The Crowded Grave

by Martin Walker

  “I think I know who it is,” said Sandrine. “It’s those students at the archaeology site who came in last week, working on some dig with that German professor, over toward Campagne. They’re all staying at the municipal campground. This time of year, they’re the only strangers around here and you know what those students are like. They’re all Greens now.”

  Bruno nodded. “I’ll check it out. See you later.” Along the fence he saw the fluttering of another of the leaflets inside a plastic bag, one of the kind that could be sealed and used in freezers. He took out a handkerchief and gingerly removed the pins that held it to the wire. Forensics might get something from it. There were several more attached along the fence and he took another. He nodded at Alain. “Do you want to come with me? You’ll have to move your tractor.”

  As he reached the road, where the jam was steadily clearing itself, Bruno’s phone rang again. He checked the screen, saw the name “Horst,” and this time he answered. Horst Vogelstern was the German professor of archaeology in charge of the student volunteers at the dig. For more than twenty years Horst had spent his vacations at a small house he owned on the outskirts of St. Denis. He ran digs in the Vézère Valley that the local tourist board liked to proclaim as the cradle of prehistoric man. The first site of Cro-Magnon man had been found in the valley over a hundred years earlier, and the famous cave paintings of Lascaux were farther up the river. It was a source of pride to Bruno that he lived in this valley that could claim the longest continuous human habitation of anywhere on earth.

  Bruno had attended a couple of Horst’s lectures, delivered in excellent if strongly accented French. He had visited his digs and read a couple of articles Horst had published in the popular monthly Dossiers d’Archéologie. Normally a quiet man, Horst became passionate when he talked of his subject, the great mystery of the replacement of the Neanderthals by the Cro-Magnons some thirty thousand years ago. Had it been violent? Did they interbreed? Were the Neanderthals wiped out by some plague or disease? It was, said Horst, the crucial question regarding our human origins. Whenever Horst spoke, Bruno caught a sense of the excitement that gripped the scholar.

  “Horst,” he answered. “How are you? I was just on my way to see you at the dig.”

  “Good, we need you here right away. And you had better bring a doctor with you. We’ve found a body.”

  “Congratulations. Isn’t that what you wanted to find?”

  “Yes, yes, but I want skeletons from the distant past. This one is wearing a St. Christopher medal around his neck and I think he’s also wearing a Swatch. This is your department, Bruno, not mine.”

  2

  As Horst led Bruno past the parallel trenches and the chessboard pattern of white string that defined the work of the site, Bruno was struck as always by the careful dedication of the archaeological team. Using fine brushes to tease away the soil from a possible find and sifting each handful of earth through a sieve, they barely looked up as he passed. Some of them were in trenches so deep that he had to peer down to see them, provoking them to look up as his body blocked what little sunlight they had.

  He heard a shout. “Bruno!” He turned to see a pretty girl with fair hair and a slim build jumping across the trenches toward him.

  “Dominique,” he exclaimed, as he received the embrace of a young woman he had known since she was a child. Her father, Stéphane, was one of Bruno’s regular hunting partners. He ran a small dairy farm in the hills and made the Tomme d’Audrix cheese that Bruno loved. Each winter since Bruno had arrived in St. Denis he had been invited to the killing of the family pig, and he and Dominique always had the job of rinsing out the intestines in the freezing water of the nearest stream. Now at the university in Grenoble, she was a militant but very realistic member of the Green Party. “I was coming up to the farm to see you. Your dad invited me to Sunday lunch.”

  “You’re here for the body?” she said, hanging on to his arm.

  “Right. I’d better get a look at it, but I’ll probably see you Sunday.”

  “No, I’ll see you tonight at the museum. You have to come to the professor’s lecture. It’s a big announcement, but we’re all sworn to secrecy.”

  She darted off, leaving Bruno to cast his eyes over the site. Close to the overhang of rock, the trenches gave way to a large pit, at least twelve feet square and nine feet deep, with metal ladders propped against the sides. At the bottom, a large flat rock with curious cup-shaped holes in its surface was being worked on by three archaeologists. They were using brushes so fine they could have belonged to portrait painters. Even from this height, Bruno could see the brown smoothness of newly exposed bones. He looked inquiringly at Horst, assuming this was the skeleton that had prompted the call. The people working with the brushes did not look up. Their continued concentration struck him as even more remarkable, given the ghoulish nature of the discovery. Maybe archaeologists were accustomed to bones and death.

  “Sorry this grave is so crowded, but your body is this way, to the side of the main dig,” said Horst. His beard was a little whiter than the previous year, his hair more sparse, and he was still wearing the English tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches that Bruno remembered from last year and many years before. “Those bones down there are from three bodies over thirty thousand years old. Your skeleton is over here.”

  Steering Bruno past a small winch with a system of pulleys attached to a tripod, Horst led Bruno across to a long, narrow trench, perhaps six feet deep. Beside it an attractive girl and an older woman with red hair, wearing what Bruno thought was a man’s shirt in green and white stripes, were standing to watch their approach.

  The girl, her glossy dark hair tied in a loose bun held together by what looked like an antique TV antenna, had a hand on the shoulder of a burly young man with long hair. He was kneeling, head bowed over the trench. A small trowel lay beside him. The red-haired woman smiled politely as Bruno approached. It was one of those delicate moments of French meetings; he wasn’t sure he knew her well enough for the bise, the kissing of cheeks.

  “Bonjour, Clothilde,” said Bruno, opting for the handshake. She was director of one of the departments of the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies. She used his outstretched hand to pull him forward to exchange kisses in a determined way, as if to declare that no mere corpse was going to deter her from the social niceties. One of the most eminent archaeologists in France, Clothilde Daunier was friend and colleague to Horst and they had once been lovers. Over a bottle of German wine he had brought as a gift to Bruno, Horst had once confided that Clothilde had been the love of his life, though their affair was said to be long over. Bruno wasn’t so sure; he distinctly remembered seeing Horst in the green and white shirt Clothilde was wearing.

  “Bruno, this young lady is Kajte, from Holland, and I hope I pronounced that correctly,” Clothilde said. The girl gave her a cool smile and proffered a hand for Bruno to shake. She looked like a self-confident young woman, her gray eyes appraising him with a raking glance. Even though she wore the khaki slacks and denim shirt that was almost a uniform among the students on the dig, hers looked expensive. Maybe it was the way she wore them. “And this is Teddy who found the body. He’s British, and he’s understandably somewhat upset.”

  “When was the body found?” Bruno peered down into the trench to see a skull, two shoulder blades and what he assumed were arm bones. The hips and legs were covered in dirt. The skeleton seemed to be lying stretched out and facedown. Scraps of what might have been a leather jacket were mingled with loose earth and stones on the body’s back. Some strands of hair were still attached to the skull, and there was a glint of gold from what had been the neck, the St. Christopher medal that Horst had mentioned. The bones of the wrists and hands were intact, but twisted together behind the back and tied with some faded red electrical wire. A Swatch was attached to the long bone of a forearm.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said Bruno. “With his hands bound like that, do you think he was buried alive?” />
  “That’s what got to me,” said Clothilde. “I know I’m going to have nightmares about this grave, just thinking of that. I suppose this makes it murder.”

  “Certainly it’s a matter for the Police Nationale as well as for the medics. I’ll have to inform them, and they’ll be sealing off this place as a crime scene. They’ll want to know exactly when and how the body was found.”

  “Teddy found him soon after we started, so not long after seven-thirty. Before eight, certainly, which was when I called you,” said Horst.

  “Bonjour, Teddy,” Bruno said to the young man. “Do you speak French?”

  “Yes, but not too well,” said Teddy haltingly. He looked up and Bruno saw a pair of very bright blue eyes and a pronounced, almost-jutting chin. “I called the professor immediately after I found him.” He had a very deep voice and a strong accent that Bruno could not identify, too melodic to be English or German.

  “Do people usually dig alone? I thought you worked in teams,” Bruno said, recalling previous digs he had seen.

  “That’s true, but Teddy had an interesting idea he wanted to pursue,” said Horst. “He was looking for the midden, the latrine, the place where people threw their rubbish, and he assumed it would be away from the water supply. It makes sense—if that stream was running in the same course thirty thousand years ago, which I doubt.”

  “We always look for the midden because it can tell us a lot about the food they ate from the bones and seeds,” said Clothilde. “Teddy is a careful worker, so we let him follow his idea. He’s been digging that trench for three days now.”

  “I’d better call in the doctor. The death may be obvious, but we need a medical certificate.” Bruno turned away and pulled his phone from the pouch at his belt to call Fabiola at the clinic. Not only was she a friend, she also knew a lot about forensics.

  As he waited for her to answer, Bruno looked up at the high cliff that loomed over the site and the way it sloped inward toward the ground, creating a narrow space that offered some shelter. A stream ran down the wooded slope, passing perhaps forty-five feet in front of the sheltered space. Beyond the stream was a stand of trees and then another cliff, but this one descended without an overhang. The stream ran for roughly three hundred feet, alongside the track the archaeologists had made with Horst’s 4×4, before it reached the narrow back road that led to Les Eyzies. Despite the narrowness of the sheltered space and the height of the cliffs on either side, this place that the prehistoric people had chosen was sited to catch the sun for most of the day. Idly, he wondered how much the landscape had changed over thirty thousand years and whether the ground at the site had risen with the generations of silt the stream must have brought down. He wasn’t convinced that Horst was right to think the route of the stream might have changed; the gap between the cliffs looked like a natural water course.

  When Fabiola answered, Bruno explained the reason for his call and gave her careful instructions on how to find them. Then he turned back to Horst and Clothilde.

  “You’ve seen a lot of digs over the years, both of you. Any idea how long the body has been dead?”

  Clothilde shrugged. “We deal with the very long dead, and I don’t know much about the rate of decomposition. Different soils can affect the speed of the process, but it must have been there at least ten years or more, but not before 1983.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The Swatch.” She held up an advanced cell phone and gave a sly and lively grin that took ten years off her age and made Bruno understand Horst’s love for her. “I just used my phone to check the Internet. Those watches weren’t introduced until 1983.”

  “What about the soil over the body? Did that look undisturbed?”

  Horst shook his head. “It was just like the rest of the site, as though nothing had been touched since Peyrony’s day.”

  Bruno raised his eyebrows. “Somebody dug here before?”

  “Denis Peyrony, eighty, ninety years ago. He was a local teacher who became the father of French archaeology,” said Clothilde. “He discovered a lot of the main sites like Les Combarelles and Font de Gaume back before the Great War, and he founded the museum where I work. He drew up a catalog of all the known and likely sites, including this one. But he only had time to make a brief exploratory dig, found nothing and moved on. Horst and I thought this one deserved another look.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Informed instinct,” said Horst. “Plus the fact that the site and location are very similar to La Ferrassie.”

  The nearest national monument to Bruno’s home, La Ferrassie was less a cave than another shallow shelter formed by an overhang of rock. But it was famous as a graveyard of Neanderthal man. The bodies of eight people—men, women and children—and two fetuses had been buried there some seventy thousand years ago. The skulls and skeletons were supposed to have been important, but Bruno couldn’t remember why. With the overhanging cliffs forming a shelter and a stream running nearby, the similarity between that site and this new one was obvious. He cast an envious glance at Clothilde’s phone, thinking how useful it would be to look up La Ferrassie on the Net without having to go back to his office computer. But he couldn’t see the mayor dipping into the town budget to provide one.

  “When did you start digging here?” Bruno asked.

  “Just over ten days ago when the students got here,” Horst said. “But you remember we did a preliminary dig at the end of the season last year, which was what made us come back. Word must have gotten around that we were on to something because we were flooded with applications for this year’s dig.”

  “You can’t keep secrets in this business,” said Clothilde. “Even the smallest hint, and the buzz goes around the world.”

  “Sounds interesting.” Bruno wondered how to ask an informed question when he had so little idea of what these experts might think important. “I presume those really old bones down in the pit are quite a find. It’s been a while since you’ve come across any burials. You said over thirty thousand years—would they be Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon?”

  Horst and Clothilde exchanged looks.

  “It’s a little early to be definite,” Clothilde said carefully. “We’ll say more at the lecture Horst is giving at the museum.”

  “You are coming, I hope,” Horst added.

  “It sounds like you’ve found something important,” said Bruno. “But I was coming anyway. By the way, what’s the winch for?” He pointed at the tripod structure.

  “It’s to lift that big flat stone at the bottom of the pit,” Horst said. “It has the same little hollows carved into it as the one at La Ferrassie, although that was forty thousand years earlier.”

  Bruno wondered briefly how Horst kept all these dates in his head. “Fascinating,” he said politely. “But today my main interest is this new body.”

  “I think we can safely say that it has no connection with our archaeology,” Horst said, with a smile. “Except, of course, that it was one of our diggers who found it.”

  Teddy heaved himself onto his feet, towering over the rest of the group. He must be more than six feet tall, thought Bruno, with shoulders to match. The Dutch girl barely came up to his chest. His nose had been broken, and looking at his imposing figure, Bruno felt a sudden curiosity.

  “Do you play rugby?”

  Teddy smiled for the first time. “Of course. I grew up in Wales, Pays de Galles, you call it. We all play rugby. I played at school and university.”

  “Gareth Edwards, Ieuan Evans,” said Bruno, naming the two recent greats of Welsh rugby. In this region, the cradle of French rugby, the two players were esteemed almost as highly as they were in Wales. And Wales explained Teddy’s unusual accent. “I saw Evans play, but Edwards only on TV. If you want a game while you’re here, we can bring you into a practice session at the club.”

  Teddy nodded eagerly. “That would be great.”

  A horn tooted from the road, and Bruno headed down the track to
direct Fabiola. Parking her car on the road rather than risk the bumpy route to the dig, she handed Bruno her medical bag to carry before kissing him on both cheeks.

  “Is this your day off?” he asked, noting her jeans and sweatshirt rather than the neat trouser suits she invariably wore to work.

  She shook her head and explained she was helping clean out the cupboard at the clinic and ditching pills and lotions that had been there for a decade and more.

  “I’m glad for the break,” she said, “even if it is a body. There were things in that cupboard growing mold. They’d been there since I was a schoolgirl and planning to be a ballerina rather than a doctor.”

  Bruno raised his eyebrows; he’d never heard that before. He introduced Fabiola to the group around the trench, observing the way their eyes first noted and then carefully avoided the long scar on Fabiola’s cheek, the legacy of a mountaineering accident. Bruno was no longer aware of it, and Fabiola simply ignored it. Her dress and demeanor boldly asserted that this was a self-confident and attractive woman who knew her own worth.

  Fabiola peered into the trench at the body. She pulled a small digital camera from the pocket of her jeans and photographed the scene from all aides. Then she looked at the narrow steps cut into each side of the trench.

  “Can I stand on those ledges to examine it?” she asked.

  “That’s why we cut them,” said Horst. “We had to brush away some of the soil. Here, take my arm.” He leaned forward to help Fabiola clamber carefully into the grave. Bruno placed her medical bag on the lip of the trench.

  “Can I have someone else down here, an archaeologist, to help clear away some of this earth?” Fabiola called. “I want a good look at that skull.”

  “You might see if there’s a wallet or anything that might identify the body,” Bruno suggested. He knew of no missing persons in St. Denis in the ten years since his own arrival, and there were no unsolved cases of missing persons in the files.