The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  Usually in a place like this he’d expect the air to be heavy with the smell of moist earth and vegetation. Instead, the air seemed almost dusty. As Bruno moved to one side his foot caught on something and he bent down to find an old stake buried in the ground, the kind that might have been used to secure a tent rope. He pulled it out and it came with a short length of dirty plastic ribbon. He could still make out the stripes of white and red that had been used to mark off a crime scene.

  ‘Where you’re standing is where J-J set up his base,’ Joe said. He was casting round, poking at the low undergrowth with a stick.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘I’m trying to find the tracks. J-J persuaded the gendarmes to let him use a forklift truck. That’s how they got the body out. It’s hard to find anything after all this time. Thirty years of leaf fall and rotting branches have put a whole new layer of soil over everything.’

  ‘J-J said he found a couple of fireplaces and a latrine. Do you recall where they were?’

  ‘The latrine was off to the side of the campsite and a bit downhill. They found it with the metal detector because they’d put their empty cans of food down there before filling it in. One of the fireplaces was pretty much where you saw the current one but I forget where the other one was.’

  ‘Anything else you recall, anything that strikes you, jogs your memory? It must have been a big moment for you, a lot of press interest, tourists coming to watch all the police activity.’

  ‘Yes, we set up a perimeter at the bottom of the hill for crowd control but the gendarmes did that. After the first day J-J sent me round asking the local hunters and mushroom and truffle pickers if any of them knew the area, if they’d seen anything.’

  ‘I don’t see any green oaks or hazelnuts so I wouldn’t expect truffles around here,’ said Bruno.

  ‘There’s the odd hornbeam and you can find truffles around them. I saw one or two on the way up here with the blackened ground around the trunks. I might come up here with the dog, see if there are any estivales here. They don’t mind the earth being dry.’

  Estivales, or summer truffles, were not greatly prized but they could flavour a mild olive oil or make truffle butter. Bruno sometimes used very thin slices on top of a salad or pasta, or to help give some taste to the usually flavourless white mushrooms sold by supermarkets, the champignons de Paris.

  ‘Thanks for showing this to me,’ Bruno said. ‘Let’s go back and visit Hilaire’s parents. They may have something.’

  The old couple, who greeted Joe with affection, had prepared their living room for the arrival of guests. Coffee cups, side plates and small glasses were lined up on a coffee table in the middle of a square formed by the fireplace, a sofa, two armchairs and a big TV set that was screening some daytime soap opera. Hilaire’s dad, Antoine, used his remote control to lower the sound and his wife brought in a plate of gâteau aux noix and coffee.

  ‘Usually we’d go outside but it’s too hot today, even with the parasol,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s this global warming they go on about.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ said Bruno, as Antoine filled the tiny glasses from a bottle of Vieille Prune, a plum brandy that Bruno recognized from Hubert’s wine cave.

  ‘I don’t know how we can help,’ Antoine said. ‘We spent hours being questioned by that young detective at the time but we really couldn’t help him. He went through the list of our bookings for that week but there weren’t many credit cards in those days. It was a cash business and the people who bothered to book would call up and often just used their first names. The police tried tracking them down but got nowhere. It wasn’t like these days where you have to give a credit card number when you book and give identity cards and passport numbers. It all has to be accounted for and documented now.’

  ‘You can’t get away with anything on the taxes any more,’ Joe said with a chuckle. ‘It’s the same with that cottage we rent out to tourists. It all has to be registered with the Mairie.’

  Bruno ignored Joe’s comment and spoke to Antoine. ‘I’ve read the statement you gave the police at the time. You said you knew that people who were camping sauvage would often come in to use your bathrooms and the bar but you never kept track of them. Why was that?’

  ‘It was just me and Mathilde and our peak time was the school holidays so she had her hands full with our children. I couldn’t afford extra staff,’ Antoine said. ‘And the bathrooms were coin operated, a one franc piece to use the toilets, another franc for the communal showers so it wasn’t as though it was free. It wasn’t just the sauvage campers but other tourists would come in to spend money at the bar and buy snacks, and they used the little shop we had for bread and milk and basic foodstuffs. There was no way of keeping track of them all. You didn’t have to back then. I think the government was behind all the credit card business so they could track everything to tax it, as if they don’t take enough.’

  ‘Did you bring any souvenirs with you when you left?’ Bruno asked. ‘Photo albums, that sort of thing?’

  ‘The police looked through the ones we had but they were mainly family snapshots, when we were building the site, the children growing up, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Do have some cake,’ Mathilde said, pressing the plate on the visitors. Bruno and Joe each took a slice of walnut cake. She turned to her husband. ‘Had we started that camper-of-the-week business back then?’

  ‘What was that?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘It was something we put up on the noticeboard every week; a photo I took of one the campers doing something,’ her husband said. ‘There was a guy who caught a big fish in the river, another one who was a bodybuilder and used to lift weights, kids playing with animals or some guy playing a guitar – that kind of thing. It was a friendly gesture, something to give a sense of community and to get the campers to pay attention to the noticeboard.’

  ‘And you’d make a few francs selling prints to people,’ said Mathilde. ‘Being you, you’d always take a snap of a pretty girl.’

  Bruno’s ears picked up. ‘Did you keep any copies of these pictures?’

  ‘I did,’ said Mathilde. ‘Nostalgia. I kept them all in a box and then when we retired I started sticking them into a couple of scrapbooks. Would you like to see them? They’re all dated. I put the week they were taken on the back of each print.’

  ‘I’d be grateful to see the ones for ’89,’ said Bruno. ‘You remember the time of the félibrée? That was when we think the murder took place.’

  Mathilde said she’d just be a moment. She went into another room and came back with a large scrapbook, about the size of a tabloid newspaper.

  ‘This is the first year we did these photos of our camper of the week.’ She leafed through a few pages. ‘Here, that’s the week of the félibrée, with some pictures Antoine took of the town. You know how they covered the streets with paper flowers, or maybe plastic. It looked so pretty and it gave a bit of shade. It was a hot summer. And Hilaire was starting to use the camera so there are some of his photos in there as well.’

  She handed the scrapbook to Bruno, who was sitting alongside Joe on the sofa. Joe immediately found a photo of his much younger self looking rather sour as he stood beside a stage where a woman seemed to be singing.

  ‘I remember that,’ Joe said, smiling. ‘She was singing some old Occitan song and she had a terrible voice.’

  He leafed through photos of people in traditional local dress, surprisingly puritan to Bruno’s eye, mainly black and white with the odd scarf or sash to add a touch of colour. There were more photos of peasant dances, and then the campers of the week, each with a tiny pin hole at each corner where they must have been tacked to the noticeboard. There was a young man playing a recorder, a toddler trying to ride on a patient-looking dog, and then a pretty girl whom Bruno recognized.

  It was a close-up of the head and shoulders of a tan
ned, slim and very attractive young woman in a bathing suit, or perhaps the top half of a bikini. She was standing by the side of the swimming pool, some of the bathers visible as they stood in the shallow end, watching her being photographed. Her head was turned a little to one side and she was giving a broad smile or she might have been laughing.

  Bruno pulled out his phone, called up the wedding photo J-J had sent him, and showed it to Mathilde.

  ‘Would you say this was the same woman?’ he asked her, pointing to the image of Dominique.

  ‘Yes, I think it is. I’m almost sure of it and I think I remember her, always very cheerful, always on the dance floor. I think she was a hairdresser because I remember her showing different styles to some of the other girls. And we nearly used another photo of her, cutting some young man’s hair. He was blond but his skin hadn’t gone red – he was tanned. A good-looking boy.’

  ‘Would you have any more photos of her, like the one with the young man, or did you keep just this one?’

  ‘Just that one, I think. We didn’t keep the ones we didn’t use.’

  Bruno turned to the next few pages. There was an old man fast asleep in a deckchair, an empty bottle of wine beside him; a toddler looking intently at a hedgehog that had rolled into a ball; a boy juggling oranges. He leafed through to the end of the book but there was nothing else that caught his eye. He turned back to the image of Dominique.

  You say you recall her being cheerful. Do you remember anything about her friends, the people she was with?’

  ‘She had a girlfriend she was always with, I think they shared a tent.’

  ‘Do you have a magnifying glass I might use?’ he asked, turning back to Dominique’s photo.

  Mathilde left the room again and came back with a small magnifying glass. ‘Here you are. My eyesight isn’t what it was.’

  Bruno studied the bathers in the pool behind Dominique. There was a young woman who looked like Sabine’s mother standing in front of a young man, his muscular arms wrapped around her and his face half-buried in her neck. He had blond hair and was very tanned. He examined the other bathers but none of them looked at all relevant, mainly families with their children.

  ‘Would you mind if I borrowed this to make some copies and blow them up? I’ll make sure you get it back but the detective needs to see this. I think this might be the murdered man.’

  ‘Not very good of him, is it?’ Mathilde said, taking the scrapbook and the glass. ‘You can’t see much of his face.’

  ‘It’s more than we’ve found so far,’ said Bruno.

  ‘I stuck it down so you’d have to take the whole page,’ she objected.

  ‘I think the police can afford to buy you a new scrapbook if you let me borrow this one. I can scan it in the office and then bring it back. It might give me a chance to have some more of your delicious walnut cake.’

  10

  Bruno dropped Joe off at his house and drove on to the Mairie, scanned the photo of the young Tante-Do and Sabine’s mum onto his desk computer and sent a copy to J-J with a note identifying the happy couple in the pool behind Dominique. Yves, the forensics chief, would have some computer wizardry to blow up the detail. He printed out two more versions, one for him and the other for Sabine. Then he called Philippe Delaron, who was on his way back after photographing a couple in Les Eyzies who were celebrating their joint hundredth birthday. They arranged to meet at Fauquet’s.

  ‘I’m going to have to install air conditioning if these summers go on like this,’ said Fauquet, bringing a welcome glass of cold beer to Bruno’s shaded table on the terrace. ‘If it wasn’t for the ice creams, I’d go broke.’

  Bruno had only taken his first, long swallow when Philippe arrived. ‘Unless this is urgent, Bruno, I’ll have to go to the office to send these snaps back to the paper. They’re for one of the pages that gets printed early. Then later this afternoon I have to go and photograph the pompiers doing some new training to deal with forest fires. The Prefect has put out an alert.’

  ‘I wanted to see if you can track down those photos your dad took of the félibrée thirty years ago. I remember you telling me he kept everything. Time for a very quick beer?’

  ‘Gladly.’ Bruno signalled the order to Fauquet. ‘That’s true, he did. But I didn’t. I had to clear out the shop when we started renting it out. I only kept the stuff I knew would make money, like those photo books of old St Denis they sell in the tourism office. Wedding and baptism photos I kept, because a lot of people lose them and want to buy them again. I offered all the rest to the Mairie. You know how the Mayor loves anything historical, but he didn’t take much.’

  ‘What about the félibrée photos?’

  ‘There was a whole box of that stuff, Dad must have shot rolls. That was one thing the Mayor took but lord knows what he did with it. And if the box was stored in that old basement, you remember it got flooded. They could be ruined.’

  ‘What did you give them, negatives or prints? The prints might be gone but the negatives could be okay.’

  ‘Both, because the Mairie had paid him by the day for covering the félibrée so they were the legal owners. Dad was pretty thorough, so the negative rolls were put back into sealed plastic canisters and each of the prints had its own plastic cover. Maybe they survived.’

  ‘Did you hang onto any of the félibrée photos?

  ‘Yes, I selected the best because next time we have a félibrée here, I’ll put out a photo book of the last one. I’ve saved maybe a hundred and twenty prints, possibly more.’

  ‘I’d like you to look them out for me and I’ll come by your office once I’ve checked with the Mayor.’

  ‘What’s this about, Bruno?’

  ‘Can’t tell you yet but there may be a good story in it for Sud Ouest and you’ll be the first to know. I’ll give you a clue. Did you shoot that exhibition that’s now on at the museum in Les Eyzies?’

  ‘The woman who rebuilds faces from prehistoric skulls? Yes, I was there at the opening reception when you were. I even got a shot of you and the artist and Clothilde chatting together.’

  Bruno saw a blank look in Philippe’s eyes as his mind began working overtime, looking for a connection. Maybe he’d given Philippe too strong a hint but so far nobody but the investigating team knew of any connection between the dead man and the félibrée.

  ‘The beer’s on me,’ Bruno said, rising and leaving a five euro note on the table before climbing the stairs of the Mairie. The Mayor recalled getting the félibrée photos from Philippe but was not quite sure where they had been stored. Claire brought him the registry book for the archives. He leafed through, running his finger down each page before looking up.

  ‘It went first to the basement but when we had the flood alert I had most of that stuff shifted up to the new registry behind the Trésor Public. I’ll give the Treasurer a call to say you’re coming.’

  ‘Tell him I won’t be alone. There are a lot of rolls of film, thirty-six images each, so I’m going to need help from Sabine, the gendarme from Metz whose half-brother was fathered by Oscar. She’s been attached to Yveline’s gendarmerie.’

  ‘Bring her to the Mairie at some point so I can say hello and give her my condolences on her brother’s death. Off you go, and I’ll call the Treasurer.’

  Bruno called Yveline, who answered brusquely. ‘Bruno, where have you been? I’ve sent you a couple of texts.’

  Bruno felt instantly guilty. He tried to be good at answering emails but he’d never yet learned to make his phone an extension of himself and seldom bothered to check for text messages.

  ‘Sorry, I was out in the woods at the murder scene so I didn’t get a signal. How’s Sabine and what are you up to?’

  ‘We’re in Les Eyzies, with your colleague Juliette. I’ve been showing Sabine around our beat and we ran into her and are having coffee. What’s up?’

  ‘Can y
ou meet me at the Trésor Public archive in St Denis? I’m going to need your and Sabine’s help. We’ve a lot of félibrée photos to look through but I think we might have a lead. There’s no great hurry, the photos will wait, and give my best regards to Juliette.’

  ‘OK, we’ll be with you in twenty minutes.’

  Bruno went to Philippe’s office, the ground floor of a small terraced house at the far end of the Rue de Paris. Philippe lived upstairs, and rented out the neighbouring house that had been his father’s and grandfather’s camera shop until the coming of mobile phones had overtaken the family business. Fortunately for Philippe, he’d already started taking sports photos for Sud Ouest and quickly turned it into a full-time job as regional correspondent for the whole valley, from Le Buisson up to Montignac. He and Bruno had a complicated relationship of mutual dependence that made them part-allies and part-adversaries. Bruno had the stories and Philippe had the means of publicity so each found the other useful. They also liked each other, which helped. Bruno had kept the teenage Philippe out of trouble over a youthful escapade that involved a stolen car that had been crashed. Philippe and his friends had to work for months to pay off the owner and the garage.

  ‘Here are the prints I’ve saved for the félibrée book,’ said Philippe, handing Bruno a cardboard box. ‘Did you track down the others?’

  ‘Thanks, Philippe. The Mayor saved the others in the archives and even kept them dry. I’ll tell you as much as I can as soon as I can. In the meantime, keep this to yourself but if this works out we’ll probably be coming to you for a publicity campaign. Have fun with the pompiers and give them my best. If I’ve got time, I might drop by to watch this training for forest fires.’

  ‘Did you see the weather forecast?’ Philippe asked. ‘They say this heatwave is going to last into August.’