Also by Martin Walker
The Dordogne Mysteries
Death in the Dordogne
(previously published as Bruno, Chief of Police)
The Dark Vineyard
Black Diamond
The Crowded Grave
The Devil’s Cave
The Resistance Man
Death Undercover
(previously published as Children of War)
The Dying Season
Fatal Pursuit
The Templars’ Last Secret
A Taste for Vengeance
The Body in the Castle Well
A Shooting at Chateau Rock
This ebook published in 2021 by
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Copyright © 2021 Walker & Watson Limited
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TPB ISBN 978 1 78747 775 9
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
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To the volunteer firefighters, the pompiers of the Périgord
Contents
The Coldest Case
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
1
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26
Acknowledgements
1
The three skulls transfixed him. The first, the original that had been unearthed after seventy thousand years, was not quite complete. Beside it stood a reconstruction, an exact copy but artificially filled in with the missing parts of the jaw and cranium. Behind them, glowing eerily in the museum’s carefully crafted lighting, was an artist’s attempt at reconstructing the face that had once covered the skull. Maybe it was a trick of the light that made it seem larger than the others. Reluctantly, Bruno Courrèges shifted his gaze back to the original, whose caption said it was the closest to a perfect Neanderthal skull ever found. It came from the rock shelter of La Ferrassie, a place he passed each day as he drove from his home to his office at the Mairie of St Denis, where for the past decade or more he had carried out his duties as the local chief of police in the Périgord region of France.
The region boasted an extraordinary wealth of prehistoric remains, from painted caves to carvings from the tusks of mammoths, and Bruno had become an enthusiast who had now visited all the known caves and was a regular visitor to the museum of prehistory in Les Eyzies, close to his home and where he now stood. The reconstructed face set him thinking. It made him recall the curious obsession of his friend Jean-Jacques, known to the region’s police as J-J, with another and more recent skull. Bruno knew this skull well since its enlarged photograph had for three decades accompanied J-J’s rise to become the chief of detectives for the department of the Dordogne. For as long as Bruno had known him, and for years before that, the photograph had gone with J-J to every office he had occupied. These days, it was fixed to the back of J-J’s door, where he could see the skull from his place at the imposing desk that was standard issue for such a senior official. His visitors couldn’t miss it as they left his room. His fellow cops often speculated why J-J submitted himself willingly to this constant reminder of his first big case, the one he had failed to solve as a young detective some three decades earlier.
J-J claimed not to remember why he had called the skull ‘Oscar’ but every policeman in south-western France knew the story. A truffle hunter out with his dog in the woods near St Denis had found a tree downed by a storm. The fallen trunk had blocked a small stream tumbling down the slope and forced it into a new channel. The rushing water had then eroded a bank and exposed something that had attracted the hunter’s dog: a human foot, partly decomposed and partly nibbled by woodland creatures. The hunter had called Joe, Bruno’s predecessor as the municipal policeman in St Denis. Joe had visited the site and in turn had informed the Police Nationale in Périgueux and they had sent J-J, their newest young detective, to investigate.
Determined to make his name with this unexpected case, J-J had rushed to the scene, established a security cordon, demanded spades and a local photographer from the Mairie and help from the local gendarmes. With their support he had carefully unearthed the remains of a healthy young male with long blond hair, perfect teeth and dressed in a T-shirt which still bore the faded logo of some forgotten rock band. The body’s own bacteria and the insect life and soil microbes had done their work in the year or so since the death, as estimated by the medical examiner. Too little flesh remained for any cause of death to be evident. The fact that the corpse had been deliberately hidden persuaded J-J that the man had been murdered.
To the horror of the watching gendarmes, J-J had donned medical gloves and carefully removed the remaining earth that still covered much of the body. He’d then commandeered a steel sheet about two metres long and a metre wide, along with a forklift truck from a nearby builders’ depot and had them both manhandled up through the woods. He had then slid the steel sheet into the ground a few centimetres beneath the deliquescent remains and inserted the prongs of the forklift to raise and remove the body. Using four staves of wood beneath this steel plate, he’d ordered eight gendarmes to carry it like some heavy military stretcher, down to the flat land adjoining the campsite below. It was then taken by truck to the morgue in Périgueux for a forensic autopsy.
Meanwhile, J-J had spent an hour foraging for any sign of a bullet in the soil beneath where the body had been discovered. Nothing useful had been found, even when the gendarmes with metal detectors and volunteers from the local hunting club had made a careful fingertip search of the vicinity. They had found the sites of two small fires, remnants of charred wood ringed with stones, and some disturbed soil which, on examination, turned out to be a latrine. The burial site was but a short walk through the woods from a popular commercial campsite. It seemed to have been a regular place for what the French called le camping sauvage, where people squatted on a temporary and unofficial camp
site in the woods without paying the fees required for a formal campground.
In those days before DNA had transformed the forensic profession, J-J had challenged himself to discover how the man had been killed. In the morgue, when the remaining flesh and organs had been painstakingly removed in the hope of finding a bullet or perhaps some evidence of poisoning, J-J had peered at every rib in search of a scratch that could have been made by a knife. Finally, in desperation, he persuaded the investigating magistrate assigned to the case to let him try one last, desperate measure. He’d used his own money to buy a large metal pot, removed the body’s head and went to the kitchens in police headquarters to demand the use of a mobile cooking stove. He moved it into the courtyard and proceeded to boil the head until all the flesh had fallen away.
This took some time and the aroma at first intrigued and then horrified the other policemen in the building, along with those members of the public with businesses close by and the two local news reporters who had a small office near the entrance. The stench itself was unforgettable but at least its reach was confined at first to a limited area around the police building. Soon, however, local shopkeepers began to complain and then the Mayor and the Prefect arrived to demand an explanation, each of them wearing masks that had been soaked in some mentholated liquid. By the time they arrived, the local radio reporter had already broadcast the news that the local police were cooking a corpse.
When the policemen began to grumble, J-J had been summoned to the Commissioner’s office, where he showed his letter of authorization to boil the skull. It had been signed by the magistrate who had by then departed on a long-planned weekend trip to visit his parents in Brittany and in those days before mobile phones, there was no immediate way to reach him. The Commissioner then announced that he had some urgent business at the Bergerac police station, almost an hour away, that required his personal attention. The Mayor and Prefect found themselves met by the Deputy Commissioner, who had been told of the magistrate’s authorization and pleaded to his visitors that there was nothing he could do. His youngest detective was leaving no stone unturned in his pursuit of a murder case.
‘You might at least have insisted that this unpleasant procedure take place in some remote location rather than in the centre of the city,’ the Mayor had said, the force of his protest somewhat diminished by his mask, which made the Deputy Commissioner ask for every statement to be repeated. Finally, he led the two distinguished visitors, one representing the city of Périgueux and the other the Republic of France, to the small courtyard where they found J-J, oblivious to the stench, stirring the pot amidst clouds of pungent steam.
The Mayor strode forward and turned off the bottle of gas beneath the mobile stove. At the same moment, J-J had hauled the now fleshless skull from the pot with a pair of heavy tongs and waved it at his visitors in a manner that made them back away nervously. He then announced, his face beaming with pride, ‘It worked. See for yourselves, messieurs. He was bludgeoned to death! We couldn’t see that from the decomposed flesh.’
The Mayor, Prefect and Deputy Commissioner each looked at the tell-tale cracks between the eye and ear sockets of the gleaming white skull as the two local news reporters entered the courtyard, notebooks at the ready.
‘We are looking for a left-handed killer, gentlemen,’ J-J went on, who had become a policeman after a boyhood devotion to the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes. ‘You will see the wound is on the right side of the victim’s head, and from the shape of the cracks it was evidently delviered from in front.’
‘Could this not have been established more simply, perhaps by an X-ray of the skull?’ asked the Prefect.
‘Indeed, sir,’ replied the Deputy Commissioner. ‘But you will doubtless recall that you refused to endorse our proposed budget for modernizing our police laboratory and installing an X-ray facility.’
J-J, intent only on the skull and the clues it offered, did not notice the reporters scribbling in their notebooks. The Mayor, who had an eye for such things, and who vaguely recalled having told the local hospital to refuse police requests to use their X-ray machine on the grounds that the public health came first, was already regretting his decision to demand an explanation from the police. Regretting even more his suggestion that the Prefect should accompany him, he said, ‘Well, the cooking is now over, the smell will soon disperse and the vital clue has been found. It only remains to congratulate the police on their ingenuity in difficult circumstances and perhaps we might adjourn, my dear Deputy Commissioner, to the open air, and leave this enterprising young detective to his duties.’
It was the event that made J-J’s reputation with the press, the public and above all with his colleagues in the police. Even the Commissioner forgave him when the Prefect reconsidered his earlier verdict and approved the budget for a state-of-the-art facility, including an X-ray machine, for the new police scientific laboratory. But this was little compensation for J-J, who then embarked on a long and fruitless attempt to identify his corpse, even though the Mayor had persuaded the local hospital to let him use the X-ray machine to document an unusual double break in the body’s left leg, made some years before death. J-J had been confident that medical records would eventually enable him to confirm the name of the most celebrated corpus delicti in the history of the Périgord police.
There had been no local report of a missing young male with fair hair and no such missing person reported in France in the twelve months that the medical examiner estimated had been the maximum time since death. J-J went through Interpol to ask other European countries whether they had any candidates on their lists of missing persons, and even tried the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all without success. As the Berlin Wall came down and relationships improved with the police of Russia and Eastern Europe, J-J widened his search. Through French embassies, he made contact with the medical associations and the health ministries across Europe, seeking a doctor who might recall treating the unusual leg break. He turned his attention to the T-shirt on the body and tracked down the Austrian rock band that had enjoyed a brief success and sold several thousand T-shirts in Germany and Switzerland on the strength of it. Months passed and then years, but J-J’s labours, to which he devoted much of his spare time, were all in vain.
He had a body, or at least a skeleton. He had a murder and had identified the murder weapon as a collapsible spade, produced in large numbers by the US army and widely available at army surplus and camping stores around the world. What he did not have was an identity, only the photograph of Oscar’s skull that covered the back of his office door as a memento mori of the case he’d never solved.
And so Bruno, studying the artist’s reconstruction of a Neanderthal face from the original skull, had the first glimmerings of an idea. The face did not look primitive. It was almost entirely human but with elements of our primate ancestors, with the same heavy jaw and prominent bone ridges above the eyes. The reconstruction seemed more real because the artist had also produced not simply a face, but the whole body from the ancient skeleton of La Ferrassie. The man was sitting, a thick and brawny arm outstretched as he made some point to a small child sitting rapt with attention before him. The child’s face had also been reconstructed from another Neanderthal skull and the scene was to Bruno’s eyes wholly convincing.
He paused at the next display case, startled at the sight of a young woman with a defiant or perhaps proud pose of her head. She was clad in furs with beads around her neck, her eyes looking sidelong at some scene that made her gaze watchful, even suspicious. She had a high forehead, full lips and prominent cheekbones. She had been reconstructed from a partial skeleton found at the Abri Pataud rock shelter in Les Eyzies, just along the main street from this national museum of prehistory. The skeleton of the body, a young woman of roughly eighteen years, had been discovered with the skeleton of a newborn child; her skull had been found four metres away, protected by some stones that appeared to have
been deliberately placed. She was a Cro-Magnon, or early modern human, who had lived some twenty thousand years ago, nearly twenty thousand years after her people had replaced the Neanderthals.
Bruno shook his head in awe rather than in disbelief at the sight of this woman whose face had moved him. There was a lively intelligence in her features and a self-reliance in her stance that made him realize with a start of surprise that this was a woman who attracted him. He could imagine seeing her in a crowd on the street outside or gazing out from the window of a passing train or even sitting at another table in some outdoor café. He let the fantasy run on, imagining sharing glances with her across the crowded café, perhaps arranging to meet. This was a woman that stirred thoughts of might-have-beens; a woman with whom he could even imagine, across the millennia, falling in love.
The next face he recognized, but not her adornment. The reconstructed head wore a skull cap of dozens of tiny shells, carefully pierced and then sewn together. He had seen it before at the famous rock shelter of Cap Blanc, just a few kilometres up the road towards Sarlat, where prehistoric people had crafted a massive bas-relief of horses, deer and bison. They were so lifelike that they might almost be emerging from the rock into which they had been carved.
In 1911, archaeologists had found an almost complete human skeleton buried beneath the hooves of the central horse of the sculpture, the bones protected by rocks at the feet and more rocks balanced above the head. It was presumed at first to be male, but then the local landowner sold it to the Field Museum in Chicago for the equivalent in francs of one thousand dollars in 1926. Henry Field, who collected the skeleton in New York and wrapped it in cotton wool to be taken back to Chicago, noted at once that the pelvic girdle was female and arranged such a blaze of publicity that on the first day it was shown to the public, more than twenty thousand people crowded into the museum to see the first prehistoric skeleton ever displayed in the United States.
The Coldest Case Page 1