The Crowded Grave by Martin Walker Read Free Book Online

sheet or a copy of an ID card or wedding certificate. Nor did he recognize the crude leaflet when Bruno showed it to him. Then Bruno went to the Infomatique, where they repaired computers and sold office supplies and charged twice as much as Patrick for a photocopy. Locals knew this, but strangers might not. Finally he tried the tourist information bureau down by the river, where Gabrielle, a tennis club friend, ran the small Internet center, sold rail tickets and looked after the photocopier.
    “No, I don’t recognize that leaflet, but then I never really look,” she told him.
    “Any batch jobs?”
    “We did do a lot for those students at the archaeology dig yesterday, maybe the day before. Cooking rotations and worksheets and other paperwork,” she said. “Nice young girl, Dutch. It must have been fifty or sixty sheets.”
    “Did you see what it was she was copying? Did you load the machine?”
    “No, someone came in for a ticket to Bordeaux, and the girl knew how to run it anyway. I just checked the number counter at the end and charged her.”
    “You’d recognize her again?”
    “Certainly. She was here for ages, used the computer for her e-mails.”
    “Has it got one of those history buttons that tells you which websites you’ve visited?”
    “Yes, but I don’t know how long it goes back. Mind you, it hasn’t been busy. No tourists this time of year. That’s why I let her stay so long on the computer. Usually it’s an hour maximum, thirty minutes if we’re busy.”
    Gabrielle fired up the computer and clicked open Internet Explorer. But the Delete Browsing History function had been applied. Damn, thought Bruno. Maybe this won’t be so easy.
    “Wait a minute. She was saying she didn’t like Explorer,” Gabrielle interrupted. “She has a Mac at home, she said, and she likes Apple and hates Microsoft. So maybe she’d have used another browser …”
    Her voice trailed off, and she opened the Firefox browser, waited for it to load and clicked “History.” The fourth item was petafrance.com and the fifth was peta.nl for the Netherlands.
    “Can you print that page out for me, please, Gabrielle, and sign and date it?” He waited until she was done and then clicked the PETA France Web page. As he expected, it was connected to a page on foie gras.
“Écrivez au ministère de l’Agriculture pour protester contre cinq années supplémentaires de cruauté du foie
gras.”
Write to the minister of agriculture to protest against five more years of foie gras cruelty.
    Bruno considered the contrast between the good sense of a civil appeal to ministerial reason and the pulling down of fences. He had no problem with writing to a minister. Criminal damage to the property of a perfectly legal and not-very-prosperous farmer was another matter, quite apart from the squashed bodies of ducks and geese he recalled from the morning.
    “And print that out too, if you would.”
    He clicked on the PETA site for the Netherlands. He couldn’t read the Dutch, but he read the names of celebrities and movie stars who seemed to be lending their names to its campaigns. Then there was what looked like a vegetarian recipe to make some kind of foie gras substitute. It seemed to be mainly mushrooms.
    “What’s this about, Bruno?”
    “The Villattes. Somebody pulled down their fences last night and let the ducks and geese out. It seems your nice Dutch girl may have been involved.”
    Gabrielle put her hand to her mouth and stared at him. “What are you going to do? Arrest her?”
    “Well, I’d have to be sure it was her first. And I don’t think she acted alone, so I’ll have to find out who else was involved. Was she alone when she came here?”
    Gabrielle nodded. “She was at first, then a bunch of other students came in and took some of the tourism leaflets. She left with them. And I remember now, they called her Katie. But she was very polite, thanked me when she paid for the photocopies and the computer time. I