The Crowded Grave

quick look.”
    Bruno waited, wondering whether Kajte had said something to the Villattes or Maurice about his treating her wounds. If not, that left him with Carlos or Dominique as the most likely sources of the letter. Dominique didn’t like Kajte, but Bruno couldn’t see her wanting to denounce him. That left Carlos. But what possible motive could he have? And could he write a letter in French good enough to fool a French speaker?
    “Got it,” said Jules, coming back to the phone. “It was in a file in his drawer marked ‘Bruno,’ and it’s unsigned. I’ll make you a copy.”
    “Is it in good French?”
    “It’s no worse than half the anonymous letters we get. A couple of misspellings, some odd turns of phrase but nothing out of the ordinary. I can’t tell about the accents because it’s all typed in capital letters.”
    Before he set off on his search of the Internet sites, Bruno called an old contact at the French military archives and asked what their files had on Eurocorps. Carlos had served in it and been based in Strasbourg, where he’d learned his French. The old soldier at the archives said the Eurocorps records were remarkably good. He wrote down Carlos’s name and the units Bruno could recall and promised to call back. Bruno took the old stone stairs down to the square, heading for the town’s tourist office, where Kajte had done the photocopying that had first alerted him to her role in attacking the farms. He showed the sketches to Gabrielle, who looked at them carefully and said she was sure she had seen neither one.
    “And what finally happened to that Dutch girl?” she asked.
    “It turned out just as you suggested, Gabrielle. She went to the farmers and apologized and paid them compensation and she’s now back at work on the dig. The matter is closed, thanks to your excellent advice.
Merci
.”
    Patrick at the Maison de la Presse did not recognize the sketches, but the woman behind the counter at the Infomatique looked at them carefully, called over a male colleague, and they both pronounced themselves convinced that Galder, or someone very like him, had paid ten euros to use their computer for an hour late the previous afternoon, just before they closed at six. In fact, he was the last person to use it. Bruno immediately called Isabelle and asked for a fingerprint man to be sent.
    “He spoke really bad French,” said the man as they waited. He offered to check the cache to see what sites Galder had used, but Bruno told him that neither the chair nor table nor computer could be touched until the fingerprints had been checked. They remembered little else about him, except that he had paid for the computer time from an impressive roll of fifty-euro notes. He had arrived and left on foot with no sign of a vehicle. They did not recognize Fernando.
    Bruno went to the nearest shops—a small supermarket, a gift shop and a property sales and rental agency—but nobody recognized his sketches. Nor had they served any obvious foreigners the previous day. When he returned to the Infomatique, Yves had already arrived with a fingerprint man and was shining a flashlight sideways along the keyboard.
    “Not a trace,” he said. “It’s been well wiped.” Wearing gloves, he checked the memory cache and declared that wiped too. He searched for the computer’s IP address and scribbled a note of the number. Then he called Isabelle and gave her the number and asked if she wanted him to bring back the harddrive. Bruno couldn’t hear her answer, but Yves hung up and took a CD from his briefcase and inserted it into the computer, opened a browser and then called another number. He spoke briefly, and then a small window opened on the monitor screen, asking if the user agreed to surrender control. Yves hit the “Oui” window and sat back.
    “What’s happening now?” Bruno asked.
    “It’s the cyber guys in Paris. They linked in and have taken over the computer. They’ll download everything, which saves us having to take the hard drive. And Isabelle says she wants you back at the château.”
    Bruno stopped at the gendarmerie for Sergeant Jules’s photocopy and took it with him to show Isabelle. “This is the letter that made the magistrate try to get me fired,” he said. “I’m having trouble coming up with any likely suspect other than Carlos, and I remember one of the students telling me that he saw Carlos having coffee with Jan. Then there are things that you and the brigadier