The Crowded Grave

together and hadbreakfast at Fauquet’s, then he drove me to the dig where I saw you, and he went to the museum to deal with all the phone calls. He was out somewhere for lunch, and when I got back to the museum he’d gone to the dig.”
    “Had you been cooking? There’s an onion half sliced and an open bottle of wine.”
    “That’s not like him. Horst is positively anal about corking his wine and leaving his kitchen clean. And I told you, we went to Fauquet’s for coffee and croissants.” She sounded as if she were going to add something but then remained silent.
    “What is it, Clothilde?”
    “I suppose you ought to know. We had a row over breakfast, about that damn girl who caused all the trouble, the Dutch one. I wanted her sent home, off the dig, but Horst said I was overreacting. Her professor back in Leiden is a close friend of his, and he didn’t want to offend him.”
    “It doesn’t sound too serious.”
    “It got serious. It was my fault. I said he was giving her a break because she was young and pretty. It wasn’t fair, but I suppose I was worried about the farmers doing something to damage the dig or the museum. It had been on my mind overnight and I raised it when we woke up. We started to argue, and it got worse in the car and over breakfast. By the time we got to Les Eyzies we were hardly speaking.”
    “So he was upset?”
    “Yes, but he was much calmer than me. I tend to get emotional and he doesn’t, or at least he doesn’t show it. When we have rows he usually goes off to that friend of his for a few hours and lets me cool down.”
    “What friend?”
    “The Danish guy, Jan. You know him.”
    “The blacksmith?” Bruno asked.
    “Yes, they’re pretty close. But I called him before I calledyou, and he said he hadn’t seen Horst since the night at the museum. That was when I got worried.”
    “Anything else that might have upset him?”
    “Not that I know of. I’m worried sick now. If I hadn’t gotten so worked up … And that damn girl has gone anyway.”
    “You mean the Dutch girl? Gone where?”
    “Back to Holland, according to Teddy. She’s on the train to Paris now. She had a big fight with some of the other students when she turned up at the dig this morning because she hadn’t done the cooking and it was her turn. And then Kasimir attacked her about the animal rights stuff and somebody else complained they’d had to buy pizzas last night because there was no food and she tossed a fifty-euro note at them. Then it was ‘poor little rich girl,’ and she stormed off. Teddy persuaded one of the boys to give them a lift to the station.”
    “Has he gone too?”
    “No, just her. She wasn’t much use anyway. But Teddy’s good, in fact Horst and I had talked about offering him a research post at the museum once he graduates.”
    “Time for a visit to Jan, I think. See if he can throw any light on Horst.”
    Jan had been in the district for twenty years or so, much longer than Bruno, and his smithy had become a modest tourist attraction. The credit should go to his late wife, a local schoolteacher, who had started taking schoolchildren to watch a blacksmith at work and arranged for the
département
’s educational budget to pay a small fee to Jan for each visit. Then she began running guided tours of the smithy in the tourist season, with herself as guide. She had pushed him to make candlesticks and boot scrapers, table lamps and crucifixes and name plaquesfor houses, items that the tourists would buy. They soon started bringing in more money than the horseshoes and plow repairs and door fittings for house restorations that had so far made Jan a bare living. Eventually Jan realized that Anita had made herself so indispensable to his life that he’d married her.
    He still lived in the small farmhouse that he had bought and restored when he first arrived, but it had been Anita who had cajoled and bullied him into restoring the huge barn so that it looked like a smithy of the nineteenth century. The fire was stoked with a vast bellows that Jan could operate with a foot pedal. Jan was about Bruno’s height, but heavier, with massive arms and shoulders from his work, and with a healthy belly that looked as firm as rock despite his age. He wore wooden sabots on his feet and a heavy apron of cowhide, black with age and scorch marks. A black bandanna kept the sweat from his eyes, and the great bucket where he cooled the red-hot iron was made of wood and leather.
    The