Free The Grave Gourmet by Alexander Campion Page B

pulling your leg. He’s a funny one, Rolland. I’ve never been able to figure him out. This whole ortolan thing really is very much ado about very little. The general public likes to think of it as some sort of highly secret black mass of the obscenely rich. But in fact in the Landes any number of restaurants serve ortolan more or less openly. They don’t actually put them on the menu, of course, and they’re certainly not cheap, but they’re easy enough to get if you ask. And they don’t really do that funny business with the napkins except at frou-frou dinners. Anyway, no one is going to bother sneaking ortolans into Diapason in the middle of the night.” He paused. “Also, when you think about it, since those boys with the 2:30 A.M . bag were staggering under the load, there would have been enough birds to feed an army if that’s what it was filled with. I hardly see Jean-Basile wholesaling endangered game on the side.”
    Capucine pouted. “So that damned man was just having his little joke at the expense of a foolish girl wannabe flic, is that it? What do you need to do to be taken seriously in this business?” As Alexandre attempted to hug her she slipped out from under his embrace and stalked off to the bedroom.

Chapter 12
    W hen she arrived at the Quai the next morning, an angry red lozenge throbbed on Capucine’s screen: an urgent e-mail convoking her to a meeting with Tallon that had been scheduled for fifteen minutes earlier. Rushing into his office, she was dismayed to find Rivière already there. At first she thought she was the latecomer at some sort of early-morning male-bonding session. But no, Rivière was slumped dejectedly in his chair while Tallon leaned on the sill of his open window moodily meditating on the scene below. The room was damp with defeat and unfulfilled expectation.
    The last few days’ newspapers were heaped in an unruly pile on the corner of Tallon’s desk. They had not been kind to the Police Judiciaire. The press had lost interest in Delage for three days, but a lull in domestic and international news had incited a number of editors to inflate the case into a minor cause célèbre. The police were accused of indifference and incompetence, and an outrage had been fabricated from whole cloth describing a quasi-government employee dining at the public’s expense in a restaurant where a meal for four cost more than the monthly minimum wage. In actual fact Renault had been privatized for over a decade and Delage had paid out of his own pocket. Tallon must be under considerable pressure from his superiors to produce results or, at the very least, some newsworthy bones to throw the press.
    As Capucine stood at the desk waiting to be invited to sit, three brigadiers in the courtyard below were in the process of extracting two Arab men from a police van. The detainees’ hands were cuffed behind their backs and they had difficulty getting out. One lost his balance and stopped to steady himself. A brigadier slapped the back of his head to get him moving, hard enough for the crack to be heard in the room. Tallon shook his head in disappointment. It was not clear if the disappointment was with the brigadiers in the courtyard or the situation in general. He spun his chair and focused on Capucine.
    â€œLieutenant, if you remain in the Brigade Criminelle you will discover that these cases usually go one of two ways. Sometimes the right lead pops up immediately. Then everyone is happy. The press becomes like a litter of fawning puppy dogs licking our photogenic officers, like Lieutenant Rivière here, as they pose for pictures and gloat about their victories. Or, sometimes, nothing comes up and we have to do the work of real flics.”
    He paused. Capucine waited for the other shoe to fall. Eventually he resumed, “And that’s what we have to start to do now: cast our net very wide and draw it in very slowly and very