The Crowded Grave bop-4

by Martin Walker

  “She was supposed to have six months’ leave to recover, but she got bored doing nothing,” said Bruno, talking to Pamela’s back. “I’m told she’s now walking with a cane and is coming down to do something about communications and security. It’s her minister who’s doing the meeting.”

  “What brings the minister of the interior to St. Denis?”

  Bruno shrugged, then realized Pamela couldn’t see the gesture. “Some meeting with a foreign colleague and a photo op,” he said, raising his voice so it would carry.

  “A foreign colleague?” Her voice was mocking. “So St. Denis joins the ranks of international conference centers?” She was sitting very upright in the saddle, her back stiff. “Two meetings a day. I suppose she’ll try to lure you to Paris again. Isabelle has always impressed me as the kind of woman who gets what she wants.”

  Carlos Gambara was sitting on the uncomfortable chair outside Bruno’s office and filling in the blank numbers in Sud Ouest ’s Sudoku game when Bruno arrived. He looked up and caught Bruno glancing at his watch. It was two minutes before eight.

  “Give me a moment,” Carlos said. “I’m almost done.” He scribbled another number as Bruno went into his small office, put his hat on the table, turned on his computer and sat in his revolving chair. It gave the usual, almost welcoming squeak. He rang Claire, the mayor’s secretary, and asked for two coffees and then tapped in his username and password and began dealing with the accumulated e-mail. Most were routine, but two made him pause.

  They both came from Isabelle. The first was a formal note from her ministry e-mail address, attaching a list of “families of interest.” Bruno scanned it, found no surprises and sent it to his printer. The second came from her private Hotmail address.

  “It’s good to know we’ll be working together again. Still a lot of convalescing to do, but the doctors are pleased with me. More important, my karate teacher says I’ll be back to normal by midsummer. Isabelle xx.”

  Bruno pondered his reply, trying to catch the same tone that she had used, of friendly colleagues rather than old lovers. He wasn’t satisfied with his reply, but as Carlos pushed open the door, he hit the SEND button anyway. “Happy to hear you are recovering and fit enough to be back at work. La Republique can breathe easily again. Always a welcome for you in St D. See you soon, Bruno xx.”

  Carlos held up the front page of Sud Ouest with the photo of Horst’s first modern family. There was a smaller photo of Horst, and the headline made Bruno smile-“First Family Found in St. Denis.”

  “What did you think of the lecture?” he asked.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it and what Horst was saying about murder as the first act of modern man, the original sin,” Bruno said. “It makes me wonder who was the first policeman.”

  Carlos pulled two sheets of paper from his inside pocket and laid them on Bruno’s desk.

  “Families of Spanish origin in this region who may be of interest,” he said. “Your records may be better than ours.”

  Bruno handed him the printout from Isabelle’s attachment. “Most of the names are the same. We have a couple more, but none that rings my alarm bell.”

  “What about this old corpse you found? No possible connection to our business?”

  Bruno shrugged. “I’ll save you a copy of the forensic report, if you like. I should get something today.”

  “This other matter, the animal rights militants. Can we check them out? In my experience, being a radical in one thing makes it more likely to be a radical in another.”

  “I can give you a full list of all the students, names, addresses, passport numbers. I was going to ask the brigadier to check them out with the various home countries, but you can probably do that.” He turned to the computer, clicked open Clothilde’s e-mail to him of yesterday and printed out two copies of the attachment.

  “E-mail it to me at this address,” Carlos said, handing across a business card that bore simply the arms of Spain, his name, an e-mail address and phone number. “Then I can forward it direct. It will be faster. But I’d like to take a look at the archaeological site, if that’s possible. It’s mainly for my own interest, but I’d like to be able to report that I’d checked the site of the grave, if this dead man turns out to be interesting. And I’d like to take you to lunch, but perhaps you have other plans.”

  “We have the security meeting at the chateau this evening,” Bruno said. “I also want to go and have a quiet talk with the old man who did this job for thirty years before me. He knows everybody, so I was going to ask him about Basques, as well as the mysterious corpse. You’re welcome to come along, but be careful of any wine he offers you. His red pinard is terrible, but his vin de noix is worth the detour.”

  Carlos smiled. “Thanks for the tip. I suppose we all have friends like that.”

  “I’ve got one question for you,” Bruno said, leaning back. His chair squeaked again. “How serious is the security threat? I realize this meeting makes an inviting target, but ETA has been on the defensive for years. You must have some idea of what resources and capabilities ETA still has.”

  “We know they used the cease-fire to rebuild some of their networks,” Carlos said. “And we know they have now determined France to be an enemy state and a legitimate target. We think they have two, perhaps three, active service teams available, at least one in southern France. We’ve already passed on everything in our files to your minister of the interior, including what few photos and records we have on the members, and I’ll be providing daily updates.”

  Bruno nodded and rose. “I’m going to the site of the dig, if you’d like to come.”

  The Spaniard pointed to his computer and said he’d work on his e-mails. As Bruno trotted down the stairs to his van, his cell phone rang. Bruno looked at the screen and saw the name of Maurice, a friend from the hunting club. He clicked the green button to take the call.

  “Bruno, it’s Maurice. You’d better get here quick. I’m in trouble. I think I’ve shot somebody.”

  8

  Maurice Soulier’s farm was on the lowest slope of the hillside below Coumont. On the flat land that stretched down to the busy stream that joined the Vezere near St. Denis he kept the ducks that he fattened by hand in the old-fashioned way. Lacking a permit to slaughter them, he had the ducks collected twice a week by a cousin who was a local butcher. He paid Maurice a fair price for the foie but kept all the money from selling the meat and carcasses. Of course, the entire hunting club and its extended families bought Maurice’s foie gras and his magrets and the confits made by his wife, Sophie. This meant that Maurice was still killing a couple of dozen ducks a week with his grandfather’s ax on the old stump in the barnyard, and Bruno was not the only citizen of St. Denis who slept under a magnificent eiderdown made by Sophie from duck feathers. So it was with considerable alarm that Bruno pulled into the farmyard, to find Sophie weeping in the kitchen and Maurice trying to comfort her.

  Bruno sized up the situation, went to the familiar cupboard in the corner opposite the stove, removed the bottle of cognac that Maurice kept to fill his flask before a hunt and poured a glass for each of them. They drank, and then husband and wife began to speak at once.

  “One at a time.” Bruno held up a hand. “Maurice, you first-tell me what happened.”

  Maurice explained that it was about 5:00 a.m. and he was asleep when the dog started barking in the yard. He went downstairs and saw nothing but then heard a noise over by the barn where he kept the car. Then the ducks started making a racket. Maurice thought they must have been startled by a fox, so he grabbed the shotgun and went toward the duck barn. He heard glass breaking in one of the cold frames he used to plant early seeds. He had shouted and heard another frame break. When he turned the corner he saw something moving low down by the fence and was sure it was a fox so he fired. He heard a scream and someone shouting in a foreign language and the sound of running. That was all.

  “Tell him about the blood,” said Sophie, hiccupping n
ow rather than sobbing.

  “I looked around and saw the fence had been partly cut through so I patched that with some twine. Then I went to see if Sophie was all right because she’d been woken by the shot. I saw to the ducks and took the dog out to see what was what. He stood barking just where I’d patched the fence, but it wasn’t until after dawn that we came out to look and then we saw the blood-”

  “I said we should call you,” Sophie interrupted. “But he’s a stubborn old devil and he said you wouldn’t be in the office until after eight and it wasn’t fair to call you before then.”

  Bruno rubbed his jaw and pondered. It was a strange time for a shot to be fired and somebody may have reported it, or gone to a hospital where a doctor might already have called the gendarmes.

  “I’m going to take a statement right now, get your version down. It’s important to say that you really believed it was a fox and only later thought it might be a human attacker. Give me some writing paper.”

  “We had that fox dig his way in last December, you remember,” said Sophie, getting up to pull a writing pad from a drawer. She seemed calmer with something to do. “No wonder that’s what he thought. But then I remembered what happened to the Villattes and thought about those animal cruelty people. Do you think it was one of them he shot, Bruno?”

  “Right now, we don’t know what was shot. Please, can you make us some coffee, Sophie, while I take Maurice’s statement?”

  Bruno led Maurice carefully through the statement, suggesting phrases and sentences and putting the best possible face on Maurice’s account that after the previous fox invasion, he had fired at what he thought was another fox to protect his livelihood. Then he had heard what might have been human voices, but he could not be sure because the sounds were in no language he could understand. It was only when it was light enough to see the bloodstains that he had called the chef de police, who was taking his statement.

  Bruno drank his coffee and got Sophie to make a brief corroborating statement before going outside to look at the patched fence and the blood.

  “Just one thing,” he said, standing at the door. “Whoever else comes here, whether gendarmes or a magistrate or the president of the Republic, say nothing. You’ve made a sworn statement to me. I’ll get it registered, and that’s all you have to say. If anyone makes threats about charging you, say you insist on your right to a legal adviser and ask them to send for me.”

  Sophie looked even more frightened, but Maurice nodded and led the way to the rear of the old barn where the vegetable garden was protected by a wire fence. Just inside the fence was Maurice’s row of cold frames, two of them broken, and Bruno saw that Maurice’s careful watering the previous evening had preserved a very clear footprint of what looked to Bruno like a small sneaker. He went to his car, pulled out a roll of yellow police tape and fastened it around and across the cold frame, then covered the useful footprint with one of Sophie’s plastic bags. The small patch of blood was beside the cold frame. As he bent to examine it, he saw a couple of what could have been wormholes in the wood of the barn. But the holes in the wood were fresh, so he guessed they must be pellets from Maurice’s shotgun. They were below waist height. That would support Maurice’s claim that he thought he was shooting at a fox.

  “What kind of shell did you have in the shotgun?”

  “Just bird shot. It was what was in the drawer when I fetched the gun.”

  “Can you show me where you were standing at the moment you fired?”

  “About here, I reckon. I’d just turned the corner,” Maurice replied, from the angle of the old barn that he used as a garage. Bruno paced out the distance, taking thirty-six long steps. He sighed in relief. At that range, the bird shot would have spread. Then he went back to the cold frame.

  There wasn’t much blood, a small patch roughly four inches across. It was maybe thirty feet from the woods. At the spot where the vegetation was trampled down he found some more blood on the crushed leaves. The trail continued through the woods toward the track that led up the hill to Coumont. Attached to the thorns of a bramble bush he found a crumpled copy of the leaflet he had first seen at the Villatte farm. Using his handkerchief, he removed it from the bush, and noting some smears of dried blood on the paper, he placed it carefully inside a plastic bag. On a small pile of dead leaves nearby he found two more smears of blood. He tied his handkerchief to a twig to mark the spot, and then called Maurice to examine them.

  “If that was a deer, what would you say?” he asked Maurice.

  “I’d say it wasn’t badly hurt, maybe a flank shot.”

  Bruno nodded. “So put your mind at rest. You haven’t killed anybody. It was an accident, and you can’t even be sure it was human.”

  Maurice nodded dully, and Bruno saw that he was feeling too guilty to be reassured.

  “I’ll have to take the gun, they may need to run tests,” Bruno said, thinking that even at a range of over ninety-five feet bird shot could do a lot of damage. “I’ll borrow your hunting permit, make a copy and get it back to you. Don’t worry, Maurice, the gun’s legal, your permit’s in order, and you very reasonably believed you were shooting at a fox to protect your property.”

  “What about those cuts in the fence?” Maurice asked, his voice quavering. He suddenly looked very old.

  “Nothing about them in the statement. I’ll add a note to say we just found them and patched them now.”

  “I don’t like this, Bruno. It feels like deception.”

  “Trust me, Maurice. This could turn out badly unless you do what I say and never utter a word that’s not in your statement. And make sure Sophie does the same.”

  Back at the house, Bruno asked Sophie to write out a copy of both statements. He and Maurice went out and put a saucepan over the patch of blood to protect it for the likely forensic tests. Back inside, Bruno signed and dated the statement copies. Then he called the medical center and asked for Fabiola.

  “Anybody been brought in with gunshot wounds?”

  “No, and I was on night call for the whole district, so I’d have heard. Why, should I expect somebody?”

  “Looks like some animal rights people got up to their tricks last night and the farmer thought they were a fox. There’s a small bloodstain, about the size of a saucer.”

  “Doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll keep my ears open. You might want to try the pharmacies, see if anybody’s buying bandages.”

  “Bandages and tweezers-they’re probably trying to pull out bird-shot pellets right now.”

  “Some girls carry tweezers to pluck their eyebrows. Stick with the bandages and surgical gauze. And maybe bleach or something, to get the bloodstains out of clothes.”

  Bruno scribbled down “Pharmacie” in his notebook, then added the names of the baron, J-J, Jules, the mayor and Herve, the insurance broker. He was that year’s president of the hunting club, which paid an annual insurance premium in case its members needed legal assistance. J-J could recommend a good lawyer, which Maurice would probably need.

  The first call was to the baron to come and sit with Maurice and Sophie and be prepared to stand up to the gendarmes and to Annette if they turned up while Bruno was elsewhere. J-J reported that the case did not sound too serious to him, if nobody had reported being hurt, and gave Bruno the name of a reliable lawyer in Perigueux. In any event, the incident had now been officially reported to the Police Nationale, which meant that the gendarmes would not have jurisdiction. Nonetheless, Bruno called Sergeant Jules on his personal number, who told him to bring in Maurice’s shotgun for safe keeping, and he promised to warn Capitaine Duroc that the Police Nationale had taken over the case. He rang the mayor and gave him the details, and finally told Herve, who confirmed that the club’s insurance was both up-to-date and well funded.

  The baron arrived in his veteran Citroen DS, greeted them all and proceeded to distribute more cognac, on the inventive principle that anything Maurice might say thereafter could be dismissed as the ramblings of someone
who had taken a little too much alcohol for the shock.

  Bruno took the shotgun to Sergeant Jules at the gendarmerie and then went to the general office in the mairie to make more copies of Maurice’s statement. He faxed them to J-J and Herve, and to the general number at the magistrates’ office in Sarlat, with a covering note addressed to Annette. That gave Bruno an idea. Rather than call the lawyer in Perigueux, he went into his own office to track down a number for Annette’s predecessor.

  As a devoted hunter and an occasional customer of Sophie’s foie gras, the old chief magistrate was delighted to take the case. He assured Bruno he would be at Maurice’s house within the hour. Bruno read him Maurice’s statement aloud, and it was pronounced “most helpful.” The problem would be, the former magistrate noted, if someone reported having been shot. Bruno replied that he was making inquiries.

  He phoned both of the pharmacies in St. Denis and drew a blank each time. Where else would students, relative strangers to the area, try to find a pharmacy? The one other town they knew was Les Eyzies, where the museum was located. Bruno called the pharmacy there and was told that a tall, young foreigner had been waiting at their door when they opened. He’d bought bandages, antiseptic wipes and surgical gauze and had paid with a credit card. They gave Bruno the name and number, issued by a British bank, Barclays. Its owner was Edward G. Lloyd.

  9

  By the time Bruno arrived at the site, Clothilde had installed a security guard from the museum, roped off a field for parking and announced a thirty-minute photo opportunity followed by a press briefing back at the museum. He was impressed. She was standing by the site entrance where the cell phone reception was better, talking fiercely into her mobile and dressed in another shirt that he remembered seeing on Horst. She’d been wearing a skirt the previous evening and was in khaki slacks now and work boots. Bruno found himself hoping she’d spent the night with Horst; he deserved it, after the triumph of the lecture. And so, perhaps, did she.