The Crowded Grave

just doing office work, and then I got interested in the logistics of it and went to Madagascar to help run the office there and the depot with the food and medical supplies. I was there for three years, which is why I’d forgotten most of the law I’d learned. That’s where I took up rally driving. But I found myself getting really concerned about France and politics and migrants and the Front National and, you know—the whole mess.”
    “We know,” said Fabiola. “But how did you find out what was going on from Madagascar?”
    “I used to be on the Internet on this terrible phone connection for hours at a time at night, trying to keep up with the French news. And friends in the Paris office would make sure they put back copies of newsmagazines into the supplies that came out. Then I came back to Paris and worked as a legal assistant for an organization that tried to help Muslim women integrate. Mainly it meant learning to navigate the bureaucracy, which confirmed me in my plan to become a magistrate.”
    Bruno nodded, impressed. Médecins Sans Frontières was an operation he respected. And he approved of people who wanted to experience something of real life along with their studies. Running a food and medical depot in Africa must have been a challenge for a young woman who still looked barely out of her teens. He could understand her nervousness at her first posting, even understand her suspicion of a local policeman like him who must have seemed prickly and set in his ways. And he’d been a soldier in France’s postcolonial wars in an Africa that she knew from a different perspective.
    But how could a young woman so obviously intelligent be taken in by the blundering Capitaine Duroc? And why had she been so vindictive against that sweet couple Maurice andSophie? Worse still, Annette had no idea what would happen tomorrow when she was hit by the counterattack of St. Denis in the media and she discovered that the story was no longer about foie gras but about her. The mayor was a veteran politician who knew how this game was played.
    Fabiola brought in her mother’s dish, a risotto made with fish stock, and
coquilles St. Jacques
, brushed with olive oil and grilled, on a separate platter. The rice was perfect, the short-grain Italian variety that was made for risotto. The scallops still had their roe attached. Fabiola hovered over the dishes before serving, looking both shy and proud as she presented her first dinner party in St. Denis.
    “I used the crayfish shells left over from your birthday dinner, Bruno, to make the stock for the risotto. Pamela showed me how to do it.”
    “It’s wonderful, Fabiola,” he said, and it was. “Truly, it’s perfection with these scallops. Annette, what do you say?”
    “I seldom eat fish, but I’ll make an exception for this, Fabiola, anytime you want to cook it.”
    The apple tart from Pamela’s recipe was pronounced an equal success, and as Fabiola took the plates away and started to make coffee, Bruno asked Annette if she had managed to do any more rally driving. Not enough, came the answer, with what she tactfully called the drama under way in St. Denis. But Fabiola had shown her the motor-cross course in the woods nearby that the farmer rented out for weekend races. He was happy for Annette to try it out and she was planning to use it again early the next morning.
    “Want to come for a ride?” she asked him.
    “Try it, Bruno, it’s fun,” said Fabiola, bringing the smell of fresh coffee with her from the kitchen. “Annette took me on a few circuits. I never thought you could go so fast on forest tracks.”
    “I’d love to, but I have to ride Hector in the morning,” he said.
    “I’ll be riding Victoria tomorrow while Fabiola rides Bess, so we can hit the circuit after that,” said Annette. “It won’t be long, just enough to give you the flavor.”
    “In that case, sure, and thank you. But I have to get an early start tomorrow, so I can come if we take the horses out at dawn,” he said. “I’ll skip the coffee, if you don’t mind. I have to walk Gigi and then unpack.” He looked across at Fabiola. “I trust Pamela told you she asked me to stay here to look after the horses while she’s away?”
    “Yes, and we’re going to have a full house. Florence is staying in the spare room overnight rather than wake the children, and Annette’s bedding down on the couch.”
    “Rather than use a couch there’s a spare room in Pamela’s