The Crowded Grave

to pull herself together because Maurice would need her support. He strode out, ignoring Annette, spoke briefly to Pouillon to explain why he had to leave and then with a wink at Villatte he squeezed his way past the tractor and began walking to the end of the lane.
    “Sorry I took so long,” said Carlos, when he arrived. “Seems to be a demonstration at the gendarmerie and it held me up. Is there another way back?”
    “Yes, but it’s no faster,” Bruno said, taking off his képi so he’d be less easy to recognize. “And I ought to take a look at the demo.”
    The traffic was reduced to single file as they came off the side road, one of Sergeant Jules’s gendarmes controlling the flow. Already they could hear the bullhorns. When it was their turn to creep forward to the bend that opened onto the place de la Gendarmerie, the whole space seemed filled with tractors and farm equipment and a pungent smell of manure hung in the air. The Chasseurs Party had brought out some of the old HUNTERS ARE THE REAL GREENS banners from the last election. Bruno saw Alphonse from the local hippie commune with two of his goats in the back of his truck, Dominique standing beside her father waiting to take the bullhorn and the mayor in his tricolor sash talking to Philippe Delaron who was taking photos for
Sud Ouest
.
    “What are they protesting about?” Carlos asked, grinning as Bruno explained. “Anything I can do to help?”
    “Call Isabelle,” said Bruno. “Ask her to complain to the prefect that you can’t do your job because St. Denis is blocked by a protest against the local gendarmes arresting farmers. Make sure she tells the prefect that the mayor is leading the protest. Then ask her to call that gendarme general you met yesterday and complain to him.”
    “Here, take the wheel,” said Carlos, pulling the Range Rover onto the side of the road and thumbing his cell phone as he walked around the front of the car to take the passenger’s seat.
    J-J was already at the quarry, squatting outside the small blockhouse with the iron door where the explosives were kept. With him were Jeannot, the site foreman who had done twenty years in the army engineers, and a worried-looking man in a gray suit which carried traces of the yellow-gold limestone the quarry produced. The system of dead bolts and padlocks on the door seemed intact, but around the side of the low building lay a pile of broken bricks beneath a large hole.
    “The explosives were secured according to the regulations,” the man in the suit was saying.
    “You can have all the locks in the world, but they’re useless if they can crowbar their way through the bricks,” said J-J, ignoring the man in the suit to address his words to Bruno and Carlos.
    “What did they get away with?” Bruno asked.
    “There were sixteen sticks left in the case,” said Jeannot. “We only ever keep one case at a time in the store. The rest are at the secure depot at Périgueux.”
    “Let’s hope it’s more secure than this place,” said J-J. “The stuff could have been taken anytime from six last night until Jeannot here opened the quarry at eight this morning. They were blasting yesterday and had a permit to continue blasting today. Forensics will be here soon, but I’m not confident offinding much here. They also used wire cutters on the fence that seals this place off from the road. I say ‘they’ but it could have been a single man. The dynamite wouldn’t weigh much and my grandma could break through those bricks with a good crowbar.”
    “We reckon four sticks weigh a kilo,” said Jeannot. “It’s the usual stuff, ammonium dynamite, fifty percent strength, stabilized with gelatin and sawdust.”
    “What about blasting caps?” Carlos asked.
    “We use the electric-match type, and store them separately in the safe in the office. That wasn’t touched.”
    “So either it was a thief who didn’t know what he was doing, or one who knew perfectly well where else he could get some blasting caps,” said Bruno.
    “I’ve checked the employee list,” said J-J. “Everybody has worked here at least six years and there are no connections with any of the names on that list you sent me.”
    “How often do you have dynamite stored here?” Bruno asked Jeannot.
    “Every second or third week. But it depends. For the big blasts, we drill a ten-meter hole, ten centimeters wide, fill it with about a hundred pounds of ANFO and then tamp it down with six or so feet of