Martin Walker - Black Diamond

F ICTION

Bruno, Chief of Police

The Dark Vineyard

The Caves of Prigord

N ONFICTION

The Iraq War

Europe in the Twenty-first Century (coauthor)

America Reborn

The President They Deserve

The Cold War: A History

Martin Walkers Russia

The Waking Giant: Gorbachev and Perestroika

Powers of the Press

The National Front

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2010 by Walker and Watson Ltd.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britain in slightly different form by Quercus, London, in 2010.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Walker, Martin, [date]
Black diamond / Martin Walker.1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-70145-9
1. Police chiefsFrance, SouthwestFiction.
2. TrufflesFiction. 3. SmugglingFiction. 4. Country
lifeFrance, SouthwestFiction. 5. France, Southwest
Social life and customsFiction. I. Title.
PR6073.A413B63 2011
823.914dc22 2011003407

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket photograph Mark Atkins/panoptika.net
Jacket design by Jason Booher

v3.1

To Commandant Raymond Bounichou,
old barbouze, great cook, good friend
and one of the few to be given the honor
of lighting the sacred flame at the
Arc de Triomphe

There were not many times that Bruno Courrges disliked his job. But today was certainly one of them. The weather was not to blame, a crisp day in late November with thin, high clouds trailing feebly across a sky that was determined to be blue. And even this early in the morning the sun was warm on his face and lending a rich gold to the few remaining leaves on the line of old oaks that fringed the towns rugby field. It gave warmth to the aged stone of the mairie across the river and to the red tile roofs of the houses that climbed the hillside. The season was still mild enough, he noticed, for the women to have thrown open their windows and the blue wooden shutters. Splashes of white and blue, stripes and floral patterns, adorned the townscape where they had heaped out bedding to air on the balconies, as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them. It might be the last day of the year that would be possible. A touch of frost had silvered the grass outside his cottage when Bruno walked his dog just after dawn that morning, and he had heard the first of the Christmas Muzak in the supermarket over the weekend.

Bruno turned back to the scene before him, the small crowd waiting outside the silent sawmill, its chimney no longer sending plumes of smoke into the clear sky. The fork-lift trucks that usually scurried like beetles around the warehouses under their loads of timber were all parked neatly in their garage. The air still carried the wholesome scent of fresh-cut wood. But the memory would soon fade, since this was the day that the sawmill, one of the biggest and oldest employers in St. Denis, was to close its doors.

Bruno himself, acting under orders, had two weeks earlier delivered the formal notice of closure from the prefecture, citing the legal judgment against Scirie Pons and its owner for breach of the new rules on pollution in urban areas. As the towns only policeman, Bruno had tied a copy of the order, wrapped in plastic against the weather, to the sawmill gates. Now he had to stand watch as the law took its solemn course and the court ruling was carried out. And of course he was obliged to deal with whatever ill feeling followed from this long-running feud between the jubilant Green Party and the man they called the arch-polluter of St. Denis.

Pons out, Pons out, chanted the crowd, led into a chorus by a handsome man with a bullhorn, an expensive leather jacket and a white silk scarf. His long blond hair was tucked into a neat ponytail, and he wore a large Green Party button on his lapel. The posters the crowd carried explained the closure. There had been no economic calamity, no financial embarrassment, no sudden shortage of timber that the woods and forests of the Dordogne region had produced for centuries. There was no shortage of demand for the oak and chestnut, pine and hemlock. Indeed it was known that Boniface Pons, the owner of the sawmill that had been in his family for generations, was simply shifting his entire enterprise to another commune with wide forests and fewer than two hundred voters, where he had been assured there would be none of the angry demonstrations and the endless lawsuits that had driven him from St. Denis.

AT LAST, OUR CHILDREN CAN BREATHE , read one of the posters, which made Bruno roll his eyes at the exaggeration. He had played countless hours of rugby on the nearby playing field and endured dozens of training sessions while the chimney still spouted and never felt out of breath.

ENVIRONMENT 1PONS 0 , read another poster, which for Bruno was closer to the truth. Ponss sawmill had, over the decade of Brunos time as the towns policeman, installed two separate sets of scrubbing equipment for the steam and smoke that belched from the tall chimney. Each installation was supposed to be the latest in clean-air technology, yet within a few years each had been overtaken by new pollution directives from the European Union in Brussels. The most recent directive, which required any business with a polluting chimney to be a minimum distance from the nearest housing, had been the final straw for Boniface Pons. It was not his fault, Pons maintained, that the commune of St. Denis had decided, years before the latest directive had been thought of, to erect a block of cheap flats for public housing just one hundred and fifty feet from the fence around his sawmill. But with the new regulation, that meant his business was twenty-five feet inside the limit required by the EU.

Ive had enough of this green crap, Pons had announced at the last, heated council meeting. If you dont want the jobs I bring and the two hundred thousand euros I pay in taxes to this towns budget every year, then fine. Ill go where my jobs are wanted.

Bruno had hoped to avoid trouble this morning, wishing that Pons would leave his building, lock his gates and make a dignified departure while the crowd of colos, the towns environmental activists, calmly relished their victory. But from the gossip in the cafs and the grumbling around the market stalls, he had known that the closure might not go so smoothly. He had discussed with the mayor, Grard Mangin, whether they should call on the gendarmes for reinforcements. But the moment they envisaged Capitaine Duroc blundering his way in, they had dropped the idea. Had Duroc been away on a course, and the gendarmes under the experienced command of Sergeant Jules, their presence might have been a sensible precaution. As it was, the mayor and Bruno knew they could count only on themselves and on the years of trust they had built with their neighbors.