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are usually a waste of my time. The shot is invariably in the epidermis, where it will work its way out. Even if a pellet made its way under the skin, that would only be dangerous if it found its way into an artery, and there’s nothing I could do about that.” He laughed virtuously, daubing a vile-looking yellow antiseptic on the wounds. “Anyhow, Monsieur Henri here only has eleven pellets in his epidermis. They’ll hurt like blazes for a week or two and then start to pop out when he shaves. It’s not the first time it’s happened to you, eh, Henri?” he said, addressing the beater in the familiar tu .
    Capucine was always horrified at the callousness of country life. Two of the pellets were less than an inch from the man’s eyes. She wondered if Homais would have been so cheerful if he had been blinded.
    Even Henri agreed that he was too woozy to return to the shoot and reluctantly accepted to be driven home to be entrusted to his wife.
    “I wonder,” Alexandre mused, “if that pharmacist worries about the risk of practicing medicine without a license. Particularly in front of a flic. One reads that that sort of thing is the nemesis of his breed.”
    “What an odd thing for you to be thinking about,” Capucine said.
    “You know, of course,” said Alexandre, “that it was none other than the good Monsieur Bellanger who did the damage.”
    “How can you be so sure?”
    “We were posted next to him. As I was knocking birds out of the sky right and left, I noticed that a pheasant had walked out of the wood. Poor thing seemed to think that hoofing it was the safest course of action. But when he reached the clearing and saw all the hullabaloo, he changed his mind and took to wing. Bellanger, apparently, is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and fired when the bird was barely at head height. I heard the beater’s shout just after Bellanger’s shot went off. Vienneau explained to me that in sporting circles shooting birds that are not really flying is not the done thing at all, but in Bellanger’s defense the bird actually had both feet off the ground.”

CHAPTER 5
    T he next day, well aware that she had exhausted Alexandre’s patience with Nimrod’s pursuits, Capucine asked Odile to prepare a picnic basket, put it in the back of the Clio, and drove Alexandre to the forest for a day of mushrooming. Capucine had never quite believed it, but according to him, Alexandre was a rabid mycologist, apparently happiest when rooting for rare mushrooms in dense cover. Many was the time she had seen him in paroxysms of delight over some fungal treasure he had uncovered in a Paris market, but she had yet to observe him à l’œuvre in the great outdoors. She had consulted Emilien, the gamekeeper, about the most promising spots in the forest. Clearly a mushroomer himself, he had hemmed and hawed and defended his secrets, but eventually his feudal spirit won out and he admitted he might reveal one or two of his pet locations if Capucine swore her eternal silence.
    The morning was an idyll. It was a perfect autumn day, almost too warm once the sun toasted off the chilly snap. Alexandre grubbed in the ground cover on his hands and knees as happily as a little boy. It turned out he really was as familiar with the inhabitants of the undergrowth as she was with the denizens above ground. Normally chronically impatient, he seemed delighted to poke around endlessly. Within an hour Alexandre’s irritation at being deprived of his beloved Paris was long gone and he had reverted to his former self, telling stories that she had never heard, as bubbly as if he had been sitting in a Paris café.
    All of a sudden he exclaimed, “ Langue de bœuf! ” and held up a disgusting fungus that did look exactly like a cow’s oxblood-red tongue. A few minutes later it was “ tricholome de la Saint-Georges ” and then “ pleurottes, ” followed by “ pieds de mouton. ” The basket was nearly full. They walked down a lane,