The Crowded Grave

guilty about sending you into that fire-fight,” Bruno said. “And so he damn well should. There was no need for you to be there.”
    “I volunteered,” she said crisply. “And as you can see, I’m making a complete recovery. But enough of that. Tell me about yourself. Are you happy? Is your Englishwoman looking after you? I always found it hard to read your face.”
    “I’ve become a horseman, thanks to her. She taught me to ride, and I love it. Perhaps we appreciate skills more when we learn them when we’re older. I had to work at riding, and it gives me enormous pleasure.” He looked across at her, leaning back into the corner of the car seat, studying him with fond amusement. “Do you ride?”
    “No, but then I’m not in the rural police,” she said. He could hear the gentle teasing in her voice. “I like the thoughtof you patrolling the far reaches of St. Denis on horseback, like an old-fashioned
garde-champêtre
, or perhaps like a sheriff in a Western. Bruno, the fastest gun in the Périgord.”
    He laughed. Two could play at this game. “And now you’re the queen of the committees, a rising star among officials, with generals and prefects deferring to your leadership,” he said. “A woman with a future.”
    “A woman with a career,” she said quietly as he turned up the lane that led to his home. “I’m good at it and I’m proud of it. And I’m not going to let this leg slow me down.”
    Bruno nodded, giving what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Inwardly he sighed. This was the irony that governed them and that had doomed their affair. Everything that made him love her, Isabelle’s courage and her drive and self-confidence, was locked inextricably into her job and her determination to excel. And that meant living in Paris and working at the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior on place Beauvau. If she gave that up and returned to live with Bruno, she’d probably succeed J-J as chief detective for the
département
. But diminished by the curtailing of her own ambition, she’d no longer be the Isabelle he loved. And if he accepted her offer to move to Paris, giving up his hunting and his garden and all his friends and roots in St. Denis, he knew he’d no longer be the Bruno that she loved. He wasn’t made to live in a city. He’d be unhappy and resentful in a way that would slowly but certainly undermine whatever happiness they found together. He had pondered it and thought it through to the same bleak conclusion on dozens of solitary evenings and walks in the woods with Gigi. But it didn’t stop him thinking of might-have-beens.
    As he rounded the last bend she lowered the car window and poked her head out, shouting “Gigi, it’s me,” and opening the door before Bruno had fully stopped to welcome thegalloping basset hound, his short legs pounding and his long ears flapping as he leaped into Isabelle’s lap and licked passionately at her neck.
    Bruno left them to their reunion, musing how much easier such encounters seemed to be for dogs than for humans, and took the packet of foie from the barn. He let himself in the back door and opened the front one for his guests. Isabelle laid the table and J-J made more drinks from the supply Bruno kept in his kitchen. Carlos, who had brought two bottles of Rioja from a case in the back of his Range Rover, leaned against the window frame to watch.
    Bruno put a kettle on to boil and from his larder took a large glass jar filled with an
enchaud de porc
he had made earlier in the winter, a fillet of pork cooked and preserved in duck fat and garlic. Usually he served it cold, but the night was chilly so he spooned the duck fat into a frying pan to melt on low heat, sliced the fillet and put it into the oven to warm, along with four plates. He peeled and sliced some potatoes, threw in some salt and added them to the boiling water. Then he cut thick slices from the fat round loaf of
pain de campagne
and put them under the grill. Without being told, Isabelle took the cheese from the refrigerator, half of a Tomme d’Audrix that Stéphane made and some
cabécous
of goat cheese from Alphonse. She put them on a wooden board and took it into the dining room.
    “Making your special foie?” she asked on the way out. When he nodded she said, “I’ll come back to watch. Anything I can do?”
    “Peel and slice those shallots,” he said, and for a moment it was as though she had never left, each of them falling into the familiar kitchen