The Crowded Grave

war in Bosnia. Now Isabelle’s gift stood beside it on the shelf.
    “Gigi has to go out and patrol the grounds first, and we’ll meet again tomorrow,” he said as he turned on the porch light and saw them out. Gigi looked mournfully after Isabelle and then up at his master.
    “She’s still our friend, Gigi,” he said. He grabbed his coat and led the dog into the shadows around the enclosure where he kept his ducks and hens. “And that’s all she is.”

13
    Bruno had learned to worry whenever Capitaine Duroc looked triumphant. As he stalked out of the gendarmerie pulling on his gloves against the early morning chill Duroc looked very smug indeed. Following him in a dark blue trouser suit beneath an open black raincoat, Annette seemed impassive. She still looked astonishingly young, almost like a schoolgirl dressing up in her older sister’s clothes. Alongside her was a stranger, a small, dark-haired man in blue overalls and rubber boots with some sort of badge on his chest pocket and a large black bag in his hand. Pouillon emerged from his warm Citroën, its engine purring to keep the heater going. Still glowing from a jog through the woods with Gigi followed by a brisk shower, Bruno barely felt the cold. But beside him Maurice was shivering despite his overcoat.
    “You’re probably aware that temporary security precautions have delayed my investigation into the shooting and wounding that took place at your farm,” Duroc told Maurice. “In the meantime, the magistrate has asked me to investigate reports of breaches of the hygiene regulations at your farm. You will now accompany us while Inspector Varin here from the INRA office in Bordeaux makes his report.”
    Damn Duroc, Bruno thought, and damn Annette too. They had planned this carefully. The inspector from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique had either gotten up very early to reach St. Denis or had been called in late yesterday. They were determined to get Maurice for something, and once Duroc had him in the gendarmerie they could put pressure on him over the shooting.
    Bruno felt Annette staring fixedly at him. Any hint of that understanding he thought they had reached was gone. Beside him, Maurice looked ashen. Bruno’s heart sank as he thought of that gift of foie that Maurice had left at his house the previous evening. He must have killed the ducks sometime that afternoon, but he only had a license to rear them. Although few farmers observed the rule, animals for human consumption were supposed to be killed in a licensed abattoir.
    “Aren’t they supposed to give some kind of notice of an inspection?” Bruno asked Pouillon in a whisper. The lawyer shook his head. Bruno had another worrying thought. The insurance company would pay Maurice’s legal fees if he was accused on the firearms charge, but not for illegal killing of his own ducks. Maurice had no money for lawyers.
    “The inspector and the magistrate and Monsieur Soulier will come with me,” Duroc said, pausing to escort Annette to the gendarmerie van. “The rest of you may follow, as you wish.”
    Bruno called out to Pouillon, who was about to climb into his car, to ask if they could drive together. They needed to talk without Duroc or Annette being able to overhear. This latest gambit by Annette and Duroc, Pouillon warned as they followed the gendarmerie van, was something for which he had not prepared. He had read the relevant parts of the Code Criminel on firearms, and he believed they could mount a very strong defense. But the hygiene regulations were different,complex and constantly being updated. The most dangerous provision of the law for Maurice would be the clause prohibiting unlicensed slaughter, even for personal consumption.
    “You know what always worried me most when I was magistrate, Bruno?” Pouillon went on. “It was the fear of doing something so stupid that the public felt justified in taking the law into their own hands. You know the kind of thing, blocking roads with their tractors, sending flocks of sheep into official buildings and dumping strategically placed heaps of manure. Nothing really violent, of course, that might justify the state in taking strong action.”
    “You mean the kind of spontaneous public demonstration that makes the law look like an ass and the authorities look worse?” Bruno said, as he began to understand. “Like enforcing an unpopular law that is widely ignored.”
    “Exactly,” Pouillon replied. “Particularly