The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  Some night markets liked to offer different foods, like St Denis’s stalls of Vietnamese, Caribbean, Moroccan, West African and Indian-style food from Mauritius, gifts of the old French colonial empire. Audrix remained proudly traditional; the specialities were dishes based around roast chicken and barbecued steak, along with snails from a local farm and raw foie gras sautéed with a sauce of honey and balsamic vinegar. Then there was the village bread oven, a beehive-shaped structure of stone which baked fresh bread and pizza, all surrounded by a paved space without walls but covered by a wide roof supported by wooden beams. This was where the musicians played while visitors danced. Thanks to the passionate Greens on the local council, the village had banned the use of plastic plates and utensils, so beneath the Mairie was a stall where crockery, glasses and cutlery could be hired for a modest deposit.

  Having waited for Pamela, who always took longer in her trusty but ancient deux-chevaux, Bruno and his group strolled up from the car park in the fields, pausing to admire the gigantic straw sculptures of a mammoth and a warrior of ancient Gaul, at which Balzac always paused to lift his leg. Bruno assumed it was his dog’s way of paying respect to such magnificent structures. The Baron and his friends had secured a large table on a patch of higher ground beside the Mairie and had spread out plates, glasses and cutlery from their various picnic hampers. Bottles of wine had already been bought and opened. Florence was standing in line for salads, Fabiola for cheese, Gilles for roast chicken and lamb chops, Jack Crimson for bread and pizza and Jacqueline for the foie gras. Everybody had put twenty euros into the communal pot and planned to spend any remainder on dishes of strawberries and cream.

  The band was a local favourite, composed of an accordion, guitar, drums, saxophone and a woman in a blonde wig who dressed and performed like a pre-war torch singer. They made a living in summer by playing each night at a different market in the region, offering popular French cabaret classics mixed in with bal musette dance music and romantic ballads. Bruno enjoyed it hugely, making a point of dancing with each of the women in their group, and with several more, friends whom he came across while strolling past the food stalls.

  After his first stroll, trying to decide which of the foods on offer he would choose this evening, Bruno went to the rear of the church. Balzac followed him and at once joined some children playing on the grass. Bruno waved at two of them whom he recognized from his tennis classes. He then used his burner phone to call Isabelle on her private number.

  ‘Thanks for the Paris Match piece,’ she said. ‘And give my thanks to Gilles. There’s nothing much that’s new in it but he certainly makes it all sound sensational. Maybe he should try a new career as a spy novelist. It’s Jacqueline’s piece I’m more worried about.’

  ‘It’s all policy-based, Franco–American relations,’ Bruno replied. ‘But it all hinges on Gilles’s point that the Stasi were recruiting among the student left in Germany in ’68 and they’d almost certainly have tried the same in France. It seemed a bit odd to me since any of that generation would be in their seventies by now and long since retired. Other than some cerebral stuff about the new Cold War and national versus European interests, that seems to be it. I shouldn’t imagine that it will cause you any real problems.’

  ‘That’s not what they’re saying in the Elysée Palace,’ she said. ‘Anyone recruited back in the sixties could have recruited promising candidates from the next generation they were meant to be training and supervising. There are already people warning that this could lead to a witch-hunt, sniffing out suspected spies and sleeper agents among the énarques,’ she added, referring to graduates from the elite ENA, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, who filled the higher ranks of the state bureaucracy and the boards of directors of France’s top corporations.

  ‘But all these people are routinely vetted by our own security people, just in case,’ Bruno replied.

  ‘Yes, but the point Gilles missed about Rainer Rupp was that the guy was an idealist. He wasn’t a passionate supporter of East Germany, far from it. He just thought that the Cold War arms race could be made less dangerous if each side knew what the other was doing and thinking. He convinced himself that he was in the right place to do that. He even claimed that he helped prevent World War Three by reassuring the Warsaw Pact that NATO was not planning a surprise attack back in ’83, when Ronald Reagan was talking about the Evil Empire and Star Wars and scaring the pants off the Kremlin.’

  ‘These are very different times,’ Bruno said.

  ‘Up to a point, Bruno, but the current American administration is not exactly reassuring. It’s no secret that most European capitals worry that we’re all skating on thin ice, whether we look at trade, security policy, arms control, relations with Russia, the Middle East . . . I could go on. Some of the advisers around our President are almost panicking about it.’

  ‘This is all way above my head,’ Bruno said.

  ‘Yes, but you can understand why the Rosenholz dossier has suddenly become a hot topic here in Paris. I have to go but thanks, and kisses to you and Balzac.’

  Bruno stood for a moment looking out over the valley, the sounds of some old dance music drifting to him from the far side of the church, accompanied by the scents of different foods from the night market stalls. The contrast between the innocent pleasures of this peaceful village and the mood and politics in Paris that Isabelle had described disturbed him deeply. It suggested a huge and dismaying gap in perceptions and concerns between the Parisian elite and the people who voted them into office and entrusted them with power.

  As a very minor cog in the vast machinery of French administration, the scale of this gap scared him. Nor was Bruno comfortable at having shared his friends’ articles and views with Isabelle. He told himself that he’d passed on Gilles’s piece only with his tacit permission, for Gilles was familiar with this game of complicity between media and officialdom. And while he had shared nothing of what Jacqueline had written, he’d passed on her views, not that they were secret. Everything would soon be available to anyone who bought Le Monde or Paris Match.

  That did not stop Bruno from feeling he’d participated in something underhand. It was not so much guilt as feeling rather shamefaced at making use of people he considered his friends. These were people who had reason to trust him, to assume that they could converse with him in confidence. And he could not fool himself by claiming to have acted from patriotism nor from some sense of duty to the French state. Not at all. He had acted simply to render a small service to Isabelle, a woman he would rather not disappoint.

  Putain, it was a lot more than that. He still loved her, still thrilled like a schoolboy at the sound of her voice, still dreamed of somehow squaring the impossible circle of contrasting ambitions that kept them apart. Even in those blissful moments when they shared the same bed, they had different dreams. Perhaps he should force himself to end it, to refuse to run at her bidding. It would hurt, he knew, but pain eases with time. He’d be bruised but free to look elsewhere and perhaps to give his heart fully and honestly to another.

  He breathed out a long sigh. As he’d told Isabelle, this was all far above his head. Also he was hungry. He went back to buy another bottle of wine from the woman from the Domaine de la Voie Blanche, who made the wine the Baron had offered for his blind tasting. And that, Bruno recalled, as he tried to decide between the foie gras and the lamb chops, had been the dinner when Jacqueline had first talked of the Rosenholz dossier.

  Enough of that, he told himself. This was a Saturday night. He went back to the table to invite Pamela to dance. Then he should also dance with Rosalie again, he thought. Nor should he leave out Sabine, Florence and Fabiola. The thought of more dances made him feel better. Food could wait.

  15

  The next morning there was no sound from the guest bedroom upstairs when Bruno rose and took Balzac out for their morning run. He’d bought a couple of extra loaves from the Audrix bread
oven the previous evening so he could make breakfast here at the cottage. Looking in at the chicken coop on his return he saw that his hens had been particularly generous that morning. He left six out and put four into the large crockery duck he kept in his pantry. He then went out with Balzac, his wand and a trowel to his row of truffle trees and began tapping as he watched for the shimmering dance of a rising fly.

  ‘Cherche, Balzac, cherche,’ he said and the hound padded forward to sniff at the point where Bruno had placed his wand and began to paw gently at the ground. Bruno moved him to one side and scraped with his trowel until a summer truffle, perhaps the size of a golf ball, emerged. That would do. Usually he’d have put it with the eggs in his pottery duck for a couple of days so the scent could seep through the porous eggshells but he’d grate this one onto the omelette he was planning.

  He showered and dressed, set the table on the terrace and brought out butter, home-made apricot jam and freshly squeezed orange juice. As he went back inside to make the coffee, he heard the shower running upstairs. He went to the garden to pick a small bunch of fresh parsley before peeling and chopping two cloves of garlic, brushing the truffle clean and shaving off half a dozen slices. He waited until his guests had descended before cracking the eggs and announcing that their breakfast would be an omelette aux truffes outside in the garden. He whisked the eggs, added salt, pepper and the remainder of Stéphane’s cream before pouring a little olive oil and a large pat of truffled butter into the frying pan. He tossed in the garlic and as it sizzled he added the egg mix and began to make the omelette, lifting and then lowering the pan to spread the liquid and running a wooden spatula around the sides to stop it sticking.

  When he judged it to be almost done, Bruno grated the remainder of the truffle onto a surface that was still slightly liquid and folded the omelette over. He added the slices of truffle he had shaved earlier and took it out to the terrace, where he tore apart the parsley leaves and sprinkled them on top before serving. Alain broke off chunks of bread for them while Rosalie poured out the coffee.

  ‘A perfect country breakfast,’ said Rosalie, tapping her tummy when the omelette had gone along with all the bread and a third of a jar of Bruno’s apricot jam. ‘I’ll go on a diet when we get back.’

  ‘And we missed our morning run,’ said Alain.

  Rosalie smiled and put her hand on his, giving him a dreamy, loving look that suggested to Bruno that they’d enjoyed a rather different form of exercise this morning already. He smiled at the thought.

  ‘I think you’re well suited, you two,’ he said. ‘I look forward to seeing more of you when you’re out of the air force and settled somewhere nearer.’

  ‘We’ve been talking about that, whether we want to settle down in the Bergerac area as we first thought, or somewhere near here. It seems there’s a vocational school in Sarlat we might consider, as well as the one in Bergerac. We heard about it from Florence over dinner last night. She said we might be able to do as she did, get the teaching diploma while actually working.’

  ‘But Florence already had a university diploma,’ Rosalie added. ‘Still, she said vocational schools were more interested in craft skills and she asked me to send her the qualifications we got from the air force. And since she’s on the executive committee of the teachers’ union, she’ll try to make it work. Your Mayor said he’d help if he could.’

  ‘It makes sense to have a good look around,’ Bruno said. ‘You know what they say in the army – time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted. Sarlat will be full of tourists but if we set out now, we’ll beat the rush. It’s a handsome old town and worth seeing for its own sake.’

  Soon after, they set off in Bruno’s Land Rover, Rosalie on the back seat with Balzac. At Les Eyzies they looked up to admire the great overhanging cliffs that sheltered the town. They were in Sarlat not long before nine. The town was starting to stir, with stalls of cheese, saucissons and souvenirs being set out in front of shops. The streets weren’t yet crowded so they could admire the heart of old Sarlat.

  Other than the shop windows, it was a place that seemed barely to have changed over the past four hundred years. Its centre was filled with Renaissance townhouses, a grand square and cathedral, interspersed with narrow alleys filled with restaurants and shops selling local delicacies. Bruno took them around the back of the cathedral to see the Merovingian tombs from the centuries after the Roman empire fell, and to the Lanterne des Morts, a tall, conical tower built eight centuries earlier from whose top a lantern glowed each night to mark the place of the dead.

  ‘St Bernard came here to preach the Second Crusade,’ Bruno said, warming to his role as guide. ‘And there are Knights Templar signs engraved inside the tower. This was where the rebellion against English rule began in the Hundred Years’ War. And the town was a Catholic stronghold in the Wars of Religion. It went through a bitter siege but held out. There’s a lot of history here.’

  Alain stopped to look at an estate agent’s window and Rosalie picked up a photocopied leaflet that offered local houses for sale. They stopped for coffee at a place Bruno saw had a bowl of water outside for customers’ dogs so Balzac could drink, too. Bruno glanced at the copy of that morning’s Sud Ouest that lay on the counter. A third of the front page was covered with the composite photo of Henri under the headline, ‘Unsolved murder – Do you know this man?’

  Inside was Philippe’s photo of Elisabeth Daynès at the Les Eyzies museum standing beside the Neanderthal skull she had reconstructed. Alongside it was a photo of the skull Virginie had worked on. Although it was unfinished, to Bruno’s eyes it was already uncannily like the composite photo of Max that he had helped put together. The caption read, ‘At last – after thirty years, we reveal the process of rebuilding the face of the unknown victim.’

  Bruno nodded approval, thinking that J-J’s media blitz seemed to be going well. He wondered if he’d had similar success with the national press and TV. He called Virginie to tell her how impressed he was but had to make do with leaving a message on her answering service. Just as he’d done so his phone rang again. It was J-J.

  ‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said. ‘I’m in Sarlat, admiring your coverage in Sud Ouest. Did you have any luck with Henri?’

  ‘Yes, he’s coming to the Bergerac police station for an interview tomorrow at ten,’ J-J replied, sounding very cheerful. ‘Do you want to be there? Sabine is bringing Tante-Do for the confrontation. And our hotline has already had two calls saying it’s Henri Bazaine. I think we’ll get a few more after the responses come in from the TV bulletins.’

  ‘Great, and well done. I’ll see you before ten tomorrow in Bergerac.’ He ended the call, picked up his coffee and joined his friends outside.

  ‘I mean it about wanting one of Balzac’s pups when we find a place of our own,’ Alain said. He scratched the area where Balzac’s silky ears joined his pointed skull and the dog groaned softly with pleasure as they sat on spindly chairs outside the coffee shop.

  ‘That’s agreed,’ Bruno said. ‘I thought I’d show you one or two more sights and then take you to the town vineyard outside St Denis that we’re so proud of. We can have a light lunch there and taste our wines before you have to get back to the base. Have they got you on some kind of curfew?’

  ‘No, it’s not that, but it’s at least a three-hour drive and we want to be back at the base in time for the evening meal, which means putting on our uniforms. The town vineyard sounds like a good plan.’

  ‘I could stay around here for ages,’ said Rosalie. ‘It’s lovely. Still, we haven’t quite ruled out moving to Bordeaux, where we’d have a lot more options with technical schools but the house prices look steep. And with you nearby, we’d have a ready-made social life if we moved here.’

  ‘You don’t want to go back to Normandy?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘No, the weather’s better down here. The farm was sold when my parents split up and th
e family is spread out all over the place. I’ve got a sister who’s a surgical nurse in the South Pacific, in Nouvelle Calédonie, where we’re planning our honeymoon, and a brother who works in insurance in Paris.’

  ‘Well, you’ll both be very welcome if you want to move to this area.’ Bruno looked at the groups of tourists gathering behind guides holding up coloured ribbons on poles. ‘The crowds are starting to move in so let’s head back and I’ll show you one of my favourite castles on the way.’

  He took them to Commarque, a medieval fortress founded by Charlemagne and built up over the centuries to become one of the largest castles in Europe. They walked down the lane and through some woods until they reached the valley floor. Suddenly there it was, the great walls and tower standing proudly against the sky. Children were trying their hand at archery butts further down the valley. Beyond them, a special breed of cattle that thrived on marshland was grazing among the rivulets to which the River Beune had shrunk in the drought. Bruno told them the story of the dead woman he’d found at the bottom of the cliff on which the tower stood, and the Templar remains that had been unearthed in one of the caves beneath the castle.

  ‘I think that was in the paper, with those Arab terrorists. I remember reading about it, around the time Alain and I were getting together,’ said Rosalie. ‘They had your photo in the paper and that was when Alain told me you were his cousin.’

  ‘It’s quite a place,’ said Alain, looking up. ‘I’d like to come back here and take a good look, climb up to the top of that tower. There must be a terrific view.’

  ‘There certainly is,’ said Bruno. ‘It was built to be high enough to send signals by beacon across to Sarlat. The hills were bare of trees in those days. They were all cut down for charcoal to feed the forges in the area, busy making swords and armour for the knights. Much of the land around here is full of iron ore. Those cave paintings you saw used the iron-bearing clay to get the red pigments, and around St Denis they were still making cannon for warships in Napoleon’s time. They used to ship them down the river to Bordeaux.’