The Crowded Grave

and Clothilde exchanged looks.
    “It’s a little early to be definite,” Clothilde said carefully. “We’ll say more at the lecture Horst is giving at the museum.”
    “You are coming, I hope,” Horst added.
    “It sounds like you’ve found something important,” said Bruno. “But I was coming anyway. By the way, what’s the winch for?” He pointed at the tripod structure.
    “It’s to lift that big flat stone at the bottom of the pit,” Horstsaid. “It has the same little hollows carved into it as the one at La Ferrassie, although that was forty thousand years earlier.”
    Bruno wondered briefly how Horst kept all these dates in his head. “Fascinating,” he said politely. “But today my main interest is this new body.”
    “I think we can safely say that it has no connection with our archaeology,” Horst said, with a smile. “Except, of course, that it was one of our diggers who found it.”
    Teddy heaved himself onto his feet, towering over the rest of the group. He must be more than six feet tall, thought Bruno, with shoulders to match. The Dutch girl barely came up to his chest. His nose had been broken, and looking at his imposing figure, Bruno felt a sudden curiosity.
    “Do you play rugby?”
    Teddy smiled for the first time. “Of course. I grew up in Wales, Pays de Galles, you call it. We all play rugby. I played at school and university.”
    “Gareth Edwards, Ieuan Evans,” said Bruno, naming the two recent greats of Welsh rugby. In this region, the cradle of French rugby, the two players were esteemed almost as highly as they were in Wales. And Wales explained Teddy’s unusual accent. “I saw Evans play, but Edwards only on TV. If you want a game while you’re here, we can bring you into a practice session at the club.”
    Teddy nodded eagerly. “That would be great.”
    A horn tooted from the road, and Bruno headed down the track to direct Fabiola. Parking her car on the road rather than risk the bumpy route to the dig, she handed Bruno her medical bag to carry before kissing him on both cheeks.
    “Is this your day off?” he asked, noting her jeans and sweatshirt rather than the neat trouser suits she invariably wore to work.
    She shook her head and explained she was helping clean outthe cupboard at the clinic and ditching pills and lotions that had been there for a decade and more.
    “I’m glad for the break,” she said, “even if it is a body. There were things in that cupboard growing mold. They’d been there since I was a schoolgirl and planning to be a ballerina rather than a doctor.”
    Bruno raised his eyebrows; he’d never heard that before. He introduced Fabiola to the group around the trench, observing the way their eyes first noted and then carefully avoided the long scar on Fabiola’s cheek, the legacy of a mountaineering accident. Bruno was no longer aware of it, and Fabiola simply ignored it. Her dress and demeanor boldly asserted that this was a self-confident and attractive woman who knew her own worth.
    Fabiola peered into the trench at the body. She pulled a small digital camera from the pocket of her jeans and photographed the scene from all aides. Then she looked at the narrow steps cut into each side of the trench.
    “Can I stand on those ledges to examine it?” she asked.
    “That’s why we cut them,” said Horst. “We had to brush away some of the soil. Here, take my arm.” He leaned forward to help Fabiola clamber carefully into the grave. Bruno placed her medical bag on the lip of the trench.
    “Can I have someone else down here, an archaeologist, to help clear away some of this earth?” Fabiola called. “I want a good look at that skull.”
    “You might see if there’s a wallet or anything that might identify the body,” Bruno suggested. He knew of no missing persons in St. Denis in the ten years since his own arrival, and there were no unsolved cases of missing persons in the files.
    Horst stepped down, and Teddy handed him a brush, a trowel and a plastic bag for the dirt. While Fabiola took more photos, Horst carefully exposed the top half of the skull. Hehanded the filled plastic bag to Teddy who handed him a fresh one. As Horst began to clear away more soil, Fabiola told him to stop and clambered down into the pit. She looked intently at the base of the skull, then took the brush and worked gently at the soil.
    “I’m pretty sure that’s a bullet hole,” she said, and looked up at Bruno. “At least he wasn’t buried