The Crowded Grave Page 4

  Bruno said nothing. The brigadier, he knew, was the kind of ruthless operator who would not shrink from putting a couple of ministers at risk if it meant luring a terrorist squad into the open. Carlos was an unknown quantity, but Bruno had few illusions about the way counterintelligence worked, and he bridled at the prospect of this kind of danger being invited into St. Denis.

  “I’ll have to explain to the mayor about holding the summit here. Are you planning to announce it?”

  “Oh yes,” said the brigadier, almost casually. “There’s to be a press conference after the agreement, TV cameras present for the signing. You can’t keep that kind of thing secret. So we might as well make an announcement. It depends on today’s inspection whether the conference chamber and facilities will be ready.”

  The brigadier gestured to his security men to stay outside and led the way up the steps to the balcony, flanked by a long line of French windows. He tried several in turn, not sure which was the main door. He tapped on a window, and a man in painter’s clothes looked up, waved and came forward to open the last window in the row. The brigadier nodded thanks and shepherded them all inside, over the paint-spotted sheets. He stopped to gaze at the long room.

  “This is where the formal meeting will be held, and the final press conference.”

  Spanish and French flags were propped neatly against the far wall. Carlos walked down the length of the room to unfurl the Spanish banner, as if studying it for blemishes. He let the folds fall and walked back, studying the space as if he sought to commit its contours to memory.

  “Where will the furniture come from?” he asked, opening a door that led into a small closet.

  “Government stores,” said the brigadier. “Usual things, conference table, signing table, chairs—they’re supplying some decent antiques. Maybe a statue or two and a couple of sideboards for the walls. They’re probably in that furniture van in the yard.”

  “Upstairs?” Carlos asked.

  “We’ll have the entire place checked, but upstairs will remain unfurnished apart from a couple of bedrooms in case the ministers want to rest. Nobody’s staying overnight except the security teams. And Isabelle, of course,” the brigadier added in an aside to Carlos, carefully not looking at Bruno. “You remember from Paris, the young inspector on my staff who got shot, walks with a cane.”

  “When is she expected?” Bruno asked, his mouth suddenly dry. He suspected it always would be, at the mention of her name. He wondered what the need for a cane might do to that shining self-confidence of hers. He’d been there when Isabelle left the military hospital for the convalescent center outside Paris, still on a stretcher.

  “Tomorrow, I think, when the communications systems start being installed. Maybe the day after. She persuaded the doctors that she was fit enough to return to light duties, so she’ll be here, running the base. We’re taking over the local hotel.”

  “So I report to her?” Bruno asked.

  “Of course. Usual procedure, a morning staff meeting at nine, evening review at six. If I’m here, I’ll take it; if not, then it will be Isabelle and Carlos. I see you’re still using that secure phone we gave you.”

  “Have you selected a backup location in case anything goes wrong?”

  “What makes you think we’ll need a backup location?” Carlos asked.

  “I’ve worked with the brigadier before.”

  “Come on out to the balcony,” the brigadier said. “The sun’s out and we can take our casse-croûte there.” He turned to his bodyguard. “Can you find us some plates and wineglasses?”

  “Already taken care of, sir. Philippe went to the hotel across the road to borrow some.”

  “Enough for the bodyguards to have a bit of the foie, Bruno? They won’t drink on duty.”

  “Enough for everybody,” said Bruno, pulling the rubber seal on the glass jar to break the vacuum and then levering up the wire catches to open the lid. The brigadier picked it up to sniff. “Try that, Carlos,” he said as Bruno took his Laguiole knife from the pouch at his belt, levered up the corkscrew and opened the bottle of sweet golden wine. He cut the baguette into five portions and brought out a small pot of onion marmalade he had made the previous autumn.

  “Bon appétit, and welcome to the gastronomic heartland of France,” he said to Carlos. He took some of the yellow duck fat he had used to preserve the foie and spread it on the baguette before adding a healthy slice of pâté and a small dab of marmalade.

  “This is wonderful,” the Spaniard mumbled through a mouthful of fresh bread and foie gras. He took a sip of wine, and his eyes widened. “Magnificent. They were made for each other.”

  Bruno found himself smiling broadly as the brigadier sniffed at his Monbazillac and said, “Spring sunshine warming the stone of an old château, a wonderful foie gras and a glass of the perfect wine to accompany it. What do you say, Carlos? Counterterrorism isn’t always like this, eh?”

  4

  Lunch with J-J was late, but Ivan offered them an omelette with the fresh, tender buds of the first pissenlit and brought them a carafe of his new house wine from the Domaine down in the valley. His plat du jour was one of the happier memories of his disastrous love affair with a Belgian girl from Charleroi, endives au jambon. Bruno well remembered Ivan’s three months of summer bliss and a crashing, drunken winter of heartbreak when she left him, and his Café de la Renaissance almost went under.

  “He does a good béchamel sauce, your Ivan,” said J-J, wiping the last of his empty dish with a crust of bread. He chewed with enthusiasm, took a sip of the young red wine and sat back content, his big, square hands resting on his portly stomach. “You don’t know how lucky you are here in St. Denis. No fast food, a couple of real bistros, wine from your own valley. Half my colleagues up in Périgueux seem to live on takeout pizzas and hamburgers.”

  “Talking of your men, can you get them to run this for fingerprints?” Bruno asked. He handed across an envelope containing the animal cruelty leaflet that he’d taken from the Villattes’ farm. “I used a handkerchief, but there may be one or two of mine smeared on.”

  J-J took it with a grunt. “The priority is going to be identifying that corpse, at least once we get the brigadier and those damn ministers out of the way. They’ll demand the use of half my force for security.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “I’ll wait for the forensic report. What they told me after the initial examination was pretty obvious—the body of a youngish male, dead at least ten years, probably shot while already in that grave, but that’s not certain. If we get a good estimate of his age and the length of time since death, then we’ll run it through missing persons. But over two hundred thousand people are reported missing in France every year, so it’s a long shot. And we’ve no idea where the dead man’s from. One of the forensics men said the teeth suggested a foreign dentist.”

  “He’s not from around here. I know our own missing persons file,” Bruno said. “But there has to be a local connection, if only through the killer. Only someone from around here, or maybe an archaeologist, would know about that site.”

  “Not necessarily. They could have been driving around, interrogating him in the back of a car, hands behind his back. They decide to do him in, and it’s a quiet, sheltered place.”

  “It’s not that sheltered. And there would’ve been a gunshot. Then they had to bury him. If they wanted somewhere deserted, they could’ve found better places up in the woods. Maybe there’s a reason they picked that spot. If so, there is a local connection—and it’s the killer, not the victim.”

  “But until we know who he was …,” J-J said, as Ivan brought their coffee and the check. He stared at the total, blinked in disbelief, and slipped a twenty-euro note under his saucer. “It’s like time travel, coming here. Lunch for two and change from a twenty. Now I know why you like this place.”

  “I’ll see if Joe recalls anything. You remember him, he had this job before me?” Bruno pulled out his own wallet. J-J w
aved it aside, muttering “Expenses” and putting the check into his notebook.

  “Keep me informed, particularly if Joe has anything, and I’ll send over the forensic report as soon as I get it. The best clue might be the watch. One of my guys says there’ll be a batch number in the workings somewhere that could give us a better time frame.” He looked at his own watch and lumbered to his feet. “Got to go. By the way, you’ll be getting a call from the new magistrate about the body. I sent a notification through of a suspicious death, and she wants to see the site. Just remember, Bruno, she’s feminist, vegetarian and very Green—in both senses of the word.”

  There were three places in town for photocopying, and Bruno started at the nearest, the Maison de la Presse. Patrick shook his head when Bruno asked about recent batch jobs. Most of Patrick’s customers just wanted a single sheet or a copy of an ID card or wedding certificate. Nor did he recognize the crude leaflet when Bruno showed it to him. Then Bruno went to the Infomatique, where they repaired computers and sold office supplies and charged twice as much as Patrick for a photocopy. Locals knew this, but strangers might not. Finally he tried the tourist information bureau down by the river, where Gabrielle, a tennis club friend, ran the small Internet center, sold rail tickets and looked after the photocopier.

  “No, I don’t recognize that leaflet, but then I never really look,” she told him.

  “Any batch jobs?”

  “We did do a lot for those students at the archaeology dig yesterday, maybe the day before. Cooking rotations and worksheets and other paperwork,” she said. “Nice young girl, Dutch. It must have been fifty or sixty sheets.”

  “Did you see what it was she was copying? Did you load the machine?”

  “No, someone came in for a ticket to Bordeaux, and the girl knew how to run it anyway. I just checked the number counter at the end and charged her.”

  “You’d recognize her again?”

  “Certainly. She was here for ages, used the computer for her e-mails.”

  “Has it got one of those history buttons that tells you which websites you’ve visited?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know how long it goes back. Mind you, it hasn’t been busy. No tourists this time of year. That’s why I let her stay so long on the computer. Usually it’s an hour maximum, thirty minutes if we’re busy.”

  Gabrielle fired up the computer and clicked open Internet Explorer. But the Delete Browsing History function had been applied. Damn, thought Bruno. Maybe this won’t be so easy.

  “Wait a minute. She was saying she didn’t like Explorer,” Gabrielle interrupted. “She has a Mac at home, she said, and she likes Apple and hates Microsoft. So maybe she’d have used another browser …”

  Her voice trailed off, and she opened the Firefox browser, waited for it to load and clicked “History.” The fourth item was petafrance.com and the fifth was peta.nl for the Netherlands.

  “Can you print that page out for me, please, Gabrielle, and sign and date it?” He waited until she was done and then clicked the PETA France Web page. As he expected, it was connected to a page on foie gras. “Écrivez au ministère de l’Agriculture pour protester contre cinq années supplémentaires de cruauté du foie gras.” Write to the minister of agriculture to protest against five more years of foie gras cruelty.

  Bruno considered the contrast between the good sense of a civil appeal to ministerial reason and the pulling down of fences. He had no problem with writing to a minister. Criminal damage to the property of a perfectly legal and not-very-prosperous farmer was another matter, quite apart from the squashed bodies of ducks and geese he recalled from the morning.

  “And print that out too, if you would.”

  He clicked on the PETA site for the Netherlands. He couldn’t read the Dutch, but he read the names of celebrities and movie stars who seemed to be lending their names to its campaigns. Then there was what looked like a vegetarian recipe to make some kind of foie gras substitute. It seemed to be mainly mushrooms.

  “What’s this about, Bruno?”

  “The Villattes. Somebody pulled down their fences last night and let the ducks and geese out. It seems your nice Dutch girl may have been involved.”

  Gabrielle put her hand to her mouth and stared at him. “What are you going to do? Arrest her?”

  “Well, I’d have to be sure it was her first. And I don’t think she acted alone, so I’ll have to find out who else was involved. Was she alone when she came here?”

  Gabrielle nodded. “She was at first, then a bunch of other students came in and took some of the tourism leaflets. She left with them. And I remember now, they called her Katie. But she was very polite, thanked me when she paid for the photocopies and the computer time. I hope she’s not going to get into trouble.”

  “What would you do to her, Gabrielle, if you were sure it was her? You know the Villattes, decent, hardworking people. You know their boy, Daniel, good little tennis player. What happens to him if his parents lose their livelihood?”

  Gabrielle looked at him, considering. “I’d make her go and confess to them and say she was sorry. I think she should put it in writing. Then I’d make her pay for the birds and repair the damage and then pay some more compensation for their trouble. And I’d hope she learned her lesson.”

  Bruno pondered the difference between Gabrielle’s thoughtful reply and the blunt avowals of vengeance that he’d heard that morning from Alain. Maybe the difference was that Alain was thinking of some anonymous, faceless enemy; Gabrielle knew the Dutch girl and had warmed to her.

  “She’s very young,” Gabrielle went on. “Maybe she just got carried away. You know young people and their causes. And some of this animal cruelty business is nasty stuff. It turns my stomach to see those poor whales and those baby seals that get clubbed on TV.”

  “Well, we don’t eat baby seals,” Bruno replied. “We do eat duck and foie gras and a lot of our neighbors make their living from it, and they’re the ones who pay my wages. And yours, come to think of it. They’ve got rights too. Thanks for your help, Gabrielle. I’ll let you know how this develops.”

  The municipal campground of St. Denis had a pleasant location beside the river. The town’s open-air swimming pool flanked one side, and the rear opened onto a large sports field with a running track and a playground for children. Between the campground and the main part of town were some of the tourist attractions of St. Denis: a small aquarium that was closed for repainting, a wildlife museum and a beach where canoes were rented in summer. Behind them were the town’s handsome municipal gardens, a less ambitious attempt to repeat the gravel walks and checkerboard lawns and topiary of Versailles. It wasn’t greatly to Bruno’s taste.

  He walked quickly through the gardens to the iron-studded wooden door in the garden wall that was partly hidden by a boxwood hedge and used one of the many keys on his belt to let himself in. Bruno always enjoyed this place, where time seemed to slow a little and in summer butterflies gathered in unusual numbers. He paused as he relocked the door and gazed around at the walled garden with peach and apricot trees espaliered symmetrically against the old bricks, faded now from their original red to a dusty orange that made a pleasing backdrop to the bright green of the new leaves. Inside the walls were herb gardens and beds for unusual plants, continuing an old tradition that went back to medieval times when there had been a nunnery on this land and when Jean Rey, a local natural philosopher, had written an early book on using plants as medicines. St. Denis was the only commune Bruno knew that employed its own herbalist, who turned a decent profit for the town by selling seeds and plants to the homeopathic trade. There was no sign of Morillon, the old gardener. But Bruno was only using the garden as a shortcut to the town’s campground and let himself out quickly by the rear door.

  Dominated by the shower block at one end and the reception building at the other that housed office, shop and bar, the campground was a large field crisscrossed by gravel paths and parking stands. In one corner stood perhaps a score of
multicolored tents, one very large but the rest mostly small, huddled together close to the riverbank. There was no sign of life except the thin sound of radio music leaking from the office, where Bruno found Monique. She was sitting and smoking while she toyed with the crossword in that day’s Sud Ouest and hummed along to the pop songs on Périgord Bleu. Married to Bernard, who managed the campground and did whatever odd jobs were required, Monique looked after the campground shop and the town pool. They lived rent-free in a small apartment above the office, shared two modest salaries and worked like slaves from the start of the tourist season in May until the end of September. For the rest of the year there was little to do other than maintenance.

  “Salut, Bruno. How about a coffee?” She got up and presented her plump cheek to be kissed. Her hair was bottle blond, black at the roots. He nodded and she began fussing with a small machine that looked new.

  “Trying it out on approval,” she said. “I like the coffee it makes, but Bernard prefers the old way, stewed on the stove top. What brings you here?”

  “The students who’re camping; are they all from the group that’s here for the archaeology?”

  “They’d better be. That’s why they get the special rate. But they all had the right paperwork from the museum. Why, is there trouble?”

  “I don’t know, but the Villatte farm was vandalized last night by some animal rights people. They let all the ducks out. There are no other strangers around, so I thought I’d better ask if you heard anything from the youngsters.”

  “No, they keep to themselves, cook their own food down by that big tent they use as a living space. They don’t even shop here anymore, once they saw the prices are cheaper at the supermarket. They’ve been no trouble, except for the noise late at night, but you have to expect that.”