The Crowded Grave

covered stadium. It still gleamed with the coat of paint it had been given in the autumn for the start of the new rugby season. The dressing rooms, built of cinder blocks by local volunteers and painted white, were at one side, and on the other were small kiosks that served beer and grilled sausages on game days. Kajte and Teddy sat hunched together on the stadium steps. The girl’s face was white and drawn with pain. Bruno checked his watch. Nobody would be coming for the training session for hours yet.
    “I know you’ve been shot,” he said to Kajte. “Can you make it into the dressing rooms where you’ll be out of sight? If not, we can carry you.”
    “I got here on my own legs,” she said in excellent French. “I’ll just lean on Teddy.” She grimaced as she got to her feet and then limped down the steps and followed Bruno, who had his own key to the rooms. Inside, between the two dressing rooms for the home team and the visitors, was a passage that led to the big communal bath, a row of showers, and to a small medical room. A massage table stood against one wall.
    “Get out of those slacks and let me look at your injuries,”Bruno said. “Don’t worry. I’ve treated worse gunshot wounds than yours.”
    “I told her you said you wanted to fix this, if you could,” Teddy said to Bruno, helping Kajte onto the table and easing the khaki cargo pants over her bandages. There were two spots of blood on the bandages, none on her trousers. Bruno took a pair of scissors from the medical cupboard, cut the knot and then unrolled the thick bandages and gently peeled away the medical gauze. Kajte bit her lip but remained silent.
    The damage could have been worse. There were three small pellet wounds in one calf and about a dozen in the other, on the back of her thigh and her calf, some of them so close together that they almost met. She must have been turning to run when the bird shot hit her.
    “I’m surprised you could run after that,” Bruno said, bending her knee carefully to see the play of the ligaments.
    “Adrenaline,” said Teddy, and almost at the same time Kajte said, “He carried me.” They looked at each other and smiled. Bruno felt a rush of sympathy.
    “You’ve been lucky,” said Bruno. “Nothing near the knee and the ligaments look to be okay.” He turned to Teddy. “You sure you got all the pellets out?”
    “Every one. I counted, one pellet for every hole.”
    “Some of them are so close …,” Bruno muttered, peering to see. But none of the wounds seemed deep, and they’d stopped bleeding.
    “I used a magnifying glass. We all have them at the dig,” Teddy said.
    “You’ve cleaned her up well,” said Bruno, turning at the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside. A girl’s voice called, “Bruno?”
    “In here, Dominique,” he shouted back. “These two youknow,” he said as she stood by the door, looking into the room. “And this is Carlos, a colleague from Spain who’s been very helpful,” Bruno went on, explaining what had happened while Dominique’s surprise turned into something that looked like disapproval. It troubled him, and so he tried to find the words that would make her want to help. “If we can’t find a way to settle this amicably, Maurice could be in deep trouble. The farmers are going to react angrily, and I suspect your dad will be one of them. Why not explain to your two friends here what that might mean while I treat these shotgun wounds.”
    Bruno went back to the cupboard and returned with a bottle of iodine and a tube of antiseptic cream that contained an antibiotic. They used it for the serious cuts and grazes on the rugby field.
    “Dad was talking about it last night,” Dominique said. “All the farmers were upset after the attack on the Villattes, and a lot of them blame us at the dig. Some of them wanted to go and fill the dig in, so that’s why I dragged Dad along to the lecture, so he could understand how important it was. But all he could talk about on the way home was blocking off the way into the museum with piles of manure, like they did with the prefecture over milk prices.”
    The lid of the iodine bottle was a rubber bulb, with a long tube beneath. He warned Kajte that the iodine would sting, but she bit her lip and said nothing as he used the rubber bulb to squeeze a drop of iodine onto each of the fifteen pellet holes. Some of the brown liquid overflowed and trickled down her leg.
    “I hadn’t heard about the