Martin Walker: The Crowded Grave

“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. “Ecrivez au ministere de l’Agriculture pour protester contre cinq annees supplementaires de cruaute 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 Perigord 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.