The Crowded Grave

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 theVillattes’ 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 hissaucer. “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