Crime Fraiche Read Online Free PDF Page A

his first name, this is a world-class brand and you’re wasting its franchise with so little flow-through. You have to think of your business potential, your patrimony, your family.”
    Vienneau’s face hardened. “ Mon cher Bellanger,” he said almost rudely, “when we met in Paris, I made it quite clear to you that I would never sell my élevage. You told me you wanted to have a look at the ranch to use it as a comparison for some deal or other you were cooking up, and I was happy to have you down here for that and to invite you for a little shooting. But don’t even try to tempt me to sell out, because that will never happen. Have I made that perfectly clear?”
    With more diplomatic skill than Capucine would have ever thought she possessed, Marie-Christine calmed the crisis. She smiled a slightly bored, wifely smile at her husband. “Darling, why don’t you invite Alexandre—and Capucine, too, of course—to visit the élevage? If they could come on Monday, the day after tomorrow’s shoot, I could be there, too, and we could make a party of it. Wouldn’t that be fun?” As an afterthought she added, “Monsieur Bellanger would come along as well, naturally. We wouldn’t want to leave him out, now would we?”
    They stayed at the table happily for two more hours. In the end, the only one who didn’t enjoy himself was Oncle Aymerie, who played with his food and excused himself the moment the guests moved to the salon for coffee and liqueurs.

CHAPTER 4
    C apucine hung on for dear life. The back of the ancient Renault Estafette van had been stripped to a bare minimum decades before; all that was left were homemade wooden benches screwed in to either side of the back and three handrails welded into the roof. In the front seat, Emilien, Oncle Aymerie’s gamekeeper, a thick Gauloises Caporal glued to the corner of his mouth, drove erratically over the bumpy dirt road with the firm conviction that the pedals functioned only when fully depressed.
    “So, mon oncle,” Capucine shouted over the rattling din, “tell me about today’s shoot.”
    “He can’t hear you, mam’selle ,” Emilien said, turning around stiffly to address her, his face made cheerfully rosy by a latticework of bright red capillaries, the product of an abiding love of Calvados. “We’re doing the Sinner’s Wood, you know, the big wood in the southeast. We haven’t been there since opening day. Bound to be full of birds. Your shoulder’s going to be aching tonight,” he said, laughing the gurgling chuckle of an inveterate smoker of tabac brun .
    When the van shuddered to a stop, Oncle Aymerie jumped down, clipboard under his arm, with the energy of a Montgomery about to deploy his troops at the battle of El Alamein, and took sight of his terrain. He stared bleakly at Alexandre in his enormous plus fours, contemplated Capucine in her trim khaki corduroy hunting suit and loden cape draped over her shoulders, and consulted his clipboard. “I’m posting you and Alexandre together. That way he can keep you company and you can let him take the occasional shot if he gets bored,” he said with command briskness and strode briskly off.
    Alexandre sighed audibly with relief.
    Within half an hour, Capucine and Alexandre were at their station on the line, which ran down the length of a hundred-foot-wide swath cut into the wood. Alexandre was precariously perched on a shooting stick, one of those diabolical English devices that start out looking like canes but whose handles unfold into skimpy leather seats. A small pile of distressed shooting luggage—cartridge case, gun covers, ill-defined leather bags—staked their territorial claim. A hundred feet to their left the Vienneaus formed a similar tableau, Marie-Christine sitting primly on her shooting stick while Vienneau jangled tensely. A hundred feet to their left Henri Bellanger stared lustfully at the forest with the intensity of a pig expecting a feed of potato peels. He was weighed down by