European Union, which allowed young Danes and Portuguese and Irish to come and work on the camp sites and in the bars each summer, just as if they were French. His local farmers and their wives had their living to earn, and would be hard put to pay the inspectors’ fines from the modest sums they made in the market. Above all, they were his friends and neighbours.

In truth, Bruno knew there were not many warnings to give. More and more of the market stalls these days were run by strangers from out of town who sold dresses and jeans and draperies, cheap sweaters and T-shirts and second-hand clothes. Two coal-black Senegalese sold colourful dashikis, leather belts and purses, and a couple of local potters displayed their wares. There was an organic bread stall and several local vintners sold their Bergerac, and the sweet Monbazillac dessert wine that the Good Lord in his wisdom had kindly provided to accompany foie gras. There was a knife-sharpener and an ironmonger, Diem the Vietnamese selling his nems – spring rolls – and Jules selling his nuts and olives while his wife tended a vast pot of steaming paella. The various stalls selling fruit and vegetables, herbs and tomato plants were all immune – so far – from the men from Brussels.

But at each stall where they sold home-made cheese and paté, or ducks and chickens that had been slaughtered on some battered old stump in the farmyard with the family axe rather than in a white-tiled abattoir by people in white coats and hairnets, Bruno delivered his warning. He helped the older women to pack up, piling the fresh-plucked chickens into cavernous cloth bags to take to the nearby office of Patrick’s driving school for safe keeping. The richer farmers who could afford mobile cold cabinets were always ready to let Tante Marie and Grande-mère Colette put some of their less legal cheeses alongside their own. In the market, everyone was in on the secret.

Bruno’s cell phone rang. ‘The bastards are here,’ said Jeanne, in what she must have thought was a whisper. ‘They parked in front of the bank and Marie-Hélène recognised them from the photo I gave to Ivan. She saw it when she stopped for her petit café. She’s sure it’s them.’

‘Did she see their car?’ Bruno asked.

‘A silver Renault Laguna, quite new.’ Jeanne read out the number. Interesting, thought Bruno. It was a number for the Departement of the Corrèze. They would have taken the train to Brive and picked up the car there, outside the Dordogne. They must have realised that the local spy network was watching for them. Bruno walked out of the pedestrian zone and onto the main square by the old stone bridge, where the inspectors would have to come past him before they reached the market. He phoned his fellow municipal police chiefs in the other villages with markets that week and gave them the car and its number. His duty was done, or rather half his duty. He had protected his friends from the inspectors; now he had to protect them from themselves.

So he rang old Joe, who had for forty years been Bruno’s predecessor as chief of police of St Denis. Now he spent his time visiting cronies in all the local markets, using as an excuse the occasional sale from a small stock of oversized aprons and work coats that he kept in the back of his van. There was less selling done than meeting for the ritual glass, a petit rouge, but Joe had been a useful rugby player two generations ago and was still a pillar of the local club. He wore in his lapel the little red button that labelled him a member of the Légion d’Honneur, a reward for his boyhood service as a messenger in the real Resistance against the Germans. Bruno felt sure that Joe would know about the tyre-slashing, and had probably helped organise it. Joe knew everyone in the district, and was related to half of them, including most of St Denis’s current crop of burly rugby forwards who were the terror of the local rugby league.

‘Look, Joe,’ Bruno began when the old man answered with his usual gruff bark, ‘everything is fine with the inspectors. The market is clean and we know who they are. We don’t want any trouble this time. It could make matters worse, you understand me?’

‘You mean the car that’s parked in front of the bank? The silver Laguna?’ Joe said, in a deep and rasping voice that came from decades of Gauloises and the rough wine he made himself. ‘Well, it’s being taken care of. Don’t you worry yourself, petit Bruno. The Gestapo can walk home today. Like last time.’

‘Joe, this is going to get people into trouble,’ Bruno said urgently, although he knew that he might as well argue with a brick wall. How the devil did Joe know about this already? He must have been in Ivan’s café when Jeanne was showing the photos around. And he had probably heard about the car from Marie-Hélène in the bank, since she was married to his nephew.

‘This could bring real trouble for us if we’re not careful,’ Bruno went on. ‘So don’t do anything that would force me to take action.’

He closed his phone with a snap. Scanning the people coming across the bridge, most of whom he knew, he kept watch for the inspectors. Then from the corner of his eye he saw a familiar car, a battered old Renault Twingo that the local gendarmes used when out of uniform, being driven by the new Capitaine he had not yet had time to get to know. From Normandy, they said, a dour and skinny type called Duroc who did everything by the book. Suddenly an alert went off in Bruno’s mind and he called Joe again.

‘Stop everything now. They must be expecting more trouble after last time. That new gendarme chief has just gone by in plain clothes, and they may have arranged for their car to be staked out. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’

‘Merde,’ said Joe. ‘We should have thought of that but we may be too late. I told Karim in the bar and he said he’d take care of it. I’ll try and call him off.’

Bruno rang the Café des Sports, run by Karim and his wife, Rashida, very pretty though heavily pregnant. Rachida told him Karim had left the café already and she didn’t think he had his mobile with him. Putain, thought Bruno. He started walking briskly across the narrow bridge, trying to get to the parking lot in front of the bank before Karim got into trouble.

He had known Karim since he first arrived in the town over a decade ago as a hulking and sullen Arab teenager, ready to fight any young Frenchman who dared take him on. Bruno had seen the type before, and had slowly taught Karim that he was enough of an athlete to take out his resentments on the rugby field. With rugby lessons twice a week and a match each Saturday, and tennis in the summer, Bruno had taught the lad to stay out of trouble. He got Karim onto the school team, then onto the local rugby team, and finally into a league big enough for him to make the money that enabled the giant young man to marry his Rashida and buy the café. Bruno had made a speech at their wedding. Putain, putain, putain …

If Karim got into trouble over this it could turn very nasty. The inspectors would get their boss to put pressure on the Prefect, who would then put pressure on the Police Nationale, or maybe they would even get on to the Ministry of Defence and bring in the gendarmes who were supposed to deal with rural crime. If they leant on Karim and Rashida to start talking, there was no telling where it might end. Criminal damage to state property would mean an end to Karim’s licence to sell tobacco, and the end of his café. He might not talk, but Rashida would be thinking of the baby and she might crack. That would lead them to old Joe and to the rest of the rugby team, and before you knew it the whole network of the quiet and peaceful town of St Denis would face charges and start to unravel. Bruno couldn’t have that.

Bruno carefully slowed his pace as he turned the corner by the Commune notice board and past the war memorial into the ranks of cars that were drawn up like so many multi-coloured soldiers in front of the Crédit Agricole. He looked for the gendarme Twingo and then saw Duroc standing in the usual line in front of the bank’s cash machine. Two places behind him was the looming figure of Karim, chatting pleasantly to Colette from the dry cleaning shop. Bruno closed his eyes in relief, and strode on towards the burly North African.

‘Karim,’ he said, and swiftly added ‘Bonjour, Colette,’ kissing her cheeks, before turning back to Karim, saying, ‘I need to talk to you about the match schedule for Sunday’s game. Just a very little moment, it won’t take long.’ He grabbed him by the elbow, made his farewells to Colette, nodded at Duroc, and steered his reluctant quarry back to the bridge.

‘I came to warn you. I think they may have the car staked out, maybe even tipped off the gendarmerie,’ Bruno said. Karim stopped, and his face broke into a delighted smile.

‘I thought of that myself, Bruno, then I saw that new gendarme standing in line for cash, but his eyes kept moving everywhere so I waited behind him. Anyway, it’s done.’

‘You did the tyres with Duroc standing there!?’

‘Not at all.’ Karim grinned. ‘I told my nephew to take care of it with the other kids. They crept up and jammed a potato into the exhaust pipe while I was chatting to Colette and Duroc. That car won’t make ten kilometres before the engine seizes.’