The Crowded Grave

by Martin Walker

  “If it helps find Horst, consider it a gift,” she said, starting the car and heading back toward St. Denis. “This all seems a bit cloak-and-dagger, you hiding in the backseat.”

  “Better not to raise Jan’s suspicions,” said Bruno. “It seemed natural enough for you to bring along a young Danish student to meet the only other Dane in the district. Just so long as it didn’t make Jan think he was being checked out.”

  “No, I was pretty casual, just asking him what he liked about the area, why he’d stayed, if he missed going back to Denmark, that kind of thing,” said Harald, who had evidently enjoyed his brief foray into police work. “And I asked him if he knew who’d won the Danish soccer final—just friendly chitchat.”

  “Did he know?”

  “No. He said he sometimes got Politiken to keep up with the news, but he didn’t follow sports much. That surprised me a bit because he had a copy of L’Équipe in front of him when I saw him in a café early this morning. That’s your sports paper, isn’t it?”

  “It is, indeed,” Bruno said. “Could Jan’s accent come from being born on the border? He said everybody there spoke German as much as Danish.”

  “He’s right about that, but they’re still Danes. I had a girlfriend from down there once and visited her a few times. They speak Danish like me, and he doesn’t. I’m sure he’s not one of us.”

  “Anybody else there?”

  “Some young guy. We weren’t introduced, and he didn’t speak, but I was pretty sure he didn’t understand the Danish we were speaking.”

  “I’m not even sure he understood my French,” added Clothilde.

  Bruno nodded, remembering the young relative of Juanita he’d met at the smithy when he called, the one that Jan had said was learning the business. The name escaped him. When Clothilde dropped him at the mairie, Bruno took the wrapped candlestick in his own car to the château at Campagne. The workmen had been replaced by armed security guards who called up to Isabelle before letting him enter.

  Isabelle had installed herself in what must have been the master bedroom. It was vast, with high ceilings and three tall portes-fenêtres that opened on a broad balcony overlooking the gardens. Beyond the château wall, Bruno could just see the wind sock of the helicopter pad. Inside the room was an old-fashioned four-poster bed draped in great swoops of heavy cream damask.

  “Apparently there was a lovely scene of nymphs and cherubs on the ceiling but they couldn’t save it so they had to paint over it,” she said from the Louis XVI armchair at the elegant desk that stood before the central window. A huge bouquet of flowers dominated the desk.

  “You could get used to living like this,” Bruno said.

  “Not really,” said Isabelle, gesturing at the small and functional folding table beside her desk. It held two mobile phones and a military radio. Leaning against it was a bulletin board thumbtacked with security team rosters and phone numbers. “I seem to bring this chaos with me.”

  “Are you sleeping here?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “The bed isn’t even made up. I stay at the hotel across the road, but I hate working out of a hotel bedroom. This is perfect.”

  She looked at the parcel in Bruno’s hands, smiling, and surprised him when she asked, “Is that a present?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, recovering swiftly. “But first we have to get it checked for Jan’s fingerprints and see if the Danes or Germans can trace him that way.”

  In the courtyard, Isabelle had a mobile police unit at her disposal that could deal with fingerprints. She directed Bruno to it, saying that she would need the prints scanned and e-mailed to her so she could forward them. While that was being done, Isabelle called Danish police colleagues in Copenhagen and asked them to check on the details of date and place of birth that Bruno had taken down from Jan’s carte de séjour. When he returned to her room, Bruno sifted through the reports that had come in from other national police units on the background of the various archaeology students.

  Nothing seemed to stand out, except for young Kasimir, who was supposed to have been fulfilling his duties as a conscript at an army camp for his Easter vacation, rather than digging in the soil of Périgord. Bruno grinned. He could imagine Kasimir talking his way out of that problem.

  Bruno read the report from the British police saying that nothing was known on Teddy, no arrests or driving offenses, not even a parking ticket. There was a photocopy of the passport, however, and that grabbed Bruno’s attention. “Teddy” was short for “Edward,” the name on his credit card and passport. But the British police record listed him as Todor (Edward) Gareth Lloyd. But “Todor” was not a name Bruno recognized, which made him curious. What did the British mean when they put the name “Edward” in parentheses? Why did the passport give his name as Edward? Could he have changed his name?

  Bruno asked Isabelle for the use of her laptop. He went into Google.fr and typed in the name “Todor.” A blizzard of Bulgarian and Hungarian names came up, variations on “Theodor,” which left him scratching his head. Then on a hunch he added the word “Basque,” and again a flurry of names emerged, but this time full of Basque connections. “Todor” was a Basque name. Bruno opened his notebook and looked up the brief remarks he had scribbled after visiting Jan at the smithy. The name of Juanita’s taciturn relative was Galder. He typed that into Google and again up came a blizzard of Basque references.

  Coincidence was piling improbably upon coincidence, and he needed more data. He showed Isabelle the British police report and the Google pages. She moved her chair alongside his and took over the computer, going into her own database and picking out the file of documents marked “Campagne” and then a subfolder marked “Étudiants.” As he moved aside to make room for her, he could not help but see a large card attached to the bouquet of flowers on her desk. It said, “In thanks and admiration, Carlos.”

  What could that mean? Bruno felt the sly curl of jealousy start to unfurl in his mind and tried to stamp on it. Isabelle had no obligation to him. She was a free woman with her own life to lead. Perhaps he was being more sensitive after recently saying good-bye to Pamela, he told himself. Putain, he had to stop this. He was going around in circles while there was a job to do. Come on, Bruno, focus.

  “I asked the various police forces for more detail on the students and dumped it all into this file,” Isabelle said, unaware that he had noticed the card. She began searching through the assorted PDF files until she came to a further subfile marked “RU,” for Royaume-Uni, United Kingdom. Two more clicks and she brought up Teddy’s birth certificate. He had been born in Swansea on March 26, 1986. His mother was listed as Mary Morgan Lloyd, and her occupation as student. The father was listed as Todor Felipe Garcia, occupation mechanic. Teddy had been born in Swansea maternity hospital.

  “ ‘Felipe Garcia’ is a Spanish name, but not Basque,” said Bruno.

  “I know,” Isabelle replied. “Let’s do some more checking.”

  She went into her own secure Ministry of the Interior database and put in the name “Todor Felipe Garcia” with a date range from 1984 to 1986. Three items came up. The first was a carte de séjour issued in Biarritz in September 1984 for a Spanish citizen of that name, employed as a mechanic at a local garage. The second was a speeding ticket issued in Bordeaux in April 1985. The third was the report of a missing person, filed on August 30, 1985, by a British citizen, Mary Morgan Lloyd, employed as an au pair with a French family in Talence, Bordeaux. She reported that Todor Felipe Garcia had disappeared from his rented apartment and from his workplace a week earlier.

  “She would have known by then that she was pregnant,” said Isabelle, counting on her fingers. “Poor girl, she must have been frantic with worry about him.”

  She double-clicked on the fourth line on her screen that contained only three asterisks, and a pop-up window appeared.

  “Turn around, Bruno,” she said. “This is an Intel database and I need to punch in my own password.”

  He
looked away until she told him to turn back, and the screen was filled with lists of raw surveillance reports, the name of “Todor” highlighted in yellow.

  “Todor, the father, was a Basque militant, sure enough, and we were keeping an eye on him,” she said, clicking on. “Here is young Mademoiselle Lloyd, with whom he began a relationship that summer; she was checked out but nothing known. We even checked on her with the British police, but she was clean.”

  She clicked back again and followed Todor’s trail further. “Known associates,” she said, and sat back in surprise at the length and detail of the list that appeared on her screen. Pedro José Pikabea, injured in an attack on the Les Pyrénées tavern in Bayonne on March 29, 1985. Pikabea allegedly was a member of ETA. Another associate had been assassinated the next day in St.-Jean-de-Luz, a photojournalist called Xabier Galdeano. Another assassination had taken place in Bayonne on June 26, of yet one more of Todor’s known associates, Santos Blanco Gonzales, and he was also an alleged ETA member.

  “Mon Dieu, Bruno, everyone Todor knew was being bumped off that spring and summer, and all of them we suspected were carried out by GAL. You were right to talk about the dirty war, all these killings by Spanish agents, all on French soil. And here’s one more, on September 2, Juan Manuel Otegi, again a suspected ETA militant, killed in St. Jean-Pied-de-Port.”

  Isabelle sat back again and looked at Bruno. “We’ll have to pick up Teddy and interrogate him, find out just how much he knew about his father. And it looks to me as if his father could have been killed by GAL when Teddy was still in the womb, so we’ll have to get the British to go and have a talk with Teddy’s mother.”

  “Teddy should be at Bergerac by now with the rest of the students,” said Bruno. “You’d better get onto the gendarmes, find out who went with them in the bus and get some more gendarmes to the airport to make sure they hold him.”

  Isabelle picked up her phone and made the call.

  “And he was the one who found the unidentified corpse,” she said, turning back to Bruno after asking the general in Périgueux to arrange for gendarmes to meet Teddy at Bergerac and bring him directly back to the château after the explosives check.

  “So the question is, how did Teddy know where to look?” said Bruno. “Somebody must have told him where the body was buried, and that somebody must have known about the killing of Teddy’s father. So when did Teddy become an archaeologist and get himself onto the team going to exactly that site? Could Horst have been involved in that?”

  “Who apart from Horst and Clothilde knew where they were going to dig?” asked Isabelle.

  “Remember they did a preliminary dig last year, late in the summer. We can find out from Clothilde if Teddy was in that group,” Bruno said. He picked up his phone and called her, keeping his eyes on Isabelle, and then nodding excitedly at Clothilde’s reply before he hung up.

  “Teddy was indeed on the dig last summer, and he knew they’d be digging again,” said Bruno. “But we still don’t know how he knew where to look for the corpse.”

  “Do you think it could be his father’s corpse?” she asked. “The dates would seem to fit.”

  “We aren’t sure of that yet. We’ll need a DNA check on Teddy, but I bet it will be positive.”

  A small buzz came from Isabelle’s laptop, and she clicked into her secure mail window, again asking Bruno to turn away while she entered yet another password to open the message.

  “It’s a reply from the Danish police,” she said. “There is no record of any Danish citizen by the name of Jan Olaf Pedersen being born in 1942, and no record of anyone of that name being born in Kolding. The Danish passport number that Jan had filed for his carte de séjour is a false one. And the Danes would be grateful for any more information since they might want to file an extradition request.”

  “You could send them the fingerprints your mobile team took from the candlestick,” said Bruno.

  “Good idea,” she said. “I’ll send them along with a copy to Interpol for a search request.” She looked at him apologetically and closed the special database on her computer, saying, “Sorry, Bruno. You understand.” She picked up her cane and limped out to arrange for a room, a security guard and a DNA test kit for use on Teddy.

  Bruno was trying to make sense of all this information and not doing well. So he pulled a piece of paper toward him and drew a box, writing inside it the name of Teddy’s father with the date that Mary had notified the police of his disappearance and then drew an arrow to another box in which he wrote Teddy’s name and his date of birth. If the gestation period had been the usual nine months, Teddy had been conceived in June of 1985, and Mary should have known she was pregnant sometime in August. Todor had disappeared the week before August 30.

  Then he drew three more boxes. He wrote down Horst’s name in one, with an arrow to another where he wrote Jan’s name, and an arrow to yet another in which he wrote Juanita’s name. Could Juanita, with her Basque background, have a connection to Todor? He drew a dotted line between them. That might even connect Horst’s disappearance to the Basques. He put a question mark over his dotted line.

  And who was Jan, if he wasn’t Danish? Harald had said he sounded as if he came from Hamburg, just like Horst. Horst had a brother, but he was dead. Bruno tried to remember exactly what the brigadier had said during the video connection. The brother had been reported dead, but by whom? By the East Germans, in the days when their so-called Democratic Republic had been giving sanctuary to some of the Baader-Meinhof Group. Could it be that the boxes all connected, Horst leading to Jan who led to the Basques through Juanita?

  Isabelle came back into the room with a phone at her waist starting to buzz. She answered it, listened and said, “But surely they checked them all onto the bus?”

  She listened again, and said crisply, “So you mean to say that your gendarme miscounted when they boarded the bus. I was hoping you might assign someone with a minimal level of efficiency, at least sufficient to count.”

  She paused once more. “We’ll send you a full description,” she said. “Passport details with photograph and credit card numbers and we’ll get the British to put a stop on his card. With any luck, he won’t get far.”

  She closed the phone and looked at Bruno.

  “They lost Teddy. He never got on the bus.”

  22

  Like any large, hierarchical organization, the gendarmes were pleased to be given a simple and familiar task. They had a procedure for a manhunt, and the routine deployments clicked smoothly into place. Patrols were assigned to each rail station, and pairs of motorcycle cops were dispatched to the main roundabouts and the ramps onto the autoroutes. Gas stations and rental car firms were visited and banks, ferries and airlines alerted to Teddy’s credit card number. Faxes of Teddy’s description and details, particularly his distinctive height, went out to the municipal police of every town in the département and to the immigration posts at every airport and frontier. Europol was alerted, and the staff of the liaison office with the British police were told to expect to stay around the clock.

  “What sort of manpower does that leave us for searching for Horst?” Bruno asked Isabelle, once the flurry of phone calls died down. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of empty vacation homes and gîtes out there and he could be in any one.”

  “Let me worry about that,” she said. “You know the gendarmes, they can only do one thing at a time. I agree with you that Horst’s disappearance is probably connected, but so far it’s more hunch than evidence.”

  Bruno left Isabelle to her conference calls and drove from the château back to the municipal campground where Monique seemed to be doing the same crossword puzzle and listening to the same radio station as when he’d last seen her. Again, he was offered coffee, but this time he refused.

  “Still looking for that Kajte girl?” Monique asked “They say she’s gone back to Holland. Can’t say I blame the girl with half the gendarmerie hanging around here waiting to arrest her.
I almost ran out of coffee.”

  “It’s Teddy’s tent I need to get into this time,” Bruno told her. “He’s on the run and I need to know what he left behind.”

  Monique stubbed out her Royale filter and led the way to the tent, where the two sleeping bags zipped together had been replaced by a single sack, left open to air. Teddy’s rucksack was still there. Donning a pair of evidence gloves, Bruno opened it, found a toilet bag and saw with satisfaction that although the toothbrush was missing the hairbrush was still there.

  “Do you want a receipt for this?” he asked Monique. “I’ll have to take the whole rucksack.”

  “You’d better,” she said. “Just so I’m covered if there’s any problem. And do you want the envelope he left in the safe? They usually leave valuables with us.”

  “Yes, please.” He was angry with himself that he hadn’t asked her if there was anything else.

  Teddy had left a large manila envelope that seemed to contain only papers. Bruno put it into the rucksack, thanked Monique and headed back to the mobile police unit parked at the château. From a previous case he recognized Yves, one of the forensic experts, and showed him the rucksack. Yves took fingerprints from the hairbrush handle and then used tweezers to take some hairs from the brush itself. Bruno checked that Yves had the DNA data on the unidentified corpse for comparison, and then lugged the rucksack up to Isabelle’s stately room.

  He handed her Teddy’s big envelope—her English was better than his—and started to unpack the rucksack. “They’ve already taken Teddy’s fingerprints from the hairbrush,” he said as she slipped on some evidence gloves.

  “Routine.” She shrugged, and began shuffling through the papers, and Bruno went through the pockets of the rucksack and of every item of clothing inside it. He unrolled pairs of socks, looked at name tags and labels and smoothed out scraps of paper, candy wrappers and old bills that had found their way to the bottom of the sack.