The Crowded Grave

he could hardly have looked less like Bruno’s mental image of a descendant of Vikings. But he spoke good French, his eyes were keen with intelligence and he was not lacking in self-confidence.
    “That guy’s not a native Danish speaker,” said Harald, settling back into the passenger seat of Clothilde’s car as she climbed in. She handed a wrapped brown-paper parcel that contained a shapely wrought-iron candlestick to Bruno, who was sitting in the backseat.
    “You’re sure?” Bruno asked. “This is really important.”
    “His Danish was okay, but he’d never fool another Dane. I’d say he was originally German, probably from Hamburg or somewhere,” said Harald, swiveling in his seat to look at Bruno. “What’s this about?”
    “I’m not sure yet, but the professor has disappeared mysteriously. Jan was his closest friend in these parts, and now it seems there’s something suspicious about him. I’ll take this candlestick he wrapped and check his fingerprints, see if we can find out anything else. How much do I owe you for the candlestick, Clothilde?”
    “If it helps find Horst, consider it a gift,” she said, starting the car and heading back toward St. Denis. “This all seems a bit cloak-and-dagger, you hiding in the backseat.”
    “Better not to raise Jan’s suspicions,” said Bruno. “It seemed natural enough for you to bring along a young Danish student to meet the only other Dane in the district. Just so long as it didn’t make Jan think he was being checked out.”
    “No, I was pretty casual, just asking him what he liked about the area, why he’d stayed, if he missed going back to Denmark, that kind of thing,” said Harald, who had evidently enjoyed his brief foray into police work. “And I asked him if he knew who’d won the Danish soccer final—just friendly chitchat.”
    “Did he know?”
    “No. He said he sometimes got
Politiken
to keep up with the news, but he didn’t follow sports much. That surprised me a bit because he had a copy of
L’Équipe
in front of him when I saw him in a café early this morning. That’s your sports paper, isn’t it?”
    “It is, indeed,” Bruno said. “Could Jan’s accent come from being born on the border? He said everybody there spoke German as much as Danish.”
    “He’s right about that, but they’re still Danes. I had a girlfriend from down there once and visited her a few times. They speak Danish like me, and he doesn’t. I’m sure he’s not one of us.”
    “Anybody else there?”
    “Some young guy. We weren’t introduced, and he didn’t speak, but I was pretty sure he didn’t understand the Danish we were speaking.”
    “I’m not even sure he understood my French,” added Clothilde.
    Bruno nodded, remembering the young relative of Juanitahe’d met at the smithy when he called, the one that Jan had said was learning the business. The name escaped him. When Clothilde dropped him at the
mairie
, Bruno took the wrapped candlestick in his own car to the château at Campagne. The workmen had been replaced by armed security guards who called up to Isabelle before letting him enter.
    Isabelle had installed herself in what must have been the master bedroom. It was vast, with high ceilings and three tall
portes-fenêtres
that opened on a broad balcony overlooking the gardens. Beyond the château wall, Bruno could just see the wind sock of the helicopter pad. Inside the room was an old-fashioned four-poster bed draped in great swoops of heavy cream damask.
    “Apparently there was a lovely scene of nymphs and cherubs on the ceiling but they couldn’t save it so they had to paint over it,” she said from the Louis XVI armchair at the elegant desk that stood before the central window. A huge bouquet of flowers dominated the desk.
    “You could get used to living like this,” Bruno said.
    “Not really,” said Isabelle, gesturing at the small and functional folding table beside her desk. It held two mobile phones and a military radio. Leaning against it was a bulletin board thumbtacked with security team rosters and phone numbers. “I seem to bring this chaos with me.”
    “Are you sleeping here?” he asked.
    She shook her head. “The bed isn’t even made up. I stay at the hotel across the road, but I hate working out of a hotel bedroom. This is perfect.”
    She looked at the parcel in Bruno’s hands, smiling, and surprised him when she asked, “Is that a present?”
    “Yes, of course,” he said, recovering