The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  Five years later, by which time it had been seen by more than a million visitors, the skull was withdrawn from exhibition to be fully reconstructed. A detailed examination found it to be a young woman of around twenty years, 5ft 1in tall, and that she had lived between thirteen and fifteen thousand years earlier. She had been buried with an ivory point, perhaps a harpoon or spear head, about three inches long, on or perhaps inside her abdomen. This led to speculation that this weapon might have been the cause of her death, a suggestion of long-ago murder that was astutely promoted by Henry Field to bring in more visitors to his museum. He also suggested that the location of her burial suggested that she might have been one of the sculptors of the unique equine frieze.

  The reconstruction of this woman’s face had delighted Bruno since he had first seen it at Cap Blanc, not only because she was lovely in a strikingly modern way with huge eyes, a graceful neck and high cheekbones, but because of the skull cap of shells that she wore. It made her look like some café society beauty of the 1920s. Bruno could almost imagine her dancing the Charleston.

  ‘What do you think of the exhibition, Bruno? You’ve been studying it long enough.’ The speaker was Clothilde Daumier, a short, red-haired powerhouse of a woman who was one of the museum’s curators and a leading expert on the prehistory of the region. She and her German archaeologist husband, Horst Morgenstern, were good friends and Bruno had been one of the witnesses at their recent wedding. As she spoke, she came forward and they embraced.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Bruno replied. ‘Thank you for inviting me to this preview. I’m overwhelmed with the skill of these reconstructions.’

  ‘In that case, you can tell the artist yourself,’ Clothilde said, steering him towards an attractive, grey-haired woman who moved gracefully as she advanced to shake Bruno’s hand. ‘Elisabeth Daynès, meet Bruno Courrèges, our chief of police and a good friend who has a great interest in archaeology. He even found a modern corpse in one of our ancient graves.’

  ‘Clothilde’s archaeologists found it,’ Bruno said, smiling. ‘I just helped find out who it was. But please, let me tell you how moved I am by your work, bringing these people back to life in this way. You are a great artist, madame.’

  ‘You’re very kind, Monsieur Bruno,’ Elisabeth replied. Her voice was soft and well-modulated, with just a hint of an accent of the Midi. ‘I always enjoy meeting Clothilde’s friends. How did you realize the body you found was not some prehistoric skeleton?’

  ‘Because he was wearing a Swatch. And Clothilde informed me that they had only been made since 1983. Tell me, have you ever worked with the police in trying to reconstruct the faces of unidentified skeletons?’

  ‘A little, but only informally. It’s a considerable investment in time and effort to do such a reconstruction and since so much of our work is seen by the courts as inspired guesswork, the police are understandably reluctant to finance such projects.’

  ‘I find it hard to understand why the courts are so reluctant when I see your work here, madame,’ Bruno said.

  ‘Please, call me Elisabeth,’ she said, as Clothilde steered them towards a reception area where they were handed glasses of wine and Clothilde excused herself to welcome some other guests to the preview. ‘I understand the courts’ point of view. If you study the verbal descriptions that people give of strangers, they usually describe the hair, its style and colour, the colour of the eyes, and whether the face is fleshy or lean. But those are three elements that we cannot discern from the skull itself. What we can do is use the contours of the individual skull, which vary much more than you might think, to reconstruct each of the forty-three muscles in the human face. So in terms of form and structure, I think we can go a long way to reconstruct the features. But the hair, the eyes, the depth of flesh – that’s almost impossible.’

  ‘So the muscular structure of a face varies with the small differences in the shape of each individual skull?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, nodding with enthusiasm. ‘We use a laser measurement system to map the precise shape of each skull down to fractions of a millimetre and put that into a computer which creates a three-dimensional model. Then we use a high-precision 3D printer to give us the head. After that we use the laser again to compare this printed skull with a cast we make of the original skull to check that they are absolutely identical. Developing and perfecting that system took a year of work but now it’s almost automatic.’

  ‘Why bother with the computer-printed version when you have a cast of the original skull?’

  ‘Because we can do so much of the work on recreating the musculature on the computer where it’s easy to make adjustments,’ she replied. ‘And with the computer, we can share images of our progress with colleagues all over the world. When we reconstructed the face of Tutankhamun, we could stay in constant touch with the National Geographic people in Washington and the Cairo museum.’

  ‘And if you knew the hair colour and that the body was that of a young man in his twenties, athletic and probably without much body fat, could you reconstruct something fairly accurate?’

  ‘Absolutely, Monsieur Bruno. Should I assume that you have a particular skeleton in mind and that you’re hoping to enlist my help? I’m afraid my schedule is already impossibly full – perhaps Clothilde has told you of our project to recreate the entire family of hominids from the earliest times: Australopithecus, Homos habilis, ergaster, floresiensis and of course, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. That takes all my time.’

  ‘I understand. But perhaps you have some young associate or student with such skills?’

  ‘Most of what I learned in this area came from Jean-Noel Vignal, whom I met when he was at the Forensic Institute in Paris. Perhaps you might consult him. But tell me about this body.’

  Briefly, Bruno recounted the story of J-J and Oscar, and she suddenly interrupted him.

  ‘But those dates, you say 1988 or 1989, that is when I was here in the Périgord,’ she said excitedly. ‘I was working at Le Thot, the park that’s attached to the Lascaux cave. They asked me to reconstruct a mammoth and a group of human hunters. That was part of my earliest work in this field. I’d been working in the theatre on costumes and then on masks for the national theatre in Lille and I really became interested in ancient humans when I was making models for the prehistory museum at Tautavel in the Pyrenees. So I have a personal connection to this region at the time this young man died. Give me your card and I’ll talk to some colleagues and see what might be done. Now I’d better circulate but thank you for your interest and your kind words.’

  They exchanged business cards and she scribbled a personal mobile phone number onto the one she gave him.

  ‘Au revoir, Elisabeth, and thank you for your exhibition and also for your help.’

  2

  Bruno put his idea to the back of his mind until he heard from Elisabeth that she had a possible candidate, a young student at a design school in Paris who was looking for a project she could submit to complete her diploma. Her name was Virginie. Her mother was Spanish and her father French and she had been raised in Madrid and Toulon. She had spent the previous summer vacation on an internship in Elisabeth’s studio.

  ‘Virginie is good. She knows my techniques and her work is meticulous,’ Elisabeth said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her progress with you and if this works out I’ll probably offer her a job in my studio when she graduates. She can continue to live on her student grant but she may need help with rent unless you can find her a place in a student hostel. And she’ll need a workshop. By the way, don’t be alarmed by the tattoos and the piercings! She’s good.’

  ‘Ha! It takes more than a few piercings to shock St Denis. She sounds excellent, Elisabeth, thank you. I’ll discuss this with J-J and get back to you.’

  As soon as he’d cut the call, Bruno contacted J-J to invite him to dinner, but warned him they’d be visiting the Les Eyzies museum first.


  ‘By the way,’ he asked J-J, ‘do you still have access to Oscar’s skull?’

  ‘It occupies pride of place in our evidence room here. Why?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. And do you still have that budget for cold cases?’

  ‘Certainly. It’s part of the training budget. We assign new candidates to unsolved cases to see how they shape up. What are you up to, Bruno?’

  ‘I’ll let you know over dinner, J-J. But I think you’ll like the idea.’

  Bruno prepared a simple meal before he left to meet J-J at the museum. They’d begin with some smoked salmon he’d been curing for the past three days. The marinade was made of peppercorns, dill, salt, pepper, crushed juniper berries and lemon zest, with a shot glass of eau de vie drizzled over the mixture before it went into the fridge. The sauce to accompany the gravlax was made of Dijon mustard, cider vinegar, honey and sunflower oil. He had cooked a casserole of venison in advance and had made an apple pie that he would serve cold with ice cream.

  Knowing that Fabiola, the local doctor, was on duty at the medical centre that evening, he invited her partner Gilles, a journalist, suspecting he would be intrigued by the prospect of reopening an investigation into Oscar’s death. He also invited the Mayor of St Denis, whose political skills might come in useful if J-J met some official resistance to reviving his old obsession with Oscar. They met at the museum shortly before it closed, each relieved to be in an air-conditioned space and escape from the brutal July heatwave that had gripped south-west France for the past week. Clothilde showed them around Elisabeth Daynès’s exhibition while Bruno explained what he’d learned from his talk with her.

  ‘Normally, a project like this would cost a fortune, but Elisabeth has a young student who’s keen to reconstruct Oscar’s face from his skull as part of her diploma,’ Bruno explained. ‘I’m assured she’s very good.’

  ‘You’re proposing that we could get something close enough to Oscar’s real face that we could use it to identify him?’ J-J asked. ‘But how do we go about making sure enough people see it?’

  ‘Publicity,’ said Gilles. ‘This is a great story and it’s very visual, just made for TV and social media. You have the skull and the reconstructed face and a long-ago murder. I’m sure my old editor at Paris Match would want a two-page spread on that, and so would Sud-Ouest and TV news magazines. It’s just the kind of quirky, off-beat story they love to wrap up a news bulletin.’ Gilles leaned back, made a mock-solemn face and adopted the half sonorous, half-folksy diction of a newsreader. ‘And now, from Périgord, how the archaeologists are helping police investigate a thirty-year-old murder that has never been solved.’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure I can persuade the powers that be to give me a budget for this,’ J-J objected, but his eyes were bright as he kept looking at the reconstructed faces of the women in the display case. ‘Still, I’d certainly like to give it a try. Nobody could deny that these faces are amazingly lifelike.’

  ‘You don’t need a budget,’ said the Mayor. ‘It seems to me that the artist will be working for free, or for not much more than pocket money. I’ll have a word with the Mayor of Périgueux and I’m sure we can get her a place in a student hostel. You’ll have plenty of room for her to work in that police science lab of yours, J-J. And since the original murder took place in St Denis, I imagine we can find some modest funds in our tourism promotion budget if required, so long as we can eventually put the reconstruction of the face on display for the tourists. Gilles is right, this is something that will catch the public imagination.’

  They took a last look around the exhibition, pausing once more before the exhibition case that depicted the life-sized reconstruction of the Neanderthal man with the child and beside it another display of a young Cro-Magnon man, spear in hand and poised to throw it.

  ‘It’s a funny thing about these men with their straggling beards,’ said J-J. ‘It makes them look less modern somehow than the women.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean, but imagine trying to shave with a piece of flint,’ Bruno replied.

  ‘You’re both missing something,’ said Gilles, a note of excitement in his voice. ‘Look at the Neanderthal man with that animal fur draped loosely around him. And then look at the Cro-Magnon guy with his spear from tens of thousands of years later. His furs have been deliberately fashioned into trousers and a jacket. I’d never thought of it before but the Cro-Magnons must have invented the needle, which gave them the technology of sewing. It meant they could wear garments that were much better suited to surviving cold spells and ice ages. Maybe that’s how they flourished while the Neanderthals died out.’

  Later, in Bruno’s living room over their aperitifs, protected from the heat outside by the thick stone walls, the Mayor turned to J-J and asked if he’d ever thought of using the DNA from Oscar’s skull to help identify him.

  J-J shook his head. ‘It was all too new at the time, very expensive and not too reliable.

  ‘It wasn’t until 1985 that a British scientist called Alec Jeffreys first established that everyone’s DNA is unique, J-J explained. The police were still studying the science behind it but a defence lawyer was quick to take advantage and the following year the lawyer used DNA in a British court in a case of two girls raped and murdered to show that his client was innocent, even though he’d already been convicted. DNA was then able to establish the real culprit. That made news and the following year it was first used in another rape case in Florida. France took some time to start using the technology, proposing to keep a national DNA database as late as 1996. It began with sex offenders but its use was not extended to those convicted of serious crimes until after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

  ‘Even today, we only have some five million people in our national database,’ J-J told them. ‘The British and the Americans each have over twenty million. But it was French police scientists who showed its limitations. There was a case of a woman’s DNA connected to several murders in Austria, Germany and France, and French detectives established that the DNA came from a woman working in the factory that produced the cotton swabs used to collect the DNA from swabbing inside the mouths of suspects. The killer was finally caught – and turned out to be a man. But there’s no doubt that DNA has revolutionized police work.’

  That seemed a natural point to pause and Bruno invited them to the table, brought out the smoked salmon and asked how Oscar’s DNA might be useful today.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said J-J. ‘I’ll start by running it against the national database which is a long shot but it’s getting better. Then I’ll ask for a Europe-wide search through Interpol. I can work on that tomorrow. Our own lab can take a sample of the skull and get the DNA.’

  ‘Isn’t Jacqueline supposed to be back soon?’ Gilles asked the Mayor, referring to the half-French, half-American historian who spent one term per year teaching at the Sorbonne, another at Columbia in New York and the rest of her year in St Denis. She now rented out her renovated farmhouse nearby and lived with the Mayor, an arrangement so mutually agreeable that it seemed to have subtracted several years from each of them.

  ‘She’ll be back on Friday in time for the weekend,’ the Mayor said. ‘She stayed on for some conference in Washington at the Cold War research centre that relates to her next book, something about a horde of Stasi documents from the former East Germany. She emailed me to say that Jack Crimson is also attending the conference. Apparently he’s on some British committee that determines which official documents are to be declassified.’

  ‘So Jack will be back here as well?’ Bruno asked. He was fond of the former British diplomat and intelligence official whose daughter Miranda helped Bruno’s former lover and still close friend, Pamela, run a nearby horse-riding school. They had recently started offering cooking courses to fill Pamela’s gîtes in the winter months when tourists were scarce. Bruno and o
ther friends had been roped in to help demonstrate the local cuisine.

  ‘No, Jacqueline told me that Jack is going back to London for a few days for some committee meeting, probably relating to the conference in Washington,’ the Mayor said. ‘He’ll be back later next week.’

  The conversation drifted off to sport and then through politics over the venison until interrupted by Bruno’s phone. He didn’t recognize the number of the caller but thought he’d better answer and was surprised to hear the voice of his cousin Alain, the one who had gone into the air force and the relative to whom he was closest.

  ‘Bad news, Bruno,’ he began. ‘It’s about Mum. She’s had a stroke and been taken to hospital in Bergerac, the one on Avenue Calmette. It happened sometime last night but I just heard about it from my big sister. I’ll get some compassionate leave and head there tomorrow. I’m told she can recognize people but she can’t talk.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it,’ said Bruno. ‘What time do you expect to be there?’

  ‘I’ll have to sort out the paperwork at the base for my leave tomorrow morning and then I’ll drive up. Should be there at about four and I’ll stay with Annette for a day or two. Should I expect to see you?’

  ‘I’ll get there as soon as I can after four,’ Bruno said. ‘Maybe we can have a drink together afterwards and catch up. It’s been too long.’

  ‘Right, see you then.’

  The call left Bruno feeling pensive about his aunt and his childhood in the overcrowded tenement in a grim public housing project where all six children shared a bedroom, even the eldest, Annette. Bruno only ever saw her and the other siblings when he paid a duty call to his aunt on her birthday and at Christmas, each time taking her a bottle of his home-made vin de noix. Annette and the eldest brother, Bernard, lived in Bergerac, in public housing. The other three siblings had all moved away and Bruno had lost touch, except for Alain. Annette worked in the kitchen of the Bergerac retirement home in which her mother had been living and Bernard had been unemployed for years, claiming disability allowance for a bad back which did not seem to stop him taking part-time jobs as a painter and decorator, working off the books and only for cash.