The Crowded Grave

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 now 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 versiondown. 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 Brunosaw 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