Read The Devil's Cave: A Bruno Courrèges Investigation (Bruno Chief of Police 5) for Free Online Page A

newspapers or magazines. What a strange childhood Francette must have known, Bruno thought. How could she hope to fit in with school classmates who’d talk of the latest TV shows and pop songs?
    ‘Where’s Francette?’ he asked. ‘I hear she’s left the supermarket, got a new job.’
    Her mother’s back stiffened. ‘Is this what you came to ask?’
    ‘No, I came to ask about your being beaten. We had a complaint, an allegation. Domestic violence is a crime and Louis could go to prison.’ Out of the window, he could see her husband working on an old tractor at the entrance to the barn. ‘I can see from the way you wince that it’s true.’
    ‘No, I fell. I told you.’ Her head down, it was as if she weretalking to the soup she was stirring. Bruno wondered why the house had been built uphill, just above the barn, open to the winter winds, when the barn could have provided shelter. The answer came almost as soon as his mind formed the question: the animals’ waste would have seeped downhill into the home. There were still a couple of farms up in these hills, older than the Junot place, where the animals still lived on the ground floor with the humans above, taking advantage of the warmth from the bodies of the livestock below.
    ‘He used to beat Francette, too, didn’t he?’ Bruno asked. ‘Is that why she left home?’
    Silence from the stove, but her shoulders seemed to sag a little more. Then he saw that the shoulders were shaking and she was trying to damp down some huge, racking sobs. He moved across to stand beside her and looked at her face, tears spilling down her cheeks.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered. ‘Francette could get away. She has her life ahead of her. I have nowhere to go, even if I wanted to.’
    ‘There are places you can go, shelters in Bergerac and Sarlat,’ he said. ‘I can drive you there now.’
    ‘I don’t want to,’ she said firmly, stooping to wipe her eyes on her apron. ‘He isn’t always like this. It’s just that everything has gone wrong, the subsidies and then the sheep dying and the bill from the vet that we can’t pay and now the tractor …’
    ‘This beating has to stop,’ Bruno said. He didn’t know what else he could say and he had the feeling that there wassomething she wasn’t telling him. Not for the first time, he thought how useful it would be to have a policewoman working alongside him.
    ‘Louis is not a bad man,’ she said, standing straight now and more sure of herself. ‘I know him better than anyone.’
    ‘Is he drunk when he beats you?’
    She shrugged, and then winced again, her hand going to her ribs. Whatever the outcome of his confrontation with her husband, Bruno resolved that he’d take her down to the clinic.
    ‘His own wine is all he can afford to drink and there’s little enough of that,’ she said, turning off the gas beneath the soup. ‘Nobody would drink it but him.’
    She turned to the rear wall where Bruno saw a haybox, something he used for long, slow cooking. But he remembered from his childhood, when he was taken in by cousins, that poor families used them because they could not afford the gas.
    ‘I’ll get it,’ he said. He put it on the counter alongside the stove, lifted the soup pan inside and then packed the extra hay on top and sealed the box. It would keep on cooking all day.
    ‘After I’ve spoken to Louis, I’m taking you down to the clinic,’ he said.
    ‘I’ll be all right.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter. Either you come with me, or I’ll have to arrest you for obstruction of justice and get a doctor to see you in the cells.’ Bruno was bluffing, but he was determined that she see a doctor, preferably Fabiola. She shouldbe back by now from whatever private patient she was seeing.
    He lifted Louis’s shotgun down from the hooks that held it to the wall, opened the breech, held the barrel to the window and squinted. Never much of a gun, it had been badly cared for. The barrels were pitted and