The Crowded Grave bop-4

by Martin Walker

  “I’m pretty sure right now,” Albert said. “But I’d still like to hear what Jeannot has to say.”

  “Hey, chef,” Ahmed called from the side of the wrecked storeroom. “Come look at this.”

  They walked across. Ahmed’s discovery was the scorched and badly bent face of a small clock. Albert bent down to examine it more closely.

  “See that little hole drilled there?” he said, looking at Bruno. “That’s the giveaway. This was the timer. They drill that hole for the contact, and when the minute hand comes around and touches it, boom.”

  As Bruno pulled out his phone and punched in the speed dial for J-J, an all-too-familiar Peugeot pulled into the parking lot and Philippe Delaron appeared, camera in hand.

  “Do you never mind your own camera shop?” asked Bruno, tiredly.

  “ Maman can do that. I make more money from the papers these days,” Philippe replied. “Great evening last night, Bruno. So what’s this? I heard the siren and went to the station to ask where the trouble was, but it doesn’t look like your usual fire.”

  “It’s not,” said Ahmed before Bruno could stop him. “It was a bomb. Somebody tried to blow the place up with dynamite.”

  “ Bordel, dynamite? After those attacks on the farms? Somebody’s declared war on foie gras,” said Philippe, snapping away. “Hey, that’s not a bad headline.” Camera around his neck, he turned to Arnaud, pulling a notebook from his pocket. “So what’s this going to do to your business?”

  Meanwhile, Bruno heard the tinny tones of J-J shouting into his phone and quickly stepped away, out of hearing. Philippe knew far too much already. “Sorry, J-J, an interruption. We’ve had an explosion here, looks like dynamite. Nobody hurt, but it was a bomb with a timer. We’re at Gravelle’s foie gras canning plant, the one off the side road by the bridge as you head for Ste. Alvere. There’s an animal rights statement painted on the wall, and the press is here already, talking about a war on foie gras. This is getting serious.”

  “Any sign who did it?”

  “There was nobody here, and it’s quite a way from the nearest house. You might want to give all the students an explosives test,” Bruno said. “But if they’re all clear we’d better start thinking about the Basques.”

  “Get the press out and seal off the whole area. We’ll need a fingertip search so you’d better call Isabelle. She can get the gendarmes to round up all the students. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Maybe a bit more, I’ll collect that Spanish guy, Carlos, bring him with me. He’s been with the prefect.”

  Before hanging up, J-J said he’d get a bus to take the students to Bergerac airport. “It’s only thirty minutes away, and all the airports have explosives testing gear for their security checks these days.”

  Bruno called Isabelle to report the news and then went to his car for his roll of crime-scene tape, steering Delaron and Arnaud out of the area. He’d barely finished sealing off the scene when Jeannot arrived in a small truck. Albert took him into the wreckage of the showroom, showed him the scraps of mattress and the clock face, and they began sketching likely blast patterns.

  Bruno sat in his van and from memory began calling every house he could think of that might have been close enough to hear the blast. He tried three without success before he remembered Manchon, who ran a couple of taxi-ambulances that took outpatients to the hospitals in Sarlat and Perigueux. He might have been up early, and might even have been close enough to hear something.

  “Didn’t hear a thing, Bruno,” Manchon replied. “But my son said something over breakfast when he came back from his run. He’s training for the Bordeaux marathon and said he heard something that sounded like an explosion just after five. He thought it was the quarry, starting early.”

  Bruno sat back, thinking. He didn’t see the students resorting to dynamite, however many PETA enthusiasts might remain after Kajte’s departure. Nor was it likely that they’d know how to use it and tamp it down. But somebody certainly wanted to make it look that way.

  He tried to put himself in the shoes of a terrorist group, isolated and trying to put together a hurried operation in unfamiliar territory, with no military-grade explosives on hand. They raid a quarry for some dynamite, knowing it would bring a massive police operation. It might be worthwhile to use a stick or two to mount a distraction, to send some of the security forces chasing after the students on a false trail.

  Bruno slammed a fist into his hand. He was the one being distracted, and not by any terrorist group but by his own foolishness. He’d been thinking of horses and of Isabelle, of Pamela and of Maurice and the Villattes and his own people. Were there really Basque terrorists so short of explosives that they had to raid a quarry within shouting distance of the chateau where the summit was taking place? ETA had been in business for fifty years, despite everything the Spanish state could throw at them. They weren’t a bunch of amateurs. They’d have access to Semtex or some other plastic explosive. They could get hold of a sniper’s rifle on the black market. They might even have shoulder-launched missiles to attack the helicopters. Sticks of dynamite and cheap clock timers seemed like kids’ stuff, rather than the work of an experienced and professional terrorist organization. None of this felt right to Bruno, unless he and Isabelle and Carlos and the whole security operation were being deliberately encouraged to underestimate the opposition.

  Putain de bordel, he’d been lazy and irresponsible, Bruno told himself. He’d forgotten the first rule he’d been taught in the army: know your enemy. He hadn’t even sat down to do some basic research on ETA and its methods here in France, let alone in Spain. He’d been going through the motions, content to let the brigadier and Carlos and Isabelle and the other specialists set the agenda and do all the work, while he sat back and thought about his farmers and that worryingly inexperienced new magistrate. He took a deep breath and picked up the phone to call Isabelle and ask her what intelligence data she had on ETA that she could share with him.

  “It was dynamite, sure enough,” came a voice. Jeannot was coming toward him, Albert by his side. He was waving something in his hand. It fluttered as he walked. “And what’s more, it’s mine.”

  “We walked around the perimeter and stopped where the slogan was painted,” Jeannot said. “Seemed a funny place to put it, away from the road where nobody would see it. But it would be the right place to put a bomb together, out of sight. They could even have used a flashlight to see what they were doing. We found this.”

  He held out a strip of waxed brown paper, about eight inches long. It had numbers stamped on it.

  “It’s wrapping from a dynamite stick. They pulled this end off when they put the detonator in. And those numbers are from the same batch that was stolen from us yesterday. I should know-I spent half the day filling in those same numbers on a stack of insurance forms.”

  “Looks like we’ve solved your case, eh Bruno?” said Albert, looking pleased with himself.

  “Could be,” said Bruno. “A pity you didn’t use gloves when you picked it up. It means we’ll have to fingerprint you, Jeannot, just to eliminate your prints from the inquiry.”

  His doubts about this whole business redoubled. He could just about accept that a terrorist group might in desperation raid a local dynamite cache, but he couldn’t see them leaving such helpful clues scattered around the landscape. Somehow he was sure they were smarter than that.

  His phone rang again. This time it was the mayor.

  “I’ve just heard Philippe Delaron live on Radio Perigord talking about some animal rights bomb at the Gravelle place,” the mayor said. “And now Claire tells me I’ve got France Inter asking questions on the other line about a war on foie gras. That’s our bloody livelihood, Bruno. What the hell’s going on?”

  Bruno ignored an incoming call and briefly explained, promising to return to the mairie as soon as his security meeting was over. Then he checked the number of the call he had missed. It was Pamela and he called her back.

  “I’ve just had a
call from Edinburgh,” she said, sounding distracted. “It’s Mother, she’s had a stroke. My aunt said it doesn’t look too serious but I have to get to Scotland.”

  “I can drive you to Bergerac for the afternoon flight,” said Bruno, knowing how the coming of the daily Ryanair flights to the once-sleepy nearby airport had transformed the lives of the British in Perigord.

  “Let me check connections to Edinburgh and call you back. I want to get there tonight so I may have to go via Bordeaux or Paris. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” Pamela said, her voice tense with dismay.

  “Have you managed to speak to the hospital?” he asked.

  “No, just to my aunt so far, but she had a brief meeting with the doctor and she’s at the hospital. It’s so unfair. She’s only in her sixties, never had a day’s illness and now this. Can you look after the horses? It might be easier if you and Gigi moved into my place…”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll work it out,” he said, trying to calm her. Bruno had never heard Pamela like this, her voice gabbling, jumping from subject to subject. She must be in shock herself. “The important thing now is to get you there. Let me know about the flight times and I’ll drive you wherever you need to go.”

  Part of his mind was wondering whether he’d be able to keep that promise, with security meetings and bombings, foie gras and Horst’s disappearance, the mayor and horses all clamoring for his attention.

  “I’m very sorry about your mother. I hope she recovers soon. What time did it happen?”

  “That’s just it. We don’t really know,” said Pamela, her voice cracking. Bruno heard her swallow hard. “They think it was sometime yesterday evening. She was in her normal clothes, and her bed hadn’t been slept in. If my aunt hadn’t arranged to visit her for coffee this morning she might have been lying there another day.”

  “Are you alone now?” he asked.

  “Yes, but I’m okay. I’ll get onto the Internet and call you back.” Pamela hung up, and Bruno, ignoring the buzz of an incoming text message, quickly rang Fabiola at the clinic to tell her the news and ask if she could go and keep Pamela company. Fabiola promised to go as soon as her last morning appointment was finished, probably not long after eleven.

  18

  Although it was the smallest of the security committee meetings so far, for the first time the video conference link with the ministry in Paris was being used, and Bruno looked at the brigadier’s familiar face on the screen with interest. Most unusually, the brigadier was smiling.

  His voice was normal, but his image on screen kept jerking in a disconcerting way as he explained that Horst’s name had raised an alarm in Berlin. Bruno was startled to learn that the quiet archaeologist had been a student militant in the sixties and a suspected sympathizer with the Red Army Faktion in the seventies. Isabelle gasped when the brigadier said that Horst had a brother called Dieter, now believed dead, who was an associate of the Baader-Meinhof Group and possibly even an active member. The brother got to East Germany, and the Stasi files reported him dying of a heart attack in 1989, the year the Wall came down. There were no specific links to ETA from his known record, although there was a well-documented history of cooperation between ETA and the Red Army Faktion.

  “This Dieter was known to have attended a Palestinian training camp in the Beka’a Valley in the seventies, at a time when several ETA militants were there,” the brigadier said, and looked up from the file. “I think we have a connection.”

  “Perhaps Senor Gambara can get us some more information on this,” Isabelle interjected.

  “We never came up with much on this so-called cooperation,” Carlos said. “There were personal contacts and some visits, stemming from those training camps in Libya and Lebanon, but no real collaboration. No joint operations, no sharing of munitions, nothing useful that we could get hold of. Remember those Palestinian training camps were over thirty years ago. But if you can get me the name of the camps and the dates, we’ll check from our side.”

  “Our German colleagues have also tracked the father’s war record for us,” the brigadier went on. “He was Waffen SS, the military arm, and served his entire war in the Totenkopf armored division, which spent most of its time on the Eastern Front.”

  “But there was a photo of him in France, on a tank with a Dunkerque signpost,” Bruno objected.

  But that had been in 1940, when Heinrich Vogelstern was a junior officer, an Untersturmfuhrer, the brigadier explained. After the fall of France his unit was stationed south of Bordeaux near the Spanish frontier until April 1941. Then they were moved to the east, to take part in the invasion of Russia, where they stayed

  until the end of the war. By 1945 he had risen to be a Standartenfuhrer, the equivalent of colonel, and was killed in Hungary at the end of the war, in March 1945.

  “Anything known of his time in France, anti-Resistance operations or anything that could have made his son a target for vengeance?” Bruno asked.

  “There wasn’t much Resistance at that time,” the brigadier said drily. Until quite late in the war, the Communists had dominated the Resistance. And until Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, the French Communist Party had been under orders from Moscow to accept the German occupation. So the brigadier saw nothing relevant from Vogelstern’s time in France. And although most of the Totenkopf division came from concentration camp guards, Horst’s father had come from a different unit, the SS-VT, or Verfugungstruppe, a special force that trained alongside Hitler’s Leibstandarte bodyguard. He had been a devoted Nazi from the beginning, but as a soldier, not in the death camps.

  The brigadier looked up. “These German records are remarkably thorough. It makes me envious. Horst’s university hasn’t heard from him nor have his neighbors in Germany and there’s been activity on his credit cards…” The screen and the audio went blank and then cleared, and Bruno heard the brigadier’s voice, sounding distorted, saying “… because it seems like there’s no obvious connection. But we have to assume there is a connection here somewhere that could be relevant to our security mission. The coincidences are too strong.”

  “I’ve got another coincidence for you,” said J-J. “I got the forensic report this morning on that unidentified corpse at our German professor’s dig. They did a DNA analysis and there’s a better than eighty percent probability that he was a Basque. Don’t ask me how they know, but apparently there are some distinctive genetics.”

  “Anything on the identity?” asked Isabelle.

  J-J shook his head, leafing through the file. “No, but they think he was shot sometime between 1984 and 1987.”

  “And once again our German professor is the connection,” said the brigadier. “His brother, his dig and now his disappearance.”

  “This Basque, the unidentified corpse, wasn’t he shot at the time of the dirty war?” Bruno asked the flickering video image, and then he turned to Carlos. “Remember, we talked about it the day we first met. If he was a victim of the dirty war, maybe there is something that could identify him in the Spanish records.”

  “Not many records were kept, for obvious reasons,” Carlos said, scribbling a note to himself. “And then they were very thoroughly sanitized. The commission of inquiry in the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion had a terrible job trying to reconstruct it all. But I’ll check with Madrid, see if they have anything.”

  “I’ll e-mail you the forensic report,” said J-J. “There’s some detail on the clothing, but nothing that really helps us beyond giving us a rough date, like the Swatch he wore. His nose had been broken in childhood, that’s about it. And the electric wire that was used to bind his hands was made in Germany, but it was on sale all over Europe.”

  “And I’ll arrange a search of our own files,” said the brigadier. “A lot of those killings took place on French soil. I remember we even arrested four of your agents in Bayonne, Carlos, trying to kidnap somebody they claimed was the head of ETA. Some of their colleagues then kidnapped somebody else to secure their re
lease.”

  “Jose Mari Larraetxea,” said Carlos, his voice somber. “He was the head of ETA at the time. It was a very embarrassing operation.”

  “Our German professor could be a kidnap victim,” said Bruno, thinking that nobody else seemed much concerned about Horst’s fate. “You saw my report on the scene at his house, the bloodstains and the marks of someone being dragged.”

  “All that could have been staged,” said Isabelle. “But what worries me most about all this is our almost complete lack of intelligence on this ETA active service unit. It’s said to have been based in France for months now, and all we have is one name, Michel-I can’t pronounce this-Goikoetxea, and a photograph of him at age eighteen. He’s now what, almost forty.”

  “Mikel Goikoetxea, he’s named after his father, one of the ETA leaders,” said Carlos, “killed by a GAL sniper in Bayonne in 1983. The son is forty next year, and we’ve never laid eyes on him, since he was arrested at a student demonstration. What can I say? They have very good security. It’s almost impossible for a non-Basque to infiltrate them.”

  “And now we come to the latest drama,” said the brigadier. “Bruno, what do you know about this morning’s bombing? There was something on my car radio about a war on foie gras, but Isabelle e-mailed me that there could be a connection.”

  “There’s certainly a connection with the dynamite theft from the local quarry,” Bruno replied. He explained that the dynamite that was used had come from the batch that was stolen the previous day and there was a scrawled slogan about animal rights on the side of the building.

  “Is anything more known about any of these students?” asked the brigadier.

  “We put through a routine inquiry to all the relevant foreign police, but nothing of significance came back,” Isabelle said. “I’ll do it again with a priority code, and with a special request under your name asking for a full security readout on the two students directly involved in the earlier attacks.”