The Crowded Grave

Horst’s cleaning. She hadn’t seen him, and there was no answer when she went to knock on his door. The woman used her key to let herself in and had told Clothilde the place looked as if there’d been trouble. Furniture had been knocked over.
    “I’ll go and check his house and call you back,” Bruno told Clothilde. He hung up and then he tried Horst’s mobile number, but there was no reply. He set off for Horst’s home. The neighbor let him in, and at first Bruno thought she must have exaggerated when she’d told Clothilde the house was in disarray. One of the chairs at the big round table had been knocked over and some papers had been spilled on the floor.
    “You might want to accompany me while I look around,” Bruno told her. “I think we’d both feel reassured.”
    Horst had many years earlier bought a small and half-ruined house, one of a row of cottages just outside St. Denis on the road to Ste. Alvère, and by the time Bruno had arrived in the town he’d restored the place in a way that was both functional and lavish. The downstairs was one large room with a big round table where Horst worked and ate, a couple of armchairs and an expensive stereo system, its power light glowing red. The walls were lined with shelves for books, CDs of classical music and files and papers.
    Horst’s laptop was open on the table, its power cable trailing down to a plug in the floor. The screen was dark, but it lit up when Bruno pressed the ENTER button, open at the front page of
Die Welt
. Bruno checked the date; it was yesterday’s. He noted with surprise that it was still connected to the Internet.Horst was paranoid about viruses and had often warned Bruno never to leave a computer connected when not in use. The commands were all in German, but he moved the cursor to the place where the HISTORY button was usually found to see what Horst had been looking at. Another surprise; he’d been looking at peta.de sites on foie gras and animal cruelty.
    Upstairs looked tidy, the big double bed neatly made and the bathroom clean, towels hanging folded on their rails and toothbrushes and toothpaste in their jar. The bedroom was large, and the bathroom was the most luxurious Bruno had seen in St. Denis, with a large Jacuzzi bath and a separate shower stall with nozzles spraying water from every possible direction. With a smile, he remembered one evening over dinner when Clothilde had joked she had only started her affair with Horst so that she could use his bathroom. The kitchen seemed like an afterthought, a lean-to attached to the rear of the house but filled with expensive German appliances. The kitchen door led to Horst’s small terrace and garden and the space where he parked his car. Unable to park in front of the cottages, Bruno had driven into the alley and parked beside Horst’s familiar black BMW with the Cologne registration. He checked that the doors were locked.
    It was the kitchen that worried Bruno, the chopping board with an onion half sliced, a splash of olive oil in an empty frying pan and the refrigerator door ajar. A bottle of Château de Tiregand 2005 was open on the counter, a half-filled wineglass beside it. Horst was careful about his wine. He’d never have left a decent bottle uncorked. Horst’s overcoat was hanging on the rack by the front door, and his leather gloves were in the pockets. The morning had been cold enough that he’d have worn them if he’d been going out.
    The wooden floorboards, golden with age and layers of wax,were highly polished by the conscientious cleaner, and Bruno knelt down to see if there were any marks that might suggest a scuffle. There were some smears on the wax by the round table and more by the kitchen door. On the kitchen floor were two thin black parallel lines leading past the refrigerator to the back door. It could have been feet being dragged. On the side of the half-open refrigerator door was a reddish-brown smear that might have been a meat sauce, or it might have been blood. The back door was closed and locked, but it was a Yale so it would have locked itself.
    “Don’t touch anything,” said Bruno, when he saw the woman take a cloth from her apron. “Have you done any cleaning since you looked in when Clothilde called?” She shook her head.
    “When did you last see Horst?”
    “Yesterday morning, quite early,” she said. “He came in to give me my week’s money and then he and Clothilde left in his car. I didn’t see it come back last