“I don’t think she could pull out fence posts on her own,” Bruno replied. “She may have had help.”
“Does anyone know where she is?”
“Yes, she’s not digging today,” Bruno replied. “She’s on the kitchen rotation so she could be shopping or she might be back at the campsite. That’s where I was planning to go next.”
“Do you want to come with us?” Duroc asked, in a reluctant way that suggested he would rather not share the arrest.
“I’ll let you handle the paperwork,” said Bruno. “It could be complicated, her being a foreigner. You might want to check with Dr. Clothilde Daunier of the National Museum in Les Eyzies. She’s in charge of this dig, and she’s responsible for the students. I’m sure the magistrate will agree.”
“That’s seems the right thing to do,” Annette said in a small voice, avoiding Bruno’s eye.
“So you’ll leave it to me?” Duroc asked, a hint of suspicion in his voice.
“I have a security meeting with Monsieur Gambara here.” Bruno nodded at Carlos. “So she’s all yours.”
“I was just asking Monsieur Gambara what brought him to St. Denis.”
“We have a liaison meeting coming up nearby, and I asked Chef de Police Courreges to show me around the district,” Carlos said. “And after the lecture last night, I particularly wanted to see this famous site.”
“What’s this lecture?” Duroc demanded. “Nobody told me about any lecture.”
“Perhaps the magistrate can explain,” said Carlos. “But the chef de police and I have an appointment elsewhere. Capitaine, mademoiselle, I hope to see you again.”
Without looking at Bruno, he led the way down the path to the cars. With an apologetic gesture, Bruno hastened after him.
“Since I have no idea where we are meant to be going to this security meeting you mentioned, I’ll follow you,” said Carlos when they reached the road. Then he lowered his voice. “They don’t seem to know about the shooting yet.”
Conscious of Duroc’s eyes following him, Bruno took the road for Les Eyzies and then turned off at the railway crossing and followed a farm track to the back road through the woods to reach the St. Denis rugby stadium, avoiding the town center. As he skirted St. Chamassy, his cell phone beeped that he had a message. He pulled off to the side of the road to read it. In the mirror, he saw Carlos pull his Range Rover in behind and gestured from the window that he needed to answer a call. Carlos waved back, and raised a thumb.
“We are at the rugby stadium,” it said, and Bruno breathed a sigh of relief. Then he made a call to Dominique. He had not seen her at the dig, but when she answered she said that she was working on cataloging at the museum.
“Can you get away for an hour or so? It’s important,” he asked her. “It’s about two of your colleagues at the dig, Teddy and Kajte. I think I’m going to need your help.” Quickly he explained what had happened.
“There are a lot of rumors flying around about those two,” she said, but promised to come.
Bruno drove on and parked behind the tennis club, where his car would not be seen by any passing gendarme, and waited until Carlos pulled in beside him.
“Thanks,” he said, when Carlos climbed out. “I owe you for this.”
“It’s always fun to tease gendarmes,” said Carlos, grinning. “But can you tell me who or what you are trying to protect, and why?”
“Two young fools who have gotten mixed up in the animal rights movement and did that raid on the duck farm. You wanted to talk to them anyway, when you said that one kind of militant can easily become another. Now’s your chance, they’re hiding out at the rugby stadium.”
“Why don’t you want them arrested?”
“Because I don’t want two young lives ruined and I don’t want the farmers here getting angry with the archaeologists and the museum. Horst is a friend of mine,” Bruno said as his mobile phone buzzed on his belt. He checked the screen; it was Annette. He ignored it and led the way across the field to the tiny gate that led from the tennis club to the rugby field and its stadium, where two distant figures sat huddled together.
10
The town was very proud of its small covered stadium. It still gleamed with the coat of paint it had been given in the autumn for the start of the new rugby season. The dressing rooms, built of cinder blocks by local volunteers and painted white, were at one side, and on the other were small kiosks that served beer and grilled sausages on game days. Kajte and Teddy sat hunched together on the stadium steps. The girl’s face was white and drawn with pain. Bruno checked his watch. Nobody would be coming for the training session for hours yet.
“I know you’ve been shot,” he said to Kajte. “Can you make it into the dressing rooms where you’ll be out of sight? If not, we can carry you.”
“I got here on my own legs,” she said in excellent French. “I’ll just lean on Teddy.” She grimaced as she got to her feet and then limped down the steps and followed Bruno, who had his own key to the rooms. Inside, between the two dressing rooms for the home team and the visitors, was a passage that led to the big communal bath, a row of showers, and to a small medical room. A massage table stood against one wall.
“Get out of those slacks and let me look at your injuries,” Bruno said. “Don’t worry. I’ve treated worse gunshot wounds than yours.”
“I told her you said you wanted to fix this, if you could,” Teddy said to Bruno, helping Kajte onto the table and easing the khaki cargo pants over her bandages. There were two spots of blood on the bandages, none on her trousers. Bruno took a pair of scissors from the medical cupboard, cut the knot and then unrolled the thick bandages and gently peeled away the medical gauze. Kajte bit her lip but remained silent.
The damage could have been worse. There were three small pellet wounds in one calf and about a dozen in the other, on the back of her thigh and her calf, some of them so close together that they almost met. She must have been turning to run when the bird shot hit her.
“I’m surprised you could run after that,” Bruno said, bending her knee carefully to see the play of the ligaments.
“Adrenaline,” said Teddy, and almost at the same time Kajte said, “He carried me.” They looked at each other and smiled. Bruno felt a rush of sympathy.
“You’ve been lucky,” said Bruno. “Nothing near the knee and the ligaments look to be okay.” He turned to Teddy. “You sure you got all the pellets out?”
“Every one. I counted, one pellet for every hole.”
“Some of them are so close…,” Bruno muttered, peering to see. But none of the wounds seemed deep, and they’d stopped bleeding.
“I used a magnifying glass. We all have them at the dig,” Teddy said.
“You’ve cleaned her up well,” said Bruno, turning at the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside. A girl’s voice called, “Bruno?”
“In here, Dominique,” he shouted back. “These two you know,” he said as she stood by the door, looking into the room. “And this is Carlos, a colleague from Spain who’s been very helpful,” Bruno went on, explaining what had happened while Dominique’s surprise turned into something that looked like disapproval. It troubled him, and so he tried to find the words that would make her want to help. “If we can’t find a way to settle this amicably, Maurice could be in deep trouble. The farmers are going to react angrily, and I suspect your dad will be one of them. Why not explain to your two friends here what that might mean while I treat these shotgun wounds.”
Bruno went back to the cupboard and returned with a bottle of iodine and a tube of antiseptic cream that contained an antibiotic. They used it for the serious cuts and grazes on the rugby field.
“Dad was talking about it last night,” Dominique said. “All the farmers were upset after the attack on the Villattes, and a lot of them blame us at the dig. Some of them wanted to go and fill the dig in, so that’s why I dragged Dad along to the lecture, so he could understand how important it was. But all he could talk about on the way home was blocking off the way into the museum with piles of manure, like they did with the prefecture over milk prices.”
The lid of the iodine bottle was a rubber bulb, with a long tube beneath. He warned Kajte that the iodine would sting, but she bit her lip and said nothing as he used the rubber bulb to squeeze a drop of iodine onto each of
