The Crowded Grave

by Martin Walker

  “Fernando came back to see me in January. This time he had the map and said he thought it was probably my father’s grave,” Teddy went on. “I didn’t believe him at first—the coincidence was just too extraordinary.”

  But Fernando had been positive, Teddy said. One of the problems the GAL had in the 1980s was the anger of the French authorities at the way Basque bodies kept turning up on their territory. So GAL had started burying their victims to avoid more trouble with the French. One of the killers apparently knew that the St. Denis site had already been pronounced uninteresting by Denis Peyrony so he reckoned it was a safe place for a burial. Now that there was digging there again, the Spanish police were worried that the grave was likely to be found and trigger a whole new controversy over the GAL’s activities.

  “So Fernando had a source inside the Spanish police?” Isabelle asked. “Did he say anything about this source to you?”

  “Only that he had access to the secret archives and had given Fernando the map.”

  “Presumably a new scandal over GAL and these illegal killings was just what Fernando wanted,” Bruno said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Teddy replied. “But it makes sense.”

  “Have you had any contact with Fernando since you’ve been in France?” Isabelle asked.

  “No, and no reply to the e-mails I sent after finding the body. Mum hadn’t heard from him either, last we spoke.”

  Isabelle took a pen and pad from her bag and made Teddy write it all down in English as a statement and then sign it. She checked the wording, and promised to give him a photocopy.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Have you ever met any other Basques apart from Fernando?” she asked. Teddy shook his head. “Have you been in touch with anybody from outside the dig while you’ve been in France this time?” He shook his head again, saying “Just Bruno and the foie gras people and now you.”

  Isabelle turned to Bruno and raised an eyebrow. She was going to leave this up to him, which would probably mean that each of them would spend a very difficult few minutes with the brigadier.

  “I have your word that you won’t leave St. Denis without my permission and that you’ll be available for more questions if we need you?” Bruno asked. Teddy nodded.

  Bruno suggested they go to the campground to drop their things. He’d talk to Monique and also let the magistrate know where they were. He proposed that they return to the dig so he’d know where to find them.

  “One more thing. May I have your passports?”

  Teddy unbuttoned his shirt pocket and handed his over. After a moment’s hesitation Kajte did the same.

  29

  Back in his office at the mairie after briefing the mayor, Bruno made calls to Monique and Clothilde about the return of the two students and had to explain to Clothilde that there was still no news about Horst. He couldn’t tell her about the cell they’d found at Jan’s smithy. He put off calling Annette until he heard from Mathilde at Médecins Sans Frontières.

  He opened his e-mails. One from Mathilde contained two attachments. The first was a press release from her organization, with “MSF” on its letterhead, praising Annette’s record and stating that she’d been the victim of a mugging in print. Bruno grinned, relishing a good phrase. The second one began by saying that MSF was joined in condemning that unfair attack on Annette by “Chef de Police Bruno Courrèges of St. Denis, the town at the center of the storm over foie gras.” Mathilde had quoted him fairly, made it clear that he disagreed with Annette over foie gras and felt she’d been foolish to call it barbaric, but that she was sincere in her beliefs. Whatever her father did or whatever he spent on his fancy lunches, it wasn’t French justice to condemn someone by association. He e-mailed Mathilde back saying he approved, although privately he doubted whether much of it would make its way into print.

  He cleared the rest of his e-mails, and took an apple and a banana for his lunch from the big fruit bowl that was kept in the mairie’s kitchen. It had become a feature after Fabiola had come to one of the staff meetings to give them all a lecture on healthy eating. He called J-J to tell him that Teddy and Kajte had returned and gave him a summary of their statement. The forensics team at the smithy had reported back. Fingerprints were being checked against the Spanish files. The Bayonne hotel that had provided the small shampoo bottle he’d found had been contacted, but the guests had paid in cash. Bruno suggested that the hotel staff be shown a copy of Fernando’s Identi-Kit.

  He sat back, hearing the familiar squeak from his chair, and wondered where Jan and the Basques might be at that moment. In their place, he’d look for a remote house that looked modernized but had all the shutters closed, the kind of place owned by Dutch or British vacationers who only came in the summer. Here they had the benefit of Jan’s local knowledge. He’d made wrought-iron fittings for wealthy foreigners restoring their properties, and he had to know dozens of places that were likely to be empty. With Easter so close and the school vacations starting, however, that might be risky. But there were hundreds of empty tobacco barns dotted around the fields, many of them far from roads or other buildings.

  They would need supplies, he thought. They’d also need at least one car and more likely two or three for the surveillance that would have been required to keep a watch on Carlos, to locate his car and place a bomb beneath it. But cars were easily stolen and license plates changed. What else was essential? he asked himself. As soon as he formulated the thought he was looking at his own computer and answering his question.

  They would need communications. Phones were too easily monitored, but they could use e-mail. It was simple enough to concoct a fake address through Yahoo or Hotmail. They might be somewhere too remote to have online access, but they could be using Internet cafés. He called Isabelle at the château, passed on his thinking and asked her to e-mail him the Identi-Kit sketch of Fernando and also the one he had done of Galder, the youth at Jan’s smithy. Perhaps gendarmes with the same sketches could be asked to check all the Internet cafés and facilities in the region, he suggested. He’d take care of St. Denis.

  She told him that a police cyber team in Paris had already gotten into Fernando’s Hotmail account and were locating the various sites he’d used most recently. They’d found one in Sarlat and another in Bergerac used in the last week. The sketches were on their way. Almost at once his computer trilled to signal an incoming message. He printed out the two sketches and was reaching for his cap when his phone rang.

  “It’s Annette. I’m calling to thank you. I just heard from Mathilde at Médecins Sans Frontières and she sent me a copy of this press release the two of you concocted. How on earth do you know her?”

  “I don’t. I just dialed the main number and asked for the press office.”

  “She spoke as if she’d known you for years. She sent me a scan of the Paris Match article with that photo of you swinging out of the window in a ball of fire.”

  “It looked more dramatic than it was. Being in a car with you took a lot more courage,” he said. “But I’m glad you called. Teddy and Kajte have come back and surrendered themselves to my custody.”

  After telling her they’d be available for questioning, he explained that the corpse Teddy had discovered was his own father, shot by undercover Spanish cops in their war on the ETA movement.

  “He dug up his own father’s corpse? He must have known where to find it, which means … God, I’m not sure what it means. Is he connected to ETA?”

  “Only through his father. He’s helping us. But since you had opened that dossier on Teddy and his girlfriend, I thought I’d better tell you that they both are back in the district. Is it still open, on them and on Maurice?”

  “Along with my disciplinary proceedings against you, the Maurice matter was dropped on orders from my superior this morning, which means the dossier on those students is also closed. That was Duroc’s business, anyway. And have you heard that he’s been suspended?”

  “Suspende
d? What for?”

  “It happened this morning. I heard about it at the morning staff meeting because we’ll have to assign someone to the case. There was an internal investigation by the gendarmes, and they say he was fixing traffic tickets.”

  “I just know he fixed your speeding ticket.”

  “Yes, but I paid it, just like I paid your parking fine. I sent off checks that very night. But it seems there were quite a few tickets Duroc took care of, and some of the beneficiaries claim they paid him to do it.”

  “I don’t suppose they’ll assign you to the case.”

  “No. You’re getting another new magistrate. I’m being transferred to the Sarlat office, along with a formal reprimand for my TV interview.”

  “I can point you to one or two foie gras factories there that I’d like to see hit with a hygiene order,” he said.

  “I think I’ll stay away from that issue for a while. But look, thanks for what you did and please tell those two students and Maurice that the case is closed.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “But when you called me in to say you were launching disciplinary action against me, you said I’d helped those two students evade arrest. Wherever did that come from?”

  “It was a letter of denunciation handed in to the gendarmerie. It said you had treated the girl’s shotgun wounds in secret and then told them to bribe the farmers to stop them filing formal complaints.”

  “Was it signed?”

  “I don’t remember. That was Duroc’s big complaint against you, cheating him out of an arrest. Was it true?”

  “Yes, I suppose it was,” he said. “But I still think it was for the best.”

  “Maybe you were right,” she said, and hung up leaving him with the feeling that some little justice had been done. But who knew enough about what he had done to have written the letter? He couldn’t see Teddy and Kajte doing it. He’d have to find the letter. But that meant going through the gendarmerie, and the thought of Duroc’s suspension sobered him. It didn’t say much for Bruno’s skills that Duroc had been fixing speeding tickets under his nose and Bruno had known only about Annette’s. He called Sergeant Jules.

  “What’s this I hear about Duroc being suspended?”

  “First we knew was when a new captain came in this morning and told us. He’s just temporary, from Nontron up in the north of the département. Apparently they’d had their eye on him for some time. Some guy trying to talk his way out of a jail sentence for repeated drunken driving shopped Duroc a few weeks ago. We’re in deep mourning. Come by the bar this evening and you can share our grief. I’m buying.”

  “I’m tied up this evening,” said Bruno. “But drink a glass for me. This security stuff will be finished in a couple of days. One thing you can help me with. There was some kind of letter delivered to the gendarmerie accusing me of secretly helping those two students evade Duroc. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Francette found it in the postbox, in a sealed envelope addressed to Duroc. Give me a minute. His office is empty so I can take a quick look.”

  Bruno waited, wondering whether Kajte had said something to the Villattes or Maurice about his treating her wounds. If not, that left him with Carlos or Dominique as the most likely sources of the letter. Dominique didn’t like Kajte, but Bruno couldn’t see her wanting to denounce him. That left Carlos. But what possible motive could he have? And could he write a letter in French good enough to fool a French speaker?

  “Got it,” said Jules, coming back to the phone. “It was in a file in his drawer marked ‘Bruno,’ and it’s unsigned. I’ll make you a copy.”

  “Is it in good French?”

  “It’s no worse than half the anonymous letters we get. A couple of misspellings, some odd turns of phrase but nothing out of the ordinary. I can’t tell about the accents because it’s all typed in capital letters.”

  Before he set off on his search of the Internet sites, Bruno called an old contact at the French military archives and asked what their files had on Eurocorps. Carlos had served in it and been based in Strasbourg, where he’d learned his French. The old soldier at the archives said the Eurocorps records were remarkably good. He wrote down Carlos’s name and the units Bruno could recall and promised to call back. Bruno took the old stone stairs down to the square, heading for the town’s tourist office, where Kajte had done the photocopying that had first alerted him to her role in attacking the farms. He showed the sketches to Gabrielle, who looked at them carefully and said she was sure she had seen neither one.

  “And what finally happened to that Dutch girl?” she asked.

  “It turned out just as you suggested, Gabrielle. She went to the farmers and apologized and paid them compensation and she’s now back at work on the dig. The matter is closed, thanks to your excellent advice. Merci.”

  Patrick at the Maison de la Presse did not recognize the sketches, but the woman behind the counter at the Infomatique looked at them carefully, called over a male colleague, and they both pronounced themselves convinced that Galder, or someone very like him, had paid ten euros to use their computer for an hour late the previous afternoon, just before they closed at six. In fact, he was the last person to use it. Bruno immediately called Isabelle and asked for a fingerprint man to be sent.

  “He spoke really bad French,” said the man as they waited. He offered to check the cache to see what sites Galder had used, but Bruno told him that neither the chair nor table nor computer could be touched until the fingerprints had been checked. They remembered little else about him, except that he had paid for the computer time from an impressive roll of fifty-euro notes. He had arrived and left on foot with no sign of a vehicle. They did not recognize Fernando.

  Bruno went to the nearest shops—a small supermarket, a gift shop and a property sales and rental agency—but nobody recognized his sketches. Nor had they served any obvious foreigners the previous day. When he returned to the Infomatique, Yves had already arrived with a fingerprint man and was shining a flashlight sideways along the keyboard.

  “Not a trace,” he said. “It’s been well wiped.” Wearing gloves, he checked the memory cache and declared that wiped too. He searched for the computer’s IP address and scribbled a note of the number. Then he called Isabelle and gave her the number and asked if she wanted him to bring back the hard drive. Bruno couldn’t hear her answer, but Yves hung up and took a CD from his briefcase and inserted it into the computer, opened a browser and then called another number. He spoke briefly, and then a small window opened on the monitor screen, asking if the user agreed to surrender control. Yves hit the “Oui” window and sat back.

  “What’s happening now?” Bruno asked.

  “It’s the cyber guys in Paris. They linked in and have taken over the computer. They’ll download everything, which saves us having to take the hard drive. And Isabelle says she wants you back at the château.”

  Bruno stopped at the gendarmerie for Sergeant Jules’s photocopy and took it with him to show Isabelle. “This is the letter that made the magistrate try to get me fired,” he said. “I’m having trouble coming up with any likely suspect other than Carlos, and I remember one of the students telling me that he saw Carlos having coffee with Jan. Then there are things that you and the brigadier tell me not to share with Carlos. Are we sure he’s on our side?”

  “Now’s your chance to find out,” she said, leading the way down the stairs to the main conference room. “We were just waiting for you to get here. Carlos asked for a brief meeting before the security committee session, just you, me and the brigadier, says he wants to make a personal statement.”

  Carlos was already waiting, and he rose and inclined his head before sitting, putting on a pair of spectacles Bruno had not seen him wear before, and turning back to a sheaf of papers before him. The brigadier strode in, and Carlos rose again and remained standing.

  “I’ve asked you here to apologize to each of you in person,” he began. “We Spaniards have been less than frank with you.
We haven’t shared information with you to anything like the degree that you’ve done for us. My only explanation is that I was acting under orders and did so reluctantly. Following those orders, I behaved especially badly to Bruno here, who has treated me with kindness and given me his personal hospitality. I repaid this by trying to get him suspended from his work and from this operation, because he was getting too close to creating an embarrassment for my ministry and my government. I’m very sorry.”

  Bruno felt the basilisk stare of the brigadier turning toward him, and nodded briefly to acknowledge the apology. Where was Carlos going with this?

  “There are two matters you should be aware of. First, the killing of Todor over twenty years ago and his burial near what is now an archaeology site was an unofficial Spanish operation, one of the extra-legal killings committed by GAL. My superiors took the view that it would be most unhelpful, before tomorrow’s summit between our ministers, to have a new GAL scandal exploding into the media and reviving the story of our secret war against ETA. As a result, we dragged our feet on providing information from our files. I promise that we will provide all the information we have, including the names of the killers, once the summit is over.”

  “This is a very serious matter,” the brigadier said. “You’re telling me that you deliberately hindered an operation in a way that could materially increase the prospects of an assassination attempt against a minister of France? You understand that I have no choice but to brief my minister before tomorrow’s meeting.”

  “I understand, and I trust that the threat to our ministers is not increased, thanks to the impressive security measures you have in place. But let me explain the second matter.” Carlos paused, and took off his glasses.

  “This is highly confidential and I tell you this by way of some recompense for our uncooperative behavior,” he said. “It was only because of the attempt to kill me today that I have authorization to share this.”