The Coldest Case

by Martin Walker

  Acknowledgements

  The idea for this novel began with a reminiscence from my good friend and neighbour, Raymond Bounichou, a retired officer of Gendarmes, about a case he was never able to solve. He still has the photograph of the skull of the unknown murder victim whom he dubbed ‘Oscar’. Raymond tried for years to identify the body of the man who had been buried in a remote wood until unearthed by a dog. It remains a mystery that haunts Raymond to this day. As a last resort, he secured a magistrate’s authorization to boil the head of the corpse, which at least allowed him to examine the skull and establish that the cause of death had been a blow from a camping tool.

  The mystery of Oscar came to mind when I first saw an exhibition of the work of Elisabeth Daynès. She may now be best known for her reconstruction of the face of Tutankhamun from the skull of the ancient Egyptian ruler, which achieved worldwide renown when it appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine. I was even more impressed by the way her reconstruction of the faces of prehistoric men, women and children from their skulls allows us to see not just the bones but uncannily real people. She has brought a new and highly personal dimension to the study of the long-distant past and her work has given me and many modern visitors to the Les Eyzies museum of prehistory a striking sense of personal connection to our remote forebears.

  The Rosenholz dossier is real and its contents and its fate are much as described in this book. Its listing of the thousands of agents of the Stasi (the term comes from Staatssicherheit, or State Security) is a unique document of espionage and intelligence in the Cold War. Despite the efforts of the East German regime to destroy it and cover their tracks, the CIA obtained a copy and shared its contents with chosen allies, not including the French; the history of tension between US and French intelligence services is a matter of historical record. The Le Monde editorial cited in the text is an invention but its warning against taking as fact something found in the intelligence archives of a rival power is worth noting, as the Finnish security police learned to their cost.

  The annual celebration of Occitan language and culture, the félibrée, or felibrejada, is a remarkable feature of Périgord life. These festivals emerged as a kind of resistance to the efforts of the Third Republic to eradicate Occitan and other local languages in schools and to make everyone speak French. As late as the 1860s, local authorities estimated that ninety per cent of the Périgord spoke the langue d’oc as their first tongue. Then it became state policy to ban the various patois, Breton and Provençal as well as Occitan. That period is known locally as the Vergonha, the shaming, in which local tongues were banned in class and offenders punished, often with clogs being hung all day around their necks. Since 1903 the festivals have been held in a different town or village in the Périgord each year. The songs, poetry and dances, and accompanying banquet (taulada) are intriguing and often magnificent in themselves; they also serve to remind us that the Périgord is not entirely France. It is older, with its roots stretching back far into prehistory, and with its own distinct mythology, language and culture.

  To those of us who live in rural France, the volunteer firemen and women, the pompiers, are an essential and splendid part of life. They are the first responders not only for fires but also for medical and other emergencies. It is hard to conceive life in the Périgord without the skills, courage and public service of our neighbours who volunteer. I am grateful to the pompiers in my own village for their technical advice, and to Monsieur Kléber Rossillon and his team at the castle of Castelnaud while writing this book. Any mistakes are my own fault. I don’t know if the pompiers have ever tried to fight fires with trebuchets but those at Castelnaud are very much worth seeing in action and I warmly recommend a visit to the whole fortress and its museum of the arts of war.

  While researching this book I was delighted to learn that the trebuchet team at Castelnaud had already experimented with tossing bags of water. They also alerted me to a remarkable article on this medieval technology in Scientific American, the issue of July, 1995, which notes that some of biggest trebuchets of the Middle Ages could fire weights of a ton and more (1000 kilograms). A modern trebuchet built in England in the 1990s was able to fire a small car weighing 476 kilos (without its engine) a distance of eighty metres. The researches of the thirteenth-century mathematician Jordanus de Nemore on the use of pivoting counterweights to increase the range of these missiles had an important impact on the later work of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo and the makers of mechanical clocks.

  As always, much of what I write depends on my friends and neighbours in the Périgord, on their splendid cuisine and wines, on the stories and legends they love to recount, and on the landscape they and their ancestors have tended for millennia. My debt to them is very deep indeed, matched only by my gratitude to my family, always the first to read, edit and advise on my manuscripts.

  Without the help of my wife, Julia, Bruno’s cooking would too often end in disaster. All the recipes in this book come from the cookbooks we wrote together: Brunos Kochbuch and Brunos Garten Kochbuch, both published by Diogenes Verlag, my splendid German publishers. Julia and I are extremely proud that Brunos Kochbuch was named ‘The World’s Best French cookbook of the past twenty years’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2015, a prize awarded by Gourmand International. Without the work of our daughters, Kate and Fanny, Bruno’s investigations would lead up blind alleys, be stuck up trees or sink without trace. Kate runs the brunochiefofpolice.com website and Fanny keeps track of all the characters, the books and incidents in which they appear and the meals they enjoyed. She also organized and ran the video readings and interviews that we made to stay in touch with readers and to entertain them when we and much of the world were all locked down under the threat of the Coronavirus. Thanks to Julia, Kate and Fanny, the world of Bruno is a family affair.

  I owe more than I can say to the help and support of my literary agent, Caroline Wood, and to the skills of my editors, Jane Wood in London, Jonathan Segal in New York and Anna von Planta in Zurich, and to the printers, copy editors, sales people, librarians and booksellers who bring these stories to the final, crucial link in the chain – you, the reader.

  Martin Walker, Périgord, 2020.