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Grenoble. She was a hard worker and had been captain of the school swimming team. Bruno began to scribble notes as Rollo described how during a mock election, Dominique and her partner had held meetings about global warming and melting ice caps, plastered the school with posters about it and defeated the Socialist favorites to pull off a victory for the Greens. When he asked who had been her partner, Rollo said it had been Max, Alphonse’s son.
    Bruno thanked Rollo and put down the phone. The prospect of a militant young Green at the research station, doubtless knowing about the GMO project, with a father whose farm was near the trial crops, was by far the best lead in a case where he was making no progress. But Stéphane was a friend of his. He’d have to make some inquiries of his own before talking to J-J, at least to establish whether the girl had adecent alibi for the time of the fire. He rose and was reaching for his cap when Claire put her head around his door to say the mayor needed to see him.
    “I like the new haircut, Bruno,” she added, lingering in the doorway.
    “It’s the same one I get every month,” he said, grabbing his notebook.
    “No, it’s shorter,” she said, edging closer to the door so that he had to squeeze past. “It makes you look younger.”
    “But I’m even older now than I was when it was cut,” he said, and left her nonplussed.
    His spirits rose as they always did when he entered the mayor’s office. The rich colors of old wood and paneling and faded rugs could hardly have been more different from those of his own cramped and functional office, or from the modernized reception area. The mayor kept to the old ways, preferring his fountain pen to a computer terminal, and the traditional system of manila file folders bound with green and red tape over some electronic database.
    “Bonjour
, Bruno. I had a call earlier from the American embassy in Paris, commercial section, following up on a letter they sent that somehow Claire seems to have misfiled. Could we receive some distinguished businessman who wants to discuss a possible investment in our region?”
    “What kind of investment?”
    “They didn’t say. But I’d be glad of anything. We need the jobs. The meeting is here in my office, tomorrow at 9 a.m. I’d like you to be there, along with Xavier.” Xavier was the
maire-adjoint
, as well as one of Bruno’s tennis partners, and probably would be the next mayor when Gérard Mangin eventually stepped down.
    “Did we get a name?” Bruno asked.
    “Only if Claire finds that letter.”
    “If the meeting is at nine, they’ll be staying in a hotel near here. I’ll call around, find out the name and see what I can dig up.”
    “It could be just some big political donor looking to buy a château,” the mayor speculated. Bruno knew him to be an old-school politician who had learned his skills as an aide to Jacques Chirac around the time Bruno had been born. “Still no progress on the fire?”
    “Only that we got the lab report confirming the presence of gasoline. It was arson, all right. But we’re no nearer to knowing who or why. The staff all seem to be in the clear, so J-J is working on possible competitors, and I’m supposed to make discreet inquiries among the locals, starting with the
écolos
and then the nearby farmers who might have been worried about contamination of their crops. But first I want to find out a bit more about the anonymous call alerting us to the fire. It came from the phone booth at Coux. It’s a long shot, but somebody may have seen or heard something.”

6
    Back in his office, Bruno tracked down the American businessman at the Centenaire in Les Eyzies, the grandest hotel in the district, with a restaurant that boasted a Michelin rosette. Thérèse at the hotel’s reception desk had a daughter in Bruno’s tennis class. He took hasty notes as Thérèse told him everything she knew. A young man named Fernando Bondino had arrived in a big