It’s how they preserved bodies for the long trip home in colonial days.’ He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. ‘Legend has it that in Nelson’s case, the barrel was nearly empty by the time the ship made port.’
Roussel pulled a face. ‘Thank you for that thought, monsieur. It makes me feel so much better.’
Enzo nodded towards the woods. ‘Who’s up there?’
‘Two gendarmes and an adjutant from the STIC.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘Which is what?’
‘ Section Technique d’investigation Criminelle. The Police Scientifique from Albi. Officially known as the IRCGN these days. And a police photographer.’
‘Can I have a look?’
‘No.’ Roussel was emphatic. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all.’
‘You’ve seen my qualifications, Gendarme Roussel. You know that crime scene analysis is one of my specialities.’
‘I know that I’d get shot if I let you anywhere near it. We have our own people, Macleod.’
‘Just a glimpse. That’s all.’
Roussel looked at him long and hard-although perhaps it was through him, rather than at him-as he engaged in some inner dialogue, a silent argument with himself. Then he delved into the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a couple of plastic shoe covers. ‘Put these on. And touch nothing. This is strictly unofficial.’
The source was dry, moss-covered stones carefully built around the opening of an underground spring from which water would bubble when the water table was high and tumble down the hillside to irrigate the vines. It was only three or four metres inside the treeline, a path trodden through tangling saplings and briars. Enzo could not imagine what possessed young people to come here. If sex was the object of the exercise, he could think of many more appropriate places.
Almost as if reading his mind, Roussel said, ‘It’s the romance of the legend that draws the kids. I don’t know the whole story, but needless to say it involves young lovers meeting in secret, defying families and fate. There was a chateau here in the woods at one time, but it was destroyed during the Albi crusades. The cellars and foundations still exist somewhere, pretty much buried by the centuries. The old church that served it is still up there on the hill looking out over the valley.’
He turned towards a path freshly beaten through the undergrowth.
‘This is the way the boy went when he heard the killer and thought it was a Peeping Tom.’
‘What exactly did he hear?’
‘Someone moving through the undergrowth, he said. Making quite a noise, apparently.’
‘Did he see anyone?’
‘Not until he stumbled across the body.’
They followed his path through the trees, a chaos of decaying wood matted with moss, fresh saplings, broken branches, trunks choked by ivy leaning one against the other. Leaves wet with condensation slapped their faces. In the distance, light shone through the mesh of vegetation, splintered and fragmented, hanging in the mist that now rose from the rotting forest bed beneath their feet.
Lamps powered by battery were raised on unsteady stands to throw light across a clearing where someone had broken the ground with a shovel, scraping fresh, rich earth to one side in a shallow pile that was peppered with fallen leaves. The outline of what looked like a grave was clearly marked out, but it was no more than a few centimetres deep. The clearing was delineated on the south side by the gnarled trunk of a huge chestnut tree that must have been three hundred years old. It was long dead, its twin trunks collapsed and rotten. One of them had fallen across the clearing at an angle, creating something like an arch, a natural entrance, old branches propping it up, like so many crumbling columns, to prevent complete collapse. It looked as if the tree might have received its fatal blow from a lightning strike, which had split the central trunk in two, creating a deep, natural cradle about two metres from the ground. It was this cradle that held the body, purple and shrivelled, naked legs dangling like withered sticks, arms stretched out on either side as if to hold it upright. The head was canted forward, grotesque in the harsh lamplight. There were no eyes, just deep, dark shadows, thin lips stretched back across red-stained teeth in a ghastly grimace. Black hair was smeared across the forehead. There was an odd stench of alcohol and decay in the air.
Several uniformed gendarmes hovered around the perimeter of the clearing, just beyond the light, in which three figures in white tyvek suits moved around in careful concert searching for evidence. The splat and whine of a flash camera filled the night air as a photographer took pictures of the corpse.
Roussel said, ‘The killer entered the wood from the east side. You can follow his path through the trees. It’s a pretty well-worn trail. I guess people must come up here quite a lot. It looks like he held the corpse under each arm and dragged it backwards. You can see the tracks the heels left through the fallen leaves.’ He shone his flashlight in the direction from which the killer had come, and Enzo saw the grooves made by the heels. ‘There’s an old farm track runs along the east side of the forest, so it was easy for him to get up close with it.’
‘Did the young couple hear him drive away?’
‘They did. No lights, though. It’s a nearly full moon, so I figure he wasn’t taking any chances.’
‘Tyre tracks?’
Roussel shook his head. ‘It’s stony ground up here, monsieur. And it hasn’t rained in weeks.’
Enzo craned his neck and gazed up into the dark above them. The nearest leaves were illuminated by the light from the clearing, but beyond it was just blackness. The warm September weather had retarded the fall, and only a few leaves had begun to turn. The bed of old, dead leaves through which the killer had dragged his victim, was from another year, another fall.
One of the STIC techniciens called out suddenly. He was crouched down on the west side of the shattered chestnut. With careful precision he lifted up between white-gloved fingers what looked like a discarded cigarette end. ‘There’re three of them,’ he said. He sniffed at it. ‘Fresh. If there’s any saliva on these there’s a good chance we’ll get DNA.’
Enzo pursed his lips thoughtfully. DNA seemed like missing the point.
The technicien put the cigarette butts into separate ziplock bags, and labelled them each in turn.
Enzo said to Roussel, ‘So how did you identify the victim?’
‘I recognised him.’
‘Really?’ Enzo looked again at the shrunken, shadowed face of the corpse. ‘I’m not sure I would have.’
‘We were best pals when we were kids. When he was about ten he had a terrible biking accident. Front wheel caught in a railway line as we went over a crossing. Turned it right around and threw him over the handlebars. Nearly killed him. Fractured skull, depressed fracture of the cheek, broken jaw. He was a terrible mess. They just about had to rebuild his face. And didn’t do a very good job. You could always see the scars.’ He paused. ‘Still can. Have to get his wife to make the official ID, though.’ He looked less than thrilled at the prospect, and was lost for a while in private contemplation. Then he said, ‘After we left school we sort of, you know, went our separate ways. But I still saw him. We had some good nights out. I always kind of found it hard to believe that he would just take off like that, without saying anything to me. But then I thought, if it had been me, would I have said anything to him? And I figured probably not.’ He shook his head. ‘But I never dreamt of anything like this.’
The adjutant from the STIC approached. He was a small man inside a tyvek suit that looked two sizes two big for him. The hood left only his face exposed, so Enzo could not see if he was bald. Or, if he had hair, whether it was dark, fair, silver. It was extraordinary how little you could tell about someone from the face alone. But he had thick brown eyebrows and looked to be man in his forties. He glanced cautiously at Enzo then addressed himself to Roussel. ‘There’ve been a lot of people tramping about here before we arrived, David. It’s a shitty crime scene. Doesn’t make our job any easier. But it looks like the kids disturbed him in the middle of trying to bury the body. The cigarette ends would indicate that he’d been here a while. Hard work digging a grave in ground as hard as this.’
‘Hardly much of a grave,’ Enzo said.
The adjutant turned hostile eyes in his direction. ‘Who’s this?’
‘A forensic expert from Scotland. He’s not here in any official capacity.’
The adjutant fixed him again with an unfriendly stare. ‘So what’s your point?’
‘My point is he wasn’t digging a grave at all. And the digging he did wasn’t done tonight.’
Roussel turned towards him in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’
