The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  ‘You should be fine,’ he said. ‘But if you have to get out, make sure you and Miranda prepare boxes with all your essential documents and things you don’t want to lose, and tell your guests to do the same.’ Bruno checked his watch. ‘May I take Hector out, go up to the ridge and see just how dry those woods are?’

  ‘I’ll come too, on Primrose, we both need some exercise.’

  Ten minutes later, Bruno dismounted, handed his reins to Pamela and plunged into the woods, the vegetation was dry and crunchy beneath his feet at first, but as he went deeper the trees were older and the canopy more dense. The grass beneath his feet gave way to the mulch of a forest floor and he saw new shoots and some ferns, all still green. He bent down and brushed away the top layer of mulch, feeling a slight but reassuring dampness below.

  ‘It’s not too dry so it won’t catch fire easily,’ he said. ‘Have you looked at your spring lately?’

  She said she hadn’t so Bruno rode further along the ridge and then diagonally down to the rocky outcrop from which water bubbled throughout the year. It fed a small stream that ran down through the riding school to a pond that housed colonies of toads whose croakings always fascinated Balzac. The water was invariably cool and clear, and Bruno found it delicious to drink, usually filling a twenty-litre bidon before the regular Monday night suppers. He dismounted again and clambered through the rocks to find that the spring was still giving water, not much but the flow in summer was always more feeble. Still, if the water table on the ridge and plateau were still feeding the spring, there would be water underground for the tree roots.

  ‘It’s still flowing, so the woodland above should be moist enough to resist anything but a massive fire,’ he told Pamela.

  The further they rode along the ridge, the drier the woodland below appeared to be, and when they came to the bridle trail they so often took, some of the trees were so dry that they had lost many of their leaves. Land that he knew to be usually boggy was now dry cracked mud. When they reached the hunters’ cabin and took the track back to the valley, the stream that usually fed into the Vézère was barely a trickle. The horses cantered easily but even Hector seemed reluctant to increase his pace, as if drained by the heat. How, Bruno wondered, had Arabian horses won their historic reputation for speed when they must have endured heat like this? Perhaps their breed had grown used to it.

  Back at the stables, they unsaddled and rubbed down the horses. Bruno sluiced himself down in the sink and drove back to town where he entrusted Balzac and his boxes to the Mayor. After this he made his usual patrol of the Tuesday morning market. Everyone he knew asked him about the fire emergency and he told them all of the need for fire-watch volunteers. One of the stallholders Bruno knew slightly, who sold novelty T-shirts and only came in the tourist season, brandished a mobile phone at him and said, ‘You know this cop they’re talking about.’

  Bruno peered at the Twitter feed on the small screen. It read: ‘Flic should be locked up,’ followed by ‘#CrazedCopPerigord’. He took the phone and scrolled up, seeing insult after insult against J-J, all with the same hashtag. Calling for him to be locked up was mild. Others claimed it should be ‘#CorruptCopPerigord’ and that led to a second stream of different insults. There was one, referring to a long-ago gunfight when J-J had been hit by a bullet, that said, ‘Shooter should have aimed higher, #CrazedCopPerigord.’

  Feeling a cold anger at this vicious and anonymous attack on his friend, Bruno handed back the phone, and said curtly before turning away, ‘He’s a brave, honest guy and a friend of mine. If you get robbed or your kids get snatched, you’ll want him on your side.’

  ‘Aw, come on, don’t take it so seriously,’ the stallholder called after him. ‘It’s just a joke.’

  Bruno turned on his heel, controlling his anger but his eyes were blazing. ‘How would you like it if somebody burned out your stall and I said that was just a joke? Or if somebody held you up at gunpoint and I just shrugged and said you shouldn’t take it seriously? We’re cops. We’re not supposed to back away and say it’s all a joke. It’s not a joke to me when some cop-hater trashes the reputation of a good man.’

  He stared around at the people who had gathered to watch this confrontation, and one by one they dropped their eyes. As they began to move away, Bruno felt a hand land heavily on his shoulder and heard Léopold’s deep voice.

  ‘I was right here in this market just before Christmas when some young thugs trashed the Vietnamese stall that sells those nems we all like,’ the big Senegalese said quietly, looming over the T-shirt seller. ‘This cop here, Bruno, was dressed like Santa Claus, raising money for kids. And he went for those thugs, knocked them down and took them out. Alone.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything,’ mumbled the T-shirt man, backing away to the shelter of his stall. ‘Sorry.’

  Bruno nodded at him coldly, turned, and Léopold shook his hand. ‘My boys and I will be going to the pompiers to sign up for the fire watch after the market closes,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Léopold, See you there,’ Bruno said, and walked on to the fire station. Ahmed was holding the fort, Albert’s deputy and the only other professional firefighter in the St Denis team. The rest were all volunteers.

  ‘Albert is getting some sleep,’ Ahmed said. ‘He’ll be on watch all night. We’ve got some more professionals coming up from Bordeaux later today, bringing water tenders. You ought to go home and get some sleep. We might need you tonight.’

  Instead, Bruno went back to his office and called an old contact in army records to see if there was any record of Henri being excused military service for asthma. He gave Henri’s details, and was promised a call back. Then he called the Belleville archives again, to see if they had any medical records of children at the orphanage suffering from asthma. They would check. Almost as soon as he put down the phone on his desk, the mobile at his waist buzzed.

  ‘What’s this crap on Twitter about J-J?’ came Isabelle’s familiar voice.

  ‘Bonjour, Isabelle. It’s good to hear your voice,’ he replied. ‘There’s a publicity-hungry lawyer playing games over the Oscar case.’

  ‘That’s clear from the Twitter feed but is this guy that J-J interrogated really a suspect?’

  ‘His name is Henri Bazaine and his identity was visually confirmed by an old girlfriend who knew both him and Max – that’s Oscar’s real name. The guy says she’s mistaken, so we’re double-checking his background at an orphanage in Bellville that was long since closed and the local records were left in a mess, lots of files missing or destroyed.’

  ‘Belleville? In the old Red Belt?’

  ‘Yes, an orphanage named after someone called Paul Lafargue.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Lafargue was Karl Marx’s French son-in-law. He founded the Workers’ Party in France and wrote a book with the brilliant title, The Right to be Lazy. No wonder they liked him in Belleville. Still, it’s convenient that this Henri claims to be from somewhere where the archives are a mess.’

  ‘I’m checking his military service records. He claims he was excused because of asthma.’

  ‘Would you like me to have someone take a look at the old RG files?’ she asked. The Renseignements Généraux was the old police and security intelligence network which devoted much of its time to watching French political activists of left and right. Some of its employees were once famously discovered planting microphones in the offices of the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné. The RG had long since been merged into a new Directorate of Internal Security but its files and its work continued.

  Hoping the RG might turn up something useful, Bruno gave her Henri’s details, including his original surname, and then ended the call as his desk phone rang again. It was J-J, announcing himself by saying, ‘Your mobile line was busy.’

  ‘It was Isabelle, worried about your Twitter attack.’

  ‘A man is judged by the enemies he ma
kes,’ J-J replied, his voice calm. ‘Enough of that. I seem to recall that you had a contact with the Quebec cops in Canada. Are you still in touch?’

  ‘I can be. Why?’

  ‘I’m interested in Henri’s wine-consulting business. Don’t ask how I know but there are hefty annual payments to Henri from a Montreal-based corporation that owns vineyards and distilleries in Quebec and on the west coast. It all looks legal – a friend in the fisc tells me the money was declared and tax paid. It’s a lot, ten grand a year going back as far as we can track – over ten years – and rising to fifteen the last two years. We looked at the firm’s website and it seems real but maybe the local cops know something different.’

  ‘I can try. What have you got?’

  ‘It’s called Vins de la Nouvelle France, and it’s run by a guy called Laurent Loriot, and guess what? He was born in Belleville, just two days before our Henri. It seems a hell of a coincidence. He emigrated to Quebec from France in ’91 and made good.’

  ‘You have to be joking.’ Bruno scratched his head, thinking hard, and said, ‘I just talked to Isabelle. She’s looking into old RG files about Belleville. You could ask her to try Loriot’s name along with Henri’s and I’ll do the same with army records and a helpful guy at the Belleville archives. And she’s the one with the Quebec police contacts.’

  Bruno tried his army records contact first, a retired sous-officier who had helped him in the past, who began by saying he was about to call Bruno.

  ‘There’s nothing here in the Henri Zeller file about asthma or any medical condition. He got a deferment to finish vocational school and the next thing we knew was that we were informed that Henri Zeller had died in a road accident. We received a death certificate from the Belleville Mairie along with another one who died at the same time, Max Morilland, who was also on a vocational school deferment. They each had the same address, the Lafargue orphanage in Belleville.’

  Bruno suppressed his excitement. ‘What was the date on the death certificate?’

  ‘December tenth, ’89. Both men were supposed to turn up for military service the following month, January.’

  ‘Thank you, my friend. This is very important. Could you email me a scan of those death certificates, please? We’re into a murder inquiry involving a man who’s been using that identity of Henri Zeller, changing his name to Bazaine. And the murdered guy was called Max.’

  ‘I’ll do it now. Let me know how this turns out. You’ve got me interested.’

  Forgetting his promise to check army records for Loriot in Quebec, Bruno immediately called J-J to convey the news that Henri Bazaine had officially been dead for three decades, supposedly in a car crash with a man from the same orphanage named Max Morilland. As they spoke, his desktop computer pinged to signal an incoming email. It was the scans of the two death certificates that he at once forwarded to J-J and to Isabelle. The printed form itself looked straightforward, with the official stamp of the Mairie, the date, and the name of the doctor who certified the cause of death as a traffic accident.

  ‘I suppose this means I can arrest him for identity theft, or for forgery to evade military service,’ J-J said, sounding hesitant. ‘I’ve never come across anything like this before. I’d better have a word with our police lawyer. And this other guy, Max Morilland, do you suppose he’s the murder victim?’

  ‘I presume so,’ said Bruno. ‘It could be a coincidence. I’m as confused as you by this. Either Henri forged the death certificate or, more likely, got somebody in the Mairie to do it for him and sent it to the army. But the record of Henri’s death should have gone automatically to other official databases like the electoral roll and the social security register. You’d better check whether this supposed death was recorded elsewhere. And before you arrest him, do you have any evidence that he was involved in this fake certificate? He could claim he was the innocent victim of some bureaucratic mix-up – and given what I’ve been told about the state of the local archives in Belleville, that’s entirely possible.’

  As Bruno spoke, his computer pinged again. The new email was from the archives in Belleville, informing him that Henri had a classmate in vocational school called Max Morilland. He immediately passed on the news to J-J.

  ‘It all seems too convenient,’ J-J replied.

  ‘It reminds me of something I read about the Resistance during the war,’ Bruno said. ‘They always wanted to have somebody inside a Mairie who could arrange to concoct apparently genuine identity documents, working papers, coupons for food rations, justifications for travel. Maybe there was somebody doing that in Belleville and making money out of it. This was back in the eighties, when it must have been easier to get away with it. Registers were filled in by hand and kept in filing cabinets, before everything became computerized.’

  Bruno’s computer pinged yet again. This time it was an email from Isabelle, with a copy to J-J. It read, ‘Have passed this to Paris police and to RG. It smells fishy. We’ll also take a look at Malakoff, which has had a Communist Mayor since the 1920s and a sports stadium named after Lenin. RG suggests no arrests yet. We’ll talk.’

  18

  Bruno had hoped to catch a few hours’ sleep at home before heading out at around ten to his fire-watching post on the church tower of Audrix. Now he wondered whether he’d make it. He felt almost overwhelmed with all the balls he was juggling – the fire precautions, worrying about Pamela’s house and Hector as well as trying to keep straight all the aspects of the murder case. He called his friend at army records and asked him to find what he could of the military service of Laurent Loriot, the Quebec winemaker who’d been born in Belleville and had become the main customer of Henri’s wine consulting business.

  His phone rang again almost at once. It was Florence to say that she had thought about his offer of one of Balzac’s puppies and she was very grateful, but her children were still too small to take proper responsibility. Bruno said he understood and promised to save one from a future litter. Then he called Rod Macrae, a former rock musician who lived nearby. He’d told Bruno months earlier that he wanted one of Balzac’s pups and now he could have one. Macrae was delighted and they agreed to visit the kennels at some future weekend and he invited Bruno to drop by to seal the deal over a drink.

  The next call came from Sabine, saying that Tante-Do was becoming increasingly nervous for her own safety as a woman living alone and had asked if Sabine might come and stay with her. Bruno, feeling instantly guilty at not thinking of this, said he saw no objection but she’d better check with J-J. Moments later, Isabelle was calling again, this time to say that the latest edition of Le Monde had just arrived on her laptop and the expected counter-attack of the French establishment had begun. As she spoke, a copy of the article appeared in Bruno’s inbox.

  The new ‘Finlandization’ and the danger to France [ran the headline]. As France considers how to deal with the latest eruption of the East German spy scandal of the Rosenholz dossier, a timely warning comes from Finland. During the Cold War, the term ‘Finlandization,’ deployed in the American capital as a term of abuse, described the way that the small Nordic country felt the need to remain neutral to appease its giant Soviet neighbour. Now France is threatened with a new kind of Finlandization, following in Finland’s footsteps into a dangerous witch-hunt that could target many innocent officials

  The article went on to explain that on the basis of the Rosenholz files, Finland’s SUPO (security police) had begun to investigate one of the country’s ambassadors, Alpo Rusi, a former adviser to the country’s President Martti Ahtisaari, as a possible Stasi agent. SUPO had judged him to be the Stasi agent called Pekka in the Rosenholz dossier, and Rusi had strenuously denied the charges brought against him. He’d won his case, and then sued the Finnish state for slandering his good name and won again, securing a compensation payment of twenty thousand euros. As a result, the Finnish high court decided that the Rosenholz files were inadequate
as proof and that they should remain classified in future.

  So why is France now trying once again to obtain these dubious records, whose validity has been publicly questioned, and to what end? Do we seriously wish to inflict on our own public servants the ordeal inflicted on Ambassador Rusi? Do we want to stage our own McCarthy-style witch-hunt when such an act of anti-Communist hysteria is now widely and rightly condemned in the country that suffered it?

  ‘The key point, Bruno,’ Isabelle said, ‘is that this article is signed by a member of the Constitutional Council, which sounds to me like a shot across the bows from the legal establishment. I’ve already had a couple of worried calls from the Elysée, and the President himself is concerned. On top of that we have French diplomats saying that this is damaging our relations with Germany, and I’m getting some snide remarks from my own German counterparts. This is becoming a very unpleasant political mess.’

  ‘I sympathize, but I don’t see what I can do about it.’

  ‘You could try to persuade Jacqueline and Gilles to shut up.’

  ‘You and I know them well enough to be sure it would have the opposite effect and make them redouble their efforts,’ he replied. ‘And it’s too late.’

  ‘You may be right, but at least give me warning of any new intervention they’re planning.’

  ‘I shall. You can do something for me,’ he said. ‘Another of the Belleville orphans, Laurent Loriot, born in the same week as our Henri Bazaine, went to Canada thirty years ago and made good in the wine business. He’s been paying Henri large sums for alleged wine consulting – ten or fifteen grand a year for many years. Could you check with your contacts in Ottawa and Montreal if anything is known about him and his group, Les Vins de Nouvelle France?’

  ‘I’ll make a call,’ she said. ‘And please keep me informed.’

  Bruno sighed and went back to his task of listing all the elderly and handicapped people living in remote locations in the commune who might be at risk from a fire. He had still to check it against separate lists for emergency evacuations drawn up by the medical centre, the pharmacists and the social services. Then there was the list of volunteers who offered to use their cars to pick up people who would not need a special vehicle. His phone rang again.